The Indian caste system and it’s “Untouchability”

The caste system is a system for determining the class or assigning a status to people from birth. The causes, effects, and solutions of the caste system in India are described below:

The main reason for creating the caste system in India is the caste assignment based on professional specialization. Four classes of the caste system: Four classes include:

• Brahmins – priesthood class.
• Kshatriyas – a class of warriors and rulers.
• Vaishyas – a commercial class.
• Sudras – the lowest of four traditional classes involved in household members and workers, etc.

The caste system has many disadvantages, such as:

• Promotes inequality
• Undemocratic by nature
• False differentiation in superiority and inferiority
• It increases the difference between people from the upper and lower caste.
• People fall victim to the caste.

Education will help people realize the disadvantages of the caste system. There is a need for broad social change for equality. There should include special classes in schools that give children value and moral education.  Thanks to better learning and economic progress, people belonging to different castes mix and cooperate.

India’s caste system is perhaps the world’s longest surviving social hierarchy. A defining feature of Hinduism, caste encompasses a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity. A person is considered a member of the caste into which he or she is born and remains within that caste until death, although the particular ranking of that caste may vary among regions and over time. Differences in status are traditionally justified by the religious doctrine of karma, a belief that one’s place in life is determined by one’s deeds in previous lifetimes.

Traditional scholarship has described this more than 2,000-year-old system within the context of the four principal varnas, or large caste categories. In order of precedence these are the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Ksyatriyas (rulers and soldiers), the Vaisyas (merchants and traders), and the Shudras (laborers and artisans). A fifth category falls outside the varna system and consists of those known as “untouchables” or Dalits; they are often assigned tasks too ritually polluting to merit inclusion within the traditional varna system. Almost identical structures are also visible in Nepal.

Despite its constitutional abolition in 1950, the practice of “untouchability”-the imposition of social disabilities on persons by reason of birth into a particular caste- remains very much a part of rural India. Representing over one-sixth of India’s population-or some 160 million people-Dalits endure near complete social ostracization. “Untouchables” may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes. They may not use the same wells, visit the same temples, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls. Dalit children are frequently made to sit at the back of classrooms. In what has been called India’s “hidden apartheid,” entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste.

“Untouchability” is reinforced by state allocation of resources and facilities; separate facilities are provided for separate caste-based neighborhoods. Dalits often receive the poorer of the two, if they receive any at all. In many villages, the state administration installs electricity, sanitation facilities, and water pumps in the upper-caste section, but neglects to do the same in the neighboring, segregated Dalit area. Basic amenities such as water taps and wells are also segregated, and medical facilities and the better, thatched-roof houses exist exclusively in the upper-caste colony. As revealed by the case study below on the earthquake in Gujarat, these same practices hold true even in times of great natural disaster.