Talk:Apastamba Dharmasutra

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Casteism

A nice round of cherry-picking has gone into the making of this article. Disclaimer: I am not accusing the primary contributors of any nefarious intention; the negative bits had skipped their attention by sheer chance.

The second and third line of the Dharmasutra goes, There are four classes: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra. Among these, each preceding class is superior by birth to each subsequent. In 2.10, it enlists occupations which are available to these classes; in 2.11 it is held that abiding by the path of one's dharma leads to a higher caste but only in the next birth. Sudras are restricted to serve higher classes (therein, lay their salvation) and forbidden from receiving education ever. Any Sudra pretending to be above his class was to be flogged and if found abusing higher classes, tongue cut out. The same crimes which got the Brahmins a blindfold, got the Sudras a capital punishment! Even the life of a Kshatriya is held to be hundred times more valuable than a Sudra; the penance for killing a Sudra is merely equal to that of slaying a crow or rat or frog.

The text—reflecting "a broad minded and liberal view", according to our article—states outright that any Aryan women engaging in a carnal relation with a Sudra man gets "degraded". Hence, he shall be executed and she be subject to a complete social boycott. If the genders reverse, we have the Aryan man banished. Overall, any inter-caste marriage/sex is deemed to be a sin but particular attention is cast on Sudras in multiple verses; inter-caste sex outside marriage attracts four times the penalty of intra-caste sex outside marriage. All food touched by an impure Sudra are held to become immediately unfit for eating; in general, it is advised against to accept food from Sudras. Students are even prohibited from consuming food from any Vedic scholar, who is married to a Sudra woman. They are explicitly allowed to seize properties of any random Sudra (!) if their teacher is in an economic hardship. TrangaBellam (talk) 21:43, 6 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Explanation for removal of a line from lead: When Olivelle explicitly notes that his opinion of Apastamba as among the liberals goes against the mainstream view of the orthodox nature of the text, it is weird to introduce that unattributed in lead as some kind of consensus among scholars. TrangaBellam (talk) 22:23, 6 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]