Prof Elst's muddled defence of 'caste'

An old essay by Prof Koenraad Elst (Hinduism Today, Sep 1994) re-surfaced recently in some e-mail groups. The essay (click here) had been presented as the “verdict from Belgium” on the Hindu caste system: that “for the most part” Hinduism has been “helped rather than hurt”.

More than justifying the above “verdict”, the essay actually shows up the Professor as confused and confusing. It was following the above essay that the Professor is known to have completed a doctoral thesis with the Catholic University of Leuven in 1998, based on which a book titled Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism was published in 2001 (Note 1).

Prof Elst’s defence of the Hindu caste system reminds one of Dr Annie Besant who served as its apologist during the formative years of India’s Congress Party, which Periyar and others (including Subhash Chandra Bose) would quit, in later years (when Gandhiji had assumed leadership), in disappointment that the Party was being hijacked by the upper castes or ‘vested interests’. Annie Besant’s alignment with the Brahminists led to such perverse arguments as: “here [in India] as well as in Britain they [the lower classes] are a menace to civilisation and were undermining the fine fabric of society….. the danger to the country was not as many imagined from educated India but from these poor miserable classes” (New India, 13 Sep 1915). Besant also believed that an untouchable had to work out his karma in this life in the hope of breaking free from the shackles of untouchability in some future life (Note 2).

Let’s now examine the logic of Prof Elst’s arguments in his abovesaid essay.

1. For instance, Elst asserts:

“…… Everyone is a shudra by birth. Boys become dwija, twice-born, or member of one of the three upper varnas upon receiving the sacred thread in the upanayana ceremony."

a) This Professor is NOT saying how are these boys – who are ALL supposedly born shudra - selected to become ‘dwija’ or twice-born, i.e. to become a member of one of three upper varnas. He seems to be hoping that his reader will be ignorant of the fact that it is only those who are born into one of these three upper ‘dwija’ varnas who will get to receive “the sacred thread in the upanayan ceremony”, thereby being pronounced dwija or twice-born. This learned Professor is simply obscuring the fact that the distinction of being born again (or born twice) is not earned by individual merit but is derived by birth. In making such a presentation, he is either NOT being truthful OR plainly muddled.

b) The Professor also paraphrases the Purushasukta, the creation myth of Brahmanism that might have been interpolated into the RigVeda, as follows:

"….. The youngest part of the Rg-Veda describes four classes: learned brahmins born from Brahma's mouth, martial kshatriya-born from his arms; vaishya entrepreneurs born from His hips and shudra workers born from His feet."

This blinkered Professor seems NOT to care that the above creation story leaves out the origin of those (sub-)humans – the millions of outcastes - who do not belong to any of the four castes of caturvarna (or classes, as he calls, consistent with Hindutva’s revisionist terminology). If these out-of-castes (or outcastes) could not have emanated from Brahma (or, some celestial / primordial being), where else could they have emerged from?

c) Though one may not be impressed by the Professor’s display of knowledge and logic, one cannot fail to recognize that he had mastered the circularity (endless looping) of the home-bred Brahmanists.

2. This Professor, who would himself count as a “mlechha” in the Manusmriti conception of society, offers another muddled opinion about history:

"….The varna system expanded from the Saraswati-Yamuna area and got firmly established in the whole of Aryavarta (Kashmir to Vidarbha, Sindh to Bihar). It counted as a sign of superior culture setting the arya, civilized, heartland apart from the surrounding mleccha, barbaric, lands. In Bengal and the South, the system was reduced to a distinction between brahmins and shudras."

He seems to be lamentably ignorant of the fact that civilization (e.g. the Indus Valley Civilization) existed across the Indian landmass well before the marauding nomads arrived to set up aryavarta.

It seems that Professors like him practically stop learning (about some matters) after they complete school. That shows up in his view of Indian history through the ‘narrow-angle lens’ with which (mentally) he must have graduated some decades earlier. So much water would have flowed through the Thames (rather, the Meuse and the Schelde of Belgium) since then, but he seems to have absorbed little by way of new knowledge.

3. This Professor completes his exposition on Hindu caste(ism) without any mention of the Manusmriti, the source document of Varnashrama Dharma that sets out the four-fold caste order of Brahmanism but based on a fraudulent claim of Vedic authority. Why?

a) It is like finishing a talk on evolution theory without at all mentioning Charles Darwin and his ‘Origin of Species’.

b) At least the VHP was mindful of the Manusmriti in its recent rejection of the Varnashrama Dharma, though it still fought shy of full admission and contrition by prevaricating clumsily: "supposedly written in Manusmrithi" (see VHP rejects `varnashrama', seeks end to untouchability, The Hindu 20 March 2006).

4. Elst refers to the existence of classes in other societies: "In Europe and elsewhere, there was (or still is) a hierarchical distinction between noblemen and commoners, with nobility only marrying nobility." Apparently, he does not understand the difference between the Hindu castes or caste system (as codified by the Manusmriti) and the Western classes or class system. He may benefit from some explanation in:
Social inequalities: the Varnashramic difference


5. Elst’s credits (at the end of his abovesaid essay) include the following disclosure:

"…. Between 1988 and 1993 he spent much of his time in India doing research at the prestigious Banaras Hindu University."

It appears that his research in India did not lift him from ignorance, instead only deepened his prejudice.

Prof Elst also appears to be one of those so-called scholars of Hinduism who know next to nothing about the extant literature in Tamil pertaining to the oldest (Dravidian) tradition of Hinduism. It is literature that will easily match, if not exceed, in volume and quality what exists in Sanskrit. Yet such scholars boldly hold forth on a subject they are ignorant by half, only to turn out as muddled and worse.


Note 1: see Note 7 of Hinduism: its caste system & priesthood

Note 2: Geetha, V. and Rajadurai, S.V., Towards a Non-Brahmin Millenium (1998), p.20-21.


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