posted
I had a short debate with my brother. He said that the British brought nothing but pain and death to India. I agree that the old empire wasn't some utopian thing, but neither was India. And while the British did damage the Indian culture it also brought many good things.
I was under the impression that the Indian cast system was in place for thousands of years...but my bro says that it was the English that created the Untouchable caste. Is this true? I've tried looking around the net a little but found nothing on a surface scan.
I argued that the British united India in a way it wasn't before through the English language. My bro said that they could all understand each other anyway or at least had a translator cast. Again, that doesn't sound right to me. Any Indian history buffs out there?
[edit for spelling]
[ August 09, 2005, 05:46 AM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
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posted
I believe that the caste system was in place long before the British arrived in India. I don't know about the "Untouchable" caste particularly, although it would surprise me to find out that the Brits created it.
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It's "caste", with a silent 'e' at the end. I think, though, that the British ruled quite well in India; I am particularly impressed with the peaceful withdrawal. They could have ruled for another twenty years if they had been willing to employ tanks and machine guns, secret police and terror; they chose not to.
The other thing is, you don't have to do that much to look better than those old Indian empires, particularly in their declining phases, which is where the Brits come in. Corruption, a really crushing tax burden, essentially debt peonage, some fairly nasty customs like suttee - short of Belgium in the Congo, any European colonial regime of the Victorian era begins to look pretty good.
As for the British inventing the untouchable caste, that's ridiculous. From the Wiki :
quote: Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar wrote:
The Broken Men hated the Brahmins because the Brahmins were the enemies of Buddhism and the Brahmins imposed untouchability upon the Broken Men because they would not leave Buddhism. On this reasoning it is possible to conclude that one of the roots of untouchability lies in the hatred and contempt which the Brahmins created against those who were Buddhist.
Also there's the bit about doing the dirty work; the British can hardly be accused of inventing tanning or night-soil carrying. What they did do was to formalise, or at any rate codify, the caste system. Even early on, they knew that they could not rule India without some kind of consnent of the governed, and took pains to apply Indian law to Indians. But with Western ideas of a fixed, codified law, rather than rulings handed down by individual law-speakers (Brahmins, in India), things got rather worse for the Dalits, as there was suddenly rather less room for maneuver and leeway.
As for the languages, according to the Wiki, the languages of India belong to no less than four language families, to wit, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, and Tibeto-Burman. In other words, about as inter-intelligible as Spanish and Finnish, which, for those of you uncertain about European languages, is to say not at all.
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posted
I'm dating an Indian and I took Hinduism last semester as an audit so...
The caste system has roots that are older than Christianity by at least a thousand years. The Untouchables came about as the caste system spread - what happens when you have a nice, neat social structure, with everyone in their proper places, and then you find a new tribe of people? In Indian history, they, along with the people who were doing the really really dirty jobs become the Untouchables - literally outside of the caste system (so calling the Untouchables a caste is technically wrong).
The British did do a lot for India - the infrastructure and organization they brought hadn't been seen in the subcontinent for a long time.
But you could say the same about our North American "Indians." If Europeans had never invaded, then they wouldn't have all the oppurtunities they have today, right? The British did some good things for the subcontinent, but no people likes to be ruled over by another. And they did a lot of bad things in order to keep their power for as long as they did. They treated Indians quite similarly (at least at first) to how the Native Americans were treated - as humans that were inferior to Europeans.
I don't know this for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if the British sowed dissant among the different ethnicities and groups in India, as a way to keep their colony.
The book Kim by Kipling shows the whole empire-building mindset that the British had. It was the first novel my boyfriend read in his post-colonial literature class - as an example of everything that a true post-colonial novel should not be or do.
As far as understanding each other, well, it's a small miricle that India as a nation has survived for as long as it has. The country is at least as diverse as Europe, in terms of different groups and languages. There may have been a translator caste - I wouldn't know, but there were an awful lot of different subcastes. However, all of the northern Indian languages can trace themselves back to Sanskrit, which is kinda the holy language for Hinduism (like Latin with Catholics). If you speak Sanskrit, and know one or two of the more modern languages, you can probably understand most of the Northern Indian languages without a problem. The southern Indian languages are similar, in that if you learn one or two, you can at least understand other related languages. My boyfriend grew up with Bengali, Hindi, and English, and studied Sanskrit for about 8 years while in school- he lists about ten languages on his resume, though, because he can at least get his point across and understand what others are saying because of his knowledge of Sanskrit.
Today in India the main language in the north is Hindi (although there are plenty of English speakers), and Tamil and English are spoken in the south. If you know English and Hindi you can probably get along in everywhere but the smaller villages.
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I don't know anything about the British in India, but I have enough background in both Hinduism and Buddhism to add something about the caste system in India.
There are four classes and then the Untouchables: Brahmin (priests) Ksatriya (warriors) Vaisya (merchants) Sudra (laborers) --------- Untouchables (outcasts)
The untouchables did everything that the Hindu tradition considered unpure, such as dealing with dead animals and bodies, waste, etc.
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Oddly enough, being an untouchable is a quick route to a cushy government-related (that is, including contractors) job, nowadays, because they have a very strong quota based affirmative-action programs for the lower castes.
Even though the dirt poor in India are nowadays comprised of a nice mix of all classes.
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India was in decline when the British arrived. Like China, there was once a time when India was the greatest place on the globe (they invented the numerals we use today and had plumbing a couple of thousand of years before Christ). But there was a lot of strife between the different groups, and a long series of Muslim rulers, then Hindu rulers, then Muslim...
Sutte, however, is becoming viewed more and more as a backlash against the British rule. Yes, it had happened occasionally in the historic past, but it became a kind of fad in the 1800s. One of those "invaders pushing new religion and way of life onto us, let's see how fanatic we can become in our religion" type of thing. Other unsavory things in Hinduism also became popular around this time as part of that backlash.
Brahmins aren't exactly the "ruling class" in Hinduism or India. They're the priestly class. The kings (and warriors) actually come from the Kshatriya caste. However, the Brahmins are the ones traditionally in charge of religion, and I doubt there's any religion that is more entwined into daily life than Hinduism.
Also, I would disagree that the British brought "codification" to India. The Brahmins had all of the many religious books of Hinduism memorised. A lot of those books said quite a bit on who is exactly to do what. There was a particularly loathsome fellow, Manu, who wrote down a bunch of rules he thought everyone should follow. There wasn't really any basis in Hinduism for his rules, but I guess he was a popular fellow, because they became accepted widely through India.
There are four main language families in India, as KoM pointed out, but the big two are Indo-Aryan (northern, and part of the Indo-European group) and Dravidian (southern).
The untouchables and tribal groups (also outside the caste system, since they aren't Hindu) are actually a fairly large minority in India, and they've used their voting power well to get the quotas set up. It's a pity, in a way, because, while they were and are discriminated against, there are also members of the other castes who aren't doing too well either. A good number of Brahmins work as servents and cooks in others' houses, since they're "clean" in a religious sense, although dirt poor and uneducated.
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One way my brother put it is that while the untouchables did exist already, they had a much more respected role. The idea of the body, the nobles as the head, priests as the heart, warriors the arms, and untouchables as the feet/foundation. He argues that the British changed the way the Indians saw the untouchables...from a important part of society to people who should be looked down on.
I guess you could say something similar happened in Rwanda... when the Europeans took over and put the taller, more European looking tribe as rulers over the shorter people. Thus sparking a horrible hatred that had never existed before but would lead to genocide decades later.
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Uh, in Hinduism the feet are considered as something dirty, not as a foundation. You clean your feet before entering a temple - and cleaning someone else's feet or kissing the feet is paying them a pretty high honor and showing that you respect them greatly. If your foot touches a book or something holy then you're suppose to do a quick puja (prayer and/or sacrifice) and say you're sorry. These aren't rites and ideas that sprung up because of the British - there's a pretty strong historical backing in Hinduism for the idea that the feet are a very impure area of the body.
The untouchables most certainly were an important part of society (someone has to do the dirty jobs), but they were also considered the lowest of the low. If their shadows fell upon a Brahmin, he'd have to spend at least a few hours cleansing himself of the pollution.
So, yeah. You can tell your brother that looking down on the untouchables was very popular in India before the Britishers came.
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I don't see that what the British did as occupiers and lords of the land was necesarily better than the caste system that was in place prior to the Brits. If anything it's possible the Brits exacerbated the problem, and that the lowest castes were treated more poorly, as they were enslaved to make goods for the Colonials to ship back to Mother England.
It isn't like the Brits actually brought "civilization" because India had a rich and complex civilization before that time. It may have been weak at the time the Brits showed up on the scene, but you'd be hard pressed, to say it was uncivilized. I can't see that the Brits rule was terribly benevolent, even if it did create "modern" buracracy. For crying out loud, they didn't reform their textile sweatshops at home until the Progressives forced them to! India was where small downtrodden government bureaucrats went and built themselves mini-empires by downtrodding the natives, because they had guns and bullets.
Obviously the civilization wasn't at the united point it was when it repelled Alexander the Great, but to say that it was totally backward is a misconception.
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