China Open Source Observatory

Chapter Two The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations

January 1, 2021

种姓制度与印度历史上的动荡

中国现代国际关系研究院

Chapter Two The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History种姓制度与印度历史上的动荡

Note: this document was translated using machine learning technology. Learn more.

Originally Written By
China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations中国现代国际关系研究院
Publisher
Current Affairs Press时事出版社

Chapter Two
The Caste System and Turmoil
in Indian History

第二章
种姓制度与印度
历史上的动荡

Chapter Two

For a very long period — at least before Britain established direct colonial rule over India[1] in 1859 — India was less a political concept than a geographical category: the Indian subcontinent,[2] referring primarily to the South Asian landmass south of the Himalayas. And before Jawaharlal Nehru and other Indian National Congress leaders established an independent state in 1947, “India” was less a name for a country than a civilizational symbol — denoting the Indian civilization, with Hinduism at its core, that had flourished and spread across this South Asian continent.

This continent, cradled by snow-capped mountains and seas, was endowed with extraordinary natural gifts and formed a world unto itself, enjoying many natural and geopolitical advantages. Yet its history was marked far more by fragmentation, disunity, and conflict than by unified feudal dynasties or powerful empires. The American historian L. S. Stavrianos observed in his monograph A Global History: “India differed from China in that China experienced long periods of imperial unity interrupted by brief intervals of division, whereas in India the reverse was true — brief unity and prolonged fragmentation.” The turbulence of Indian history, with its tendency toward division over unity, stands in sharp contrast to China’s history of unification. The ratio of unified to divided periods in Chinese history is roughly 7:3, whereas in India it is less than 3:7.

To understand why, one must trace the roots back to the deep and rich genetic code of India’s traditional culture.

Chapter Two

Nehru’s Anxieties

On the eve of independence from colonial rule, India’s founding Prime Minister Nehru wrote in his celebrated 1945 work The Discovery of India: “India, as she is constituted today, cannot play a second-rate part in the world. She will either count for a great deal or not count at all. A middle position is not for her, nor do I believe it is possible.”

This passage, quoted countless times by Chinese scholars, reflects less Nehru’s idealistic expectations for India’s future as a great power than his deep anxiety — born of historical chaos — about the prospects for India’s development.

Nehru firmly believed that, given India’s unique geopolitical advantages, natural endowments, and the substantial colonial inheritance it stood to receive, India both could and should become a great power that “counts for a great deal” on the world stage. Yet what worried him more was the possibility that India might, through the inertia of history, squander its potential as a great power, sink to the status of a “second-rate” member of the international community, or even cease to “count at all.”

Nehru’s concerns were not without foundation. Drawing on his profound understanding of Hindu traditional culture, Nehru was acutely aware that a certain tension existed between this traditional culture — and the national character it had nurtured over millennia — and the demands of national modernization and the rise of a great power. Indian history itself was a mirror. Marx’s remark that “India could not escape the fate of being conquered” cut Nehru to the quick.

Around 1500 BCE, the Aryans entered the Indian subcontinent and ultimately established the foundational character of Indian civilization. Before the Age of Sail arrived at the end of the fifteenth century, Indian civilization was repeatedly harassed by outside forces entering through the Khyber Pass in the northwest. In the pre-medieval era of cold weapons, it could be said that whoever controlled this pass controlled the vast expanse of northern India, from the Indus plain to the Gangetic plain. Persians, Macedonians, Greeks, Yuezhi, Hephthalites (also known as White Huns), Sakas, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and others successively invaded the subcontinent through this northwestern gateway — some to plunder its wealth, others to establish kingdoms on the spot. These frequent foreign invasions either interrupted or constrained the process of unification across the Indian landmass, or further tore apart India’s existing political map. Wave after wave of conquest ultimately made present-day India a “museum of races, religions, cultures, and languages” unlike any other in the world.

With the Age of Sail came European industrial civilization, and Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Britain, and other European powers successively landed on the Indian subcontinent by sea. Faced with the superior firepower of European powers, the Indian subcontinent — still living in an agrarian civilization — had almost no defensible position. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 gave the British East India Company a firm foothold on the subcontinent. Starting from that battle, this trading company ultimately not only swept away all other colonial powers entrenched in India, but established absolute dominion over it. That a trading company came to unify a territory of over four million square kilometers under its rule stands as one of history’s great “curiosities.” It was a “curiosity” that weighed heavily on the minds of thoughtful Indians like Nehru.

Indian history is, in essence, a history of repeated harassment, invasion, and occupation by outside forces. The reason India has such a history is to be found in Nehru’s own The Discovery of India: “The caste system flourished in a particular age… but later it became a prison for society and for the human mind. In the final analysis, it came entirely at the cost of subsequent progress.”

Standing on the eve of a new India’s dawn, with the weight of a history saturated by foreign invasion pressing upon him, Nehru could not help but be seized by deep anxiety about the nation’s future: could a new India, freed from colonial rule, escape the “cyclical law of history”?


＜ 1949年，印度开国总理贾瓦哈拉尔·尼赫鲁在喜马偕尔邦首府西姆拉演讲

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History


＜ Sunrise over the Ganges

Conquered Again and Again

Marx once observed with incisive clarity: “India could not escape the fate of being conquered, and its entire history, if it can be called a history at all, is a history of being conquered again and again.”

India’s abundant resources and far-flung reputation made it a perennial target for foreign conquest and plunder throughout its history, while the subcontinent’s various internal conflicts and divisions repeatedly allowed foreign invaders to succeed. And so history repeated itself, in an endless cycle.

India’s recorded history may be said to begin with the Aryan entry into the subcontinent around 1500 BCE. The following millennium was a history of continuous struggle and fusion among the various Aryan tribes, with northern India as their grand stage. By the early sixth century BCE, northern India had fragmented into a political landscape of sixteen contending states. In the mid-fourth century BCE, the Nanda dynasty was established on the foundation of Magadha — the hegemon among these states — and ultimately unified northern India. Historians refer to this period as the “Age of the Sixteen Kingdoms,” which roughly coincides with China’s Spring and Autumn period.

During the Age of the Sixteen Kingdoms, the Indian subcontinent experienced two major foreign invasions. In 516 BCE, the Persian Emperor Darius I — who styled himself “King of Kings” and “King of Nations” — led his armies to conquer the northwestern region of India and established the twentieth satrapy of the Persian Empire in the Indus plain. This was the first recorded contact between Aryan Indian society and another advanced civilization, and it was the first time India was exposed to the Western world. In 327 BCE, Alexander the Great of Macedon — the greatest conqueror of the ancient world — continued his eastward campaign after destroying the Persian Empire, advancing into the Punjab region of northwestern India. But faced with fierce resistance from Magadha, compounded by widespread war-weariness among his troops and the ravages of disease, Alexander was compelled to leave “this land of milk, honey, and wondrous creatures” and turn back. Alexander’s campaign in India facilitated the exchange and fusion of Greek and Indian civilizations. The writings left by historians of Alexander’s era not only established the first confirmed chronology of Indian history, but also spread word of India’s fabulous wealth throughout the Western world.

Alexander’s invasion and withdrawal, combined with the corruption and palace intrigues of the Nanda dynasty, ultimately gave rise to the Maurya Empire (324–187 BCE). The Maurya Empire was the first unified empire to emerge from Indian soil, and the first dynasty in Indian history to practice centralized rule. It reached its zenith under Emperor Ashoka (268–232 BCE), who waged wars of conquest across the subcontinent, unifying it except for the southern tip of the Deccan Plateau. His realm stretched from present-day Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east. Ashoka is therefore regarded by many Indians as the greatest emperor in history. Yet this unified dynasty endured for only 137 years.

In the half-century following Ashoka’s death in 232 BCE, the Maurya Empire gradually disintegrated. India descended into more than 550 years of warfare. During this period, beginning in the early second century BCE, India was successively invaded by the Greco-Bactrians, the Sakas, the Parthians, and the Yuezhi. Among these, the Yuezhi — who had originally inhabited the Hetao region of China — established the Kushan Empire (55–425 CE) in northwestern ancient India. At its height under Kanishka (r. 120–162 CE), the Kushan Empire stretched from Afghanistan to the middle Ganges and the central Deccan Plateau, ranking alongside Rome, Parthia, and the Eastern Han as one of the four great empires of the world.

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

The next great dynasty on the subcontinent was the Gupta Empire (c. 320–540 CE). This was another powerful empire to arise on the Indian subcontinent after the Mauryas, and the last empire established by Indians themselves — or, one might say, by the Aryans. The Gupta Empire’s golden age was inaugurated by Chandragupta II (also known as Vikramaditya, r. 380–413 CE). Its historical stature is comparable to that of the Tang dynasty at its height in China.

In the century following Vikramaditya’s death in 413 CE, the Gupta Empire was wracked by incessant internal strife. In the mid-fifth century, the Hephthalites invaded from Central Asia and by the early sixth century had occupied most of northern and central India. Under the repeated blows of the Hephthalites, the Gupta Empire finally collapsed in 540 CE. India once again fragmented into numerous kingdoms large and small. The Harsha Empire briefly appeared in the early seventh century — the kingdom in which the Tang monk Xuanzang spent many years studying during his pilgrimage to the west — but it too was a flash in the pan, and its territory could not compare with the great Maurya and Gupta empires. In fact, in the nearly 700 years following the fall of the Gupta Empire, no indigenous power on Indian soil was able to achieve even a relative degree of political unification.

The Arabs arrived in the present-day Sindh region in 712 CE, inaugurating the era of Muslim invasions of India. Among these, the Central Asian Muslim Ghaznavid dynasty (963–1186 CE), founded by Afghan Turks, repeatedly plundered and ravaged northern India during the reign of Sultan Mahmud (999–1030 CE). Muslim chroniclers enumerate as many as seventeen campaigns by Mahmud against India (some scholars count twelve), coming almost every year or two to “feast.” After his third eastern campaign in 1009, Mahmud never again encountered any serious resistance. Mahmud’s plundering wrought unprecedented destruction on the productive forces of northern India, severely undermining the confidence of Indians in resisting foreign enemies, and paved the way for Muslims to later sweep through India and ultimately establish the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526). Moreover, Mahmud’s raids led to the gradual extinction of Buddhism in India — which had originated in northern India in the fourth century BCE — as temples throughout the region were destroyed, forcing Buddhism to seek survival by spreading to other lands.

The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 brought renewed unification to northern India and inaugurated a new era of Muslim rule over India. The Delhi Sultanate spanned five dynasties and more than three hundred years. Throughout this period, dynastic transitions were accompanied by palace intrigues and warfare, as well as foreign invasions and plunder. Most notably, in 1398, Timur — a Turkicized Central Asian Mongol who claimed descent from Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde — invaded Delhi, and the devastation he wrought made even the repeated atrocities of Mahmud four centuries earlier pale by comparison. Wherever Timur’s iron hooves passed, nothing remained but rubble and scorched earth. After capturing Delhi, he carried out a massive massacre, killing hundreds of thousands of residents and leaving the city deserted for two months. Even a Muslim scholar who had never harmed so much as a sparrow in his life was compelled to kill fifteen Hindus. Timur spent fifteen days in Delhi, stripping the city bare. He transported the skilled craftsmen and countless treasures he had seized from northern India back to his capital Samarkand to build the grand mosque he had designed himself.

When the third dynasty — the Tughluq dynasty — came to an end in 1413, the Delhi Sultanate’s grip over local governance had grown increasingly weak. Beneath the court, kingdoms proliferated and conflicts were unceasing. At this moment, the Portuguese seized the opportunity to forge an alliance with southern Hindu kingdoms and establish the colony of Goa — the first European colonial foothold in India.

In 1526, the Turkicized Mongol Babur — also a sixth-generation descendant of Timur — intervened in the internal power struggle of the Lodi dynasty (1451–1526) and overthrew the last dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, ending the chaos in northern India and establishing the Mughal dynasty (1526–1857). This was the third great unification in Indian history, coming nearly a thousand years after the previous one. Under Aurangzeb (r. 1659–1707), through years of continuous warfare, the Mughal Empire reached its greatest territorial extent: from Ghazni in the west (present-day Ghazni Province, Afghanistan) to Chittagong in the east, from Kashmir in the north to the Carnatic region in the south — a domain of unparalleled breadth in all of Indian history. Yet Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 triggered a new cycle of turmoil across the Indian subcontinent. Provincial governors raised their own armies and declared independence, warring against one another, leaving the imperial court a hollow shell. Among them, the powerful Marathas of the south swept all before them. Had the Afghans not intervened, the Marathas might well have marched north and established a new unified dynasty in place of the Mughals.

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

The internal strife of the late Mughal period invited invasion and plunder from the neighboring states of Iran and Afghanistan to the northwest. In 1738, the Iranian Shah Nadir Shah led an army of 50,000 into India, captured Peshawar, and the following year reached Delhi. The Mughal army was, predictably, utterly routed by the Iranians, and Emperor Muhammad Shah surrendered. Nadir Shah unleashed his troops to sack Delhi, massacring 20,000 people and carrying off 700 million rupees in wealth — including 150 million rupees in cash and the priceless Peacock Throne. All territory west of the Indus River was also seized. The plunder was so immense that Nadir Shah declared a three-year tax exemption throughout Persia. The Mughal Empire never recovered. In 1748, Afghan King Ahmad Shah Durrani followed in Nadir Shah’s footsteps and launched a massive invasion. Over the course of more than a decade, Afghan armies invaded the Indian subcontinent twelve times (some accounts say eight), seizing vast wealth and at one point occupying the northwestern Indian regions of Punjab, Kashmir, and Sindh, inflicting even greater destruction on northern India than the Iranians had. Durrani’s invasions not only further accelerated the disintegration of the Mughal Empire, but also crushed the Marathas’ ambition to rebuild an Indian empire.

Chapter Two

The Mughal Empire, ravaged by years of warfare and repeatedly stripped of its wealth, had been reduced to utter destitution. This paved the way for the British East India Company to nibble away at and ultimately swallow the Indian subcontinent. Marx vividly described the situation: “The great Mogul was overthrown by the Mogul’s own governors, the governors by the Mahrattas, the Mahrattas by the Afghans, and while all were struggling against all, the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all.”

British imperial colonial rule over India falls into three broad phases. In the first phase (1608–1757), London granted the East India Company a royal charter monopolizing trade with India. This phase also saw the East India Company militarily defeat its European rivals on the Indian subcontinent one by one — Portugal, the Netherlands, and France. In the second phase (1757–1857), London backed the East India Company in militarily conquering all of India and exercising colonial rule on its behalf. This phase fully exposed the greed, cunning, treachery, and brutality of the British colonizers. In the third phase (1858–1947), London ruled India directly. Through a series of colonial policies, Britain gradually transformed India from a self-sufficient agrarian economy into the primary source of raw materials and the most important overseas commodity market for British industrial capitalism, thereby creating a period of glory for the British “empire on which the sun never sets.” In 1947, the British Empire withdrew from the Indian subcontinent, and British India was divided in two — India and Pakistan each became independent states.

From the foregoing, it is clear that a defining feature of all Indian history is the predominance of division over unity, unceasing internal strife, and relentless foreign invasion. Political unification was always temporary and relative; fragmentation and internal conflict were the historical norm; and suffering repeated harassment, plunder, and ultimately colonization was an inescapable fate.

For more than 2,000 years before the founding of the Maurya Empire and for more than 500 years after its collapse, and for nearly 700 years after the fall of the Gupta Empire, India’s fragmentation was staggering. The Delhi Sultanate and the later Mughal Empire also fell apart, leaving dynasties as empty shells. British colonial rule unified the Indian subcontinent for the first time in a genuine sense, with administrative authority reaching unimpeded across a landmass tightly enclosed by mountains and sea. Even so, constrained by limited capacity, the British adopted a “differentiated governance” model for their colonial rule of India: one category was direct rule, called “British India”; the other was an “princely state system” established with hundreds of princely kingdoms, through which the colonizers exercised indirect rule by dispatching resident officials. According to British government documents from the 1920s and 1930s, the number of princely states at that time reached 562, scattered across the Indian subcontinent. The largest princely states were the size of France; the smallest were no more than a large estate. Because of the sheer number of these states-within-a-state, the map of British India’s colonial territory looked like a monk’s patchwork robe.

So why was this land — “backed by snow-capped mountains and bordered by sea on three sides” (in Xuanzang’s words), a heaven-sent gift of geography — historically unable to coalesce into a unified state? What factors caused these incomparable geographical advantages to come to nothing? Why was this subcontinent unable to mount effective organized resistance against invading foreign peoples? Why did no dynasty ever mobilize the manpower and resources to seal off the one gap left in the natural barriers surrounding it — the Khyber Pass — which is only 53 kilometers long and less than 600 meters wide at its narrowest point? Why did Indian history always present a picture of fragmentation, incessant internal disorder, and unending strife? The answers to all these questions must be sought in the caste system, which has prevailed on the Indian subcontinent for more than 3,000 years.

A God-Like Presence

The caste system germinated during the pre-Vedic[3] period following the Aryan invasion of the subcontinent (1500–1000 BCE), took formal shape during the later Vedic era (c. 1000–600 BCE), and successively served as the core content of Vedism and Brahmanism — both forerunners of Hinduism.

The term “caste” is a Chinese translation. In the Vedic era, “caste” was called “varna,” meaning “color” or “complexion.” As Vedism transitioned into Brahmanism — and especially after the rise of medieval Hinduism — “varna” was gradually replaced by “jati,” meaning “birth” or “lineage.” “Jati” further subdivided the peoples of the Indian subcontinent according to bloodline and occupation. Later, when Europeans arrived, they called “jati” “caste,” a term that spread widely and became universally used; the Chinese rendered it as “zhongxing” (种姓), meaning roughly “birth-group.”

Thus “varna” and “caste” represent two distinct historical stages in the development and evolution of the caste system. “Varna” was the caste system in its early form. After the Aryans invaded the upper Indus region and gradually subjugated the indigenous inhabitants they called “dasa” (meaning “enemy”), they began using “varna” to distinguish their own “fair complexion” from the darker skin of the indigenous people. In the territories occupied by the Aryans, two “varnas” or two strata thus emerged: the Aryan varna of the conquerors and the dasa varna of the conquered. As Aryan society differentiated internally, distinctions of rank appeared within the Aryan community itself. The priestly class engaged in ritual and the armed groups led by tribal chieftains gradually separated from the general Aryan populace, forming two privileged strata, while the common people became a third stratum within Aryan society. In the early religious texts of the Aryans, these three strata were customarily called Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. The originally unified Aryan varna thus split into three; together with the dasa varna, the whole of society divided into four strata. The four basic castes were thereby formed.

After Buddhism rose in the fourth century BCE, the caste system and Brahmanism were somewhat weakened — primarily reflected in a decline in the supreme status of the Brahmins — but the notion that “people are born unequal” remained deeply ingrained. Following the religious reforms of Adi Shankaracharya in the eighth century CE — the greatest reformer in the history of Hinduism — Hinduism staged a powerful revival, the caste system became more refined, and it became the most fundamental social norm on the subcontinent. British colonial rule subjected the caste system to the dual impact of industrial capitalism and colonialism, but in the end it was forcefully maintained because the colonizers needed it for their strategy of “divide and rule” — indeed, a minority of experts and scholars have argued that the caste system was a colonial invention of the British. After India’s founding in 1947, the caste system was legally abolished, but more than seventy years of practice have shown that caste discrimination in social life has not yet exited the stage of history.

The fundamental characteristics of the caste system are the belief that “people are born into different ranks,” hereditary occupations, and endogamy. The “purity-pollution” concept upheld by the caste system — which ranks castes according to whether their occupations are “pure” or “polluting” — and the doctrine of “fatalism” (or “karma and rebirth”) stratify Hindu society and solidify those strata. The most effective means of maintaining this stratified society is the hereditary transmission of caste occupations, the division of labor and cooperation among castes, and the strict observance of marriage taboos — the insistence on marrying within one’s own caste and maintaining the purity of bloodlines.

The caste system emphasizes “dharma” — the correct code of conduct, also called “law.” Each caste group, according to its position in society, has a specific dharma it must follow. If one’s words and actions strictly adhere to one’s caste dharma, one accumulates good karma and will receive good rewards in the next life — for example, being reborn into a higher caste. Conversely, one accumulates bad karma and will suffer bad consequences in the next life — for example, being reborn into a lower caste or even as an animal — and will also be punished in this life, such as being expelled from one’s caste. Because the dharma differs for each caste, the standard for judging whether a person’s conduct is good or bad is often not some universally recognized moral standard, but rather whether it conforms to the dharma of the caste group to which the actor belongs — even if that dharma might appear to others as wrongdoing. Since upholding one’s caste dharma is the duty of every Hindu, every caste member has their own life taboos and customs: which foods may not be eaten, which things may not be touched, where sacrifices are to be performed, when festivals are to be observed, and so on. In this way, each caste has its own culture and way of life, impenetrable to others, with each group living within its own closed and narrow circle. This gives the caste system extremely deep roots that are very difficult to shake. It has therefore been said that in India, caste loyalty and

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

caste-ism are even more prevalent than nationalism. This fact is both a threat and a challenge to India’s national integration. It is the fundamental answer to why India has historically been unable to achieve national unification and why foreign invaders have found it so easy to succeed.

The caste system is thus simultaneously a social order, a code for living, and an ideological system that is both worldly and, even more so, otherworldly. Other regions of the world have had similar caste-like systems in the past, but in Hindu society the caste system has prevailed for the longest time, been enforced with the greatest rigor in practice, encompassed the most complex content, and exerted the most far-reaching influence. For thousands of years, the caste system has enveloped every Hindu on the Indian subcontinent — from emperors and generals down to peddlers, peasants, and villagers — shaping the birth, aging, illness, and death; the weddings and funerals; the food, clothing, shelter, and travel; the occupational status; and the interpersonal norms of all living beings. To this day, the caste system continues to profoundly influence the worldview, outlook on life, and values of most Indians,[4] and through these, it influences every aspect of India’s politics, economy, society, and culture. As one Indian scholar has put it: “In Indian society, a person can give up everything, but cannot give up caste belief.”

The great modern Indian philosopher Swami Vivekananda once said: “In India, religious life forms the center; it is the principal keynote of the whole music of national life.” Among India’s religions, Hinduism is the synthesis of Indian culture. Understanding Hinduism is a key to understanding Indian culture, and understanding the caste system is a key to understanding Hinduism and Indian culture as a whole. Some scholars have even said that to speak of Indian religious philosophy is necessarily to speak of caste; to speak of Indian society is necessarily to speak of caste; to speak of the behavioral patterns and cultural psychology of Indians is necessarily to speak of caste; and to speak of India’s past, present, and even future is necessarily to speak of caste. In this sense, it is not inappropriate to call Hindu society a caste society and Hindu culture a caste culture.

Therefore, as the dominant culture running throughout Indian history, the caste system bears inescapable responsibility for India’s repeated subjugation. It is precisely because of the god-like presence of the caste system that Indian history has been so conspicuously lacking in a political culture and national psychology oriented toward unification, that national identity has been severely weakened or even rendered meaningless, and that the pursuit of caste liberation has become the highest ideal of human life.

Kings and Generals Are Born with a “Caste”

In 209 BCE, Chen Sheng raised his arm at Dazexiang and cried out: “Are kings, nobles, generals, and ministers born to their station?” The result was a surge of popular fury, an uprising, and the toppling of the powerful — sounding the death knell of the Qin dynasty. Clearly, the Chinese have believed since ancient times that “my fate is mine to determine, not heaven’s” and that “anyone can become a sage-king.” But had Chen Sheng and Wu Guang been transported to ancient India, they could have shouted themselves hoarse without stirring a ripple in the hearts of the people below. For on the Indian subcontinent, the creed that “people are born unequal” had already been in circulation for a thousand years. For Indians, the idea that “a person’s fate is determined by heaven” was never a question. India’s kings, nobles, generals, and ministers were born with a “caste” — and that “caste” was precisely what the word implies.

When the caste system first took shape, the whole of society was divided into four major strata, each closely linked to a corresponding occupation. Caste and occupation were mutually dependent. The first caste was the Brahmins — primarily the priestly class versed in the Vedic scriptures and in charge of religious affairs, later expanding to encompass nearly all those engaged in “mental labor.” The second caste was the Kshatriyas — the royal family and warrior class holding military and political power, the greatest wielders of real authority in secular society. The third caste was the Vaishyas — primarily merchants and artisans. The fourth caste was the Shudras — the most numerous and most heterogeneous group, including agricultural laborers, craftsmen, and slaves. By the later Vedic period, a further social stratum had been added: the untouchables. Those Shudras engaged in “polluting” occupations — such as washing clothes, cutting hair, sweeping, slaughtering animals, tanning leather, and handling corpses — were expelled from the four-caste hierarchy and came to constitute the majority of the untouchable class. The untouchables were therefore generally called the “untouchables.” Some conquered primitive tribes and those who had committed serious “violations of taboo” within the four castes were also at times demoted to untouchable status. After India’s founding, most untouchables were classified as “Scheduled Castes.”

To maintain the hierarchical order of caste society, the caste system enforced a strict system of hereditary occupations, and in particular strictly prohibited untouchables from engaging in any occupation belonging to the top three castes. The famous line from the 1950s Indian film Awaara — “A judge’s son is still a judge; a thief’s son is still a thief”[5] — is a vivid illustration of the Hindu caste system. It can be said that caste is a hereditary occupational group.

Over more than 2,000 years of evolution — particularly as occupations continued to differentiate and residential areas became relatively fixed — the five major castes proliferated into tens of thousands of sub-castes, collectively known as “jati.” For example, India’s historically well-developed weaver caste evolved into more than a dozen sub-castes, primarily as a result of the continuous subdivision of the trade. Similarly, the untouchables at the very bottom of the caste hierarchy gave rise to numerous sub-castes as higher castes generated new demands for various forms of menial labor. The 1931 census conducted by the British colonial authorities showed that untouchables had produced 429 sub-castes through occupational differentiation. According to India’s 1971 census, the Scheduled Castes (i.e., untouchables) were distributed across 632 sub-castes. The upper castes also split into many new castes; the Brahmins alone numbered more than 2,000. The Brahmins, at the very apex of the hierarchy, enjoyed the exclusive privilege of performing sacrifices and, by virtue of their own “purity,” could engage in various other “clean” occupations. But one iron rule held: a Brahmin fallen on hard times would never become an untouchable, and no matter how high an untouchable might rise,

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History 073

they could never become a Brahmin. India’s 1991 census showed that among a total population of 838 million, the three upper castes of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas together accounted for approximately 11% (5%, 4%, and 2% respectively); the Shudras were the most numerous, at approximately 45%; and untouchables accounted for approximately 25% of the total population.

The proliferation of sub-castes was both the result of occupational specialization and the emergence of new occupations, and even more so the result of the progressive regionalization of caste. One or several castes working in concert could often monopolize a particular type of occupation or industry within a community or region, making it difficult for members of other castes or non-Hindus to enter. Sub-castes — “jati” — are therefore also called “local castes,” meaning castes fixed to a particular region. For example, the 1971 census showed that a single linguistic region might contain more than 2,000 sub-castes. To use an analogy: a mason from the north side of a mountain and a mason from the south side, separated by only a single mountain, often belong to two different sub-castes, each with their own fixed territory. Moreover, even members of the same occupational caste may occupy very different positions in the social hierarchy depending on the region in which they live — sometimes worlds apart. For example, historically, weavers in West Bengal often enjoyed a relatively high caste status, but in other regions weavers were regarded as untouchables. Similarly, in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state — the Rajput caste, said to be descendants of the Sakas, ranked just below the Brahmins and held a secure position in the second tier of the caste hierarchy; but in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Modi, their social standing fell somewhere in the lower-middle range of the third-tier Vaishya caste. As a result, fearing that their caste status might be diminished in unfamiliar regions, the regional character of caste occupations produced a non-mobility in Hindu society. Indian soldiers recruited by the British during the colonial period once refused orders to serve overseas. The British subsequently resorted to recruiting soldiers from Nepal’s Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Muslims.

To rationalize and enforce this rigidly hierarchical caste system, Hindu doctrine placed particular emphasis on the “purity-pollution” concept and fatalism. The “purity-pollution” concept provided the basis for ranking caste occupations, while fatalism provided the theoretical underpinning for the hereditary transmission of caste occupations.

On one hand, Hinduism holds that all things in the universe exist in a hierarchical order. Whether in the natural world, the supernatural realm, or human society, everything is classified and positioned according to “purity” and “pollution.” No religion in the world has developed a concept of “purity and pollution” as elaborate as Hinduism’s.

According to the Hindu “purity-pollution” concept, the rank of a caste is determined by the rank of its occupation, and the rank of an occupation is determined by its proximity to sources of pollution — such as blood, death, soil, and decaying organic matter. The closer the proximity, the more polluting; the greater the distance, the purer. The more “polluting” an occupation, the lower and more degraded the caste that practices it; the more “pure” an occupation, the higher and more noble the caste; and the nobler the caste, the closer it is to the divine and to liberation from the cycle of caste rebirth. For example, occupations such as sweeping, transporting corpses, washing clothes, brewing alcohol, and making pottery were considered polluting; higher castes could not engage in them, and they could only be performed by “polluting” castes — that is, lower castes or untouchables. The top three castes, and especially the Brahmins, went to great lengths to maintain “social distance” from polluting castes in order to preserve their own ritual purity. A survey conducted in 1937 on the distances that must be maintained between higher and lower castes found that if a Nambudiri Brahmin was present, a Nair caste member had to keep a distance of 7 feet, an Irava caste member 32 feet, a Cheruman caste member 64 feet, and a Nayadis caste member 74 to 124 feet. The distances between these lower castes relative to one another were calculated based on the differences in their respective distances from the Brahmin.

But if the “purity-pollution” concept were strictly applied in all conduct and daily life, the whole of society could not function at all. To address this, Hinduism also designed an elaborate set of purification rituals presided over by Brahmins, which greatly alleviated the intense anxiety of higher-caste members about being defiled. Even so, the “purity-pollution” concept acted like a knife, cutting Hindu society into one closed caste-occupational group after another, and erecting between each group — and especially between higher and lower castes — high psychological and doctrinal walls of mutual estrangement and even mutual wariness.

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

The mutual segregation of caste groups is very pronounced in Indian villages. The residences of the various castes are distributed roughly according to their occupational categories and social rank. Each caste lives separately, without mixing with others. Many villages are clearly divided into two main parts: one is the main village, inhabited by Hindus of the four basic castes; the other is a satellite settlement at some distance from the main village, where untouchables or members of other religious communities live. Larger villages are further subdivided into many smaller neighborhoods according to sub-caste and occupational category — a Brahmin quarter, a Shudra quarter, a dairy-farmer quarter, a menial-laborer quarter, a washerman quarter, a cobbler quarter, and so on. Higher-caste residential areas are typically situated in the most favorable locations — upwind and near water — while lower-caste areas are generally relegated to a remote corner of the village, and those engaged in “polluting” occupations are sometimes forced to live on the village’s outer periphery, with each group keeping strictly to its own domain. Clearly, this spatial segregation in caste society serves to maintain and reinforce caste consciousness. Each individual relies on the stable and closed circle of their caste group to maintain the most basic security of survival and means of livelihood.

Because of the protection afforded by one’s own caste circle, even most untouchables did not find the caste system intolerable enough to feel compelled to break it. The British initially felt great sympathy for the plight of untouchables. When the colonial government compiled lists of tribal groups and untouchables, it classified them as “Scheduled Castes” or “depressed classes.” However, because some untouchables were unwilling to be called “depressed classes,” the 1931 colonial census commission switched to the term “exterior castes” to refer to untouchables.

On the other hand, Hindu fatalism provided powerful theoretical support for the caste system’s notions of “natural hierarchy from birth” and “hereditary occupations.” The core idea of fatalism is karma and rebirth.

A person has three lives: the present life, the past life, and the future life. Whatever the purity or impurity, nobility or lowliness of a Hindu’s caste occupation, it is the fruit of the karma accumulated in their previous life and has nothing to do with the present life — yet what one does in this life will determine one’s position in the caste hierarchy in the next. In other words, a Hindu’s “karma” (i.e., conduct) in their previous life determines which caste they are born into in this life. If one “accumulated virtue” in a previous life, the reward is to be born into a higher caste in this life; if one “committed sins” in a previous life, the punishment is to be born into a lower caste in this life. The rank of one’s caste is not immutable, but changing it requires living this life with contentment and steadfast adherence to one’s “dharma” — and the results will only be seen in the next life. In short, one lives for the next life. For lower castes or untouchables, their “wretched” fate is not the result of an “unjust” caste system or human oppression, but the consequence of sins committed in a previous life; the suffering they endure in this life is repayment of a “debt” from a previous existence. To change one’s social status in this life is impossible; the only option is to accept the arrangement of fate and strictly observe the way of “purity and pollution” and public morality — otherwise, the next life will be even more miserable, or one may not even be reborn as a human, but instead as an animal, a stone, or even “a worm in a dog’s intestines.” Higher castes, for their part, believe that their noble status is the fruit of their “good deeds” in previous lives; that the misfortunes of lower castes and untouchables are their just deserts; and that the poverty, hunger, and social discrimination they suffer should not only not be pitied, but are in fact the indispensable means by which they atone for their sins and purify their souls — only then will they receive good rewards in the next life.

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

In this way, the caste system uses the “purity-pollution” concept and fatalism to partition the whole of Hindu society into closed, self-sustaining, mutually isolated, and mutually antagonistic groups and units. Higher and lower castes each perform their designated functions, accept their allotted station, and submit to their appointed fate.

From a sociological perspective, this is an extraordinarily clever arrangement by the ruling class, for rulers always need the ruled, and always need the ruled to provide them with various services. The caste system perfectly meets this requirement: it causes the vast majority of social members to be content with their lowly social position, and to willingly accept the various life circumstances arranged for them from birth, treating these as the supreme standard. For example, during the great Bengal famine of 1943–1944, tens of millions of people starved to death, yet nothing like the Japanese rice riots occurred — there was no mass seizure of grain.

Because India lacked the imperial examination system — built on the Confucian ideal of “those who excel in learning should become officials” — individuals at the bottom of Indian society had almost no opportunity throughout their lives to rise into the governing class. In the Hindu society of historical India, social strata were rigid, with little vertical or horizontal interaction between them, and each individual was confined within a grid. “Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost” became the guiding creed of each caste group. People lacked empathy for one another, sometimes to a degree of mutual indifference that bordered on the inhuman. Someone once personally witnessed in an Indian village a scene that would be hard to find anywhere else in the world: a lower-caste family’s house had been destroyed by fire and then drenched by heavy rain. Yet these lower-caste people preferred to struggle in the downpour rather than step under the eaves of a higher-caste house to take shelter. This also helps explain why some Hindus can simultaneously condemn the taking of life while remaining unmoved by the sight of an untouchable being burned alive for violating the caste system.

The continuous proliferation of sub-castes and the regionalism and non-mobility they engendered gave Hindus in caste society a naturally separatist worldview. They tended to regard the coexistence of mutually antagonistic groups and factions in pluralistic form as the normal state of affairs, and the continuous splitting and fragmentation of social groups, organizations, and sects as the normal course of human society. As a result, throughout the long river of Indian history, the forces of division and pluralism have always been greater than the forces of cohesion and unification. Even though this subcontinent possessed the natural conditions most conducive to the formation of a unified political culture — namely, a closed geographical and geopolitical environment enclosed by natural barriers — what did it matter? In fact, the four great unifications that appeared in Indian history were all essentially unrelated to the Hindu cultural tradition. The first unified empire was the Maurya Empire, but Ashoka ultimately “laid down the butcher’s knife” when he had a sudden “awakening of the Buddhist heart” during his southward campaign to conquer the Deccan Plateau, and thereafter vigorously promoted Buddhism throughout the realm. The second unified empire was the Gupta Empire, during which Buddhism flourished; although Brahmanism had followers at the grassroots level, it was in a weak position. The third unification of the subcontinent was achieved by the Mughal dynasty, which was devoutly Islamic, and Hindu society was in a state of suppression. The fourth unification of the subcontinent was carried out by European colonizers, who championed capitalist commercial culture and Christian culture.

During the vast majority of the remaining periods, the Indian subcontinent was in a fragmented state of numerous small states in constant conflict with one another. People clustered by kind, communities gathered by caste, each performing their designated function and accepting their appointed fate. The whole of society was perpetually unable to muster the spiritual and material forces needed to resist foreign invasion. And the repeated consequences of foreign invasion, occupation, and colonization further deepened the fragmentation of society, reinforcing the mutual estrangement, antagonism, and wariness between groups — which in turn further impeded Indian society from nurturing and forming the national psychology of a unified political culture.

One Village Is One State

Max Weber (1864–1920), the most vital and influential sociologist of the modern era, conducted in-depth research into Eastern cultures, and Hindu culture in particular. He once said that “India has always been a land of villages.” Marx, in his study of India, also paid close attention to the village community, regarding it as the key to understanding Indian society. In the course of colonizing India, the British found these village communities — impenetrable and impervious — a source of great frustration, and were compelled to devote enormous effort to dismantling the village community system as their primary task after militarily conquering India. In the struggle for Indian national independence, Mahatma Gandhi placed great emphasis on the importance of the village, arguing that the village was India. He said: “India does not live in her few cities, but in her 700,000 villages.” The Indian village community thus provides an extremely important lens through which to understand the “historical chaos” of India. It can be said that the village community was the foundation sustaining the basic functioning of Indian society and the fundamental carrier through which Indian civilization has continued to the present day.

A standard Indian village community had two outstanding characteristics: economic self-sufficiency and a high degree of political autonomy. Even as the princely kingdoms and central dynasties to which they belonged changed like a revolving lantern, the countless village communities remained as permanent fixtures. In 1830, Sir Charles Metcalfe — one of the most talented British officials in India — offered this description: “The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. The union of the village communities, each of which forms a separate little state in itself… enjoys a large share of freedom and independence.”

On one hand, village communities were economically self-sufficient and self-contained. This was of course inseparable from the social division of labor based on caste occupations, as well as the combination and cooperation of agriculture and handicrafts within the village community.

Because of the strict division of caste occupations, village communities were relatively complete in their major economic sectors. The most basic material and spiritual needs of villagers could be met within the village community. Taking an eighteenth-century village in the Maratha region of central-southern India as an example: in addition to landlords, owner-cultivators, and tenant farmers engaged in agriculture, the village also contained various craftsmen and service providers essential to production and daily life, each belonging to a specific occupational caste. These non-agricultural castes were collectively called “balutedars.” Their occupational division of labor was very detailed and relatively fixed. A village community typically had more than ten occupational castes, such as carpenters, cobblers, potters, blacksmiths, barbers, watchmen, goldsmiths, water-carriers, washermen, Brahmin priests, village deity priests. Some villages also had sorcerers, peddlers, musicians, and even clergy of different religions or sects, such as Muslim mullahs.

In ancient China, the combination of agriculture and handicrafts took place within the household, not within the village. “Men plow, women weave — the combination of plowing and weaving” was the fundamental characteristic of China’s traditional household economy. By contrast, in India, the combination of agriculture and handicrafts took place primarily within the village community, carried out separately by households of different castes. Because of the

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History 081

The process of making the traditional Indian garment, the sari

iron law of the caste system, each occupation corresponded essentially to a specific caste; they had a clear division of labor, passed down hereditarily, and formed a relationship of mutual complementarity and interdependence through the exchange of goods and services. On this point, Marx wrote in his article “The British Rule in India”: “These family communities are based on domestic industry, in which a peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hand-spinning, and hand-tilling agriculture gives them self-sufficiency.”

Each village community was a self-sufficient and mutually isolated natural economic unit. The production and daily life of the village community did not depend on the market, but primarily on internal occupational division of labor and the exchange of goods in kind. This meant that the economic activity of each village community formed a self-contained and relatively closed production cycle, capable of self-sustenance and self-operation without relying on the outside world. The vast Indian rural society was thereby broken down into “many atoms of the same description, with no connection between them.” Before the British colonizers implemented their land tax and revenue reforms, the internal structure of each such village community never changed; no foreign invasion or outside rule could disturb or disrupt it — it possessed a quality of hyper-stability.

The reason the various occupational castes were able to congregate in a single village community and cooperate with one another was, beyond the regulations of the caste system itself, primarily due to the dual public-private nature of village community land ownership.

Before the British colonizers had fully conquered the subcontinent, private land ownership was not prevalent in India. Although land fundamentally belonged to the state or to feudal princes and nobles, the actual right of possession and use belonged to the village community. Each village community was a “small republic.” Land was collectively owned, with each household holding an allotted plot, cultivated independently and used hereditarily; in a minority of cases, resembling primitive communes, land was collectively owned and collectively cultivated. In addition, wasteland, pastures, and forests were also collectively owned and used by the village community. Because of the communal nature of land ownership, and because individual members were weak, expanded reproduction and the construction of irrigation works had to be accomplished through the collective strength of the village community. The imperial court or princely state was an absentee landlord; the state was severely absent from rural infrastructure. In practice, paying taxes was the primary — and for most of the time the only — way in which a village community was connected to the ruling elite.

On the other hand, village communities were highly autonomous and self-operating in political terms. The economic self-sufficiency of the village community provided a powerful material foundation for its high degree of political autonomy. Before the British colonizers promoted rural tax reforms, the internal operations of village communities were almost entirely free from interference by higher-level authorities. As long as tax obligations were fulfilled, no one could infringe upon the independence and autonomy of the village community. Crucially, for the ruling authorities, infringing upon village communities not only yielded no benefit, but could even harm their own revenues.

The two main models of village governance that ensured the self-operation of village communities were the Panchayat system and the Jajmani system.

What is the Panchayat system? The Panchayat system — also known as the council of five elders — was composed primarily of five high-caste village elders. Traditional Indian village communities had at least four types of Panchayat, but the ones that played the most important role were the caste Panchayat and the village community Panchayat assembly.

The caste Panchayat was the caste management mechanism within the village community, functioning similarly to a modern trade union, professional association, or the guilds of ancient China — but with a broader scope of functions and authority that touched on nearly every sphere of caste society. The caste Panchayat not only handled disputes among members of its own caste, but also had the authority to adjudicate cases involving caste groups of lower status.

The village community Panchayat assembly held a monopoly on both administrative and judicial authority within the village community. It was elected by the powerful castes of the village community. Although representatives of lower castes could obtain some positions within it, the important posts were all controlled by higher castes. The village community Panchayat assembly focused on maintaining order and morality in the village, coordinating inter-caste relations, and resolving various disputes; protecting village interests from threats — such as resisting outside interference and responding to natural disasters — and providing each member with a basic, stable environment for production and daily life. Historically, the village community Panchayat assembly served as an intermediary between the imperial court and the villagers, handling matters connected to the court — such as collecting land taxes, surveying land, and supplying soldiers and horses to the state in wartime — and in practice functioned as the terminal node of the political apparatus.

Chapter Two

A scene from an Indian village Panchayat assembly

The existence of these two types of Panchayat system ensured, to the greatest possible extent, the basic functioning of Indian grassroots society — especially during times of natural disaster and human calamity. For the vast majority of the time, the existence of the imperial court or even the state seemed somewhat superfluous. As for the idea of national unification or national consciousness, there was no room for such things; what villagers had was only caste consciousness, extended-family consciousness, and village community consciousness.

What is the Jajmani system? “Jajmani” originally referred to the lower castes and untouchables who provided various services to village community patrons. Under this system, a relationship of “mutual service” existed between the various caste groups in a village, and this relationship was customary and hereditary across generations. The Jajmani system was prevalent throughout India, differing only in name. The Yajamana system of South India, the Hali system of the western Gujarat region, and the Aya system of the southwestern Karnataka region all belong to this category.

Under the Jajmani system, each caste in the village community engaged in handicrafts or services — generally lower castes and untouchables, such as gardeners, goldsmiths, carpenters, blacksmiths, barbers, cleaners, corpse-bearers, and tanners — provided various services on a fixed basis to one or several families (generally of higher castes) and received fixed remuneration. Remuneration came in the form of goods in kind — such as grain, vegetables, pottery, and cloth — as well as non-material compensation, such as ritual services, singing, and house construction. The service recipients of artisan castes in the village were essentially the entire village, with all castes as their customers. If the number of artisans of the same caste in a village community was relatively large and the village was small, their services might extend beyond their own village community, forming a cross-village service network. But this was not the norm.

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

Moreover, the services provided by lower castes to higher castes were typically not limited to a single type of task but encompassed all manner of miscellaneous duties, and were generally not measured by time. Remuneration was also generally not calculated by quantity; beyond payment in grain or reciprocal services, patrons sometimes provided a small plot of land or lent draft animals and farm tools, and on major festival days gave gifts and gratuities. Crucially, all exchanges were governed by custom and convention — there were no agreements or contracts between the parties; everything was maintained across generations purely on the basis of goodwill and trust. This, to a very great extent, fixed villagers within each village community. “Home is always best; leaving the village makes everything hard.” On this subcontinent, population mobility across the whole of society was unthinkable. Each individual had no sense of belonging outside the village community, and spent their entire life within an isolated, closed, self-revolving village community, with a horizon that rarely extended beyond the village boundary — let alone any consciousness of national unification or national identity.

The Jajmani system primarily embodied a relationship of occupational complementarity, and best demonstrates that the caste system was a highly coordinated and remarkably ingenious machine. Under this system, competition among laborers was essentially eliminated, and even the poor had a basic guarantee of livelihood. This system objectively ensured harmony and stability within the countless village communities of the Indian subcontinent.

Because of economic self-sufficiency and political self-operation, combined with the hereditary nature of caste occupations under the caste system and the practical absence of a market economy, Indian society — composed primarily of village communities — maintained a quality of hyper-stability for thousands of years. This stands in stark contrast to the turbulence of Indian history at the macro level.

K. M. Panikkar — the sea-power theorist known as “India’s Mahan” and also India’s first ambassador to the People’s Republic of China — had an even deeper understanding of this: “The life that the Buddha witnessed 2,500 years ago continues on this continent, essentially unchanged… Marriage customs, funeral rites, and social organizational relationships are fundamentally no different. If the Buddha were born today, he would surely recognize the Indian people as his own.” Marx made a similar observation: “From the most remote antiquity until the first decade of the nineteenth century, however great the political changes in India, its social condition has remained unaltered.”

Scholars studying Indian history — and even its present condition — therefore often say that India has since ancient times been a country of order within chaos. Historically, the village community — the most basic unit of Indian society — neither underwent obvious disruption due to dynastic change, nor ceased to function because of it. For every member of a village community, the succession of dynasties and the rotation of the powerful meant only a change in the party to whom taxes were paid. Each village community was like a “land of peach blossoms” — knowing nothing of the Han dynasty, let alone the Wei or Jin.

Indeed, on many occasions, the fall of states, the struggles of the powerful, and even foreign invasions could not entirely interrupt the functioning of village communities; village communities could even maintain a kind of “tranquil contentment” amid the surrounding turmoil. A British official report once described the Indian village community system in these terms: “From a very early period, the inhabitants of this country have lived under this simple form of self-governing administration. The boundaries of the villages have rarely been altered. Although the village itself has sometimes been grievously harassed and even depopulated by war, famine, or disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged.”

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

Yoga Is Not for Fitness

Today, yoga has swept the globe. It has even become one of India’s most dazzling calling cards, much as Chinese kung fu is for China. In 2014, India’s Modi government successfully lobbied the United Nations to designate June 21 of each year as “International Yoga Day.”

Yet devout Hindus practice yoga not for fitness or physical beauty, but as an ascetic discipline aimed at realizing the state of “Brahman-Atman unity.” Generally speaking, yoga practice has five stages: first, directing the mind to a specific part of the body; then to the body’s entire operating system; then to the surrounding external environment; then to the cosmic space; and finally to that ultimate existence — the “Great Self,” or “Brahman” — thereby achieving “Brahman-Atman unity.” As an ascetic practice,

many yoga practitioners mortify the body in order to achieve “Brahman-Atman unity.” They will hold a single posture for a week or even several months, willing to endure physical deformity in the process. The author of the Ramayana — one of India’s two great epics — was called Valmiki, which translates literally as “anthill.” According to legend, Valmiki once sat in meditation beneath a tree until he reached a state of complete absorption, so profound that countless ants built their nest upon his body. So why are devout Hindus willing to destroy their bodies through ascetic yoga practice? The answer is: to achieve “Brahman-Atman unity.”

In fact, the pursuit of “Brahman-Atman unity” is the highest ideal of every Hindu’s life, regardless of caste. Yoga is merely one convenient method of mental cultivation through which Hindus approach the state of “Brahman-Atman unity.” For most Hindus, achieving “Brahman-Atman unity” requires spending an entire lifetime scrupulously adhering to the way of one’s caste — that is, one’s “dharma.”

“Brahman” is the Supreme Self, the Great Self, the Supreme Deity, the Ultimate Existence. According to the definition of Adi Shankaracharya — the greatest reformer in the history of Hinduism — “Brahman” has two forms: “Nirguna Brahman” and “Saguna Brahman.” “Nirguna Brahman” is the Brahman without attributes, without differentiation, without limitation — the absolute reality, the origin and creator of all things. “Saguna Brahman” is the Brahman with attributes, with differentiation, with limitation — the Brahman as subjectively conceived by human beings, a phenomenal or experiential thing. On the relationship between Brahman and the world, Shankaracharya held that the colorful phenomenal world is a manifestation of Brahman, created through human illusory cognition or a kind of magical power called “maya.”

The universe is a long staircase leading to “Brahman.” Human society is but a small segment of this staircase; the human entity is insignificant on the scale of the macrocosm, and therefore its inequalities are of little consequence. All things in the universe strive to approach “Brahman” and will ultimately return to “Brahman.” Because each caste is at a different distance from “Brahman,” people are unequal — the closer one is to “Brahman,” the higher one’s status. The five strata of the caste system are arranged in sequence according to their proximity to the divine. In other words, human inequality is predetermined and immutable, governed by some supernatural force, and “the inequality among people is the same as the differences among animals.”

The “self” in “Brahman-Atman unity” is called “Atman” in Hinduism. This “Atman,” like “Brahman,” is neither material nor spiritual, without beginning or end, neither born nor destroyed. “Atman” has two aspects: the “small self” and the “Great Self.” The “small self” exists behind the individual’s world of sensation and governs all of the individual’s activities; the “Great Self” is in fact “Nirguna Brahman,” existing behind all things and governing everything in the universe. Discovering “Atman” is what enables one to reach the state of “Brahman-Atman unity” and thereby escape the cycle of caste rebirth to attain liberation. Only through unceasing cultivation can Hindus break through “maya” or illusory cognition, discover “Atman,” and realize “Brahman-Atman unity.”

The Hindu pursuit of “Brahman-Atman unity” as the highest ideal of life is closely connected to the proliferation of the caste system. Although the caste system stipulates that “people are born unequal,” this “inequality” in Hinduism is in fact the result of the manifestation of the “small self” — the “Atman.” If one wishes this “Atman” to have a better dwelling, one must strive diligently in this life — even through self-mortifying asceticism — so that in the next life it may be reborn into a better host, or even merge with “Brahman” and be completely freed from the cycle of caste rebirth. The primary content of cultivation is steadfast adherence to one’s caste “dharma.” This is a Hindu soteriology — it offers beautiful promises to those of lower castes, enabling them to await a better tomorrow and a better next life through religious consolation, and to voluntarily uphold the social order under the caste system.

Yet the endless pursuit of “Brahman-Atman unity” and “individual liberation” objectively relegated the Hindu individual’s sense of social responsibility, political engagement, and economic ambition to a secondary and subordinate position. Moreover, the more one struggles against the real world and pursues material progress, the more one impedes the realization of “Brahman-Atman unity” as the ultimate goal of life. This set of values, outlook on life, and worldview meant that Hindu society generally lacked both the Protestant cultural drive to pursue worldly success and the Confucian cultural emphasis on “devotion to family and state” and “self-cultivation, family regulation, state governance, and world peace.”

To conquer India, the British East India Company, following the example of French colonizers, recruited Indian soldiers and organized a private armed force of mixed British and Indian composition. Statistics show that by 1853, this private army of the East India Company had swelled to 280,000 men, of whom 233,000 were Indian soldiers. These Indian soldiers became the most effective instrument through which the British East India Company conquered the Indian subcontinent in less than a century (1757–1849), and also the backbone force through which the British colonizers bloodily suppressed the Indian national uprising of 1857–1858. Yet the Indian soldiers did not believe they were “helping a tyrant commit evil” or assisting colonizers in suppressing their own people. They simply had no such political consciousness or national awareness. They understood it simply as a caste occupation. For devout Hindu soldiers, no matter for whom they fought, only by faithfully fulfilling their duties could they achieve the ultimate goal of “Brahman-Atman unity.”

In this sense, the life pursuit of “Brahman-Atman unity” provided the cultural and psychological foundation upon which the caste system rested. Under the influence of this cultural psychology, in the eyes of Hindus, all things in the secular world — including the phenomenon of “inequality from birth” among the various castes, and the national responsibility expressed in the idea that “every citizen bears responsibility for the rise and fall of the nation” —

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

are like bubbles in the ocean: they will not last, and there is no need to be overly troubled by them.

In practice, for the vast majority of Hindus, earnestly fulfilling the responsibilities and obligations of one’s caste is the most easily understood and most easily practiced path to achieving “Brahman-Atman unity” — the ultimate goal of life. Under these circumstances, for the individual, steadfast adherence to the caste system — and especially to one’s caste occupation — necessarily takes precedence over all else. In the pursuit of “Brahman-Atman unity,” even family or clan ties are powerless to help — they do not provide a permanent refuge for the fulfillment of one’s ultimate life ideal, let alone the state or the nation.

For Hindus living under the caste system, the question of whether one can achieve “Brahman-Atman unity” after death — whether one can break free from the fetters of one’s present caste — hangs like the Sword of Damocles, constraining the policies and exercise of power of rulers at the top, and the daily conduct of ordinary people at the bottom. This cultural psychology and ideology led Indians to hold in highest esteem leaders of spiritual and intellectual authority, rather than masters of power and material wealth, and thus to lack absolute obedience and devotion to autocratic rulers.

Furthermore, the life pursuit of “Brahman-Atman unity” gave Hindus under the caste system a greater tolerance and fatalistic acceptance of social pluralism. This tolerance and fatalistic acceptance, to a very great extent, caused the Indian populace — steeped in this culture — to lack a spirit of resistance and struggle, manifesting as a non-resistance to foreign invasion. In the eyes of every Hindu, all changes in the universe unfold automatically according to a “program” pre-arranged by “Brahman.” Just as “inequality from birth” under the caste system is pre-arranged by “Brahman,” so too is foreign invasion — it need not be resisted; one simply accepts it. If one cannot coexist with the invaders, one simply moves away. Steadfastly adhering to one’s caste dharma in this life, ultimately achieving “Brahman-Atman unity,” and escaping the cycle of caste rebirth — this is the right path for human beings. Clearly, in this framework, the pursuit of national or ethnic justice is relegated to second place, or may not figure among one’s life goals at all.

Defending the Homeland Is a Privilege

In 1025, the Sultan of the Ghaznavid kingdom, Mahmud, decided to attack the Somnath temple, which he had long coveted. The temple was located on the Kathiawar Peninsula and was one of the most magnificent Hindu temples of the time. It housed countless treasures; the canopy over a single Shiva idol alone was studded with thousands of diamonds of varying sizes. One thousand Brahmins presided over religious ceremonies there, 350 men and women danced and sang before the idol all day long, 10,000 villages were assigned to it, and offerings from pilgrims never ceased. Yet in this raid, only the soldiers, civilians, and monks of the city of Somnath Patan put up resistance; the nearby villagers did not participate. Two days later the city fell, and with it the temple was destroyed. It is said that the spoils Mahmud carried away this time exceeded the combined total of all his previous plundering expeditions. The 10,000 villages had at least a million inhabitants, yet they sat by and watched the city fall and the temple be destroyed. The greatest reason can only have been the profound influence of the caste view of “each fulfilling their duty and accepting their fate.”

The god-like presence of the caste system meant that Hindu society throughout history was conspicuously lacking in national identity and national consciousness. For every Hindu, caste identity far outweighed any other form of identity — “blood is thicker than water, but caste is thicker than blood.” First and foremost, a person was a member of a specific caste group; caste identity and belonging were primary, most important, and often the only thing that mattered. Second, they were a member of a family, clan, community, or village community. Last, they were a member of a princely state, imperial court, or nation. Of these, national identity and belonging were the weakest — indeed, having no national belonging made little difference. A scholar once put it this way: “The Indian individual exists only within their caste; outside the caste, they lose their self, are no longer a person, but a social outcast — a non-entity.”

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

Banding together for mutual protection has always been the way any occupational caste survives and makes its way in the world. Given that the grand sweep of Indian history is a history of being “conquered again and again,” when faced with turbulent times, Hindus must first rely on the caste group to which they belong to resist external risks — “outside the caste, there is no individual.” Although at the cost of many individual freedoms and rights, the caste group provided individuals with a powerful protective network that the state could not offer, ensuring the most basic survival rights of every individual within the group — such as protection from arbitrary harm by other caste groups and access to stable means of livelihood. In practice, caste groups exercised many of the protective functions that should have been performed by the state or higher-level authorities. In 1955, the Chamar caste — the lowest caste in the Giriya region of Madhya Pradesh, India (the leather-worker caste) — convened a caste assembly. In addition to voicing complaints about exploitation and discrimination, they made the following declaration: “Whoever does not feel pride in their honor and their caste is not a human being, but a beast — a dead man.”

Corresponding to caste identity was occupational identity. Members of each caste could only obtain social recognition and belonging by scrupulously adhering to their respective caste norms — especially caste occupational norms. Each performs their designated function; none may transgress. The caste system therefore naturally lacked the cultural gene of “every citizen bears responsibility for the rise and fall of the nation.” For the majority of lower castes and untouchables in particular, “the rise and fall of the nation is no concern of the common man.” Based on the strict division of caste occupations, the vast majority of Hindus had no interest in participating in warfare; they believed it was best to leave war to the professional warriors — the Kshatriya caste — for defending the homeland was their affair. They would therefore not receive training for this purpose. This meant that historically, foreign invasions of India would essentially never encounter organized resistance at the level of the whole of society.

The caste system also meant that Hindu society lacked the authority of a monarchical institution. On one hand, the priestly class — composed primarily of the Brahmin caste — always occupied a superior and exalted position in society, which meant that historically India’s “imperial power” was the greatest but not “supreme.” In the eyes of Hindus living under the caste system, Brahmins were the presiders over the divine, while kings and commoners alike were mere mortals. On the other hand, according to the division of labor under the caste system, governance and administration were primarily the responsibility of the Kshatriya caste, while the Brahmins’ responsibility was to provide religious and advisory services. In the eyes of other caste groups, whether the Kshatriya caste resisted or submitted to foreign rule was entirely their own affair — other castes had no need to concern themselves with it. Even if they did resist foreign plunder or rule, it was merely the fulfillment of their present-life caste “dharma” — each pursuing “Brahman-Atman unity” in their own identity and capacity, which had nothing to do with nobility or baseness, good or bad, patriotism or its absence.

Such a national psychology and traditional culture meant that national heroes who resisted foreign invasion carried little halo, and their image in caste society was no more elevated than that of an ascetic monk. In traditional Hindu society, the power of national heroes to inspire and serve as role models was not

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

boundless — indeed, on many occasions, whether such power of inspiration and example existed at all was an open question. For each individual, as long as one steadfastly adhered to one’s caste “dharma,” one need not panic even if the state “collapsed before one’s eyes.” For lower castes and untouchables, if the sky fell, the top two higher castes were there to hold it up. If they held it up, that was the higher castes fulfilling their duty effectively; if they could not hold it up, that was no concern of the lower castes.

Although after India’s founding, the caste system was legally abolished due to state policy, and some untouchables even entered politics, rising to the positions of minister and president — these were only extremely isolated cases and held no substantive significance for elevating the position of their low-caste group within the Hindu social hierarchy. More importantly, the “rise to prominence” of lower-caste politicians depended far more on the collective strength of the entire caste group than on the power of the state. After India’s founding, as India’s multi-party democratic politics developed, many caste groups took advantage of the situation to build caste-based political parties, using the collective strength of the group to compete on the Indian political stage against other politicized caste groups. The spectacle of caste politics is even more common on the political stage of northern India. In practice, the politicization of caste has often reinforced the divisions between caste groups and the sense of self-belonging within castes, rather than strengthening national consciousness or national identity.

Self-sufficient village communities made the state even more dispensable. Throughout the long river of history, for Hindus living under the caste system, the state above the village community was in fact dispensable. If the state ceased to exist, if the imperial court disappeared, it was no great matter — it might even be a good thing, since there would be no more taxes to pay. The ruling class at higher levels could slaughter one another; higher-level regimes and central dynasties could succeed one another in turn — all of this was, for the vast majority of Hindus, “another caste’s business” or “someone else’s affair.” What villagers cared about was typically only how to correctly fulfill the obligations and duties of their own caste. The American scholar Barrington Moore once wrote: “As an institution, caste can effectively organize life in a particular locality, which means that the existence of a national government is irrelevant. Government above the village community is generally an externally imposed superfluity, not a necessity. Government truly has nothing to do in the village community, because everything, large and small, is handled by the caste villagers themselves.”

Caste Above Nation

Historically, under the constraints of religious custom, the broader lower castes — who constituted the majority of the population — were excluded not only from religious activities but also from political activities. They lived entirely within their own caste groups, with no room for any sense of devotion to family and state.

At the start of 2018, large-scale protests by untouchables erupted in Mumbai and several other Indian cities. The trigger for the protests was a commemoration held by the Mahar[6] untouchables marking the British East India Company’s 1818 conquest of the Peshwa regime of the Maratha Empire in India. The Maratha Confederacy had been the greatest local resistance force the British encountered in their conquest of the Deccan Plateau, leading the British to fight three Anglo-Maratha Wars (1775–1782, 1803–1805, and 1817–1819). In the course of these wars, the British extensively provoked and exploited the resentment of untouchable castes — especially the Mahars — toward higher castes, recruiting them widely into military service. Mahar soldiers at one point constituted one-sixth of the East India Company’s Bombay Army. In May 1818, these Mahars played an important role in helping the British colonizers finally destroy the Maratha Empire. The Mahars believed that being able to serve in the sacred warrior profession — historically monopolized by the Kshatriya caste — within the British ruling system was a glory for their caste. Their commemoration two hundred years later was in fact a celebration of this historical glory, and had nothing to do with the nation or the ethnic group. Of course, their actions would be seen by any nationalist as an act of treason — politically immoral. Thus, when approximately 300,000 Mahar untouchables held a celebration in a village in Maharashtra on January 1, 2018, two Hindu populist organizations attacked the procession, causing multiple casualties. The Mahar protests quickly spread to Mumbai and several nearby cities, causing businesses to close and schools to shut down.

If lower castes lacked devotion to family and state, the highest caste — the Brahmins — also lacked it. Brahmins lived primarily within their own religious affairs. Throughout history, the Indian subcontinent suffered greatly from foreign aggression, but the elimination or decline of the dynastic royal power controlled by the Kshatriya caste did not mean that these Brahmins would lose their livelihood. As long as the whole of society remained bound by the caste system, Brahmins continued to live comfortably. Indians tended to believe that Kshatriya royalty, though possessed of superhuman power, could not guarantee that they would always conform to moral standards and ideals; they therefore did not regard the royal family as saviors, nor did they show respect to any particular ruler. Instead, they showed great respect to Brahmins, because the purification rituals of society and the sacrificial activities of families still depended on Brahmins to preside over them. The maintenance of these ritual orders was the ladder by which all castes ascended toward “Brahman-Atman unity.” Moreover, in the history of rule by non-Hindus, Brahmins were the most important target for co-optation by the ruling class. For example, in medieval India under Muslim rule, the rulers regarded the Kshatriyas as their greatest adversaries, but treated the Brahmins with great favor and made extensive use of them. The regional caste regulations promulgated by Brahmins were supported by the highest Muslim authorities, and the rulings of the caste courts controlled by Brahmins were also approved by local Muslim governors. Thus, in the successive dynasties established by non-Hindus — which was the norm in Indian history — the Kshatriyas were long excluded from the political center, while the Brahmins’ position of spiritual dominance was increasingly consolidated.

More importantly, whether the Kshatriya ruling class or the Muslim ruling class, both frequently fell into a state of fragmentation — endlessly engaged in internal strife, each treating their neighbors as adversaries, with eyes fixed only on their own “little patch of land.” As the ruling class, the hyper-stability of the entire Hindu grassroots society paradoxically allowed the royal nobility to devote their primary energy to political power struggles rather than to the construction of political institutions.

Internal strife among the powerful typically produced two grave consequences: first, the proliferation of small states in each dynasty; and second, the weakness of central authority. The perfect combination of the caste system, the village community system, and the extended family system caused Indian society to mature too early, leaving the construction of higher-level political authority significantly lagging behind. Something comparable to China’s “commandery-county system” was not established on the Indian subcontinent until very late (the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries), and never developed to the same degree of completeness as in China. Central power was perpetually disinclined to reach down to the grassroots level, let alone to manage it — for there was no need.

From the grand sweep of India’s turbulent history, it is clear that internal power struggles among the ruling class were often the primary temptation for foreign powers to invade the subcontinent, or the greatest convenience for entering and dominating it. Mahmud, Timur, Nadir Shah, and Durrani each succeeded in their plundering without exception by exploiting internal power struggles. And the British colonizers’ ultimate military conquest of the subcontinent and maintenance of stable colonial rule made even greater use of inter-kingdom conflicts.

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

Let us turn back the clock to Alexander’s eastern campaign of 327 BCE. After conquering the vast and decaying Persian Empire, Alexander pressed on without pause, crossing the Khyber Pass to invade the northwestern region of India. Alexander declared his intention to inherit the Persian legacy and rule this land of milk, honey, and wondrous creatures. After the collapse of the Persian Empire, some small states in northern India were engaged in mutual warfare. Alexander’s invasion at this moment allowed some kingdoms to use the foreign power against their own enemies. The king of Taxila, for example, openly sided with the invaders — not only allowing Alexander’s forces to enter his territory, but actively “sending Alexander large quantities of silver, cattle, sheep, and elephants, ‘opening the gate to the wolf,’ as well as 700 cavalry,” helping him conquer other kingdoms.

The same was true of India’s Muslim dynasties as it was of the Aryan regimes. In the final years of Ibrahim Lodi (r. 1517–1526), the last sultan of the Lodi dynasty, internal royal strife grew increasingly fierce. The governor of Punjab — a member of the opposition to the Lodi sultan — actually invited Babur, the sixth-generation descendant of Timur, to come and help him seize the throne. The result was that in 1526, after Babur defeated Ibrahim at the First Battle of Panipat, he pressed his advantage and marched on Delhi and Agra, in one stroke ending the rule of the Lodi dynasty and the Delhi Sultanate over northern India, and inaugurating another era of Muslim rule — the Mughal dynasty.

Another example: in the Mughal dynasty following Aurangzeb (r. 1659–1707), provincial governors raised their own armies and warred against one another. The Rajputs, Jats, and Sikhs successively rose in rebellion, and the Marathas were constantly expanding their territory, with every appearance of being poised to replace the Mughals. At this moment, Iran’s Nadir Shah and Afghanistan’s Durrani successively arrived to plunder amid the chaos. The various forms of disorder ultimately created the conditions for the British East India Company to conquer the subcontinent.

The British colonizers entered by exploiting internal strife, and then used internal strife to conquer the subcontinent. The internal strife of India’s ruling class undoubtedly made them, objectively speaking, accomplices of the British colonizers.

To finally conquer all of India, the British colonizers successively launched the Mysore Wars (1767–1799, comprising four Anglo-Mysore Wars), the Maratha Wars (1775–1782, 1803–1805, and 1817–1819, comprising three Anglo-Maratha Wars), and the Sikh Wars (1845–1846 and 1848–1849, comprising two Anglo-Sikh Wars). Throughout this series of campaigns, the British employed one tried-and-true stratagem — repeatedly exploiting the princes’ tendency to use their neighbors as pawns and to borrow a knife to kill — and it worked every time without fail. The powerful Kingdom of Mysore fought the British several times but was ultimately defeated by a group of internal traitors. The same scenario played out repeatedly when the British fought the Maratha Confederacy and the Sikh Kingdom. Throughout the entire process of the British conquest of the Indian subcontinent, it seems that only Tipu Sultan of Mysore was an exception — he never colluded with the British invaders to attack other Indian princely states. Yet the undeniable fact remains that among hundreds of princely rulers, only this one man of blood and courage emerged, which is truly lamentable.

Moreover, virtually the entire class of princely rulers became a “support group” for the British colonizers in suppressing the national uprising of 1857–1859. This uprising was the only large-scale national uprising the British encountered in their two hundred years of colonizing India. Throughout British India at the time, the vast majority of feudal princes and large landlords stood firmly on the side of the colonizers. Why was this? The primary reason was fear that the uprising would ultimately spread to their own territories. These princes and nobles — accustomed to “fighting within their own nest” — were inwardly terrified by this national uprising that had drawn in the middle and lower strata of society. Most of them had long grown accustomed to the hyper-stable state of grassroots society and to a life of contentment with the status quo; they had no sense of crisis or capacity to respond to emergencies. After the uprising broke out, what these princes and nobles could do was to provide military and financial support to the British rulers — which was in fact a reprise of their habitual court stratagem of “borrowing a knife to kill.” For example, during the uprising, the Scindia of Gwalior, the Raja of Tehri, and the Rani of Orchha all provided the British with ample grain, vegetables, and firewood. As a result, the forces of the uprising were surrounded on all sides by the British colonial government’s troops and their supporting armies. Throughout the entire uprising, the number of troops sent from Britain was 112,000, while the Indian soldiers provided by various princes reached 310,000. The then-Governor-General of India, Lord Canning, frankly acknowledged that the princely states had served as a breakwater. Even after British forces stormed Delhi with heavy artillery on September 14, 1857, Canning received a congratulatory letter from Bengali princes, landlords, and major merchants bearing the signatures of 2,500 people. As one Indian historian put it: “Although the rebels had the sympathy of the people, the whole country did not stand with them; merchants, intellectuals, and Indian feudal princes not only looked on with indifference, but actively supported the British.”

The Caste System and Turmoil in Indian History

Chapter Two

The Way Does Not Change, and Neither Does Heaven

From the time the Aryans entered the subcontinent, the caste system — together with the village community system and extended family system it regulated — made Hindu society on the subcontinent extraordinarily stable. The caste system was the “Way,” and as long as the “Way does not change,” even heaven is hard to change.

On one hand, throughout Indian history, ruling dynasties changed in endless succession and waves of foreign cultural influence arrived one after another, yet the caste system never perished. Emperors came and went, but the caste system continued to smile through the ages. Even today, when capitalist relations of production have developed to a considerable degree, caste has not only failed to exit the stage of history, but has in fact combined with many modern factors to demonstrate an even stronger capacity for adaptation. A relatively strict and stable caste hierarchy remained the core characteristic of the social structure of rural society across the Indian plains in the mid-twentieth century. “Although changes have occurred in urban areas, this does not mean that traditional attitudes toward caste have simply disappeared.” The “dams” constructed by the caste system ultimately held back the tide of modernization and its erosion of Indian society.

On the other hand, throughout the long river of history, the subcontinent witnessed numerous social movements and reform efforts that opposed caste discrimination and advocated equality for all — yet all ultimately proved futile.

The rise of Buddhism and Jainism in the early sixth century BCE, and of Sikhism in the fifteenth century, all originated in various social currents opposing “Brahmin supremacy.” Even so, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism were unable to achieve a lasting mainstream position in Indian society. The egalitarian principles of Islam were also never fully realized in Indian society. For example, those of originally higher-caste background who converted to Islam still found it psychologically and behaviorally difficult to accept standing on equal footing with converts from lower castes.

The Indian subcontinent witnessed a succession of religious reform movements aimed at achieving caste equality. For example, the “Bhakti movement” of the eleventh to seventeenth centuries, and the Hindu reform movements of the nineteenth century — such as the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, and the Ramakrishna Mission — all opposed caste division and discrimination and advocated caste equality in practice. Yet the result of each movement was the same: each new religious movement merely added a new sect or a new sub-caste, while caste division and discrimination persisted. The reason is that such religious reforms all spun within the framework of “fatalism,” focusing their primary energy on the proposition of “liberation in the next life” through achieving “Brahman-Atman unity,” and never managed to generate a secular revolution directed at the present.

In the early period of British rule over India, out of ignorance of India and a sense of superiority and arrogance toward Western civilization, the British bourgeoisie harbored the ambition to thoroughly break up India’s social class structure and mold a new India — implementing sweeping social and economic reforms that included abolishing caste inequality. However, this approach quickly encountered united resistance from the higher castes, which reached its peak in the national uprising of 1857. When the British learned that more than half of the main force of the uprising — the Bengal sepoys — were Brahmins, they were compelled to deeply reflect on some of their own practices. They ultimately arrived at the insight that “a Canadian fur coat is not suited to India’s tropical climate.” The British then came to understand even more clearly that preserving the caste system and keeping India in a state of perpetual antagonism among numerous groups was more advantageous than disadvantageous for their colonial rule. Accordingly,

the British began implementing a series of policies and practices that reinforced and solidified the caste system — such as registering the population by caste and introducing policies to protect the political rights of untouchables. These practices undoubtedly legitimized and entrenched the group divisions based on religion and caste. It is for this reason that some contemporary scholars have gone so far as to argue, in extreme terms, that the caste system, even if not invented by the British, was at least made into a particularly rigid social phenomenon through British colonial rule — “a uniquely Indian form of civilized society.”

Social reform movements in a genuinely secular sense only emerged after the introduction of Western capitalist modes of production in modern times. Influenced by capitalist modes of production and the associated bourgeois ideas of equality and freedom, early Indian National Congress leaders — such as Mahatma Gandhi — proposed solutions to social inequality under the caste system that went far beyond the religious sphere and penetrated into real society. For example, Gandhi regarded the abolition of untouchability and the elimination of caste prejudice as important components of the national liberation movement. The Indian National Congress, both before and after Indian independence, strove to eliminate caste inequality through legislation, campaigns, and policy measures. Today, the Modi government is vigorously promoting a “national reconstruction” movement aimed at forging “one nation, one language, one people” — which is in fact still an effort to resolve the historical legacy problems brought about by caste culture and the caste system.

More than seventy years of Indian nation-building history — and tracing further back, more than 250 years of history since the British colonial conquest of the subcontinent — have proven that “it is easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains, but hard to defeat the bandit in one’s own heart.” The caste system, having weathered thousands of years of wind and rain, has long since taken deep root and spread its branches throughout a society composed primarily of Hindus, reaching into the innermost depths of people’s hearts. Historical reformers, British colonizers, Mahatma Gandhi, and the various leaders of India since its founding — all of them criticized the inequality of the caste system rather than the caste system itself, and sought to eliminate the bad practices of Hinduism rather than Hinduism itself. Nehru held a relatively opposed attitude toward the caste system, but even he said: “As long as Indians maintain the caste system, India will remain India; but from the day they sever their connection with this system, India will cease to exist.” Their many reform efforts therefore carried something of the spirit of Don Quixote. And in the contemporary era, with Hindu nationalism rising ever more vigorously, reforming the caste system and its associated mindset has become even harder. In the deep consciousness of Indian nationalism, the caste system has always been an inextricable knot.

More importantly, after India’s founding, its increasingly developed multi-party democratic politics gave rise to a proliferation of caste-based political parties. In India’s first general election in 1952, as many as 196 parties competed; in the 2019 general election, as many as 2,354 parties registered with the Election Commission of India, of which 450 parties fielded more than 8,000 candidates to contest 543 seats. Local elections are even more saturated with the melee of caste-based parties. As each party goes to every length to win the support of its own caste voters, the politicization of caste has not only further solidified the divisions, antagonisms, and living spaces between castes, but has also brought about severe fragmentation of India’s political landscape, constraining the pace of India’s rise as a great power.

India has not “ceased to count” on the world political stage, and certainly will not do so in the future — but the distance between India and the status of a great power that “counts for a great deal” is neither closer than it was when Nehru founded the state, nor, of course, any further.

Chapter Two

References

  1. Selected Works of Marx and Engels, People’s Publishing House, 2009 edition.
  2. [India] Jawaharlal Nehru, translated by Xiang Zhejun et al.: The Discovery of India, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2016 edition.
  3. [Germany] Max Weber, translated by Kang Le and Jian Huimei: The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2010 edition.
  4. [India] K. M. Panikkar, translated by Wu Zhichun: A Survey of Indian History, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1956 edition.
  5. [India] Deepak Lal, translated by Zhao Hongjun et al.: The Hindu Equilibrium: India c. 1500 BC–2000 AD, Peking University Press, 2008 edition.
  6. [UK] Richard Hall, translated by Chen Qiaoyi: Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders, Tianjin People’s Publishing House, 2019 edition.
  7. [USA] Robert D. Kaplan, translated by Wu Zhaoli and Mao Yue: Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2013 edition.
  8. [UK] Julia Lovell, translated by Liu Yuebin: The Opium War, New Star Press, 2015 edition.
  9. [USA] Sven Beckert, translated by Xu Yijie and Yang Yan: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Democracy and Construction Press, 2019 edition.
  10. Shang Huipeng: Caste and Hindu Society, Peking University Press, 2001 edition.
  11. Ren Jia and Li Li (eds.): India, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2016 edition.
  12. Chen Xiaorong: Hindu Nationalism and the Study of India’s Political Development after Independence, Current Affairs Press, 2015 edition.
  13. Liu Jian, Zhu Mingzhong, and Ge Weijun: Indian Civilization, Encyclopedia of China Publishing House, 2017 edition.
  14. Huang Sijun: A Study of India’s Land System, China Social Sciences Press, 1998 edition.
  15. Wang Hongsheng: On Indian Democracy, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2011 edition.

16 Chen Fengjun: An Overview of Indian Society, China Social Sciences Press, 1991 edition. 19 Chen Fengjun: Indian Society and Culture, Peking University Press, 2013 edition. 17 Zhao Bole: A Study of India’s Ethnic Issues, Current Affairs Press, 2015 edition. 20 Sun Peijun et al.: India’s Monopoly Conglomerates, Current Affairs Press, 1984 edition. 18 Chen Fengjun: The Course of World Modernization — South Asia Volume, Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2012 edition. 21 Lin Chengjie: A History of India under Colonial Rule, Peking University Press, 2004 edition.

1 Before breaking free from British colonial rule in August 1947, British India encompassed present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sikkim, and at one point even included present-day Myanmar.

1 在 1947 年 8 月摆脱英殖民统治之前，英属印度包括现在的印度、巴基斯坦、孟加拉国、锡金，甚至一度包括现在的缅甸。

2 India’s geographical environment is unique. Its terrain — backed by mountains to the north and bordered by sea on three sides — makes it a self-contained entity distinct from the rest of Asia, which is why it is commonly referred to as the “Indian subcontinent.”

2 印度的地理环境很独特，北靠雪山、三面临海的地形使之成为有别于其他亚洲部分的一个独立整体，故又常被称为”印度次大陆”。

1 The “Vedas” are the oldest texts of “knowledge” and “revelation,” written in ancient Sanskrit. They are the foundation of Indian religion, philosophy, and literature. “Even today, Hindus follow the ancient Vedic rites for all ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death.”

1 ”吠陀”是一种用古梵文写成的最古老的”知识””启示”，是印度宗教、哲学及文学的基础，”甚至就在今天，印度教徒在出生、婚姻和死亡等所有的礼节上还是按照古老的吠陀仪式来进行的”。

2 India’s 2011 census showed that Hindus numbered 966 million, accounting for 79.8% of the total population. India conducts a census every ten years. The next one was scheduled for 2021.

2 2011年印度人口普查显示，印度教徒达9.66亿，占总人口的79.8%。印度每十年开展一次人口普查。下一次是2021年。

3 Under the caste system, thieves, beggars, and prostitutes also constituted specific castes, classified as untouchables, passed down hereditarily from generation to generation.

3 依种姓制度，小偷、乞丐、妓女等也是特定种姓，属贱民，代际世袭相传。

4 The Mahars’ historical occupations were primarily as repairmen and sweepers, and they were traditionally regarded as “impure.” They live mainly in Maharashtra (whose capital is Mumbai) and constitute 10–12% of the state’s population. Most Mahars converted to Buddhism in the mid-twentieth century, unable to bear the oppression of the caste system, but this still could not change their discriminated social status.

4 马哈尔人历史上的职业主要是修理工、清道夫，传统上被认为是”不洁净者”。他们主要生活在马哈拉施特拉邦（首府是孟买），占该邦人口10%—12%。马哈尔中的大部分人因不堪忍受种姓压制而在20世纪中叶皈依了佛教，但这依然改变不了他们受歧视的社会地位。

PreviousThe Cultural Code of National SecurityNextCircle Culture: The Paradox of Japanese Cohesion