The caste system...is really EVIL

The REAL evil of Hinduism…is not idolatry, but the caste system. I have been tutored by several new friends about the ugly reality of the caste system that continues to systemically strangle India at every level. I had read in several books over the years I have been coming and certainly experienced it from afar as I witnessed the social structures as a visiting outsider. Now I am learning from those who live with their own burdens of discrimination how Dalits, the Untouchables and minority or ‘backward’ castes continue to face daily forms of this ancient Hindu social network…even though it is supposedly outlawed. The tragedy is that the caste system is now fully engaged even in the Indian Christian communities…and the missionaries had promised that Christianity was the ultimate anti-dote, the messianic egalitarian society.

My new tutors have all affirmed that my sense that Hinduism breeds pacifity…people accept their destiny-by-birth. Everything that the Manu, the ancient Hindu lawgiver, stipulated about the caste remains now after more than 3000 years.! While typing this blog entry, a student at UTC came to me asking for help, after caring for his wife’s serious health care needs, he requires help with his tuition costs…there are no grants, scholarships or even loans…he has been threatened and humiliated by the bursar’s office. When I asked why a seminary would treat him this way, he said, that the administrators were a higher caste…that he is from a very small minority group, which has no power in the church body. I met a physicist who is interested in Hebrew and has visited Israel and taught at the Hebrew University…he too felt that the caste limits him at his laboratory. Even among seminary professors there are painful experiences of caste not scholarship being the primary context of their destiny.

Caste confuses me because it is so OUTRAGEOUS that you would expect people to throw the system off as an ancient yoke of fundamentalism, but even the brightest people seem resigned to it being an anchor to the soul of India. It is far force that racism or social class competition…it defines every aspect of a complete destiny. It is expected that if you are in a caste which puts 18 above you….that you will be oppressed by all that are above you and that those below you EXPECT you to do the same to them. Regardless of your intellectual insights the entire village, family community, religious community, school and professional communities…they all sustain, maintain and expect the system to work.

I went to the Ghandi museum in Madurai and followed his famous Salt Walk in which hundreds of thousands eventually joined him to protest the British..I naively wonder why hundreds of thousands of Dalits and minority castes are not in the streets protesting even single Brahmin application of the ancient caste law..? Everyone of the children in the Living India Home of Hope is a Dalit…an untouchable so for me this is not just an intellectual concern.

I am wondering about Dalits and Jews…how the parallels work?