No, Brahmins don’t need to feel guilty!

Brahmins feel guilty? They should feel proud. It is because of them that India and the world still has at least a part of this most precious wisdom that is contained in the Vedas, because they painstakingly memorised them and passed them on over many thousands of years.

I guess the questioner has the caste system in mind. I am aware that the whole world knows about the caste system. I already knew in primary school about it but knew nothing about what Nazi Germany had done only a few years earlier or about the atrocities of slavery, colonialism, but about the Indian caste system, and about untouchables, we children in Germany and surely elsewhere, too, were taught. Pictures were shown of poor, miserable looking untouchables. The impression was given that nothing was worse than that, and it left this impression on us children. This impression is not only wrong but has a mischievous agenda.

I know I read dangerous ground now, as even some people with Brahmin names may attack me for not knowing anything about the ground realities in India, being a foreigner. The atmosphere is vitiated with ‘anti-Brahmanism’ especially in the Left all over the world.

Yes, caste system exists, and untouchables, too. And it exists all over the world. I won’t go into it that originally, in the Vedas, the caste (varna) was not necessarily hereditary. Fact is that Brahmins have to stick to many more rules for purity than any other caste. I knew a Brahmin lady who would not enter her kitchen before having taken a bath. Brahmins were the guardians of the purity of the Vedas. So it is understandable that they would not touch those who for example remove the dead bodies of animals or clean the sewers, though a society needs people, who do these jobs, too. In the west, too, not everyone would shake hands with them. But no issue is made out of it.

So why is there such hue and cry worldwide over the structure of the society in India, when nobody accuses for example the royalty, the highest caste in Europe that it does not mingle with workers? More so, since independent India has done so much affirmative action in favour of the lower castes, so that today, it is often the Brahmins who suffer, and who are unfairly treated?

Why nobody is upset that the British had signs of “Only for Whites” in the club of Madikeri town in Karnataka, as an old Indian gentleman told me, and probably all over the country?

Why is nobody upset that the agriculture policy of the British starved some 25 MILLION Indians to death? There are absolutely terrible pictures on the net of Indians only being skin and bones, barely alive. Each one dying a slow death.

Why is nobody upset that the British, after the slave system was abolished, sent indented labour from India all over the world in cramped vessels, where a big number died during the journey already (and were spared the torture in the sugarcane estates)?

Why nobody talks about what the Muslim invasions did to Hindus and especially to Brahmins? How cruel they were? How many Hindus were killed or made slaves? How many Hindu women committed mass suicide by jumping into fire so that they won’t fall into the hands of the Muslim troops?

Today, ‘thanks’ to ISIS we can well imagine what happened then, yet the Left ‘activists’ and even ‘respectable’ British Parliamentarians are not concerned with all this, only with the ‘terrible, most inhuman caste system’ of India. Caste is not even an Indian, but a Portuguese word, and it can be safely assumed that the colonial masters tried their best to drive a wedge between the castes – successfully, it turns out.

My point is: what Brahmins did by segregating from others or even snubbing others is negligible in comparison what Christian colonialists and Muslim invaders did. How many people from lower castes were killed or tortured by Brahmins? And if a Brahmin did it, he surely did not have the sanction from the Vedas.

So why are the so-called atrocities of the caste-system so hyped? My guess is to divert the attention from those who really should feel guilty what they did and still do to India. It’s not the Brahmins. They suffer today, mainly due to reservation and, though poor in many cases, by being excluded from benefits which are given to religious minorities or lower castes.

But this is not the only reason. Another important reason is to make Brahmins feel guilty and to make them reluctant to follow their original Dharma of memorising and teaching the Vedas. The goal is to make Vedic knowledge disappear in India, because it poses a danger for Christianity and Islam. It can challenge their so called “revealed truths”. Vedic knowledge makes sense and is therefore the greatest obstacles for Christianity and Islam to expand over the whole world.

It is about time to stop this Brahmin bashing. It sounds fake, especially, when ISIS gets neutral treatment by just mentioning facts, like, “ISIL burns 19 Yazidi women to death in iron cages because they refused to have sex with fighters” without any emotional colour or condemnation.

Some time ago, I saw an old Brahmin couple in a temple in south India. They had dignity, but were very thin. When Prasad (sacred food) was distributed, they were in the queue before me. Later I saw them again in the queue…. It was due to poverty.

No, Brahmins don’t need to feel guilty. Others need to, but those others are brazen and probably won’t. And the leftist activists won’t remind them.

Written by Maria Wirth

*Published as received