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By force-fitting caste into reductive Marxist class analysis, the progressive and left-leaning Indian intelligentsia has made seeing caste even harder.
varnas—Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (servants).
avarna castes, the Ati-Shudras, subhumans, arranged in hierarchies of their own—the Untouchables, the Unseeables, the
Dalit President and even a Dalit Chief Justice.
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)
Mayawati, four-term Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh—a Dalit, a single woman,
Even among these dollar billionaires the distribution of wealth is a steep pyramid in which the cumulative wealth of the top ten outstrips the forty-five below them. Seven out of those top ten are Vaishyas, all of them CEOs of major corporations with business interests all over the world. Between them they own and operate ports, mines, oilfields, gas fields, shipping companies, pharmaceutical companies, telephone networks, petrochemical plants, aluminium plants, cellphone networks, television channels, fresh food outlets, high schools, film production companies, stem cell storage systems,
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They are: Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries Ltd), Lakshmi Mittal (Arcelor Mittal), Dilip Shanghvi (Sun Pharmaceuticals), the Ruia brothers (Ruia Group), K.M. Birla (Aditya Birla Group), Savitri Devi Jindal (O.P. Jindal Group), Gautam Adani (Adani Group) and Sunil Mittal (Bharti Airtel). Of the remaining forty-five, nineteen are Vaishyas too. The rest are for the most part Parsis, Bohras and Khattris (all mercantile castes) and Brahmins.
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS),
“Brahmin Power”, the writer Khushwant Singh
Gandhi’s life and his writing—48,000 pages bound into ninety-eight volumes of collected
Ambedkar thought of the Constitution as a work in progress. Like Thomas Jefferson, he believed that unless every generation had the right to create a new constitution for itself, the earth would belong to “the dead and not the
Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi
Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.
“Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and
History of the Indian Freedom Struggle, E.M.S. Namboodiripad,
Madhu Kishwar (Tehelka, 11 February 2006) who says “the much reviled caste system has played a very significant role in making Indian democracy vibrant by making it possible for people to offer a good measure of resistance to centralised, authoritarian power structures that came to be imposed during colonial rule and were preserved even after Independence”.
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) (1999).
Sukta 90 in Book X of the Rig Veda tells the story of the myth of creation. It describes the sacrifice of the Purusha (primeval man), from whose body the four varnas and the entire universe emerged. When (the gods) divided the Purusha, his mouth became Brahmin, his arms Kshatriya, his thighs Vaishya, and Shudra sprang from his feet. See Doniger (translation, 2005). Some scholars believe that Sukta is a latter-day interpolation into the Rig Veda.
Ambedkar’s Pakistan or the Partition of India (1945), first published as Thoughts on Pakistan (1940), and featured now in BAWS 8.
