Indian people partying: members of a high caste
Why is caste important?
Castes were the central feature of people’s identities in ancient India. Beginning soon after the Yamnaya arrived in India, about 1500 BC, people in India began to divide everyone into one of five groups, or castes.
Who are the Yamnaya?
All our ancient India articles
Caste system as science
People thought of the caste system as people’s mirror of the way the universe worked.
Ancient Indian science
History of astronomy
Just as the sun and the planets each had to follow its prescribed path, in the same way people had to live according to their caste. This parallel between the real world and the caste system made caste seem natural and impossible to change or avoid. Caste gave some people special rights and privileges that other people did not have.
Yale professor Mridu Rais talks about caste
The Rig Veda and caste
A Hindu epic, the Rig Veda, describes each of these castes. There were really four castes, and then the lowest group had no caste, and were known as Untouchables. Below the untouchables were the slaves.
What is the Rig Veda?
Slavery in medieval India
History of slavery
What is Hinduism?
Ancient Indian religion
Who are untouchables?
Untouchables usually did the worst jobs, like cleaning up people’s poop from the gutters, or collecting garbage.
Who are Shudras?
The lowest of the castes was the Shudras – the servants and farmhands who did not own their own business or their own land, and who had to work for other people. But gradually a lot of land-owning farmers fell into this caste, too. Probably the largest number of people belonged to this caste.
History of farming
Ancient Indian economy
Who are Vaishyas?
Above them were the Vaishyas, or farmers and traders, who owned their own farms or businesses. There were a lot of them, too.
Who are Kshatriya?
Above these were the Kshatriya, or warriors. There were not very many Kshatriyas. A lot of Ksatriyas were in the army, or leaders in other ways. Women could be Kshatriyas, whether or not they were actually warriors (and they could also sometimes be warriors).
Who are Brahmans?
The most powerful caste was the Brahmans, the priests and leaders. There were only a few of them. Only Brahman men were allowed to go to school, or to teach in schools (Brahman women could not go to school).
Indian schools and education
There were also a lot of smaller groups within these castes, who each had their own traditional jobs and rights. So there were really hundreds of different castes. People who came from different castes could not eat together. Usually people from one caste did not marry or make friends with people from another caste.
Learn by Doing – A project with caste
Friendship in ancient India
Slavery in ancient India
Bibliography and further reading about people in ancient India:
Your works are example of a ongoing global intellectual fraud against India’s great ancient history. Distorted, misinterpreted.. outsider ..biased missionary view to look into our sound scriptures. Shame on you guys. Delete this anti-Hindustani site. If you are really knowledgeable than try to present the actual system of past. Don’t interpret and speculate to diminish our oldest advanced culture . You white looser people. Less capable.. less advanced.
Your educational system has been taken over by propagandists. You are being taught things that are not true. That happens here in the United States as well – maybe worse than it does in India. It happens in every country. But what we do here is present the truth as we see it, not the propaganda people learn in school.
thx for formation 0==[]===========> lol
This text was helpful since we are learning about the Caste System.
I’m glad we could help!