Rituals are not simply acts which lend dignity to critical transitions, but acts which have a role in the ordering of the world as it should be.
Dharma is also social order. In Rig Veda X. From his head the priests and scholars brahmins arose; from his arms the kings and warriors kshatriyas arose; from his thighs the farmers and merchants vaishyas came to be; and from his feet came the servants and laborers shudras. The hierarchy and stratification of society is thus written into the blueprint of the universe.
At the same time, the interdependence of the castes is recognized, for they are parts of a body, a whole organism. Dharma is not exactly the same for each of these castes. Graham M. We cannot choose at this stage, for instance, our own parents, or our own birthplace, or our own ancestry. Why then, should we claim as individuals the right during this present brief life-period to break through all the conventions wherein we were placed at birth by God Himself.
Site Map. The Hindu conception of the social order is that people are different, and different people will fit well into different aspects of society. Brahmin : the seers, the reflective ones, the priests. The intellectual and spiritual leaders.
In Western society, this group would correspond to the philosophers, religious leaders, and teachers. The protectors of society. In many Western societies, the politicians, police, and the military. Vaisyas : pronounced something like "vy sy us" the producers, the craftsmen, artisans, farmers. These ideas, even seen in a BBC explainer , represent the conventional wisdom. The problem is that the conventional wisdom has not been updated with critical scholarly findings. The first two statements may as well have been written years ago, at the beginning of the 19th Century, which is when these "facts" about Indian society were being made up by the British colonial authorities.
In a new book, The Truth About Us: The Politics of Information from Manu to Modi, I show how the social categories of religion and caste as they are perceived in modern-day India were developed during the British colonial rule, at a time when information was scarce and the coloniser's power over information was absolute. This was done initially in the early 19th Century by elevating selected and convenient Brahman-Sanskrit texts like the Manusmriti to canonical status; the supposed origin of caste in the Rig Veda most ancient religious text was most likely added retroactively, after it was translated to English decades later.
These categories were institutionalised in the mid to late 19th Century through the census. These were acts of convenience and simplification. The colonisers established the acceptable list of indigenous religions in India - Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism - and their boundaries and laws through "reading" what they claimed were India's definitive texts. What is now widely accepted as Hinduism was, in fact, an ideology or, more accurately, a theory or fantasy that is better called "Brahmanism", that existed largely in textual but not real form and enunciated the interests of a small, Sanskrit-educated social group.
There is little doubt that the religion categories in India could have been defined very differently by reinterpreting those same or other texts. The so-called four-fold hierarchy was also derived from the same Brahman texts. This system of categorisation was also textual or theoretical; it existed only in scrolls and had no relationship with the reality on the ground.
This became embarrassingly obvious from the first censuses in the late s. The plan then was to fit all of the "Hindu" population into these four categories. But the bewildering variety of responses on caste identity from the population became impossible to fit neatly into colonial or Brahman theory. WR Cornish, who supervised census operations in the Madras Presidency in , wrote that "… regarding the origin of caste we can place no reliance upon the statements made in the Hindu sacred writings.
Whether there was ever a period in which the Hindus were composed of four classes is exceedingly doubtful". Similarly, CF Magrath, leader and author of a monograph on the Bihar census, wrote, "that the now meaningless division into the four castes alleged to have been made by Manu should be put aside".
0コメント