@obscu[...]
11 hours ago
How many of the current Brahmin sects are actually Brahmins of the old India? I am asking this because there must have been colonial "Brahmin" stooges who have distorted the hindu texts like crazy.
@darkprince2490
1 hour ago (edited)
to be honest, almost all jatis in ancient india were well versed in mantras and performed their own pujas and rituals. They would have been indistinguishable, on the basis of adherence and dedication to dharma, to a lutyens type modernist from what we call brahmins today.
For brahmins, the gotra is indistinguishable from the kula. While for all others, the gotra and kula are separate. The native explanation for this is that at some point in time an ancient rishi was the guru of the kshatriya/vaishya/sudra with the same gotra. Gotras are also taken directly from the Devas or their equivalents ie, a natural being like a mountain. Gotras are shared across kulas. All varnas and kulas were thus integrated. Rajiv Malhotra has recorded that one kula contained all 4 varna.
(Don't try to parse out the above at the level of mathematical logic.. it integrates at a higher plane than the mere mundane.. at the plane of guna and karma.
Certain Brahmin families were associated with certain kshatriya/vaishya/sudra families across generations. The same brahmin family would officate at the wedding of multiple generation of one kula. In a wedding, the bride and groom would each bring their own brahmin ritualist. Often the family members would chant alongside the priest, they knew the verses if not for any reason than the ubiquity of marriages in ancient bharata.
Brahmins were specialists in ritual - they are not the same as "priests" (ie enforcers of [church] doctrine) of the west.
All bharatiyas (one moral community) belonged to the three varnas and were thus adhikaris to the veda. Vaishyas or farmers made up the bulk of the populace, unlike what modern detractors say. Sudras were a minority and associated with temples - eg devadasi and shilpis - Their emphasis on Kama refers to Kama/enjoyment of the Lord, not to mundane enjoyment. The term sudra gets used differently in different contexts in our texts... especially in buddhist texts.. just because a sudra is being mentioned, does not mean it maps out onto some dharmik community.
Mlecchas are outside our moral community because they do not recognize varna type inter-dependence, they have only 2 categories - master and slave and they need to invent apologia and ideologies for the same. We do not. This was pinted out even in our ancient texts where mlecchas were said to have only 2 categories.
Coming to your question, it is possible that those families that understood the colonial game jettisoned their kula association and kept only the gotra. This would make them synonymous with the ancient rishis.
In Bharata, there was no collaborator class, no financier class, no sepoy class, these are known to have come along with colonialism and played middleman and enforcer roles for colonialism. so no need for these classes.
Native bharata was not a colonial society outside of the theories of the missionary and his pet, the indologist.
Note that these are true "classes" in that they are utterly separate from one another, often in terms of brute genetics like Africans and whites in america.
Brahmins were neither a class nor a community unto themselves. Rather, they were a part of the wider community of Hindus. This is not some point of activism - it was actually the prior native state of affairs.
There is no such thing as some "secret brahmin cabal" trying to subvert other jatis; it is clear from this very language used seculars accusing brahmins, that they are projecting the conspiracy laden state-of-affairs in the west and monotheism onto brahmins. That is, there is an exact match in the common language of demonizatioin used in the west to that attributed by seculars supposedly to brahmins.
A class/tribe separate/ruling over others comes from monotheism, where the believer nonbeliever distinction led to ideology-based separateness and predation. This was all absent from Bharata - there were no ethnic fights between south and north, between biharis and bengalis, between telugus and Tamils... between vaishnavas and saivas... all these came with western colonialism when they applied their theories and policies based on those theories to bharata.
Historically: Brahmins were always integrated into their communities. Once the gurukuls etc were destroyed, it was only then that pan-indian associations of the basis of "caste" (same master slave dynamics as the monotheist term tribe, except mapped out ordinally into more categories, to inlcude an enabler nobility class between priest and peasant, later replaced by the professional) came into being, not just for brahmins, but other indian groups as well eg jats. The politics of jati and identity are traceable to this period, and was later exacerbated by mandal reservation politics (started by missionaries on the basis of prior EIC preferential hiring to service positions in the colonial state including babudom and colonial army). As traditional livelihoods became endangered and communities transitioned, they were picked off one-by-one by the colonial state's political exigencies until they gelled into interest and identity groups. This was never the case in ancient bharata. Did Dronacharya organize a mob of brahmins demanding permanent "employment", or did he go from Raja to Raja?
Varna means category. Only when the term is essentialized (eg as the domain of some community, in colonial or translation discourse) does it become problematic. Devas have varnas. Pasu, pakshi have varna. Each varna has its own fighting weapon.
The above is necessarily an "idealized" account - I do not contend that ancient bharata was a peaceful utopia. But the type of (exaggerated) ethnic conflicts and street level hatred we see today is due to colonials. Even Jitendra tyagi who converted back said that there was no animosity at ordinary level of public functioning before the predatory religions. Will write more. Also see kusumlata Kedia's yt talk on rasthra versus state, and the books by Martin Fasek and Satish Sharma.
Jai Sri Ram
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"Caste" is a European category that refers to the slave feudal system of Europe where everyone was enslaved by the church-nobility. this system was transferred to the colonies during colonialism (while the european population was "democratized" - basically every european took on the attitude of a colonizer). and this system was falsely mapped onto jati varna by indologists using AIT (which is false or fabricated) in a colonial blame-shifting and justification exercise. Casteism was also the internalized colonial attitude of colonial collaborators - basically colonial sepoys were the ones who tried to introduce "casteism" into India by "aping" western/monotheist attitudes to "lesser peoples", even while denying it, and also by their support to colonial theories (eg, AIT and its various sociological versions).
If you look at the purported evidences for caste in india, it reads like basically a translation of the monotheist injunctions against the unbelievers.
The original feudal slave system in Europe was theologically mandated in monotheism. That is precisely why they went looking for the "scriptural mandate" of this "system" in native texts. Just as Europe looked on its colonies as mere resources, so too are European ideologies parasitical upon native categories ie , in an exploitative fashion; the give-take relationship between native categories gets remapped using ideological one-way terms ie, an ideological lens is imposed on an experiential and tradition-based culture. In heathen cultures like India, there was no such thing as other-ization, stereotyping, ideologies, doctrines, theology, dogma, religion, ghetto-ization, or even exploitation.
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