He's a troll ....he replied to my post about caste too, seems to be a trend,
If disagreement is trolling then why are you always trolling ?
he seems to be Indian too cause his understanding of caste seems to be what you'd expect to learn in a typical Indian high school, with no nuance whatsoever.
So funny because the history of caste taught in Indian high schools and that is main stream in India is that caste issues were created by Britain and it was not as bad but that idea is absurd for any historian of pre-colonial India because of the evidence for the caste system in primary sources. I learned about caste system from primary sources, non Indian scholarship and Indian marxist scholars who in India are pretty much the only source of people's history of pre colonial times unlike the wealth of people's histories in the West.
To continue your line of answer, i would like to add something:
Look you're not going to abolish the caste system unless you abolish cousin marriage, which was common amongst all indo European society. The indo European have a taboo against cousin marriage, that is marrying your first cousin but oddly enough they were totally cool with marriage amongst second cousins though was ok so long as you don't end up violating the gotra rules and you tended to marry close to your family.
That's totally misinformed. Caste system is perfectly avoidable without abolishing cousin marriage. Pre Roman Europeans were totally fine with marrying cousins and sibling's children just like Hinduism still is. Rome introduced the taboo against cousin marriage by prohibiting marriages within four degrees of consanguinity. This was expanded to the rest of Europe and the west by expansion of Rome and Roman influenced Christianity. Yet pre Roman Europeans barely had any caste system while also marrying their cousins
This marriage between close but no so close relatives help form extended kinship groups through blood and marriage which helped in accumulation of capital in a clan/tribe as people avoided marrying outside the select group of relatives and in a lot of cases they refused to marry out because of group solidarity.
That can perfectly avoid condemning groups to occupations that nobody wanted which the caste system does which was avoided in Europe
Now your caste/jati/clan performed a lot of work for you, one it helped you get married and thus have kids, it ensured that you get a job as knowledge and know how is kept within the group with all marrying within, your privileges with reference to a job was enforced by your group, your contacts came from the group and more importantly in times of need this extended kinship group came to your aid.
It also condemned you and all your descendants to the occupations nobody wanted
Now in Europe catholic Church destroyed this kinship because it got in the way of spreading the word of" God", since pagan culture was pretty closely connected to this kinship and there by you break paganism and to the Church's credit it did take on all the responsibilities that these kinship groups did, for a while anyway.
The ban on cousin marriage was introduced by Rome not the catholic Church. The Church just adopted the ban after it became closely connected to Rome
Problem here is Indians don't understand the nuances of their own history and how similar and different we are from the rest. This is down to two problems
Problem here is Indians don't understand that the only nuance of their own history of oppression is that the caste system adjusted to regime change but the oppression has been going for thousands of years
1. Politicisation of history thought in school, nuances such as these are not even though in school, caste system is thought in a very poor manner as if it was one solid unchanging institution for 5000 years, which it was not.
They are thought that because caste system did exist in a poor manner for thousands of years
The line between brahman and Kshatriya blurred as time passed by, as they inter married, and that of vaishya and Shudra was often blurred, again because of inter marriage. This is one example as to how it contradicts the state's lazy attempt to propagate history.
In actual history castes mostly stopped inter marriage around thousands of years ago. State's agendas prevents awareness of this history
Social mobility was possible as a group because as i stated earlier, We were a group culture and we even have instances in British rule of certain groups rising to the rank of vaishya or kshatriya or even Brahman and the depreciation of fortune of some groups. Another example.
Social mobility was negligible because regime change was pretty much the only way for castes to rise in rank and it facilitated mobility for very few groups
2. Chauvinism: Islamists saying Mughal rule was golden, Hindu nationalists saying Gupta rule was the golden age, secularist saying it was the Mauryan empire. We know all of them are dead wrong and what's worse is that they say other eras were bad.
Both groups down play prevalence of caste oppression in those eras
Indian history like all history is messy, complicated, nuanced and has no black and white, infact it's not even grey, it's a rainbow, a spectrum.
But the history of caste oppression is anything but spectral and it is very dark
Yeah there were periods in history where all groups, were well off but it kept happening at every point in the long history of of country during the mauryas, the Guptas and the Mughals were not the only ones
there were no periods in history where all groups, were well off. Throughout recorded history Caste was used to oppress most of India's population and it mostly continued into the independent India
Again not all groups suffered under the British rule and the experience of the British rule is complicated for many groups,
Caste system mere adjusted to British rule just like it did to every regime change in it's history but that doesn't mean Britain invented caste or turned it in to an oppressive system
Bengalis suffered a lot because of famines but the flowering of the language took place during the British rule in Bengal,
Britain did not create famines in Bengal and did not manage them worse than the previous rulers of Bengal did
Paris community benefited disproportionately yet a lot of independence activists were Parsi disproportionately,
That doesn't effect my points
The upper caste muslim and Hindus also benefited but then again it's not all upper castes, a lot saw their fortunes taken away as the British rule was established.
Caste system mere adjusted to British rule just like it did to every regime change in it's history but that doesn't mean Britain invented caste or turned it in to an oppressive system
Yeah history is confusing, complicated and contradictory , which is what I use to test how true a narrative is and if it's simple, straight forward, self contained/consistent, it's probably wrong.
History is very concrete as long as there is evidence
Off the bat i want you to realise that I don't:
1. Believe that India industrialized before the British, industrialization is the process of adding chemical energy to industrial processes, what India had before the British rule was a lot of cottage industries that produced goods on a large scale.
By what metric did Britain not industrialize ? By the end of 19th century the majority of Britain's workforce was employed in industry that number was much higher than that of US. What is your definition of industrialisation ?
2. Believe the infamous 45 trillion dollar loot, i got no idea how they got that figure from, like zero idea.
Now why did India and the British economy decline in importance? As time went by. My reasoning are as follows:
3. India never expanded its agricultural production because of poor land laws which dis- incentivized investment in land and capital necessary for the expansion of agricultural production and this is primarily the fault of the British cause it was they who introduced the system of land tenure to secure political power in India.
That just a baseless assumption. Britain did not introduce feudalism to India it only co-opted the existing system. Indian rulers did not improve agriculture any better than British Raj even while their region was being colonization so there is no reason to believe India would've modernised on it soon just if Britain did not colonize it
Indian agriculture could have modernized and could have drowned out competition in Latin America, and could have made the British and Indians filthy rich but the investment went to south america and africa where a lot of the venture failed
That needs Britain to abolish feudalism in India requiring them start war on feudal lords which would be more destructive than all the late qing revolts combined
5. British throttled the infant indian industries, even the British East India company was interested in industrializing India to finance the conquest or to reduce the burden but London had other ideas that were stupid in retrospect. This lead to India's economy being primitive, agro based with no significant industries.
India did not have industries to be throttled and it's economy was already primitive, agro based.
British administration in India was corrupt and often took bribes from Indians and foreigners which lead to a horrible system of patronage that countinue to this day.
No worse than the preceding administrations of India
It is because of these factors, combined with the fact that both Indian and British economy was linked that both countries did not see any significant industrialization during the second industrial revolution.
claim based on faulty reasoning
In the end Britain got what it deserved for destroying indian industries,
India did not have industries to be destroyed
it's relegation to a status of a second rate power which it is now, a fate which they could have avoided if they would have let India industrialized
India would not have industrialised even if Britian let them because of it's economic structure that existed before colonization which was not improved by its colonizers because they ruled through that structure. Britain could not have remained ahead of America and Germany unless both of them remained backward because the differences in the resources of their metropoles
Would have interesting consequences though, British forced indian Markets to open up in the 19th century because all countries were racking up deficit with the British so by trading with India they could make up the deficit. With Indian markets walled off then where would the German and American industry sell their goods to?
Indian markets were not walled off to German and American industry who would be selling to them as usual
