What everyone gets wrong about varna system

The varna system model has immense popularity, in popular discourse as well as academic scholarship, as a heuristic, an idealized abstraction of the caste system and sometimes as an accurate representation of social reality. While the model can be defended on the first two counts — as a heuristic and an idealized abstraction — it leads to many problems, misconceptions and confusions when it is treated as an observable social order. 

In the varna system, the entire society is divided up in four classes — Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra — with descending order of status and symbolic power. However, many academics and public intellectuals fail to note that this is a textual model that emerged in the ancient Brahminic Sanskritic tradition. But this fact has immense implications for how we understand the varna system. 

The reason the caste system is fundamentally different from the varna system is not because they explain different realities but rather they explain reality differently. What we have come to understand as the caste system is a product of modern knowledge production practices, which were set in motion in the 19th century with the institution of public schools, spread of printing technologies, colonial data collection and ethnography, public sphere debates and scholarly societies. Social movements too played an important role in contributing to how people understood caste. The involvement of diverse actors in shaping this knowledge of what the caste system is, has continued to the current moment.^[1]And now scholars even question whether we should think of caste as a system at all. See, for example, Salovaara, I. M. (2022). Caste as Process in Post-Liberalisation India. South Asia: Journal of … Continue reading

As a result of this intense scholarly activity, we have a better idea of how the caste system functions. Despite two centuries of work, we still do not know everything about it, nor do we have consensus on all points. Further, social practices, cultural norms and institutions constantly change, and this change can only be captured through continuous investigations.

When one compares this lineage of knowledge production with the varna system model, the shortcomings of the latter become obvious. The varna system was not developed to understand the social world; it served very different functions for the Brahmin pandits who propounded it first and then reinforced it over centuries. The varna system is not a sociological model but rather an ideological one. It was first mentioned in the Rig Veda and then systematically developed in the Dharmashastras, with Brahmin religious scholars laying out elaborate rules for their own class and everybody else. At the time and place in which this model was created, the modern knowledge practices did not exist. 

This does not mean this model had no impact. It surely oriented the behaviour of Brahmin men themselves and also how they looked at and judged Brahmin women and non-Brahmin classes. It may also have influenced state policies, especially in the legal domain, considering the influential positions Brahmins held in royal courts, their religious power and scholarly hegemony. 

Once the varna model was formalised in the Mauryan period, it was reiterated in all Brahminic Sanskrit texts including the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Puranas and the commentaries on the Dharmashastras. It will not be an exaggeration to say that Brahmins were obsessed with the varna system for two millennia (and many continue to be even now). But while talking about the varna system, people often forget that its origin, propagation and deployment (in whatever limited way) remained a Brahmin prerogative. 

It is very common for academics and public commentators to label a particular caste as Shudra, Vaishya or Kshatriya. I find it deeply troubling. These terms are not sociological categories. When you use these terms to categorise castes, you normalise the varna system, accept it as a legitimate sociological model and reinforce the hierarchy intended by the Brahmin class.

Until the British attempted to slot people in the four varnas in their censuses, it was only Brahmins who could decide what caste could belong to what varna. When public commentators fight over what caste should belong to what varna, they voluntarily take up the role of Brahmins. If you want to denote the relative status of a caste in the caste hierarchy, there are other ways to do that than resorting to the deeply Brahminical concept of varna. 

Since people forget that the varna system was an ideological project of the Brahmins, they engage in debates such as whether South India has a varna system or not; whether a particular caste is Kshatriya or Shudra. These questions make sense only if you are a medieval Brahmin scholar obsessed with categorising everybody in the four classes (I am looking at you, Kamalakara Bhatta). I am not aware whether medieval Brahmins like Kamalakara Bhatta exhaustively categorised castes into the four classes; even if they could attempt this for their specific region, they could not do this for the entirety of the Indian subcontinent, nor could they be exhaustive in actual reality. Further, they were arm-chair scholars, not ethnographers or census commissioners; nor can we treat their categorisation as representation of social reality (if we for a moment treat varna system as an index of caste power). 

In sum, we need to stop naturalising the varna system in our writing. The only way to engage with it can be to understand how it originated in the ancient Brahminic traditions and how it has been taken up by various communities and individuals since then. In my opinion, it even fails to qualify for the label of social construct; it’s merely a Brahmin men’s construct that has managed to fool many academics and public commentators.