Bharat Ek Khoj 04:Caste Formation

Bharat Ek Khoj—The Discovery of India
A Production of Doordarshan, the Government of India’s Public Service Broadcaster
Episode 4: Caste Formation

With Anang Desai, Inayatullah Kantaroo, Anuradha Tarafdar, Ila Arun, Srichand Makhija, Maqsoom Ali, Salim Ghouse, K.K. Raina, Vishnu Sharma, Lalit Tiwari, Ravi Jhankal

The advent of the Aryans in India raised new problems, racial and political. The conquered race, the Dravidians, had a long background of civilisation behind them, but Nehru has little doubt that the Aryans considered themselves vastly superior and a

wide gulf separated the two races. Then there were indigenous tribes, nomads and forest-dwellers. Out of the conflict and confrontation of races gradually arose the caste system, which in course of the succeeding centuries was to affect Indian life so profoundly.

As the drama reveals, initially the tiller of the soil functioned also as priest, soldier or trader, and everyone shared his problem with everyone else. Indeed there was no privileged class. The caste divisions, originally intended to separate the Aryans from the non-Aryans, ricocheted on the Aryans themselves. Nehru figures out that, in an age when it was customary for the conquerors to exterminate the conquered races, caste enabled a more peaceful solution: fitting the growing specialisation of functions.

Gradually, from among the mass of agriculturists evolved the Vaishyas, as farmers, artisans and merchants; the Kshatriyas, as warriors, rulers; the Brahmins, as priests and thinkers. Below them were the Shudras, as labourers (inferior to farmers) and unskilled workers. Mythologically, Brahmins came from the mouth of Brahma, Kshatriyas from his arms, Vaishyas from his thighs and Shudras from his feet. Nehru points out that this was in keeping with the spirit of the times and kindred civilisations like the Iranians had a four-fold division, though not petrified into castes and the Greeks were entirely dependent on mass slavery.

That these castes must have been in a fluid condition and rigidity came in only later, is illustrated from the epics. In the Valmiki Ramayana, a Brahmin and his wife bring their 14 year old dead child and roundly condemn, for this event, their righteous king Rama who is inclined to accept the blame. In the Mahabharata, the Pandava-guru Drona denies martial training to Ekalavya, the talented son of the hunter-chieftain, but the youth practises before the guru’s statue and becomes a mighty archer. Discovered later, Drona asks him to cut off his right thumb by way of guru‘s ‘fee’ to save the Kshatriya ‘pride’. Probably, caste was neither Aryan nor Dravidian, but an attempt at the social organisation of different races, rationalisation of the facts as they existed at the time, opines Nehru. It brought degradation afterwards, and is still a burden and a curse.
Producer Doordarshan
Language Hindi

Credits

Uploaded by Public.Resource.Org
Based on Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
With Roshan Seth as Jawaharlal Nehru
Om Puri as the Narrator
Produced and Directed by Shyam Benegal
Chief Assistant Director was Mandeep Kakkar
Executive Producer Raj Plus
Script by Shama Zaldi and Sunil Shanbag
A production of Doordarshan

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