A Short Note on the Varṇa System and the Puruṣa Sūkta

 

 

A Short Note on the Varṇa System and the Puruṣa Sūkta

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

When elaborating on (what I call) hidden New Words in my earlier article ("The New Words and Other New Elements in the Rigveda"), when talking about the word brāhmaṇa, I had to use the words "social divisions", and felt that this required some more elaboration, so I added: "A special note on the varṇa system later". However, in the relief at having finally reached the end of the article, I uploaded it without remembering to add the special note on this that I had intended to do. A comment on the article in my blog brought this omission to my notice, so here is that elaboration:

 

The basic fact is that the names for the four varṇas (social divisions of society) in the Rigveda appear only at the chronological end of the text, and three of the words only in one single hymn, X.90, the Puruṣa Sūkta..

The varṇa system is clearly a concept that arose at the fag end of the composition period of the text, at some time (between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE) when the major part of the text had already been completed and only some latecomer compositions were being incorporated into Book 10 along with some final touches to some earlier hymns, and it is clearly an idea that was still only in the conception stage.

Three of the words (rājanya, vaiśya and śūdra) appear for the first and only time in the Rigveda in this hymn, and the fourth (brāhmaṇa) is also what I have called a hidden New Word. Further, the word kṣatriya (warrior), which is found nine times in the Rigveda (including thrice in the Old Rigveda, of which one reference is in one of the Three Oldest Books) is not used for the second varṇa, but a new word (rājanya) is concocted. The word varṇa itself is found twenty-three times in the Rigveda (including 9 times in the Old Rigveda, of which two references are in a hymn in one of the Three Oldest Books), but it is not found in this hymn. The word jāti (originally meaning "individual endogamous tribe" from the root √jan, to be born, later renamed as "caste" by the Portuguese) is not found anywhere in the whole of the Rigveda.

All this shows that the Puruṣa Sūkta,  which contains this concept, was not in any way a pointer to any system of social divisions which existed in the society of the time, but an individual composer's new and personal intellectual conception of a four-fold division of human society — any human society. The terms used in this hymn (with that significant change of the name for the second varṇa) were adopted much later in India's ancient history as the names for a fourfold division into which the countless jātis (endogamous tribal units) of Indian society were, at that late date, metaphorically herded.

 

What, then, does the Puruṣa Sūkta intend? Does it advocate some kind of hierarchy system where "upper" divisions are considered superior and more privileged than "lower" ones. Much though this is the dogma of caste-mongerers (from every present varṇa), there is clearly no such idea in the mind of the composer. He is merely intellectually classifying human society into four natural vertical divisions, not hinted at in the hymn as being in any way hereditary — found in every human society from the most primitive or ancient to the most modern. Classifying everything has always been an Indian obsession or skill: as Alain Danielou puts it (in his "Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales"), "The Hindu theory is not like other systems, limited to experimental data: it does not consider arbitrarily as natural certain modes or certain chords, but it takes as its starting point the general laws common to all the aspects of the world’s creation…" (p.99). Curt Sachs, on the same subject (in his monumental "The Rise of Music in the Ancient World - East and West"), refers to the "naïve belief of historically untrained minds that patterns usual in the person’s own time and country are ‘natural’…", and contrasts it with classification in India which "starts from actual facts, but is thorough in its accomplishment regardless of practice" (p.171).

But (the dogmatists persist) in this case, there is definitely a horizontal and hierarchical division indicated: the hymn clearly states that the fourth varṇa was born from the feet of the primordial Puruṣa; doesn't this indicate a vertical division and a contemptuous one? [Actually, only if you are determined to see one: Jamison, for example, translates vaiśya as "freeman" and śūdra as "servant". But what does the Puruṣa Sūkta actually say?].

A word about the four varṇas in the Puruṣa Sūkta: while this hymn does indeed refer to the four varṇas (in a ritual hymn which describes a giant Primordial Man sacrificed by the Gods, from whom came into being the four divisions of a functioning human society), this sole reference nowhere indicates the hierarchical, hereditary and discriminative system which started evolving in post-Mauryan times. Nowhere does it indicate that any one of the four varṇas is inferior to another one, or that these four divisions are hereditary, or that discrimination against any one of the four varṇas forms a part of the narrative. It simply shows the four natural divisions of any human society in the world (tribal or civilizational): every society in the world has a priestly class, a ruling class, a commercial class, and the others, the working classes who constitute the other sections of society which make the society function smoothly.

 

Much is made of the fact that the fourth varṇa, Śūdra, is supposed to have emanated from the feet of the Primordial Man, as if this automatically shows contempt. But the connections are very logical: no human society can exist, function and progress without these four parts of human society:

a) the intellectual or thinking classes (who represent the mouth which guides any society with wisdom, and scientific and scholarly thought, emanating from the mouth),

b) the military classes (who represent the arm which rules the society and protects it from external enemies),

c) the trading and commercial classes (who represent the thighs or the forward movement of the society in material terms),

d) the other working classes (who represent the feet, on the strength of whose actual work rests the entire edifice of any functioning society).

 

The notion that the reference to feet is automatically an offensive reference represents a hyper-sensitiveness not warranted by anything in the hymn or anything anywhere else in the Rigveda or Vedic literature. No part of the body (and certainly not the feet which bear the entire burden of the body and without which the body would collapse) is inferior to another, except to those determined to deliberately misinterpret or misrepresent with ulterior motives. Two verses after the reference to the Śūdra emanating from the two feet, we are told in X.90.14 that the Earth emanated from the two feet: is this also a degradation of the Earth or an indication of the inferiority of the Earth?

A fable occurs in many ancient texts, emphasizing the equal importance of each and every part of the human body, the version in Aesop's tales being as follows: "One day it occurred to the Members of the Body that they were doing all the work while the Belly had all the food. So they held a meeting and decided to strike till the Belly consented to its proper share of the work. For a day or two, the Hands refused to take the food, the Mouth refused to receive it, and the Teeth had no work to do. After a day or two the Members began to find that they themselves were in poor condition: the Hands could hardly move, and the Mouth was parched and dry, while the Legs were unable to support the rest. Thus even the Belly was doing necessary work for the Body, and all must work together or the Body will go to pieces".

https://fablesofaesop.com/the-belly-and-the-members.html

Strangely, in some versions of the fable, it is the feet, considering themselves one of the most important parts of the body, which first raise the objection against the stomach. The wikipedia article on "the Belly and the Members" tells us "There are several versions of the fable. In early Greek sources it concerns a dispute between the stomach and the feet"!

 

So, it is time to abandon narrow-minded and bigoted interpretations of the Puruṣa Sūkta, and to learn to view it from the point of view from which it was composed; that of a mystical-philosophical creation-myth of a functioning human society.

For the purpose of this article and the subject of this article, it is sufficient to note that the present-day hierarchical, hereditary and discriminative version of social divisions which comes to mind at the word "casteist" was totally unknown in the period of the Rigveda.