Society Divided into Four Classes in Hinduism

      After going over the traditions that got evolved in evolution of all human civilizations, one finds that primitive societies have been highly complicated structures with their own beliefs and codes of social conducts. However, common to all human civilizations, the fundamental needs of the societies were moral and spiritual, military and economics. As leaders in all matters relating to social interactions, Vedic people from India have assigned these roles to different groups.

Four Classes of Society

      The classification of society under Hinduism from ancient times, divides the society in four separate and distinct classes based on professions. The first and most distinguished of all are Brahmins, the second in rank come Kshatriyas or Rajas, the third are Vaishyas, the Landlords and Merchants and fourth and last residual category is called Shudras or Menials.

      Brahmins retained the duties of learning and holding virtues and thereby supposed to only undertake priesthood and duties relating to acquiring and preserving knowledge, reading and tutoring others; Kshatriyas carry the mantle of being men with courage and bravery and are responsible for military services including all its branches; Vaishyas were supposed to carry the responsibility of generating economic resources by engaging in agriculture, trade, industry and cattle breeding. The last category was more of a residual category with the mandate to extend services to above three classes in whatever area they require. These people, responsible for servitude affairs, were called the Shudras. With subsequent developments, yet another category got added to this structure called the Untouchables. Here we have people engaged in handling of human waste, latrines and animal carcase and working with animal hides.

      This system has been in vogue ever since later part of Rig-Veda. To begin with, the classification of the caste of each person was based on their individual profession based on the education and skill sets. There are numerous examples in Vedas where a person has a different profession from the family where he was born including some acclaimed sages who contributed the Vedic literature itself. But subsequently, this system got identified as hereditary. This was the beginning of troubles of the faults that are attributed with our caste system.

      As shown in the pyramid below, the large chunk of entire population was categorised under Shudras and Untouchables with Brahmins being least in proportion and commanding highest position in the social structure followed by Kshatriyas. Twice bom Group indicate the people entitled to wear janeu, the sacred three thread.

      Some people call the 'class segregation' as one of the greatest evil of Indian social structure because this system is held responsible for severe social discrimination and exploitation of lower castes at the hands of people from higher class. It is unfortunate that all over the world, the strong person has been seen to commit atrocities on weaker person. Indian social system has not been an exception of this rule. Over a long period of times, this system has kept a large chunk of Indian population under pressures from the minority of higher classes leading to lack of education, untouchability, lack of social equality, denied access to religious places, commercial exploitation, etc.

      More often than not, we come across only bad things about classification in these four classes together with castes and sub-castes arising with increasing number of professions. But there can be another side of this coin as well. I would like to quote from "Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies" (1897) by Abbe J.A. Dubois, a French national who spent a lot of his time in India and is credited to be one of the first Europeans to authoritatively comment on Hindu practices and customs and I quote:

"I am persuaded that it is simple and solely due to the distribution of the people into castes that India did not lapse into a state of barbarism, and that she preserved and perfected the arts and sciences of civilizations whilst most other nations of the earth remained in the state of barbarism. I do not consider caste to be free from many drawbacks; but I believe that the resulting advantages, in the case of nations constituted like Hindus, more than outweigh the resulting evils."

      Class segregation assigned each person a profession that was to be pursued from generation to generation forcing people to acquire special expertise that was simply difficult to be copied by others. It is to the credit of our learned social legislators of ancient India that they got so clearly acquainted about the natural character of inhabitants of their times and evolved provisions helping them to cultivate knowledge and skills as per their traits so that no one was burdened with what they were not good and at the same time rigidly imposed professions on even indolent and careless natured inhabitants of the society. Is there any thing objectionable to this doctrine? Probably no.

      Now; this is the reality that till the time this class system was working well in Indian system, India was on top of the world in most areas including education, agriculture, industry; literature, sciences, arts and crafts besides all things religious. Keeping aside charges of discrimination and exploitation, this was the system promoting expertise. People segregated by professions were able to achieve proficiencies that allowed higher expertise in their respective crafts. Why were Indian artisans of Silk could weave finer than any one else in the world? Why were Indian Rishis were able to create scriptures better than others in the world? Why were Indian smiths were able to handle all metals better than others in the world? The common answer is the expertise achieved under the class system of ancient India.

      The segregation had another remarkable impact. It was only in India that even frequent wars among kingdoms had no impact on economy and culture as only one section of the population was engaged in war while most others remained un-impacted and kept carrying on their professions as business as usual. Elsewhere, war involved each and every young person resulting in wiping out of losing side.

      To the credit of Indian system having great cultural and socio-economic progress, other societies of those times were operating largely on tribal system where wars meant inflicting injuries to entire population. In that situation, most people were always preoccupied with fight for basic survival with no focus on developing other professions specially those not directly related with war and its administration.