From Ascetics to Bigots: On the Use of Greek Sources to Prove the Existence of the Caste System in Ancient India

Ancient Greek writers wrote for several centuries about "Indian philosophers", also referred to as Gymnosophists and Brachmanes. Scholars studying India today argue that these thinkers were Brahmins and other Indian ascetics. They further assert that Greek writings on India and the descriptions they provide of these philosophers and their social contexts bear witness to the existence of the caste system, its properties, and its functioning. However, an examination of the Greek texts, even in their 19th-century translations, would call this reading into question. The ancient scholars do not talk about the caste system familiar in mainstream sociology today. If so, how and when did the view that the Greeks discussed the Indian caste system emerge? For an answer, we need to go back to how European writings depicted the Brahmins over a millennium. This history is filled with many intriguing developments. Until around the 16th century, the contemporary Brahmins were seen as the descendants of the ancient Gymnosophists. Soon, however, under the influence of the anti-clerical views of the Christian Reformation, Europeans began to differentiate between the ancient and contemporary Brahmins. They lauded the former for their austere lives and condemned the latter as immoral bigots. As the story of the degeneration of Hinduism and Indian civilisation emerged in the 17th century, scholars began looking for the roots of this degeneration in India's ancient past. However, in the absence of a unified and dominant narrative of the caste system as we understand it today, no link between the Greek descriptions of India and the Indian "caste system" was posited at this time. As the story of the caste system crystallised in the 18th and 19th centuries and Buddhism was discovered, scholars began to press the ancient Greeks into the service of providing witness to the existence of the caste system.