How did Varnas change into Caste?
So you talked about varnas in your last Reel - that means you’re supporting the caste system & its cruelty?
No, I’m saying remove caste but don’t hate or lose faith in Hinduism because of it since the two are very different.
For this, you have to understand shrutis vs. smritis, with the former being the truest original literature of our dharma while the latter being more modern interpretations of it, which leaves room for a lot of mistakes & problematic statements.
If you actually go read the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Vedic varna was flexible, horizontally arranging the society & people to perform different functions as per their gunas i.e. qualities & karma.
"Yathkamam Brahmanasya, yathkamam Kshatriyasya, yathkamam Vaishyasya, yathkamam Shudrasya" - 1.4.11
The problem starts with authors of Smritis then misusing this to give more power to Bhramins & Kshatriyas, with one of our law books, Manusmriti, dated around 2nd-3rd century CE, being one of the key books to not only turn it into a vertical hierarchy & assigning a higher status to the two based on birth, but also discourage changing or mixing of the varnas, leading to rigid structures.
"Na samsidhyet para dharmen na sva dharmaat paramaah priyan; dharme sarva pratistha hi, dharmo hi para mapnoti." - 4.19
Manusmriti is problematic for a lot of reasons but we’ll get to that in another Reel.
You then have rulers during the Gupta empire making this even more rigid in the 4th to 6th century CE, with another blow being delivered by the Mughals in the 16th & 18th century using this for their own governence with documents like Ain-i-Akbari by Abul Fazl that officially categorize castes & jatis.
Finally, we have British Rulers officially using caste for their governance with their policies that favored upper classes & acts like the Census of 1871 that categorized people based on caste.
A lot of people have suffered because of this distortion so as modern educated Hindus, we need to remove what’s evil but at the same time be aware about what our original dharma really had so that anti-Hindus don’t use it to attack the whole dharma altogether.