Quote: (02-17-2015 09:35 PM)berserk Wrote:
I wonder why so many Europeans go to India to find 'enlightenment'? Well, with what you know now, perhaps they are not so weird after all, but merely rediscovering some ancient lingering trace of their past. It's also interesting that Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. More inviting with no caste systems, but the same fundamental worldview.
The caste system in India, it seems pretty clearly, is not a relic of older Indo European religions, but a novel racial system of hierarchy imposed by the invading Aryans on the Dravidians and Aboriginal Indians that they found there.
I recently read more into this, having known little about it. I thought that Dravidians were basically the original people of India, pre-aryan, and thus Dravidian languages and religion were the original languages and religion of the whole Indian subcontinent.
It appears now that Dravidians may have originally come to India from the area of Iran (which interestingly was later a staging ground for Indo-Aryans). So when they came to India they conquered the indigenous people who have non-Dravidian languages and religions.
Indo-Aryans basically created the caste system putting themselves on top, Dravidians on the bottom, and the indigenous people outside of the system all together.