Jose Ingojo – Hindu University of America

Varna Jati & Caste – Part 2

Jose Ingojo — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 13:49:22 +0000

THE FUTURE OF CASTE AND POSSIBLE REMEDIES

If my argumentation in Part Four is in any way valid, this means that the caste system as a concept will take decades or more before it can be expunged from the Indian Constitution and from Hindu life and politics. Too many Hindus in India and in the diaspora have developed deep vested interests in keeping the caste system alive.

However, there are remedies that may be available to those who wish to make changes, so that those who are Hindus, as well as Muslims and Christians (who also are cursed by the caste system in India) may no longer be criticized and “cancelled” by “Outsiders” regarding the caste system. (By “Outsiders’, we mean those who, in other words, are Westerners, Hinduphobic academics and intellectuals, and other critics of Hindu civilization from outside the Hindu community.)

These remedies are as follows.

A. Education regarding the colonial roots of the caste system.
B. Recovering the Vedic roots of varna
C. Recovering the positive dimensions of jati
D. The recentness of the terms “Caste” and “Hinduism”
E. The modern passage of time

REMEDY #1 – EDUCATION REGARDING THE COLONIAL ROOTS OF CASTE

The first remedy is to educate both academics and the general public regarding the true origins of the caste system. The caste system was imposed from above by the British, who borrowed it from Portuguese and Spanish colonizers of the Americas and adapted it to the Indian subcontinent. Courses like HSF-4000 need to be taught, and scholarly books written, that lay out how the British co-opted the jati system and superimposed the British-devised caste system of rigid immobility and hierarchical disdain upon the much more mobile and thriving jati system of 18^th Century Hindu society.

Let the Hinduphobic British and American academic intelligentsia be re-educated so that their ire and disdain is directed at the British inventors of caste rather than the Hindu victims of British mercantile oppression.

REMEDY #2 – RECOVERING THE VEDIC ROOTS OF VARNA

The second remedy is also an educational one. Both the academic world and the general public must be educated as to the original meaning of varna in pre-British and pre-Islamic times.

Varna had nothing to do with caste. Varna did not mean the rigid categorical imposition of a brahmin class, a warrior class, a mercantile and agricultural class, and a laboring class upon Hindu society. This is a distorted misinterpretation of varna, tied to the myth of the Aryan Invasion of India.

Instead, courses must be taught, and books written that show that varna was a brilliant insight into the general organization of every society, whether primitive or modern.

Every society needs a just and wise governing body as well as a warrior class for defense and a policing and justice system that ensures justice and mercy for the people. This is the warrior varna.

Secondly, every society needs its brahmins, its mandarins, its scholars and knowledge keepers, who can help educate and wisely counsel the general population, so that they may find happiness and prosperity in an enriched and intellectually satisfying life.

Thirdly, society would disintegrate and die without a prospering economy. This means both merchants and farmers, shop owners and blacksmiths, or their modern equivalents.

Fourthly, every society needs its “real workers”, the laborers, the clerks and shopgirls, the factory workers, the artisans and craftsmen, to produce the goods and services. These are the four varnas, and are assigned by genetic make-up and ability and temperament, and not by birth or lineage or by parentage. Varna is as far from the rigid and imprisoning caste system as the British are from India today.

REMEDY #3 – RECOVERING THE POSITIVE ROOTS OF JATI

In Part Two, we covered the sociological roots of jati. Here, we simply wish to expand on what was said there, stressing the fact that jati has a positive dimension in that jati is a cooperative means of benefiting its members and those of other jatis through mutual cooperation and mutual respect for each other’s customs and traditions. One remedy, therefore, is to disentangle the superimposition of the caste system over the jati system by working toward a cooperative and respecting model of cooperation among jatis and the lowering of suspicion and disdain between jatis.

REMEDY #4 – RECENTNESS OF THE TERMS CASTE AND HINDUISM

Many will be surprised to learn that both the term “Caste” and the term “Hinduism” are of recent vintage. Before the British took possession of the Indian subcontinent, neither term existed as common currency within India. Both “Caste” and “Hinduism” are recent inventions.

According to Wikipedia, the word “caste” has its origins in Latin (castus), which means chaste or pure. Caste made its way into the Indian lexicon with the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1700s.

And according to Wikipedia, the use of the English term “Hinduism” to describe a collection of practices and beliefs is a fairly recent construction. The term Hinduism was first used by Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1816–17. Therefore, to criticize the Hindus for the caste system becomes totally moot when one realizes that the question wasn’t even possible before the modern age.

REMEDY #5 – THE MODERN PASSAGE OF TIME

In the end, the long-lasting remedy for the Caste system and its ultimate disappearance is the passage of time in the modern age. In a few more decades, when India has risen to become the most prosperous country on the planet, caste will be seen as antiquated and irrelevant.

We see evidence of this everywhere.

For example, I read a study by a team of anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnologists, which published some very interesting and revealing results in this respect. Back in the 1960s or so, a village in Latin America was studied at length, and it was found that the most important value was communal harmony and conformity. The greatest good was peace and tranquility and the economic good of the whole community. Individual ambition and greed were reigned in by communal customs and norms.

Many decades passed, and a new team returned to the village, and what they found was startling. What they found was that the emphasis had totally shifted from communal identity and harmony toward individual satisfaction and achievement, including the accumulation of wealth and possessions. It was no longer “united, we stand, divided we fall” (as Benjamin Franklin was quipped). Now, it was “every man for himself”.

If we look at a second example in China today. In previous generations, young people always took care of the old. Now, in the 2020s, it is becoming more and more difficult to find children who are willing to make the sacrifice to take care of their aging parents. Why is this relevant to the questions of caste? It is because the caste system is very much tied to kinship and communal identity. What we have learned from the passage of time in almost every modern society that attains a high level of prosperity is this: the number of children born falls below replacement level, and individuals begin to value individual happiness and nuclear family cohesion over the “old values” of clan, extended family ties, and kinship relations.

Therefore, we can predict with a high level of confidence that as India, or Bharat, becomes the nation with the highest populace, and as India rises to the most prosperous nation in the world by the second half of this century, due to its demographics, number of young people and the high birth rate, the old cultural values and adherence to caste will slowly melt away, replaced by the odious Western values of self-centered individualism and nuclear family loyalty alone.Similar changes are taking place in my native Philippines and in Nigeria, for the same reasons.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

To summarize. The criticism directed at the Hindus due to the caste system has been shown to be misdirected. It is the Portuguese with their “casta” system, and the British with their diabolical caste system superimposed over the Hindu jati system, which is the root cause of the still existent caste system of India. It is the British who should bear the brunt of all this misdirected criticism.

Indeed, the very terms “Caste” and “Hinduism” never existed in India or in Britain until the 1700s and 1800s. Caste was unknown in its modern form as rigid immobility and oppression.

The remedy for caste lies in education, education, education. Academia and the general public must be re-educated into the causes of the caste system as being firmly rooted in British mercantilism, British greed, and British malevolence.

In addition, the original meaning of varna and jati must be recovered and shown to have glorious roots in the Vedic wisdom traditions of old, rooted in ancient Bharat and the wisdom of the Rishis of old.

Varna is not caste. And neither is jati. Jati in its original meaning and incarnation as cooperative and natural alliances of families and kinship groups, which in coordination and cooperation with all other jatis in its neighborhood, ensured both prosperity, peace, and happiness for the entire community of people – this is the original meaning of jati that must be recovered.

Then, with time, and indeed, with the long passage of time over the next few decades, we may hope that the curse of the caste system as embodied in the Constitution of India will itself pass away, and the new and revived India and Bharat, rooted in the old and wise traditions of the Vedas and the Rishis, will prosper even higher and better than we can even imagine.

Endnotes

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Varna Jati & Caste – Part 1

Jose Ingojo — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 10:37:54 +0000

Whenever I mention anything about Hinduism to people, the first thing that comes to mind is the topic of caste, and it is usually judged as something negative. They think of castes as something rigid, both in terms of marriage and occupation. Men are stuck in their line of work, whether as street sweepers or farmers. The young are restricted to marrying within their castes. Lastly, there is lack of social mobility, consigning many to lack of opportunity and a life of poverty. Societies of castes are seen as societies frozen in time.

The problem of varna, jati, kula and caste is a difficult one, and a wide-ranging one. When I started this course, I knew little about the caste system. Now I must answer the question:

How do we deal with criticisms directed against the Hindu community, centered on caste?

VARNA ACCORDING TO THE VEDAS

We begin by starting with the word “varna”, which means “color” in Sanskrit. Why do we begin with the word “varna” – Because this word appears in Vedic literature, and in the Bhagavad Gita, in particular. We begin by identifying the shlokas of the Bhagavad Gita which talk about Varna.

In shloka 4.13, Krishna says:

The four categories of occupations were created by Me according to people’s qualities and activities.

In shloka 18.41, Krishna continues by listing the four Varnas:

The duties of the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras—are distributed according to their qualities, in accordance with their guṇas (and not by birth).

Shlokas 18.42-44 then list the natural qualities of work for the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas, and the Shudras. Each of the four varnas has its own unique set of qualities for work.

In Shloka 18.44, in particular, we find that:

Agriculture, dairy farming, and commerce are the natural works for those with the qualities of Vaishyas. Serving through work is the natural duty for those with the qualities of Shudras.

In shloka 18.45-46, Krishna talks of fulfilling one’s own unique set of duties:

By fulfilling their duties, born of their innate qualities, human beings can attain perfection. ….

By performing one’s natural occupation, one worships the Creator …. and …. easily attains perfection.

In shloka 18.47-48, Krishna says:

It is better to do one’s own dharma, even though imperfectly, than to do another’s dharma. ….

One should not abandon duties born of one’s nature, even if one sees defects in them ….

Why do I quote these shlokas at length? Because a close reading of these shlokas reveals that qualities are distributed according to one’s own inherent combination and balance of gunas, and not by birth. In other words, varnas are not inherited by lineage but rather by one’s own unique genetics and temperament at birth. Being born into a particular family (kula) is not what determines varna. One’s inherent abilities and predispositions determine one’s varna. Therefore, if one is born into a family with two doctors as parents, one is not automatically a doctor. If one does not have the inherent capabilities and talents to be a doctor, then that will not be one’s varna. Caste, on the other hand, is the rigid “casting” of one’s dharma according to the varna of one’s parents. The child of those parents has his or her own unique varna, determined by the “random distribution” of one’s genetic make-up.

JATI AS A SOCIOLOGICAL PHENOMENON

We now examine the word “jati”. “Jati” is a Sanskrit term that refers to one’s membership within an extended family kinship group. As an individual, one is a member of a family, with certain parents and perhaps some siblings. This family, in turn, is a member of an extended family group, composed of aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, and perhaps other related members. This extended family group may then belong to a larger cluster of extended family groups that form a clan, or a kinship group. In all pre-modern societies, community was more important than the individual, and one’s identity was defined by one’s kinship group and its rules and obligations, its expectations and anticipated benefits. The jati is not confined to Hindu society but occurs in every society that is traditional and pre-modern. In my own Filipino culture, we have the equivalent of jatis, in which, within our town, everyone was related to everyone else, and kinship groups imposed certain expectations and obligations on everyone. Therefore, jati is not the same as caste. Instead, jatis are much more fluid, and the walls between jatis are permeable, whereas in caste systems, the walls are rigid, difficult to penetrate and at great peril, with much shame and condemnation accompanying even minor transgressions. Therefore, we can conclude that jatis are not the same as caste.

CASTE AS BASED ON JATI

When the original European colonizers came upon the South Indian subcontinent, they found a thriving and prospering set of communities, ruled by a combination of Moghul and native rulers.

India was among the richest and culturally diverse economies in the world. The colonizers also found a social structure based on the cooperation and mutual benefit of jatis.

Jatis promoted the health and prosperity of all the members of the group. The various jatis, of whatever set of occupations and customs, existed to mutually interact and support each of the other jatis, so that every jati could get its own fair share or cut off the proverbial “economic pie”, to everyone’s and every jati’s mutual benefit.

The British, who eventually became the “winner take all” beneficiary of the wars among the various colonizers, soon had the “entire pie” of India. They subsequently sought to impoverish India and make all of India into a unified client state under one administration, first under the East India Company, and later, under the governance of the Raj. The British soon discovered that they could use the sociological structure of the jati as a means to gain absolute administrative control of the entire Indian subcontinent by turning the jati system into a caste system. They froze all the jatis in place and anchored all its members into the prison of a caste system. By subverting the prosperous and thriving jati system and freezing it in place so there was no longer any mobility between jatis, the British were able to subvert the entire native political and economic system and bring it to heel by its British overlords. Therefore, the jati system of the Hindus was subverted by the British and deliberately turned into a caste system.

ENTOMBING THE CASTE SYSTEM INTO CONCRETE

Once the British were able to subvert the Jati system into an imprisoning caste system, the next step in the diabolical scheme was for the British to “cast” the caste system “in concrete”, so that it would become almost impossible to overturn. It did this by instituting the first census in India, which took place in 1865. The first “all-India census took place in 1872. This was regularized in 1881, and a census was taken every ten years from that time forward. Its effect was to enable the Raj to classify the entire population of India and to implement methods for tracking the entire population of India.

With the independence of India in 1947, the caste system was officially embedded into the constitution, and the number of castes, and the membership of each caste, was easily tabulated, although there were many challenges, especially in the definition of what constituted a caste and who really was a member of each caste.

Scheduled castes and tribes were defined, privileges and affirmative action programs were instituted. There were also the effects of reverse discrimination as collateral damage. As a result, the caste system is so embedded in the politics of independent India, such that the political realities of India became deeply defined by caste, and the various caste alliances began to play a decisive role in contemporary Indian politics.

Endnote

All translation passages above are from https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org.

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