The most striking feature of the Hindu Society in the caste system. Even among Muslims, whose religion preaches equality there is a loose sort of caste system.
The essential feature of the system, is that a man’s social and domestic relation are determined by the rules of the caste into which he is born. He can not marry in any other caste. There are also some restrictions in the caste, with whose members he cannot eat or drink, without being ‘fallen in caste.’ An important off short of the caste system is untouchability.
Advantages
- It has increased the productive efficiency of labour. Each caste specialises in a particular occupation. The weaver, doing only weaving etc. Such specialisation of labour increases the efficiency of workers.
- It prompts the transmission of skill from the father to son. The son would learn all trade secrets under the loving care of his father who would naturlaly takes utmost pains to teach his son. Thus the son is not to incur expenditure for learning a trade.
- It has fostered the spirit of co-operation and fellow feeling among members of the same caste. By helping the poor and needy, it has avovided the necessity of the state supporting the poor.
- It has preserved the racial purity of the higher rules by the forbidding indiscriminate inter-marriage.
Disadvantages
- There is no mobility of labour in the system because people cannot take up any occupation they like but must follow the calling of their forefathers. Suppose the prospects of any occupation improve very much and the wages rise, the supply of labour cannot increase in the occupation, as it is fixed by birth. If in any occupation, the prospets decline, workers cannot leave it, and go to a better one. Thus labour in unable to adjust itself to the changed conditions in any occupation and suffers accordingly.
- As it renders labour immobile, it is not favourable for large scale production so the general economic condition of our country is very bad.
- It often reslults in putting man in wrong occupation. There is no guarantee that a barber’s son would also like to be a barber, or would posses the qualities of a sucessful barber. But under a rigid caste system, he cannot take up any other profession even though he may posses the skill for it. Each profession has, therefore, to tolerate many persons who are inefficient or unless in that profession but who may do better in some other jobs.
- It breeds a feeling of contempt for manual labour in the minds of the higher castes. One of the main causes of middle class unemployment is due to this contempt for manual labour.
- It is an obstacle to the growth of national untiy. It has lead to the growth of a feeling of discontent among the depressed classes.
- Caste systems is against the principle of democracy because in democracies every individual has got right irrespective of his caste, creed and colour and he got equal opportunities with other for his moral and physical development while caste system stood in the way and does not allow free choice of occupations and does not afford equal opportunities to all the members of the state for their mental, moral and physical development.
There is not doubt that whatever be the merits which the caste system possessed, its disadvantages fat out-weighed them. It is a happy sign of the times of that the rigidity of the system is breaking down in recent time.
