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Mankind Quarterly, vol 34, 1993, pp. 117-123
Understanding Caste in India
by
Subhash Kak
When viewed broadly, social relations in society can be seen as mimicking
technology. Past few centuries have seen the focus of technology to change
from clocks to steam engines to computers. Paralleling this was the change in
science from Newtonian mechanics to thermodynamics to the holistic views of
quantum mechanics and information theory. The contemporary age is the age of
computers and information. Science and technology have seen a shift from the
simple to the complex. Societies have changed from the feudal to the
democratic and we see new developments that have been called post-modern.
This path has led to increasing consolidation, although one sees signs of a
coming fragmentation. One would expect that social organization would now be
based on symbols and information. The massive movements of people after the
Second World War has also ensured that ethnic diversity will compel societies
everywhere to confront issues of multiculturism.
Ancient Indian society had information and symbols as its focus. This
happened because the science of the mind was the most prized science in
ancient India. Cognitive science is considered a major frontier of modern
science. This science is being studied only with respect to the individual
but also social groups. Individuals use language to express themselves;
social organizations also represent a language that reflects the cognitive
categories of the society. Social structure codes societal processes. No
living structure can be based on closed categories.
Caste has been often seen through the dichotomous categories of reductionist
logic. We wish to show that its proper understanding can emerge only if a
holistic paradigm is used for its analysis.
Actors and agents
Europe's successes in the past two centuries were undoubtedly due to the
technology, science, and organization that were created as a response to the
discovery of the new world. The colonial successes of Europe were
facilitated by a mastery of signs obtained in the struggles joined in trade.
As sailors and traders the Europeans learnt to appreciate the power of signs.
On the other hand, the old civilizations were so inwardly focused that there
was a refusal to learn the language of the outsider.
Since then other unintended consequences of the mastery of signs have come to
light. The interpretation of signs into European languages could not have
been a one way process. The native interlocutors were themselves
interpreting the facts in order to conform to the expectations of the
interrogators. The analysis that emerged was thus based on many false
premises. Nevertheless, in the post-colonial era the native elites, now
properly literate only in the European languages, have embraced this
analysis. This is a fascinating illustration of how representations can
altar reality. This prefigures the change in the self-image in the West by
the images fostered by television and the media.
As example consider the Brahmin caste. Books by Indologists routinely
translate this into priest. But in reality priests have had very low status
in India. To give the extreme example, the Mahabrahmin priests, who
supervise funeral services, have been “treated much like untouchables.” The
reality of status is highly paradoxical; the brahmin is respected if he
renounces his expected function. The reality runs counter to the claims of
generations of Indologists.
Theories of caste
There is no synonym for caste in any Indian language. The Indian words that
caste supposedly translates are jati, which means a large kin-community or
descent-group, and varna, which implies a classification based on function.
The word varna is from ancient Sanskritic theory implying class it has no
real relevance to the modern notion of “caste”; the word jati properly
denotes what may be termed as a group bound by custom and tradition. The
dynamics between the jatis has been influenced a great deal by historical and
political factors. During the periods of economic growth, the jatis have
been relatively open-ended; during periods of hardships the jatis have tended
to draw in for the sake of survival. The word caste comes from the Portugese
casta, a word that was meant to describe the jati system, but slowly it has
come to have a much broader connotation.
Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India, noted the existence of seven
classes that were apparently jatis. The jatis were integrated into a
cooperative system where each had a role and was cared for. One could
consider it as a kind of a decentralized social security system where
contracts were negotiated within the yajamana (jajmani) framework. The
dominant caste provided basic necessities to the other jati groups in
exchange for services. The activities in the village could be viewed as a
symbolic ritual where the yajamana was the patron (Kak, 1993). The yajamana
system is thus based on the recognition by the dominant group that it is a
part of a larger community and therefore it has an obligation to support the
other communities.
Rigveda 10.90 speaks of the Brahmana, Rajanya (Kshatriya), Vaishya, and
Shudra as having sprung from the head, the arms, the thighs, and the feet of
Purusha, the primal man. This mention of varnas has been taken to indicate
that a caste system existed in the Vedic times. But it is repeatedly
mentioned elsewhere that each human is in the image of the Purusha which
would indicate that each human internalizes aspects of all the varnas. Many
texts proclaim that one's nature alone, and not birth, determines to which
varna one belongs. It is generally agreed that in the ancient Aryan society
the varnas were functional groupings and not closed endogamous birth-descent
groups. Basham (1967, p.148) suggests that the jati system in its modern
form developed very late. The Chinese scholar Hsuan Tsang in the seventh
century was not aware of it. As a response to historical events one might
then credit the emergence of the modern jati system to the next fundamental
change in the Indian polity that occurred with the invasions of the Turks.
In its long history India has had diverse social and religious currents. It
is only in the exception that the reality has conformed to the theory of the
Dharma Shastras. The Vaishnavas emphatically define varna based on one's
actions. The Bhagavata Purana 7.11 proclaims clearly: "One's nature alone
determines to which varna one belongs". The Tantrists claim that all those
who accept the Kula (Tantric) dharma become Kauls (Mahanirvana Tantra 14.180-
9).
What is caste ?
If one limits oneself to an analysis of the term jati, one would see that its
implications have varied with history. Many scholars believe that the system
of jati that we have now emerged only about a thousand years ago. If we
accept that view then this emergence was perhaps a response to the
catastrophic disruption to legal and political institutions caused by the
Turkish invasions. With the destruction of the previous political order,
different occupational communities created their own systems of justice and
governance. In this situation, a local social structure developed which
centered about the dominant community.
Although jatis may pay lip service to the Brahmin as an intermediary to the
gods when it comes to ritual, each caste considers itself to be the highest.
If the Brahmins were to be accepted as the highest caste then other castes
would have no hesitation in giving their daughters to the Brahmins. But in
reality they do not. The Rajputs consider the Brahmins to be other-worldly
or plain beggars; the traders consider the Brahmins to be impractical; and so
on. In classical Sanskrit plays the fool is always a Brahmin. In other
words, each different community has internalized a different outlook on life
but these outlooks cannot be placed in any hierarchical ordering. The
internalized image of the other must, by its very nature, be a gross
simplification and it will never conform exactly to reality.
The question of pollution
It has been claimed that the castes are separate but interdependent
hereditary groups of occupational specialists. Thus Dumont postulates that
the principle of purity-impurity keeps the segments separate from one
another. In this system each jati closes its boundaries to lower jatis,
refusing them the privileges of intermarriage and other contacts defined to
be polluting. Facts belie the Dumont theory: Indian Muslims and Christians
also have jatis. The eighteenth century German society was divided into
princes, nobles, burghers, peasants and serfs between whom no marriage other
than morganatic was possible. Korea and Japan also had the practice of
untouchability.
Part of the mystification of the Indian social system has occurred due to a
flawed understanding of the notion of ritual. Hindu ritual is meant to
capture the connections between the human and the cosmic and highlight the
paradoxes of separation and unity. Ritual is a symbolic representation of
basic analytical knowledge where the context of the knowledge is not widely
known. A normative social structure is acknowledged to be arbitrary and
meant to be broken. The outsider has tended to assign an importance to
ritual in Indian discourse unwarranted by reality. The understanding of
pollution, and its relation to ritual, has varied across region and age.
Quigley in his recent book The Interpretation of Caste notes that the
notion of caste is a very complex one. Ideologies of materialism, that
consider caste as a rationalization of social inequality, and idealism, in
which caste is taken to represent notions of relative purity, are incapable
of providing adequate explanations. In recent decades the idealist position,
presented by sociologists like Louis Dumont has become the dominant one.
According to Quigley:
[The] practitioners of [recent anthropology] cling on to the flotsam
of a theory which their own evidence devastatingly undermines. Unable
to visualize a general structure of caste which would displace
Dumont's theory; they hang on to it unremittingly even though their
own evidence shows again and again that this theory simply does not
explain what is known about India... The entrenched idea that
“Brahmans are the highest caste” has done most to hinder an
alternative formulation of how caste systems work.
Quigley bases his own analysis on the relationships between the king and the
priest, defined very early in the Vedic times, that has recently been
examined by the Dutch scholar J.C. Heesterman. This analysis defines the
role of castes in terms of relationships with the dominant economic and
political groups. But ultimately such an approach is unsatisfactory because
the Vedic texts describe the relationship between the priest and the king in
relation to ritual. To use the theory of such relationship for the secular
world is not quite correct. Few Brahmins were ever priests; also there have
always been non-Brahmin priests.
Coda
One might wonder why the caste system developed in India. It has been argued
that European and Western traditions, owing to their exclusivist nature, set
out to obtain uniform belief and practices. The inclusivist nature of the
Indian religions, on the other hand, places each group in a larger system.
Some have suggested that the Buddhist horror of taking life led to
untouchability; as proof they point to parallels with Korea and Japan.
Some have argued that Indian society is highly transactional: the giver is of
superior rank to the receiver and the served is superior to the server. But
this leads to contradictions: Is the Brahmin beggar receiving or being
served? If caste is an endogamous descent-group, one would expect a new
system of competitive descent-groups replace the system that was
characterized by localized hierarchy owing to the isolation of the village.
But as before there will be several ideologies behind the impulse to form
communities.
Srinivas pointed out that the process of Sanskritization is responsible for
movement within the jati system. Sanskritization implies emulating a
dominant caste of any high varna. One should add that there also exists the
dynamic of fragmentation. Ancient Indian political theory speaks of an
opposition between settled community (grama) and wilderness (aranya). Even
during the Mughal rule there was a similar divide between the revenue paying
region called ra'iyati and the rebellious known as mawas. There has existed
such a divide in terms of the belief system as well. Various movements have
sought to overturn the varna system. In recent times, the institution
of quotas has prompted many groups to seek classification as “low” caste.
The social structure of India reflects no single ideology which is why no
single theory has proved to be rich enough to describe the system. The system
represents several symbiotic ideologies. These ideologies are balanced by
political and economic forces. The ideologies of the brahmin, the
aristocrat, the trader, and the commoner were all proclaimed to be equivalent
in their effectiveness in obtaining knowledge: this was reflected in the
paths of jnana yoga, karma yoga, raja yoga, and bhakti yoga. Even festivals
like Sarasvati puja, Dassera, Divali, and Holi celebrate the different
attitudes.
New technology, science, and political organization will change the social
institutions of India. In many ways the modern Indian castes are no more
than the ethnic communities in the West. The societal organizations of the
West and the East can thus be seen to converge.
References
Basham, A.L. 1967. The Wonder That Was India. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Dumont, Louis 1970. Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heesterman, J.C. 1985. The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Kak, Subhash 1993. The astronomy of Vedic altars. Vistas in Astronomy, vol.
36, pp. 117-140.
Kolenda, Pauline 1978. Caste in Contemporary India: Beyond Organic
Solidarity. Menlo Park: Benjamin/Cummings.
Marriott, McKim 1976. Hindu transactions: diversity without dualism. In Bruce
Kapferer, ed., Transaction and Meaning. Philadelphia: Institute for the
Study of Human Issues.
Quigley, Declan 1993. The Interpretation of Caste. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Srinivas, M.N. 1962. Caste in Modern India. Bombay: Asia Publishing House.
Zinkin, Taya 1962. Caste Today. London: Oxford University Press.
===============================================================
Annals of BORI, vol. 77, 1996, pp. 235-240
A Note of Caste
by
Subhash Kak
It is generally accepted that all the Kashmiri Hindus belong to the same
community or jati. Is that because they belong to a single caste or varna
resulting from the conversion of the other castes to Islam? Or does this
represent a variant of Hindu religion where the caste system does not exist?
Let me first deal with the designation Pandit that is applied to Kashmiri
Hindus. According to Henny Sender in her book The Kashmiri Pandits (1988),
this designation was requested by Jai Ram Bhan, a Kashmiri courtier in the
Mughal court, in Delhi, of the Emperor Muhammad Shah (1719-1749), and it was
granted. Apparently, before this period both Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims were
addressed as khuajah in the Mughal court.
Kashmiri Hindus call themselves Batta, from the Sanskrit bhartri, meaning
master. Such an appellation may be a reflection of the community's self-image
that emphasizes success and excellence and it need not have any sociological
implications. Two subgroups, that were sometimes considered to be separate,
are Buher, and Purib: Buher (from the Kashmiri word for grocer) and Purib
(for easterner). It appears most likely that these subgroupings, that have
all but disappeared now, reflected the profession of business in the case of
Buher and ancestry that could be traced to an immigrant from east India.
Kashmiri Hindus have other names that indicate ancestry outside India; for
example, the last name Turki. There are others who argue that the name Turki
stuck to a Kashmiri family that visited Turkestan. Although this is
plausible, the idea that communities in each Kashmir, as in other regions,
lived in watertight compartments is negated by other evidence. The category
of the Kashmiri Hindu has been fluid and it has admitted those that wished to
belong to it.
The dominant philosophical and religious system current in Kashmir is that of
Shaivism. According to the texts of the Shaivites all those who accept the
Kula (Shaivite) dharma become Kauls, irrespective of their background. The
Shaivite initiation has always been open to everyone--- and that includes
women. There are accounts of how Abhinavagupta, the great Shaivite
philosopher who lived about a thousand years ago, had several women
disciples. Later, Kashmir had great women sages such as Lalleshvari and Rupa
Bhavani.
The fact that Kashmiri Hinduism is universal does not mean that social
inequity did not exist in Kashmir. Such inequity reflected the social and
political ideas of its times and it did not spring from any fundamental
religious considerations.
So is Kashmiri Hinduism different from Hinduism elsewhere? The surprising
answer is no! There is evidence that there was no caste system in the Vedic
times. The Brahma Purana says that during the golden age (Krita Yuga)
everyone was a Brahmana. The famous Purushasukta hymn of the Rigveda (10.90)
speaks of the Brahmana, Rajanya (Kshatriya), Vaishya, and Shudra as having
sprung from the head, the arms, the thighs, and the feet of Purusha, the
primal man. This mention of varna has been taken to indicate that a caste
system existed in the Vedic times. But it is repeatedly mentioned elsewhere
that each human is in the image of the Purusha which would indicate that each
human internalizes aspects of all the varnas. So the label of a specific
varna applied to a person may have implied the dominant personality trait. At
a larger level, the varnas represented four broad classes.
Late texts speak of how everyone is a shudra when born, implying that the
yajnopavit (mekhala) ceremony was open to everyone. A girdle was also tied in
a ceremony to girls.
Many texts proclaim that one's nature alone, and not birth, determines to
which varna one belongs to. In the famous dialogue between Yudhishthira and
Yaksha in the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira is asked whether a person is a
brahmin based on “birth, learning, or conduct” and his answer is that only
“conduct” makes a person a brahmin and not birth. In the ancient Aryan
society the varnas were functional groupings and not closed endogamous birthdescent
groups. Basham in his book The Wonder That Was India suggests that
the jati system in its modern form developed very late perhaps not before
1000 A.D. The Chinese scholar Hsuan Tsang in the seventh century was not
aware of it. As a response to historical events one might then credit the
emergence of the modern jati system to the next fundamental change in the
Indian polity that occurred with the invasions of the Turks.
The term caste has no synonym in any Indian language.
People who speak of the “caste problem” in ancient India are projecting modern notions into the past.
The term caste conflated two distinct terms jati, which means a large kincommunity
or descent-group, and varna, which implies a classification based
on function. The dynamics between the jatis has been influenced a great deal
by historical and political factors. During the periods of economic growth,
the jatis have been relatively open-ended; during periods of hardships the
jatis have tended to draw in for the sake of survival. The word caste comes
from the Portugese casta, a word that was meant to describe the jati system,
but slowly it has come to have a much broader connotation.
The term jati is like the modern ethnic group and varna may be compared to
class, although it is primarily a psychological category. If one cannot get
rid of one’s ethnicity, how can one get rid of one’s jati? And why should one
even wish to do that? Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India about 2,300
years ago, noted the existence of seven classes, namely that of philosophers,
peasants, herdsmen, craftsmen and traders, soldiers, government officials and
councilors. These classes were apparently jatis.
The fact that jatis have renegotiated their position in the regional power
structure is clear from the example of the Saurashtra community of of weavers
of Madurai that used be considered Vaishya several centuries ago but now is
accepted as Brahmin.
In its long history India has had diverse social and religious currents. It
is only in the exception that the reality has conformed to the theory of the
conservative Dharma Shastras. The Vaishnavas emphatically define varna based
on one's actions. This is repeated by the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavata
Purana.
It is true that jatis pay lip service to the Brahmin as an intermediary to
the gods when it comes to ritual in major temples. But occasions for such
ritual are rare for most people. In smaller temples, the priest can belong to
any jati. In reality, each jati considers itself to be the highest. Even
those who are at the bottom of the economic and social totem pole remember a
mythical past when they were rulers.
The notion that the Brahmin jati is at the top of a hierarchical structure is
incorrect (Quigley, 1993). If the Brahmins were the highest jati then other
jatis would have no hesitation in giving their daughters to the Brahmins.
But in reality non-Brahmin jatis do not wish to intermarry with the Brahmins.
The Rajputs consider the Brahmins to be other-worldly or plain beggars; the
traders consider the Brahmins to be impractical and poor and indeed in many
parts of the country the Brahmins are amongst the poorest communities; the
commoners consider the Brahmins to have lives that are too austere. In
classical Sanskrit plays the fool is always a Brahmin. In other words, each
different community has internalized a different outlook on life but these
outlooks cannot be placed in any hierarchical ordering. The internalized
image of the other must, by its very nature, be a gross simplification and it
will never conform exactly to reality.
The French sociologist Louis Dumont claims that the castes are separate but
interdependent hereditary groups of occupational specialists. He postulates
that the principle of purity-impurity keeps the segments separate from one
another. In this system each jati closes its boundaries to lower jatis,
refusing them the privileges of intermarriage and other contacts defined to
be polluting. Facts belie the Dumont theory: Indian Muslims and Christians
also have jatis. The eighteenth century German society was divided into
princes, nobles, burghers, peasants and serfs between whom no marriage other
than morganatic was possible. Korea and Japan also had the practice of
untouchability. The Buddhist dogma about non-killing appears to have led to
the ostracization of those people whose trades involved hunting, slaughtering
animals and so on.
One might wonder why the caste system developed in certain parts of India.
It has been argued that European and Western traditions, owing to their
exclusivist nature, set out to obtain uniform belief and practices. The
inclusivist nature of the Indian religions, on the other hand, places each
group in a larger system.
The famed Indian scholar M.N. Srinivas pointed out that the process of
Sanskritization is responsible for movement within the jati system.
Sanskritization implies emulating a dominant caste of any high varna.
One should add that there also exists the dynamic of fragmentation.
The Vedas do not sanction the notion of caste as is understood in recent
times. New technology, science, and political organization are changing the
social institutions of India. Modern Indian castes (jatis) are no more than
the ethnic communities in the West.
To return to the question I posed in the beginning of this note: Do Kashmiri
Hindus have a caste system? The answer is an emphatic no. Kashmiris are
Brahmin in the sense of the Brahma Purana, according to which every human,
being desirous of knowledge, is a Brahmin.
References
S. Kak, “Understanding caste in India,” Mankind Quarterly, vol 34, 117-123,
1993.
S. Kak, India at Century’s End. VOI, New Delhi, 1994.
T.N. Madan, Family and Kinship. OUP, New Delhi, 1965, 1989.
H. Sender, The Kashmiri Pandits. OUP, New Delhi, 1988.
D. Quigley, The Interpretation of Caste. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.
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