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Hey everybody, Today I'm going to talk about the caste system something some of you may have heard about. It's kind of in the news right now. Partly it's because of the American tendency of co-opting terms from other societies and reusing them. So there is a book by Isabel Wilkerson, a journalist, which is about caste. And it does cover caste in India somewhat, but really, it's about caste in the United States. The division between blacks and whites. It's called “Caste: the origins of our discontents”. And that's been confusing some, because cast in the United States are caste in a generic sense is different than caste in the Indian context. And obviously, the caste in the Indian context, does predate caste in the United States by a bit. So to clear up some of these semantic confusions I want to talk caste mostly about the Indian context, and contrast it with cast in other contexts other times and places and show how, you know, they differ somewhat, and there is uniqueness there. And so people should be maybe a little bit more cautious about throwing the word caste around, like it's so easy, you know, conceptually. So, I want to talk first, about caste in India, as many Indian listeners will know, the word itself is not of Indic origin, it's not Indian stock from Sanskrit. It's from casta, which refers to color, in Portuguese. And so it is a European origin word to describe an Indian concept. But there are words in the Indian context which which use, which are used to describe caste. So there's two primary concepts. There's Varna, which is equivalent to color, and it's equivalent to the castes they usually read about in elementary school in the United States. And then there's jati, which is a more complicated term, often it is translated as community. And jati is a much more fine grained and detailed set of you know, social norms, folkways, endogamous acommunities, then caste, which is Varna, which is a broad conceptual, broad conceptual categorization, that's more more useful for intellectual academic, you know, contexts. So for example, if someone tells you, I mean, someone could tell you that they're Vaishya, which is kind of a, you know, freeborn, you know, maybe traders or merchants or something like that. Okay. But really, nobody in the real world is Vaishya, they’re Modh Bania or something like that, their jati. They're a very, very specific sub caste, you could call them and that's the group that has a common temple that maybe have a common religion, that intermediary is only amongst themselves and have these villages that they live in, etc, etc. The Varsha themselves is, I think, Larry Wall or the inventor of Perl called semantic sugar. It's a way to categorize a lot of communities that have approximately the same ritual status in the what we call the Hindu religion, and also social status, often a related number of professions and you know, are often now genetically related. And we're gonna get into that. But it's an abstraction that brackets a large number of communities. You know, nobody is primarily in their identity of a Vaishya, they’re a Modh Bania or something, you know, or they're Hindu. So there's a, there's a super caste identity. And there's, you know, a sub caste identity. And those are really the important ones, people care that they're Hindu, or, you know, they're devotees of Vishnu or Shiva, or their jati. But the caste identity itself is an abstraction. And you know, sometimes in America, you run into people who say, Well, I'm Brahmin and that's what I am. But really, that's because they're American, they're Indian American. And to be candid, there's no really no organization of jatis in the United States. So, in India, people will be less likely to say, I mean, they will say they're Brahmin, but really what matters is they're Iyers which is - they’re Tamil Brahmins or, you know, their Gugarati Brahmins or you know, they're Mohyal Brahmins from Punjab, those are the real categories a real social economic, cultural units, there is no pan Brahmin culture in India. Even if there are tendencies, so, for example, you could say Brahmins are vegetarian, and they tend to be more vegetarian than a lot of other communities around them, especially in South India, I think, but Bengali Brahmins you know, they eat chicken and fish. They definitely eat fish, they have ritual explanations why they have to eat fish in Bengal. Kashmiri Brahmins, Pandits - Nehru’s family, you know, the family of the Prime Ministers of India initially Nehru and Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Now, you know, the current Gandhi scions, at least now it’s diluted, but in any case, the Kashmiri Pandits they eat mutton and stuff like that. So, you know, we need to look at jatis, we need to look at varnas. And that's what really matters. I want to talk about though, this idea of varna in a non Indian context. So, there's something called the Trifunctional hypothesis, which was pioneered early 20th century by French mythologist, Georges Dumézil, I don't know how to pronounce it very well. But why well, he proposed this idea that Indo European societies did have a caste class system, tripartite ideology of priests, warriors, and commentaries. And they correspond it to three sacred functions of or they correspond to three functions: the sacred, the martial, and the economic. This is a clear correspondence taken from you know, Indian civilization where you have the Warriors and the nobles Kshatriyas. You have the priests who are the Brahmins, and you have the commoners who were the Vaishyas, so the tradesmen and whatnot the freeboard outside of this system in the Indian context, you have Shudra, who, you know, they serve the three top castes who have ritual significance as twice born, they're reborn twice. You know, in an ethnographic context, people often say, Well, the top three castes are probably the invading Aryans, and outside of them are the indigenous conquered people. So the Shudras are, you know, outside of the system of Aryan society initially, and then below the Shudras, the Shudra are interacting with their serving with they’re subordinate to the top three castes in the Indian caste system. There are the untouchables, the Dalits, and I'll just use the word Dalits from now on, because that's the politically correct term. You know, they have a lot of other terms. And so those groups are outside of the caste system in a technical way, they are not even Shudras. Shudras can listen to the Vedas, Dalits are not supposed to even listen to the Vedas. You know, in some contexts, some traditions, but going back to the Indo European system, indo Europeans do not have Shudras or Dalits in any formalized way. So the original indo Europeans were probably from the pontic steppe, as most of you know, if you have not been sleeping under a rock, and you have been listening to my podcasts and reading my pieces, and these people from the pontic steppe did not seem to have a formalized system ofoutcasts. Initially, they're probably pretty egalitarian or, you know, I don't want to overemphasize it, but they might not have initially had slaves, you know, as initially primary producers. subordinates, you know, people they conquered that was a later thing. So they had these three groups and, you know, they exist in other societies outside of India. So early Germanic society was quite clear where there's difference between the nobles and the commoners, the freeborn You know of the community, and also the nobles themselves. There's often a sacred King, and a real king, a temporal Kig. The sacred King kind of had a relationship with the gods. And the temporal King was war leader. And so that might be the Kshatriya / priest division that you see there. In Norse mythology, you see a division between various gods, one's having to do with fertility ones having to do with law and justice, and one's having to do with rule and sovereignty. And so, you know, Dumézil says that this has something to do with the tripartite division. In Plato's the Republic, there is also some sort of tripartite division in the class that divides people in terms of rulers, producing classes and some auxiliaries, like guardians and you know, people to help the rulers. So this seems to recur. Now, three is a useful number to organize society. So I wouldn't put too much into this. But I do think that there's probably there's probably some original idea of the caste system and in fact, in Iran, which does not have a Hindu caste caste system before Islamization but it does seem like the Zoroastrian Iranian society did have some sort of caste like divisions between the noble elites, the priestly castes, the priestly group, Iranian priests and, you know, Parsis, priestly families, Indian Zoroastrians, still, and then, of course, just average Zoroastrian person who would be equivalent to Vaishya like freeborn. So in the Indian system, Vaishya is often seen as some sort of high caste group, but in the Indo European system, that is just the regular person who is nevertheless part of the in group and part of the community. And so, you know, if, in sorts of elective kinships, you can imagine that the sort of person would be part of the citizen body that participated in, you know, governing. Now, in Athenian democracy to be part of the free, you know, citizen voting class, which is actually the minority, small minority in the Athenian democracy. In the post Roman period, I, I do know that one of the notable aspects of the migration of Germanic peoples like so, for example, the Saxons and others into the Roman Empire and elsewhere in Britain, was that there was a selective migration of the warrior nobility, the ruling elite of these groups, and they left behind a lot of the peasants. And this kind of dynamic actually did cause a problem because, with no warriors left, the Germanic societies actually kind of regressed in parts of Central Europe. So by, you know, early medieval period, you see, you see Slavic groups that are to the east of the - or west of the Elba, and drive to the east. The Germanic drive to the east is actually, in many ways a reconquest of territories that Germans had been living in before Gothic peoples who, as some of you know, pushed all the way to the estuary of the Danube. What we call Moldova, in western Ukraine. You know, so, what happened was the removal of the elites probably resulted in the conquest and assimilation of Germanic peasants what we call Vaishya freeborn into Slavic tribes as they expanded westward and I think that illustrates the essential role of ruling elites in kind of maintaining ethno tribal coherency otherwise, the producing classes seemed to a culturally shift. So shifting, speaking of shifting, let's talk a little bit though about caste and other societies because their caste like things have happened, or have occurred. I think that the most primary clear example that you would know about would be the Burakumin, also called the ETA in Japan, if you don't know about it, Google it. These are people who are descendants of or traditional were worked with leather, killing of animals. These are polluting activities in a both Shinto and Buddhist context in Japan. In you know, dharmic religions killing professions often have very negative connotations and results in ritual impurity. And so Burakumin they lived in segregated parts of Japanese cities, they intimate only with themselves, they are marginalized, their incomes are lower, they tend to dominate the Yakuza, which is the Japanese, you know, organized crime. Yeah. So, there are a classic example of a caste But they only emerged, you know, around the 15th century 16th century, their status was formalized under Tokugawa under the Tokugawa the palace shogunate founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu, in the late, you know, in the early, early 1600s, you know, around that period, early 17th century, and so they're relatively, you know, we've seen how they're created in history, they're not really genetically that different than the average Japanese because they came out of, you know, the average Japanese person who just happened to be working in leather working and, and all that all of these, you know, ritually impure professions. Probably, they're, I mean, they are intermarry now with the rest of the population. And so, you know, maybe if they had been distinct for another 500 years, they would have started to be, they probably would have started to be distinct, actually, but they've only been endogamous and isolated for like, about three centuries, you know, so it's, this is just not enough. And they also like, you know, emerged out of all these diverse groups that were doing these professions. In Europe, you do actually have Cagots they were segregated large parts of southern France. And they kind of disappear in the 19th century, they were assimilated. Nobody really knows what's going on with them, and who they were, there's a theory that they might be descended from Muslims who settled in, you know, Iberia in southern France, and, you know, eventually became Christianized. But, you know, their distinction was notable. So, apparently, they're noted as early as 1000. You know, ad. Yeah, that's just kind of a mysterious. So in Gascony where there's a lot of them that are called Cagots, in Bordeaux, they're called Gahets . And there's all sorts of weird names for them. And
they tended to be in the south of France more. They were not allowed to marry non-Cagots, it's. And, yeah, they lived in separate separate areas, there are professionals are prohibited from food or wine, they were prevented from touching food at the market. So they did have original impurities, couldn't work with livestock, enter Mills, they often had to be carpenters, wood cutters, rope makers, and stuff. So I mean, that sounds like a caste system. And so that is, that is, you know, pretty interesting, needs to be more study on that. There were similar types of things that actually happened to people who were say, executioner's. That became a hereditary profession, in parts of Europe, but it never really crystallized into a full blown caste system, in the way that you see in India. So, I have a hard time, you know, wanting to use the word in that context. So it's like saying, like, communism is a religion, it has religion like aspects, but it's not quite a religion, you know, Stalin dies. In religion, gods don't die, if they die, they come back. So there's just differences between a religion and a political ideology. Similarly, there's differences between caste like institutions, and societies and India's very, very defined caste system. So I can go on and on. Most of you know, in South America, there is a caste like system. That's a kind of a pigmentocracy where, you know, Creoles and white elites tend to dominate and indigenous people at the bottom indigenous and descendants of African slaves. But it's not America, all these people are mixed. Most of people who are not descendants of recent immigrants in South America, who are white have indigenous ancestry. Many have African ancestry. Some of them have quite a bit of Indigenous ancestry, 15 20%. So there's intermarriage between the different groups. So they are somewhat distinct, but the intermarry and the system is, is soft, in its enforcement. And it's norm following so if someone is a mestizo, mixed race background, but they become very wealthy and successful, you know, they can intermarry with, quote, white people, which was basically people were mostly genetically white, and look like, you know, you know, adhere to Spanish, you know, they want to be Castilian norms or whatever. But the point here is, in Latin America, the system is pretty soft. Similarly, in the Arab world, there are caste systems and there is racism. But, you know, the Prince Bandar ibin Sultan, I believe his mother was an Ethiopian slave, but he is paternally, the descendant of the founder of Saudi Arabia. And so he is part of the royal family, even though he experienced racism, he is also a royal. And so in Arab society, paternal lineage matters a lot. So in some ways, Bandar is inferior to the typical Saudi because of his race, and he has been the target of racism. him, but his wife is a cousin of his from. I'm gonna just say unblemished blood. So, you know, he has children that are of high status in the Saudi system. But his paternal lineage is from the royal family. He has a royal. So in Saudi Arabia, you don't have a real caste system you have, you know, all the bad things that we associate with caste systems. But again, it's not like strictly organized, formalized and like, you know, rock hard solid, like it is in the Indian subcontinent. In India itself, obviously, there are castes, jati, Varna, one of the things that people will tell you is, it's not simply a Hindu custom, it’s not a imply Hindu tradition, there are castes that Muslims and Christians, as even Sikhs follow, I say even Sikhs, because that was originally kind of founded as an anti caste, religion that kind of came out of the Indian traditions, you know, I think Sikhs will get offended if I say it's a synthesis of Islam and Hinduism because it’s not but you know, I mean, your mileage may vary. Just look into it. I would say it's dharmic. But, you know, it has been influenced and shaped by interaction with with Indians would call Abrahamic religions. But in any case, caste isnt present everywhere on the subcontinent, among all different religions and groups. So it's not simply Hindu. But there are groups, like Scheduled Tribes, like tribes, who are outside of the caste system, and who did not really practice caste. And you know, ritual purity rules that come down from the Hindu caste system. And so that shows that in some ways, these Muslims and Christians who practice caste are more Indianized than the tribal people that have lived here or lived in the subcontinent forever. So what's going on here? And what's really going on is, why are there Muslim castes? Why are their Christian castes? So the issue is in the Indian subcontinent, with exceptions, most of the time, communities jatis convert as a unit subjatis, or a village. And so you bring your whole community along. And so you just preserve the social order that pre existed, your conversion. So Pakistan, most of the Christians are descendants of untouchables, sweepers. Just they they did menial labor and, you know, cleaning and whatnot. And there's a they used to be called Chuhras. That's considered pejorative, it's a really bad word I, you know, Indian, and Pakistani listeners will probably be offended, but you know, most of you speak English, right? And so they're called different words now, but in any case, the point is Christian, the Christian now they converted Christianity. 90% of the Christians in Pakistan are descendants of, you know, what we call Dalits in India. So they're Dalit Christians, and the Muslims, they treat them. Obviously, as a religious minority, they oppress them, they persecute them as in the Muslim world, but they also clearly Hindu caste, like, Hindu, like, you know, I don't want to offend people, but Hindu like behavior, that you're not seeing the other parts of Islamic world. So, you know, there are advertisements, for, you know, sanitation workers, and they say Christians only apply. And why do they do this in Pakistan, why they have Christian exclusive jobs? Well, because their cast origin is as sanitation workers as cleaners as manual scavengers, which is exactly what you see on the other side of the border. You know, similarly among Muslims, you know, a lot of them claim Arab or Iranian ancestry. So that's somewhat a different thing. But they're also separated into caste like groups that do not necessarily intermarry. They remember their professions, their endogamy, their lineage, whatnot, there are Jat Muslims. So Jats are a particular jati a group of castes, sub castes, that I should say, this is complicated, I should say. There are Jats and then within the Jats, there are lineages, so there are like sub castes within the sub caste. So when you say you are a Jat, that does mean a lot. But even within that, there are narrower associations. So for example, Bania is a particular type of, you know, Vaishya ritual Vaishya, trading caste in general merchantile caste that is found in Northwest India, but there are different types of Banias and, you know, Gandhi was a Modh Bania. So that's, they're very well off. There are many Modh Bania who are very rich in India, but they're very, they're sub caste of a sub caste. So, if you want to be clear about that, I know all these details. I know it's complicated, but you know, I want to be clear for the South Asian Indian listeners that I know what I'm talking about here a little bit. So, you know, even in Pakistan, there is castes. There's also the cold beer diary, which is more of a Northwest Indian Punjabi thing, which is like lineage clan groups. And so when you look at the genetics that don't look that different than Hindus across the border, in terms of people are endogamous, they tend to hang out with their own kind, of course, Islam. You know, it's technically egalitarian and universal. So I think it does tend to slowly wear things down. I think that you see it in Bangladesh, you don't see genetic structure among Muslims. It looks like endogamy kind of ended. And people don't keep track of. I mean, I don't. I mean, I know my family backgrounds will see when they were Hindu, they were Kayastha. There's one Brahman lineage, but really, you don't keep track of that stuff. It's more like the United States or China, wheree they’re like show me the money. Like what's your, you know, do you guys have education? Do you have money? they don't really care about the caste stuff, they don't know about it. But I think in Pakistan, it's still kind of used in certain ways. And if you're a Syed , if you're descended from Muhammad, through Ali, that's also a different thing. So these these tendencies continue. In Sri Lanka, a recent paper came out, and I kind of knew this just looking at the data from the Sri Lankan Tamil sample of 1000 genomes, there is some caste like structure it looks like but it looks like it's much more attenuated than the mainland. And Sri Lanka is a predominately Buddhist Island, as you know, but there's a Hindu minority, as well as some Christians, but mostly Hindu of Tamils. So Strumica is a somewhat different case. And it shows in between position, kind of like Pakistan, but even arguably more admixed and less endogamous than Pakistan. So this shows that just because you're racially subcontinental, you don't automatically do caste. It's seems to be a cultural practice that occurs and doesn't occur. In the Christian context, I want to say
that our cast as well, many Christians, I think, especially in the north, just like in Pakistan, descend from Dalits. And they maintain their caste, you know, identity in some ways, even though they shouldn't. And I'm gonna talk about the legal issues where, you know, they don't have their caste identity, supposedly, but in South India, in Kerala, there are there's a group called nos Ronnie's who claim to be descended from Jews. They've been Christian for a long time they have, you know, they're not European, Christian and identity. Some of them are Roman Catholic and Protestant, but most are, you know, they have Eastern right Christian, so they're Jacobite. Trisha, the East I don't want to get into the details, but their Christianity really originates in, you know, the Levant and and Iraq, really Iraq church to the east, probably originally, but they shifted their affiliation, the Jacobite church in Syria after the arrival of Portuguese, who forced some of them to be Roman Catholics. Again, it's complicated. There are the Eastern rite Christians in in Kerala, who are intermediate with Rome. So they're, you know, Catholic Eastern rite then there are others that are in communion with the Church of the East, which is now I think, based on Chicago, originally, it was in Iraq. And then there's others that are, you know, was Syria, the Syrian Jacobite church, and then there's others that are in communion. Now, with the Anglican The point is they're indigenous insofar as they've been around for a couple 1000 years, at least 1000 years. In the caste context, they are their highest, they're relatively high status, or their equivalent to an upper caste. Genetically there looked to be mostly but not exclusively converted from the American mayor cast, which is now promising, but it is an upper caste in Kerala. And these Christians have had issues with, you know, Dalek converts, obviously, because those people have different caste. And, you know, there's this thing that happens where in Indian Christianity Dalit bishops are assigned to watch over Dalit flocks, you know, so, again, the caste system is perpetuating itself within Christianity. And this has been a massive argument within the Christian churches. Many of the Protestant churches, for example, are very militant against caste, they tried to break it down. Catholic Church has taken a more neutral stance insofar as they do not condone or support the system, but they will work with the cultural system as it is, and if this is how the local people organize themselves in Serbia, so and then, yeah, so that's that, you know, it exists outside of, of, of Hinduism, throughout the Indian culture, and so, there's a debate about whether the caste system is you know, Constituent Assembly, I guess, that we were I was used to associate with Hinduism. And this is a very complicated and emotionally fraught argument, because a lot of Hindus do not like it being associated with caste system or the caste system being associated with their religion. They have very religious, but they are very anti caste. Whereas, you know, I mean, as early as Albert Rooney 1000 years ago or magazines more than 2000 years ago, the caste system has been part of the Hindu, Indian, because Hindu was just the word Indian, in the past landscape, you know, priests and warriors and all these things and untouchability have been recorded by outside observers, a long time ago, it's not a new thing. So I think a Hindus will respond that, you know, where this is cultural, it's not religious. And I think that of all the religions in the world, to be candid, it's really hard for Hinduism to make the argument that something is culturally Indian or not religiously Indian, because, you know, this is again, something that same people of Indian origin who are Muslim or Christian might take some offense that but to some extent, to be Indian is to be Hindu, and to be Hindus to be Indian. Now, this is not 100% True, you can ask all of these Hindus or champion who's Vietnam, or Hindu converts like Tulsi Gabbard, they're clearly Hindu, but they're not Indian. But you know, on the whole, the connection between Hinduism in India and its sacred geography is very, very strong. And, you know, if you're Muslim or Christian, there's other connections that you have outside of the Indian subcontinent, in a religious sacred identitarian concept or construct. So, I think there is a close association with Indian culture in Hinduism that you cannot deny. And, you know, Hinduism is not a formalized organizational religion, with a confessional orientation in the exact same way, at least universally as Islam and Christianity. But, you know, it's evolved in that direction. And there are sects that are like that. But on the whole, it's organically emerged out of the Indian culture and caste has been part of that Indian culture. So I don't think that you can say that caste is derivative from Hinduism. I think what you can say is both of them emerge out of particular cultural and social conditions in the Indian context. And it's very, very difficult to disentangle in the Indian context, Hinduism from caste, this is not true elsewhere, where caste kind of fades away, it is kind of a cultural practice that's heard, I have no doubt maybe practiced by a few lineages, usually Brahmin priestly lineages in Hindu temples, but in places like Mauritius, you know, Trinidad, Guyana, these systems disappear. And the reason that they disappear, is because the whole jati Varna system, in particular, the djati system, which is unique to India, doesn't really transfer that, well, it gets destabilized and shocked and other cultural contexts, and exogamy rates get high. And so the maintenance of the system is just not, you know, it's not possible, it's not feasible. So in these other, diasporic you know, Indian, substantially Indian or Indian majority in the case of Mauritius, and arguably, — right below 50 Now, but it places the lot of Hindus, their Hindus, their Indian, but the caste system is not a big deal anymore, partly because they've been extracted out of the Indian cultural context, the Indian geography, and I think the way you can think about it is, you know, maybe it's some sort of like metastable equilibrium, where, you know, there's a bunch of different factors that are dynamically shifting around it. And once you shock the system, and you knock it out of equilibrium, the caste dissolves, the caste system dissolves. But in the Indian subcontinent, there's just so much history, there's so many people that are inextricably connected to the system in terms of, it's part of civil society for them, it's how they find their, you know, business partners, it's how they find their wives and their husbands. It's who they socialize and interact with. But, you know, it's just really hard to knock it off. So I think that the main reason that this is really interesting to me, and I think many of you are listening, is the genetics aspect. So, you know, until recently, we didn't have genetics to really analyze these demographic questions, these social cultural questions. And so you had books like Nicholas Dirk’s “Castes of Mind:” and others that kind of talked about caste through the British lens and how the British rarified and solidified a lot of these caste boundaries and you know, identities and that made it seem like it was kind of created crystallized a really relatively recently. What happened is when the just about 20 years ago and really 10 years go in detail started looking at Indian groups, they started noticing that they were very different from each other. And so I don't know I guess a fact I like to use as you can have a village in South Indian in Andhra Pradesh, where one caste one jati could be the genetic distance of people from Finland, from another caste in the village that were people from Sicily, so it's continental wide, like pairwise FSTs are like, you know, of .5 are not that out of
the norm. And you know intercontinental genetic distances are like .1 - So this is definitely like as much or more genetic variation than within Europe. It's way more than in China. It's within a single village, there is continent wide scale type variation. And that was shocking to a lot of scholars and a lot of geneticists initially. And another thing that was also shocking was that when you look at the Varna system, and the ritual ranks, the “higher” quote unquote, Varna the higher ritually higher groups like Brahmins are the most genetically distanced from the lowest groups, the untouchables, the Dalits. And that was interesting. And it was a pretty consistent pattern. It was a pretty consistent pattern. And in places like Northwest Indian subcontinent where there are a lot of groups were that are high caste that are twice born high in the Varna system, why not Brahmin, they too are genetically quite distant from the lower caste groups in the region. And the lower caste groups, like Chamars, Jatavs, or whatever, in northern India, are similar to the same groups not quite the same. They're quite different. But, you know, they exhibit the same distance from South Indian Brahmins. So what I'm trying to get here is, there's a lot of genetic diversity, a lot of genetic distance, a lot of endogamy tends to cut in the same way, all across the subcontinent, which is exactly what you would expect, kind of taking a naive view of genetic stratification based on an ancient caste system. And when you look at when you look at the endogamy, you know, David Riech's lab has talked about this a lot they've published on this, you know, stylized fact as it started really around like 1500 years ago, it in earnest, but you know, it depends on region. And it's not like a single like caste system really took over during the Gupta period, 1500 years. But you know, there's some endogamy that started earlier, there's some that was later, some castes were clearly created later. You see things like Bengali Brahmins have East Asian ancestry clearly through admixture, Tamil Brahmins have local admixture. So, you know, you had intermarriage. And there are some groups like Nayars who intermarry in or had relationships with Brahmins in Kerala to relatively recently and I'm not going to get into the details of that system. The Indian listeners know what I'm talking about. But there's a lot of exceptions to the rule, but there is the rule. So endogamy modern India, depending on the estimates is like 90 to 98% on the jati level. So this is not Brahmins marrying ing Brahmins this is like, you know, Iyer Brahmins marrying Iyer Brahmins so it's a very, very narrow definition of endogamy me and yet still it tends to hold. And this is probably what it was in the past. So exogamy rates like out marriage , it's like, Riech Lab calculated like one out of 200 maybe per regeneration, in a lot of these groups. So that means when you look at them, they look genetically homogenous. So, for example, you know, I have a friend Surya Yalamanchili and I mentioned this he is, he was a politician, he works in business now, but Surya might be listening to this, but when I looked at his genes, I could figure out what caste he was just because I'd seen that exact profile, elsewise, you know, and then if you do IBD segment matching, you see they match. So, you know, someone like, for example, Marwaris from Rajastan, they all look kind of the same. They're not necessarily genealogical cousins, but genetically, they're kind of like cousins, and there's a paper that, you know, again, the Riech Lab was involved in, which was talks about this. And, you know, it basically everybody in the subcontinent , in some of these casts are like, you know, second or third cousins, you know, like, they're the closer than Ashkenazi Jews in many cases. So, you know, 1000s of years of endogamy does this, you know. Now, there are some interesting aspects of the genetics that I think are curious. So a lot of, you know, Brahmin groups, but also some non Brahmin groups that are upper caste have these things called gotras as paternal lineages as. So, these these gotras systems, trace paternal lineages and so what you should be able to see there is Y chromosomes, right. And so, some groups like Bengali Brahmins, you see their 75% R1a, which is R1a-X 93, which is associated with the steppe and it's a new you know, that means that only 25% are outside of the paternal lineage have been integrated over 1000s of years like that makes sense. Other groups so, for example, like Tamil Brahmins are kind of evenly split between J2, which is more associate with Indus Valley civilisation, and West Asia, and R1a. So what's going on there? So there are different Founding Fathers maybe in some of these Brahmin castes, and some of these, you know, Gotra castes, these paternal lineages. And so these communities actually emerged from a founding group that was a mixture and a synthesis. And that's interesting, because, you know, their mythology, their legends, their oral history is of you know, unbroken lineage from one founder, but some of these groups, like I said, Tamil Brahmins are split between R1a and J2, and there's also minority that are L2. So, there are other groups where they're Brahmins, I think they're mostly Gujaratis that have the Y chromosome H, which is actually tend to find the lower caste groups normally. So that's interesting. And it shows that, you know,
there's a wide range of people that got integrated into these early Brahmin groups, but but there is still a stratification genetically between the different castes, where Brahmin groups tend to have more steppe ancestry than everyone else around them. And so I'm going to review the Indian genetic stuff a little again, which most of you know, but Indian genetics, you can think of it as three primary ancestral groups. One of them is steppe ancestry, which is basically like there’s Sintashta, Andronovo culture, basically people that pushed out of Belorussian eastward into the Urals, they mixed a little bit with Siberian foragers, so they have a little bit of that extra, but really, the corded ware people their mix of yamnaya and globular amphora Neolithic farmer. And so 70/30 ratio add on to that, you know, dilute that by by about 10% with Siberian forger. And then, you know, they show up, you know, in Central Asia, and here they mix with other people, the other people they mix with in the Indian subcontinent, least elsewhere, it's different. In the Indian subcontinent. They initially mixed with the Indus Valley civilisation, people. So this is a civilization that existed for 1000s of years, at least 1000 years, but more really, before the arrival of indo Aryans probably around 1800 BC, in the northwest of the subcontinent through the Khyber Pass, coming through Tajikistan, you know, traversing Kazakhstan originally for the Urals, etc. And the Indus Valley civilisation, people, we have some genetics from outliers, as well as Rakhigarhi in India. And it looks like most of their ancestry is similar to peoples in Iran, Eastern Iran. They're not Iranians, as we understand them today, who themselves have Indo- or who have Iranian ancestry and Indo-Iranian ancestry. But they're Iranian like, they are different from people in Western Iran in the Zagros. They have more Siberian ancestries, Siberian forager ancestry, as well as, you know, less Anatolian farmer ancestry. So all of these different groups are a mix of these earlier, distal groups. But so the pure quote unquote ancestors of the Indus Valley civilisation that were Iranian actually do not exist anymore. In that form. They contribute to other groups like in Khorāsān, and in Mashhad in western Afghanistan and Tajikistan. But really, as a pure group, they don't exist anymore. They're Eastern Iranians. And they're the dominant ancestry in the Indus Valley civilisation, but a minority of the ancestry there is actually similar to the ancestry that you find in indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia the Negritos peoples, the Andaman Islands. And so this is often called Ancient ancestral South Indian AASI or Aboriginal Indian forage or Aboriginal hunter gatherer, AHG, I'm just gonna say, AHG, that's easy. But basically, these are people that have connections further eastward, not with western Eurasia, they're genetically closer to Han Chinese or Australian aborigines. They're a little bit closer to Australian aborigines than Han Chinese, but the division between all these groups is very deep in the past, so Han Chinese, and the Northeast Asian group separated maybe like 41 42,000 the aboriginals, you know, Australia Melanesians, separated, maybe like 38 39,000. So these are all very diverse groups in eastern Eurasia, the AHG the Aboriginal hunter gatherers of the subcontinent. They are closest relate closely related to Do Andaman Islanders, but that just division might have occurred like 35,000 years ago. So it's actually pretty distant. These are the western most people of Eastern Eurasia. So there's a division between western and eastern Eurasia. These AHG seem to have Denisovan ancestry, whereas the Iranian farmers do not. Steppe people do not. And that indicates that the Thar Desert, which is the border of modern day, Pakistan, and India was probably bigger, which I know, for a fact paleoclimatologically should be doing most of the ice age. So it prevented gene flow from Eastern western Eurasia, just like, you know, the interior of Central Asia, Tibet, Siberia, also reduced gene flow a lot. So these are Eastern people, but they're very different from modern Eastern people that we know the Iranian farmers are more similar to Western Iranian farmers, but they also are quite different. And then you have the steppe people who there are no pure steppe people left but you know, Tajiks are maybe 30 to 40% steppe in the Indian caste context, depending on the estimator, you use, North Indian Brahmins are around like 30% Steppe. There are other groups like Jats. So Nikki Haley is a Jat. Vivek Ramaswamy, this for Americans, his wife is a North Indian Brahmin. And these groups are both about 30% Steppe. Jat, if you had to pick the Jats are probably a little higher there from Punjab, they tend to be farmers. Within the Varna structure, there's arguments who the Jats are, they claim for themselves, Kshatriya status. But historically, they were Sudras, which is just due to the fact that they were agro pastoralists. And they weren't rulers or high status in any way. They may have migrated from the Indus Valley relatively recently. In any case, there's some interesting stuff in their genetics, but I don't want to get into that. But basically, I want to point out here, genetically, you have groups, like the Jats, who are probably in the Varna, who are actually in the Varna system, have lower ritual purity that these North Indian Brahmins, but genetically they have as much or more steppe ancestry. So one thing that people like to do is just assume steppe ancestry equals higher status and on average, that's true, within any given region, that does actually seem to be true, not always, but the vast majority of time that I've seen, but you have situations like South Indian Brahmins, like Tamil Brahmins, who are saying like, you know, 15 to 20%, you know, 15 to 20% steppe ancestry, but they indubitably are of higher ritual status than the Jats. But, another thing to point out is South Indian Brahmins, though they have less steppe ancestry, because they were not impacted by Islamic, you know, invasions and all that as much as North Indian Brahmins. Many people argue that they have a pure continuation of Vedic ritualism to the north Indian Brahmins who lost some traditions. And so, if you had to pick you could probably say that in a cultural way, a cultural sense, the South Indian Brahmins are at least you know, perhaps more, you know, higher up on the Varna system, although, you know, really in the Varna system, you know, Brahmin is a Brahmin , you know, so in theory they should be able to intermarry with each other. They never did, though, right. So, Tamil Brahmins do not intermarry with North Indian Brahmins from Uttar Pradesh. Vivek Ramaswamy has no problem with this because he's American. And I'm sure you know, it's not a big deal. Like he speaks Tamil, his wife grew up speaking Hindi, but really English is their first language and that's just how it is. So, these Indian cultural contexts are gone. But I wanted to point out that this steppe IVC you know, AHG proportions vary a lot. So, there's a clone gradient from the north to the southeast as an upper caste to the lower caste, but you have the situation that you know, upper castes in the south are going to have way less steppe than middle caste to the north and even some lower castes in the north, you know, so, it's complicated. On the whole, you know, like a Brahmin might be North Indian Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh is like maybe like 20% AHG and then 30% steppe and then 50% IVC you know, you might have a Reddy from South India, which is ritually Reddy are Shudras. But they take the role of middle castes and they're generally landowners in the south, because there are no basically in most of South India, there's no castes between Brahmins and Shudras. There’s no Vaishya and Kshatriyas so some castes tried to take on those roles functionally then assert some ritual status, maybe in a few cases, but really, there's not this whole like Varna system is actually in the north, in an elaborated way, with the two Kshatriyas and Vaishyas you know, elsewhere it's just Brahmins and non Brahmins, but the North its different. In any case, these Reddys might be you know, like 50% or something or more Indus Valley, they're gonna be more than 50% Indus Valley Civilization, you know, maybe 5% steppe and maybe like 30 40%, AHG, something like that, like these are, these are common trends. You see, these are common numbers. You see, it's a little different Bengali where my family's from where, you know, there's East Asian ancestry. So that's like five to 15%, maybe even 20%. You know, that you can rejigger that, but I think you get it. You see when you see some pattern in the Sindh, and among a few of these Vaishya groups, like in the northwest, you and also Khatris who are merchants, but in the Varna system, they claim that their Kshatriyas yes, this is this gets complicated. Khatris of Punjab. So, Ro Khanna is a Khatris,
for example. And so the Varna system, Ro Khanna, who has very dark skinned, is actually much higher than Nikki Haley, who is a jock. I mean, subjects can complain and say this is wrong, but I think this is pretty true. Then Nikki Haley, who was a light skinned jock, who could actually almost pass as white. And, you know, that's just how it is. But you know, their status is a little confused, because they're merchants, but they used to be warriors, perhaps. But in Northwest India, the warrior role was taken by Muslims in many areas, and so they didn't have that role, you know. So these countries often have less step than their Brahmin neighbors, but they have more Indus Valley, civilisation type ancestry. And they might have even less, less he Aboriginal hunter gatherer, you know, and I don't want to get into why that is. But I think there's some issues with the Indo Aryan migrations are the dynamics of interconnectedness. I've explained this before, but that's a different podcast, I just wanna talk about the caste system here. So everyone's a mix of these three, these three, very Brahmins tend to have more step. But you know, there are many parts of the country where there are populations like Johnson countries in the north, in Cushaw, Trias, in the north Rajputs. So in Uttar Pradesh, the structures are Rajputs Rajputs have more steps than South Indian Brahmins, even though they're lower down, technically on the Varna system. Now, in the Vita system, I do want to say something explicit. Three top castes are twice born, they've been born twice, and they get initiated to certain rituals that sutras do not. And obviously, Brahmins get the most because they're the teachers, you know, but, but Cushaw Trias, and rushes can learn certain things. Whereas the sutras are supposed to not learn certain things. They're just supposed to hear the mantras, and then you're the untouchables that are outside of the system. So what's going on with the untouchables with the Dalits and the tribes. So their origins are almost probably rooted in the fact that they are derived from people that were not assimilated into the Indian system. And the Indian system is what we call the Hindu system. But Hindu as a distinct religion did not necessarily exist when there were when everyone was Indian, and nobody was Muslim or Christian, you know, so there's, like all these religious views within the Hindu system. But there's some commonalities, you know, maybe karma, higher status groups tend to be vegetarian. So, Buddhism and Jainism come out of Hinduism, or proto Hinduism, you know, proto Indian system, and they are vegetarian vegetarianism, non violence, these sorts of things are more high status in many ways in the Indian subcontinent for Kelly, you know, priestly castes, and yeah, so there's some things that are uniting them. But it's it's very, like, you know, in terms of practices, but beliefs very, very heterodox are like, it's very, very diverse and multitudinous you know. So, you know, you have you have these systems with all these different groups. But they also relate to endogamy that's really old, and that creates these massive genetic differences. So we know that's old. We know the caste system is old. We know it's persistent, it's robust. It's been there forever. But this does cause some issues. So David Reich's lab has talked about this, but basically, when you have these groups that are inbred, they have a lot of recessive diseases. And, you know, that causes issues, a lot of people they need some cognitive metabolic disease, all these other things. In Pakistan, they add on to that cousin marriage that they get from their Muslim culture, because of marriage, not that prevalent Bangladesh for whatever reason, in any case, you know, so you have, you have like, these genetic, you know, amplifiers of the underlying diseases. And so, you only need a little outbreeding actually to rescue this. So, you know, some people say like, oh, like, Should I marry someone from South India from from North India, you know, sometimes people ask, reality is like, you could just marry someone from another geography and that's fine. So this is like an exponential decay. That's very, very like rapid. So by which I just mean, you don't need to get into a totally different region of the country or even a totally different race, all you need to do is, you know, in a very unrelated group, so for example, let's say that your job somewhat caste is whatever, you want to preserve your high caste status and you're a North Indian Brahmin. Well, I mean, you can make a South Indian Brahmin, that's fine. That would be you know, and like, it depends, there's arguments about whether some of these larger caste groups have the inbreeding, but let's just start as fact, let's just go with it. What, perhaps like the best thing would be just marry a Rajput from your region of India. They speak the same language. And you know, they're not that different environment status. But genetically, they're different enough that there's going to be no recessive disease problems, right. So recessive disease problems are not specific to castes and varnas. They're specific to Job tees. So there's like 1000s of job tees. There's only if you include untouchables and dollies, that's like five Catholic groups. But you know, once you break down the job teaberry is that recessive diseases will go in terms of like, The Untouchables are very interesting, the dolly it's very interesting because, you know, North Indian dollies have more stepping on century than South Indian dollies, but they still have relatively low amount of steppe ancestry, less than non dolly peasants, you know, a cultivator cast, as you would call them. These would be in the Varna system, they might be shrewd, where they might be less sharp. They're also farmers who are Brahmin and Rajput too. So it's all it's all a jumble. But basically, the peasants who are not Dali do have more staff, and then the Rajputs and the Brahmins have the most. So there's just a rank order that way. And I don't know, like how that persisted so long. Greg Clark, in his book says India has the highest intergenerational persistence of social status, which basically means social status is very heritable in the subcontinent. And, you know, just take that as how you will it is, you know, just what you see in the data. A lot of people will be wondering solely caste and power and wealth and what's going on here. Americans in particular don't know too much about this caste system beyond like, you know, what they kind of have a vague ideas. And so just, you know, the richest people in India are actually not they're not Brahmin, you know, Americans who Brahmins run India sometimes partly that's because of anti Brahmin ideologies in the subcontinent that have spread but they're not the wealthiest the wealthiest are, you know, Bosnia's that are merchant caste particularly those from West India. And, you know, Jains are the wealthiest religious group in India because of that reason, along with Parsis, Zoroastrians who have taken kind of a Bania type role. And so, you know, these billionaires like the Banias like, you know, they're think they're Modh. I think he's a Modh Bania. And then there's other groups like Mawaris, Maheshwaris in Calcutta, Kolkata. The business community from what I've heard is actually heavily dominated by Banias from western India. So that just shows you kind of occupational diversification and separation between these different groups. They continue to, you know, remain endogamous, you know, I have an acquaintance who is from Kolkata from this community. And his father can speak Bengali, but he can't he speaks English and Hindi. So they still, like relatively distinct, but my point there is that these groups still maintain their customers across India, they're very wealthy, you know, tend to be literate professional and well off as well, but they're not as like, focused on money as these groups and so they're not as wealthy. Other upper caste can be quite well off and you know, Jats who you know, their caste Varna status is in dispute, but they are very powerful in you know, in Punjab, they are landowners, they tend to be landowning class in the rural areas, whereas the Khatris are, you know, urban professionals are traders. And you know, you do see this correlation between caste and wealth and power and status in various ways. In South India. Everyone is technically not if they're not a Brahmin, they're a Shudra. They're an untouchable or Dalit, or whatever. But, you know, the most powerful groups are Reddys in Andra Pradesh or Nayars in Kerala, these are a technically ostensibly Shudra groups, but really, they were the rulers and the, you know, they produced the local sub elites as well, when the Brahmins came from the north and so the Brahmins provided their religious and cultural in perpetuity to the kings who were technically Shudras like maybe they were Kshatriya-ized. But they were the only ones them and the royal family, but the local landowners are not Rajputs are Jats obviously, in South India, as Indians would know, there are Reddys and other groups. And these groups have the power. And you know, they are advancing steadily, they have quite a bit of wealth, they have the political power. And so it starts to get complicated region to region, although, you know, there is a rough correlation of upper caste power, it's it's complicated. UP had a prime minister who was Dalit for many years Mayawati. And that was through - a lot of Dalits like in terms of proportions, about 15% of Indians are Dalits, about like 10% or tribal, about depending on who you talk to, like 20-25% or upper caste. And then the rest are, you know, religious minorities and, you know, non upper castes,
many of the most of them are other backwards castes are just kind of a new category. And so that gets into reservations, which is a big deal. So, I'm gonna talk about that next. So, in terms of caste, and why does it matter? It's a private affair. I think one thing that, you know, non Indians have to know is India has some of the actually most thorough long standing affirmative action programs that date back to the independence of the country, the founding of the country, the 1940s and 1950s. They call the reservation system, and it makes it makes it basically makes it so that public, a lot of the public sector, there are reservations for different castes proportionate to their population, or at least, you know, it gives them some steak at the table. So scheduled, you know, Scheduled Castes is the term for Dalit's in the Constitution. And that basically means, you know, these are groups that are there are set asides that are reserved from them. They're targeted as marginalized oppressed groups, Scheduled Tribes somewhat similar, although the tribes are somewhat different than - so Dalits are generally Hindu. Although 90% of the Buddhists in India are Dalits from Maharashtra state, which is where Mumbai is. So not necessarily and you know, there are a lot of Christian and Muslim groups. There are Muslim Dalits, there are Christian Dalits legally they're not labeled as Dalits, because Abrahamic religions, definitely lose your caste. They're all but the Buddhist Dalits and the Sikh Dalits are still classed as Dalits and Sikh Dalits have their own temples and religious movements. So, you know, even though Sikhism was technically anti caste, it became casteified you know, there are many anti caste movements I became castes like the Lingayats I think in northern Karna. Karnataka, you know, these areas, so, it's hard to escape the system. And so, you the Indian Constitution kind of bands things like untouchability obviously, but it also sets aside you know, reservations proportions for the lower castes. Okay. Eventually, what ended up happening over the last over the next couple of decades is there was motivation from other groups who want to get in on the system. So now you have a system, which is classified between, you know, general category, which is just like, you know, you get no reservations, you know, these are Brahmins, upper caste groups like Banias and, and Rajputs cetera, white South India, probably, you know, some landowning caste there. And then there's, obviously, the Dalits, and the Scheduled Tribes. And then there's the other backward castes. So these are not the Dalits, but they're not upper caste, or they don't want to call themselves upper caste. Now, the issue here is, it starts to get confusing, because it's a political question if you're a backward caste, and there's some groups that, you know, engage in activism to become backward, castes. So in Punjab, Jats are not backward castes, I mean, they run the state to a large extent now. But in Rajistan, there are places where people and groups have wanted to become backward castes. And you know, they have and so, you know, something like, I think, around half of the Indian population are technically backward castes now, this is not a group or a category like Brahmin or Dalit, which is consistent across the nation, it varies by region and state. So there could be a jati Varna group, that's a backward caste, one state that's not a backward caste and the next state and you know, this is just due to politics, but also local local conditions. So, I could be that actually, this jati Varna group does have a higher status and more socio economic power in the state than the other. So it gets complicated when people say things about caste in a pan India manner. So for example, there are people you know, people in North South India, or people from South Indian families, South Indian Brahmin families in the United States, and they don't really know any caste dynamic besides Brahmin versus non Brahmin , because that's how things for example, in Tamil Nadu are run. It's Brahmin versus non Brahmin. And often it's pretty harsh actually, the, you know, the language is quite hostile to the Brahmin minority, which is only a couple of percent. But you know, there have been Brahmin prime, you know, chief ministers in the state actually, due to a relatively recent vintage, so I don't really understand how to interpret this. In any case, you know, the South Indian Brahmins in particular, you know, when you're talking about Brahmins that are prominent, they're really the ones that are prominent in the west and elsewhere. They flooded into information technology and other groups, others other professional groups like that. And actually, they migrated to northern cities during the colonial period because they took the Western education, English education, more enthusiastically the North Indian Brahmins were actually not as prominent, you know, in the socio economic domain globally, you know, they're not the ones that you really hear about. Really, they're mostly south Indian Brahmins or Bengali Brahmins or to some extent maybe the Brahmins from Maharashtra state, that Mumbai is dominant in etc. So, you know, Brahmin is not just a Brahmin, there are different different groups. And, you know, they have different outputs. They're not actually genetically, you know, Vagheesh Narasimhan and his paper from 2019. About South Asian genetics, they're not actually descended from the same common ancestors, they don't seem to have the same IBD segments. So there wasn't a pan Brahmin group, from which they all descend, they're genetically somewhat different. The ones in the south tend to be 25% indigenous. So that's why they have lower steppe ancestry. They look like North Indian Brahmins, but they have lower steppe ancestry, they're 25%, diluted, the ones have been called the exact same factor applies. They're 25%, diluted, and that's obviously indigenous Bengali, because they have East Asian ancestry that the Bengalis have. So they must have gotten it through admixture. The same in Maharashtra and elsewhere. In the Northwest, and in Gujarat, it's different. Another aspect in that you see in Punjab and the far northwest and is an is that there are non Brahmin groups that have just as much steppe ancestry that are not that genetically differentiated really from the Brahmins. And so that indicates that as this jati Varna system spread across India, took on local subcontinent - it took on like local configurations, right. So who is a backward caste and Other Backward caste is a bit confused. And it's a political question. In the subcontinent, and there's a lot of resentment from many upper caste people about the reservation system. So you know, there's only a certain number of government doctors have to be only so many that are, you know, upper caste and, you know, at medical schools or certain slots that are fitted in, and it's very explicit quota system. It's not like the United States where they kind of say, Oh, well, diversity is great. It's a quota system. It's a quota system, they have a quota system. And that's what they have enforced. Now, the government and the system is still to some extent, though, staffed and run by many, many upper caste people. The current Prime Minister Modi is not I mean he's not a Dalit or anything, but definitely like modest caste background, modest professional backgrounds. So that's kind of interesting. Most of the previous prime ministers were, I believe, Manmohan Singh was Khatri before that, Vajpayee was a Brahmin, the ones in the 90s are kind of confused but the Nehru family obviously, Brahmin, although they mixed with Parsi and Italian later, you know, obviously, although so, you know, India still still kind of run by the upper caste or the wealthiest they control most land. They still dominate a lot of politics, but there's the kind of, you know, Rise of, of the backward caste and other groups because they're demographically dominant. Now, there's there's confused groups like say Patidars, Patel's other people discerning Patel, so I want to say just Patel's but the United States or Patels Patidars these are peasants, traditionally, in Gujarat, they would be cultivators right theyre agriculturalists. And so there were Shudras ritually they’re Shudras so something like what happened with Jats is happening with them, where they imitated a emulated Banias who were the richer castes, Vaishyas and they're not originally Banias. But, you know, they've taken on a lot of the roles and the tendencies of Banias in terms of becoming very enterprising and merchantile. And so, you know, maybe at some point they will become Banias, I don't know, stylized practices of North Indian playing the Gangetic plain caste trying to elevate themselves from Shudras to Kshatriya. To become Rajputs is kind of what the Jats are trying to do. But in Gujarat, castes are trying to elevate themselves from Shudras to Vaishyas to become merchants, traders cetera, in Gujarat Brahmins are not very influential. So, this is another thing there are some parts of the subcontinent where, you know, the Brahmin non Brahmin dynamic has been so in Tamil Nadu, that's probably a big thing. In in West Bengal Brahmins are part of what's called the bundle of elite, which are three dominant castes, Brahmins, Kayasthas, and,
and Baidya were doctors, Kayasthas were scribes, in any case, but in Gujarat and Punjab, and these states, Brahmins are not that big of a factor. They are, you know, as they, it is what it says on the tin on the can, they are priests, they are ritualists and that's, that's it. Whereas in other parts of the country, they own a lot of land, and maybe they're heavily involved in politics, you know, and so, you know, that that varies. Similarly, you know, in UP, you know, Vaishyas and Merchant castehas have like, a lot less sway and pull of ideas. And up in Uttar Pradesh, like, which is, which has, which would be like, you know, it has like, almost 300 million people, you know, it's like, not quite as big as the United States, but it's big, it's, it would be one of the largest nations in the world. But you know, here's the state was dominant by Rajputs. And there's like prominent Brahmin community Brahmin percentage in the subcontinent is maybe like, you know, three to 5%. But, you know, parts of Uttar Pradesh in the hill country, north of the Himalayas, it's well above 10%. So this is where a lot of them live. These are not the most prominent ones in places like the United States, who tend to be South Indian Brahmins for the cities of the South, right? But no, I've already said that. So, it's really complicated. There's this massive reservation system. You know, castes are jockeying for position, there's certain castes that have clear and defined identities across the subcontinent like Brahmins and Dalits, but a lot of other groups that are in the middle, you know, might move their status depending on where they are. And the Varna status might also be kind of in doubt. So even though some aspects of the system are very static, like the endogamy rates seem to be really static, other aspects are not the position of the occupation can shift. So you know, so a lot of these groups I said, Kayastha, Kayasthas, Khatris like these are two groups that have occupations that are basically white collar professionals, you know, they're scribes are literate, they're non Brahmin literate elites. Often, you know, Kayasthas do not tend to do mercantile stuff countries do. There are Kayastha in Maharashtra, in west UP and Kayastha in West Bengal, not genetically different. I've looked at Kayastha in West Bengal versus someone from UP there genetically very distinct. So these are two these are individuals who come from groups that elevated themselves into this literate non Brahmins status at some point. And, you know, they have the same name, they have same ritual status. Although, you know, Brahmins in Bengali traditionally would say Kayastha there are Shudras whereas the ones in UP would say that Kayasthas in UP are not Shudras like maybe they're, you know, they're twice born, right. So it's complicated. And just keeping track of all this in your head is very complicated. In Maharashtra, the various Kayastha groups are considered quite elite. And on par with the two major Brahmin configurations in the state. Actually, there's three of them now, in any case, so it's hard to keep track of all this stuff. And, but it was functional, and it was useful at some point in the past, but is it useful in the future, so the endogamy rates are lower in modern India than they were in the past, just looking for the genetics. And without the endogamy, the system cannot really maintain itself. So what you're gonna see is, the caste system over the next century will probably just degrade. You know, there'll be just like the universal asset of free market economics, urbanization, which is wear it away, there will be groups that maintain endogamy as relics or in isolated areas, but really, it's going to be a cultural artifact of the past and part of India that's considered interesting, but not that big of a deal. Similarly, if, for example, just concretely, if, for example, like, you know, artificial meat from soy actually takes over. You could have a situation where vegetarianism is not that big of a deal, because everyone is a vegetarian, if, you know, it's more economically effective and efficient and it tastes the same as real meat. But, you know, it's still part of the cultural legacy of the culture similarly, you know, there's going to be people Who like in the United States say Oh, I'm a fourth Irish fourth, blah, blah, blah. Well, I'm a fourth Bania, half Brahmin, blah, blah, blah, right? These people, they have caste ancestries. But once you start to become mixed, it loses the coherency. You develop bonds across communities across jatis, and you're not as loyal to one single jati, right? So what it's going to do, it's going to dissolve the solidities of the social structure of the current India. And it's going to be a much more open landscape in some ways, probably just or more class stratified. Individuals are going to compete in a hyper, hyper competitive landscape, I think what's going to be more like, is China. So in China, you have regionalism, and you have class, but you don't really have caste, people intermarry across regions relatively frequently among urban professionals. You know, marriages aren't really arranged. It's just just understandings that you have to be of a certain class, et cetera, et cetera, right. So I think that this is a practice that is going to be around for a couple of generations. It's still a big deal. And it has huge consequences, but in the future, it will disappear. A lot of the genetic diseases associated with particular Varnas will actually diminish because they're recessive. So you know, the health and health will increase along with that's probably positive. But overall, you're going to see that this is an institution, that dynamic of the past. As for other questions, like, Oh, why did this happen in India? Nobody really knows how old is it? I suspect it predates the Aryans, I suspect that the jati system comes out of the Indus Valley civilisation, and the Varna system was fused with it to create jati Varna. So Caste uniqueness, rigidity, robustness is actually due to cultural synthesis, just like there was genetic synthesis, you know, two to 4000 years ago, between all these various groups, eventually, the Synthesis, congealed, stopped being protein and fixed itself into the configuration, you see which we are the last, we will be the last few generations to see this. Because I believe by the 22nd century, it will definitely be in the rearview mirror, as the urban elites will probably not practice at all. And many of the rural people will start to have transitioning out of it. Because, you know, the elites, once the elites transform their customs and practices, the non elites with a lag tend to follow. So I will talk to you again soon. I hope you found this informative. Most of you know that I've written a couple of pieces on caste to a couple of essays, you can check those out, I'll put those those are gonna be links. But it's a complicated topic. And I don't know if we're gonna talk about it again. I know that there's a lot of things that I said that some Indians and non Indians will take issue with them the details, and that's fine. Just understand that a lot of these questions are disputable. So I could be wrong, and I could be right. It's not a singular answer. Either way. Thank you very much.
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