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The Foundations of Caste
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Caste, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Caste, Race, and Social Division in the U.S.
Caste as a Global Problem
How Caste Sustains Itself
The Costs of Caste
Summary
Analysis
According to ancient Hindu texts, caste is rooted in the creation myth of the awakening of the universe. “The One” created the Brahmin, the highest caste, from his mouth; the Kshatriya (warriors) from his arms; the Vaishya (merchants and traders) from his thighs, and the Shudra (servants) from his feet. The Untouchables (or Dalit, as they would later be called) are not even mentioned in this myth—they are beneath the feet even of the servant caste and exist outside of the system entirely.
This chapter introduces the idea that ancient religious myths are used to explain, excuse, and perpetuate caste over centuries (or, in the case of the Hindu caste system, millennia). While the Indian caste system is more intricate than the dual-poled one that exists in the U.S., the two share a reliance on a bottommost rung of people who are forced to exist outside of society.
Themes
According to the Bible, the sacred text of the Western world, Noah (who helped humanity continue after God’s Great Flood wiped the earth clean) had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japeth. One night, Ham stumbled on his father naked and drunk in his tent. He told his brothers, and Shem and Japeth walked backward into the tent to cover their father’s nakedness. Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, condemning his descendants to become “the lowest of slaves.” Some interpretations of the Old Testament claimed that Ham had dark skin—and so this passage was used to justify the enslavement of all humans with dark skin.
Slaveholders cited the “curse of Ham” as a reason why slavery was actually their divine right. Just like the Indian caste system, the U.S. caste system used a religious text to justify itself. By claiming that the subordination and enslavement of dark-skinned people was ordained by a holy figure, these people made their claims of superiority ironclad.
Themes
Both of these countries—United States, the world’s oldest democracy, and India, the world’s largest—are built on caste systems that are buffeted by a grounding in religious texts. In other words, the caste systems in these countries are, to this day, rooted in people’s interpretation of a creator’s divine will.
