As everyone learns in school, when Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, he thought he had reached India, and therefore called the Native Americans “Indians.” It was a name that stuck, and it has created confusion ever since; thus people often say “Asian Indian” when referring to the true Indians of India. In fact the Europeans who invaded North and South America in about a. d. 1500 dealt with the natives using methods similar to those of the Indo-Europeans who invaded India in about 1500 b. c. In both situations, a group with greater military strength subdued the natives, killing off many and treating the rest as second-class citizens.
The Rig Vega (REEG VAY-dah) describes battles between the Indo-Europeans and the natives of India, but for the most part the invaders used the caste system to control them. The word “caste” (KAST) is similar in meaning to class, a term for various levels in society—for instance, rich, poor, and middle class. But caste has much more far-reaching implications.
In America, for instance, a poor person who works hard has a strong chance of becoming wealthy and thus changing his or her class; not so in the caste system, which the Aryans imposed, and which the Indian government did not outlaw until the twentieth century. A person was born into a caste and could never hope to change his or her status. Rules of caste dictated all kinds of social situations and even came to have a religious significance as well.
At the time they invaded India, the Aryans had a more or less typical class system, which, though it kept the poor people down, was still not as rigid as the caste system. The caste system came into being after the invasion and probably resulted from the Indo-Europeans' fear of the people they had conquered. The native Indians greatly outnumbered them; therefore, in order to keep themselves from being swallowed
By the larger population, the Aryans created a system to prevent intermarriage between natives and themselves.
At the time of the invasion, warriors occupied the upper classes of Aryan society. In the caste system, priests outranked them—an interesting change, given the later religious significance of castes. Thus the top caste became the Brahmans (BRAH-muhnz), priests whose name was taken from the Sanskrit word for God. Next, but close in rank to the Brahmans, came the warriors, or Kshatriyas (K'SHAH-tree-ahz). Well below the Kshatriyas were the landowners and tradespeople, known as Vaisyas (vah-EES-yahz). Far below the Vaisyas were the Shu-dras (SHOO-drahz), who were servants.
But there was an even lower rank than the Shudras, one so low it was not even part of the caste system: the Untouchables. The Untouchables did jobs that nobody else wanted to do, such as hauling waste. The Indo-Europeans classified the native peoples they had conquered as Untouchables; no wonder, then, that many of the Harappans' descendants escaped Indo-European rule. The ones who fled came to be known as Dravidians. The Dravidians ultimately moved to south India and the island of Ceylon (seh-LAHN), which in modern times is the nation of Sri Lanka (SHREE LAHNG-kah). Though they initially adopted the religion brought by the Indo-Europeans, as Untouchables they had little reason to embrace Hinduism; therefore in time they accepted a new faith, one that rejected the caste system.
World History
