Why We Do What We Do: The Caste System

Indian culture is incredibly complex and resembles a chaos of mind-boggling proportions. But beneath this seeming chaos is a scientific foundation that is thousands of years old. Often, the practices that we label today as blind superstition have very logical explanations behind them. 

The Indian caste system came when there were no formal training centers for any particular profession. When there were no training centers, the family was the only way to train. So it was very important to maintain a blacksmith culture, a goldsmith culture or a cobbler culture; otherwise there would be no skills.

Suppose your father was a blacksmith, at the age of 6, the moment you were ready, you started playing around with the hammer and anvil. By the time you were 8, your father saw that you anyway wanted to hit it, so it was better to hit it with some purpose. By the time you were 12, you were on the job. By the time you were 18 or 20, you had some craft and expertise on your hand to make your own living.

So if your father was a blacksmith, you became a blacksmith; if your father was a goldsmith, you became a goldsmith. Each profession developed its own training centers within the family structure because that was the only training center; all the craft, professionalism and skills in the society could only evolve like this. If you are a blacksmith, you do not try to go and do a goldsmith’s job, you just do a blacksmith’s job because we need a blacksmith in the society. When people multiplied and became a thousand blacksmiths, naturally they had their own way of eating, their own way of marriage and their own way of doing things, so they formed a caste. There is really nothing wrong with it if you look at it on one level. It was just a certain arrangement of convenience for the society. Between a blacksmith and a goldsmith, the kind of hammer they use, how they work, how they look, what and how they eat, everything was naturally distinctly different because the type of work was very different.

It is over a period of time that it became a means for exploitation. We started saying that a man who runs the temple is better than a man who runs the school. A man who runs the school is better than a man who runs the blacksmith shop. These are differences; everyone has to do something. But we established differences as discriminations over a period of time. Differences are fine. The world is bound to be different and it is nice that it is different, but we try to make every difference into a discrimination, whether it is race, religion or gender. If we had just maintained the difference, we would have been a nice, colorful culture. But when we lost our senses and started making everything discriminatory, the caste system became an ugly system. What was once a very relevant way to develop skills in a society has unfortunately become discriminatory and negative, not productive.

Human beings make every difference discriminatory simply because every human being is longing to be a little more than what he is right now. One unfortunate way he has found is to put down the person next to him. His longing is actually to have a larger slice of life, but he does not know how to enhance himself, so the best thing is to depreciate someone else. It is a very rudimentary mind, but we have worked like that for a long time and we are continuing to work like that. It is time to change, but things are not going to change just by stripping off the old caste system; it will just establish itself in a thousand other ways. For example, do you think there is no caste system in New York? There is a different kind of caste system based on education, or economic capabilities; all these things create their own kinds of discriminatory groups. So it is not going to change unless we revolutionize the human mind.

If there is no sense of inclusiveness in individual human beings, there is no way that the systems they create or actions they perform will lead to inclusiveness. If individuals do not experience this inclusiveness, they end up creating very exclusive processes. One basic aspect of a spiritual process is that it makes one into an all-inclusive human being. At the same time it will hugely equip the individual to be more efficient, more capable, more balanced and in turn more productive.