Buddhism in India

Buddhist Civilisation 129

the Brahmans who propagated castes themselves made such a link

and erected the Vedas into holy scriptures. Dumont himself identifies

the time of Manu as the decisive period, with roots going back to

the 8th century BCE (Dumont 1998: 37, 52–53); but this only points

to the beginnings of Brahmanical theorising of caste. We have to see

as Aloysius does, most of the first millennium BCE as an era of con-

testation in which theorists of Brahmanism were elaborating caste;

it is however a period when caste as a social structure had not

become a reality.

An interesting example of this contestation is given in a long and

probably late Jataka. Here the Nagas, very likely lineage-based

‘tribal’ societies undergoing transformations that led to class division

and political formation, are depicted as being split on the issue of

acceptance of caste ideology. According to the story, the king of

Banaras (himself born of a Naga mother) is forced to give his

daughter to a Naga king; they have four sons. One of which is the

Bodhisattva, who is captured by a wicked Brahman, tormented,

eventually released, and then debates with a brother who is prais-

ing Brahmanism in the Naga kingdom itself. The brother praises

the Vedic way:

The Veda and the sacrifice, things of high worth and dignity,

belong to Brahmans as their right, however worthless they be....

Brahmans he made for study; for command

he made the Khattiyas; Vessas plough the land;

Suddas he servants made to obey the rest;

thus from the first went forth the Lord’s behest(#543).

Upon this the Bodhisattva refutes this position, in a long critique of

the Vedas, sacrifice, and castes:

These Veda studies are the wise man’s toils,

the lure which tempts the victims whom he spoils...

Doctrines and rules of their own, absurd and vain,

our sires imagined wealth and power to gain;

‘Brahmans he made for study, for command

he made the Khattiyas; Vessas plough the land;

Suddas he servants made to obey the rest;

thus from the first went forth his high behest...’

We see these rules enforced before our eyes,

none but the brahmans offer sacrifice,

groups considered ‘naturally’ inferior—and in all cases, such
injunctions have been broken. They were broken in India, where all
available evidence shows quite a fair amount of actual mixing
between groups by the first millennium BCE. Those groups at that
time considered ‘untouchable’ or polluting, such as the Candalas,
were rarely described as dark-skinned, though other epithets were
used. The Buddhists who used the term ‘Aryan’ in the sense of
‘noble’ and not in any racial sense, were reflecting the social reality,
while the Brahmans who proclaimed ‘birth’ as decisive were ignoring
the degree to which people of low or questionable birth were
absorbed into Brahman lineages.
One of the most influential theories has been that of Louis Dumont,
the French sociologist, who stressed that caste is a religious-
ideological phenomenon, based on hierarchy and linked to
purity–pollution. The Brahman, as ultra-pure, is posed against
the untouchable, the symbol of drastic impurity (Dumont 1998:
33–49). Dumont’s approach is often criticised as idealistic, but in
many ways the greatest scholar arising from untouchables them-
selves, Dr Ambedkar, agrees with him: caste is inextricably linked
to its religious justification; it is an outcome of ‘Hinduism’.
Ambedkar views caste as a creation of Brahmans, and in his 1916
essay on caste, he sees the Brahmans as the first to constitute them-
selves as a varna-caste, the ones who defined other castes, and in
the end succeeded in making the varna system a social reality
(Ambedkar 1979: 15). This became possible, of course, because
caste had its functions in an emerging agrarian society, and also
because Brahmans could make the necessary alliance with kings
and power holders to impose it—but the ideology, the religion, was
essential for caste.
Ambedkar’s point fills in an essential missing piece of the puzzle.
It allows us to identify just when the process took place. Caste did
not emerge with the first agrarian societies; in fact there was a
fairly long period and many regions in which fairly sophisticated
agrarian production existed without significant reliance on caste as
such.^4 Caste also did not emerge with the Aryan ‘conquest’ and was
not linked in a direct line to Vedic social structure—except that

128 Buddhism in India

(^4) That is, the early Indus civilisation, the gana-sanghas, probably the early western
India system under the Satavahanas, Tamil Nadu and other southern regions up
until the 6–7th century CE.