Skip to main content

New Caste System for India

Mansiya


Mohan Bhagwat, RSS Supremo, has decided that there are no more non-Hindus in India. All Indians are Hindus hereafter. They are classified into 4: (1) the proud Hindu, (2) the reluctant Hindu, (3) the unfriendly Hindu, and (4) the ignorant Hindu. In which class does Mansiya fall?

Mansiya is an atheist from Kerala with Muslim parents and a Hindu husband. She was forced to give up her religion, Islam, when her mother was denied a burial in the Muslim cemetery because Mansiya was a Bharatanatyam dancer. Bharatanatyam is not Islamic, you see. Mansiya had to choose between Islam and Bharatanatyam and she chose the latter. Now a Hindu temple in Kerala has banned her from a 10-day National Festival of Dance and Music because she belongs to a class which does not exist in Mohan Bhagwat’s new system; she is an Ahindu, says the temple.

For the Hindutva Pope, Mansiya is not an Ahindu simply because there are no more Ahindus in the country. But the Hindu temple in Kerala insists that Mansiya is an Ahindu. When will these people agree on one thing?

“They have agreed on one thing, man,” my Marxist friend in the village tells me. “They have agreed to bring back the old caste system in a new form.”

The old caste system was created so that one group of people called Brahmins could suppress and dominate all others, my friend explains. Now Bhagwat is giving us a new caste system in which the Proud Hindus will suppress and dominate all others. All Proud Hindus are RSS men. “No, no women, please,” my friend says. “Women have no place even in front of their gods. Remember the Sabarimala controversy?”

So, the RSS men are the new Brahmins? All other Indians are low caste people. Where does Mansiya with Bharatanatyam as her religion and a Hindu husband whose category is not known yet [Proud/Reluctant/Unfriendly/Ignorant] fall? Where do you fall, my dear reader? I suppose they will dump me among Unfriendly Hindus since I keep questioning the Pope of RSS.

Hinduism is an alchemist of a religion. It had transmuted the Buddha into an incarnation of Vishnu though the Buddha was an atheist who questioned the entire Brahminical system. The Buddha’s fundamental conflict was with the Brahminical oppressions and exploitations and manoeuvres. He ended up as another Brahminical god! That is the alchemical power of Bhagwat’s religion.

I am amused by the comedies provided by this religion. Let me present a few scenes from that comedy as a conclusion to this post. No comments from me. 




And a contrast:

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरMarch 29, 2022 at 3:18 PM

    The treatment meted out to Mansiya is highly unfortunate and exposes the biases those hitherto remained unexposed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 29, 2022 at 3:38 PM

      We are not moving ahead. We as a nation have been taken back by centuries to the time of small minds, smaller fiefdoms, and constricted personal spaces.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanMarch 29, 2022 at 4:44 PM

    Hari OM
    Semantics never changed the world... and here we have semantics of gargantuan proportion. You can get my stance if you care to read this post, where I finally convey what it is that held me back from full committment... I have always been a square peg!!! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 29, 2022 at 7:45 PM

      Just read your post and I share your suppressed pain at the unpleasant turn of the tide in India. One person is enough to change an entire nation into a chaos. India now has that one person. Please continue to be a square peg. That's better than pretending to be a round one. Many of India's intellectuals have become mere pretenders for the sake of survival.

      Delete
  3. Prasanna RaghavanMarch 29, 2022 at 5:30 PM

    Wow! Kerala, the ruling classes of all stripes claiming to be the word class, everybody certificated, no one there is freed from the stripe of caste. I used to write about those Kerala caste shenanigans times ago, now watch the show for fun and entertainment. The show continues :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 29, 2022 at 7:46 PM

      The show continues. Unfortunately even the leftists have joined the show and have become comics.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 comments
Read more

Duryodhana Returns

Duryodhana was bored of his centuries-long exile in Mythland and decided to return to his former kingdom. Arnab Gau-Swami had declared Bihar the new Kurukshetra and so Duryodhana chose Bihar for his adventure. And Bihar did entertain him with its modern enactment of the Mahabharata. Alliances broke, cousins pulled down each other, kings switched sides without shame, and advisers looked like modern-day Shakunis with laptops. Duryodhana’s curiosity was more than piqued. There’s more masala here than in the old Hastinapura. He decided to make a deep study of this politics so that he could conclusively prove that he was not a villain but a misunderstood statesman ahead of his time. The first lesson he learns is that everyone should claim that they are the Pandavas, and portray everyone else as the Kauravas. Every party claims they stand for dharma, the people, and justice. And then plot to topple someone, eliminate someone else, distort history, fabricate expedient truths, manipulate...
12 comments
Read more