Is caste-system of any use?what is the definition in reality?

It is a kind of division, right? It is a kind of division—division that says that here is this person who must engage in this kind of occupation and here is this person who must engage in this kind of occupation.

The Upanishad is categorically refuting such a system because such a system exists purely on the basis of body and flesh and bones.

You see, the ego has a greatly vested interest in thinking of superiority and inferiority as belonging to the domain of the body.

In the beginning, the original intention had to be personal, not social. I’m saying that the comparison originally would not have been between two different persons but actually between two different states of the same person.

You see, what is the entire purpose of spirituality? The purpose is that you must rise from a lower state to a higher state.

Now, this is the beginning of the caste system. The lower state and the higher state exist within the same person, right?

Who is a lowly person? Who keeps thinking of himself as a mere body, just as animals do. Who is a higher or holy person? Who starts seeing that body-identification is at the root of most human suffering.

Caste simply means a gradation. Sometimes, you are at a low point in your consciousness. And if you make efforts, if you pay the right price, if you are determined enough and you act wisely, then you find that you are graduating, evolving, moving. That’s the whole point of saying that there are differences. Caste implies difference.

This difference is actually some kind of a ladder that has been shown to you.

You are born a body. Even the so-called Brahmins are born totally body-identified. In some sense, everybody is born a Shudra because we all are body-identified, and then the possibility to move up the ladder of consciousness is available to everybody irrespective of his or her birth or gender or anything. The one who manages to reach the highest rung of the ladder is a Brahmin because at the highest rung sits Brahman.

How did caste come about?

Manusmriti, widely regarded to be the most important and authoritative book on Hindu law and dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, "acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society".

The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories - Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation.

At the top of the hierarchy were the Brahmins who were mainly teachers and intellectuals and are believed to have come from Brahma's head. Then came the Kshatriyas, or the warriors and rulers, supposedly from his arms. The third slot went to the Vaishyas, or the traders, who were created from his thighs. At the bottom of the heap were the Shudras, who came from Brahma's feet and did all the menial jobs.

The main castes were further divided into about 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes, each based on their specific occupation.

Outside of this Hindu caste system were the achhoots - the Dalits or the untouchables

How does caste work?

For centuries, caste has dictated almost every aspect of Hindu religious and social life, with each group occupying a specific place in this complex hierarchy.

Rural communities have long been arranged on the basis of castes - the upper and lower castes almost always lived in segregated colonies, the water wells were not shared, Brahmins would not accept food or drink from the Shudras, and one could marry only within one's caste.

The system bestowed many privileges on the upper castes while sanctioning repression of the lower castes by privileged groups.

Often criticised for being unjust and regressive, it remained virtually unchanged for centuries, trapping people into fixed social orders from which it was impossible to escape.

Despite the obstacles, however, some Dalits and other low-caste Indians, such as BR Ambedkar who authored the Indian constitution, and KR Narayanan who became the nation's first Dalit president, have risen to hold prestigious positions in the country.

Historians, though, say that until the 18th Century, the formal distinctions of caste were of limited importance to Indians, social identities were much more flexible and people could move easily from one caste to another.

New research shows that hard boundaries were set by British colonial rulers who made caste India's defining social feature when they used censuses to simplify the system, primarily to create a single society with a common law that could be easily governed.

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