India’s Societies & the Dharma Traditions

Most of the calls for rethinking hierarchical and inhumane practices and rampant consumerism came straight from the ancient Hindu spiritual teachers – many of whom from the Śaiva, Śākta, and Vaiṣṇava Dharma traditions publicly disagreed with their Mīmāṃsaka counterparts. These critiques and disagreements are recorded in the annals of Indian history, but seldom paid any attention. Instead, Europeans theorized that the whole of Hindu/Indian society was organized as a four-fold “caste system” plus a class of “untouchable” outcastes outside the main four. This system was supposedly created and enforced by a small and ostensibly oppressive Hindu priestly class of the false religions of India with seemingly little to no opposition from the masses for millennia. This was an absolutely fabricated presumption based on their own European religious history. This idea was especially pushed by Christian missionaries and has a very deeply Protestant bent to it. These colonial-era scholars were hyper-focused on a few Indian literary sources that looked to them like legal codes. They presumed, without evidence, that these codes were enforced and followed by every non-Muslim (as Muslims followed Sharia) in the British Raj. However, it is clear that they neither were able to nor had a desire to understand what the reality was. Instead, they categorized the entirety of the British Raj according to their presumptions, including that there existed one rigid, stagnant caste system of all followers of something called “Hinduism”.

This false and harmful presumption is still by far the most common description of “Hinduism” given to this day in introductory works, encyclopedia entries, school textbooks, and other sources. In reality, terms like “Hindu religion” or “Hinduism” and “the caste system” do not refer to any institutions or entities which are or have ever been present in Indian society until that point, but only to concepts in the Western cultural perception and (mis)understanding of India. While there certainly existed (and exist) a wide variety of spiritual traditions and communities in India, the conceptions of “Hinduism” and “the caste system” are not factual descriptions of these societies, but rather descriptions of how Europeans systematically made sense of their experiences of Indian society.

What was Indian society in reality? Like any other society on the planet: complex and ever-changing. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Zoroastrians, as ancient traditions, have had many different models upon which their variously distinct societies operated. In some, particularly those of the Mīmāṃsakas, binding restrictions were ascribed to their social models in order to make a society easier for the rulers and administrators to manage, and ostensibly manipulate. However, to presume that this was the case for all Hindus is to erase the histories of the numerous non-Mīmāṃsaka societies and knowingly ignore history; even in Mīmāṃsa-based ancient Hindu societies, there were changing social models and structures and significant opportunities for social mobility. Modern sources that perpetuate such colonial-era stereotypes, whether foreign or South Asian, should be questioned in view of the fuller history of all South, Southeast and broader Asian Hindu societies – not just the ones that education systems have made the most familiar since colonial times.

All of the social models possible that evolved in Indian societies throughout ancient history, from the first human settlements until the arrival of the British Raj’s administration, were invalidated and replaced by the British’s imposition of a singular law in 1862, which they then policed and enforced as “Hindu tradition” and “custom” although they themselves had largely invented it. At this time they enumerated the “castes” through census exercises and instituted a rigid caste system which was forced onto Hindu populations however poorly it fit their former social organization and practices, using anthropology as a direct tool of colonial rule rather than impartial scholarship.

This was significantly exacerbated by the British’s imposition of the surname system on India around the same time. Prior to this point, from ancient times up until the mid-19th century, the majority of Indians did not have surnames, only personal names; individual personal identity was far more emphasized than family-based identity. The British fundamentally altered this, requiring all Indians to declare their “caste”, “sub-caste”, etc. (despite these not having previously been concepts known to Indians at all, or at best being very poor and inconsistently applied translations of highly diverse and fluid Indian concepts) and legally fixing these as their surnames, which were thereafter hereditary, thus administratively tying Indians to inflexible caste-based identities in a wholly new, non-indigenous manner. This was required and enforced through taxation records, police files, school enrollments, census documents, land records, and ration cards. So foreign was the concept of surnames to Indians that they often used their village as a surname, or their job, their region, or even the names of important trees that grew nearby. Some surnames were simply the name of that person’s parent, and when frozen in time, it suddenly became the surname for all of their descendants. All of the indigenous context of how Indian people operated in the society of their kingdom, nation, or territory was arbitrarily reorganized at an Empire-based level and artificially tied onto history in a new, static system.

The Dharma traditions do not necessarily define prosperity in terms of monetary wealth and assets. Prosperity is contentment and satisfaction that is self-sustainable. A person could therefore be prosperous though living in a simple, temporary dwelling as a homesteader. Regional Hindu societies that did not produce many commodities or have permanent infrastructure were still regarded as prosperous. Pan-regional Hindu societies tended to create many commodities and permanent infrastructure, and over time, commodities and permanent infrastructure survives even if that society does not. The archaeological and literary record in Asia is therefore only representative of part of the story of Asians; oral tradition contains the rest of the story of these societies, which can now be backed up by genetics, linguistics, climatology, human migration science, sociology, anthropology, etc. Western history had not, especially at the time that foundational survey materials were written about Ancient India during the British Raj, evolved many methods to understand anything but the artifacts and the writings that survive. Accordingly, western history presumes that all of Asia should be considered to be represented by the writings and artifacts that survive. Even if various museums highlight the significant differences of the finds, and the literature points to differences of peoples, most information in the West lumps all South Asians together, or depending on political ideology, splits them along arbitrary lines that were formerly useful only to colonial administrators.

Though some professions and occupations garner a natural respect or aversion in some people, such as that of a doctor or a grave-digger, most Hindu societies, especially those in the monotheistic, pan-regional Hindu Dharmas, promoted equitable meritocracy. However, the expansion-minded Mīmāṁsaka rulers and administrations used these feelings of aversion or respect to organize their societies in a manner that cemented the ease of governance. Sadly, this also allowed them to be easily manipulated by relying on what in today’s terms would be considered restrictive, discriminatory practices. There were a sizable majority of Hindus that did not adopt such social models. However, the insufficient research methods of colonial scholars means that today it is commonly presumed that all Hindu societies followed one social model – the one that was most prosperous and left more in the archaeological record due to their wealth.

When one thinks of the issues between England and Scotland, Northern Ireland/Ireland and Wales – even in the U.K. a singular social model did not work; from distinct British societies, they were consolidated and ruled according to England’s social model. Yet these same nations, composed of different, ancient tribal confederations, argued for greater autonomy based on their culture, language, and heritages. Why then can the West value and uplift societal uniqueness so long as it is in Britain (multigenerational family businesses, Scottish clans, etc.) and even the US (e.g. Midwestern Evangelical vs. Northeastern Catholic), while everyone in Asia must ‘become unified’ in order to be deemed ‘civil’ or ‘proper’? Why should the inaccurate colonial presumptions of ~150 years be allowed to replace the entirety of human history in India and Asia broadly speaking – whether by westernized Asians or the West itself?

Mīmāṃsā is only one of the Vedic philosophical traditions (the six being Sāṅkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiṣeśika, pūrva-Mīmāṁsā and Vedānta) upon which societies were founded in ancient India and related areas in Asia. Regional-ancestral Hindu Dharmas, Śākta, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Kaumāram, Saura, Gāṇapatya, and other regional and pan-regional monotheist Hindu Dharmas (and Sikhī/Sikh Dharma tradition after the 1400s), plus Buddha, Jaina, Cārvāka, and other pan-regional non-theist Dharmas: all of them had commentary on the social models adopted by rulers that adhered to these traditions which changed and evolved with each ruler and the times. To claim that all of these different people groups only followed one strict religious law since the time of the Vedas is to take the histories and frameworks of Abrahamic religions and impose them on top of all the variety of indigenous social models of Asia – whether the claimant is a westerner or a westernized Asian, be they Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian or Tribal. This is especially problematic, as claiming this invalidates all of the indigenous social models which were written out of existence by British colonizers, but still survive as teachings, practices, and culture in most Dharma traditions.

Anachronistically reading caste into history is not only a failure of scholarship, but is a technique that was weaponized by imperialist colonial officers and missionaries to subjugate Indians and vilify Hindus in particular. For comparison, to accuse all Hindus of being casteist or to allege that caste oppression is inherent to Hinduism is similar to accusing all Muslims of being violent jihadis. As the world only studies “Hinduism” and not the Hindu Dharma traditions in their variety, many people are goaded to believe that there is no Hindu alternative to the Mīmāṃsā-based social model but that they can only find equality in other, historically and contemporarily discriminatory, world religions. Stereotypes of Hindus as casteist and bigoted have further harmful consequences, in schools, in workplaces, in media and social media, and in society broadly. In Western schools, lesson plans on Hinduism frequently (more than 60% of the time according to survey data) associate it with “the caste system” in a way that leads to inaccurate and negative misconceptions of Hindus and bullying of Hindu students in schools. Side by side, content standards will discuss “Chinese religions and civilizations”, but instead of an equitable “Indian religions and civilizations” often it will be something along the lines of “Hinduism and the caste system,” which promotes fundamental and major misconceptions. One survey on bullying and bias in American schools found that a full half of Hindu students report social isolation because of their religious beliefs, and one-third outright bullying. One quarter of Hindu students say that the teacher put them on the spot or singled them out when the section on Hinduism was discussed, and one Hindu student in eight said their teachers made sarcastic remarks about Hinduism in front of the class. This study also found a close correlation between a curriculum’s focus on caste and perceptions of bullying.

Research has also shown that inaccurate associations of caste with Hinduism in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) trainings generate broad prejudices against the Hindu American community in people who undergo the trainings, causing a 47.5% increase in the belief that Hindus are racist and a heightened willingness to punish Hindus for such perceived slights, and promoting hostile attribution biases toward Hindus that negatively distort perceptions of interpersonal interactions and promote intergroup hostilities. Furthermore, such trainings cause shocking increases in agreement with adapted quotes by Adolf Hitler, replacing “Jew” with “Brahmin” (the scholars and teachers; an important part of Hindu societies), such as agreeing that Brahmins are “parasites” (+35.4% agreement), “viruses” (+33.8%), and “the devil personified” (+27.1%). Thus associating caste with “Hinduism” directly leads to demonization and scapegoating of Hindus. This echoes usage by actual white supremacist communities as well as radical left activist circles, who reuse formerly Antisemitic tropes against Hindus through dog whistles like “Brahmin Occupied Government,” a variation of the Antisemitic “Zionist Occupied Government.”

Other common misconceptions about so-called “Hinduism” include that it practices “idol worship” or “idolatry,” that it consists of disconnected beliefs without coherence, that it is polytheistic, that it is inherently misogynistic and/or Islamophobic/Sikhphobic, or otherwise oppressive and regressive. Often treatments of “Hinduism” are hyper-focused on practices perceived as “weird” or exotic, or slander Hinduism as “heathen.”