On Faith: Murder in the Name of Caste and Honor
Minneapolis, MN (July 12, 2010) - As a regularly featured blogger on the Washington Post/Newsweek's "On Faith" blog, Dr. Aseem Shukla, member of HAF's Board of Directors, has the opportunity to provide a Hindu viewpoint on various issues. Below is Dr. Shukla's latest blog. Please post your comments directly on the "On Faith" site by clicking here.
A story of ill fated love has been playing out in the Indian media and interest has now been sparked here as well. Juliet's cousin, Tybalt, did set out for a would-be honor killing of Romeo to end a blood feud with the House of Montague, but this episode in India was too real and brings forth the flammable mix of social and economic dichotomies between the rural and metro and persistent casteism.
Indians have been stunned to read about the mysterious death of an upwardly mobile young professional New Delhiite, Nirupama Pathak, whose decision to marry a suitor belonging to another caste was violently opposed by her rurally residing agrarian parents. Pathak's mother is in custody, charged with her daughter's murder while the rest of the Pathak family continue to justify their opposition to her choice--livid that their daughter had the audacity to search for her own mate belonging to a "lower" caste--claiming that the young lady committed suicide. That Pathak may have been pregnant before her marriage added another twist proclaiming that social mores are changing as rapidly as the urbanization ensuing in India's metros.
Episodes such as this, serve to again raise old questions about the entrenched caste system that bedevils many countries in Asia. Social groupings are as old as human civilization itself, but so is the perversion of these groupings into stratifications and hierarchies. From the class-guild system of Medieval Europe that continues today in the West as racial and ethnic discrimination, tribal conflicts in Africa, apartheid against Christians and Hindus in Malaysia and Indonesia, and the evils of caste based discrimination of India, Japan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan, humans tend to succumb to the comforts of position and place.
Discrimination against those belonging to the "lowest" castes in India, often referred to as Harijans or Dalits, continues still, exacerbated in rural villages. That people will refuse to eat or sit with their brethren born of a different caste; that Dalits are still banned from some temples, forced into menial and demeaning tasks and treated with contempt because of their birth, is morally reprehensible and criminal. Sadly, the tentacles of this social evil permeate so deeply, that Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and other faiths share in the sin of this system and have distinct caste lines and hierarchies as well in the Asian context.
It was in the earliest Hindu holy texts, the Vedas, that a fluid division of society by one's nature, interests, abilities and talents was conceptualized. The Vedas make no mention of a hierarchical caste system--people moved between groups--and did not to privilege one grouping over another. Society was interdependent and Hindu scripture is replete with examples of priests becoming kings and "untouchables" becoming the most exalted saints, for example.
Some latter texts that are ascribed to mortal authors, and not divinely revealed as with the Vedas, begin to reflect a sad reality: Those that claimed a link to God through knowledge of ritual and scripture came to occupy the highest strata of society and sought perpetuity of their status. Scriptures of the last millennium, interpolated a fossilized birth-based system. Now the children of priests became priests, children of warriors and merchants followed their fathers, and those consigned to the menial tasks of scavenging and sweeping could contemplate nothing better for their own progeny being cast out as "untouchables." This system was ascribed the Portuguese word, casta, or caste, when the first Europeans to the subcontinent recognized something they understood well, and the name has stuck.
Viewing caste as a hierarchy is an infraction of the cardinal teachings of spiritual seers throughout Hindu history, and one of India's more contemporary reformers, Mahatma Gandhi, who stressed that discrimination based on caste is a violation of the precepts of Hinduism's spiritual traditions. Similarly, every major school of Hindu thought today, it is worth noting, speak strongly against the foolish concept that any one social grouping is better or more desirable than another. The Indian Constitution too outlaws discrimination.
But it is a sad irony that while most Hindu schools of thought would abolish caste discrimination as a meaningless impediment to religious unity, the Government of India insists on keeping caste alive in the nation's consciousness by proposing--to much opposition-- to add caste as a category in the upcoming census forms. A federal system of affirmative action based, not on race or economic status, but on caste, has created the spectacle of many castes trying to prove how "low" or "backward" they are to try to harvest generous benefits for civil service employment and acceptance at competitive schools.
Pathak's possible murder and her tribulations should serve as a wake up call to Hindus as to the gross perversions of Hinduism's essential teaching that each soul is divine and the goal of life is to manifest this divinity. Swami Vivekananda, one of the first Indian spiritual leader to visit the United States as he did at the turn of the last century, said in his disgust for the abuses in the name of caste, "This [tyranny of the upper castes] is the bane of human nature, the curse upon mankind, the root of all misery -- this inequality. This is the source of all bondage, physical, mental, and spiritual."
The road to a gender, race, ethnic, sexuality, caste--add any reason to discriminate here--equality is long yet, and the destination still eludes. Pathak's death, and daily despicable acts in the name of social evils highlight the urgency of the reform ongoing right now.
Views expressed here are the personal views of Dr. Aseem Shukla and do not necessarily represent those of the Hindu American Foundation or the University of Minnesota.