Casteism and Hinduism are like oil and water

May 20, 2016May 20, 2016 Navnit Kundu 1 Comment Caste, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Varna

Caste is like “Brahmastra” or nuclear weapon in the hands of Marxists which sends every Hindu on the defensive in case they try to dominate any debate. But caste is not mentioned in any Hindu religious texts anywhere and varna system is not the same as caste system. The current caste system as we now know it was a विकृति (degeneration) introduced into our system by foreign invaders. This process was much more extensive and spanned a long duration of time which can only be understood by studying history. So, how to get off the hook next time when you get entangled regarding caste system with a Marxist/Chrislamist? The first is to not let them associate caste with varna system to justify it through Hinduism and second, read a bit of history on how castes system got frozen over time. It is important to know some examples to emphasize the second point.

For example- the Chamar (Mahar) caste was created by the Mughals to humiliate the dispossessed Hindus in the society who couldn’t pay Jaziya tax. The rich Hindus who could pay the tax were left alone but the poor ones were ill treated, even after converting to Islam they had secondary status and were made to live in ghettos (this is why you will find leather tanning places like Dharavi are still ghetto communities). They were made to slaughter cows and tan leather, just to make them dissociate from their earlier traditions of cow worship. There were many such castes created then. The British came and codified it and made it even worse.

In the late 1800s (or you can say few years before 1900), the British introduced a law to make it compulsory for everyone to write their caste in every government document like school admission, banking etc. That started the use of caste as a political tool of identification, organization and basically to support their divide-and-rule politics.

When encountered with this problem of ‘caste system’, especially if challenged by Marxists, don’t try to defend it, otherwise you will fall right into the trap of Chrislamists. Understand that they don’t give a damn about any explanation. They have managed to conflate the caste system with the varna system mentioned in the Vedas by lose associations, allusions and innuendo. Just state that Caste and Varna are not the same, because that’s what the truth is. Making half baked arguments about economic system allow Chrislamists to create a strawman to beat Hindus with. So don’t step into that trap. The caste system was in fact a transposition of the inherently discriminatory British class system due to their inherent biases. They are to blame for it, it is not something that Hindus should get defensive about.

The Hindu Varna system was fluid until it was corrupted by outsiders. Remember, we were enslaved for 1000 years. This settles everything:

Also and more importantly, if caste system is Hindu thing, then how does it exist in Christianity and Muslim, even after conversion? Are these so called perfect religions not able to wash away the imperfections even after converting evil Hindus to their religion? There are separate Churches/Mosques for Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims. Well, if it exists in all religions then it is orthogonal to Hinduism and has nothing to do with it. One can’t claim it to be derived from Hindu theology. It is a societal problem caused due to slavery of 1000 years and consequent obfuscations.

The concept of Brahma (and other gods in our texts) in Hinduism is not to be taken literally as a magic being which does magic. It is merely a metaphor to serve as a vehicle to convey an abstract idea to the reader. What you call ‘ocean’ in English is referred to as Varuna in Sanskrit. Both of them allude to the same entity, which is the ocean, but by anthropomorphizing it, it allows the story teller to convey more complicated concepts in a poetic and fine tuned manner which appeals to human imagination because nothing can be more complicated than human behaviour. Giving human attributes to natural phenomena, allows the story teller to add finer nuances, the complexity of which can only be matched by the complexity of human behaviour. It allows the building up of abstract concepts on top of one another to blossom into a more comprehensive philosophical idea.

For example, if someone says Varuna had a fight with Pashupatinath (god of forests), it doesn’t literally mean that two magic beings fought a WWF match. It is probably trying to tell you that there was a tsunami which engulfed a forest. This is merely a mode of communication. If you have seen Life Of Pi, he says it in the end “I told you two stories, one where my ship sunk and I was rescued by fishermen, other where I was stranded with a tiger on a magical island with meerkats and both the stories narrate the same incident; I just replaced the human characters with animals, that doesn’t make my story false. So, which one is the better story?” and the guy says “the one with the animals; that’s the better story”. Same is the nature of religion.

The stories are not to be taken literally, there is a certain essence it is trying to convey, which one should seek. The reason they have been compiled in the form of stories is because it becomes easy for one generation to propagate the wisdom enshrined in them to the next generation in a non-dogmatic fashion. When Hindus pray to gods, it’s not that they think some magic is coming out of the statue, it is the idea which the god represents in the narrative which they are praying. Basically, we don’t pray to idols, we pray to ideals. For example Ram is called Purushottam (the perfect man with a balanced world view), so people pray/aspire to those qualities by proxy of praying to the god. The idol and temple is only there to help ordinary people concentrate and to keep the stories/wisdom alive so that it can be passed on to the next generation (think of it like a museum). Those who have better concentration need not pray to gods and can simply make themselves useful to the society through karma (doing your duties, doctor, engineer, soldier, teacher etc).

Now coming back to Varnas. The Varna system was merely an observation of the four types of human tendencies based on their level of participation in society. These tendencies exist in all humans in all societies. There are some who are lazy and some who are altruists, some who are willing to give their life for the country, and some who will steal and murder. The Varna system is merely an observation of how humans behave. It is not a codified system and it says that everyone is born Shudra, but then everyone has to elevate themselves according to their potential. So basically if basically there are 4 kids in a house and one kid cracks IIT and other doesn’t study and fails even 10th class, then the first kid gets more respect and the failed kid gets less respect in society, even though they were born equal. What the Varna system says is that the respect you get will be proportional to how useful you are to the society. If you contribute more (like soldier dying for the country), you get more respect, if you simply slack off then don’t expect any respect. It is not that Brahma created the system, that is how humans are. Brahma is just a metaphor for the universe. So when someone says Brahma made 4 Varnas what they are poetically trying to say is “there are 4 kinds of tendencies in the universe”.

There is, but it is simply known by different names so it doesn’t register in our brain as a ‘Hindu’ thing. There are many religions born out of the same ethos which Hinduism espouses, these religions were spread by Hindu philosophers to other lands, over time the wisdom got translated in native languages (Chinese, Indonesian etc) so they refer to those concepts with different names in their own language. Check this :

“The path”, “the way” are basically Chinese terms for what we call Dharma in Sanskrit. There is a near complete interchangeability between all their concepts with ours, with, of course, Chinese names. What we call the Varna here, the other Asian countries refer to as the family honour code. If you do good then earn more goodwill and respect for your your clan (kula/ gotra/ varna), that is why Chinese and Japanese men would want to die in war, to add to the Karma points of their kula (clan). Yin and Yang correlate to good Karma and bad Karma.

There is even a Chinese Hanuman called Sun Wukong:

Instead of carrying a saffron flag with ‘Hindu Om’ on it, he carries a saffron flag with Chinese alphabets.

The exact same thing applies to Japan. Here is a Japanese Ganesha:

Here’s the Shiv Linga in Japan :

Common Terms in Sanskrit/Chinese/Japanese

Archarya – Master Achali Ajari
Dharma – Law FA Ho
Pratima – movement warrior techniques of the Hindu ksatreyas Hsing
Kata
Sunyatapani – Tang-Shou Karate/To De
Dharmahasta Chuan Fe Kempo
Marga – The Way Tao Do
Guhya-Sutra Mi-Ching Mikkyo
Nagarjuna Lung Shu Ryuju/Ryusho/Ryumyo
Mudra – ritual gesture Yin In
Mandala a special zone or area Mantolo Mandara
Vajramukti Ching Kang, Chieh T’o Kongogedastsu
Sangha – congregation or group followers Seng So
Narya – strong or manly Na-Li Nara, Naha
Nata Na-Pa, Na-Ra Nara, Napa, Nafa
Yoga – to yoke Yui Cha Yu Ga”

Link : https://ramanan50.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/bharatwaja-hinduism-gods-in-japan-religion/

Indonesia has its own local flavours of Hinduism whereby their university emblems and currency bears images of Ganesha.

There are similar parallels to Hindu concepts all over the world, with different pseudonyms, that is why it feels as if it exists only in a small part of India. It is actually a universal phenomenon. As for the Varna system in particular, you can find those four types of people even in western societies. The people who are most useful to society are the ones who create the most value, and therefore paid higher salary and get more respect in their society. Their definition of ‘adding value’ has simply been transposed by an economic criteria (instead of a Dharmic/social criteria) but the system of ‘incremental respect’ is the same there.

Saudi Arabia, which is the beacon of the purest form of Islam, considers non-Arab Muslims (like the ones in the subcontinent) to be Hind-Al-Masakeen, which means ‘the lowly slaves of Hind’. How is it that this religion, which claims to be a champion of equality under one God and offers liberation from the allegedly discriminatory Hindu social order, differentiate between two different groups of the same religion? Is that not a caste system in itself? And if it is, why aren’t the liberals raising their voices against it? But we all know why!!

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