.........India, a country in south Asia, is a perplexing and mammoth land with a long history. It is a home to many languages, religions, cults, ethnicities and caste system. Its inhabitants follow Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim religions. About eighty percent population follows Hindu religion. The diversity found here is amazing. Some consider it a power house of spirituality with gross disregard to Western materialism. Its still ancient society is based on caste. The caste is still the unofficial system of India.
The caste system or Chaturvarna has four Varnas viz. Brhaman, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Shudra in socially descending order. There is one more, large group, below the Shudra, called Untouchables. There are thousands endogamous castes/jatis belonging to each Varna. If left to itself, it is an unchanging system and tends to keep some specific people permanently at the top. And the same deprived group, permanently, at the bottom. It is operates through an inheritance system, where not only the wealth, but also social status and occupations, social/economic disabilities are transferred to an individual by birth. The marriages take place on endogamous basis.
To get an idea about this insensitive social system we have to go to the times when nomadic Aryans tribes entered India.
Around 1500 BC, the agricultureless, casteless, moving on horses the Aryan tribes arrived in North-Western region of Indian sub-continent. They moved in search of greener pastures for their cattle stock. The tribes came after tribes in succession; most probably having 2000 members in each. All the Aryan tribes, living without agriculture, lived a separate life until they combined. However, this process took 600 years to be really effective. These egalitarian, casteless, meat-eating people were later to create the Chaturvarna system with its related notion of inherent purity and inherent impurity with related social and power structure. This system gave rise to heinous, cruel and eternal system of untouchability which made the life a living hell for a large number of people. These eternal exploiters took pride in developing such an eternal system. They still take pride in it. And occasionally the blood of Untouchables is splattered on the earth for its cause. This causes the terror to be entrenched in the victims’ minds forever. And we will see in the chapter related to Karma doctrine that these victims, whose blood is splattered on the ground for dreaming, are the culprits!!.........
Monday, June 18, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment