Chapter 85. Varna, Caste and Dharma: The Social Order and Its Contestation

No institution of the Indian subcontinent has been argued over as much as caste. For its defenders it is a frame of duty (dharma) inherited from the Vedas, a division of labour that gives every person a place. For its critics it is a hereditary hierarchy of purity and pollution that pushed whole populations outside society as “untouchables”. This chapter sets out what the library’s sources say about the textual foundations (the Purusha hymn of the Rig-Veda and the Laws of Manu), about how varna and jati worked as social mechanisms, about the position of women, and about the modern politics of caste: B. R. Ambedkar’s mass conversion to Buddhism, the constitutional abolition of untouchability, and the persistence of caste that journalists still report. Defenders and critics are quoted in their own terms. Heisman’s remarks on rank and caste are added at the end as a comparative philosophical counterpoint.

Scriptural Foundations: the Purusha Hymn and the Laws of Manu

The oldest scriptural statement of the fourfold order is the Purusha Sukta (Rig-Veda 10.90), in which the gods sacrifice a cosmic Man and divide his body. In the translation in Van Voorst’s anthology: “His mouth became the Brahmin; his arms were made into the Warrior, his thighs the People, and from his feet the Servants were born” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227, “Hinduism: Purusha hymn”]. The Wikipedia survey of Dalit history notes that “scholars debate whether this was prescriptive or descriptive”. Over time, however, these categories “hardened into a rigid caste system, eventually excluding large segments of society deemed ‘untouchables'” [Wikipedia: Dalit history].

Judith Walsh places the codification of the order in the law books. “In the Laws of Manu, one of a number of Hindu law codes composed between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100, society is to be governed by the varna system, its duties and obligation overseen by Brahman priests.” She adds that the king’s role “was only the maintenance of these structures as they already existed”. She quotes Manu: “The king was created as the protector of the classes [varnas] and the stages of life, that are appointed each to its own particular duty, in proper order” (Doniger and Smith 1991, 131). In Walsh’s summary, “dharma was ‘king'”, and she cites an early Upanishad: “This dharma is the sovereign power ruling over kshatra [royal power] itself” [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599, “Kings and Emperors”]. The reference shelf gives a slightly wider date of the 2nd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, with the majority of scholars placing it “between 200 BCE and 200 CE”. It reports that eighteenth-century philologists (Jones, Schlegel) dated the text to 1250-1000 BCE, a dating now considered untenable. The Manusmriti was among the first Sanskrit texts translated into English (by Sir William Jones in 1776), and the East India Company used it “to construct the Hindu law code” for its enclaves [Wikipedia: Manusmriti].

Charles Allen describes the same order from a southern vantage point. Through Manu, he writes, the Arya “received their God-given laws, along with the God-given social order known as varna, a vexatious word which, thanks to the Portuguese, is usually translated as ‘caste’, although it can equally be interpreted as ‘race’, ‘class of men’ or even ‘colour’.” His judgement on the priestly class is blunt: “The Brahmin caste remains to this day the oldest and longest-lasting closed shop in history” [Allen, Coromandel, #65507].

Varna and Jati: How the System Worked

Walsh separates the two indigenous categories that the single European word “caste” (from Portuguese casta, first used in the 16th century) runs together. The four varnas, “Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra”, were tied early to hereditary occupations (priest, warrior, farmer/merchant, servant). “By the time of the early Upanishads the different and unequal duties of these groups were justified by karma and the individual’s acts in former lives.” Jatis, by contrast, were birth groups whose members “married, shared meals, or participated in funerals only with members of their own birth group”. Varna rank was known across India, but jati rank was local, and “there was no all-India hierarchy for these groups” [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599, “Caste, Varna, and Jati”].

Walsh stresses that the system was more fluid than this description suggests. Through “Sanskritization”, meaning the adoption of customs a higher varna is supposed to follow, a jati could raise its status over several generations. Groups that fell on hard times could “lose caste”. She reports Bernard Cohn’s finding that untouchable communities in north India “explained their low status in just such historical terms, as a loss of caste caused by poverty”. Her example is the Kayasthas, classed as Shudra in the Gupta period, who rose as scribes and administrators by the 11th century. In her reading, jatis “functioned as a way to bring a wide range of non-Hindu peoples under the rubric of a Hindu (Aryan) varna system that in origin had been a Brahman view of society, not historical reality” [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599, “Caste, Varna, and Jati”]. The reference shelf adds G. S. Ghurye’s six-point definition of 1932: birth-segmented groups, hierarchy headed by Brahmins, restrictions on food and social intercourse, residential segregation and limits on wells and streets, inherited occupation, and endogamy. It also records a debate: Louis Dumont grounded caste in religious purity and pollution, while other scholars see it as “a secular social phenomenon driven by the necessities of economics, politics, and at times geography” [Wikipedia: Caste system in India].

On the spread of the order southward, Allen notes: “Many of the Jain immigrants who came south would have been Brahmin by caste but there is no evidence that Vedic Hinduism, whether introduced by Agastya or any other rishi, entered Tamil” country in the way the legend says [Allen, Coromandel, #65507, ch. 3 “Agastya’s Country” and ch. 4 “Jains and Sangams”]. Indudharan Menon describes how Kerala was gradually brahmanised. In his account the Nambuthiri Brahman immigrants, by the time of the Perumal kings of the 9th century, had become wealthier than local rulers; “the caste status of rulers was often upgraded to that of the Kshatriya warrior caste through elaborate Vedic consecratory rituals”, and “the Brahmanical conception of a social order based on the notion of four castes (chatur-varna) was reformulated to suit the social environment in Kerala”. Society became “a stratified and rigid one that was based on the division of labour with codified rules and regulations of social intercourse”, in which “each caste was regulated by rules of pollution” and had “assigned occupational roles” [Menon, Hereditary Physicians of Kerala, #43905, sections “Synthesis of Medical Knowledge and Brahman Migration in Kerala”, “Transmission of Ayurveda and Caste Dynamics in Kerala”].

Women in the Dharmic Order

Walsh opens her section on women with Manu’s best-known verse: “Her father guards her in childhood, her husband guards her in youth, and her sons guard her in old age. A woman is not fit for independence” (Doniger and Smith 1991, 197). She immediately qualifies it: “other texts and sources give a more varied picture”. The Rig-Veda suggests that unmarried girls and young men mixed freely and that women took part in the Horse Sacrifice. The Upanishads show “two learned women (Maitreyi and Gargi)” in philosophical debate. By the early centuries CE, however, “knowledge of the Vedas had become forbidden to Hindu women (as also to Shudras)”, and women were described “as an inferior class who could obtain moksha only after rebirth as men. Only in the heterodox sects of Buddhism and Jainism did women still have access to religious scriptures.” Walsh also cites the Arthasastra’s account of secluded harem quarters and of fines on wives “who drank, gambled, or left home without permission” [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599, “Women in Ancient India”].

Duty, the Gita and Crossings of the Boundary

The Bhagavad Gita gives caste duty its most famous theological setting. Walsh summarises: when Arjuna doubts whether he should fight his kin, Krishna explains “that even though such conduct may seem immoral, it is simply Arjuna’s Kshatriya dharma”. Dharma is only one path, however, and bhakti is the best of them [Walsh, A Brief History of India, #38599, “Puranic Hinduism”]. Van Voorst’s headnote to Gita ch. 18 states that “Krishna summarizes the duties of the castes and stresses the importance of doing one’s caste duty in a spirit of detachment” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227]. Mark Ferrara reads Arjuna’s initial reluctance as coming from a rigid adherence to caste duties and a fear of the karmic consequences of killing relatives, a fear Krishna dissolves by teaching detached action [Ferrara, Sacred Bliss, #66945, ch. 1] (see Chapter 90).

Menon records an exception inside the system: the hereditary physicians of Kerala. He describes Ayurveda as “a syncretic tradition overtly influenced by Buddhist moral values”, and adds that because “healers touched dead bodies and blood, post-Vedic Brahmanical orthodoxy began to consider the vocation of physician as not being an appropriate occupation for members of the Brahman caste”. He contrasts the compassionate ethics of Vagbhata’s Ashtangahrdayam, whose author he identifies as a Buddhist, with the Brahmanical hierarchy around them, and in his account Kerala’s hereditary physicians under that influence crossed caste pollution rules in treating patients, although modern curricula no longer stress these precepts. He also notes that village physicians (vaidyans) “may belong to any caste, high or low”, and that liaisons across caste lines carried Sanskrit learning to non-Brahmans despite caste restrictions in classical texts such as the Sushruta Samhita [Menon, Hereditary Physicians of Kerala, #43905, “Vagbhata’s Ethics and Ayurveda’s Arrival in Kerala”; “Caste Hierarchy and Transmission of Medical Knowledge”].

Defence and Critique: Positions in Their Own Words

The apologetic position appears in What Is Hinduism?, a Q&A manual written to help young Hindus answer questions from others. It defines caste as “the hereditary division of Indian society based on occupation”, notes that “wealth, especially in urban areas, often trumps caste”, and argues that industrialisation and education have turned jatis “less like guilds and more like large clans of related families”. When outsiders raise caste discrimination, it recommends what it calls “the ‘You’re one, too’ defense”. This “doesn’t mean Hindus should not work much harder to end caste discrimination. But it reminds others that no country in the world is yet free from racial discrimination” [Baltutis, What Is Hinduism?, #54289, ch. 7 Q&A “What about caste and untouchability?”].

Osho offers a very different voice. He condemns Manu’s system outright: “The basis of Manu’s whole sociology was that the untouchables are souls coming from past lives who, because of their evil acts are born untouchables. Hence they should not be treated as human beings.” He dates the system’s creation to “five thousand years ago” and elsewhere places the Manusmriti “five or perhaps seven thousand years ago”, far earlier than the c. 100 BCE–100 CE (Walsh) or 200 BCE–200 CE (Wikipedia) datings given above. Yet he is equally scornful of the Dalits who became Buddhists, as the next section shows [Osho, No Mind: The Flowers of Eternity, #46664, ch. 9].

Ambedkar, Navayana and the Constitution

B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) was born into the Mahar caste, which was treated as untouchable. At school he could drink water only if a higher-caste person poured it from a height (“No peon, No Water”). He earned doctorates from Columbia and the London School of Economics, chaired the committee that drafted the Constitution of India, and served as Law Minister under Nehru [Wikipedia: B. R. Ambedkar]. In 1935 he declared that though born a Hindu he would not die one. On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur he and his wife took the Three Jewels and Five Precepts from the Burmese monk Mahasthavir Chandramani. He then administered these and his 22 Vows to his followers, around 400,000 people by the Deekshabhoomi account (600,000 by others). Conversions continued after his death on 6 December 1956, reaching a reported 15-20 million by March 1959 [Wikipedia: Deekshabhoomi]. Article 17 of the Constitution outlawed untouchability, and reservations for Scheduled Castes in legislatures, government jobs and education followed [Wikipedia: Dalit history].

Osho’s account of the movement names its monastic initiators: “One was Bhadant Anand Kausalyayan, the other was Bhikkshu Dharma Rakshita. Under the political guidance of Doctor Ambedkar, who was an untouchable, these two Buddhists converted a fraction of sudras.” He calls Neo-Buddhist critics of himself “idiots”. He argues that “initiation by Buddhist scholars can’t have any meaning” and that a “wound of inferiority” from centuries of oppression “will not be simply erased” by conversion [Osho, No Mind, #46664, ch. 9]. Elsewhere he applies a remark he attributes to George Bernard Shaw to a converted chamar: “The people who have lived in inferiority for centuries, if you liberate them don’t think they will be equal. They will immediately start being superior to you” [Osho, No Mind, #46664, ch. 11]. These are Osho’s polemical views, delivered in 1988-89 in reply to Maharashtrian Buddhists who had called him a “self-styled buddha”.

Persistence Today

Josy Joseph’s reporting from Hridaychak, Bihar, describes the gap between law and practice: “Although abolished by the Constitution, the caste system – and discrimination on the basis of caste, which is illegal and punishable – thrives in India.” Excluded from other ground, Mahadalits are forced to defecate on the road, and “the defilement of the road has often led to tension between Muslims and Mahadalits”. The Mahadalits have proposed their own remedy: “build a road from their quarter out of the village in another direction.” Joseph points out that the Modi government promised to end open defecation by 2019 and allocated Rs 11,300 crore to the Clean India Mission in 2016-17, but “many governments before this one have set similarly ambitious targets”. Rural sanitation remains low, and women face sexual violence when they go out to defecate [Joseph, A Feast of Vultures, #63180, “Caste, Open Defecation, and Government Failure”]. The reference shelf states the general picture: some 98% of Indians, of every religion, identify with a caste, and “caste-based discrimination, segregation, violence, and inequality persist” [Wikipedia: Caste system in India].

A Comparative Counterpoint: Heisman on Rank and Equality

Mitchell Heisman does not write about Indian caste as such. His Singularity framework does, however, take up the question of whether hierarchy is natural. Discussing the political organisation of a post-human “Überorganism”, he writes: “Within the political whole of an Überorganism, there may be differentiations of rank or some form of caste” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252]. He also takes a genealogical view of equality from Nietzsche: “I think Nietzsche was right in drawing a connection between Biblical values and modern egalitarianism”, for whom “modern egalitarianism and modern progress… were secularizations of Biblical values”. Against Dawkins he argues that egalitarianism cannot simply be declared not to have come from religion [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252]. Read alongside this chapter, Heisman’s thesis implies that the modern egalitarian norm by which Manu is judged has its own religious genealogy. The Purusha hymn and Heisman’s Überorganism both describe a social body that is differentiated by function and ranked.

Key points

• Walsh dates the Laws of Manu to c. 100 BCE-100 CE. In them, society is governed by varna, with duties overseen by Brahmins and protected by kings. Wikipedia gives 200 BCE-200 CE as the majority view.
• “Caste” comes from the Portuguese casta. Walsh distinguishes the all-India ideal of four varnas from local, mobile jatis. Allen calls the Brahmin caste “the oldest and longest-lasting closed shop in history”.
• Manu’s verse “A woman is not fit for independence” is qualified by Walsh with Vedic and Upanishadic counter-evidence. Only the heterodox Buddhists and Jains kept scripture open to women.
• Menon documents Kerala physicians who, following Vagbhata’s “caste-free” ethics, crossed pollution boundaries to treat all patients.
• The apologetic “You’re one, too” defence argues that no country is free of discrimination, while conceding that Hindus should work harder against caste discrimination.
• Ambedkar’s 1956 conversion at Nagpur founded Navayana Buddhism. Osho names Anand Kausalyayan and Dharma Rakshita as its initiators and treats the converts dismissively.
• Joseph reports that caste and untouchability persist despite constitutional abolition, with successive governments, Modi’s included, failing on sanitation and caste.
• Heisman allows that “some form of caste” may exist within a future Überorganism. Following Nietzsche, he traces modern egalitarianism to Biblical values.