2019 Brown Pundits Reader survey

Wow I was a bit good in my performance here yesterday but today I have written so very poorly and left a much more room for confusion than normal it seems lol. What I wanted to say with my anecdote was that I personally tend to find that people don’t know much about the Sanskritic categories (except for Brahmins probably) and the system is kinda irrelevant to their lives also and consequently they don’t care about it very much. The teacher was shocked because she could not fathom where I got the names of the Sanskritic category Shudra in the first place, not because I was somehow rare in non-caste-proud-ly and humbly accepting that term for myself but because I was probably the very rare person who used the term at all. And my father also jokingly and in a somewhat anti-Brahminical way says those things from his folk-linguistic conflation of shUdra and kSudra (it appears like he lightheartedly accuses the evil Brahmins for calling him and his caste “kSudra”, ‘socerer’ (in his imagination) when they are anything but evil sorcerers lol); he does not really have any sense of inferiority or superiority arising in his mind because of the term Shudra. Of course he has nothing but pride for his caste which is the thing that is the most relevant to him. I suspect only Telugu Brahmins (but then probably the Telugu Vaishyas (who are otherwise commonly called Komati) and the Godavari Rajus are also included in this) might have the concept of Shudras as a functional category running in their minds when thinking about the other people of Andhra and Telangana.

But I also suspect that the phenomenon which Scorpion Eater describes also exists: especially in the more modern time periods with increasing Sanskritisation first begun in the Independence movement and slightly earlier (Westernisation in India is accompanied by Sanskritisation also for many groups). I do occasionally come to read articles by various-caste zealot people in Andhra and Telangana trying to class themselves as Kshatriya (and the important thing here is that they do that by painstakingly trying to prove the usual standard biological descent from an ancient Kshatriya dynasty or something and not involving abstract arguments based on any Kshatriya-like occupations they may have held in the past like working as soldiers, etc.) or whatever. But more than this also, many of the zealots in Telugu regions (mainly coastal Andhra) are actually quite content with some form of northern origin for themselves – they don’t care if it is Buddhist or Jain also. But as I said, common people don’t find it important to care about Sanskritic categories at all, especially Shudras.

But finally, at least one important counter-example runs to the phenomenon in the last paragraph in history. I read that the Kakatiyas generally thought of themselves proudly as Shudras (when they thought about the thing in the Sanskritic terms which would not have consumed their mind a lot of the time probably), I have also once read on Hindutva (or south Indian Hindutva) twitter an emotionally endearing metaphorical poem or something written by some Kakatiya kings or someone on one of their inscriptions where they described themselves as the proud siblings of Ganga on the basis that both themselves and Ganga have their births from the feet of the Lord.