The Vedas didn’t ‘divide’ Society in the Varnas, they simply classified and stratified human beings into four types with seekers of knowledge at the highest; the political, administrative and military as next; business, production, commerce and industry as the third; and the man dealing with physical labour as the last category. This stratification exists everywhere. It is an arrangement of life that is all. But each is required and has its place. The brain in its place and the feet in its own with the heart and belly in between. They are part of one body and each is required for a healthy and complete functioning.
The Vedic seers simply used this natural arrangement which, in fact every society had and still has. The Vedic seers however assigned to each his place according to innate temperament rather than arbitrarily based on job though that too was a consideration. There is nothing wrong in helping people undertake activities towards which they were temperamentally most suited.
The problem started when the political and administrative class, the Kshatriyas because arrogant and started deriding the thought-leaders, the Brahmans whose task was to guide and help them take the right decision for the good of all. We see the same today when the political class wants to place the knowledge seekers under their power. The second problem has been when some thinkers disregarded Nature’s hints and arbitrarily divided humanity into only two types, the rich and the poor, the bourgeois and the proliteriat. This broke down the old system and has only added to the conflict and the confusion. After all the Vedic Society with its fourfold order did function much better and smoothly than the chaos we see today.
The sense of high and low was not the creation of the Rishis who saw each human being as a manifestation of the divine element. By aligning with his innate temperament each served best the divinity within. Besides the idea of rebirth took care of the upward movement of the soul from its identification with the gross physical life towards the subtle realms of thought. It was therefore not a fixed but a supple evolutionary hierarchy.
Later it was no doubt misused both by the Kshatriya and the Brahmin into a rigid class types based on the privilege of birth. Hence it has been broken by the Time Spirit. But in principle it was sound and even today it continues to exist except that the names are different and the outer form has changed.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
