Sep 2, 2011 -- 1:20PM, Jm8 wrote:

As I said, the practice became prominent with the onset of Kali yuga. However, exact times and places can't be specified, at least I haven't seen such information.

Everyone who knows what varnasrama dharma is opposes jati dharma because it's a degraded system.

In the Gita Arjuna warns against degraded population (varna sankara) which is a product of Kali yuga before it actually happened.

Well, the tenth book of the Rig-Veda, where we have the first Varna ref., the Purusha Sukta, is thought by scholars to be no later than 1000 b.c.e., while Brhaspati's writings, the earliest to criticise the hierarchical birth-ghetto-izing jati dharma customs, is dated by some scholars as roughly 600 b.c.e.  Since the Purusha Sukta makes no explicit ref. to the untouchables and only mentions four Varnas and does not explicitly reference birth or hierarchy, and since Brhaspati's reference suggests that jati dharma and the hereditary virus is in full swing by 600 b.c.e., that gives us a range of four centuries in which Varna becomes jati dharma.  It may be that there is no way of further knowing just what else was going on during those first four centuries of the first millennium b.c.e.  But it seems reasonable to assume that we can narrow down the time when jati dharma developed to those four hundred years.

Hey, we may be making some progress in answering some questions in this thread!

Cheers,

Walther

Sep 4, 2011 -- 12:50PM, Jm8 wrote:

Well, if one accepts the Western dating. As I said at the beginning, it's problematic.

Apparently, this point of contention is now moot.  It’s no longer a  matter of belief.  Birth-based caste-ism definitely goes back beyond the  c.e. after all –

genepath.med.harvard.edu/~reich/2009_Nat...

Among many other things, the chief conclusion in this article is that  “Allele frequency differences between groups in India are larger than  in Europe, reflecting strong founder effects whose signatures have been  maintained for thousands of years owing to endogamy.”  This article  gives the details behind a genetic analysis, conducted this past decade,  of the Indian population.  It shows conclusively that the birth-based version  of the caste system is rooted in the b.c.e.

What I find especially piquant here is that  many who are tackling this history responsibly, genetic scientists  included, are very careful to stipulate that they don’t view the  birth-based version of this system as necessarily scriptural.  The  scriptural version of the system, as seen in the Purusha Sukta and the Bagavadgita, could still be read as oriented  towards a non-hierarchical, non-blood-line version of varnas entirely, unlike the plain evidence in this article that what happened on the ground subsequent to that but way before the c.e. was the eventual formulation of a birth-based system.

Yet there are still those who are somehow offended at the blatant  ancient evidence for birth-based caste-ism because they view it as somehow flouting Vedic beliefs, even though such practices  are not explicitly sanctioned in the Vedic literature!  No Vedic beliefs are being explicitly challenged in the growing consensus that there was ancient  birth-based caste-ism.  So why do some behave as if Vedic beliefs are being challenged?   That is illogical.

Walther

www.urbandharma.org/pdf/AggannaSutta.pdf