Caste versus Class

MUCH reviled, our caste system – Jati pratha – finds its echo in many forms across societies, not only new and old but also modern and advanced. Am reading a book on Abraham Lincoln’s presidency years called Team of Rivals – The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln authored by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

In sociology literature, particularly the left leaning, the caste system is shown with a negative slant, of it being a regressive social more that over time degenerated into a rigid, moribund organism that has stifled individual growth.

Now here is Salmon Portland Chase, a Republican competitor of Abraham Lincoln for the Presidency of Civil war America. The author, through him, narrates how the United States of nineteenth century lived by its own caste system – calling it class system instead. Not to be missed is the equivalence of each class with the corresponding level of our castes.

As Chase recounts describing the Washington D.C. life as he saw it to his friend Hamilton Smith, the classes were very brahmanically arranged. As the author narrates, “There were distinct classes of society in Washington”, Chase told Hamilton Smith. The first, to which he aspired, included the high government officials; the second, to which he was relegated, included teachers and physicians; and the third mechanics and artisans. There was, of course, still lower class comprised of slaves and labourers.

Now would not the high government officials, much envied for their status, correspond to the Brahmins, the policy makers? Or the lowest slaves and labourers to the Shudras? Societies might have devised different ways of tackling with the negative consequences of this hierarchy but it almost seems like a pan-cultures phenomenon. What say?