please Guys answer this Question fast
Answers
Answer:
back in a minute wait .......
Answer:
From the eighteenth century onwards, Protestant missionaries and European Orientalists described Indian society as a caste hierarchy consisting of four ranks or varnas (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishas, and Shudras) and the ‘outcastes’ or ‘untouchables’. They explicitly viewed caste as a religious institution – founded in Hinduism and dominated by Brahmin priests – which condemned the lower castes to lives without basic dignity and rights. Since colonial officials accepted this as a true description of Indian society, they also included it in the educational programmes of British India. Thus, generations of Indian intellectuals learned to reproduce this characterization of their own society. As a result, they started building ‘anti-Brahmin’ movements for ‘the liberation from caste tyranny’ in the era between the 1850s and the 1940s.
When India gained independence in 1947, some political leaders argued there should be redress for the historical injustices committed against the lower castes. Hence, they pleaded for the establishment of a system of quota or reservations in the Constitution: a certain percentage of seats in all government institutions (including students and faculty in universities) should be reserved for individuals belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST), a series of castes and ethnic groups listed in a schedule of the Constitution. They succeeded: today almost 50% of all seats are reserved for certain caste groups; in some Indian states, the number is even higher.
Throughout the twentieth century, caste politics went together with the dominance of a particular discourse in the social sciences and humanities: the systematic rejection of Hinduism and the Brahmins as immoral forces in Indian society. Its climax came with the emergence of the Dalit Movement, which is aggressively opposed to the so-called ‘upper castes’ and to ‘Hindu religion’ in general. Today, its sympathizers play a prominent role in the social sciences and humanities departments of universities across India. They have established a climate of political correctness, where certain dogmas are no longer allowed to be questioned on scientific grounds.
The research questions
The notion of a fourfold caste hierarchy founded in Hindu religion faces a number of conceptual and empirical problems. Empirically, a huge variety of jatis (groups determined by birth) co-exist in Indian society and many are characterized by practices of endogamy and commensality. By convention, one could perhaps call such groups ‘castes’. However, empirically, the structure of Indian society does not reflect a fixed caste hierarchy. In fact, British colonial officials came to this conclusion long ago when they launched a caste census aimed at classifying these groups along the lines of the castehierarchy. Generally, this exercise ended in failure. For most groups, it turned out to be impossible to attribute a stable location in the hierarchy. Even worse, it was often impossible to find out to what ‘caste’ Indians belonged. When asked the question “What is your caste?” – so colonial officials complained – some Hindus would mention one of the four varnas, others would say they belonged to some “endogamous sub-caste,” yet others would mention some “caste-title” or add “vague and indefinite” entries. In short, the Hindus seemed to be ignorant of their own caste system (Blunt 1931; Dirks 2002: 202-212; Nesfield 1885).
Conceptually, the link between caste and Hinduism is unclear. Usually, this link is established by quoting a selection of passages from one text, the Manavadharmashastra (mistranslated as ‘Manu’s Code of Law’). Yet, for every Sanskrit text that supposedly sanctions the caste system, one can find another that does not. While the status of such texts in Indian society is unclear, they certainly do not count as sacred scriptures or legal codes that found social practice (Bhattacharya-Panda 2008; Menski 2003: 73-4). The claim that Brahmin priests invented the caste system and imposed it onto Indian society is as problematic (Dirks 2002; Inden 1990). Any attempt to transform a society along the lines of such a model would require a particular type of institution or centralized authority, which inculcates the rules and monitors compliance.