Why is the caste system a social reflection of Hinduism?

The caste system stamped an individual as untouchable from birth. Thereafter, observed Ambedkar, his social status was fixed, and his economic condition was permanently set. The tragic part was that the Mahomedans, Parsis and Christians shunned and avoided the Untouchables, as well as the Hindus.

Ambedkar acknowledged that the caste system wasn't universally absolute in his time; it was true, he wrote, that some Untouchables had risen in Indian society above their usually low status, but the majority had limited mobility, or none, during Britain's colonial rule. According to Ambedkar, the caste system was irrational. Ambedkar listed these evils of the caste system: it isolated people, infused a sense of inferiority into lower-caste individuals, and divided humanity.

The caste system was not merely a social problem, he argued: it traumatized India's people, its economy, and the discourse between its people, preventing India from developing and sharing knowledge, and wrecking its ability to create and enjoy the fruits of freedom. The philosophy supporting the social stratification system in India had discouraged critical thinking and cooperative effort, encouraging instead treatises that were full of absurd conceits, quaint fancies, and chaotic speculations. The lack of social mobility, notes Ambedkar, had prevented India from developing technology which can aid man in his effort to make a bare living, and a life better than that of the brute.

Ambedkar stated that the resultant absence of scientific and technical progress, combined with all the transcendentalism and submission to one's fate, perpetrated famines, desolated the land, and degraded the consciousness from respecting the civic rights of every fellow human being. According to Ambedkar, castes divided people, only to disintegrate and cause myriad divisions which isolated people and caused confusion. Even the upper caste, the Brahmin, divided itself and disintegrated.

The curse of caste, according to Ambedkar, split the Brahmin priest class into well over 1400 sub-castes. This is supported by census data collected by colonial ethnographers in British India (now South Asia). Gandhi, an admirer of Ambedkar, and who worked together to non-violently protest British colonial rule in India, disagreed with some of Ambedkar's observations, rationale and interpretations about the caste system in India.

Caste, claimed Gandhi, had nothing to do with religion. The discrimination and trauma of castes, argued Gandhi, was the result of custom, the origin of which is unknown. Gandhi said that the customs' origin was a moot point, because one could spiritually sense that these customs were wrong, and that any caste system is harmful to the spiritual well-being of man and economic well-being of a nation.

The reality of colonial India was, Gandhi noted, that there was no significant disparity between the economic condition and earnings of members of different castes, whether it was a Brahmin or an artisan or a farmer of low caste. India was poor, and Indians of all castes were poor. Thus, he argued that the cause of trauma was not in the caste system, but elsewhere.

Judged by the standards being applied to India, Gandhi claimed, every human society would fail. He acknowledged that the caste system in India spiritually blinded some Indians, then added that this did not mean that every Indian or even most Indians blindly followed the caste system, or everything from ancient Indian scriptures of doubtful authenticity and value. India, like any other society, cannot be judged by a caricature of its worst specimens.

Gandhi stated that one must consider the best it produced as well, along with the vast majority in impoverished Indian villages struggling to make ends meet, with woes of which there was little knowledge. The Harijans or untouchables, the people outside the caste system, traditionally had the lowest social status. The untouchables lived on the periphery of society, and handled what were seen as unpleasant or polluting jobs.

They suffered from social segregation and restrictions, in addition to being poor generally. They were not allowed to worship in temples with others, nor draw water from the same wells as others. Persons of other castes would not interact with them.

If somehow a member of another caste came into physical or social contact with an untouchable, he was defiled and had to bathe thoroughly to purge himself of the contagion. Castes - Rigid or Flexible? Ancient Indian texts suggest caste system was not rigid.

This flexibility permitted lower caste Valmiki to compose the Ramayana, which was widely adopted and became a major Hindu scripture. Other ancient texts cite numerous examples of individuals moving from one caste to another within their lifetimes. Fa Xian, a Buddhist pilgrim from China, visited India around 400 AD.

"Only the lot of the Chandals he found unenviable; outcastes by reason of their degrading work as disposers of dead, they were universally shunned... But no other section of the population were notably disadvantaged, no other caste distinctions attracted comment from the Chinese pilgrim, and no oppressive caste 'system' drew forth his surprised censure."49 In this period kings of Shudra and Brahmin origin were as common as those of Kshatriya Varna and caste system was not wholly rigid. Smelser and Lipset in their review of Hutton's study of caste system in colonial India propose the theory that individual mobility across caste lines may have been minimal in British India because it was ritualistic. They theorize that the sub-castes may have changed their social status over the generations by fission, re-location, and adoption of new external ritual symbols.

Some of these evolutionary changes in social stratifications, claim Smelser and Lipset, were seen in Europe, Japan, Africa and other regions as well; however, the difference between them may be the relative levels of ritualistic and secular referents. Smelser and Lipset further propose that the colonial system may have affected the caste system social stratification. They note that British colonial power controlled economic enterprises and the political administration of India by selectively cooperating with upper caste princes, priests and landlords.

This was colonial India's highest level caste strata, followed by second strata that included favored officials who controlled trade, supplies to the colonial power and Indian administrative services. The bottom layer of colonial Indian society was tenant farmers, servants, wage laborers, indentured coolies and others. The colonial social strata acted in combination with the traditional caste system.

The colonial strata shut off economic opportunity, entrepreneurial activity by natives, or availability of schools, thereby worsening the limitations placed on mobility by the traditional caste system. In America and Europe, they argue individual mobility was better than in India or other colonies around the world, because colonial stratification was missing and the system could evolve to become more secular and tolerant of individual mobility. Sociologists such as Srinivas and Damle have debated the question of rigidity in caste.

In their independent studies, they claim considerable flexibility and mobility in their caste hierarchies. 485253 They assert that the caste system is far from rigid — in which the position of each component caste is fixed for all time; instead, significant mobility across caste has been empirically observed in India. The role of the British on the caste system in India is controversial.

55 Some sources suggest that the caste system became formally rigid during the British Raj, when the British started to enumerate castes during the ten-year census and meticulously codified the system under their rule. 3738 Zwart, for example, notes in his review article that the caste system used to be thought of as an ancient fact of Hindu life, but contemporary scholars argue that the system was constructed by the British colonial regime ex hypothesi. 2 Other sources suggest that the caste system existed in India prior to the arrival of the British, and enumerating classes and castes do not constitute the act of constructing it.

Bouglé, for example, used 17th to 19th century historical reports by Christian missionaries and some Europeans on Indian society to suggest that a rigid caste system existed in India during and before British ruled India, quite similar in many respects to the social stratification found in 17th to 19th century Europe. Assumptions about the caste system in Indian society, along with its nature, evolved during British rule. 55 For example, some British believed Indians would shun train travel because tradition-bound South Asians were too caught up in caste and religion, and that they would not sit or stand in the same coaches out of concern for close proximity to a member of higher or lower or shunned caste.

After the launch of train services, Indians of all castes, classes and gender enthusiastically adopted train travel without any concern for so-called caste stereotypes. The first trains of the 1860s in north India saw mass adoption. By 1902, 87 percent of passengers carried by the then Indian Railways were in third class coach; these passengers represented all segments of Indian society without the expected concern of caste stereotypes.

The number of passengers weren't a small segment of Indian society; by 1905, over 200 million passengers travelled together in shared train coaches of India every year, and about the time of India's independence from Britain's colonial rule, people of India were using trains many times within the same year, and one billion passengers a year travelled in Indian trains. The rapid growth of train travel, with coaches packed with passengers from all caste segments of Indian society, suggests that the nature of British stereotypes about caste system in India, prior to 1860s and thereafter through the 1940s, were flawed. Célestin Bouglé, in his essay on the caste system in India, published in 12/31/907, observed the British frequently asserting they had no interest in modifying the caste system in India.

The Englishman's motto, claimed Bouglé, was to administer its Indian colony by preserving its customs, caste system, and with a minimum of security or justice or governance. Bouglé acknowledged in his essay the empirical evidence of intermingling between Indians as observed on Indian Railways and the mass adoption of te-rain (Bouglé's colorful emphasis for train as pronounced in India). Bouglé used the empirical census facts noted by Risley and the direct observation of mutual acceptance of Indians for Indians on its te-rains to conclude that the historical caste system within 20th century Indian society was fundamentally changing, and that this change was irreversible.

British rule, without wanting to, was triggering fundamental social changes in India. The lower castes were becoming officials, the Brahmins were leaving religious occupations and becoming policemen and farmers, and the three pillars of the caste system according to Bouglé—hereditary occupation, social hierarchy and exclusionary repulsion—were crumbling. Bouglé identified the cause for these changes to be economic progress, industrialization and career mobility inside India between 1880 and 1905.

He believed that British rule, without intending to, had accelerated the natural demise of the caste system in India. During the British East India Company's rule, caste differences and customs were accepted, if not encouraged, the British law courts disagreed with discrimination against the lower castes. Better source needed Corbridge concludes that British policies of divide and rule of India's numerous princely sovereign states, as well as enumeration of the population into rigid categories during the 10 year census, contributed towards the hardening of caste identities.

The nature of caste, its definition, its characteristics and its effect on social mobility within Indian society during British colonial rule was a subject of confusion and controversy. In a review published in 12/31/908, Kosambi noted that almost every statement made by anyone about caste system in India may be contradicted. Herbert Risley, the colonial ethnographer, noted in 12/31/909 that there are many misconceptions about India's caste system.

For example, he disagrees with "the proposition by Sir Henry Yule that Indian people are so superstitious that no one of a higher caste can eat or drink with those of a lower caste." In Risley's experience, social mores within people of India on eating and drinking with other sections and castes of its society were unlike those claimed by Yule, rather they were fluid and transitory. Risley further notes that, according to his 1901 Census Report on India, only 8 to 17 percent of Brahmins were involved in a religious occupation, only 8 percent of one Shudra sub-caste commonly assumed to be dedicated to leather work was actually involved in leather work, and less than 50 percent of several sub-castes were involved in their traditional occupations.

Castes, particularly the lower castes, were changing their occupations with time and need, observed Risley; once they changed their occupation, they would evolve into their own social group. Barbers became or were becoming confectioners, washermen became or were becoming farmers, pastoralists became or were becoming farmers as well. In other words, neither occupational mobility was set for life nor social mores on eating or drinking together were rigid.

These were fluid in Risley's empirical study, and not an appropriate means to define the caste system of early 20th century India. The term caste has no universally accepted definition. To some, the term caste traditionally corresponds to endogamous varnas of the ancient Indian scripts, and its meaning corresponds in the sense of estates of feudal Japan or Europe.

To others, endogamous j? Tis — rather than varnas — are castes, such as the 2378 occupation-classified j? Tis list created by colonial ethnographers in early 20th century.

To others such as Risley, castes in India means endogamous groups that resulted from interactions between what once were different races. 62 Endogamy, the common element in these three definitions, is itself disputed. Ambedkar, who was born in India in a social strata considered untouchable, disagreed that the term castes in India can be defined as endogamous groups of India.

According to Ambedkar, India during and before the British colonial rule, was a strictly exogamous society because marriage within blood-relatives and class-relations was culturally forbidden. The term caste, according to Ambedkar, should be defined as a social group that tries to impose endogamy, in an exogamous population. 63 To 19th century Christian missionaries in India during the British Raj, the term castes included people outside the four varnas or many j?

Tis within these varnas; it included the Muslims, the Sikhs and the Arabs, each sub-classified by their occupations. The use of occupation to define castes is confusing as well. Brahmins have been listed as priests and sometimes rulers or other professions, Kshatriyas include warriors and sometimes rulers or other professions, Vaishyas are listed to include traders and sometimes agriculturists and other professions, while Shudras are listed to include laborers and sometimes agriculturists and other professions.

Drekmeier, for example, after his study of Indian castes includes agriculturists as Vaishyas, while Goodrich includes them as Shudras. Drekmeier further notes that official positions of power were not exclusive privilege of the traditionally upper castes; for example, Shudras were sought and included in official administrative appointments in India's history. 6465 In modern India, people of the so-called lowest castes are to be found in all positions of responsibility and authority.

Varnas, j? Tis, castes and race are poorly defined, confusing concepts. According to William Pinch, the confusion is in part, because the very idea of hierarchical status and relative social identity has been a matter of disagreement in India.

Sociologists such as Anne Waldrop observe that while outsiders view the term caste as a static phenomena of stereotypical tradition-bound India, empirical facts suggest caste has been a radically changing feature of India. The term caste means different thing to different Indians. In the context of politically active modern India, where job and school quotas are reserved for affirmative action based on castes, the term has become a sensitive and controversial subject.

There have been challenges to the caste system from the time of Buddha, Mahavira and Makkhali Gosala. Opposition to the system of var? A is regularly asserted in the Yoga Upani?ads.

Many Bhakti period saints rejected the caste discriminations and accepted all castes, including untouchables, into their fold. Citation needed During the British rule, this sentiment gathered steam, and many Hindu reform movements such as Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj renounced caste-based discrimination (see Historical criticism, below). The injustice of caste system, and the means of addressing it, has been an active topic of modern Indian discourse, particularly in the last 80 years.

The Out-caste is a by-product of the Caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the Out-caste except the destruction of the Caste system.

Nothing can help to save Hindus and ensure their survival in the coming struggle except the purging of the Hindu Faith of this odious and vicious dogma. Article 15 of Indian Constitution, as enacted in 1950, prohibits any discrimination based on caste. Article 17 of Indian Constitution declared any practice of untouchability as illegal.

16 In 1955, India enacted the Untouchability (Offenses) Act (renamed in 1976, as the Protection of Civil Rights Act).