I’m taking a short break from political and economic matters to discuss Hinduism. I don’t have any religion but have considerable interest in the history of religions.

Sanjay Sonawani, a Marathi writer has proposed a rather different view about Hinduism than the one propounded by Hindutva ideologues. His books, Origins of the Vedic Religion: And Indus-Ghaggar Civilisation and a recent book, The Origins of the Caste System: A New Perspective challenge commonly held views about the origin of Hinduism and caste. If his thesis is true, then it will have social and political impacts in India by reshaping the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people.

According to him, Hinduism is a jigsaw puzzle and current theories of Hinduism and caste don’t fit. The main theory is that the Vedic religion is the source of Hinduism but Sonawani believes it is not possible for the fire-worship and non-idol worshipping Vedic belief system to have suddenly morphed into fertility-occultism and idol worship. From Kedarnath, Kashi and Somnath across to Hampi, many Hindus follow an ancient Shaivite and fertility worship tradition which is fundamentally different to the Vedic religion. Sonawani believes that Khajuraho or Konark cannot have possibly arisen from Vedic thought. And of course, if the Vedas are indeed the source of the “common” variety of Hinduism, why are Vedic gods missing from places of Hindu worship?

Apparently some scholars have reconciled this problem by claiming that idol worship was added to Hinduism during the Purana era. This, however, does not reconcile with archaeological proofs about the remote ancestry of fertility worship. Also, the ritualistic practices of the Vedics are based on Vedic guidelines (Vedokta) while Hindus conduct their rituals with Puranokta (based on tantra).

Sonawani’s research shows that Hinduism and the Vedic religion are entirely distinct. Moreover, and this is likely to be even more important if true, he finds that jati (commonly but mistakenly associated with caste) is entirely unrelated to Hinduism, being a mere economic occupational category prevalent in ancient Indian society. He shows that jati was not rigid and its relative rigidity is only a thousand years old. He believes that this happened because of economic forces and opportunistic attempts by the Vedics during India’s medieval economic crisis to graft their varna system on jatis. If this is true, then jatis would dissolve quickly once the Indian economy liberalizes and the poor get an opportunity to rise.

These are bold claims but have been tested widely in Maharashtra. Sonawani’s three editions in Marathi have received innumerable responses but no one has been able to refute his thesis. So it is time for the nation’s scholars to look into it and work out whether this proposal makes sense.

Sanjay Sonawani finds that the Vedic religion came into ancient India via a relatively few Vedic refugees from South Afghanistan. These refugees had fought numerous wars with their co-religionists (the Zoroastrians) and had been forced to flee. But entirely separately, for thousands of years, India had seen the evolution of an occupational jati system. The jatis were mobile, being based on technical expertise and innovation. Occupational guilds were an expression of the economic clout of these jatis which remained dominant at least till the tenth century A.D. and also issued their own coins.

Socio-political and economic circumstances began to change for the worse from the tenth century, including a series of terrible famines and the take over of trade by new Muslim rulers, so the guilds finally collapsed. These crumbling guilds established defensive barriers to entry in order to minimize competition. These events led to the fabled self-reliant villages, where occupations become more and more hereditary.

In the meanwhile, the Vedics had, after almost two thousand years, managed to finally gain a small political foothold during the Gupta era through royal patronage. This gave them the opportunity to proselytize, with their first goal being to create and increase the number of Brahmins. They now had the resources to motivate priests of ancient Hindu temple to convert into Vedic Brahmins. Sonawani shows that Hinduism did not have any Brahmins and, in fact, till today a number of Hindu temples do not have any concept of Brahmin. By “upgrading” these priests, the Vedics were now able to take over many valuable Hindu assets and rewrite Hindu texts to introduce varna. Once the Vedics had managed to persuade Hindus to install them at the top of the pyramid, the rest was easy.

The economic collapse that took place a thousand years ago gave the newly converted mass of Vedic Brahmins the opportunity to link the by-now more rigid jati system with varna, by claiming that the poor economic condition of the “lower” jatis was the outcome of actions in their previous births. Caste assemblies inadvertently reinforced this message of segregation of jatis in their economic self-interest to shut out competition. At the same time, the Vedics launched a major attack on the ancient system of tantra, gradually causing the Hindus to suspect their own previous worldview. A sense of impurity and pollution was introduced into Hinduism, leading to the development of untouchability. Despite this, many Hindu rituals and idols continued to remain tantra-centric and a significant level of social and occupational mobility remained.

With the arrival of the British, the Brahmins gained a further opportunity to advance their Vedic agenda. The Brahmins were the first to explain Hinduism to the British. The British liked to think about Vedic supremacy and claimed that it came from the West. The magnitude of the seeming takeover of Hinduism by the Vedics seemed so significant that the British thought that this could only have occurred as a result of a major invasion. The Aryan Invasion Theory was therefore promoted and received a huge boost. The British began consciously preferring the “higher” varnas for administrative appointments and did not study of the tantra traditions and the religion of the common people outside the big towns.

They also started classifying Indian people into five different “races” and began looking for a racial link between jati and race – if true, this would further support their sense of superiority. In this conducive atmosphere, some Vedics began dreaming of a full-fledged revival of the Vedic religion – something even the Brahmins had ever thought of trying in the past.

With power in their hands, the modern caste “system” was now ready to be created. The British census provided a convenient tool. During the census, many jatis sought to “upgrade” their varna by changing caste names (today, of course, many jatis seek to reduce their official social status, it being more profitable to do so). In this manner, the superficial and half-baked British histories of India and Hinduism manage to obscure what had been widely known till their time – that Hindu and Vedic religions were distinct. Subsequent generations of Indian elites have grown up with this distorted British view, given also the fact that many Vedics managed during British times to launch pro-Veda movements.

This racist history of Hinduism had strong political implications. The elites from the “lower” jatis, who had been mis-educated through British interpretation of Indian history, now underwent an identity crisis. Many blamed Brahmins and the Manusmriti, having forgotten that they (the jatis) had themselves chosen to hunker down into a hereditary system a thousand years ago. Anti-Brahmin movements began and many caste conflicts became violent.

Sonawani’s research demonstrates that while Manusmriti is problematic in some ways, its intent and reach was extremely limited – only to the very few Vedics at his time. It had no role in humiliating the “lower” castes since it was never used against them. To grasp this Sonawani asks us to understand the origin of the Shudras. Shudra was the name of a tribe into whose lands the band of Vedic refugees first settled. The Vedics later broadened the use of this term to mean all non-Vedics. Manu notes the existence of many neighbouring Shudra kingdoms which shows their political and economic clout in comparison to the Vedic refugees. At the same time, the Vedics were able to hire a few low income Shudras as personal servants. It was to prevent the intermixing of the Vedics with these servants, something which was starting to occur, that Manu dictated his humiliating commands against the servants. These commands were not intended, nor could the feeble Vedics refugees possibly have applied them to the broader Shudras (the Hindus).

According to Sonawani, it is very clear that Vedic project to graft varna on egalitarian Hinduism did not quite work out as intended. The mapping of jatis to varna is a failed project. Many similar jatis have been mapped onto different varnas in different parts of India because of local economic conditions. Thus, a jati is touchable in one region of India but untouchable in others. This further proves that there is no link between jati and varna. The “caste system” is therefore, in Sonawani’s view, a figment of the imagination of historians who have been tutored in ignorant British interpretations of history.

Sonawani believes that Hinduism is entirely egalitarian and must be rescued from the embrace of casteist Vedic religion. He believes that underlying Hinduism is entirely consistent with liberalism.

I would like to see significant and urgent research on Sonawani’s thesis across the archaeological and history departments of various universities of India and the world.