IB World Religions 4.2.5. Society and Ritual: Varna, Jati and the Varnashramadharma Notes

4.2.5. Society and Ritual: Varna, Jati and the Varnashramadharma

The four varnas

1. Hindu texts describe society as ordered into four varna (classes, literally colours), and traditional ritual assigns each of them its own duties and its own entitlements.
2. The scriptural image most often cited is the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda (X.90), in which a cosmic person is offered in sacrifice and the four groups emerge from his mouth, arms, thighs and feet.
3. The four are Brahmins (priests and teachers), kshatriyas (rulers and warriors), vaishyas (merchants, farmers and herders) and shudras (servants and labourers).
4. The first three are called dvija (twice-born) because their males may receive the upanayana, the sacred thread rite that admits them to Vedic study. Shudras are traditionally not given it.
5. Hindus disagree about what the hymn establishes. Some read it as a divine ordering of society, while reformers such as Swami Dayananda Saraswati read varna as a description of aptitude and occupation rather than of birth.
6. In ritual terms varna weighs most heavily wherever Vedic mantra is involved: who may recite it, who may officiate, and who may commission the rite.

Jati and ritual life

1. Jati (birth group) is the unit Hindus actually live in, and India has several thousand of them, each with its own name, region, traditional occupation and customs.
2. Jatis are traditionally endogamous, so marriage is arranged within the group. Arranging marriage is itself the main ritual through which a jati reproduces itself.
3. Each jati carries its own ritual repertoire. The family deity (kuladevata), wedding customs, death rites and festival observances vary from one jati to the next and from one region to another.
4. Jatis are mapped onto the four varnas, but the fit is loose and contested. Many jatis dispute the rank others assign them, and one jati can be ranked differently in neighbouring districts.
5. Colonial censuses from 1871 onwards required Indians to state a caste, and historians such as Nicholas Dirks argue this hardened arrangements that had been more local and more fluid. Other scholars hold the hierarchy was already firm well before colonial rule.
6. In contemporary practice jati regulates who cooks, who is invited and who eats alongside whom at a wedding or a temple feast far more visibly than varna does.

Sva-dharma and ritual duty

1. Sva-dharma (one's own duty) is the personal code that follows from a Hindu's varna, jati, gender and stage of life. It is what dharma looks like for this particular person rather than for people in general.
2. The Bhagavad Gita states the principle at its sharpest when Krishna tells Arjuna it is better to perform one's own dharma imperfectly than another's well (3.35, repeated at 18.47).
3. Applied to ritual, sva-dharma means each group has rites it must perform and rites it must not. The Brahmin's daily sandhyavandana, the twilight prayer built on Vedic verses, is not required of a shudra householder.
4. The duties are graded rather than simply ranked. Protection is assigned to the kshatriya and trade and animal husbandry to the vaishya, and each is treated as a religious obligation and not merely as work.
5. Hindus who follow this teaching describe it as a division of religious labour in which the whole social order, between them, sustains sanatana dharma.
6. Critics inside and outside the tradition, most prominently Bhimrao Ambedkar, argue that the same teaching fixes people in inherited disadvantage and gives that disadvantage religious sanction.

The varnashramadharma

1. Varnashramadharma joins two axes: varna, the class a Hindu is born into, and ashrama, the stage of life a Hindu has reached.
2. The four ashramas are brahmacharya (celibate student), grihastha (householder), vanaprastha (forest dweller or retiree) and sannyasa (renouncer).
3. Duty is read off the intersection of the two. A Brahmin student's obligations differ from a Brahmin householder's, and both differ from a vaishya householder's.
4. The scheme is prescriptive rather than descriptive. Most Hindus have historically lived their whole adult lives as householders and never entered vanaprastha or sannyasa at all.
5. Ritual marks the transitions most clearly. The upanayana opens brahmacharya, marriage opens grihastha, and the renouncer performs his own funeral rites to mark his departure from the householder world.
6. The Laws of Manu set the scheme out in great detail, while other Hindu texts and teachers qualify it heavily, so Hindus have never treated it as a single agreed rulebook.

Purity, access and priesthood

1. Traditional ritual works with a distinction between shaucha (purity) and ashaucha (impurity), which describes a ritual state rather than a moral judgment or a claim about hygiene.
2. Everyone contracts impurity temporarily, through a birth in the family, a death, menstruation or contact with certain substances. It is lifted by bathing, by the passing of time and by prescribed rites.
3. Traditional teaching also treats some hereditary occupations as permanently polluting, and it is here that the ritual system has borne hardest on particular jatis.
4. Brahmins hold the priestly role in most temple and domestic rites, though not every Brahmin is a priest, and many temple priests are poor and carry little authority outside the sanctuary.
5. Access varies widely. Large temples run on the agama manuals restrict the inner sanctum to trained Brahmin priests, while countless village goddess shrines have never used Brahmin priests at all and are served by their own hereditary specialists.
6. Bhakti (devotional) movements have often bypassed the whole apparatus, teaching that love of a chosen deity needs no priest, no Sanskrit and no qualification of purity.

Dalits and ritual exclusion

1. Below the four varnas, traditional texts place the groups they call chandalas, later described as avarna (outside varna), who carried the heaviest ritual restrictions of all.
2. Members of these communities today largely name themselves Dalit (broken, or oppressed), a term chosen in preference to untouchable and to Gandhi's coinage harijan (children of God), which many found condescending.
3. The restrictions were severe and ritual in form: exclusion from temples, separate wells, a prohibition on hearing Vedic recitation, and in some regions rules governing distance and even shadow.
4. Dalit devotional traditions are old and substantial. The fifteenth-century leatherworker sant Ravidas, whose verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, is revered by the Ravidassia community, which maintains its own places of worship.
5. Temple-entry campaigns ran through the twentieth century, among them the Vaikom satyagraha of 1924 to 1925 and the Temple Entry Proclamation issued in Travancore in 1936. Many temples opened, though practice on the ground has stayed uneven.
6. Hindus disagree sharply about how this exclusion relates to Hindu teaching. Reform movements hold it is a corruption of a tradition that finds atman in every being, while Ambedkar concluded it could not be separated from the tradition and led a mass conversion to Buddhism in 1956.
7. Contemporary Hindu organizations respond differently, some running temple-entry and inter-dining programmes as religious work, others treating the question mainly as one of social welfare rather than of ritual.