VALOUR, VARNA, CASTE ET AL ... 1

VALOUR, VARNA, CASTE ET AL ... 1

Mother's children must be as pure as they must be brave. A culture of courage must be developed in us along with other refinements of the heart and the mind. Mere pursuit of the finer arts without the parallel culture of valour will weaken our defence against marauders within and aggressors without.

Purity breeds strength but if pure people compromise with truth, it raises serious questions about the validity of such a statement. Or, perhaps, the statement holds but our assumption about the venerable ones is flawed and needs revision.

A modicum of discipline is necessary. Work builds the edifice of civilisation. Where indolence reigns, there structures fall, culture collapses and barbarism invades. The same applies to lopsided development of a people either in socially stratified terms as a whole or in organically segmented terms in the individual. Either way, an unbalanced weakening becomes deadly and brings in disaster from corruption within and conquest without.

For security of a race or a nation to be ensured, there must be all-round development in every phase of individual and aggregate life. Here we have to understand the individual in terms of his fivefold phase as so beautifully delineated in our scriptures. The phases are as follows:

1. physical sheath (annamaya kosh)

2. vital sheath (praanamaya kosh)

3. mental sheath (manomaya kosh)

4. intellectual sheath (vijnaanamaya kosh)

5. spiritual sheath (aanandamaya kosh).

When all these phases in an individual are harmoniously developed, then the individual stands strong to meet head on the vicissitudes of life and emerge victorious. But every individual is not equally endowed in all the phases and develops strengths and weaknesses in different areas of his being. This lapse can be made up for in the collective body of society by accordingly developing others to supply the shortfall and restore aggregate balance.

Perhaps, this was one of the reasons why society in ancient times in India was structured in four phases, that of the scholar (brahmin), the warrior (kshatriya), the trader (vaishya) and the labourer (shudra) with all its structural consequences in the short run and in the long run. In a simple society this may have worked to some good effect for a while but with growing complexity it was bound to develop into a privileged hierarchical order of social existence with all its concomitant evils. However, the idea was to order society which in the ancient state of social evolution had its significant benefits, albeit in an exploitative order, but with greater recourse to technology in modern times with its associated fluidity in social movement consequent upon industrial migration, urbanisation and its ilk, such rigid structures are bound to fail and fall as society takes its 'great leap forward'. 'Charaiveti', the Vedic call to advance, rings in our memory and beckons us to march ahead.

The fourfold 'varna' system and its latter-day evolution into multifarious 'jaati' was the product of the times and persists in an unnamed way or in other guise in every country of the world. Specialisation, which is the order of the day everywhere, barring very primitive societies, necessarily has its vocational distinctions and divides within a fluid society that facilitates expertise in human endeavour without obstructing flow of human capital from one sector to another. This facilitation of expertise, with its natural flow within a sector and its transit beyond, is the evolving perfection of the 'varna' and the 'jaati' system that ancient and medieval India had aspired for and attempted without being able to successfully implement it in a large measure that would alleviate the misery of the masses. India succeeded and failed in phases then despite the phased order, and the moderns are failing today despite its much more evolved manifestation in terms of specialisation of the day. As every other thing, this evolving social structuring or its breakdown deals with people and, imperfect as people are, systems centring them are bound to be imperfect in implementation and failing in phases ever.

Written by Sugata Bose