#casteism

Harsh judgement: not on Shambuka but on the ruthlessness of a certain king. So harsh most later Ramayanas would prefer to pretend the incident never happened.

But a few pockets kept the memory of it, whether as a cautionary lessons to the underclasses, or in appeasement of them, or in the living proof of the episode and its continual re-enaction in everyday life—hard to say.

And at least one place where I heard Shambuka was given an altar right next to Rama, a fort temple from the twelfth or thirteenth century in the martial branch of the epic's legacy. There, in this place called Ramtek, in eastern Maharashtra, near the Chattsigarh border, a local legend says, "there is where Rama killed Shambuka."

Don't get me wrong. Yes urban women sometimes do have their head up their ass while thinking about feminism and the don't think about how the broader demography of women in smaller towns/ villages or women are stuck in a much conservative situation.

Yes not all women can have the support or situation to do everything that urban women think is a woman's right in feminism.

But to call it fucking SAVARNA FEMINISM??

I'm sorry but that's not helping any women at all. And it's a weird casteist generalization in itself that you believe all urban women who are in a comfortable or richer economic situation are of upper caste. And that all poorer rural women are of lower caste.

THAT. IS. CASTEISM.

As someone who is from the so called “lower caste” and has grew up in a tier 1 city since birth, this statement pisses me off so much.

You not only are dismissing that upper caste people can and are in bad conditions. But is also showing your narrow thinking that all lower caste people are poor and in need of a saviour.

Do not play the oppressor and oppressed card on me. I no way in hell am oppressed. And neither do I want to misuse the term Savarna just to demean a perticular group of people. It's shitty and stereotypical AND CASTEIST.

Class and caste did used to be intertwined in earlier times, but in modern times it has long since become distinct. Especially in urban places.

Even without that. Even knowing many lower caste people DO still till day suffer issues and face discrimination in many places. Have less access to resources like education and basic necessities. It is still an insult to everyone if you believe all of them are stuck in the same poor situations as before.

You in your thoughts and believes at the end of the day are casteist and saying “savarna women don't care for other castes women” are also misogynist. Because at the end of the day you ARE stereotyping and villainizing a whole group of women just because of their birth.

Casteism can and DOES happens to upper caste people as well. And I am saying this as a member of the so called “lower castes” who in you head will always be victims.

I was interested in learning more about Dalit politics because of the recent flaring up of mandal politics and also because my girlfriend is from that community. I am a UC. She and I are both Hindus who are proud of our heritage and are devout (we try our best). We both support the BJP and the hindutva vision of a casteless society based on vedic knowledge and inclusive capitalism but I have a few doubts regarding the ways to achieve this vision. You can directly jump to the tldr if you do not want to read this long message.

We believe that caste system is adharmic and needs to be done away with but we find that both, some UCs and some Dalits like holding on to their caste strongly. Some UCs do that because it gives them a sense of pride and superiority and some Dalits do that because of power hungry political and societal gains. Both the sides show some strong signs of victim complex which is not healthy for a growth-oriented mindset in society. In both the communities, I have noticed that the people who hold on to their caste pride and casteist resentment are often people who have not achieved much in life at a personal level.

Secondly, we have noticed that some people (on both the sides) claim that Hinduism = Brahminism. Now, this results in two things. One, it makes some politicians energise and manipulate Dalit feelings of resentment against dharma and Hindu gods (what happens in Tamil Nadu) and it also makes some people who are on the UC side extremely guilty conscious which makes them either hate their religion or double down and become more casteist and believe that they are the sole defenders of dharma and dharma survives in the country because of them (some statements to this effect by JSD in his video on inter caste marriage and several such statements on social media). Dharma prevails because of all those who fight for it including non-Hindus and tribal Hindus and all those who continue practising astika Hindu traditions in their personal lives.

This belief that Brahminism = Hinduism and Brahmin = Aryan are colonial constructs and they directly lead to the implication that 1. without Brahminical rituals (that are highly essential and necessary of course), Sanatana Dharma cannot exist. 2. it leads to Dravidian politics and fuels Dalit politics that hates Sanatana Dharma.

The recent statements by RSS have flared up debates on inter caste marriage and the arguments for and against this topic on social media are very convoluted and distasteful. It is making me brood over a lot of things and view my relationship with my girlfriend through the lens of privilege and politics and it irritates me that my mind is even going there. I wish caste system had never existed in the first place.

I wonder what is the solution to a casteless society? Is it intermarriage? Urbanisation? What did Bengalis do right that the rest of India did not to a achieve a casteism free society?

tldr; 2 questions:

What is the way to achieve a casteless society?

Some people insist that without caste, hinduism cannot function, is it true?

P.S. Brahminical rituals are necessary for the religion and culture to prevail and I firmly believe that only a certain, serious and specialised group of believers, across castes, should have an authority over that, however, the philosophy/spirituality behind those rituals is more essential and it belongs to all.

Hi, first of all, thank you for your inquisitive and intellectually stimulating ask. You've thought about this topic very well, and it's evident in this ask. The way you've psychoanalysed the caste politics in today's India is summed up well. You hit the nail on the head when you wrote "both sides show some strong signs of victim complex which is not healthy for a growth oriented mindset in society". To put these things into proportion, one needs to study the pre-industrial societies in Europe. They had a rigid, feudal, hereditary stratification of society with little "upward mobility". Take a look at this list of social vices ⬇️

The incidents on that list above happened in Europe in the early 20th century more commonly than people think. Why am I bringing up Europe? Because, one needs to study what Europe did to get rid of this problem versus what India has done. India's current caste / dravidianist politics are a direct consequence of the Morley-Minto Reforms. I wrote about the Indian electoral politics in this reply ⬇️

The seeds of it were sowed in the British colonial era, just like the Hutu vs. Tutsi racial theories and racial segregation were sowed in Rwanda in the colonial times. This gave rise to the profitability of victim mentality politics - basically, each caste block can extort the Indian Republic by threatening with violence or secession, just like the Muslim League did (which did end up in the creation of Pakistan). A lot of fake history and atrocity literature is being manufactured to keep fuelling this victim mentality. Compare that with Europe. Finland was a backwards, agrarian, feudal society that attained independence relatively recently. They had a civil war, it was a war between the socialist red guards and the white army. The Finnish Civil War happened due to intense social divisions, economic hardship, and the sudden collapse of Russian rule. In this war, the "lower" class lost and the "upper" class won, it was a very bloody war, and in the aftermath, the red guards were executed for treason. However, the feudal system was ended months after the Civil War. Finland enacted series of laws that ensured free, universal education for every single citizen, Finland was also forced to industrialise after the world wars, so Finland naturally moved away from the agrarian society. Today, Finland is known as the paragon of a welfare society. There is still an underlying class division that can be soul-crushing, but equal opportunity for free education has closed the gap significantly.

India had a civil war -like situation during the Partition. It led to the breaking of India and the permanence of secession threats. India is a post-colonial country. It means that there are entities in India, still seeking to extract resources via the existing system that was promulgated in the colonial era. The Morley-Minto Reforms, the Ramsay MacDonald Award, the education system that teaches fake history to ensure victimhood politics, the neo-colonial resource extraction, the fact that India was kept economically poor, are all major reasons why caste electoral politics and quasi-feudalist structure (that is falsely attributed to Hinduism) flourished in India.

To answer your main questions, the way to achieve a "casteless society" is universal, high quality education for every child, and industrialisation. For that, you need massive investments in infrastructure so that it reaches even the remotest villages. Access to high quality education, door-to-door, grass-roots, community-driven social campaigns will significantly help every child in their scholastic endeavours.

Industrialisation in Europe was not all a bed of roses, initially it did create extreme wealth gaps, however in the long-term it became a catalyst for democratisation and stabilisation. It is only societies with skilled labour and educated workforce that create a stable society. Inequality will never disappear completely, but education and work are equalising factors. India is still primarily an agrarian society, because a vast majority of its population relies on agriculture for their livelihood. Roughly 40% to 50% of India's total workforce is employed in agriculture, and more than half of India's population lives in rural areas with over 70% of rural households depending on agriculture for their livelihood. Compare that with Europe. There are no primarily agrarian societies left in Europe, and all EU countries are fully industrialised or service based economies. If you take a look at Romania, Bulgaria and some area areas of Greece in Poland, you will notice that these are the regions that are the most agrarian, and coincidentally have the most poverty and social issues that are today considered as "3rd world issues". 

To answer your second question, whether caste is essential for Hinduism, it totally depends on what is meant by caste. For example, I'm from a napit (barber caste) background. Napits used to cut hair and do small surgical procedures in the villages, they also used to do matchmaking. There are certain puja vidhis that may be unique to napits. With the modernisation of the world, I don't think there's any need for match-making village barbers :D. It is more than likely that some of those unique puja vidhis will become obsolete and more dominant and widespread customs will supplant them. From a cultural preservation perspective, it is going to be seen as disappearance of cultural heritage. But I personally don't mind it, it has always happened, with migrations and loss of connection to land. The main thing for me is that these people remain in Hinduism because they're still connected to the pantheon, even if their connection to the land and ancestral vidhis got severed for one reason or another. About Bengal, it's not really casteless. Caste and class are intertwined in a unique way, and the discrimination is much more hidden. Bengal also had partition and tumultuous political landscape, which made the violence party based rather than caste based. So, Bengal isn't really an example of castelessness, but a different social environment.

What about castes like Vishwakarmas or Brahmins who have to do with temple building, murti making and paurohitya? The disappearance of these people will permanently sever the ancestral memory that was passed from father to son. In a modernised world, though, you can't expect someone to be a full-time purohita or a murti maker. This is why a collective preservation project is needed, so that the knowledge is never lost, but it is preserved and passed on. None of this requires caste politics or casteism btw. The reason why caste polarisation exists in India is not due to Hinduism but due to poverty and profit.

!! thank you for the rec - I haven’t read it, but I do have a casual interest in anti-casteist writings, although I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable about the topic as some mutuals & people I follow living in India. what did you think of the essay?

I don't know why people keep comparing casteism to white supremacy (I've even seen some claiming that Brahmins are "white passing" or whatever),cause,not every sort of problem in the world is white supremacy,like,of course colonialism has a role to play in more casteism,and that there is a lot of colourism in India,but what even is the point of saying that Brahmins are white passing