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 Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
28 comments
Read more