Scum you're mission today

[Guest]

Not language related but..

Indians caste system is a pure form of racism, introduced by light skinned Aryan invaders to oppress dark skinned indeginous Dravidians. Please discuss.

[Guest]

Another well explained answer Scum.

Yes, the question was kept deliberatly brief cos in a couple of areas I was unsure of some facts. I had a feeling the dravidians had come from somewhere else. I used indigenous purely cos they were in situ at the same time. In the same way that Native Americans and Aborigines were in place befroe mass migration arrived.

By the way, I agree that 1 brothel = 10 taverns. It takes me that much ale to pluck up the courage

We can of course take this colour thing further and apply it locally. I live in Bangladesh, and dark skinned Banglas are looked down upon they their lighter compatriots. Chinese and Japanses prize lighter coloured skin than theirs, pity not ours , urban light skinned Chinese Thais are amazed that farang would be interested in dark skinned Isarn totty...

[Guest]

Hi Abbot Thong, thanks for keeping me on my toes!

You're mostly right with your statement, but not in all points.

The Aryans may already have had a rudimentary form of a caste system before they ever entered India. Their society may have been a separated into "arya" (the "noble") and commoners. But that might not yet have been very different from other societies of their time.

With the invasion of India the caste system became more refined, and yes, the Aryans subjugated the darker-skinned Dravidian peoples they encountered, as well as the Proto-Australoid and Kolarian tribes. Many of these tribes are still around today, such as the Bhils, Kols, Satals, Mundas etc.

Now, you call the Dravidian peoples of South India "indigenous" and this may be a mistake: There is a quite credible theory that the Dravidians hailed from the Mediterranean (around Crete) and migrated eastward. This might explain why there is a small pocket of a Dravidian language, Brahui, spoken in Baluchistan, Pakistan, far away from Southern India. During their migration eastward the Dravidians must have settled in that area, and through sheer luck, a linguistic remnant of their stay remained.

There is no record as far as I know of Dravidians moving the other way round, from South India to what today is Pakistan.

 

The rights and duties of the castes were codified in The Lawbook of Manu (600 BC? - 300 AD?). It you ever find a copy, buy it - it makes very interesting reading. You'll find gems like:

"One oil-press is as bad as ten slaughter-houses;

one tavern is as bad as ten oil-presses;

one brothel is as bad as ten taverns, and one king is as bad as ten brothels."

Kings were not too well-regarded because they traditionally hailed from the Khshatriya caste, one notch below the almighty Brahmins.

To come back to your point: Yes, the caste system is very racist, extremely colour-conscious. The Sanskrit name for caste is "varna", meaning colour. The darker races were subjugated, and the whole enterprise is celebrated in the Ramayana, which is nothing but an account of the Aryans (Rama, Sita, and their trusted monkey friend Hanuman) against the "demon" king Ravana (in the Thai version of the Ramayana called Tossakan, "Ten-Ears").

Ravana was a "demon" because his skin was almost black, he had an australoid short nose and frizzy hair - just like Autralian aboriginals.

Ravana's descendants can stil be seen in Sri Lanka: They're the Veddas, the original inhabitants of that island. There are only a few hundred left. In Srilankan literature they were called "yakkhas"(demons).

As we know, Sri Lanka was taken over by the Aryan Singhalese (originally from Gujarat and Orissa in Northern India), and later the Tamils arrived on the scene.

There are about 3,000 castes today in India, split into 25,000 sub-castes; all these can differ vastly from region to region. Beyond the pale of the caste system are the "outcastes" who traditionally had no rights whatsoever and were employed in "unclean" occupations like road and toilet cleaning, disposing of dead bodies, working with leather or other materials from dead animals etc. According to the Lawbook af Manu, even the killing of a shudra (the lowest of the four main castes, but still above the outcastes) was not more reprehensible than the killing of a cat or a frog.

Now I'm expaning maybe a bit too much on the subject, but in closing I may answer your question with a quote from an encyclopedia on Hinduism. In it, the author, Benjamin Walker, states poignantly, "The Aryan was a white man, and proud of it."

And thus be became a racist.

[ July 15, 2001: Message edited by: Scum_Baggio ]

[Lamock Chokaprret]

... And Issan girls all want to be white skinned ...

[Guest]

Originally posted by Lamock Chokaprret:

"And Issan girls all want to be white skinned ..."

Of course. But it's got nothing to do with any Aryan influence, rather with trying to look "hi-so". Dark skin is associated with farmers and other lowly folk who have to toil under the hot sun.

In India, matrionials often stress that the person to be married off is "wheatish-complexioned", the second-best thing after being white. I have often heard comments about dark-skinned people which went like, "He/she is dark, BUT has a good heart!"

[Guest]

On the colour front, it's not that long back in the West that we hadthe association of darker skin and manual labor, it's a recent phenomana that people could afford to have foreign holidays and then obtained a tan to show how wealthy they were. Time for liesure in hot foreign countries.

Being a blue blood comes from the wealthy never going out into the sun and therefore having very pale skin that showed Blue veins hence being Blue blooded.

[Guest]

quote:

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Originally posted by Scum_Baggio:

[QB]

Originally posted by Lamock Chokaprret:

Of course. But it's got nothing to do with any Aryan influence, rather with trying to look "hi-so". Dark skin is associated with farmers and other lowly folk who have to toil under the hot sun.

QB]

---

 

It could be the influence of Brahminism on Thailand...

BTW, I've never understood why the Isaan people are described as dark skinned. The Isaan and Lao people are quite light skinned many having recently migrated from China. In addition the weather is cooler in the north. The truly dark skinned people are those from the south, some of whom are as black as Negros.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Snake Head:

"BTW, I've never understood why the Isaan people are described as dark skinned."

It seems that people in colour-conscious countries like to describe outsiders or enemies as "dark". The name Siam stems from Sanskrit "shyama", dark, and was awarded, if I'm not mistaken, by the Khmer (who wouldn't have been any more light-skinned either).

 

There may be other interpretations for the name, though. "Shyama" is also another name for Hindu god Krishna ("The Dark One"). Yet Krishna was never one of the widely worshipped Hindu gods in Thailand; Vishnu and Shiva were. So the colour issue may indeed have been the one which gave rise to the name.

[Guest]

According to some interesting new research, the genetic material of the upper-caste Indians closely matches that of Europeans, whereas that of the lower-caste Indians seems to be closer to Asians. From this it is deducted that the upper-caste Indians might in fact have migrated from Europe into India; on the other hand it might confirm that the Aryans sujugated the tribes they encountered in India and made them low- or out-castes.

I picked this up from an article in the latest issue of "India Today" (30 July). They have a website, www.india-today.com, but I'm not sure if the article in question is on there. (I'm writing this from a hotel room and there seems to be something wrong with the phone/modem connection, and some websites I just can't get into; this is one of them.)

[ July 24, 2001: Message edited by: Scum_Baggio ]