Thanks to Krishen-ji for alerting me to this article by Dr Arvind Sharma. The essay examines (in Krishen-ji’s words)

How authoritative really was Manu, and was his a contested text? Was the Manusmriti prescriptive of what he believed should be or descriptive of how society really was, or both?

In any case, what the article conclusively demonstrates is that “caste” as it is used in sociopolitical discourse today does not go back 3000 years as conventionally claimed, but is relatively recent.”  (emphasis mine)

Excerpts from “What Was Manu Up To?“

I should begin by clarifying that I am using the expression caste system as a category which semantically subsumes the two allied, but distinct, concepts of varṇa and jāti. The confusion between the two has been deplored (by scholars and historians).

A.L. Basham, in his highly regarded book on ancient India, remarks…

…When the Portuguese came to India in the 16th century they found the Hindu community divided into many separate groups, which they called castas, meaning tribes, clans or families. The name stuck, and became the usual word for the Hindu social group. …authorities credulously accepted the traditional view that by a process of intermarriage and subdivision the 3,000 or more castes of modern India had evolved from the four primitive classes, and the term ‘caste’ was applied indiscriminately to both varṇa or class and jāti or caste proper. This is a false terminology; castes rise and fall in the social scale, and old castes die out and new ones are formed, but the four great classes are stable. They are never more or less than four, and for over 2,000 years their order of precedence has not altered. All ancient Indian sources make a sharp distinction between the two terms; varṇa is much referred to, but jāti very little, and when it does appear in literature it does not always imply the comparatively rigid and exclusive social groups of later times. If caste is defined as a system of groups within the class, which are normally endogamous, commensal and craft-exclusive, we have no real evidence of its existence until comparatively late times.[1]

I shall, despite this warning, subsume both the terms…because at the moment my concern is centered on the consequence of their fusion for understanding the significance of the caste system in India…

At this point, we must draw a distinction between the manner in which modern scholars view the relationship between varṇa and jāti, and the manner in which the Hindu tradition itself regards it according to modern scholarship.

Nobody can understand the caste system until he has freed himself from the mistaken notion based on the current interpretation of the so-called Institutes of Manu, that there were ‘four original castes’. No four original castes ever existed at any time or place, and at the present moment the terms Brāhmaṇa, Kshatriya, Vaiśya, and Śūdra have no exact meaning as a classification of existing castes. In northern India the names Vaiśya and Śūdra are not used except in books or disputes about questions of caste precedence. In the south all Hindus who are not Brahmans fall under the denomination of Śūdra, while the designations Kshatriya and Vaiśya are practically unknown.[2]

…What precisely does this ‘mistaken notion’ consist of? It consists of

The common notion that there were four original castes, Brahman, Kshatriya or Rājanya, Vaiśya, and Śūdra is false. The ancient Hindu writers classified mankind under four varṇas or ‘orders’, with reference to their occupations, namely, (I) the learned, literate, and priestly order, or Brahmans; (2) the fighting and governing classes, who were grouped together as Rājanyas or Kshatriyas, irrespective of race, meaning by that term ancestry; (3) the trading and agricultural people, or Vaiśyas; and (4) common, humble folk, day labourers, and so forth, whose business it was to serve their betters…[3]

The mistaken notion consists of the conflation of varṇa and jāti categories, when “it is practically certain that caste (jāti) did not originate from the four classes. Admittedly it developed later than they but this proves nothing.”[4]

The locus classicus of the conflation is supposed to be the Manusmṛti. The point to note however is that the Manusmṛti itself does not conflate the two terms. As Percival Spear points out: “The compiler of the Institutes of Manu was well aware of the distinction between varṇa and jāti. While he mentions about fifty different castes, he lays much stress on the fact that there are only four varṇas…”[5]

…This forgoing analysis raises the question: what theory precisely is Manu claiming to propound by undertaking such an exercise? Is he not thereby establishing the consanginuity of the entire Hindu community comprised by varṇas and jātis? Does not the net effect of his theory make them all of one blood (including the Untouchables), and what better antidote to bad blood than to be told that we are all of the same blood?

And was the author of the Puruṣasūkta trying to achieve a similar integration by describing all the four varṇas as part of the same puruṣa?

*** End of Excerpts ***

References: A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (London: Sidgewick & Jackson, 1967) and Percival Spear, ed., The Oxford History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994)

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