The uncontestable evidence harnessed by the survey on the prevalence of casteism in every Christian church in India through casteism, is so appalling and overwhelming for all those who firmly believe in the power of the Gospel of Christ to transform both the individual and the society anywhere in the world. Hence the question: Is Hinduism whose “core is the creed of caste” (Dr. Ambedkar) so very impregnable and unassailable? Is this human construction of caste ideology of hierarchy found codified in the Manusmriti and based on the Rig Vedic Purusha Sukta really part of Hinduism?. Dr. Ambedkar said:
“It is a misnomer to call Hinduism a religion. Its philosophy is opposed to everything for which religion stands… This brief analysis of the philosophy of Hinduism from the point of view of justice reveals in a glaring manner, how Hinduism is inimical to equality, antagonistic to liberty and opposed to fraternity… Indeed inequality is the soul of Hinduism. (W&S, Vol.3, pp.92 and p.66).
6 FEATURES OF THE CASTE SYSTEM
The power and potency of the Hindu belief system and the caste-graded social system which together have held their sway over all the population living anywhere in the Indian subcontinent proved insurmountable for over 3,000 years. It is imperative, at least from the perspective of the millions of victims (outcaste Untouchables or Dalits) of these oppressive system to identify those elements and aspects that constituted the power – source and forces to these. systems.
For the purpose of this paper, only six major features of caste ideology are identified and briefly described.
(1) CASTE SPIRIT
The strength and power of the caste system had the capacity to absorb and assimilate the challenges posed by non-Hindu egalitarian religious like Budhism, Christianity and Islam during the past 2,600 years. Perhaps the mode and manner through which the Hindu religious caste complex is claimed to have absorbed and assimilated the other belief system has made some imaginative writer to compare the Hindu caste system to an octopus that sucks into its clutches the fresh looking and faster swimming fish in the same ocean. This picture would acknowledge some kind of superior animal power as we could imply in expression “brute majority”. However, this would also imply the octopus-like absorbing power which is derived from the “hierarchical principle of social organization.”
CULTURE OF SILENCE
This is lauded and justified by the defenders of caste like Dr. S. Radhakrishnan.
No wonder this “caste spirit” manifested itself and functioned as divisive spirit, dominating spirit, oppressive spirit, exclusive spirit etc. operating in the creation of caste-group distinctions and their multiplications into the hundreds and even thousands of jatis. These divisions with their competing inequalities have resulted in classes discriminating against the underprivileged oppressed sections. This has resulted in the permanent split and cleavage between the dominant castes and the dominated outcastes among the same sprawling masses of the Indian society.
This situation had also promoted a superiority complex among the members of the caste groups based on the false pride and prejudice leading to their hatred and discrimination against the members of the outcaste groups who had imbibed an inferiority complex generation after generation, deriving from an imposed Hindu belief in karma and cycle of rebirth.
PERMANENTLY CHAINED
This in turn made the latter fatalistically accept their lowly birth (descent) and social status with assigned survival occupations as something divinely ordained and inherited destiny. The low self- esteem and lack of self dignity and apathy towards life on the part of the outcaste individuals and communities because of their patho-genie misbeliefs had pushed them into a culture of silence.
This is how all the outcaste victims (presently called Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes or Dalits) individuals and communities were rendered powerless, exploited, enslaved and segregated underclass of the whole Indian society down through some 30 centuries.
In other words, such is the process by which all the victims of Hindu caste ideology have virtually become “possessed” by the demonic caste- spirit, which has permanently chained and imprisoned them into the house of bondage of caste. A similar situation is not found anywhere else in the whole world. All this in contrast to the non-Hindu societies elsewhere most of which are built on the ideals of egalitarian and democratic principles with the basic emphasis on the value of the individual person in human community. Obviously, what could not be maintained as true in the realm of thought and reason, had to find support and sanction from the “sacred scriptures”. The dominant power exercised by the caste-spirit is the ground reality and facts of life in the long story of India.
SPLIT IN THE MIDDLE
However, we must examine the real source of this dominant power of the caste spirit at the deeper levels of its inner workings and manifestations. Perhaps we must discover it within the open fact and the ground reality of the inner contradictions within caste ideology and its praxis. Thus for example how can Hinduism be so boundless as to encompass the loftiest metaphysics alongside its rigid discrimination and exclusiveness against the Untouchable Panchamas or Avarnas who are outside the pale of its four-fold caste-graded society?
Here we are talking about over one quarter of 25 crores out of a total of 100 crores of Indian citizens today described as SC/ST in the 1950 constitution who are victims of caste-based exclusion.
The most glaring evidence for the enduring power of the caste system could be most clearly identified in the terrible fact of the split in the middle of Indian society between the caste communities and the outcaste communities, between the Touchables and the Untouchables segregated in their separate ghettos in everyone of our 600,000 villages scattered throughout India.
And this segregation practiced even today much like apartheid in South Africa until 1996, is the symbol of continuing dominance of the touchable castes over the Untouchable minorities.
SANCTIFIED RACISM
It is nothing but the and the age-old hegemony of the brute majority habitually exercised over the ethnic minorities of the original inhabitants of this land even after untouchability is abolished by Article 17 of the constitution. Yet it is all justified and legitimated by the religion and sanctified by sacred Hindu scriptures such as the Rig Veda, Manusmriti and the Bhagavat Gita by the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the Hindu caste- ideology. This is how the source of the power to absorb and assimilate rival systems of belief and their votaries came to be attributed to the spiritual and supernatural realms of Hindu religious ideology.
This is the reason why Dr. Ambedkar, the champion of the liberation of 250 million of the oppressed Dalits, burnt the Manusmriti in 1923.
LUTHERAN CHURCH CRISIS
To illustrate the truly diabolic divisive nature of the caste-spirit that continue to plague the Indian churches the following account from the history of the Lutheran churches may be cited from the book, The Lutheran Enterprise in India:
(1) The caste controversy: The caste institution met with wholesale condemnation by many mission bodies. Mission agents and converts were required to remove caste by eating meals or drinking a cup of tea prepared by an Adi- Dravida cook. The Lutheran Mission held somewhat milder views. The caste institution represents not only an evil. It is at the same time a civil order serving to protect race and profession. Caste discipline may supply a moral help in certain circumstances. It was, therefore, held that not the caste institution as such but the caste spirit should be fought. Force and compulsion should not be used. Instruction from the pulpit, soul- care and setting a good example were considered the only means to be employed.
(2) Candidate Nallatambi was to be ordained in 1854. Christopher Ochs supported by some other missionaries demanded that he should eat food prepared by an Untouchable demonstrating thereby that he stands beyond caste differences. Nallatambi declined stating that he would rather remain a catechist.
(2) CASTE SEGMENTATION
(3) The incident led to a serious crisis. The controversy was carried over to Germany. Professors, pastors, church councillors and congregations disputed over the right attitude to be adopted. In India, the synod was split into two camps. Finally Graul (the German mission superintendent) succeeded in carrying through his moderate view not to insist upon demonstrations and to treat the caste institution in a moderate manner. Still four German missionaries among them, the highly gifted Ochs, severed their connection from Leipzig Evangelical Lutheran Mission (LELM).
Caste segmentation is a second major feature/characteristic to the caste ideology. However, the deliberate and conscious intervention and interaction on the part of certain men and women motivated by desire to dominate and to exploit others in their own society had chosen to use certain other criteria like religion and caste to create new divisions, hierarchical fragmentations and graded segmentations. This is particularly an unique phenomenon.
Divide and dominate was the rule in principle that becomes a source of power for caste ideology.
(3) CASTE SOLIDARITY
Nehru defends caste system: It was Jawaharlal Nehru who identified the caste as the source and strategy for ensuring social status and group identity to any particular section within the Indian society. This acknowledged caste solidarity as the basis for common identity deriving from the hierarchical social organization. The Brahmin Nehru found the “secular” source of power and potency of the ancient Hindu society in what he called an ingenious method to preserve caste group solidarities or a certain hierarchy of classes. We find Nehru’s analysis and interpretation of caste system as a dominant feature of the Indian social structure in his book, The Discovery of India.
NEHRU’S MISCHIEF
In other words, Nehru as a proclaimed secular socialist would rather confine himself to economic determinism as the sole criteria for social division and petrification of the classes while yet counting the so-called outcaste Untouchables, the landless laboring masses of his “beloved India” perhaps as the “lumpen proletariat of the society.
Nehru’s approach was not radical enough towards a total revolution or total transformation of thew hole society (Dr. B.R. Ambedkar). The social vision of Nehru was distorted by the unquestioned realities of. status-quoist, caste privileges and inherent inequalities among the different communities as well as individuals in the Indian society.
(4) CASTE CONSCIOUSNESS
The most potent reality that we may identify as the basic source of power of the caste ideology is the caste consciousness. It is found in every individual Indian and among the entire social groupings oг communities in India.
Caste consciousness is in the very blood of everyone born Hindu. “Blood is thicker than the water of baptism”.
How then are we to define this caste consciousness?
DALIT ACCEPTS HIS LOW STATUS
S.D. Sharma, a Brahmin writer, explains that
An important development in the age of mantras is the concept of rita or cosmic order from which are derived in later times the characteristically Indian ideals of dharma and the law of karma.
It is the cosmic order apparently which provided the framework for the four-fold structure of the caste system. In other words what gives life, dynamism and power to this varna social structure may be identified as the all-pervasive caste consciousness.
The belief in karma and rebirth provided the “rational” principle of criteria of division and discrimination within the whole society. This belief in fact is the very air we breathe in this country. This true whether in the case of the votaries of the Hindu caste system or the victims of the same.
In particular this is tragically true in the case of the (Dalit) outcaste untouchable victims of Hindu caste ideology. These Dalits have come to believe that they are born to be slaves as determined and assigned by the law of karma to lowly menial occupations from their very birth or decent (destiny). So the root causes of their captivity and low mentality in them are to be traced in the same belief in karma, punarjanma and varna dharma shared with all the different graded caste communities of the varna system.
However, while these beliefs created the caste consciousness among those coming under the four- fold caste hierarchy, giving them superior caste-status and caste- identity even if within their own rank and file.
But in the case of the outcastes the very same beliefs imposed on them an inferior and contradictory outcaste consciousness through their experience of exclusion and degradation effected by endogamy and non-commensality by the same hierarchical caste ideology.
FATE OF ISLAM & CHRISTIANITY
This kind of caste or caste consciousness may be compared to some kind of a contagion that seemed to have entered into the conscience of every Indian individual as well as into the common sensibility or the collective psyche of every caste group or outcaste communities in India.
In other words the root cause for caste discrimination and caste mentality or prejudice and hatred against other castes and outcastes is embedded in the mindset of the members of all the caste graded communities is that caste consciousness which is engineered into the very soul psyche, heart and mind of every individual born in India.
This Hindu belief system has inflicted such grievous inner wounds in the collective psyche of every outcaste group or non-caste ethnic social grouping even if they had been only living isolated in their respective local setting or geographically segregated ghettoes. More significant is the fact that this same caste-consciousness had become deeply ingrained also in the moral order of the openly- proselytizing non-Hindu religions such as Islam and Christianity and their caste-tainted generations of the members of the community that were living for centuries in the Hindu environment.
TWIST IN THE MIND
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar had called this reality as a twist in the mind of the every Hindu. He recognized this to be the real binding force of Hinduism. This binding force of Hinduism was infused by the Brahminic religious beliefs and rituals taught by the Sanskrit scriptures and practiced through the Brahminic system of priest-craft ever since the Vedic times.
This varna or jati consciousness had percolated into the whole being of mind, heart, soul and body – of every individual and into the collective psyche of every human group or community living in the midst of Hindu religious environment.
GANDHI DEFENDED CASTE SYSTEM
Perhaps the best known protagonist and representative of modern Hinduism with unsullied caste- consciousness, according to Dr. Ambedkar is the “Father of the Nation” M.K. Gandhi.
Gandhi condemned untouchability but defended the “caste system” stoutly. He was ready only to treat the symptom but not the disease.
He was ready to cut off the branch of the poison tree but leave the trunk and roots of the tree itself untouched and intact – indeed even religiously watering and menuring the same.
FIGHT WITH DR. AMBEDKAR
His dubious ways of reinforcing outcaste-slave- consciousness among the Untouchables are not so unambiguous.
The most dramatic way in which Gandhi cruelly snatched way the legitimate demands of the Untouchable people for separate electorate was by forcing Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to sign the “Poona Pact” (1932).
The non-Hindu outcastes were forcibly converted Hindu religious consciousness. It is to reinforce the same view, Gandhi gave them the name Harijan.
In contrast to Gandhi’s view, Dr. Ambedkar said in 1946 to the Untouchables “Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors.
The Vedas, smritis and shastras were all instruments of torture which Hinduism used against them to make them unapproachable.
(5) THE CASTE CULT
This is one of the most potent modern manifestations or instruments of caste ideology. Several new cultic institutions and dogmatic movement w were consciously and deliberately constructed and launched and feverishly promoted by the beneficiaries and perpetrators of the caste system.
Wider resurgence in Hinduism came to be stimulated and popularized through well-conceived and constructed cultic movements by Hindu orthodox groups. Such as the Kali cult in Bengal, Vinayaka cult in Maharashtra and soon spread into South India in particular to Tamil Nadu as a popular counter movement to Dravidian Rationalism in the hands of the Hindu Munnani, the rise of the personality cult of the living Bhagvan Satya Sai Baba of Puttparthy, the lyappa cult with its main temple in Kerala with popular annual pilgrimages and the spread of local lyappa temples of towns and villages in the other South Indian states.
(6) THE CASTE CREED
This is the central and sustaining source of power of caste ideology. This caste creed was unwittingly incorporated even in the country’s constitution itself. At the final stages of drafting even Dr. B.R. Ambedkar himself seem to have been caught in a minority position unable to stop or avoid the same. Of course, by Article 17, untouchability is abolished. But this meant only dealing with the symptom of the disease of the caste system. Indeed the very concept of caste is specifically introduced in several articles of the constitution as something to be overcome.
DALITS MADE “HINDU”
But caste system was not identified as a source of discrimination and oppression of its victims.
And yet, a whole mass of millions of Indian citizens are marked off even if with good intention for “affirmative action of providing handicap reservation benefits to the victims of caste, with a brand name calling them as Scheduled Castes. Such subtle and imperceptible way was like giving a name to a dog and hanging it.
Thus a whole quarter of the Indian nation, who were in fact a casteless non-Hindu population, without themselves being aware of it, became forcibly converted into Hinduism and identified as Scheduled Castes.
In the process at one shot they were unwittingly identified both as Hindu by religion and also as yet another set of caste groups.
Hinduism and casteism are like two sides of the same coin. This had left legal tag and a social stigma upon these already stereotyped sections of the Indian society all by a stroke of a pen as it were. Such indeed is the most subtle manner in which the Hindu caste-creed was introduced into the paramount parchment of our nationhood.
Hindu nationalism, which is synonym for caste-based communal solidarity of all the Hindu dharma, came to be based upon and built around the caste-creed. This caste- creed began to evolve concretely with the founding of RSS in 1925 by Dr. Hedgewar. As soon as the British left, M.K. Gandhi was shot dead by an RSS Brahmin Nathuram Godse (1948). The sin of Gandhi was his efforts at national integration through Hindu-Muslim unity. This one single event alone is sufficient to lay bare the inner contradictions of the Hindu caste-creed as the source of evil power of the caste ideology.
CONCLUSION
The true nature of the Hindutva caste-creed is built round the philosophy of violent confrontations between different religions.
The best advocate of the Hindu caste-creed are Aurobindo, M.K. Gandhi, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan and C. Rajagopalachari.
And yet how are we to account for the unending patterns and varieties of distinct cultures and religious belief systems that had their historical co-existence within the context of the rigid manifestations of the Hindu caste ideology? How are we to explain the grand mosaic and the rainbow-like combinations of peoples and cultures that make up the plural society of India down through the centuries?
Even though the classic Budhism after a full 1,000 years of it reign in the land of its birth seemed to have been banished to leave its shores, the same great superior religious ideology and conquered many lands to take the rank of the third largest global religion after Islam and Christianity. This is true even in terms of the numerical count of the adherents. After all this, one must and can say Hindu caste ideology is not all that impregnable or unassailable.
