Caste and Meritocracy in Ancient India

In one of my earlier posts, I had put forth my theory on the evolution of the caste system as it is in modern India.

My Theory on the Evolution of the Caste System

This is my theory on how the caste system came into existence in the first place. A few days ago, I came to notice that its not only the Brahmins who wear the sacred thread but even Kshatriyas and Vaishyas do so. Then I heard someone tell me that they are ranked in the order Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Kshudra as per the descending order of intellectual aptitude. For some time that had been bugging me for I knew that there had to be more to it. To my scientific mind, the idea that intellectual aptitude was restricted to certain lineages seemed grossly ridiculous.

Then I remembered something that I overheard as my father was conversing with the priest who performed my thread ceremony. The priest said that the thread ceremony should be performed either at the age of seven or at the age of eleven, failing these two times, the thread ceremony could be performed just before marriage. I also heard somewhere that the thread ceremony marked the entry of a person into the life of a student.

All these facts seemed disconnected till I finally stumbled upon the significance of the ages of seven and eleven. This I gleaned from my memories of one of ma all time favorite television serials – Chanakya. In ancient India (I mean really ancient, that is before the time of Christ). It was a custom among the people of India that a child when born would remain with his/her parents till the age of seven or eight. Then the child would be sent to the Gurukula, which is basically a large group of teachers (gurus) living in an ashram mostly in a forest or densely vegetated area of some sort. There they would have to undergo a test of some sort. Those who passed through the test were made to undergo a thread ceremony as a kind of admission ceremony. And the thread ceremony marked the person’s entry into the Gurukula. Those who didn’t pass the “entrance test” did not go through the thread ceremony and hence did not wear a sacred thread. It is my assumption that these people were the ones who came to be known as the Kshudras.

As is common in all institutions of education, the students could be classified broadly into three categories. The first category, and also what I assume to be a small minority among the students were those who had intellectual and philosophical inclinations. These students I assume were classified under the category name “Brahmana”. The literal meaning of the term “Brahmana” in Sanskrit is “the one who can realize the Brahman” where the Brahman is another word for “supreme spirit”, in other words, Brahmins were highly spiritual and philosophical people who became the future ministers, priests, and accountants and the crème de la crème of this group became scientists, philosophers, future teachers (gurus) and spiritual leaders.

The second category, and what I assume to be another minority among the student body of the Gurukula (I make no attempt to compare the sizes of these two minorities) were those who showed distinctive leadership qualities. The students in this group may or may not have had higher intellectual abilities or an inclination towards physically demanding activities. This category would have been labeled “Kshatriya”. They were leaders capable of leading common folk in times of peace as well as at times of strife. They commonly joined the armies of various kingdoms as commanders or commanding officers and the crème de la crème among them became monarchs.

The majority of the student populations of the Gurukulas were those who neither had the higher intellectual inclinations of the Brahmins nor the leadership qualities of the Kshatriyas. But they were reasonably good students. They made up the general society. They became artisans, craftsmen and traders. They were the people who enabled their respective kingdoms to function as economically independent social units. This category of people was labeled the “Vaishyas”.

If I am right in my assumptions, I believe it would be safe to say that ancient India was a true meritocracy where merit of each and every individual in their respective fields was given paramount importance.

If you would notice, I have tried to leave out gender specific pronouns in this text of mine. For, it is my belief that Gurukulas used to cater to students of both sexes. Maybe this can be passed of as an author’s idealization of the past, but I do have the beginnings of a deduction to back my assumption. The Aryans were a nomadic tribe of people who invaded the Indian subcontinent. The Indian subcontinent was inhabited by Dravidians. It is my belief that the Gurukula system is a remnant of the Dravidian system of education which was copied by the Aryans and thus passed down to the Vedic peoples. Dravidians followed a religion which now forms a part of modern Hinduism, some call this religion tantra, and call its system of philosophy yoga. And one look at the tantric pantheon is enough to convince any person of reasonable intelligence that theirs was a matriarchal society. An examination of any matriarchal society, for example the pagan/wiccan society described by Marion Zimmer Bradley in her book “The Mists of Avalon” shows that although importance was given to the woman, men were not as subjugated as women are in our modern patriarchal society. Therefore I feel it is safe to draw a conclusion that Gurukulas catered to students of both genders.

Therefore, when the Aryans invaded India, it is likely that they copied the Gurukula system from the Dravidians but made one minor change – they excluded the girls. One major drawback I find in the Gurukula system is that, all control was left in the hands of the Brahmins. It is always unsafe to leave all the controls in the hands of one person or one particular elitist group. The result of that small folly is the modern hereditary caste system which provides advantages to nobody except power hungry and uncouth politicians.

Back then, the caste of a person was a measure of his abilities and aptitudes. But this modern abomination of the once useful and beautiful system is absolutely meaningless. In this day and age attempting to use the caste of a person to judge his/her aptitude would be akin to using the cubit (distance between tip of thumb and tip of little finger) as a scientific unit of measurement.

The only way in which we can abolish this system is by promoting quality education and providing it to even the poorest of the poor. Unless that is done, India can never become a truly developed nation.

DISCLAIMER:
I, THE AUTHOR OF THIS POST, DO NOT IN ANY WAY SUPPORT THE CASTE SYSTEM. I DIDN’T WRITE THIS TO OFFEND ANYONE, I WROTE IT WITH THE SOLE PURPOSE OF SHARING MY VIEWS ON ONE OF THE GRAVEST SOCIAL EVILS PLAGUING OUR COUNTRY.

Swastika

History of the Swastika
The swastika is an extremely powerful symbol. The Nazis used it to identify themselves as Aryans and to unite Bavaria, Prussia, and Austria under the German banner and instill a sense of national pride, but for centuries it had positive meanings. What is the history of the swastika? Does it now represent good or evil?

The Oldest Known Symbol

The swastika is an ancient symbol that has been used for over 3,000 years. (That even predates the ancient Egyptian symbol, the Ankh!) Artifacts such as pottery and coins from ancient Troy show that the swastika was a commonly used symbol as far back as 1000 BCE.

During the following thousand years, the image of the swastika was used by many cultures around the world, including in China, Japan, India, and southern Europe. By the Middle Ages, the swastika was a well known, if not commonly used, symbol but was called by many different names:

* China - wan
* England - fylfot
* Germany - Hakenkreuz
* Greece - tetraskelion and gammadion
* India - swastika

Though it is not known for exactly how long, Native Americans also have long used the symbol of the swastika.

The Original Meaning

The word "swastika" comes from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix.

Until the Nazis used this symbol, the swastika was used by many cultures throughout the past 3,000 years to represent life, sun, power, strength, and good luck.Even in the early twentieth century, the swastika was still a symbol with positive connotations. For instance, the swastika was a common decoration that often adorned cigarette cases, postcards, coins, and buildings. During World War I, the swastika could even be found on the shoulder patches of the American 45th Division and on the Finnish air force until after World War II.

A Change in Meaning

In the 1800s, countries around Germany were growing much larger, forming empires; yet Germany was not a unified country until 1871. To counter the feeling of vulnerability and the stigma of youth, German nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century began to use the swastika, because it had ancient Aryan/Indian origins, to represent a long Germanic/Aryan history.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the swastika could be found on nationalist German volkisch periodicals and was the official emblem of the German Gymnasts' League.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the swastika was a common symbol of German nationalism and could be found in a multitude of places such as the emblem for the Wandervogel, a German youth movement; on Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels' antisemitic periodical Ostara; on various Freikorps units; and as an emblem of the Thule Society.

The Origin of the Swastika

The ubiquity of the swastika symbol is easily explained by it being a very simple symbol that will arise independently in any basketweaving society. The swastika is a repeating design, created by the edges of the reeds in a square basket-weave. Other theories attempt to establish a connection via cultural diffusion or an explanation along the lines of Carl Jung's collective unconscious.

While the existence of the swastika symbol in the Americas may be explained by the basket-weave theory, its American presence weakens the cultural diffusion theory. While some have proposed that the swastika was secretly transferred to North America by an early seafaring civilization on Eurasia, a separate but parallel development is considered the most likely explanation.

Yet another explanation is suggested by Carl Sagan in his book Comet. Sagan reproduces an ancient Chinese manuscript that shows comet tail varieties: most are variations on simple comet tails, but the last shows the comet nucleus with four bent arms extending from it, recalling a swastika. Sagan suggests that in antiquity a comet could have approached so close to Earth that the jets of gas streaming from it, bent by the comet's rotation, became visible, leading to the adoption of the swastika as a symbol across the world.

Bob Kobres in Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse (1992) contends that the swastika-like comet on the Han Dynasty silk comet atlas was labeled a "long tailed pheasant star" due to its resemblance to a bird's foot., and further suggests that many swastika and swastika-like motifs may have been representations of bird tracks, including many of those found by Schliemann.

Barbara G. Walker, author of The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, claims that the crux dissimulata, an early swastika, represented the four winds. Concerning the short-armed version of this symbol, known as the gammadion because it is made up of four Greek gammas, Walker says this symbol was an emblem of the ancient goddess and probably represented "the solstices and equinoxes, or the four directions, four elements, and four divine guardians of the world."

The Speed of Light as in an Ancient Indian Text

The Speed of Light

The speed of light was determined by Roemer in 1675. Recently it has been pointed out that an ancient Sanskrit text of 14th century contains the value of the speed of light that is identical to the modern value. Sayana (1315-1387 A.D.) was a very famous Vedic scholar. He was the prime minister in the court of Emperor Bukka I and his successors of the Vijayanagara Empire. In his commentary on the following verse in the Rigveda he gives the value for the speed of light.

"O Sun! You see all, create brightness and travel very fast. You brighten the whole sky." Rigveda 1.50.4

Sayana comments: "It is remembered that Sun traverses 2,202 yojanas in half a nimesa."

It is to be noted that Bhatta Bhaskara (probably in 10th century) made the same statement in his commentary on Taittiriya Brahmana. He says this to be an old Puranic tradition.

Yojana is an ancient unit of length. Arthasastra defines it as being equal to 8,000 dhanus(a dhanu is approximately equal to 1.81 meters), which is equivalent to 14.481 kilometers. Nimesa is an ancient unit of time. One nimesa is equal to 16/75 seconds. Thus 2,202 yojanas in half a nimesa is equal to 298942.143 kilometers per second after conversion. This is very close to the value of 299792.458 kilometers per second for the speed of light. Why would Sayana call this the speed of the Sun? The speed of the Sun calculated by Indian astronomers was very small compared to this value. It turns out that Sayana was following the ancient Indian tradition of codifying the knowledge. In this code Sun represents light. The discovery of this code is described in the book “Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism”.

This subject has been discussed in detail in a scholarly article ("The Speed of Light and Puranic Cosmology", Subhash Kak, "Computing Science in Ancient India", editors T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak, 1998, pp 80-90).

I HAD COPIED THIS INFORMATION LONG AGO FROM A WEBSITE ONTO A PIECE OF PAPER. THEREFORE I HAVE NO WAY OF MENTIONING THE SOURCE OF THIS INFORMATION. ALL NUMERIC DATA IN THE ORIGINAL TEXT WAS EXPRESSED IN TERMS OF THE BRITISH SYSTEM OF UNITS WHICH I CONVERTED INTO THE SI SYSTEM FOR EASE OF READING

The Origin of the Algorithm and the Arabic Connection

In the modern world one would associate the adjectives of “backward”, “fundamentalist”, “communalist” and maybe even “militant” with the Arab world. And one would be labeled a maniac for even entertaining the idea that it was the same Arab world which gave us our so called modern system of counting. In Arabic, their number system is called “arqa-m hindiyyah” which loosely translates to “Hindu-Arabic numerals”. Whats even more puzzling is the fact is that if it weren’t for one person belonging to that region, we probably wouldn’t have had computer in this day and age and you might not have been reading this article on this blog.

The name of that one man is Mohammed Ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi. He inhabited the exact place where we have almost created hell on earth: Baghdad, on the banks of the river tigris. It was in Baghdad where this man worked as a faculty member of the House of Wisdom between 800 & 847 CE (common era; a period previously referred to as A.D.). He even wrote one of the first books ever written on algebra in 830 CE. The book, back then, was called “al-Kitab al-mukhtasasar fi hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala”. The title of this book loosely translates as “the condensed book of calculation by restoration and comparison”. The preface of this book reads something like:

…what is easiest and most useful in arithmetic, such as men constantly require in cases of inheritance, legacies, partition, law-suits, and trade, in all their dealings with one another…

Students who deal with x, y, z and variables of the like in their algebra textbooks would hardly believe that they are studying what was once created to deal with such complications of daily life. But before he wrote this book, he wrote “On Calculations with Hindu Numerals” in 825 CE which was part translation and part explication of Indian Numerals as expounded by Brahmagupta.

Brahmagupta was a court astronomer in Ujjain like al-Khwarizmi, and he wrote the Brahma Sputa Siddhanta in 628 CE where he used and defined a new concept in mathematics, the ZERO for the first time. If it weren’t for this concept, there wouldn’t have been any calculus, nor any theoretical physics, nor any advancement in mathematics. He also wrote the Khandakhadyaka in 665 CE about astronomy. The Arab world learnt about the Indian system of counting when the second Abbasid Caliph invited a scholar from Ujjain called Kanka. Kanka introduced the concept Zero to the Arabic world.

This was then translated into Arabic by Al Fazaii around 770 CE.

Khwarizmi used these concepts in a book. The book itself was lost but its latin translation exists, and this translation is called Algorithmi. The name changed from Al-Khwarizmi to Algoritmi and is now called the concept of the algorithm.

Therefore, if it weren’t for this one man, Mohammed Ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi, from the city of Baghdad, we wouldn’t have had the computer. For the fundamental idea on which all computer theory is based is the algorithm.

Courtesy The Hindu Young World Page 6, June 23, 2006. Original article by Serish Nanisetti

THIS IS MY THEORY ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE CASTE SYSTEM.

As we walk around in out towns, what do we see? People. But these People are segregated into various groups. Engineers, scientists, artists, artisans, labourers, etc. What is this segregation basd on? Our occupation. We live in a society that is segegated based on what we do for a living. The society of india too did have this segregation of its society. We percieve the remenants of that system these days in what we call the caste system. But the standard argument against that theory is that its is based on heredity.Now, if a person would come into a crowded market square any place and at any time and say that certain types of people were to be considered to be of high birth and then define the hierarchy based on this, he would have been torn apart by a very angry mob.



Here is my hypothesis as to how the caste system came into being:



The creators first took into consideration the policy makers of the kingdom. They were ministers, royal councillors, village heads, judges, architects, engineers, in short those who used their brains to work. Now these people had immense scholastic aptitude which took atleast a decade to hone. This was a very difficult task as they had to live in gurukulas in forests and abstain from creature comforts. These people were given the highest position in the hierarchy of castes as the brahmins. Next came those whose scholastic aptitude was not all that great but had immense control over a perfectly coordinated musculature. These people were the warriors, martial artists, wrestlers, boxers, master swordsmen, kings, commanders of the royal army, etc. They too did not have an easy time getting to where they were in terms of physical aptitude. It did take the better part of a decade to develop a fair degree of coordination between mind, body and soul. So they were given the second place in the hierarchy as Kshatriyas. But taking into account the approximate equivalence in vitality to the kingdom of both these peoples, there isn't a clarity in discerning who exactly held the first and second position at the time of the creation of his system. Next came the traders, merchants, and anyone who bartered - and later when the concept of currency was discovered - bought and sold anything for profit in the markets. These people were given the third place in the hierarchy of the castes as the Vaishyas. Then came the Sudras, the people who had neither the mental aptitude nor the physical aptitude to be eligible for anythig other than labour.



I myself am a brahmin, and when I look about myself I do not see many of the so called Brahmins as being eligible to be in that caste. So I have drawn the hypothesis that the Brahmins of those days made their position at the top of the hierarchial order definite by making themselves indisposible in almost everything that they did. This they did by complicating all the procedures they were involved in and creating concepts of 'madi' which means the conncept of being spiritually clean and by excluding all the other people from the sources of knowledge. The next thing they did was to make this system hereditary in order to ensure that their progeny enjoyed the same respect and honour that they did irrespective of whether they were worth it or not.This last move was the most damning of them all as there can be no guarantee that if the parent has a high I.Q the offspring will too. The same goes for those with parents with low I.Qs. But this move was also the most difficult because it is one thing to create a system of segregation of people. but it is another to aspire to change the outlook of the entire population of life towards their fellow human beings and infinitely more importantly towards themselves.