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Caste comes from the Portuguese word "Castus". There is no literal translation found for this word in ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts. The quoted article comes wri
by amriksohata 5y ago
Caste comes from the Portuguese word "Castus". There is no literal translation found for this word in ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts. The quoted article comes written from a time under British Raj where peoples backgrounds were used to further divide society so that they would not rise up against the British.
Caste in the same sense of occupational background exists in all cultures but was never used in such a divisive way like the British Raj did. For example people of the "Smith" surname used to be Goldsmiths or Blacksmiths. But the British put a sense of elitism into some communities in India, telling them they are higher than others. There is no Hindu scripture which says who is high or low, but merely responsibilities.
Skilfully sidestepping any explanation of the metric being used to measure “high”, the educated spiritual priests in British Raj times and intellectuals were all banded together into one and labelled "highest caste" because they represented the “highest threat” to Anglican domination and those who represented the “lowest threat” to the Anglican were pushed into the lowest caste.
During the British Raj of the 540 principalities existent at that time, over 400 were ruled by Shudra Kings (Professor Vaidyanathan, IIM Bangalore) which the British denoted as low caste. When the British left, the second largest landowner in India after the Indian Government, was the Church and thus it’s reasonable to note that the largest transfer of assets and land from was in fact from the Shudra groups (Lord Harries’ so called low-castes) to the Church. Further, there is readily available overwhelming historical evidence that the Dalits “the Untouchables” were themselves a creation of the crushing sanctions created and imposed by the Anglican Colonialists of the Church of England as is clarified below. The castes and tribes “notified” under the 1871 Act were labelled as Criminal Tribes for their so-called “criminal tendencies”. As a result, anyone born in these communities across the country was presumed a “born criminal”, irrespective of their criminal precedents.
Mixing castes was normal as it was based on deed back few thousand years ago, only recently caste mixing wasn't allowed. Some further reading:
https://pragyata.com/caste-system-pointers-for-the-social-media-world/ https://pragyata.com/caste-system-pointers-for-the-social-me...
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-gene-data-reveal-two-millenia-of-caste-relations-in-india-081213 https://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-gene-data-reveal...
- pkphilip 5y agoCaste endogamy in India is well established and it shows that inter-marriage etc between castes basically stopped around 1800+ years ago.. which is clearly well before the British, Portuguese or whoever else came to India. And also saying that the Portuguese/British invented the caste system because "caste" is a Portuguese system makes no sense because: a) Indians don't speak Portuguese and the words Jati and Varna have both existed in Indian languages for millenia b) To claim that something didn't exist because a word from a foreign language is most commonly used to discuss it is like saying that gravity didn't exist before Isaac Newton as he is the one to discover it and give it meaning.
- amriksohata 5y agoJati and Varna are completely different things to Caste. Castus is a Latin word meaning clean and pure, which is where Caste comes from. Varna is occupational work. Inter marriage was allowed in Hindu scriptures, if they stopped for whatever reason, does not take away from the fact that the British (especially Christian aspect) used it to divide people in India. What you are talking about specifically is the discrimination and whilst discrimination to the poorer occupations always existed in most societies, it was accelerated in India by the Brits.
- pkphilip 5y agoWell, then you can explain that to the Shankaracharya himself who clearly disagrees with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uks3lIJ3wR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uks3lIJ3wR0
- naruvimama 5y agoEvangelists, Colonialist, Colonial apologists & Leftists have a perverse incentive in theorising & establishing a framework linking caste to Indians & Hindus along with exaggerations and hiding equally bad or worse examples from Europe. It would only be fair to look at the opposing views and reject or reevaluate theories that are on thin ice. Jati & Varna are two separate ideas, "Indian caste system" is an import and a framework trying to combine the two. Why do we keep using the word "caste", when we talk about Jati. A lot of Jatis do not see themselves as lower & upper and there are thousands of Jatis so no one is carrying around a dictionary to see where they stand. People rarely talk ever about "their" varna and the vast majority do not see themselves or their jati falling into a specific varna. 70% of the temples in Tamil Nadu have priests from the Jati that built the temple and non-brahmins, there falls the idea "Brahmins" exclusively being the priestly class.