The Creation of India's Caste System

A History of Mankind (69)

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The word “gotra” is still equivalent to lineage in modern Hindu, broadly referring to people who are descendants in an unbroken male line from a common male ancestor or patri-line. Generally speaking, marriage within the same gotra is prohibited by custom, being regarded as incest; this prohibition is often maintained to this day because of its importance in marriages among Hindus, especially among the higher castes.

The even more important word “birth,” jati, is used in all South Asian languages to describe the groups of clans, tribes, communities, and sub-communities in India; all of these “jati” are then distributed under the four “varna”, or castes: Brahmins (priests, scholars and teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers, warriors and administrators), Vaishyas (agriculturalists and traders) and Shudras (laborers and service providers, unable to conduct Vedic sacrifices.)

Those outside of and below the varna system – the untouchable Dalits and the forest-dwelling Adivasi who would later provide foot-soldiers for radical, egalitarian insurrections in India – have the smallest amount of Aryan genes[1]. And, in the Rig Veda, they are specifically cited as Chandala, now a specific sub-class of Dalit, but in ancient India a term meaning “outcast” in the wider sense: victims available for human sacrifice.

This system has persisted on the strength of a complex set of Vedic beliefs based on the notion that proper Dharma (behavior, conduct[2]) leads everybody, regardless of caste, to improvements on one's Karma, so that, after death crowns a properly subservient life, one can be reborn into a higher caste – and thus on and on with the reincarnations until the only way up is Nirvana, a transcendent state of non-being roughly equivalent to the Zoroastrian paradise.