Class is rooted in economic function and property ownership. It is based on Feudal
land tenure, classification of ownership designated by the Feudal system, with a King or Monarch as the head of the Feudal land tenure. The category is simplistic: Feudal lords or serfs.
Class is a Church-sanctioned hierarchy. When you see the definition of the word ‘Pagan’, which evolved around the 1600s, it originated as a rural, country, uneducated, unrefined person, to one who is not ‘Christian’.Class is linked with ownership of land. Divisions are created by granting ownership of
land. A classic example of this was the division created in the Sikhs of the Panjab. The British gave only one group the right to own land. They created a division within a belief formed on castelessness and classlessness. There are different Jati and Baradari among the Sikh, but only the Jaat Sikhs were given the right to own property, thereby creating a division among the Sikhs,for whom land is their blood.
Another reason for the dissimilar of Class and Varna The word in the Sanskrit texts is Varna. Caste does not exist in any Sanskrit text. It is only in Latin and Latin derivative Portuguese and English.
4 | Class vs Caste
Another reason for the horrified reaction by the Swamis when they were told about the
Church and biblical ecclesiastical stratification was that Salvation was mediated by the
Church, Literacy was monopolized by the clergy, authority was centralized and vertical,
and Latin was the gatekeeping language.
F. Creed is a codified set of beliefs that defines belonging through assent—often
turning faith into a boundary between insider and outsider. In creed-governed societies,
authority frequently rests with institutions that claim the power to define truth, mediate
salvation, and regulate legitimacy through doctrine. This is why language control (Latin),
literacy monopolies, and church sanction become not merely religious features but
civilizational mechanisms of stratification.
Although creed is not in the title of this essay, I decided to include it since it does overlap
with some of the definitions featured in the western establishment
Vedic System: Sanskrit based societies focus on Self-Realization, the nature of Reality, with
the Human form , its social roles in a community mirroring cosmic order or Rta as mentioned
in the Rg Veda.
“Truth is one; sages call it by many names.” – Ṛg Veda
Biblical–Latin System: Authority-first: Who has power to define truth? Hierarchy mirrors
divine command which is based on the Church.
“Render unto Caesar…”
Historical Distortion post Imperialism and Evangelism
Important for intellectual honesty:
a: In Vedic Sanskrit based societies the Portuguese term ‘Casta’ was forced to supersede
Varna
b: In the attempt to break Vedic society in India, Colonial census + British legal codification
froze jātis making it the definition of a person. Fluid mobile Varna systems hardened into
caste apartheid
c: Class oppression justified as “God’s will”
d: Imperialism created the Feudal and Serfdom enclosure which produced intergenerational
poverty
e: Imperialism and Colonialism exported class hierarchy globally
5 | Class vs Caste
STRESS ON CASTA
Whenever caste comes up, the conversation tends to harden almost immediately. People rush
either to defend or to condemn, to explain it away or to present it as the defining moral failure of
an entire civilization. I understand that urgency. But I also think it often prevents us from seeing
what actually happened.
What I am trying to do here is slower and, perhaps, less satisfying at first glance. I am not
interested in romanticizing the past, nor am I interested in repeating the familiar story that treats
caste as a timeless and unchanging system of oppression embedded in the very soul of Indian
civilization. Neither position does justice to history, and neither helps us understand how the
modern world inherited the version of caste we now argue about.
Much of what we call “the caste system” today is already filtered through colonial eyes.
Before colonial rule, Indian social life was complex, layered, and deeply regional. There was no
single authority imposing a uniform social grid across the subcontinent. Social identity was
shaped locally—through occupation, kinship, custom, patronage, and place. Communities
organized themselves through jāti: lived, practical groupings that could shift over time. The same
jāti might hold different status in different regions. Professions changed. Alliances formed.
Social life was negotiated rather than administered.
When the Portuguese first arrived in India at the end of the fifteenth century, they encountered a
society that was clearly structured, but not in ways they easily understood. They observed varṇa
and jāti—Sanskrit categories that described social function, community, and lived practice—but
they lacked the language, and perhaps the inclination, to grasp the philosophical distinctions
embedded in those terms. Instead, they reached for a familiar word from their own world. They
called it casta.
Casta in Portuguese. Casta in Iberian usage meant lineage/breed/stock/race—a “purity of
blood / inherited descent” logic. It is a word rooted in inheritance, and biological descent. By
using this term, early colonial observers quietly but decisively reframed Indian social
organization through a European lens. What had been a complex interplay of philosophical ideals
and local social arrangements was reduced to something rudimentary, simple-minded,
unsophisticated, and far more rigid: inherited status.
This was not merely a translation error. It was a conceptual substitution. Sanskrit categories
grounded in function, duty, Dharma and cosmology were replaced with a European obsession
with pedigree. From that moment on, Indian society was increasingly described—and eventually
governed—as though it were organized around immutable bloodlines, rather than lived social
realities. The word caste did not simply name a system; it reshaped it.
6 | Class vs Caste
The Portuguese word casta means:
• lineage
• breed
• stock
• pedigree
It comes from Iberian and Latin ideas of bloodline and inherited status.
Portuguese observers:
• did not understand Sanskrit categories
• did not distinguish varṇa from jāti
• reached for the closest word they had: casta
This single act of translation did enormous damage.
They imposed a European pedigree logic onto a Sanskritic functional–philosophical
system
• Civilizational self-understanding
The British faced a problem that every empire faces: how to govern a vast population they did
not understand. Their solution was classification. Census-taking, legal codification, and
ethnographic surveys required people to be sorted—once, permanently, and legibly. Fluid
identities posed a problem. Negotiated status could not be entered into ledgers.
So categories hardened.
Colonial censuses beginning in the late nineteenth century required each person to name a single
caste, a single religion, a fixed occupation. What had once been contextual became essential.
What had once been flexible became frozen. Identity became an administrative fact rather than a
social relationship.
At the same time, British legal systems selectively elevated certain Sanskrit texts—most notably
the Manusmṛti—treating them as binding legal codes rather than as normative, interpretive, and
historically situated works. Local custom and regional practice were sidelined. Elite informants
were privileged. Textual ideals were converted into enforceable law.
This was not a neutral process. It reshaped Indian society in ways that had never existed before.
European observers also brought with them their own inherited assumptions and complexes.
Coming from societies organized around rigid class hierarchies, hereditary privilege, and church-
mediated salvation, they interpreted Indian categories through familiar lenses. Varṇa was
7 | Class vs Caste
mapped onto European estates. Jāti was equated with class. Social differentiation was moralized
as spiritual corruption.
Missionary discourse reinforced this framing. Caste was presented not merely as a social
problem, but as proof of religious failure—a justification for conversion and civilizational
intervention. In this way, caste became both an administrative tool and a moral indictment.
None of this is to deny injustice. Hierarchies existed. Exclusion existed. Suffering existed. But
oppression does not require ancient metaphysics; it requires power. It requires law, enforcement,
and moral authority. Colonial rule supplied all three.
What is often overlooked is that the philosophical core of Vedic thought does not sanctify social
domination. At its deepest level, it unsettles it. The idea that the same consciousness (ātman)
moves through all beings leaves little room for absolute human hierarchy. That tension—
between metaphysical unity, and social differentiation, between Advaitya, or non-duality and
Duvuda, or Duality—was never neatly resolved, but it was always present. It matters.
Centering Jāti and Varṇa
What the early European observers failed to see—or chose not to see—was that Indian society
was not organized around a single principle of inherited rank. Two distinct ideas were at work,
operating on different levels. Varṇa belonged to the realm of philosophy and cosmology. It
described an ideal ordering of social functions—learning, protection, sustenance, service—
mapped onto a vision of harmony in the universe itself. Jāti, by contrast, belonged to lived social
reality. It referred to specific communities shaped by occupation, region, kinship, and custom.
Jātis were local, practical, and historically fluid. They changed names, professions, and status
over time, and the same jāti could be understood very differently from one region to another.
Varṇa was never meant to function as a social census, and jāti was never meant to serve as a
cosmic hierarchy. When these two were collapsed into a single inherited “caste,” something
essential was lost: the distinction between an ethical–philosophical model and the everyday
complexity of human social life.
Portuguese to British Continuity
What began with the Portuguese did not end with them. The British, arriving later and staying far
longer, took this early misnaming and turned it into policy. Where the Portuguese had
instinctively reached for casta—pedigree—the British refined it into an instrument of
governance. Divide and rule depended on fixed identities, ranked populations, and internal fault
lines that could be administered and exploited. Jāti, once local and negotiated, became
enumerated. Varṇa, once philosophical, became social destiny. The very rigidity that colonial
observers claimed to be describing was, in fact, something they were actively producing. There
are accounts of Indian scholars and swamis reacting with shock when they realized how their
society was being redefined. To hear Sanskrit categories of function and community translated
into the European language of blood and pedigree was not merely inaccurate—it was horrifying.