Monday, March 07, 2005

Caste System in India

Caste system is not unique to India! It has been practiced by civilizations around the world. It's just that Indian civilization has been around for so long. Hence, the system had more time to become established, institutionalized, percolated into family and social life.

Identifying and differentiating other groups by various factors like economy, education, cultural and religious practices, as well as birth seems to be a way for humans to establish their own identity as well as dominance.

Caste can be used or abused:

Uses: For self identification, for building supportive communities, for preserving tradition and similar positive things. This is good and even necessary.

Abuses: For establishing one group's dominance, suppressing other groups, highlighting the differences and provoking fights, tearing apart society and country, suppressing individual ambitions, suppressing individual relationships, breaking love and marriages. These are obviously very bad things.

The role of caste for the purposes identified in "Uses" section above is becoming increasingly irrelevant in modern times. Supportive communities are built in other ways. Identities are formed in other ways. Tradition... I will come back to this later. The fact is that, we don't need caste for these purposes in today's world.

Unfortunately, the purposes described in "Abuses" section above have gained prominence over the recent centuries and decades in India, with active provocation and support from powerful political, intellectual and economical groups/individuals. Other groups not directly involved in the Indian caste system have taken advantage of this system and may be, also unwittingly (or not) caused it to continue. Examples of such groups are the British, the missionaries, the historians with vested interests, etc. The reality is that today, the caste system has become more representative of the abusive purposes than the useful purposes. For that reason, it has to go.

Ironically, the most precious and permanent casualty of the caste system is our culture and tradition, the very culture and tradition which practitioners of caste think they are protecting. In a new world where everyone can and does almost everything regardless of congenital identities and status, caste system cannot be sustained. With modernization, we are fast losing our culture and tradition. People who have been conditioned by centuries and decades of caste-based thinking, are not able to come up with innovative ideas of preserving culture and tradition. Seemingly educated and intelligent people who nevertheless support caste system, instead of coming up with innovative ways of preserving and continuing our culture, want to stay back or go back to the old system with all it's inherent abuses.

Although untouchability, denial of facilities/services for caste-based reasons and similar practices seem to be almost completely absent in much of Inida, other harmful practices like caste-based reservation for academic and job opportunities, and casteist politics are as strong as ever in our society, across the length and breadth of the country. A surprisingly large percentage of people - even urban, young, educated people - are not free of casteist mentality and thinking in certain aspects of life. Meanwhile our culture and tradition is being irredeemably lost. Loss of culture is a huge loss for our country, for our present generation and for countless future generations to come, for our very Dharma!

Some people argue that the caste system helped India flourish and grow for centuries; so, it is not a bad system and we should continue with it. This argument is analogous to the following: We had a machine that used to function very well. Over the years it degenerated and started causing more harm than good. This machine is on the way to being phased out now. That is not good. Let us clean and repair it and bring it back into usage.

The problem with this argument is that the machine has some inherent design flaws which led to its degeneration and harmful effects, in the first place. These inherent design flaws cannot be discarded or repaired away because that is the nature of this machine.

It is better for intelligent people to realize this, hasten the phasing out of the caste system and think up other innovative systems to preserve our culture. The urgent need is to protect, preserve, help the evolution and adaptation of our Dharma!

2 comments:

  1. Hi,
    Being a sociologist and an anthropologist, my view on caste system is one of skepticism.
    I think the caste is no different from class in western world. Although there are some subtle differences such as in is an ascribed status unlike class everything else seems the same when we look closely.
    It was created for the purpose of social control. The control over some groups is obtained through control over resources, how resources are allocated and distributed. These resources could be political, economic and social...If u look at the larger picture u will see some countries have to be kept "under developed" for the other countries to be "developed"...same principle applies to caste...People who were more previleged at a point of time laid the rules as to how "others" need to live..and when more people follow these rules laid down for them it becomes part of the system and a necessary evil...how they got so many people to follow what was laid down is a topic for discussion for a later time...usha

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  2. My belief is that people have bad impressions about our ancient system.They think caste system was bad.so every thing related to ancient India was tribal and primitive .

    but i dont think so.The fundamental flaw in our thinking is that caste doesn’t separate people,its peoples mind that separates.

    people says caste divides so it should be banned.

    we have lots of problem all over the country.People fight for languages.Tamil speaking guy hates hindi wala.Maratis hate biharis so language divides us so as result according most people we should all stop speaking different languages so that there will be no fight.

    lets take america.it has no castes,do you think there is no problem there.

    there is a great divide between classes in usa.Rich and middle class fight,so people fight because of money.Does removing or banning money any solution.

    similarly power divides people,and so do political parties should we ban them all and talk bad about all of them.

    look money,power,language everything has a purpose.and so does caste.The problem does’nt lie in them to blame them,the problem lies in peoples minds.

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