Women can get married starting from as young as 18 whereas men get married at an older age. Marriages tend to be arranged by parents and monogamy is expected. Widows are not allowed to remarry whereas widowers are allowed to.
Although Brahmin women are second to men, they do hold a higher level of education than other women in Indian society. Overall Brahmins hold a high status in Hindu society, and are considered to be smart and influential. They set the standard of social conduct and morality due to their leadership in society. The term Kshatriya comes from kshatra which means authority and power. This authority and power is not based on successful leadership, but more on sovereignty over certain territories.
Kshatriya is the second Varna within the social hierarchy. The Kshatriya constitutes the ruling and military elite, the warriors. Their purpose in the society is to fight as warriors during war and govern in time of peace.
They had a duty to protect the citizens from harm, to ensure that each individual performed their prescribed duty and advanced spiritually in their specific Varna. In addition to that they are responsible for the protection of the political cosmic order dharma. Kshatriyas initially achieved their status on merits of their aptitude guna , conduct karma , and nature swabhava. As the caste system later developed, merit became irrelevant status became hereditary. The negative energy took the form of Rakshasas also known as devils who started to torture Brahma.
Brahma asked Lord Vishnu for help, who later killed them. Lord Vishnu then explained to Brahma that when positive energy is used, negative energy will also emerge.
Because of this Lord Vishnu tells Brahma that a special race of humans should be created to protect the entire human race. The Rig Veda contains a different story of origin for the varnas. In this Hindu scripture, Brahmin originated from the mouth of Brahma, while Kshatriya originated from the arms. The two primary roles of the Kshatriya Varna were to govern the land and to wage war, which led to professions as rulers and soldiers.
Outside of this Hindu caste system were the achhoots - the Dalits or the untouchables. For centuries, caste has dictated almost every aspect of Hindu religious and social life, with each group occupying a specific place in this complex hierarchy. Rural communities have long been arranged on the basis of castes - the upper and lower castes almost always lived in segregated colonies, the water wells were not shared, Brahmins would not accept food or drink from the Shudras, and one could marry only within one's caste.
The system bestowed many privileges on the upper castes while sanctioning repression of the lower castes by privileged groups. Often criticised for being unjust and regressive, it remained virtually unchanged for centuries, trapping people into fixed social orders from which it was impossible to escape.
Despite the obstacles, however, some Dalits and other low-caste Indians, such as BR Ambedkar who authored the Indian constitution, and KR Narayanan who became the nation's first Dalit president, have risen to hold prestigious positions in the country. Historians, though, say that until the 18th Century, the formal distinctions of caste were of limited importance to Indians, social identities were much more flexible and people could move easily from one caste to another.
New research shows that hard boundaries were set by British colonial rulers who made caste India's defining social feature when they used censuses to simplify the system, primarily to create a single society with a common law that could be easily governed.
Independent India's constitution banned discrimination on the basis of caste, and, in an attempt to correct historical injustices and provide a level playing field to the traditionally disadvantaged, the authorities announced quotas in government jobs and educational institutions for scheduled castes and tribes, the lowest in the caste hierarchy, in In , quotas were extended to include a grouping called the OBCs Other Backward Classes which fall between the traditional upper castes and the lowest.
A Shudra man was only allowed to marry a Shudra woman, but a Shudra woman was allowed to marry from any of the four Varnas. Shudras would serve the Brahmins in their ashrams, Kshatriyas in their palaces and princely camps, and Vaishyas in their commercial activities.
Although they are the feet of the primordial being, educated citizens of higher Varnas would always regard them as a crucial segment of society, for an orderly society would be easily compromised if the feet were weak.
Shudras, on the other hand, obeyed the orders of their masters, because their knowledge of attaining moksha by embracing their prescribed duties encouraged them to remain loyal.
Shudra women, too, worked as attendants and close companions of the queen and would go with her after marriage to other kingdoms. Many Shudras were also allowed to be agriculturalists, traders, and enter occupations held by Vaishyas. These detours of life duties would, however, be under special circumstances, on perceiving deteriorating economic situations. Despite the life order being arranged for all kinds of people, by the end of the Vedic period, many began to deflect and disobey their primary duties.
As a large Varna populace became difficult to handle, the emergence of Jainism propounded the ideology of one single human Varna and nothing besides. Many followed the original Varna rules, but many others, disapproving opposing beliefs, formed modified sub-Varnas within the primary four Varnas.
The subsequent rise of Islam, Christianity, and other religions also left their mark on the original Varna system in India. Converted generations reformed their notion of Hinduism in ways that were compatible with the conditions of those times. Thus, soulful adherence to Varna duties from the peak of Vedic period eventually diminished to subjective makeshift adherence, owing partly to the discomfort in practicing Varna duties and partly to external influence.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Module 2: Hinduism. Search for:. Most Hindus chant the gayatri hymn to the sun at dawn, but little agreement exists as to what other prayers should be chanted.
Most Hindus worship Shiva , Vishnu , or the Goddess Devi , but they also worship hundreds of additional minor deities peculiar to a particular village or even to a particular family.
Although Hindus believe and do many apparently contradictory things—contradictory not merely from one Hindu to the next, but also within the daily religious life of a single Hindu—each individual perceives an orderly pattern that gives form and meaning to his or her own life.
No doctrinal or ecclesiastical hierarchy exists in Hinduism, but the intricate hierarchy of the social system which is inseparable from the religion gives each person a sense of place within the whole. Texts The ultimate canonical authority for all Hindus is the Vedas. The oldest of the four Vedas is the Rig-Veda , which was composed in an ancient form of the Sanskrit language in northwest India.
This text, probably composed between about and BC and consisting of hymns to a pantheon of gods, has been memorized syllable by syllable and preserved orally to the present day. A fourth book, the Atharva-Veda a collection of magic spells , was probably added about BC. At this time, too, the Brahmanas—lengthy Sanskrit texts expounding priestly ritual and the myths behind it—were composed.
Between the 8th century BC and the 5th century BC , the Upanishads were composed; these are mystical-philosophical meditations on the meaning of existence and the nature of the universe.
The actual content of this canon, however, is unknown to most Hindus. No prohibition is made against improvising variations on, rewording, or challenging the Smriti. The Smriti includes the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana ; the many Sanskrit Puranas , including 18 great Puranas and several dozen more subordinate Puranas; and the many Dharmashastras and Dharmasutras textbooks on sacred law , of which the one attributed to the sage Manu is the most frequently cited.
The two epics are built around central narratives. The Mahabharata tells of the war between the Pandava brothers, led by their cousin Krishna , and their cousins the Kauravas. The Ramayana tells of the journey of Rama to recover his wife Sita after she is stolen by the demon Ravana. But these stories are embedded in a rich corpus of other tales and discourses on philosophy, law, geography, political science, and astronomy, so that the Mahabharata about , lines long constitutes a kind of encyclopedia or even a literature, and the Ramayana more than 50, lines long is comparable.
Although it is therefore impossible to fix their dates, the main bodies of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were probably composed between BC and AD Both, however, continued to grow even after they were translated into the vernacular languages of India such as Tamil and Hindi in the succeeding centuries.
The Puranas were composed after the epics, and several of them develop themes found in the epics for instance, the Bhagavata-Purana describes the childhood of Krishna, a topic not elaborated in the Mahabharata. The Puranas also include subsidiary myths, hymns of praise, philosophies, iconography, and rituals.
Most of the Puranas are predominantly sectarian in nature; the great Puranas and some subordinate Puranas are dedicated to the worship of Shiva or Vishnu or the Goddess, and several subordinate Puranas are devoted to Ganesha or Skanda or the sun. Philosophy Incorporated in this rich literature is a complex cosmology. Hindus believe that the universe is a great, enclosed sphere, a cosmic egg, within which are numerous concentric heavens, hells, oceans, and continents, with India at the center. They believe that time is both degenerative—going from the golden age, or Krita Yuga, through two intermediate periods of decreasing goodness, to the present age, or Kali Yuga—and cyclic: At the end of each Kali Yuga, the universe is destroyed by fire and flood, and a new golden age begins.
Human life, too, is cyclic: After death, the soul leaves the body and is reborn in the body of another person, animal, vegetable, or mineral. This condition of endless entanglement in activity and rebirth is called samsara see Transmigration. The precise quality of the new birth is determined by the accumulated merit and demerit that result from all the actions, or karma , that the soul has committed in its past life or lives.
Hindus may thus be divided into two groups: those who seek the sacred and profane rewards of this world health, wealth, children, and a good rebirth , and those who seek release from the world. The principles of the first way of life were drawn from the Vedas and are represented today in temple Hinduism and in the religion of Brahmans and the caste system.
The second way, which is prescribed in the Upanishads, is represented not only in the cults of renunciation sannyasa but also in the ideological ideals of most Hindus. To the first three Vedas was added the Atharva-Veda. The first three classes Brahman, or priestly; Kshatriya, or warrior; and Vaisya, or general populace were derived from the tripartite division of ancient Indo-European society, traces of which can be detected in certain social and religious institutions of ancient Greece and Rome.
To the three classes were added the Shudras, or servants, after the Indo-Aryans settled into the Punjab and began to move down into the Ganges Valley. The three original ashramas were the chaste student brahmachari , the householder grihastha , and the forest-dweller vanaprastha. They were said to owe three debts: study of the Vedas owed to the sages ; a son to the ancestors ; and sacrifice to the gods. The three goals were artha material success , dharma righteous social behavior , and kama sensual pleasures.
Shortly after the composition of the first Upanishads, during the rise of Buddhism 6th century BC , a fourth ashrama and a corresponding fourth goal were added: the renouncer sannyasi , whose goal is release moksha from the other stages, goals, and debts.
Each of these two ways of being Hindu developed its own complementary metaphysical and social systems. Svadharma comprises the beliefs that each person is born to perform a specific job, marry a specific person, eat certain food, and beget children to do likewise and that it is better to fulfill one's own dharma than that of anyone else even if one's own is low or reprehensible, such as that of the Harijan caste, the Untouchables, whose mere presence was once considered polluting to other castes.
The primary goal of the worldly Hindu is to produce and raise a son who will make offerings to the ancestors the shraddha ceremony. The second, renunciatory way of Hinduism, on the other hand, is based on the Upanishadic philosophy of the unity of the individual soul, or atman , with Brahman, the universal world soul, or godhead.
The full realization of this is believed to be sufficient to release the worshiper from rebirth; in this view, nothing could be more detrimental to salvation than the birth of a child. Many of the goals and ideals of renunciatory Hinduism have been incorporated into worldly Hinduism, particularly the eternal dharma sanatana dharma , an absolute and general ethical code that purports to transcend and embrace all subsidiary, relative, specific dharmas.
The most important tenet of sanatana dharma for all Hindus is ahimsa, the absence of a desire to injure, which is used to justify vegetarianism although it does not preclude physical violence toward animals or humans, or blood sacrifices in temples. In addition to sanatana dharma, numerous attempts have been made to reconcile the two Hinduisms.
The Bhagavad-Gita describes three paths to religious realization. To the path of works, or karma here designating sacrificial and ritual acts , and the path of knowledge, or jnana the Upanishadic meditation on the godhead , was added a mediating third path, the passionate devotion to God, or bhakti , a religious ideal that came to combine and transcend the other two paths.
Bhakti in a general form can be traced in the epics and even in some of the Upanishads, but its fullest statement appears only after the Bhagavad-Gita. It gained momentum from the vernacular poems and songs to local deities, particularly those of the Alvars, Nayanars, and Virashaivas of southern India and the Bengali worshipers of Krishna see below.
Therefore, most Hindus are devoted through bhakti to gods whom they worship in rituals through karma and whom they understand through jnana as aspects of ultimate reality, the material reflection of which is all an illusion maya wrought by God in a spirit of play lila.
Gods Although all Hindus acknowledge the existence and importance of a number of gods and demigods, most individual worshipers are primarily devoted to a single god or goddess, of whom Shiva, Vishnu, and the Goddess are the most popular. Shiva embodies the apparently contradictory aspects of a god of ascetics and a god of the phallus. Shiva is also the deity whose phallus linga is the central shrine of all Shaiva temples and the personal shrine of all Shaiva householders; his priapism is said to have resulted in his castration and the subsequent worship of his severed member.
In addition, Shiva is said to have appeared on earth in various human, animal, and vegetable forms, establishing his many local shrines.
To his worshipers, Vishnu is all-pervasive and supreme; he is the god from whose navel a lotus sprang, giving birth to the creator Brahma. Vishnu created the universe by separating heaven and earth, and he rescued it on a number of subsequent occasions. Several of these are animals that recur in iconography: the fish, the tortoise, and the boar. Others are the dwarf Vamana, who became a giant in order to trick the demon Bali out of the entire universe ; the man-lion Narasimha, who disemboweled the demon Hiranyakashipu ; the Buddha who became incarnate in order to teach a false doctrine to the pious demons ; Rama-with-an-Axe Parashurama, who beheaded his unchaste mother and destroyed the entire class of Kshatriyas to avenge his father ; and Kalki the rider on the white horse, who will come to destroy the universe at the end of the age of Kali.
Most popular by far are Rama hero of the Ramayana and Krishna hero of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata-Purana , both of whom are said to be avatars of Vishnu, although they were originally human heroes. Along with these two great male gods, several goddesses are the object of primary devotion.
They are sometimes said to be various aspects of the Goddess, Devi. In some myths Devi is the prime mover, who commands the male gods to do the work of creation and destruction. As Durga, the Unapproachable, she kills the buffalo demon Mahisha in a great battle; as Kali, the Black, she dances in a mad frenzy on the corpses of those she has slain and eaten, adorned with the still-dripping skulls and severed hands of her victims.
The Goddess is also worshiped by the Shaktas, devotees of Shakti, the female power. This sect arose in the medieval period along with the Tantrists, whose esoteric ceremonies involved a black mass in which such forbidden substances as meat, fish, and wine were eaten and forbidden sexual acts were performed ritually. In many Tantric cults the Goddess is identified as Krishna's consort Radha. More peaceful manifestations of the Goddess are seen in wives of the great gods: Lakshmi, the meek, docile wife of Vishnu and a fertility goddess in her own right; and Parvati, the wife of Shiva and the daughter of the Himalayas.
The great river goddess Ganga the Ganges , also worshiped alone, is said to be a wife of Shiva; a goddess of music and literature, Sarasvati, associated with the Saraswati River, is the wife of Brahma. Many of the local goddesses of India—Manasha, the goddess of snakes, in Bengal, and Minakshi in Madurai—are married to Hindu gods, while others, such as Shitala, goddess of smallpox, are worshiped alone. These unmarried goddesses are feared for their untamed powers and angry, unpredictable outbursts.
Many minor gods are assimilated into the central pantheon by being identified with the great gods or with their children and friends. Hanuman, the monkey god, appears in the Ramayana as the cunning assistant of Rama in the siege of Lanka.
Skanda, the general of the army of the gods, is the son of Shiva and Parvati, as is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of scribes and merchants, the remover of obstacles, and the object of worship at the beginning of any important enterprise. Worship and Ritual The great and lesser Hindu gods are worshiped in a number of concentric circles of public and private devotion.
Because of the social basis of Hinduism, the most fundamental ceremonies for every Hindu are those that involve the rites of passage samskaras.
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