varna
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FlyDie, Volume Two
Nineteen more FlyDie comments across six threads: the three pillars of caste, what the Mughals took from the land, how the Rig Veda got written, Kerala’s three-cornered trade, and Bollywood…
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The evolving understanding of varNa in Indian history
Nachiketa, writing as a self-described informed layperson, traces how varna evolved from the Rigvedic priest and warrior elites through the Vaishya and Shudra categories to the modern understanding shaped under…
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What Genetics Can, and Cannot, Explain About Caste
X.T.M summarises a WhatsApp exchange between two contributors over what ancestry data can show about caste, noting that no group maps cleanly onto caste or purity, and that the real…
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Varna is Indo-European and jati is Indian
Razib Khan observes that most Indo-European societies had occupational caste systems but only the subcontinent has jati, suggests the Indo-Aryans adopted indigenous forms of strict endogamy, and speculates that jati…
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History of India Series: Episode 4 – The Vedic Age
Maneesh Taneja talks with Shrikanth Krishnamacharya and Gaurav Lele about the Vedic age in the History of India series: its origins, literature and culture, recitation techniques, the layers of Vedic…
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Early Hinduism – the epic stratification
Nachiketa offers a self-described highly speculative account of how jati-varna stratification emerged, bringing together early Indian texts and the Sramana traditions of Buddhists, Jainas and Ajivikas, and contrasting their detailed…
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How the BJP Became the Bahujan Janata Party
The author argues that the BJP, long dismissed as a Brahmin-Baniya party, now draws a mandate from Bahujans as well as its upper-caste base, breaking the habit of voting by…
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The myth of Brahmin supremacy!
Razib Khan argues that ‘Brahmin privilege’ and ‘Brahmin supremacy’ are imported analogues of ‘white privilege’ and ‘white supremacy’, and disputes a quoted claim that varna literally means colour and that…
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Genetical clarifications on caste
Following an earlier post, a geneticist uses jati and varna to avoid the European word caste, and argues South Asia’s population-genetic structure is unusual because groups remain genetically distinct, unlike…
