Caste is one of the most complicated and misunderstood concepts encountered when attempting to understand India and Hinduism. Yet caste and a so-called caste system have become the singular focus of how Indian and Hindu society and culture are seen by the West — and increasingly being focused on by activists within the diaspora.

Sources:

• German Indology, Aryanism, and Anti-Semitism, by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee
• The Indian Caste System and The British – Ethnographic Mapping and the Construction of the British Census in India, by Kevin Hobson
• The Brahmin, the Aryan, and the Powers of the Priestly Class: Puzzles in the Study of Indian Religion, by Marianne Keppens and Jakob De Roover
• Caste Confusion and Census Enumeration in Colonial India, 1871–1921 by Kevin Walby and Michael Haan
• Census in Colonial India and the Birth of Caste by Padmanabh Samarendra
• Ethnographic inquiry in colonial India: Herbert Risley, William Crooke, and the study of tribes and castes by C.J. Fuller
• ‘Untouchable’: What is in a Name?, by Simon Charsley
• Scheduled Castes vs. Caste Hindus: About a Colonial Distinction and Its Legal Impact, by Jakob de Roover

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If you think of Nazis, white supremacists, the Holocaust, a rabble of Fred Perry-wearing white dudes marching in Charlottesville, Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us”, we don’t blame you. If your primary source of knowledge about India is your average  high school textbook or mass market travel guideyou might also conjure up images of a group of light-skinned Aryans invading India in the hoary past and subjugating the darker skinned people already living there, the invaders imposing their beliefs and culture. In this episode we explain to you the connection between those two sets of imagery and how both are hugely off the mark.

Related: That's So Hindu interview with Professor Lavanya Vemsani

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Hinduism’s most basic ethical foundation — its guidelines, observances, and practices for living — are called yama and niyama. As most generally expressed, there are five of each. The yamas are often described as principles, while the niyamas are often called practices or observances. 

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The cycle of reincarnation — birth, death, and rebirth — is called s​amsara.​ It is the process through which individual divine consciousness or souls, for lack of better word, repeatedly take on a physical body through being born on Earth. Though these physical bodies die, each immortal soul continues to exist, until being reincarnated again and again, in a process of spiritual evolution and development.

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Every culture marks moments in human life in some way. We honor and recognize those points where our experience of and place in society moves, through a doorway, passing from one room, as it were, to the next. In doing so, in making that passage, we become changed. In Hinduism these rites of passage, these sacraments, are called samskāra​.

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