Letter published on December 3, 2023
THE UNEDITED VERSION
Shri David Miltonji calls caste as ‘sanctified apartheid’ (letter dated December 2, 2023, THI). This shows how deeply colonial narratives have taken root in Indian thinking. Our social sciences after independence did not pause to think that the caste story that the colonials set for us could be false too.
‘Caste’ came to us from a Christian Portuguese world where the ‘casta’ of ‘New’ Christians (converted Muslims and Jews) and ‘Old’ Christians played a role with notions of ‘purity of blood’ at its roots. Varna and Jati grew in Indian contexts. There were always four varnas based on ideas like guna (nature), swadharma, and karma. The word ‘caste’ has no equivalent in the Indian scriptures, and yet we have extraordinarily superimposed caste on all our indigenous social systems and achieved a breakdown of the country that the colonials could only dream of.
Many Indian scriptures challenge the notion of the hierarchical ordering of varnas as characteristically developed. There are more likely to be ‘categories’ and sometimes there was a complete reversal of hierarchies, a fact conveniently ignored in the cherry picking of data. Profound thinkers like Sri Aurobindo and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy believed that the ‘three quartets’, highly interlinked, were responsible for the civilization’s ability to constantly withstand attacks across centuries: the four varnas; the four ashramas; and the four purusharthas. They need to be studied together, as an isolated study brings only strife, confusion, and distortions.
The ultimate ideal of the nation and the individual was ‘moksha’ and there was no denial of this to any varna. The jatis, today 4000 in number, have a poor correlation to the varnas, and it was a difficult job, sometimes extremely so, to fit them perfectly one-on-one with the varnas. The lived reality of the country is the jatis, and it is a fact across time and space that the most powerful in the social-economic-political world have been the jatis, who are traditionally the Shudras for the simple reason that they are not Brahmins, Kshatriyas, or Vaishyas. But the narrative of Hinduism equals caste system equals untouchability has to continue thanks to a constant powerful narrative, and the only solution to untouchability is disbanding Hinduism altogether and converting to any other religion or even becoming an atheist.
Dr. Balagangadhara says: “As a system from antiquity, it (caste) survived Buddhism, Bhakti movements, colonisation, Indian independence, world capitalism, and globalisation strongly. Hence, it must be a very stable social organization. There is no centralised authority for enforcing the caste system. It is an autonomous and decentralised organisation, and no social or political regulation could eradicate the system. Hence, it must be a self-reproducing social structure. It exists in one form or another in all religious denominations and in different environments. Hence, it adapts itself to any new environment it finds itself in. New castes have come and gone, and hence, this system is also dynamic. Since it has survived under all political regimes, it must be neutral to political ideologies too. Would not such an autonomous, decentralised, stable, adaptive, dynamic, self-reproducing social organisation, also neutral to all political, economic, and religious doctrines and environments, be the most ideal system if one really existed as such? This most ideal caste system derives only from the present descriptions of the caste system and does not require any additional theories or assumptions. Hence, the European narrative about the ‘evil caste system’ may not amount to much.”
Can our social sciences do better at developing a better understanding of India instead of parroting what the West tells us?
RANDOM MUSINGS 