Critiques and alternative social visions

Detail

Why a critique was needed

• Brahmanical texts said the four varnas (the fourfold order — Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra) came from the body of the primeval man in the Purusha sukta of the Rigveda.
• That story made rank divine and fixed. You were born into it. You could not leave it.
• From about the 6th century BCE new thinkers — above all the Buddhists — attacked this claim head-on.

The Buddhist position: differences are real, but man-made

• Buddhists did not say society was equal. They accepted social differences existed.
• But they said these differences were neither natural nor inflexible — not made by god, not permanent.
• Birth-based claims to high rank were rejected.
• They also rejected inequality as oppression — the strong dominating the weak was wrong, not divine order.

The Majjhima Nikaya test case — wealth beats birth

• The Majjhima Nikaya ("middle-length sayings", part of the Sutta Pitaka, the basket of the Buddha's discourses) records a talk between the king Avantiputta and Kachchana, a disciple of the Buddha.
• Avantiputta asks: are Brahmanas not the best varna?
• Kachchana answers with a simple test. Take a rich Shudra. Could he get another Shudra to work for him as an obedient servant? Yes.
• Could that same rich Shudra get a Kshatriya, a Brahmana or a Vaishya to serve him? Yes — also yes.
• Conclusion: on this count the four varnas are "exactly the same". No difference at all.
• The lesson: wealth, not birth, decides who obeys whom. Rank in real life follows money and power, not the Purusha sukta.

The social contract story (Sutta Pitaka)

• A second Buddhist myth attacks kingship the same way. It appears in the Sutta Pitaka, the collection of the Buddha's discourses in the Pali canon [2].
• The text is the Agganna Sutta ("the discourse on origins") [3].
• The story runs in steps:
• Start: an ideal first state. People and nature were fine. Wants were met without effort [3].
• Decline: greed, anger and deceit grew. Humans became grasping. Ideas of private property and family appeared [3].
• Crisis: stealing and quarrels. Nobody punished the wrongdoer.
• Fix: the people met and chose one being among themselves to punish wrongdoers, pass judgement and keep the peace [3].

• Payment: in return they gave him a share of their rice.

• This chosen one was called mahasammata — "the great elect" [3].

• Three sharp political ideas come out of this:
• Kingship rests on human choice, not on divine birth. Buddhist (and Jain) thought leaves divinity out of it entirely [3].
• Taxes are wages. The rice share is payment for a service, not tribute owed to a god-king.

• What humans made, humans can change. Society and the state are human arrangements, so they are open to reform.

• This is the direct opposite of the Purusha sukta. One says order came from a god's body; the other says order came from a public meeting.

Note: Britannica describes the Agganna Sutta as a story of decline from an idyllic state, in which the king is chosen to "slow the pace of decline" [3]. This extends, and does not contradict, the NCERT scaffold's point that people selected a ruler to punish wrongdoers.

The Tamil alternative — give, do not hoard

• The critique was not only Buddhist. Sangam-age Tamilakam (the Tamil country) offered a different social ideal altogether.
• Sangam literature is the earliest Tamil poetry, traditionally said to come from three sangams (literary academies) at Madurai, and usually dated to the 1st–4th centuries CE; about 2,381 poems survive [4].
• These poems are grouped into the Ettuttokai — the eight anthologies [5]. The Purananuru is one of them.
• The poems split into two types:
• akam — inner life, love.

• puram — outer life: war, death, personal virtue, the courage and glory of chiefs, and praise of rulers [6].

• Tamilakam then was ruled not by big kingdoms but by chiefdoms. Status there worked differently:

• Honour came from generosity, not accumulation.
• Misers were despised. Hoarding wealth lowered you.

• Wealth had value only when given away, especially to bards (poets who sang a chief's praise and carried his name).

• The Purananuru (c. 1st century CE) praises the poor but generous chief of Irantai. He is called "an enemy to the hunger of bards".

• He had little. So he would commission a war spear from a blacksmith.

• With the spear he would fight and win wealth — only so he could give it away to the bards.

• So here the yardstick of a good man is not varna and not riches. It is what he hands out.

Putting the three critiques together

• Majjhima Nikaya attacks birth-rank using wealth.
• Agganna Sutta / Sutta Pitaka attacks divine kingship using human choice.
• Purananuru attacks wealth itself using generosity.
• All three show that the Brahmanical model was one vision among several, not an agreed fact of early Indian society.

Prelims Hooks

• The dialogue of Avantiputta and Kachchana on the four varnas is in the Majjhima Nikaya.
• In that dialogue, the point is proved using a wealthy Shudra who can command servants of all four varnas.
• Mahasammata means "the great elect" — the chosen ruler in the Buddhist origin myth [3].
• The myth of the great elect is found in the Sutta Pitaka, specifically the Agganna Sutta [2][3].
• In that myth the ruler is paid with a share of the rice — i.e. tax as wages, not tribute.
• Buddhist and Jain accounts of the origin of the state leave out divinity [3].
• The Buddhist critique's target text is the Purusha sukta of the Rigveda, which derives the four varnas from a primeval body.
• Purananuru belongs to the Ettuttokai, the eight Sangam anthologies [5]; it is puram poetry — war, heroism, praise of chiefs [6].
• Sangam literature is linked to academies at Madurai, roughly 1st–4th centuries CE, with about 2,381 poems surviving [4].
• The Purananuru (c. 1st century CE) praises the poor chief of Irantai as "an enemy to the hunger of bards".

Mains Points

• Early India was not one social ideology but an argument between several. Brahmanical varna theory (divine, birth-fixed) faced the Buddhist claim that difference is real but man-made, and the Tamil chiefdom ideal that ranked men by giving rather than by birth or wealth. Use this to reject any exam answer treating varna as "the" ancient Indian social system.
• The Agganna Sutta is India's own social contract theory — ruler chosen by the people, taxes as payment for service, authority revocable in principle [3]. It is a strong comparison point against divine-right theories of kingship, and useful in questions on ideas of the state in early India.
• Texts are evidence of ideals, not always of practice. The Majjhima Nikaya's wealthy Shudra shows the Buddhists themselves noticed that real life ran on wealth and power while the texts spoke of birth. Use this gap as the standard historian's caution when handling normative texts like the Dharmashastras.
• Literature as a source for social history. Sangam puram poetry lets us reconstruct a chiefdom society where redistribution, not accumulation, made status [6] — a reminder that the Gangetic-valley model of early Indian society does not fit the whole subcontinent.