the 'new' colonialism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
>
>>  The caste system is said have emerged over centuries during the Vedic
>>  period, beginning roughly in 1500 BC. I mean by caste well known
>>  division of Indian society into four categories: Priests (brahmins),
>>  Warriors (kshatriyas), Traders and farmers (vaisyas) outside and sudras,
>>  the lowest sub-caste.
>
>My impression from the standard works of history is that:
>
>(1) this four part division was basically the three part division we
>Europeans know so well from our own Aryan past -- the division of society
>into Warriors, Priests and Peasants -- with the difference that in India,
>the preexisting groups weren't chased out, absorbed, exterminated or
>completely marginalized (e.g., the Basques), but instead remained numerous
>enough to form a fourth group, the Shudras, or untouchables.  So that it
>was originally almost a racial division between Aryans and non Aryans, and
>largely mapped onto a north/south, light skin/dark skin division; and
>
>(2) that although "caste" is commonly used to refer to that basic four
>part division; and for many people in modern india those divisions are
>been the last ones to go when all others have been forgotten; still, when
>people start talking about "caste theoretically" they are almost always
>referring not to the four basic classes, but to the the 5000 jatis which
>seem to have pre-existed the Aryan invasion/migration and and to later
>have been synthesized with this four part class division.  In this view,
>the 5000 jatis are occupational and religious in their original
>conception, which is attached to the idea of karma: there is an order to
>the universe, and virtue consists of contributing to this harmony by
>fulfilling the carefully prescribed duties of the occupation one has been
>born into.  Then over time intermarriage and linguistic bonds eventually
>gave them more of a clannish character.
>
>Is that wrong?
>
>Michael

As far as the untouchables in the modern period (in contrast to the 
origins of the concept of the untouchability and castes in general) 
are concerned, the root of the problem probably lies in the 
oppression of agrarian laborers:

*****   _Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in History and 
Society_ VOLUME 7 (2000)

_The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern 
India_, by Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany. New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 1998, xviii, 289 pp.

Reviewed by Lynn Vincentnathan, Department of Anthropology, 
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL

.....Regarding the fact that most untouchables throughout India do 
not perform polluting work, but are mainly agrarian laborers -- which 
Charsley (1996) uses to bolster his claim that the term "untouchable" 
is wrong -- Mendelsohn and Vicziany, following a critical 
perspective, suggest that the ideology of untouchability has probably 
been used for the purpose of exploiting agrarian laborers. Stein's 
(1967) historical work on this topic could have given support to this 
argument....

References Cited:

Charsley, Simon. 1996. "Untouchable": what is in a name? Journal of 
the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(1):1-24.

Stein, Burton. 1967. Brahman and peasant in early South Indian 
history. The Adyar Library Bulletin 31-2:229-69.

<http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/volume_7/Mendelsohn1200.html>   *****
-- 
Yoshie

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