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From Cynthia Tablot’s Precolonial India in Practice[0]
> One peculiarity of Andhra society is that many of the leading warrior families made no pretensions to ksatriya status but instead proudly proclaimed their descent from the creator Bramha’s feet. This is an allusion to the famous origin myth first found in the Rig Veda wherein the four varnas are said to have originated from different portions of the body of Purusha, the primordial man. It was from the creator’s feet that the fourth, or sudra, class sprang, and another way of expressing sudra status was to say that one belonged to the fourth order of society. The pride in sudra origin is especially prominent in two records from the fourteenth century, in which sudras are said to be the best of the four varnas because they are the bravest or the purest. Families in what was theoretically the lowest social category, and not the ksatriya lineages of the costal subregion, possessed the greatest degree of actual political power in medieval Andhra, despite their relatively humble ancestry.
India’s history of caste in society is far more complicated than what’s portrayed in popular depictions of India. Add to this, India’s insane cultural diversity. When Ibn Batuta was traveling through (presumably north) India recording how women were uneducated, forced into marriage and how Brahmins held the highest social status, the Bhakti movement (sort of similar to Europe’s protestant movement) was brewing in the south[1], the Virasaivas were trying to form a caste free society in what is now Karnataka[2] and you have sudra rulers over modern day Andhra Pradesh.
This complicated history has largely been forgotten, Indian textbooks do not come anywhere close to exploring the complexity of the origins of Caste.
I appreciate NPR taking an interest in talking about Caste in India, but this treatment is extremely disappointing. Indian society can not discuss caste freely - there is too much political baggage that gets in the way (notice how all the references below aren’t from Indian scholars). NPR has an incredible opportunity to be the swiss neutral ground when talking about caste and how it impacts every day life in India.
I really hope they don’t bring that baggage over to America and end all possibility for level headed discourse.
[0] Cynthia Talbot, “Precolonial India in Practice - Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra”. Chapter 2, page 51.
[1] John Stratton Hawley, “A storm of songs”
[2] Gil Ben-Herut, “Silva’s saints - the origins of devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragalegalu”
The first trained multilayer deep neural network was presented by the Soviets in 1970 in a paper titled “Heuristic Self-Organization in Problems of Engineering Cybernetics“
http://www.gmdh.net/articles/history/heuristic.pdf
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