Honestly India needs a fresh start at the moment. The baggage of caste system has deprived millions of people for centuries. Most people will prefer to live in a society where they are treated equal in favor of giving up their caste identity that have descriminted their community for centuries.
Actually it worked out pretty well for Kerala. It's #1 in India in terms of HDI and all most all human related metrics in India. The state with lowest income inequality. And nobody descriminates you on basis of caste in day to day life. Which I can't say is true for many northern states.
Yes. And Kerala was able to do that among all the castes. I am sure not being able to guess the caste of a person from their name should have defintely helped the cause. The fact that the students wont be descriminated by others students because of their surname. Not having to goto a hospital worrying about getting discriminated on basis of your name. All of these things add up and have a big impact in long term.
They had pretty serious land reform, too. Meaning that large estates were confiscated and given to the people working them. Doesn't always work out, but seems to have been an important part of what other success stories like Japan/Korea also did.
Kerala is a separate case study. Kerala had a feudal society and the Namboothri Brahmins and the warrior Nairs has a special arrangement. Nowhere else were the strict rules of society applied in India other than in Kerala. No where else was life fine and streamlined but also damn bloody unfair. But it functioned well as a monarchy. People were ok with it because with prosperity there was also security. This was necessary because it was the tip of the peninsula and there was also border security because the defense here was to protect the long coastline. Where they also enjoyed tremendous profitable trade.
The Namboothris distinguished themselves from other Brahmins by wearing the hair tuft on the front/side(Purvasikha) as opposed to the way Brahmins elsewhere wore their hair tufts which was at the back of their heads(aparasikhas).
This is why it makes no sense to make any generalities about Hindus or caste or even sub sects of Brahmins in India. They were all different with different habits and practices. Not to mention languages. There were thousands and thousands of small tight knit communities with the freedom to govern themselves socially as long as they adhered to the broader foundational principles. Note that by this time, Mughals and Islam and Buddhism and Jains and Christian missionaries were all gaining foothold. So it was not just a Hindu nation.
The British were fascinated and horrified and overwhelmed by the diversity of faiths and beliefs and cultural practices of this massive country which still operated as little kingdoms under larger kingdoms. No two Hindu groups are alike. Just like no two Brahmin communities are alike. The country had millions of people and get hundred people together in a room, they’d find something common only amongst themselves and form a separate community. And smaller communities were robust communities. It was great and working smoothly before the British came..from a colonist POV, homogenous country as a single profitable blob made more sense. Now instead of a multitude of string robust communities capable of working well by themselves, a very diverse population found themselves together and couldn’t work well as a group anymore. No one got along with each other. It was the diversity of individuals that weakened them. The diversity of different groups was their strength earlier.
(Visualize it like this. India was a basket of bundles of coloured matchsticks. Each bundle was the same colour but there were thousands and thousands of them. The basket was filled with bundles If multiple colours. And then the British came and removed the threads that kept each of the bundles together. As they came apart, all the individual match sticks got mixed and no one knew where to belong. So many different people got along only because they knew that they had the freedom to live and die on their own terms or rather the terms of their chosen group where everyone agreed to the rules. After the British came, no one agreed with anyone because suddenly it’s a blur of colour. What kept them together as neat little bundles was their sub religious beliefs and sub sub caste divisions and sub sub sub cultural beliefs etc. there were progressive Brahmins and orthodox Brahmins. It’s nuts to imagine that they all shared the same core belief system. Hinduism is not a monotheistic religion. The British knew Christianity but Christianity was designed as an evangelical faith and by definition cannot have drastic divisions and sub divisions and sub sub divisions even though they did have their denominations. We have thirty thousand gods vs one monotheistic god. Should have kicked out the British at first sight.)
Management, you see. Colonial MBA types with gunpowder found it easier to strip the country and ship off the resources back to an impoverished Britain. Not to mention the looting. But first, they had to play their hand with Divide and Rule strategy. To this end, shatter small kingdoms..off with the King’s head. And then destroy a rather woke and strangely also libertarian religious arrangement we called Hinduism.
The poor dears so far way from their dull and dreary little northern island. And unlike the Vikings, no one slaughtered them and rolled out the carpet instead. And 400 years to pay for that mistake and an eternity to fix it.
