I believe
in meritocracy. A person’s actions should be a bigger determinant of his success
in life than his birth. I believe social mobility is a sign of a just and
developed society.
Then why
the distasteful title? No, it’s not a typo. I didn’t intend to write ‘In
defiance of the Hindu Caste System’ or something of the sort.
The caste
system as it has become today is abhorrent. It has become a blight on the Hindu
religion and sets an unparalleled example of institutionalised discrimination.
The caste
system is the easy target with which atheists and missionaries attack the Hindu
religion. It is the cancer of Hindu society that has driven millions of its
followers into the arms of Islam, Buddhism and Christianity. These religions only
had to offer prospective converts the dignity of being treated as human beings
to entice them to leave the faith of their ancestors.
Despite
this deserved opprobrium, there is a positive philosophical side to the caste
system that deserves a hearing. Before it was corrupted into an
elaborate protection racket for the socially privileged, the caste system embodied a
sophisticated system of relative morality.
I avoid
using the term moral relativism, which has earned a bad reputation from being
used to justify unjustifiable cultural practices and imply that all cultures
are equally moral. I focus instead on whether morals for individuals are
absolute or relative.
A little
thought on the subject will show that morality cannot be absolute, and is highly
dependent on context and circumstance. Most of us will agree that a rich man
stealing from a shop is far more immoral than a poor hungry man
doing the same, even though both of them have committed exactly the same act. Modern
courts consider motive and circumstances in sentencing.
Prescriptive rules of absolute morality such as the Ten
Commandments would thus seem to be a poor moral guide for the complexities of the real world. They
are useful to teach children about basic morality (e.g. thou shalt not kill,
thou shalt honour thy mother and father), but fail in the most basic
complications. Should a soldier in war not kill? Should the child of a serial
murderer honour her father?
The
morality espoused by Jesus transcends the more primitive absolute morality of
the Old Testament. For example, the golden rule of “do unto others as you would have
them do unto you” perfectly encapsulates the subtlety of morality, and implies
that it is relative. What I may have others do unto me is different to what you
would have them do unto you.
Jesus could
hardly endorse relative morality more explicitly than in Luke 12:48 where he
says:
“But he who did not know, yet
committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone
to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has
been committed, of him they will ask the more.”
The caste
system divides human beings into having four types of dispositions, and
prescribes societal roles, moral rules and different levels of accountability based
on those dispositions. In theory, this is an enlightened concept that
recognises that all men cannot be judged by the same scales given their vastly
different abilities and intelligences.
A good
parable that illustrates this is an episode from the Indian epic, The Mahabharata. When
the righteous emperor Yudhishthira was in contention for becoming crown prince
in competition with his immoral cousin Duryodhana, the minister at the time
tested the two in a criminal proceeding. Four men had been found guilty of
conspiring to commit a murder, and the two princes were asked to give their
sentences to the criminals. Duryodhana went first. His judgement was that the established
penalty for murder was capital punishment, and all four murderers thus deserved to be
hung.
Yudhisthira’s
response was more nuanced. To the surprise of the court, he asked for the
castes of the four murderers. Conveniently for an epic tale, they were each from
one of the four castes: a Brahmin (priest), a Kshatriya (warrior), a Vaishya
(trader), and a Shudra (labourer).
He
considered that the Shudra, while guilty, was illiterate and hence not as
guilty as the educated Vaishya, who was better educated in moral matters. He
therefore sentenced the Vaishya to a jail term four times longer than that of
the shudra’s. For the Kshatriya, whose very moral duty it was to protect citizens,
his crime of murder was particularly heinous, and deserved a punishment quadruple
that of the Vaishya. As for the Brahmin, whose moral duty was to spread morality
and peace itself, his crime was so vile, that he referred him to his own guru
to judge his punishment.
It can be
said that Yudhishthira’s caste-based judgement applied Jesus’ principle of “to
whom much is given, from him much is required” some 5 millennia before Christ.
This subtlety
of relative morality in the caste system was again illustrated during the great
war of the Mahabharata. In the course of the war, a Kshatriya king, Virata,
lost his son in battle. Breaking the news to his wife with tears in his eyes, he told her that as a
Kshatriya woman, she should be proud that her son gave his life in war
fighting for righteousness. The next morning, he returned to the battlefield
and continued to fight, as was his duty as a Kshatriya.
Some days later,
the Brahmin chief general Drona was informed his son had died in battle. His
reaction was extraordinary. In his anguish, he ceased fighting, dropped his
arms, descended his chariot, and starting meditating. His sudden abdication of
responsibility while being chief general was a dereliction of his duty.
His actions
reveal that in choosing to take up arms and fight on the battlefield, Drona was
not doing unto others as he would have them do unto him. Virata killed others’
sons, accepting that he and his sons were fair game to be similarly killed.
While aggrieved, he continued to perform his duty when he lost his son. In
contrast, Drona, who was a Brahmin at heart, responded to the killing of his
own son in a way he would not have expected from the many fathers he
commandeered. It was hence immoral of him to kill others’ sons in war if he was
unable to accept his own son being killed without becoming completely emotionally
incapacitated. Or as Jesus put it, “For with what judgment you judge, you will
be judged”. Drona was judged by that judgement, and was found wanting.
In ancient India the caste system was central to this relative morality. Different
castes had different moral guidelines in
consideration of their duties. For example, hunting and eating meat were
considered acceptable for Kshatriyas as they need to be skilled in violence to
employ it in the defence of righteousness. As individuals who would risk their
lives to defend their communities, Kshatriyas were allowed a more risk-taking
nature and to indulge in activities such as high-stakes gambling. Such
behaviour was strongly discouraged or forbidden for the other castes, particularly
for Brahmins, who were expected to shoulder society's burden of
preserving, developing, and distributing society’s intellectual and spiritual capital.
Seen as less intelligent and engaged in menial tasks, Shudras had fewer rights
but also fewer responsibilities.
The caste
system only really became the problem it is today, when individuals were forced to belong to a caste
based on their birth, and were stuck to it for life. The fundamental problem
with the caste system is its heredity and
rigidity.
Throughout
its history, India has risen and fallen with these moral principles. Every time society judged an individual's deeds (karma) to be above his birth (janma), India has thrived, and it has
decayed every time the reverse was true.
India was
first united as one country by Emperor Bharata, who gave India its native name
of Bhaarata. A key story of Bharata’s reign was that he so
elevated action over birth, that he overlooked all of his sons and anointed someone else as his crown prince. This
is especially extraordinary given it occurred many millennia BC, when states
and kingdoms around the world were seen as mere possessions of kings, not commonwealths
of the people.
The roots
of the downfall of Indian civilisation can be traced to when Bharata’s
descendant Shantanu and his son Bhishma guaranteed the throne to a person who
was as yet unborn, purely on the basis of his birth. Down the line, Dhritrashtra
then conspired to give the throne to his son ahead of his more competent
nephew. Ultimately, this led to the epic war of righteousness that was the
Mahabharata, which ended with Kshatriya society largely wiped out.
In the era
leading up to the Mahabharata war, the ills of the caste system had begun to
set in. India had become a society where the thumbs of aspirational lower-caste
citizens were cut off to preserve privilege for the upper classes.
It was a classist society that refused to accord the low-caste born son Karna the
respect he deserved as a Kshatriya, despite being one of the greatest warriors
of his time.
It is
interesting to note that India’s classical golden era was under the Gupta king Chandragupta
Maurya, who was also not born into royalty.
Interestingly, this
conflict of action and birth, karma
and janma, will manifest itself again
in the upcoming 2014 Indian general election. The contrast in its expected Prime
Ministerial candidates could scarcely be more poetic. One the one hand, Rahul
Gandhi is expected to try and join his father, grandmother, and
great-grandfather to become the fourth Prime Minister of India from the Brahmin
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. His mother is the leader of the ruling Congress
Party, and his only political achievement to date is his surname. In his ten
years as an MP, he has given very few speeches and only recently gave his
first detailed interview. He and the Congress Party represent the power of janma, with its inherited wealth and status. Representing karma in this election is the Prime Ministerial candidate of the Bhartiya Janata Party, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. Born into a low-caste family,
Modi sold tea to make a living in his youth and rose from obscurity to become India’s
most recognised and respected chief minister. Since 2001, he has presided over a period of unprecedented
economic prosperity in his state by delivering reform and competent governance.
There could
not be a starker choice in this election between janma and karma.
It is not
difficult to see that until Indian society once again elevates karma above janma, it will remain mired in the material and spiritual poverty
in which it currently dwells.
According to traditional Indian history, it was not the British who
first united the Indian subcontinent. The word for India in native Indian
tongues is Bhaarata, a patronymic of
Bharata.
