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A
Comprehensive Look: Pro and Cons of The Caste
System
Hinduism believes in
"Vasudhaiva
Kutumbakam" (the world is one family -
an ancient Vedic term).
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) Was among India's most fervent
nationalists, fighting for Indian independence from British rule. Gandhi
was a staunch and devout Hindu and he
proclaimed it proudly:
"I
am a Hindu because it is Hinduism which makes the world worth living."
(source:
Young India
1-12-26).
He said
that the caste system or varnashrama is
"inherent in human nature, and Hinduism has simply made a science of
it."
He defended the "much-maligned Brahman" and entertains " not a shadow
of doubt" that "if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism will
perish".
"Hinduism
insists on the brotherhood of not only all mankind but of all that lives."
(source: Hindu
Dharma - M. K. Gandhi p. 7-374 and Harijan
28-3-1936).
Refer to
Caste games: Battleground India
- hinduhumanrights.info
Sri
Aurobindo
(1872-1950) most original philosopher of modern India.
Education in England gave him a wide introduction to the culture of ancient, or
mediaeval and of modern Europe. He was described
by Romain Rolland as ' the completest synthesis of the East and the West.'
This is what he observed about caste:
"Caste
was originally an arrangement for the distribution of functions of society, just
as much as class in Europe, but the principle on which the distribution was
based in India was peculiar to this country.
"A
Brahmin was a Brahmin not by mere birth, but
because he discharged the duty of preserving the spiritual and intellectual
elevation of the race, and he had to cultivate the spiritual temperament and
acquire the spiritual training which alone could qualify him for the task.
The
Kshatriya was a Kshatriya not merely because he was the son of warriors and
princes, but because he discharged the duty of protecting the country and
preserving the high courage and manhood of the nation, and he had to cultivate
the princely temperament and acquire the strong and lofty Samurai training which
alone fitted him for his duties.
So it
was with the Vaishya whose function was to amass wealth for the race and the
Shudra who discharged the humbler duties of service without which the other
castes could not perform their share of labour for the common good. Essentially
there was, between the devout Brahmin and the devout Shudra, no inequality in
the single 'virAt purusa' [Cosmic Spirit] of which each was a necessary part.
Chokha Mela, the Maratha Pariah, became the
Guru of Brahmins proud of their caste purity;
The
Chandala taught Shankaracharya: for the
'Brahman' was revealed in the body of the Pariah and in the Chandal there was
the utter presence of Shiva the Almighty."

Chokha Mela
and Shankaracharya
Chokha Mela,
the Maratha Pariah (lower caste) became the Guru of Brahmins proud of their
caste purity;
The
Chandala taught Shankaracharya: for the 'Brahman' was revealed in the body of
the Pariah and in the Chandal there was the utter presence of Shiva the
Almighty."
***
Caste
therefore was not only an institution which ought to be immune from the cheap
second-hand denunciations so long in fashion, but a supreme necessity without
which Hindu civilisation could not have developed its distinctive character or
worked out its unique mission.
But to recognize this is not to debar ourselves from pointing out its later
perversions and desiring its transformation.
It is the nature of human institutions to degenrate, to lose
their vitality and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility
and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived. The spirit
is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die.
The
spirit expresses itself in many ways while remaining essentially the same, but
the body must change to suit its changing environments if it wishes to live.
There is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated. It ceased to be
determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have now come to
be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely material
tests of occupation and birth. By this change it has set itself against the
fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual and
subordinate the material, and thus lost most of its meaning. The spirit of caste
arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it instead of the
spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us to
our present condition."
(source:
India's Rebirth -
By Sri Aurobindo).
Swami
Vivekananda (1863-1902)
was the foremost disciple of Ramakrishna and a world spokesperson for Vedanta.
India's first spiritual and cultural ambassador to the West, came to represent
the religions of India at the World Parliament of Religions, held at Chicago in
connection with the World's Fair (Columbian Exposition) of 1893. His Chicago
speech is uniquely Vedantic. Jawaharlal
Nehru refers to
this universal dimension of Vivekananda in his Discovery of India. “Rooted in
the past, and full of pride in India’s heritage, Vivekananda was yet modern in
his approach to life’s problems, and was a kind of bridge between the past of
India and her present.”
He said:
"Caste
is a plan we want to follow- - .There is no country in the world without caste.
The plan in India is to make everybody a Brahmin, the Brahmin being the ideal of
humanity. Indian caste is better than the caste that prevails which prevails in
Europe or America."
"Caste
is a very good thing. Caste is the plan we want to follow. What caste really is,
not one in a million understands. There is no country
in the world without caste. Caste is based throughout on that principle.
The plan in India is to make everybody Brahmana, the Brahmana being the ideal of
humanity. If you read the history of India you will find that attempts have
always been made to raise the lower classes. Many are the classes that have been
raised. Many more will follow till the whole will become Brahmana. That is the
plan.
As
there are sattva, rajas and tamas - one or other of these gunas more or less -
in every man, so the qualities which make a Brahmana,
Kshatriya, Vaishya or a Shudra are inherent in every man, more or
less. But at time one or other of these qualities predominates in him in varying
degrees and is manifested accordingly. Take a man in his different pursuits, for
example : when he is engaged in serving another for pay, he is in Shudra-hood;
when he is busy transacting some some piece of business for profit, on his
account, he is a Vaishya; when he fights to right wrongs then the qualities of a
Kshatriya come out in him; and when he meditates on God, or passes his time in
conversation about Him, then he is a Brahmana. Naturally, it is quite possible
for one to be changed from one caste into another. Otherwise, how did Viswamitra
become a Brahmana and Parashurama a Kshatriya?
The means of European civilization is the sword; of the
Aryans, the division into different varnas. This system of division into varnas
is the stepping-stone to civilization, making one rise higher and higher in
proportion to one's learning and culture. In Europe, it is everywhere victory to
the strong and death to the weak. In the land of Bharata (India), every social
rule is for the protection of the weak. Such is our ideal of caste, as meant for
raising all humanity slowly and gently towards the realization of the great
ideal of spiritual man, who is non-resisting, calm, steady, worshipful, pure and
meditative. In that ideal there is God. "
We
believe in Indian caste as one of the greatest social institutions that the Lord
gave to man. We also believe that through the unavoidable defects, foreign
persecutions, and above all, the monumental ignorance and pride of many
Brahmanas who do not deserve the name, have thwarted in many ways, the
legitimate fructification of this glorious Indian institution, it has already
worked wonders for the land of Bharata and it destined to lead Indian humanity
to its goal. Caste should not go; but should be readjusted occasionally. Within
the old structure is to be life enough for the building of two hundred thousand
new ones. It is sheer nonsense to desire the abolition of caste.
It is in the nature of society to form itself into
groups; and what will go will be these privileges!
Caste is a natural order. I can perform one
duty in social life, and you another; you can govern a country, and I can mend a
pair of old shoes, but that is no reason why you are greater than I, for can you
mend my shoes? Can I govern the country? I am clever in mending shoes, you are
clever in reading Vedas, that is no reason why you should trample on my head;
why if one commits murder should he be praised and if another steals an apple
why should he be hanged? This will have to go.
Caste
is good. That is only natural way of solving life. Men must form themselves into
groups, and you cannot get rid of that. Wherever you go there will be caste. But
that does not mean that there should be these privileges. They should be knocked
on the head. If you teach Vedanta to the fisherman, he will say, "I am as good a
man as you, I am a fisherman, you are a philosopher, but I have the same God in
me, as you have in you." And that is what we want, no privilege for anyone,
equal chances for all; let everyone be taught that the Divine is within, and
everyone will work out his own salvation. The days of exclusive privileges and
exclusive claims are gone, gone for ever from the soil of India.
(source:
Swami Vivekananda On India and Her Problems
and The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
Kolkata,1985, Vol V, pp 215).
Sir
Rustom Pestonji Masani (1876 - ) a Parsi, distinguished
himself when he was elected as the first Indian national to become Municipal
Commissioner of Mumbai. Author of Zoroastrianism:
the religion of the good life he
points out:
“The
seers of the early Vedic period know nothing of caste. Delve as much as one may
into the literature of the period, one discovers only classes not castes. …the
conception of social segregation and untouchability was repugnant to the genius
of the people who sought unity in variety and dissolved variety in unity. Each
class was regarded as an integral part of the fabric of society. Each submitted
cheerfully to the special functions and duties assigned to it. Even the Sudra
appears to have been content with his mission in life; and there were no
agitators abroad to sow in the minds of the proletariat the seeds of discontent.
There appeared to have been a tacit understanding that different classes of
individuals stood at different stages of evolution and that, therefore, the
duties, modes of life, and rules of conduct applicable and helpful to each must
necessarily differ. The differentiation was, however, regarded only as a means
to an end, not an end in itself. It assigned to each individual his due position
in the social order; it regulated his relation with other members of the
community, and provided means for his orderly development, eliminating
possibilities of a clash of interests between master and servant, landlord and
tenant, capital and labor, state and subject.”
"According
to Hindu philosophy divine energy manifests
itself in different degrees according to the preponderance in each person of one
or other of the three gunas, or fundamental qualities, which make up the
prakriti or nature, of an individual. These gunas are sattva, rajas and tamas.
It follows, therefore, that for his own salvation as well as for social
efficiency an individual should be allowed to develop along the lines best
suited to his natural endowments and that he on his part should perform the
duties assigned to him in accordance with the predominant quality of the strand
in his nature. The well-known episode of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita is a
typical illustration of this philosophy of life. Dismayed, he refuses to fight;
but Lord Krishna, the preacher, prevails upon him to discharge the duty proper to his Kshatriya
caste."
"There is
nothing, however, in the whole body of Sanskrit literature to show that the
caste system was deliberately devised as a means to attain the coveted end of
realizing the divine within man. A remarkable and almost unique feature of Hindu
culture is the process of minute analysis and synthesis to which it subjects
from time to time the phenomena which leave their impress upon the senses and
the mind and the unchangeable soul. Such an exposition has helped succeeding
generations to grasp the significance of the philosophic doctrines underlying
the social and religious systems of a race excelling in spiritual speculations
and metaphysical subtleties."

"According
to the Rig Veda hymn, the different classes
sprang from the four limbs of the Creator. It was meant to show that the four
classes stood in relation to the social organization in the same relation as the
different organs of the Primordial Man to his body. Together they had to
function to give vitality to the body politic. There was nothing in that account
to warrant the assumption, that the order in which the four groups were
mentioned, or that the particular limbs specified as their origin, marked their
social status."
"A
person’s worth is determined by his knowledge and capacity and the inherent
qualities which mark his conduct in life. “The four fold division of castes’
says the Creator in the Bhagavad Gita, “was
created by me according to the apportionment of qualities and duties.” “Not
birth, not sacrament, not learning, make one dvija (twice-born), but righteous
conduct alone causes it.” “Be he a Sudra or a member of any other class,
says the Lord in the same epic, “he that serves as a raft on a raftless
current , or helps to ford the unfordable, deserves respect in everyway.”
(source: Legacy of India
- edited by G T Garratt - Oxford At the Clarendon Press p. 132
- 140).
Sardar
Kavalam Madhava Panikkar (1896-1963)
Indian scholar, journalist, historian from Kerala, administrator, diplomat,
Minister in Patiala Bikaner and Ambassador to China, Egypt and France. Author of
several books, including Asia
and Western Dominance,
India Through
the ages and India
and the Indian Ocean.
He says:
“The
fact is that the four-fold caste is merely a theoretical division of society to
which tribes, clans and family groups are affiliated. It is a sociological
fiction. The earliest available literature gives instances of Brahmins carrying
on the professions of medicine, arms and administration."
"In the Jatakas
Brahmins are mentioned as traders, hunters and trappers. R P Masani quotes the
case of a Kshatriya prince, Kusa, mentioned in one of the Jataka tales, who
became an apprentice in turn to a potter, a basket maker, a florist and a cook.
Conversely, from even the Vedic days there have been innumerable instances of
men born in the lowest rank of caste-society taking to professions which in
theory were the monopoly of the other castes. Even the Mauryas royal family came
from among the Sudras.”
(source: Hindu
Society at cross roads - By K M Panikkar p. 1 - 17).
Dr. A. L. Basham,
one of the leading authority of ancient Indian culture and author of
The Wonder That Was India
noted:
"Caste is a word which in most minds is most strongly connected with Hindu
social order but
this practice did not exist
in the ancient India."
(source:
The Wonder That Was India
- By A L Basham).
P. D.
Ouspensky ( ? ) a thoughtful Western writer is of the opinion that
"All the most brilliant period of history, without exception, were periods
in which the social order approached the caste system." He thinks that the
caste system (varna vyavastha) "is a natural division" of society.
"Whether people wish it or not, whether they recognize it or not, they are
divided into four castes. There are Brahmans, there are Kshatriyas, there are
Vaishyas, and there are Shudras. No human legislation, no philosophical
intricacies, no pseudo-sciences and no form of terror can abolish this fact. And
the normal functioning and development of human societies are possible only if
this fact is recognized and acted on."
(source: A
New Model of the Universe - By P. D. Ouspensky p. 447).
Sir George
Birchwood ( ? ) has said:
"So long as
the Hindus hold on to the caste system, India will be India; but from the day
they break from it, there will be no more India. That glorious peninsula will be
degraded to the position of a bitter "East End" of the Anglo-Saxon
Empire."
(source: The
Discovery of India - By Jawaharlal Nehru.
Oxford University Press. 1995. p. 247).
Dr.
Subramanium Swamy (1939
- ) He is also a reputed economist and worked as Assistant Economic
Affairs Officer, United Nations Secretariat, New York in 1963. He worked with
two Nobel laureates, Simon Kuznets and Paul A. Samuelson for his doctorate in
economics at the Harvard
University, awarded in 1965. He
is the President of the Janata Party and author of the book, Hinduism
under Siege. In an interview with a Canadian TV station he
has remarked:
"Caste
system was originally not designed as mutually antagonistic groupings. It was
not even connected to birth. It is one of retrogression that caste
has been connected to birth. The sages in their discussions on why caste system
should be created had said that there are four sources
of power in society – knowledge, wealth, weapons and land and
thus all these should not be in any one hands. In fact one should be
in the hands of one person. Therefore if you are a pursuer of knowledge, a
teacher of knowledge you should have no wealth, weapons or land. Society should
give you donations so that you could live – that is how our preachers,
sannysis, religious preceptors etc. they lived in society and taught people but
donations came from the public.
If you were the owner of weapons then you were the King but you could not make
policy - for policy you had to go to people of knowledge – same thing with
wealth and land."
(source:
Dr.
Subramanian Swamy interview on Hinduism with CTS TV Canada - By Richard
Landou).
Refer to
London is most unequal city in Western world
with gap between rich and poor widest since slavery - By Steve
Doughty - dailymail.co.uk and
British rioters the spawn of a bankrupt ruling
elite – By
Theodore Dalrymple
Rev.
William
H Robinson (1955 - ) in his book By
Temple Shrine and Lotus Pool p. 66 writes:
“The
fortress of caste cannot be taken by external assault. Its wall will only
crumble when the garrison within ceases to repair them. The only real discipline
that
India
has maintained is the discipline of caste. If you really could create genuine
democracy in
India
it would destroy caste. If it destroyed caste it would
destroy Hinduism and if it destroyed Hinduism it would destroy
India
, at least the
India
that has existed for so many thousands of years….Far far better
that they should remain good Hindus than become rampant atheists!
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty.
Penguin Books. 1991 p. 69 -
239). For more refer to the book online - digilib.
bu.edu.
Caste is the
cornerstone of Hindu society
Radha Rajan
is editor of
vigilonline. She has recently observed:
"Caste
is not intrinsic to Hindusim, jaati, kula
and varna
are not only intrinsic to Hinduism, they are in fact the
cornerstones of our society;
a self-respecting and respectful Hindu does not wish away aspects of his dharma
or apologize for it.
While
individuals or individual families may give up by choice, their jati, kula,
varna, gotra, bhumi and
even their mother for
their own reasons, as indeed have innumerable English-educated, upwardly mobile
and deracinated Hindus around the world, the very idea of shaking or dislodging
the three cornerstones of jaati, kula
and varna
of an entire society is diabolic because this is actually an attempt to denude
Hindu society of all civilisational values contained in jati, kula
and varna
dharma. Forces which know very well the place and role of jati, kula
and varna
in Hindu society, want to discredit and eventually destroy them, so that they
can fill the ensuing vacuum with one of the Abrahamic monotheisms or Abrahamic
economic ideologies."
It
is jati, kula
and varna
which makes Hindu society diverse and Hindu dharma an ever-relevant and dynamic
principle. Without them, we would be just another intolerant monotheist culture.
Hindu society remains largely autonomous, power is broad-based and culture is
diverse only because of jati, kula
and varna.
To melt them
all down to Portuguese ‘caste’ and then destroy it is Abrahamic evil intent; and
this group of
American PIOs is playing right into its hands.
(source:
Hindu American Foundation’s motivated ‘report’: Cast in hubris and deception
– By Radha Rajan - bharatabharati).
Swami
Chidanand Saraswatiji ( ? ) of the India
Heritage Research Foundation defines:
"The Caste system as
you see it today is not was originally simply a
division of labor based on personal, talents tendencies and abilities. It
was never supposed to divide people. Rather, it was supposed to unite people so
that everyone was simultaneously working to the best of his/her ability for the
greater service of all. In the scriptures, when the system of
dividing society into four groups was explained, the word used is “Varna.”
Varna means “class” not “caste.” Caste is actually “Jati” and it is
an incorrect translation of the word “varna.” When the Portuguese
colonized parts of India, they mistakenly translated “varna
vyavasthaa” as “caste system” and the mistake has stayed since then.
The
varna system was based on a person’s characteristics, temperament and their
innate “nature.” The Vedas describe one’s nature as being a mixture of the
three gunas – tamas, rajas and sattva. Depending on the relative proportions
of each of these gunas, one would be classified as a Brahmin, Kshetriya, Vaishya
or Shudra. For example, Brahmins who perform much of the intellectual, creative
and spiritual work within a community have a high proportion of sattva and low
proportions of tamas and rajas. A kshetriya who is inclined toward political,
administrative and military work has a high proportion of rajas, a medium
proportion of sattva and a low proportion of tamas. A Vaishya who performs the
tasks of businessman, employer and skilled laborer also has a high proportion of
rajas but has relatively equal proportions of sattva and tamas, both of which
are lower than rajas. Last, a shudra who performs the unskilled labor in society
has a high proportion of tamas, a low proportion of sattva and a medium
proportion of rajas.
These
gunas are not inherited. They are based on one’s inherent nature and one’s
karma. Therefore one’s “varna” was also not supposed to be based on
heredity, and in the past it was not. It is only in relatively modern times that
the strict, rigid, heredity-based “caste” system has come into existence. There
are many examples in the scriptures and in history of people transcending the
“class” or “varna” into which they were born. Everyone was free to
choose an occupation according to his/her guna and karma.
Further,
according to the scriptures, there is no
hierarchy
at all inherent in the varna system. All parts are of equal importance and equal
worth. A good example is to imagine a human body. The brain which thinks, plans
and guides represents the Brahmin caste. The hands and arms which fight, protect
and work represent the kshetriya caste. The stomach which serves as the source
of energy and “transactions” represents the vaishya caste, and the legs/feet
which do the necessary running around in the service of the rest of the body
represent the shudra caste. No one can say the brain is better than the legs or
that hands are superior to feet. Each is equally important for the overall
functioning of the body system. They just serve different roles. " Look
at Bhagwan
Ram and Bhagwan Krishna.
Both show the example of taking their food from even people of the lowest caste
and going to the homes of the lower caste people. It is devotion, purity and
commitment which make us great or small, not our caste.
(source: The
Caste system - By Swami
Chidanand Saraswatiji - India
Heritage Research Foundation).
M V
Nadkarni ( ?) writes:
"It
is necessary to demolish the myth that caste system is an intrinsic part of
Hinduism. This myth is believed by orthodox elements within Hinduism and also
is propagated by elements outside Hinduism with the mischievous intent of
proselytising. Even Vedic and classical Hinduism – not
only does not support the caste system, but has taken lots of pains to oppose it
both in principle and practice, making it obvious that caste system is not an
intrinsic part of Hindu canon, philosophy and even practice.
It is only in
the dharmashastras (dharma sutras and smritis) that we find support to the caste
system, and not in other canon. However, dharmashastras
never had the same status as other canon known as shruti (Vedas and Upanishads)
and it is laid down that whenever there is a conflict between the shruti and
smriti literature, it is the former that prevails. It is Manusmriti, which is
particularly supportive of caste system but where it conflicts with Vedas and
Upanishads, the latter would prevail. Though Bhagvadgita (Gita) is not regarded
as a part of shruti, Gita is highly regarded as sacred and is very much a part
of classical Hinduism. As we shall just see even the Gita is against caste
system based on birth, and not supportive to it. Thus, to the extent that
dharmashastras conflict with shruti and the Gita, the latter prevails.
Apasthambha dharmasutra may have supported untouchability, but it seems to be
read more by those who like to attack Hinduism with it than by its followers! It
is hardly regarded as canon, even if any Hindu has heard of it. Vedanta
philosophy declares that there is divinity in every lecture. Rg Veda emphasises
equality of all human beings. It goes to the extent of saying, which sounds
quite modern: ‘No one is superior, none inferior. All are brothers marching
forward to prosperity’
"
(source: Is
Caste System Intrinsic to Hinduism?
Demolishing a Myth - By M V Nadkarni - Economic
and Political Weekly - November 8' 2003).
Dr. Pankaj Jain
( ? )
is an Assistant
Professor of South Asian Religions and Ecology at the University of North Texas.
He has taught Indian Films, Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu languages, and literatures at
North Carolina State University, Rutgers, Kean University, Jersey City
University, and the University of Iowa. In his scholarship he connects the
ancient Indic traditions of Hinduism and Jainism with contemporary issues -
particularly the environment. He has observed:
"Varna vyavastha (literally, the class
system) remains one of the most interesting and debatable topics in the study of
Vedic culture. Since the Vedas remain an unraveled mystery even today due to the
archaic Sanskrit in which they were composed, much of the ancient social history
is derived from the extrapolation from the later history of Indian society.
While most of the modern scholarship on this issue applies Marxist and Weberian
themes to interpret this, I endeavor to take a fresh approach to demonstrate
some of the lesser-known aspects of this system.
The Original
System
The varna
system illustrates the spirit of comprehensive synthesis, characteristic of the
ancient Indian mind with its faith in the collaboration of races and the
cooperation of cultures. Paradoxical as it may seem, the system of varna was the
outcome of tolerance and trust. Though it may now have degenerated into an
instrument of oppression and intolerance and tends to perpetuate inequality and
develop the spirit of exclusiveness, these unfortunate effects were not the
central motives of the varna system. The system of varna insisted that the law
of social life should not be cold and cruel competition, but harmony and
co-operation. Society should not be a field of rivalry among individuals. The
varnas were not allowed to compete with one another. Varna divisions were based
on individual temperament, and which were not immutable. Originally varnas were
assigned to people based on their aptitude and qualities, but in later periods
they were assigned based on birth. However, there are a number of exceptions in
the entire period that shows the flexibility of the system.
This system ensured that the religious, political, financial and physical powers
were all separated into four different social classes. Due to this fair
separation of political and intellectual powers, ancient Indian society could
not turn itself into a theocratic or autocratic society.
In the beginning, there was only one varna in the ancient Indian society. "We
were all brahmins or all sudras," says Brhadaranyaka
Upanisad (1.4, 11-5, 1.31) and also Mahabharata (12.188). A smrti
text says that one is born a sudra, and through purification he becomes a
brahmin.
Does the varna
system treat human beings unequally, with the brahmins at the top of the
hierarchy and the sudras at the bottom? This is a common observation about the
system which is based on the modern caste system rather than the ancient varna
system. It is rarely observed that the social hierarchy is not just limited to
Hinduism but it stays intact in any Indian religious society; Buddhists, Jainas,
Sikhs, Christians and Muslims have their own caste hierarchies and restrictions.
Even western societies have their own classes and groups. Thus, it is indeed a
social phenomenon, which is not just limited to Hinduism or India. J. Muir has
provided numerous passages from ancient Indian texts to demonstrate the equality
of varnas.
Varna system is
one of the most debatable phenomena of India and is tarred with many
controversies. However, on a deeper analysis one finds that the basic need for
this system was simply to ensure a healthy and flexible society unlike the one
which has been rigidified due to the colonial misinterpretation and mistreatment
of varnas, resulting in the castes as we find them in the present day India .
The original varna system was quite flexible in which one's varna could be
changed based on one's skill and was not fixed as is often understood."
(source:
The Caste system of the Hindu Society - By Dr. Pankaj Jain -
huffingtonpost.com).
John
Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892- 1964) the
world-renowned geneticist. In 1922, he joined Cambridge University to take up
research in biochemistry. Among his significant contributions is an estimate of
the rate of mutation of a human gene. Some of his famous books are The
Causes of Evolution, New Paths in
Genetics and Biochemistry of Genetics.
He
immigrated to India and soon found himself attracted to Hindu culture.
Himself a rationalist, Haldane told his colleagues, “I do not think that a
Rationalist and Humanist need necessarily break with Hinduism.” He
watched with disdain the way the socialist government machinery rooted in
sycophancy and corruption, was developing a stranglehold on the budding Indian
science. The stranglehold on the progress of India, as Haldane
observed was of a socialist government's making and not that of the Dharma. He
wrote:
“The old caste system
had this merit, that the richest merchant or Zamindar could not buy the status
of Brahmin for his son, even if the son was learned and pious. Whatever the
defects of that system – and I think that they were and are grievous – it
was not subservient to wealth. The new caste system, which the
university administrative authorities, with the connivance of many government
officials, are trying with some success to impose upon India, has no such
excuse…. In India today the unworthy successors of Durvasa and Vishvamitra
actually invite governors, vice-chancellors, and the like, to address them. This
may be a relic of British Rule. If so, it is a regrettable one.”(source:
A passage to India - By JBS
Haldane
1958 and
Science and Indian Culture - By JBS Haldane
1991
p.19 & p.24. For more on J B S Haldane,
refer to chapter on Quotes).
(Note:
Casteism pales in comparison with 50 million Africans killed in slave
boats, 200+ years of slavery with church justification of Africans having no
soul, lynchings of young African Americans, decimation of Native Americans with
things like disease infected blankets, colonization of Africa, Americas and Asia
and sapping their economy totally causing famines and living skeletons, Nazi
holocaust of 10 million, burning of witches. Refer to Hinduism
Under Threat - protectreligions.org).
Professor
R. Vaidyanathan is Professor of Finance at the Indian
Institute of Management,
Bangalore has observed:
"The
metropolitan elite and rootless experts have concluded that caste is bad. They
have made it so that every Indian is expected to feel guilty at the mention of
caste. Internationally, caste is a convenient stick to flay anything Indian, its
religions, customs, culture.
But the caste system is undeniably a valuable social
capital, which provides a cushion for individuals and families to
deal with society and the state.
The Western
model of atomising every individual to a single
element in a right-based system and forcing the individual to have a direct link
with the state has destroyed families and erased communities. Every person
stands alone, stark naked,
with only rights as his imaginary clothes to deal directly with the state.
While attacking the caste system, Indian intellectuals
have borrowed the Western right-based concept of reservation, or affirmative
action. In doing so, they have overlooked an extraordinary contribution of the
caste system, in consolidating business and entrepreneurship in
India
, particularly in the last fifty years."
(Note:
Prof. Vaidyanathan
of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, has spent years
researching the role of jati-based economic empowerment. He cites World Bank and
Indian government statistics to show that a large number of jati-based groups
have used their internal cohesion to rapidly climb up the economic ladder. This
phenomenon is what has made the "bottom of the pyramid"
(a term coined by C.K. Prahalad) thrive in
India, and has turned the rural areas into the fastest growing markets for
industry.
Critique of Hindu American Foundation's Report on 'Caste' – By Rajiv
Malhotra).
M.
N.Srinivas, the
late great sociologist, said in Collected Essays
brought out by the Oxford University Press in 2005,
“An
important feature of social mobility in modern
India
is the manner in which the successful members of the backward castes work
consistently for improving the economic and social condition of their caste
fellows. This is due to the sense of identification with one’s own caste, and
also a realisation that caste mobility is essential for individual or familial
mobility.”
“The caste system is
far from a rigid system in which the position of each component caste is fixed
for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially so in the middle
regions of the hierarchy. A low caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise
to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism,
and by Sanskritizing its ritual and pantheon.” (Srinivas 1952: 127).
Caste is a stick to beat India with and for the West to interfere in her internal affairs
'Caste' is Now
a Dangerous Geopolitical Game
***
Dr.
Koenraad Elst
(1959 -) Dutch historian, born in Leuven, Belgium,
on 7 August 1959, into a Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian) Catholic family.
He graduated in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the
Catholic University of Leuven. He is the author of several books including The
Saffron Swastika, Decolonising
The Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism and Negationism
in India: Concealilng the Record of Islam
He
has written why Christian missionaries attacked the caste system.
'The caste system is
often portrayed as the ultimate horror. Inborn inequality is indeed unacceptable
to us moderns, but this does not preclude that the system has also had its
merits.
Caste is perceived as an "exclusion-from," but first of all it is a
form of "belonging-to," a natural structure of solidarity. For this
reason, Christian and Muslim missionaries found it very
difficult to lure Hindus away from their communities. Sometimes
castes were collectively converted to Islam, and Pope Gregory XV (1621-23)
decreed that the missionaries could tolerate caste distinction among Christian
converts; but by and large, caste remained an effective
hurdle to the destruction of Hinduism through conversion. That
is why the missionaries started attacking the institution of caste and in
particular the brahmin caste. This propaganda has bloomed into a full-fledged
anti-brahminism, the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism.
Every caste had a large measure of autonomy, with its own judiciary, duties and
privileges, and often its own temples. Inter-caste affairs were settled at the
village council by consensus; even the lowest caste had veto power. This
autonomy of intermediate levels of society is the antithesis of the totalitarian
society in which the individual stands helpless before the all-powerful state.
This decentralized structure of civil society and of the Hindu religious
commonwealth has been crucial to the survival of Hinduism under Muslim rule.
Whereas Buddhism was swept away as soon as
its monasteries were destroyed, Hinduism retreated into its caste structure and
weathered the storm.
Caste also provided a
framework for integrating immigrant communities: Jews, Zoroastrians and Syrian
Christians. They were not only tolerated, but assisted in efforts to preserve
their distinctive traditions.
Nineteenth-century Westerners
projected the colonial situation and the newest race theories on the caste
system: the upper castes were white invaders lording it over the black natives.
This outdated view is still repeated ad-nauseam by anti-Hindu authors: now that
"idolatry" has lost its force as a term of abuse, "racism"
is a welcome innovation to demonize Hinduism. In reality,
India
is the region where all skin color types met and mingled, and you will find
many brahmins as black as Nelson Mandela. Ancient "Aryan" heroes like
Rama,
Krishna
, Draupadi, Ravana (a brahmin) and a number of Vedic seers were explicitly
described as being dark-skinned.
Finally, caste society has been the most stable society
in history. Indian communists used to sneer
that "
India
has never even had a revolution." Actually, that
is no mean achievement.
(source: Why
the Christian missionaries attack the institution of caste and in particular the
brahmin caste? - By Koenraad Elst).
Refer to
Vatican Hiding Evidence Convicting Pope Frances of Killing and Trafficking
Children! Evidence PILES against Him- Court April 7th
- Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis),
Adolfo Pachon (Jesuit Superior General), Justin Welby (Archbishop of
Canterbury), and many others linked to the Vatican, have been accused of
operating a global child trafficking network involving routine and systematic
kidnapping, rape, torture, and sacrificial murder of newborn infants and
children up to the age of fourteen.
Refer to
'Xavier was aware of the brutality of the Inquisition'
-
One of the darkest chapters in Indo-Portuguese history, ‘the Inquisition’
deserves far more comprehensive research to bring out the truth from an Indian
perspective, says historian
Teotonio R de Souza. This
year marks 500 years of the Portuguese arrival in Goa in 1510 which set the
stage for one of the longest colonial dominations in history.
Refer to how
Brahmin is sold in the West -
Brahmin
Handbags
Note: Refer to
Post-Hindu India - By
Kancha Ilaiah, in order to understand the grand designs being
sponsored by these global players.
Caste has given Indian society stability and
protection from Foreign Invaders and today's corrupt Government.
Caste
is our social capital. We don't have to become apologists.
***
Rajiv
Malhotra (
) Founder of The Infinity Foundation in
Princeton, NJ has remarked on the ill prepared
HAF report on caste
thus:
"There are so many Hindu organizations working hard on the ground on this issue,
that deserve recognition, but unfortunately, only the church related and leftist
groups are given international recognition. Christians participate in world
forums by putting themselves on a strong footing, presenting all the great work
they claim to do. They never start on a weak footing with any kind of "apology"
externally. Where is the Christian apology for the
slaughter and rape perpetuated during the
Inquisition in India and
subsequent atrocities by its missionaries, or the
Islamic apology for terrorism
done in its name? Why must Hindus grovel just to gain standing in front of
Western institutions?
Can we imagine an Islamic group, that claims to be champions of Islam, to spread
a report that condemns Sharia Law as a human rights violation, and that gives 20
pages of graphic and sensational incidents of Sharia based violations?
The effects of this would be to support those who want Sharia Law outlawed by
international bodies. Indeed, there are movements against Sharia Law, and a
small number of liberal Muslims can be found among them. But these Muslims are
not empowered and are on the fringes of legitimacy as spokespersons for Islam.
They are not accepted as the voice of mainstream Islam.
"I cannot imagine a Christian or Muslim group taking their cases of abuse within
their community to some foreign capital, and submitting it to foreign legal
authorities to get them involved in dealing with it. "
Failure of
Western Model
The western model of a society made of
atomic individuals has led to the breakdown of families and communities. In such
a model, the government social security is the only recourse for those who are
handicapped, who fall on hard times, or are in old age. There is no local
community support available very often. We know how this experiment has failed
in the US where the social security system is virtually
bankrupt. Is it ethical to export this failed model to India? In a
poor country like India, the central government has even less chances of
providing a safety net of social security to its vast population. Traditionally,
the jati served as the safety net one turns to in times of distress.
What would be the social security for Indians once
devoid of closely knit communities that are held together by centuries of
traditions and bonds? Already, in westernized cities such as Delhi,
many elderly are being thrown out of their homes in this new era of western
modernity that has arrived. There are "old age homes" now being built in Delhi
for the first time. HAF better have a substitute in place, before dismantling
the old structure too hastily.
Jati cohesion has also been a form of collective bargaining of
rights, and even during Mughal and British times the rulers had to face their
power of collective bargaining. Dissolving jati became a
British strategy to get rid of local power that was in the hands
of Indians. Today, when a jati structure gets eradicated, the
vacuum left is often filled by
church-run or madrassa-run collective
identities. The church "congregation" and Islamic "umma" are the alternative
"new jatis" waiting to take over. Thus, the role played by jatis for resisting
against conversions must be understood. "
The "caste problem" today, is a
problem of perverted secularism for politicians'
self-interests. It is the result of modern
democracy that encourages vote bank politics and fragmented parties, and this is
why Arun Shourie has proposed a US style central presidential system."
The New Washington Politics on Hinduism
The recent mid-term elections has been a big boost for
right-wing Christians joining the US Congress in large numbers
starting in January, 2011. Obama is on the defensive and eager to make "deals"
with them, sacrificing those items to their wishes that he does not consider
critical to his own agenda. Hinduism has always been on
the brink of US Congressional sanctions
and US pressure that would amount to interference in India on the ground of
"human rights."
The new buzz of excitement in these radical right-wing Christian circles is that
this is the right time to introduce bills in the US Congress whose ultimate
effect would be to pressure the Indian government on certain social policies.
Demands will be made that could try to: (1) open the
floodgates for massive faith-based funding from overseas, in the guise of human
rights, far more openly than before; (2) enact laws or policies in India to
curtail Hindu voices further; (3) require that US corporate activities and
investments in India should give employment preference to certain "minorities"
and "oppressed" peoples, and Christian groups have prepared their ground forces
in India over several years to pounce on this opportunity and claim the lion's
share of the benefits; and (4) start prosecuting caste-based "human rights
violations" under international laws.
I fear that
HAF is acting under the pressure to either
soften its stand in defending Hinduism, or face the music that could sideline it
in these debates.
(source:
Critique of Hindu American Foundation's Report on 'Caste' – By Rajiv
Malhotra). Refer to
Breaking India: Western Inventions and Dalit Faultlines -
By Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan
Refer to
Hindu American Foundation faces desertion on Caste Report - By Dr.
Srinivasan
Kalyanaraman
and
PIO Hindus: Gateway to White Imperialism –
By Radha Rajan - vijayvaani.com
Gurcharan
Das, the strategic consultant, writer and former vice-president
and managing director of Proctor & Gamble Worldwide, says in his book, India
Unbound,
“In
the nineteenth century, British
colonialists used to blame our caste system for everything wrong
in India. Now I have a different perspective. Instead of morally judging caste,
I seek to understand its impact on competitiveness. I have come to believe that
being endowed with commercial castes is a source of
advantage in the global economy.”
(source:
Caste
as social capital: Why
have the Gounders, Nadars, the Marwaris and Katchis done so well - By R
Vaidyanathan - newsinsight.net).
Gerald
Heard (?) American thinker and writer who has studied the Indian
social system, has called it "organic democracy", and
suggests in his work, Man the Master, that it is the type of democracy the world
as a whole needs today. Heard defines "organic democracy" as "the
rule of the people who have organized themselves in a living and not a
mechanical relationship; where instead of all men being
said to be equal, which is a lie, all men are known to be of equal
value, could we but find the position in which their potential contribution
could be released and their essential growth so pursued." He calls the four
varnas by the names "seers" (Brahmins), "politicians (Kshatriyas),
"technicians" (vaishyas) and "coherers" (Shudras).
"These four classes are distinguished by unmistakable psychological
characteristics which suit them to their particular purpose, function and
place." It is this organization that made
Indian society stable, efficient and strong. It produced in India great
scholars, warriors, administrators, and producers of wealth.
(source: Man,
the Master - By Gerald Heard p. 129).
Rajeev
Srinivasan columnist has wisely noted that:
"It
has become a conditioned, Pavlovian reflex
for Indians to condemn the entire idea of caste unthinkingly. It
has become a cliché to rail against caste, but jati and varnam are just a
codification of the fact that all humans are not born equal in their endowments:
Some are tall, some are fat, some are musically talented, and so on. We cannot
escape the ruthless Bell Curve.
The very term 'caste' is not proper, because it
is a European Christian distortion of the ideas of jati and varnam, which the
colonialists condemned out of ignorance and prejudice." What
is deplorable is not caste per se, but casteism, or discrimination based on
caste. This is similar to the rightly abhorred discrimination based on other
inescapable biological facts: Race, gender, or age. Casteism
must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, but that does not mean caste
has to be thrown out, baby with bath-water.
Allegedly egalitarian Communist
states, too, have their elites: Rulers' offspring get the plum jobs.
Not too many children of Polit Bureau members toil in the gulags of
China
, or have their organs harvested on demand. In Muslim
societies, too, there are obvious hierarchies: Women are defined to
be inferior. Among men, Arabs are top of the heap; among Arabs, Prophet
Mohammed's tribe is superior. In that tribe, Mohammed's family members are more
privileged. The rigidity of caste as we know it is yet another 'contribution' -
as are very many of modern
India
's ills, such as dowry - of Christian European
imperialists. They capriciously decided that the Manusmrti was the
rulebook of Indian society, and used their census to arbitrarily assign jatis to
varnams. The objective of the imperialists was simple: To divide and rule.
Today, their lineal descendants, the Communists, have latched on to the same
idea as a way of subverting
India
.
The
truth of the matter is that jati is an entirely satisfactory construct for most
members of a particular jati, so long as there is no overt discrimination
against them. It is not as though people are just dying to get into a 'higher'
jati. They are content with their existing in-group, even if they belong to a
relatively 'low' jati. It is belonging that matters. Finally,
caste makes Indian society robust.
It is a
system theory axiom that a centralised, monolithic system is vulnerable to a
single-point failure. But a distributed system, which has many smaller,
independent, nodes, is far more difficult to destroy. Castes have functioned as
these distributed nodes, and thus no attacker could overthrow the system. Caste,
in a fundamental way, has been a reason for the longevity of Indian civilisation.
Surely, the distortions in this perfectly sensible construct need to be removed,
but it is not per se inappropriate.
(source:
Nothing
wrong with caste: Birth and berth - By Rajeev Srinivasan
- dailypioneer.com - Agenda Special section).
The caste system has
been the most misunderstood, the most vilified subject of Hindu society at the
hands of Western scholars and even today by "secular" Indians. The Hindu caste system has often been described as
" the most cruel
apartheid, imposed by the barbaric white Aryan invaders on the gentle
dark-skinned natives."
(Refer to Aryan Invasion Theory
Chapter).
The earliest reference to the four
classes is in the Purusa Sukta of the Rig Veda,
where they are described as having sprung from the body of the creative spirit,
from his head, arms, thighs, and feet. This indicates that just as in a human
body, the different organs perform different functions so also in human society
different people must perform different functions, according to their
predominant traits or temperament.
(source: Hinduism:
The Eternal Religion - By M. D. Chaturvedi p.
200-201).
'This poetical
image is intended to convey the organic character of society."
Man is
not only only himself, but is in solidarity with all of his kind. Man is not an
abstract individual. He belongs to a certain social group by virtue of his
character, behavior, and function in the community. The four-fold classification
is conceived in the interests of world progress.
(source: Eastern
Religions and Western Thought - By S.
Radhakrishnan p. 355-357).
If Caste is destroyed - it will destroy Hinduism
Destruction of Hinduism will mean destruction of India
***
Sir
Sidney Low
(1857-1932) in his book, A Vision of India: with a
frontispiece says:
“There is no doubt that it
(caste) is the main cause of the fundamental stability
and contentment by which Indian society has been braced
for centuries against the shocks of politics and the cataclysms of Nature.
It provides every man with his place, his career, his occupations, his circle of
friends. It makes him, at the outset, a member of a corporate body; it protects
him through life from the canker of social jealousy and unfulfilled aspirations;
it ensures him companionship and a sense of community with others in like case
with himself. The caste organization is to the Hindu his club, his trade union,
his benefit society, his philanthropic society. There are no work houses in
India, and none are as yet needed. The obligation to provide for kinsfolk and
friends in distress is universally acknowledged; nor can it be questioned that
this is due to the recognition of the strength of family ties and of the bonds
created by associations and common pursuits which is fostered by the caste
principle. An India without caste, as things stand at present, it is not quite
easy to imagine.”
(source:
Hindu
Superiority
- Har Bilas Sarda p.
32-33).
William
Robinson,
author of By
Temple
Shrine
and Lotus Pool, wrote on p. 66 of his book:
"The fortress of caste
cannot be taken by external assault. Its wall will only crumble when the
garrison within ceases to repair them. The only real discipline that
India
has maintained is the discipline of caste. If you really could create genuine
democracy in
India
it would destroy caste. If it destroyed caste it would
destroy Hinduism and if it destroyed Hinduism it would destroy
India
, at least the
India
that has existed for so many thousand of years… Far, far better that they
remain good Hindus than become rampant atheists!"
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By
Suhash Chakravarty p. 233).
Nirad C.
Chaudhari, (1897-1999) prominent Indian author and scholar, who
rejected Western culture in an independent India, has defended the caste
system on the grounds that the successive waves of migrant tribes or invaders
probably made a class society inevitable in India, and that caste still has a
useful function:
"The Caste system has only
organized the disparities created by historical forces and movements. By doing
so, it has done great good by reducing the competition of the diversities, by
freezing them within certain limits, and by making each not only legitimate but
even moral.....It canalized competitions and helped the coexistence of elements
which otherwise would have been at war. It was a social
system specially suited to a country like India, which
history has made into a warehouse of civilizations, and a couloir and cul-de-sac
of diverse people and cultures." He
emphasized that if he considered the caste system in any danger - which he does
not - he would add, "Please do not pulverize a society which has no other
force of cohesion, into amorphous dust."
(source: The
Continent of Circe - By Nirad C. Chaudhari New York: Oxford
University Press, 1965 p. 60).
Alain Danielou
(1907-1994) author of several books,
including History of India and Virtue,
Success, Pleasure, & Liberation : The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of
Ancient India. writes:
"It
is easy to see that despite all the national and linguistic barriers, even
modern Western society is fundamentally, like all societies, a caste system. The
problem of Western society derive from the fact that while proclaiming the
equality of men, it is entirely graded on a hierarchical system as far as the
professions are concerned. Under the pretext of equality, Western lawmakers do
not let the various groups cooperate among themselves while keeping their
different habits, ethics, and social life. Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Celts,
Basques, Albigemsoams, Pygmies, Blacks or Inuits are accorded a relative
equality only on condition that they conform to our customs, losing most of
their social, national, and religious characteristics and in fact abandoning
their own personality."
Hindu Society is 'caste-ridden' while modern democratic society reveals the
presence of 'classes', sociologist explain. They acclaim 'class' and condemn
'caste'. Caste, according to them, has its roots in Hindu (Brahmannical)
religion, while 'class' has its roots in economic disparities.
(source:
Virtue,
Success, Pleasure, & Liberation : The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of
Ancient India - by Alain Danielou
p. 33 - 35).
Caste
system provided for positive Social Networking and support
vs
The Total Alienation
of Young people in the West
***
Mark Tully
( ? ) was the BBC correspondent in New Delhi and author of several books
including No
Full Stops in India
and The
Heart of India.
He points
out:
"The
alienation of many young people in the West and the loneliness of the old show
the suffering that egalitarianism inflicts on those who do not win, the
superficiality of an egalitarianism which in effect means equal opportunities
for all to win and then ignores the inevitable losers. For
all that, the elite of India have become so spellbound by egalitarianism that
they are unable to see any good in the only institution which does provide a
sense of identity and dignity to those who are robbed from birth of the
opportunity to compete on an equal footing – CASTE. Caste
is obnoxious to the egalitarian West, so it is obnoxious to the Indian elite
too."
"The very fact that the institution of caste has
survived about 3,000 years is a clear proof of the services which it must have
rendered to the Hindu society in different periods of history. It
is the caste system that has been largely responsible for the preservation of
Hindu religion and culture. The caste
brotherhoods, on account of their policy of exclusiveness, did not mix with the
foreigners. So the Greeks, Huns or Muslims could not conquer Hindu culture. On
the contrary, most of these foreigners were themselves absorbed into the Hindu
fold."
(source:
No
Full Stops in India
- By Mark Tully).
"The
caste system is based on the sound economic principle of division of labor which
ensures efficiency of production. A person from
his birth knew what profession he was to follow later on. So from the start, he
devoted all his energy to the one profession of his forefathers. It was because
of this reason that in every period of Indian history, there was no dearth of
highly-skilled workers and scholars. Megasthenes, Hieun Tsang, Alberuni, Ibn
Batuta, Babar and even the early Britishers were impressed by the talents and
artistic skill of the Indians in every art and craft."
(source: Ancient
India - By V. D. Mahajan p. 166).
Note:
Mark Tully has spoken in defense of the caste system
and denounced the spread of consumerism in the subcontinent. The BBC
pushed him out because of his excessive identification with Indian
culture.
(source: India
Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800 - By
Kate Teltscher introduction page).
Michael Pym
wrote : "Caste
is the secret of that amazing stability which is characteristic of the Indian
social structure. It is the strength of Hinduism. Naturally, it can
be abused. The moment a Brahmin treats a sweeper cruelly because he is a
sweeper, he departs from his Brahminhood. He becomes a usurper and a social
danger. And in due course, he will have to pay for this mistake. Because men are
imperfect, and because power is a deadly intoxicant, such abuses may and do
occur, but they are not inherent in the institution – they are contrary to its
principles, though they may be inherent in the make up of the individual.
Caste in
itself is also a protection for the individual, because it permits group action.
The reason why a Hindu dreads being outcaste is analogous to the reason why, in
England say, a worker would dread being thrown out of his trade union.
(source:
The Power of India
- By Michael Pym
p. 152- 153).
While Marxists and other anti-Hindu intellectuals calling
themselves Secularists never miss an opportunity to denounce it, the fact of the
matter is that the Indian civilization survived nearly
a thousand year onslaught of Islam. Several
other ancient civilizations – like those of Iran (Zorastrian), the Byzantine
Empire (Christian) and Central Asia (Buddhist) broke down under the same force
over a much shortest period. This shows that they must have lacked a social
order capable of protecting their societies.
The so called ‘egalitarian’
Buddhist society lacked the social organization which enabled the Hindu society
to survive. It was the same story in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey which were part of
the Christian Byzamtine Empire. They lacked the strength and resilience of the
Hindu society and succumbed to the Islamic invasion.
(source:
A
Hindu View of the World - By N. S. Rajaram p. 103 -
104).
Dr.
Koenraad Elst
(1959 -) Dutch historian, born in Leuven, Belgium,
on 7 August 1959, into a Flemish (i.e. Dutch-speaking Belgian) Catholic family.
He graduated in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the
Catholic University of Leuven. He is the author of several books including The
Saffron Swastika, Decolonising
The Hindu Mind - Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism and Negationism
in India: Concealilng the Record of Islam
"The caste system is
often portrayed as the ultimate horror. Inborn inequality is indeed unacceptable
to us moderns, but this does not preclude that the system has also had its
merits.
Caste is perceived as an "exclusion-from,"
but first of all it is a form of "belonging-to," a natural structure
of solidarity. For this reason, Christian and Muslim missionaries found it very
difficult to lure Hindus away from their communities.
Sometimes castes were collectively converted to Islam, and Pope
Gregory XV (1621-23) decreed that the missionaries
could tolerate caste distinction among Christian converts; but by and large,
caste remained an effective hurdle to the destruction of Hinduism through
conversion. That is why the missionaries
started attacking the institution of caste and in particular the Brahmin caste.
This propaganda has bloomed into a full-fledged anti-brahminism, the Indian
equivalent of anti-Semitism."
(source: Caste
- By Prof Koenraad Elst - hinduismtoday.com).
T M P
Mahadevan wrote about the castes:
"The origin of caste is lost in obscurity. It purpose however,
seems to have been the same as that of Plato’s
division of the State into three classes, castes, or professions,
viz. philosophers-rulers, warriors and masses. (see Plato’s
Republic) The underlying principle is division of labor. Originally
the castes were professional and subsequently became hereditary. The Brahmins
were custodians of the spiritual culture of the race. He was friend,
philosopher, guide to humanity. The Kshatriya is the guardian of society, its
protector and preserver. The Vaisya is the expert in economics. His was the duty
of arranging for the production and distribution of wealth. The Sudra was the
worker or manual laborer. By his manual labor he places the entire community
under a debt of gratitude. The
system was evolved to keep the social fabric in a harmonious condition; but in
later years it became a divisive force. The original
designers built the edifice of caste on the secure foundations of obligations;
the lesser men who came after them produced a caricature on the shifting sands
of rights…
The four classes were not meant to be warring communities but
complementary classes. Mahatma Gandhi said: “It
is a law of spiritual economics” “It has nothing to do with superiority or
inferiority”. And as the system of caste is purely a social
adjustment, there is nothing that can stand in the way of its revision and
readjustment except a sense of pride and obstinacy and a demand to preserve the
status quo on the part of some of its members."
(source:
Outlines
of Hinduism
- By T M P Mahadevan ISBN 0836457862 p. 69-74).
When Julius Caesar occupied the
Celtic West of Europe, he found that the Druid
class was the backbone of this society (the
parallel with the Brahmins
in the perception of the missionaries is quite exact): therefore, he persecuted
the Druids.
(source:
Ayodhya
and After: Issues Before Hindu Society -
By Koenraad Elst p. 100).
Huston Smith
(1919 - ) born in China to Methodist missionaries, a philosopher, most
eloquent writer, world-famous religion scholar who practices
Hatha Yoga. He has written various books, The
World's Religions. He says:
Men
and women that are lining the bathing ghats are all Hindus, but how different
they are. But India looked past their bodies into their minds where she found
the prolific ness of the infinite exploding like a Roman cantle.
No other
civilization saw, appreciated, and classified so precisely the full spectrum of
human personality types…an achievement that has earned for India – the title
of the world’s introspective psychologist.
"India identified four such
types and once again honored all of them. Likening society to an organism,
she pictured Brahmins - its head, Brahmins are intellectuals, their chief
delight in art, ideas, and things of spirit generally.
Next come the arms and shoulder of society – its
administrative - persons who are
talent for getting things done
Next personality
type – the artisan or craftsmen – the engineer and the farmer – India
likens these people to society’s stomach – for they produce and feed us the
things on which life depends.
Finally, manual labor is important too. They are the legs and
feet without which society could not run.”
(source: The
Mystic's Journey - India
and the Infinite: The Soul of a People – By Huston Smith).
The
Ploy of Western Propaganda
Linking
Caste to Hindu Scriptures and de-linking Racism from the Bible
***
Dr.
Koenraad Elst has written:
"Increasingly,
Hinduism is identified by the international public with the caste system and
nothing but the caste system. The caste system, in
turn, is painted in the ugliest colors: as a racist Apartheid system designed to
oppress the native population. These notions are eagerly welcomed and amplified
by outside forces such as Christian missionary centers, followed by their
Islamic counterparts. Till recently, American foreign policy agencies
made no secret of their designs on India's unity. When she was US ambassador to
the UN, Mrs. Jean Kirkpatrick once said that "the break-up of India is one
of the goals of the American foreign policy." Patrick Moynihan, who had
held the same job, said more recently, "After the break-up of the Soviet
Union, the artificial state India is also bound to break up."
(source:
Indigenous
Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar - By Koenraad Elst Voice of India
ASIN 8185990042 p. 59-60). For
more refer to chapter on Islamic
Onslaught and European
Imperialism
Ronald
B Inden author has pointed out:
"Caste, the Western scholars held, is the type of
society characteristic of India, the institution that distinguishes it from the
other civilization dominated by caste from the West. The
representation of India as a civilization dominated by caste are legion. Caste,
considered the essence of Indian civilization, has
often been treated as though it were the unchanging agent of the civilization,
from the rise of the Indus Valley culture and the arrival of the Aryans down to
the present day of regionalism and caste in electoral politics. It is, thus,
deeply embedded in Indological discourse. Many of the more recent accounts of
caste have dropped the racialist discourse, but they have not broken with the
notion that caste is a unique type of society, one that displaces the
economically oriented politics of the West. Accounts of
caste can and have been used as a foil to build up the West’s image of itself."
(source:
Imagining
India - By Ronald B Inden p.
82-83).
Refer to how
Brahmin is sold in the West -
Brahmin
Handbags
"It would lead to a greater respect for Indias
culture, and indeed a better
understanding of it, if it were recognized that the caste system has never been totally
static, that it is adapting itself to todays changing circumstances and that it has
positive as well as negative aspects. The caste system provides security and a community for millions
of Indians. It gives them an identity that neither Western Science nor Western thought has
yet provided, because caste is not just a matter of being a Brahmin or a Harijan:
it is
also a kinship system. The system provides a wider support group than a family: a group
which has a social life in which all its members participate."
Dr. K. M. Munshi
(1887 - 1971) A
freedom fighter, Committee of the
Indian National Congress. He founded
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in 1938 with the
blessings of Mahatma Gandhi. He ceaselessly strove for cultural and spiritual
regeneration. He
has
drawn our attention to the harm several European scholars have intentionally
done to Hindu culture: He laments how the failures of Hindus have been
highlighted and how their successes have been consistently ignored:
“It (history) does not give us the real India. … During our school or college
career, generation after generation were told about the successive foreign
invasions of the country, but little about how we resisted them and less about
our victories. We were taught to decry the Hindu social
systems; but we have never been told how
this system came into existence as a synthesis of political, social, economic
and cultural forces; and how it developed in the people the tenacity to survive
catastrophic changes.”
(source:
History of Ancient India: Distorted and
Mutilated).
Jakob
De Roover is
at the Research Centre Vergelijkende
Cultuurwetenschap,
Ghent University,
Belgium. He has observed that:
"When
European scholars describe
India
, they tend to connect all ills and atrocities in that society to the nature of
Indian culture. One links widow-burning, dowry murder, domestic violence, female
infanticide and caste discrimination to ‘Hindu’ foundations.
Europe
also loves to celebrate Indian authors whose specialty is revealing the ‘dark
underbelly’ of Indian society.
In
contrast, social ills and atrocities in European
societies are characterised as aberrations: racism, colonial genocide, the two
World Wars, the Holocaust, sexual abuse, etc. are considered as acts that
deviate from the true temper of European culture. This stance of cultural
asymmetry has become the hidden premise of the European study of
India."
(source:
How
Free Are We? - By Jakob De Roover).
Refer to
Poverty in America:
Census: US poverty rate rises to 15.1 per cent; number of
uninsured hits high of 49.9 million
Refer to Why
Nothing has Changed for Victims of Church Torture, or for the Victimizers -
By Rev. Kevin D. Annett - Hidden
From History: The Canadian Holocaust. Watch Film Trailer to
Kevin's award-winning documentary film Unrepentant
- youtube.com.
In the September 1989 issue of Seminar magazine, Madhu
Kishwar,
one of India leading feminists, wrote,
"The caste system provides for relatively
greater stability and dignity to the individuals than they would have as atomized
individuals. This is part explains why the Indian poor retain a strong sense of
self-respect. It is that self-respect which the thought-less insistence on egalitarianism
destroys."
(source: No
Full Stops in India - By Mark Tully p. 4-8).
Caste
system is often perceived to be an integral part of Hindu religion. This erroneous
perception arises when people mix the ancient social tradition (caste system)
with Hindu religious philosophy.
According to V. A. Smith, most of the
misunderstanding on the subject of caste system has arisen from the persistent
mistranslation of Manu's term "Varna" as caste, whereas it should be
rendered class or order or by some equivalent term.
(source:
Oxford History of India - By V. A. Smith
Oxford Date of Publication: 1958).
The Genius of
India
Guy Sorman
(1944 - ) visiting scholar at Hoover Institution at Stanford and the
leader of new liberalism in France, states:
"Westerners tend to be perplexed and scandalized by the caste
system but they forget that the aristocracy which ruled over Europe for a
thousand years was a caste of sorts. The guilds of the Ancient Regime resembled
Indian castes as they had existed initially, each caste corresponding to a
particular trade." When it comes to marriage, in Europe as in India, one
looks for a partner from among one's immediate social circle.
Till the Age of
Enlightenment, castes were viewed with interest rather than revulsion. Some
French travelers even felt that the caste system had a certain social utility.
In 1777, when Desvaulx (1745 - 1825) wrote in his
book:
"Indians
are as attached to their caste as our gentlemen to theirs."
(source: Les
indes florissantes - Robert Laffont 1991).
Sorman further said: "The
authority of the caste is a check on the possible abuse of their power by the
princes." There has never been a central authority capable of imposing a
single language, religion or way of life on the myriad castes that constitute
India.
It is for this very reason that in the past the
Muslim and British conquerors and prozelytisers have had to curtail their
ambitions.
"India, is the only great civilization not to have been devoured by the
West." says Guy Sorman.
Caste system
has also made Indians completely immune to the
totalitarian temptations. Overturning
Western prejudice, Guy Sorman sees in the caste system and polytheism not a
curse but the stuff that forearms Indians against absolutism. It is perhaps
thanks to castes, however archaic and oppressive they may be, that India, unlike
China, has escaped from totalitarianism and the grip of a single state or a
single party. It may be said that the endurance of the Brahmins in India has
kept her elite intact, whereas in neighboring China the anti-intellectualism of
communist peasants has completely wiped out the intelligentsia of that country.
It was the Brahmins who, at the time of British colonization, introduced in
India the first notions of public health and modern techniques in agriculture
and industry.
Though caste as an ideology is
unique to India, the caste spirit, both as a metaphor and social reality, seems
widespread. It is the caste system which holds Indians
together and has allowed eternal India to endure. Its religious bases
was attacked by Islam and Christianity and since the 19th century both Indian
and European reformers have not stopped harping on the social ills of the caste
system. But nothing, neither socialism nor nationalism nor republican
egalitarianism nor any other doctrine of Western origin, has managed to replace
it.
(source: The
Genius of India - By Guy Sorman ('Le Genie de
l'Inde') Macmillan India Ltd. 2001. ISBN 0333 93600 0 p. xiii - 56-58).

An Englishman getting a
pedicure from his Indian servants.
No Ten Commandments in the
East of the Suez Canal?
The Tyranny of British Rule: "The British have set
themselves up as the master race in India. British rule in India is fascism,
there is no dodging that."
"It is in India, of all places on the earth, that the
superiority of the white over the colored races is most strikingly
demonstrated."
Refer to the chapter on European
Imperialism. Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com
Refer
to
British
aristocracy ‘ate human flesh’ -
indianrealist.wordpress.com
and Think
tank alleges British MPs involved in promoting evangelism in India -
hinduvoice.co.uk. Refer to The
Genocidal war being waged against
Iraq
and its people by the Anglo-American imperialists - Iraq
Body Count. Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide. Refer
to Campus
murders of Indian students in US cause for concern. Refer
to Hindus
want public apology from Pope
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
Watch
Why
we fight
(2005)
documentary
- Imperial
and technological arrogance of world's Super power:
describes the rise and maintenance of the
United States
military-industrial complex and its involvement in the wars led by the
United States
during the last fifty years, and in particular in the 2003
Invasion of Iraq.
The film alleges that in every decade since World War II, the American public
has been told a lie to bring it into war to fuel the military-economic machine,
which in turn maintains American dominance in the world.
***
Why
The British
Hated
the Brahmins
According
to columnist, Meenakshi Jain:
"The
British were not wrong in their distrust of educated Brahmins in whom they saw a
potential threat to their supremacy in India. For instance, in 1879 the
Collector of Tanjore in a communication to Sir James
Caird, member of the Famine Commission, stated that "there
was no class (except Brahmins ) which was so hostile to the English."
The predominance of the Brahmins in the freedom movement confirmed the worst
British suspicions of the community. Innumerable CID reports of the period
commented on Brahmin participation at all levels of the nationalist movement. In
the words of an observer,
"If any community could
claim credit for driving the British out of the country, it was the Brahmin
community. Seventy per cent of those who were felled by British bullets were
Brahmins".
To
counter what they perceived, a Brahmanical challenge, the British launched on
the one hand a major ideological attack on the Brahmins and, on the other
incited non-Brahmin caste Hindus to press for preferential treatment, a ploy
that was to prove equally successful vis-à-vis the Muslims.
In the attempt to rewrite Indian history, Brahmins began to be portrayed as
oppressors and tyrants who willfully kept down the rest of the populace. Their
role in the development of Indian society was deliberately slighted. In ancient
times, for example, Brahmins played a major part in the spread of new methods of
cultivation (especially the use of the plough and manure) in backward and
aboriginal areas. The Krsi-parasara,
compiled during this period, is testimony to their contribution in this field.
Apart from misrepresenting the Indian past, the British actively encouraged
anti-Brahmin sentiments.
Apart from misrepresenting the
Indian past, the British actively encouraged anti-Brahmin sentiments.
A number of scholars have commented on their involvement in the anti-Brahmin
movement in South India. As a result of their machinations non-Brahmins turned
on the Brahmins with a ferocity that has few parallels in Indian history. This
was all the more surprising in that for centuries Brahmins and non-Brahmins had
been active partners and collaborators in the task of political and social
management.
(source:
The Plight of Brahmins - By Meenakshi Jain The Indian
Express, Tuesday, September 18, 1990).
Refer
to The
Indian Jews - By Jakob
De Roover - Outlookindia.com June 20, 2008.
Author S.
Balagangadhara writes:
"The Brahmins were identified as the
‘clergy’ or the priests of Hinduism. An explicit
hostility towards the heathen priesthood was not helped by the inability of the
messengers of God’s word to convert Brahmins to Christianity. In
Brahmins, they came across a literate group, which was able to read, write, do
arithmetic, conduct ‘theological’ discussions, etc. During the first hundred
years or so, this group was the only source of information about India as far as
the missionaries were concerned. Schooled to perform many administrative tasks,
the Brahmins were mostly the only ones well-versed in the European languages –
enough to communicate with the Europeans. In short, they appeared both to be the
intellectual group and the most influential social layer in the Indian social
organization. Conversion of the heathens of India, as
the missions painfully discovered, did not depend so much on winning the
allegiance of the prince or the king as it did on converting the Brahmins.
This
attack was born out of the inability of Christianity to gain a serious foothold
in the Indian society. The ‘red
race’ was primitive – it could be decimated; the ‘blacks’ were backward
– they could be enslaved; the ‘yellow’ and the ‘brown’ were inferior
– they could be colonized. But how to convert them? One would
persecute resistance and opposition. How to respond to indifference? The
attitude of these heathens towards Christianity, it is this: indifference.
"
(source: The
Heathen in His Blindness...: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion - By
S. Balagangadhara p. 82 -149). For more refer to chapter on First
Indologists and European
Imperialism).
Sesha
Samarajiwa
( ? ) from Sri Lanka is interested examining foreign religious agents’ role as
Fifth Columnists of neocolonialism/neoimperialism. He has written:
"Evangelists
belong to a long line of pests from the West who have come and keep coming like
locusts to colonize our souls and cannibalize our cultures.
The
latest incursions are merely a continuation
of the 500-year-old sorry saga
of Asia, Africa and
South America
, which began with the arrival of the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Some have
never recovered from the machinations of their priests and the savagery of their
conquistadors. The baton of imperialism has passed from the Europeans to the
Americans. That is not to say that the rest of the West has dropped out. They
have not. They are very much in the game. It’s just that the Americans are in
the lead, the new Romans on the rampage.
We know
well how the Europeans won the West. They won it through mass
genocide of the native populations
in North and
South America
. In
South America
, hundreds and thousands of natives who resisted conversion were garroted.
There is a poignant painting depicting such conversions. It shows armored
Spanish soldiers garroting native priests, while a Spanish priest holds up a
large cross. More terrified natives await their turn. On the side, another
Spanish priest feeds stacks of ancient gold-leaf books of the Mayans into a
fire. On the face of the Mayan priests, a look of utter sadness mixed with
resignation.
In places
like
India
and
Sri Lanka
, they were no better. They too faced abject horrors. In his book, Christianity's
scramble for
India
, Navaratna
Rajaram
says that “the
Christian Missionary is neither a Christian nor a missionary. In fact, he is a
racist and a white supremacist in priestly guise.” Their
Buffalo Bills and their Wild Bills, their Custers and their Cortezes, and the
long line of predators
and priests
made sure that the sorry remainder of once-proud nations would remain so, while
they ruled the roost in lands drenched with native blood. Many weaker cultures
succumbed to the relentless onslaught from the West. They either slaughtered
those who resisted or they sowed the seeds of abjection and their eventual
self-destruction. Even today, we see the pathetic dregs of once-noble nations
staggering around native reservations and barrios in North and South America, in
Australia
, in
Canada
, in
New Zealand
. They have lost their spirit. They have lost their will to live. They seem
embarrassed to be alive. They are self-destructing. At best, they are performing
monkeys titillating whites with a thirst for the exotic. These are abject
peoples, vanishing tribes. Now, not satisfied with ruling their large chunk of
raided real estate, they are hell-bent on extending their hegemony over the
whole world. They
howl in protest when the natives resist.
Human misery is happy hunting grounds
for these
spiritual cartels.
They strike when their targets are at their weakest or bomb them to submission
to make sure they are at their weakest. Thus softened up, they are susceptible
to inducements and brainwashing. They are canny. To ‘convert’ people, you
must first make them despise
and reject what had sustained their people for
millennia. So they vilify their faith or convince them it is a spent force or
dark superstition. In so doing, they make us spit
on our heritage."
(source:
Beware
of wolves in sheep’s clothing
- By Sesha Samarajiwa - Asian Tribune October
9, 2007).
According to Shyam Sashtri, the words,
Brahmins, Kshatryas, Vaisyas and Sudras were names of classes rather than castes
during the pre-historic period. According to H. G. Rawlinson, caste is a
Portuguese word meaning purity of race.
But ultimately if
one wants to understand the truth, the original purpose behind the caste system,
one must go to
antiquity to study the evolution of the caste system. When the Vedas refer to the four-fold division
of society, they use the Sanskrit word varna meaning "class," not the
word jati meaning "caste". The word varna was mistakenly translated by
the Portuguese during their period of colonial establishment in India. Four
orders of society were recognized based upon the four main goals of human beings
and established society accordingly.
These
four orders of society were called "varna", which has two
meanings; first it means "color" and second it means a "veil".
As color it does NOT refer to the color of the skin of people, but to the
qualities (gunas) or energies of human nature. It is true that the Caste system did
degenerate with passage of time.
This mix-up is quite significant because
the Varna system of the Vedas was designed to achieve division of labor and help
society operate efficiently.
Dagmar
Grafin Bernstorff, (author of 'Das Kastensystem im Wandel' Indien
in Deutschland 1990 p 29-51) based on convincing evidence, suggests
that varna originally did not refer to skin color but designed the four
directions identified by white, black, red, yellow according to which the
participants were arranged during the Vedic yajna.
(source: A
Survey of Hinduism - By Klaus K. Klostermaier p. 334).
Alain Danielou
writes: " The Hindu lawgivers felt that no advanced society could exist without the
recognition of certain facts, such as professional organizations; relations
between the various occupations needed to maintain the economic, political, and
social stability of the state; and the problems arising from the various
degrees of development among peoples and individuals, their various aptitudes,
and the drawbacks of intermarriage. It should not be forgotten that the
so-called equality in aptitude of the sundry human races takes only the
capacities of the most aggressive races into account, and not of those that are
unable to adapt to modern conditions, such as the Pygmies, the Australian
aborigines, the Munda populations of India, and many other groups. Their
systematic genocide still continues today, since their existence upsets all
ideas of so-called equality of aptitude, values, and aspirations among the
various races. For the Hindus, the caste system is not a man-made invention to
justify slavery but the recognition of the Creator's will, the codification of a
state of fact, an attempt to harmonize human society in accordance with the
general scheme of creation."
He predicts:
"Far from guiding the world
toward an ideal future for human society, democratic ideas are probably no more
than a brief period of romantic politics, which will lead the world into great
turmoil. The social and political ideologies of the modern West will probably
appear as childish and absurd to our descendants as they seem irresponsible and
incoherent to traditionalist Hindus today."
(source:
Virtue,
Success, Pleasure, & Liberation : The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of
Ancient India - by Alain Danielou -
p. 33 - 43).
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)
most original philosopher of modern India. He wrote:
"Caste was originally an arrangement for the
distribution of functions in society, just as much as class in Europe, but the
principle on which this distribution was based was peculiar to India. A Brahmin
was a Brahmin not by mere birth, but because he discharged the duty of
preserving the spiritual and intellectual elevation of the race, and he had to
cultivate the spiritual temperament and acquire the spiritual training which
alone would qualify him for the task. The Kshatryia was Kshatryia not merely
because he was the son of warriors and princes, but because he discharged the
duty of protecting the country and preserving the high courage and manhood of
action, and he had to cultivate the princely temperament and acquire the strong
and lofty Samurai training which alone fitted him for his duties. So it was for
the Vaishya whose function was to amass wealth for the race and the Shudra who
discharged the humbler duties of service without which the other castes could
not perform their share of labor for the common, good".
(source: India's
Rebirth - By Sri Aurobindo Publisher: Mira Aditi
(ISBN 2-902776-32-2
p 26).
Many Indian sages have even gone even further than Sri Aurobindo, arguing that
in the occult relation India had with the Universal Force, each one was born in
the caste CORRESPONDING to his or her spiritual evolution. There are accidents,
misfits, errors, they say, but the system seems to have worked pretty well
until
modern times when it got perverted by the vagaries of materialism and western
influence.
Varna vyavastha means a
social organization based on free choice of vocations in accordance with one’s
vocational aptitudes determined by heredity and vocational training. Its
purposed is not to divide people into castes or classes, as it is generally
supposed to be, but to integrate the society into a whole by giving each type of
individual a suitable vocational place in it. It aims at efficiency,
satisfaction, and co-operation. Modern society in the
West is in a chaotic condition. There is a great struggle for
existence, power and wealth and superiority. All people seek for one and the
same thing, wealth, and power. The ancient Indians who planned society on the
basis of varna understood human nature better and planned a pattern of society
in which there would be less chaos, less struggle and less dissatisfaction. They
found out that all people fall naturally, into four types. Each of pleasures,
and distinctive ways of living and dressing etc.
(source:
Indian Culture - Its Spiritual, Moral and Social
Aspects - By
Suniti
Kumar Chatterji, Bhikhan Lal Atreya and Alain Danielou p. 30-31).
According to Sir
S. Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was one of the most profound
philosophers of this century:
"Caste divisions are based on individual temperament, (Sattvadguji
brahmanah syat ksatriyastu rajodhikah tamodhiko bhaved vaisyo gunasamyattu
sudrata.)which is not immutable. In the beginning there was only one caste. We
were all Brahmins (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad I. 4. 11-5; Many I. 31. Cp. Also
Mahabharata, XII. 188: na visesosti varnanam sarvam Brahman idam jagat brahmana
purvasrstam hi karmabhir varnatam gatam.) or all Sudras. A smriti text says that
one is born a Sudra, and through purification he becomes a Brahmin. (Janmana
jayate sudrah samskarair dvija ucyate.)
Brahminhood in not an order, but a
temperament. Anyone can have it, though many born in the Brahmin caste may be
without it. It is independent of sex or calling, birth or breeding. Everyone has
a right to Brahminhood, the state where inward grace and outward beauty fuse.
People were divided into different castes according to social
needs and individual action. The Brahmins are the priests. They should have
neither property nor executive power. They are the seers and conscience of the
society. The Kshatriyas are the administrators, whose principle is reverence for
all life. The Vaishyas are the traders and craftsmen, men of technical ability
who aim at efficiency. The Sudras are the routine workers, the proletariat, who
carry out instructions and contribute only a fraction. The caste scheme is meant
to apply to all mankind. In the Mahabharata we are told that the Yavanas
(Greeks), the Kiratas, the Daradas (Dards), the Chinas (the Chinese), the Sakas
(Scythians), the Pahlavas (Parthians) and several other non-Hindu peoples,
belonged to one or the other of the four classes. The foreign tribes were
absorbed into the Hindu society. The sort of social adjustment, by which
foreigners were admitted into the Hindu fold, has taken place from very early
times. The great empire-builders, the Nandas, the Mauryas and the Guptas, were
according to low-born.
In special cases individuals and
groups changed their social class. Visvamitra, Ajamidha and Puramidha were
admitted to the status of the Brahmin class, and even composed Vedic hymns.
Yaska, in his Nirukta, tells us that of two brothers, Santanu and Devapi, one
becomes a Ksatriya king and the other a Brahmin priest. Kavasa, the son of the
slave girl Ilusa, was ordained as a Brahmin priest. Janaka, a ksatriya by birth,
attained the rank of a Brahmin by virtue of his ripe wisdom and saintly
character. The Bhagavata tells of the elevation of the ksatriya clan named
Dhastru to brahminhood. Even a Sudra, if you do good, you become a Brahmin. (ebhistu
karmabhir devi subhair acaritais tatha sudro brahmanatam yati, vaisyah
ksatriyatam vrajet.)
We are Brahmin not on account of
birth or the performance of rites, not by study or family, but on account of our
behavior.
(na yonir napisamskaro nasrutam na ca santatih karanani dvijatvasya vrttam eva
tu karanam.) ( sarvoyam brahmano loke vrttenaca vidhiyate vrttisthitasu sudropi
brahmanatva, mouaccjato – Anusasanaparva.
Even if we are born Sudras. By good conduct we can raise
ourselves to the highest status. (sudrayonau hi jatasya sadgunan upastisthatah
vaisyatvam labhate brahmam ksatriyattvam tathaiva ca arjave vartamanasya
brahmanyam abhijayate – Aranyaparva. )
Sage Patanjali refers to
Brahmin kings, and Manu to Sudra rulers. There were Brahmin soldiers in the time
of Alexander, as there are today. Shankara held the view that members of all
castes can read the sastras. Hindu acaryas denounced the spirit of caste
separatism. Vajrasucikopanisad holds that many who were born of non-brahmin
women had risen to the rank of Brahmin saints.
Even The Hindu Mahasabha
resolved: “Whereas the caste system based on birth as at present existing is
manifestly contrary to universal truth and morals: whereas it is the very
antithesis of the fundamental spirit of the Hindu religion: whereas it flouts
the elementary rights of human equality…this all India Hindu Mahasabha
declares its uncompromising opposition to the system and calls upon the Hindu
society to put a speedy end to it.”
(source: Religion
and Society – By S. Radhakrishnan ASIN 8172231636 p. 129-133).
R
P Masani has observed:
"Caste
riven though the population was, these groups may be likened to the fingers of
one's hand, perpetually separated, yet perpetually co-operating."
(source:
Our
Heritage and Its Significance - By Shripad Rama Sharma p.93).
Sri Aurobindo,
while praising the original caste system, does not spare it in its later stages:
"it is the nature of human institutions to
degenerate; there is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated.
It
ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have
now come to be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely
material tests of occupation and birth... By this change it has set itself
against the fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual
and subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning. the spirit of
caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it instead of
the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us
to our present condition..."
(source: India's
Rebirth - By Sri Aurobindo Publisher: Mira Aditi
(ISBN 2-902776-32-2 p 27).
The Varna scheme is a
multi-dimensional, omnibus scheme of social organization. According to Sri
Aurobindo, it is "at once spiritual, psychic, ethical and economic
order.."
(source: The
Human Cycle - By Sri Aurobindo p. 166).
Sir Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan
one
of the most profound philosophers of this century, writes:
"The institution of caste illustrates the spirit of comprehensive
synthesis characteristic of the Hindu mind with its faith in the collaboration
of races and the co-operation of cultures.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the
system of caste is the outcome of intolerance and trust.
Though it may now have degenerated into an instrument of oppression and
intolerance, though it tends to perpetuate inequality and develop the spirit of
exclusiveness, these unfortunate effects are not the central motives of the
caste system."
"The system of caste insists that the law of social life should not be cold
and cruel competition, but harmony and co-operation. Society is not a field of
rivalry among individuals.
The castes are not allowed to compete with one another."
"Civilization is not the suppression of races less capable of or
less advanced in culture by people of higher understanding. God does not give us
the right to destroy or enslave the weak and the unfit. One race may not be as
clever or as strong as another, yet the highest idealism requires that we should
give equality of opportunity even to unequal groups."
" The
trail of man is dotted with the graves of countless communities and races which
reached an untimely end. But is there any justification for this violation of
human life? Have we any idea of what the world loses when one racial culture is
extinguished?
Indiscriminate racial amalgamation
was not encouraged by the Hindu thinkers. In
dealing with the problem of the conflict of the different racial groups,
Hinduism adopted the only safe course of democracy, viz., that each racial group
should be allowed to develop the best in it without impeding the progress of
others. Caste, on its racial side, is the
affirmation of the infinite diversity of human groups.
In spite of the divisions, there is an inner cohesion among the Hindu society
from the Himalayas to the Cape Comorin."
(source: The
Hindu View of Life - By Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
p. 73-77. Material in this book was originally delivered in the form of
lectures, the Upton Lectures, in 1926, at Manchester College, Oxford).

Slavery in Australia
Aborigines in Australia were classed as wildlife under Flora &Fauna Act till
1967
***
Dharampal
(1922
- 2006) a Gandhian and
author of several books including The
Beautiful Tree and Indian Science and
Technology in the Eighteenth century.
He
wrote extensively of the damage the British Raj inflicted on
India and Indians:
"The
conquered in their view, had ultimately to disappear, if not wholly physically,
at least as a culture and civilization. In Australia, and New Zealand
practically all the local inhabitants were wiped out soon enough; in North
America near complete elimination happened, over 300-400 years, and in Ireland
only partially. The indigenous population of the Americas had been estimated at
112 to 140 millions in 1492.
In
India a large number perished by British brutality
and deliberate creation of famines, violation of persons bodies and dignity;
in Palnad in Andhra, half of the population was said to be have perished every
ten years, during several decades after the subjugation of the areas by Britain. It
seems as if the intellectuals and leaders of Britain hated India, and felt
outraged that in spite of all their brutalities, smashing of Indian
institutions, high extortions, and tortures, men made famines and expropriation
of Indian resources to the British state, and thus the all round breakdown of
Indian society, the Indians on the whole, could not be wiped out that easily.
"
(source: Despoliation
and Defaming of India – By Dharampal published
by Bharat Peetham, Wardha Other
India Press, Goa p. 1 - 17). For more refer to The
Unity of India - By Dileep Karanth - svabhinava.org). Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
And
Sermons from the West?
"During
the four centuries spanning the time between 1492, when Christopher Columbus
first set foot on the "New World" and 1892, when the US Census Bureau
concluded that there were fewer than a quarter million indigenous people
surviving within the country's claimed boundaries, a hemisphere population
estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by something over 90
percent. The people had died in their millions of being hacked apart with
axes and words, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed
to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and
thrown over the side of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers,
intentionally starved and frozen to death during multitude of forced marches and
internments, and, in an unknown number of instances deliberately infested with
epidemic diseases. Thus occurred what even dishonest commentators have
acknowledged as being "very probably the greatest demographic disaster in
history."
(source: A
Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas
1492 to the Present
- By Ward Churchill
p. 1 - 3).
Also refer to
Red
Earth - White Lies - By Vine Deloria Jr.
Jakob
De Roover is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO)
at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap,
Ghent University,
Belgium. He has written:
"Recently,
the European Parliament hosted a meeting on
“caste discrimination in
South Asia
”. At the meeting, participants stated that “
India
is being ruled by castes not by laws” and that they demanded justice, because
there “is one incredible
India
and one untouchable
India
.”
First, the dominant
conception of the caste system has emerged from the accounts by Christian
missionaries, travelers and colonial
administrators. Rather than being neutral, these accounts were shaped
by a Christian framework. That is, the religion of European visitors to
India
had informed them beforehand that they would find false religion and devil
worship there, and that false religion always manifested itself in social evils.
Especially the Protestants rebuked the “evil priests” of Hinduism for
imposing the laws of caste in the name of religion. They told the Indians that
conversion to Protestantism was a conversion to equality. Thus, Indian souls
were to be saved from damnation and caste discrimination.
Second, this Christian
account of “the Hindu religion” and its “caste system” informed colonial
policies in
British India
. Building on the theological framework, scholars now wrote “scientific”
treatises on Hindu superstition and caste discrimination. The Christian mission
found its secular counterpart in the idea of the civilising mission, which told
the West that it had to rescue the natives from the clutches of superstition and
caste. One no longer promoted religious conversion, but the colonial educational
system harped on “the horrors of Hindu society.”
Fourth, the “Dalit”
movement of today is the product of these colonial movements. The notion of
“Dalits” makes sense only within the colonial account of
India
, which had postulated the existence of one single group of “outcastes” or
“untouchables” that was supposedly exploited by the upper castes. In
reality, it concerns a variety of caste groups, with no criteria to unite them
besides the claim that they are all “downtrodden.” Indeed, many of these
groups are poor and discriminated against by other caste groups. However,
their socio-economic interests have been hijacked by some of their western-educated
elite members. In the name of the downtrodden,
these elites establish NGOs
and then travel from conference to conference and country to country in order to
reveal the plight of the “Dalits” to eager western audiences and secure
funding from donor agencies.
Fifth, when present-day Europeans rebuke Indian
society for the “barbarism” of caste discrimination, they are reproducing
the old stanzas of the civilising mission. Such a stance of superiority perhaps
worked in the context of colonialism. But today, at a time when Indians
buy some of the European industrial giants and Europe is in need of
more collaboration with
India
, it is ill-advised to continue this type of civilisational propaganda. The
implication is that there is only one way to get rid of socio-economic wrongs
here: one has to eradicate both the social structure and the Hindu civilisation.
It is as though one would blame the racism,
bingedrinking, pedophilia, poverty, homelessness and domestic violence in the
contemporary West on its age-old civilisation.
The times have changed. As Europeans, we need to
reflect on our deep-rooted sense of superiority and how this informs our
moralising discourse on human rights in other parts of the world. To appreciate
the impression we give to Indians with our statements on caste discrimination,
just imagine a possible world in which the Indian government regularly
castigates the US for its racism against African-Americans and the
disproportionate death penalties, and the EU for the treatment of South Asians
in England, Turks in Germany, women in Romania, the Basque movement in Spain,
gypsies in Italy ... just imagine Indian members of parliament consistently
blaming the very structure of western societies as the cause of all these
wrongs.
Europe
needs to wake up fast. The time of colonialism is over. If we do not change our
attitudes, the irritation towards the EU will grow in countries like
India
and
China
.
(source: Does
Europe have a Civilising mission in
India
? – By Jakob De Roover).
Refer to
London is most unequal city in Western world
with gap between rich and poor widest since slavery - By Steve
Doughty - dailymail.co.uk and
British rioters the spawn of a bankrupt ruling
elite – By
Theodore Dalrymple
The Social Aloofness of the British in India

Indians as Inferior Race?
Racism in British India.
No Ten Commandments in the
East of the Suez Canal?
Lord
Mayo (1822 - 1872) declared, "We are all British gentlemen engaged in the
magnificent work of governing an inferior race in India."
(Note:
The legacy of Western civilization to the world - Dark
Ages, Crusades, The Inquisition, Witch Hunt, Slavery, Colonization of Africa,
Asia, America and Australia, Imperialism, World Wars, Holocaust, Bombing of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Conversion and destruction of Native cultures to
Christianity, Drugs, School shootings in American schools, Gun violence, Racism,
Clergy sex Abuse, Viagra spamming American Capitalism, quest
for individualism, Iraq war ….
).
(image
source:
Imperial
Lives in the Victorian Raj - By David Gilmour).
For more refer to
chapters on Aryan
Invasion Theory and European
Imperialism.
Refer to
British
aristocracy ‘ate human flesh’ -
indianrealist.wordpress.com
and Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com.
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide Refer
to Think
tank alleges British MPs involved in promoting evangelism in India -
hinduvoice.co.uk. Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
***
In
1452 Pope Nicholas V authorized Portugese to abduct blacks from Africa and force
them into slavery. Dum Diversas,
a bull authorising the Portuguese to reduce any non-Christians to the status of
slaves, was issued by Papal authorities. All black people were
depicted as the descendants of biblical Cain who killed righteous Abel and was
later banished by thier father to Africa. This invented legend gave Christians
needed theological justification to abduct and enslave blacks. Bible is full of
verses supporting slavery.
(source:
religioustolerance.org).
Rabindranath
Tagore (1861-1941) Poet, author,
philosopher, Nobel prize laureate, says in his Nationalism:
"Her (India's)
caste system is the true outcome of the spirit of tolerance. For India has all
along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the
different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of
their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet at close as
the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of
a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism!"
(source: Hindu Culture
and The Modern Age - By Dewan Bahadur K.S. Ramaswami Shastri -
Annamalai University 1956 p.113).
Koenraad
Elst has written:
The number of Africans killed in the age of the slave trade
and colonial conquest is estimated at 50 million or more. It
has been said that Europeans found the Holocaust so gruesome because the things
which they had considered acceptable in the case of the black “savages” had
now been committed on white Europeans. In the conquests of America
and Africa, the same psychology was at work as in Auschwitz: the inferior races
had to make way (or Lebensraum, “living space”) for the superior race. In
some cases the massacre was “functional”, the result of an unplanned
escalation. In others, the massacre was entirely “intentional” and
pre-planned.
(source:
Negationism
in India - By Koenraad Elst p. 6).
Author
Beatrice Pitney Lamb has pointed out:
"Clearly
the Indian way of assimilating foreigners - by allowing them to pursue their own
customs within some niche of the caste system - has led to greater variety and
tolerance within the country than exists in the United States, where
immigrants have been assimilated through a school program emphasizing 100 per
cent Americanization - and hence, implicitly, the rejection of inherited
cultural roots."
(source: India:
A World in Transition - By Beatrice Pitney Lamb
p. 363).
Koenraad Elst
points out: " The Buddha never said: “Down with the Brahmins! Break
Brahmin tyranny! On the contrary, he
taught about how to be a true Brahmin, as against having the outer attributes
but not the inner
qualities of the Brahmin.
Many of his disciples were Brahmins. The myth of Buddhist social revolution
against Brahmin tyranny can be disproven on many counts with the Buddha’s own
words.”
(source: Ayodhya
and After - By Koenraad Elst - Voice of India - Issues Before Hindu
Society SKU: INBK2650 p.141).
Rajiv
Malhotra ( ? ) has
observed:
"Caste systems in India evolved, just as
they have done in the US, as a labor group by the kind of work. This is why each
of India's castes corresponds to a category of labor, much like the modern guild
of American workers of a given profession, with its own procedures for
membership and strategies to compete with outsiders. In India, this segmentation
got perpetuated because training was done through work apprenticeship under
one's parents, thereby turning family lineages into specialized labor.
Perhaps, ancient rulers found it easier to
negotiate with a given category of labor collectively, much like the British
created the landowner class (zamindars) in India as a more efficient way
to maximize the collection of taxes. Most law firms in
the US are owned by Jewish families; most motels are owned by Gujaratis from
India; and this kind of list goes on. Communities evolve towards centers of
skill, excellence, and specialized assets. Bush and Gore are both political
dynasties." A key difference is that in India, caste became explicitly
codified, whereas in America social structure by ethnicity or family lineage
remains uncodified and subliminal. But what is commonly not pointed out today is
that India's smritis (codified rules) pertaining to many topics including
caste, were meant to be specific to a given time, place and cultural context and
not intended as universal 'commandments' for all people at all times.
"The
Hindu identity is still largely outcast in America or subverted in many
instances. Media, education and public images of Hinduism are often dominated by
negative stereotypes."
(source: Is
There an American Caste System?
- By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.com).
Refer to
Loot:
in search of the East India Company - By
Nick Robins and
How
India became poor - indiarealist.com
Market
fundamentalism and India's rootless Elites
Sandhya Jain (
? ) author of
Adi
Deo Arya Devata. A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface and
eminent columnist in the
mainstream English Media of India, and one who has written
eloquently about Hinduism, says:
"The
American Model of Governance is a failure. The system which allowed
Presidents to induct private sector cronies into the highest echelons of
government gave de facto control of the economy, polity, and even foreign
policy, to Corporates rather than professionals with accountability. Over time,
this eroded all institutions through de facto privatisation of all activities,
to the point that even Intelligence gathering has been out-sourced! American
government today is truly a headless torso.
The Wall Street
hustlers are everywhere.
India
’s rootless elite is increasingly enamoured of the
American model – oblivious of its obvious failures – precisely because it
wishes to enjoy the benefits of untrammelled power without responsibility.
The
rest of us will revel in the validation of the Hindu
varna
system as a hierarchy of
values relevant to all ages – brains on top (brahmin), state power on the side
(kshatriya), wealth-generators in the middle (vaishya) and the rest of the
people all around (shudra). In Hindu India, wealth served the society and the
state; a system where wealth subordinates society and state is Asuric, immoral,
and destructive of all human values."
(source: End
free market fundamentalism - By Sandhya Jain - vijayvaani.com).
But
finally, have the people who dismiss caste as an Aryan imposition on the
Dravidians, or as an inhuman and nazi system, ever attempted to understand its
original purpose and genius? Is it really worse
than the huge Class differences and racism you can see nowadays in Europe and America? The
West can boast no advantage here, no effectual superiority. Street-sweepers are
rarely invited to lunch with middle-class families, yet virtuous Europeans are
often heard decrying caste injustice and the odious Brahmin who will not share
his meal with the butcher or allow the sweeper or the tanner to draw water from
his well.
The
Imperial British and their Uncomfortable Claims:
Alexis Charles
Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
was one of the greatest political
thinkers, most prescient commentators on American society,
had observed that the English in India behaved as if they too were
members of a caste. According to
Guy Sorman: "He might well have
concluded that the notion of caste was universal and not specific to
India."
(source: The
Genius of India - By Guy Sorman ('Le Genie de
l'Inde') p. x).
Though the Imperial British scoffed
at the debased caste system, and talked about the downtrodden Hindoos, yet in India and
they themselves continued assiduously to
cultivate a detachment from the Indians.
"A British establishment in
India was situated outside the old walled town. It was generally divided into
two parts, the civil lines and the cantonment. The former was spaciously
arranged with lots of green between the bungalows inhabited by the sahiblogs and
the latter was organized on severe military lines. By and large the British
community in India lived its own life, ran its own shops and newspapers,
entertained itself at exclusive halls and concerts, admired or criticized itself
on Chowringhee Road and Connaught Circus, congratulated itself at the official
receptions at the government houses and the viceregal palace, exalted itself at
the Imperial Orchestra played Rule Brittania
on the Mall at Simla or titillated itself down memory lane as a certain Mr.
Cunningham performed Othello at the Gaiety Theatre.
F.
Yeats-Brown in the Bengal Lancer, put
it bluntly,
"The Brahmins, made a circle within which they cooked their
food. So did we. We were a caste, pariahs to them, princes in our estimation. The
compulsions of imperialism negated all passions for democratic equality or
Christian egalitarianism. Imperialism, by virtue of its very nature, was
insular, racist and arrogant."
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty.
Penguin Books. 1991 p. 87-90).
Dogs and
Indians?
"Dogs
and Indians not allowed”
- Such a barbaric signs during the British Raj clearly classified Indians as
belonging to some other-than-human species.
***
"...dogs
and Indians" were, by notification in that precise language, excluded from
some of "Europeans only" clubs. Indians were not allowed to travel by
railway carriages, or use railway waiting rooms, reserved for Europeans. Not
only that, Indian judges were not allowed to try Europeans in the districts and
the Ilbert
Bill, introduced in 1883 during Lord
Ripon's viceroyalty, to remedy the situation, had
to be withdrawn in the face of vicious opposition by Europeans and
Anglo-Indians.
(source:
Colonialism
and animals - By Hiranmay
Karlekar
- dailypioneer.com - March 5
2004).

Britannia,
a lion at her feet, examines a string of pearls she has taken from a cushion
held up by an Indian woman.
Soon
India
would be depicted as a naked black female submissively offering her rich jewels
to Britannia.
India
now entered in the
cataclysmic epoch which has left few native cultures of the world intact –
the Era of Colonialism.
The Indians, bearers of the world’s oldest civilizations were treated like
children by people who thought themselves as superior race.
(image
source: British
Library. Refer to India:
Empire of the Spirit - By Michael Wood).
Refer
to What
Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British
- www.larouchepac.com.
Refer to Hidden
from History: The Canadian Holocaust
- By Kevin Annett and documentary
Unrepentant
and Canada's Genocide. For
Cruelty inflicted by Christianity - Watch Constantine's
Sword movie - By Oren Jacoby
***
Jawaharlal
Nehru has remarked:
"In India every European, be he German, or Pole or Rumanian, is
automatically a member of the ruling race. Railway carriages, station retiring
rooms, benches in parks, etc. are marked 'For Europeans Only.' This is bad
enough in South Africa or elsewhere, but to have to put up with it in one's own
country is a humiliating and exasperating reminder of one's enslaved
condition."
In this land of
caste the British have built up a caste which is rigid and exclusive."
(source: The
Discovery of India - By Jawaharlal Nehru.
p.295).

An
Indian woodcut from around 1870 shows a train with separate carriages for
Europeans and for Indians.
(source: Colonial
Overlords: Time Frame Ad 1850-1900 - Time-Life
Books. The Scramble for Africa ASIN 0809464667 Noon of the Raj. p. 22).
Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.
For
more refer
to chapter on European
Imperialism.
Sir
Winston Churchill's attitude to Indians was quite explicitly racist. He
told the Foreign
Secretary, Leopold
Charles Maurice Stennett Amery that:
“the
Hindus were a foul race…and he wished Bert
Harris (Air Marshall Bert "Bomber" Harris could send some of
his surplus bombers to destroy them.”
***
"The
Viceroy sat at the apex of a colossal pyramid of power, and British rule was
founded on an idea of hierarchy as baffling in its complexity as the caste
system of the Hindus themselves. The Hindus had their castes while
the British had their classes, and in each case very fine distinctions sometimes
separated one social level from the next. The subtleties of the British class
system became elaborately codified in the Warrant
of Precedence, which was designed as an infallible guide to
hierarchy in India, indispensable to the proper arrangement of ceremony,
conference or even of a mere dinner party."
(source: India
Britannica - By Geoffrey Moorhouse p. 130). Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn.
Dogs
and Indians?
"...dogs
and Indians" were, by notification in that precise language, excluded from
some of "Europeans only" clubs. Indians were not allowed to travel by
railway carriages, or use railway waiting rooms, reserved for Europeans. Not
only that, Indian judges were not allowed to try Europeans in the districts and
the Ilbert
Bill, introduced in 1883 during Lord
Ripon's viceroyalty, to remedy the situation, had
to be withdrawn in the face of vicious opposition by Europeans and
Anglo-Indians.
(source: Colonialism
and animals - By Hiranmay
Karlekar
- dailypioneer.com - March 5
2004).
In
1930 the Pahartali European Club, which bore
the notorious sign 'Dogs and Indians not allowed'.
Indian
caste system created by British
An umbrella group of
Hindus says prominent British members of parliament who want legislation in
Britain
to protect against caste discrimination are being "misled
by Christian groups".
The
Hindu Council UK (HCUK), which is opposed to religious conversion,
said in a new report that caste discrimination does not exist in
Britain
- and that caste, in any case, was created by the British in
India
. "Today, we are
putting the record straight. We are also naming and shaming those who spread
misinformation about Hinduism and its relationship to caste in an ill-disguised
attempt to vilify the Hindu people and cause division within our
community," said HCUK general secretary Anil Bhanot. He claimed
in his foreword to the report that ruling Labour Party MPs Rob Marris and Jeremy
Corbyn, "who are lobbying the Department of Communities and Local
Government to legislate against caste discrimination, may
have been misled by Christian groups who want, quite simply, to 'save' people
from the 'falsehood' of Hinduism and convert people to Christianity."
"Caste has been the
subject of ill-informed comment for too long," Bhanot said. The report's
author, Raj Pandit Sharma, added that the caste system had been created by the
British during their colonial rule in
India
. "It was the British who single-handedly formulated the caste schedules
that remain in place today," Sharma wrote. "The evils manifest in the
current form of the caste system cannot be ascribed to the Hindu faith. The
current adulteration of the Hindu 'varnashram' system is a direct result of
generations of British colonial bureaucracy."
Accusing
some anti-caste groups in
Britain
of "seeking government legislation and government funds to tackle this
supposed problem", the HCUK said: "Caste,
as described in the Hindu scriptures, is not determined by birth."
"It is no joke to have to ward off concerted misinformation campaigns from
UK
parliamentarians who really ought to know better," Bhanot said.
Caste, the group said, is
"assumed by most non-Hindus to be always a gross form of unjust
discrimination, an alleged feature of Hinduism so maligned it justifies attempts
by Christians to convert Hindus here in the
UK
, in
India
, and elsewhere." It, however, acknowledged and condemned what it called
the "abuse of varnashram" in
India
.
(source:
Indian
caste system created by British: Hindu group - hindustantimes.com).
Claude
Alvares has written: "The English establishment themselves as a
separate ruling caste; like other Indian castes, they
did not inter-marry or eat with the lower (native) caste. Their
children were shipped off to public schools in England, while they themselves
kept to their clubs and bungalows in special suburbs known as cantonments and
civil lines."
(source:
Decolonizing
History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West
1492 to the Present Day - By Claude Alvares p.
191).
Amaury
de Reincourt (1918 - ) was born in
Orleans, France. He received his B.A. from the Sorbonne and his M.A. from the
University of Algiers. He is author of several books including The
American empire and The Soul of India,
he wrote:
"But the most important result was to create
a tremendous ill feeling between many Indians and many distrustful, infuriated
British, a chasm that was never really closed again. From now on, the
social aloofness of the British in India became legendary and the British
rulers became a new super-caste imposed on top of the existing caste
structure, as rigidly exclusive as any native caste; they became the
super-Brahmins in charge of government and administration."
And
it was not long before Indians themselves saw the difference. Victor
Jacquemont (1801 -1832) who traveled throughout India in the early
1830's, pointed out that Indians "have two expressions only to mention a
European. A saheb logue, a lord or gentleman...and a
gora logue..a white man. The former character is much respected by
them; the latter may be dreaded, as it is indeed very often quite dreadful, but
respected never. This aristocratic character of British society stamped its
features on the British Empire and accommodated itself quite naturally with
India's caste system."
(source:
The Soul of India
- By
Amaury de
Riencourt
p. 205 -223).
The indenture system
In
the colonies of the British,
French and the Dutch,
exploitation in one form or the other stalked the Indian indentured laborers.
The Coolies who arrived to work in the sugar estates in the West
Indies were marched to their barracks known as ‘Nigger
Yard.’ It was the same in Mauritius -- only the
language was different, ‘camps des Noirs’
or the backbreaking work in the canefields.
In
1843 the first shipload of 217 Indian labourers arrived in Port of Spain in
Trinidad in the Caribbean. And in the same decade, others were taken to British
Guiana in South America, and Mauritius off the coast of Africa; in the 1860's to
the British colony of Natal in South Africa; in the 1870's to the Dutch colony
of Surinam; in the 1880's to Fiji. By 1917-20 the indenture system was abolished
but not before 1.5 million Indian bonded labourers had been induced move to
remote parts of the globe in the service of British capitalism.
In South Africa
they worked from daybreak to nightfall, from four in the morning to seven in the
night, and far beyond their capacity. They were strictly confined to the limits
of their master’s estate. Beating and flogging was part of the regular routine
in the plantations. In the West Indies the cattle whip was employed; in
Malaya it was the cane, and in South Africa it was the rawhide cattle lash. One
callous estate manager reportedly said “As long
as the coolie is working for you, you have the right to do what you like with
him—that is, short of killing”.
Some
Caribbean planters solved the problem of the sick by abandoning them to fate. In
Grenada the majority of the 2000 Indians
were kicked off the estates when they became ill and allowed to die on the road.
The editor of a Jamaica newspaper wrote in 1863:
‘One must see these wretched hungry, houseless and outcast
specters picking up in the streets a chance bone or any putrid offal…. and so
crippled, nude, skeletoned before their death, they live on, no parish authority
taking them in’.
Unlike the Chinese and the Blacks, the Indians were also wary of
the penchant for proselytizing among white missionaries who were on the lookout
for ‘heathen converts’.
Indians were always branded as the dregs of their country, lowborn, even
criminal. Inspite of this, the Europeans managed to take Indian women for sexual
purposes – usually the daughter of a coolie.
(source: Life
of Indians Overseas: Laborers in the Plantations -
indolink.com).
Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
Dave
Freedholm teaches world religion and philosophy at a nationally
recognized independent college preparatory school in the U.S. and a practitioner
of Hindu spirituality for some years, says:
'Caste'
was used to justify Christian proselytizing and for continued domination over
the Indian population, and this continues to be the case today. Also, the ills
of contemporary Indian society (poverty, caste, etc.), which were exacerbated in
part due to centuries long foreign occupation, exploitation and domination, are
blamed primarily on Hindu thought. Thus, some Western scholars,
ignoring the historic subversion of Indian society and Hinduism by the West,
align themselves with the 'oppressed' against the 'evils' of Hinduism. The
victim is made to feel guilty and hence the 'Hindu shame' I find amongst some
Hindus.
Most Christians today (and most
scholars of religion) would be scandalized if the feudal system, slavery,
capitalist exploitation or anti-Judaism were used to define the essence of
Christianity. They would understand these things to be historically and socially
bound and not part of Christian universal ideals. In short, descriptions of
Christianity in textbooks would distinguish the core or essence of Christian
theology from specific social, historical and political contexts. However,
Hinduism is not treated in the same way.
It
does seem that the caste system, as understood today, was foisted on
Indian society by its Western (Christian) oppressors, the British. Efforts
within Hindu society to reform itself, and to provide a new vision of Hinduism,
are too often ignored or downplayed.
(source: Hinduism
in American Classrooms - By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.com).
Refer to Varna
and Jatis: The Need for Clarity - By B Shantanu - indiacause.com.
Drain
Inspector's Report?
Exclusive clubs into self-righteous
assertion?
Recently, a CBS 60 Minutes
segment on TV, showing the plight of Untouchables and caste system of India was done
by Christiane Amanpour was nothing but a typical example of sensational
journalism done in the West. This kind of portrayal will always be
negative at best. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi,
when he labeled the book," Mother
India."
by Katherine Mayo
(published in 1927), as "Drain Inspector's
Report" and a calculated smear on India's
face with malice pre-determined. Incidentally, Katherine Mayo, was no big fan of Mahatma Gandhi or Hinduism!
(Please refer to Katherine Mayo's hatred for Hindus in the chapter
on Glimpses III and
European Imperialism).
Refer
to Insults to the
Mahatma, ignored by India
- rediff.com.
Also
refer to Hate
group numbers top 800
in USA
- Southern Poverty Law Center.
Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com.
Refer to Christian
persecution against the Hellenes -
ethnicoi.org.
Refer
to Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Kashmiri Hindu
Pandits - And the World Remained Silent - Movie http://www.jaia-bharati.org/films/and-the-world.mpg
Inequality, is a “natural
order.” said Martin Luther, author of the Reformation.
It still is a natural order to
the West. Ask Wall Street!
This kind of portrayal will always be
negative at best.
In the words of Mahatma Gandhi,
when he labeled the book," Mother
India."
by Katherine Mayo
(published in 1927), as "Drain Inspector's
Report" and a calculated smear on India's
face with malice pre-determined. Incidentally, Katherine Mayo, was no big fan of Mahatma Gandhi or Hinduism!
Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com and Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com.
Watch
video - Christian
Missionary Misdeeds in India.
Refer
to The
Dead Sea Scrolls - An Eastern View of a Western Crisis - By N. S. Rajaram -
burningcross.net.
Refer
to Defaming
of Hinduism-I – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com and Defaming
of Hinduism-II – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com.
For
more on Christian Intolerance refer to
chapters on The Goa
Inquisition, European
Imperialism, Conversion,
and First Indologists.
***
Refer to Income
differences - How
the Right rationalizes racial inequality and
Hispanic
cheap manual labor
and Racial
differences in employment careers - Six
former and current employees of an Indiana Home Depot Inc.(NYSE:HD - news) store
have sued the world's largest home-improvement retailer, saying management
retaliated against them when they complained of racial discrimination and
harassment.
Watch video on Excesses
on Wall street - abcnews.com.
Suhash
Chakravarty author has observed in his book:
"Katherine Mayo set the trend for a
new branch of literature whose preoccupation was to stretch the morbidity of
Hindu customs, superstitions and rituals to a point of absurdity and invest it
with a unique inhumanity." "It is small wonder that Katherine Mayo
ingeniously appended Indian nationalism with the superstitions of a ritualistic
Hinduism and fused them into a powerful anti-Indian demonstration. The impact of
Katherine Mayo was more than ephemeral. She rendered the racial arrogance of the
exclusive clubs into self-righteous assertion."
(source: The
Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions - By Suhash Chakravarty.
Penguin Books.1991 p. 76 -79). Refer to Insults to the
Mahatma, ignored by India
- rediff.com.
Crucifying the Heathen Menace
Equating caste with race.
That is what the
colonialists used to do in justifying their rule over India’s inferior
dark-skinned subhuman masses.
It is quite nauseating
that he and many others use their supposed infallible word of a jealous male
demiurge (referred to as ‘god’) in which anti-Semitism, inequality and slavery
are sacrosanct principles in order to attack Hinduism. In reality what we have
is the desperate clutching at straws by a religion that once defined western
civilisation, yet is now about as relevance to people’s lives as the woolly
mammoth which once roamed the same regions of Europe. Like that hairy elephant
Rev Haslam’s creed is meeting its inevitable nemesis and for that very reason is
desperate to stay alive by latching onto issues such as caste and showing how
superior it is to polytheistic creeds such as Hinduism; which despite lip
service to tolerance ultimately decries as backward heathen idol-worship. Just
as Christianity once wiped out indigenous pagan beliefs in Europe through
warfare and mass murder, so its modern crusaders employs softer techniques under
the euphemism of human rights, tolerance and freedom of conscience.
Karl Marx
shared the
Christian missionary’s distaste for darker-skinned subhumans who were enthralled
to hideous idols. In attacking Hinduism the atheist Left have long compromised
their aversion to the Christian theology from which Marxism sprang (their holy
prophet did after all only revamp the ideas of Hegel) in order to crush the deep
spirituality and ancient civilisation of India which they regard as such an
affront to their ideas of progress. In the countries where communism reigned
supreme we should look at how non-monotheistic beliefs fared. The Soviets
crushed shamanism in Siberia while they happily shared vodka and caviar with the
leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. China encourages the spread of
Christianity while it annihilates Tibetan Buddhism and the Falun Gong movement.
In this Final Conflict they
yearn for a Final Solution, which is already happening when we look at how western-funded
Christian terrorists in Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura and Arunachal
Pradesh have
ethnically cleansed Hindus are gunpoint or forbidden the celebration of Hindu
festivals at the end of a Kalashnikov. What happened to paganism in Europe is
being repeated in India through use of hi-tech media and reference to human
rights all covered up with cheesy sinister smiles.
Final Battleground
The use of caste issues
by right-wing Christian extremists is merely a re-enactment of the carnage which
was unleashed in Europe by a faith which has historically shown scant tolerance.
In the thirteenth century the Teutonic Knights violently suppressed the last
vestiges of traditional European beliefs they decried as pagans and heathens in
their bloodbath against the Wends, Livonians, Estonians, Oeselians, Curonians
and Semigallians. Lithuania valiantly held out until the end of the fourteenth
century.
So even this
idea that Christianity
is the traditional religion of Europe needs to be challenged as
that continent remained pagan actually after the point of modern state formation
in the Baltic region. Now the wheel is turning full circle as Estonia is perhaps
the most secularised country in Europe. However it does not simply mean that the
Estonians believe in nothing as is often the case where Christianity has lost
ground elsewhere in Europe.
(source:
Caste games: Battleground India
- hinduhumanrights.info).
The
Hypocrisy of The Indian Church?
Casteism
in Christianity
With the advent of the
Christian missionaries in India under the patronage from the British rule in the
eighteenth century, a new chapter of proselytisation began. The missionaries
were able to use this weakness in Hinduism to convert those who were worst hit
by the caste prejudice. These missionaries concentrated their “charity” work
mainly in the tribal areas. They told the tribals that they were not Hindus,
that their indigenous culture and religion was different from Hinduism. They
taught them that Christianity, an alien religion was their own; that Jesus
Christ who was born and lived in the Middle-East was also a ‘dalit’ like
them and that Christianity was a religion without the caste bias and offered
them socio-economic equality. In their desire to lead a life of respect,
thousands of tribals got converted to Christianity assuming that they had found
an answer to the wretched caste system in Hinduism.
Little did they know that conversion to Christianity would not redeem them from
social discrimination and untouchability, because though Jesus never advocated
the caste system, Christianity in India was not free from the caste bias.
Christian outfits which criticized Hinduism for its caste system, practised
discrimination based on casteism in their Churches. In spite of the fact that
around 75% of the Christians are ‘dalits’ who got converted to Christianity
to lose their caste or ‘outcaste’ tag, Dalit Christians within the Church
were discriminated against and were denied powers within the ecclesiastical
structure.
In the churches or places of worship, which were generally laid out in the shape
of a cross, the Christians of upper caste have always humiliated their Dalit
fellow Christians by occupying the central part of the church, while the Dalits
were assigned to the wings. The Dalits were to take communion only after the
upper caste people had done so. In some Protestant churches, there were separate
cups for the Dalits at the eucharistic celebration. In the Catholic churches,
there were separate communion rails, separate cemeteries in Madras dioceses like
Trichy and Pondicherry. Such practices were also found in the Protestant
churches.
Indian
history appears to be remarkably free of large scale peasant revolts (like
The French Revolution and
The Russian Revolution)
of the kind that have provided the historians of Europe and China with materials
for assessing class antagonisms.
Dalit Christian? How can a person be a
‘Dalit’ when he is a Christian; for Christianity does not recognise the
caste system which they claim is an evil prevalent only in the Hindu society.
Refer to Petition:
Christians against proselytism.
Watch
Sex
crimes and the Vatican - videogoogle.com. Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com.
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
and
refer to Christian
persecution against the Hellenes -
ethnicoi.org.
Watch
video - Brahmins
in
India
have become a minority
***
Rev. John
Duraisamy, an editor of Sarvaviyabi, a Tamil Weekly from the
archdiocese of Pondicherry-Cuddalore published two cartoons consecutively on 4
& 11th July 1999. These cartoons were an insult to
the 240 million dalits or the untouchables of India. The Archbishop of
Pondicherry who belonged to the same caste as the editor, was silent on the
matter.
Archbishop George Zur, Apostolic Pro-Nuncio
to India said while inaugurating the CBCI (Catholic Bishops Conference of India)
in 1991:
“Though Catholics of the lower caste and tribes form 60 per cent of Church
membership they have no place in decision-making. Scheduled caste converts are
treated as lower caste not only by high caste Hindus but by high caste
Christians too. In rural areas they cannot own or rent houses, however
well-placed they may be. Separate places are marked out for them in the parish
churches and burial grounds. Inter-caste marriages are frowned upon and caste
tags are still appended to the Christian names of high caste people. Casteism is
rampant among the clergy and the religious. Though Dalit Christians make 65 per
cent’ of the 10 million Christians in the South, less than 4 per cent of the
parishes are entrusted to Dalit priests. There are no Dalits among 13 Catholic
Bishops of Tamilnadu or among the Vicars-general and rectors of seminaries and
directors of social assistance centres.”
Logically, the term ‘Dalit Christians’ is
self-contradictory. How can a person be a ‘Dalit’ when he is a Christian;
for Christianity does not recognise the caste system which is an evil prevalent
only in the Hindu society.
When a person gets converted, he is
no longer a Hindu and thus does not fall into any category of the caste
hierarchy. But unfortunately, in India we do have this category of people who
got converted to Christianity in the vain hope of leading a respectable life.
Now while the progressive Hindu society is fast changing and the dalits are
increasingly gaining respect in the society and the state patronage in the form
of reservations, economic concessions, allotment of land, etc. , the
‘dalits’ who got converted do not get any such benefits in Christianity.
Conversion to Christianity has only added to the misery
of the dalits. Many Dalit Christian leaders refer to the twice-alienated
situation of the Dalit Christians in India, namely, discrimination within the
Church and discrimination by the State as they are denied Scheduled Caste status
in the Constitution, and the related privileges which come with that status. It
is high time that the dalits realised the true designs of the church that has
alienated them from their indigenous religion and culture, which is very much a
part of the myriad hues of Hinduism. The hypocrisy of the Indian Church, which
does not practice what it preaches, has been exposed. The Dalit Christians are
welcome back to the Hindu fold, to get back their due share, where the society,
which is in a reformative mode, and the state are making the best efforts to
redress the wrongs that have been done by their predecessors.
(source:
Casteism
in Christianity - indiapride.com).
Refer
to Columbus,
The Indians, and Human Progress -
By Howard Zinn
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