Why Caste Formed In India and how the heck it could have been maintained! – A Structural Model

The following article is the original work of the author – Dr Rajorshi Datta. As such its views should be taken to be the opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Brown Pundits. If you find this article controversial the author invites you to post a respectful comment below to voice your arguments and perspectives.

 

I’ve gone back to 2014 looking at articles and podcasts posted about caste. There is information on the social and religious origins of caste within sacred texts like the Vedas and Dharmasutras. For the astute reader there are accounts from Megasthenes, Fa Hien and Xuanzhang whose writings present oblique perspectives on how caste or varna and jati was viewed by contemporary people living within or visiting the system. There’s a lot been said about the fact it exists strongly in India compared to China and Europe, and the genetic evidence to support this.

But there’s not so much about why this phenomena was so strong and strict in the Indian subcontinent and nowhere else. Here I present my thesis as to why it wasn’t luck but structural predisposition which sent India down its unique path of strict caste endogamy.

A controversial topic – why did the caste system form in India?

We know hierarchies existed in East Asian societies.

Medieval Europe was also hierarchical. Prior to the feudal system Rome was a society heavily reliant on slave labour, as were the Greeks before them.

Egypt had a hierarchical society.

Iran or Persia shared an early form of varna with India down to similar sounding Avestan/Sanskrit names.

Derivatives of Indian caste was imported to Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives which today lie outside the borders of the India/Pakistan (which will be assumed to combined together when we are talking about “India” as a genetic landscape within this article,) today but even in these areas it wasn’t so deeply rooted and did not pervade over time.

 

David Reich’s models based upon his now famous research showed us an incredible thing. That there were many endogamous groups; thousands of jatis with independent founders and runs of homozygosity comparable to long isolated island populations. It was pan-civilizational, ritualized in religious traditions, stable for 1,500-2,500 years, (or up to 3,500 starting in select areas of the Deccan according to Priya Moorjani’s latest work).

Very low gene flow is shown between neighboring castes within the same village. Two Indian groups 5km apart can be genetically more distant than two Europeans living 1,000km apart. It would seem impossible to hold genetic endogamy to that degree.

All societies have a hierarchy. But humans love to interbreed. If you put them in close proximity with another group they will breed, or at least that is the rule everywhere in the world besides India.

 

When this topic is discussed and India is compared with other subcontinents the conversation often retreats to explanations like the “weak state and strong religion”.

People often say things like the “Chinese civil service exams” are an example of why their society is meritocratic, and why they didn’t have a strong jati system.

 

None of these provide a complete structural model to explain why – I will attempt to provide that based on the following upstream points. Essentially, to borrow a line from the matrix, what happened, happened and couldn’t have happened any other way.

Human behaviour is indeed complex but still works within parameters. An advanced life form watching us with a complete understanding of Earth’s ecology and human cognitive genetics could explain how and why cultures formed and made the choices they did early in their development. Individual decision making is not as important a factor as the geographical and ecological factors of the environment people lived in.

 

In this article we will refer to subcontinents as ‘containers’.

The most upstream variables which determine the preconditions of strong caste within a ‘container’ are listed here in no particular order –

1. Overall size

2. Geographical fragmentation – (hard barriers or soft ecological gradients)– directly linked to the size and centralization capacity of the state

3. Container Entry Point – how easy it is for groups of people to reach and enter the container from the outside

4. Exit points – how easy it is for people to leave their local region. We will also examine how easy it is to leave the container itself.

5. Phenotypic variance – how many physically different looking groups are visible in the container

6. Phenotypic persistence – how long were the physical differences between groups visible before mixing or demographic replacement homogenized the container. *

7. Population density (eg, high and uninterrupted vs low with periods of reset) – this factor is amplified downstream when coupled with low exit society which evolves strict rules of inheritance.

8. Population continuity – The extent of mass death during times of major upheaval. Did large swathes of the population repeatedly die off and allow a reset of the culture or the genetics or did the society keep these older elements and any new developments were layered over it?

 

*     Note on phenotypic persistence – Mixing in India between different racial groups happened prolifically before caste as an institution. This was before convergence and stratification within one civilization.

 

A good analogy is this – picture the first Emperor of Earth is crowned next week. Right now everyone is aware of racial differences but no strict planet wide caste exists (yet) – we are mixing. Then over time there develops a high population density within this global society and low exit options (individuals and clans can’t leave Earth to live elsewhere) – suddenly something happens, an invasion or a breakdown in the power of the Empire’s centralized authority. The government is weakened and the welfare state/safety net is wiped out.

 

Now the system isn’t so stable and people have no choice but to fall back on family-kinship networks. Different groups of people stop mixing; each tribe looks out for itself. This can be a draft model of what happened in India – nobody trusts people who are different anymore.

What is the result? Localization and endogamy within a civilization.

 

If there was one equation to predict a society with the core upstream variable for strong caste formation it would be: high population density + high population continuity + low exit options + extreme internal diversity (geographical OR phenotypical variance/persistence).

 

Alternate equations may have a different result if you, the reader, plug it into your thought experiment.

 

Low Geo frag x low container entry x low exit x high density = strong state more likely

High geo frag x high container entry x high exit x low density = weak state more likely

 

High geographic fragmentation X large size x low-medium population density = high internal exit or internal migration capacity – a high option for people to exit their present local conditions.

 

High pop density x high population continuity = Landed hereditary elite aristocracy more likely to develop

 

The degree of political centralization (weak state vs strong state) of a given region across time will also be discussed as a confounding variable but not as a prime mover.

Other downstream factors of the above equation mentioned briefly will be level of village or localized autonomy, and elite replacement (how frequent and total was the replacement of the elite group versus layering of new groups over persisting old groups).

 

In this comparative case study we will be exploring these variable equations (eg density x exit x diversity). We will compare India, Europe, China, South East Asia, Japan, Egypt, Persia and New Guinea. The Bantu groups within Africa will also be discussed.

 

Intuitively we would assume the other “worlds” viable for formation of caste would be limited to East Asia and Europe. But other zones are studied to provide clarity on measures where India does not sit on one end of the spectrum. For example when we examine the case of Southeast Asia we note it is even more fragmented than India. Traditionally the conversation around caste has focused on the diversity of India’s people which precludes a “strong state” to explain why caste endogamy was not prevented. It is a more balanced and realistic to see India as the focal point of a ‘goldilocks zone’ where complex factors explains its genetic uniqueness.

 

Traditional Bantu societies at the peak of their expansion were quite similar to Vedic society. It provides a striking opportunity to view the comparative formation of caste. Hereditary status and occupations was a feature but eventually did not crystalize it the way it did in India.

 

New Guinea as an unusually population dense example of a society with extreme diverse groups of clans and tribes replete with Neolithic habits and farming techniques within close proximity with low exit scores… but not forming a collectivist civilization which coalesced into the complexity required for caste.

 

I aim to provide you with a structural model which can be stress tested in its fundamentals with any society – and update the model – Mesopotamia, Japan, the Islamic world, Iran, Egypt, Aztecs, Incas, all can be used.

I would also be interested to hear from people who can make contributions about the specific factors pertinent to the Central and South of India.

Join me in part 2 as we expand this model with detailed information including the history and geography of civilizations starting with India, China and Europe.

The following article is the original work of the author – Dr Rajorshi Datta. As such its views should be taken to be the opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Brown Pundits. If you find this article controversial the author invites you to post a respectful comment below to voice your arguments and perspectives.