False Economy - Alan Beattie [76]
As in the case with Islam, there is the temptation to read across from Hinduism, the predominant religion of India, to the country's social caste system and conclude that it has held India back. As we will see in more detail in a later chapter, the caste system has indeed limited India's advance, and it continues to distort the country's economic development to this day. But it is hard to see the system itself, or the restrictions on economic activity that followed it, as the natural consequence of the beliefs of Hinduism. Rather, those restrictions look like the result of economic self-interest using a tendentious religious justification.
The evidence for Hindu theology inevitably inducing fatalism and economic stagnation is weak. For one thing, the doctrine itself is fuzzy. Unlike the monotheistic one-book creeds of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, Hinduism is an accretion of stories, poems, and cults. It has a multiplicity of philosophies, gods (or the multiple representations of a single god), and sects, and has no central authority on doctrine and worship. There is no Hindu Vatican or Synod; there is little irreducible core of Hinduism.
The strand of Hindu belief that looks most antithetical to capitalism says that human souls, while part of an infinite reality, must go through a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth to transcend their conception of themselves as individuals and become part of the greater truth. This, it is supposed, induces fatalism and apathy in the faithful. But in the sacred texts themselves, hard work—and in some parts actually gaining wealth—can be a means of achieving salvation. In the Mahabharata, one of the most venerated texts of Hinduism, there appears the unequivocal statement, "Wealth gives constant vigor, confidence and power. Poverty is a curse worse than death. Virtue without wealth is no consequence."
The link between Hinduism and the caste system is also less straightforward than might initially appear. Distinctions between four different varnas, or classes of society—the priestly and scholarly Brahmin; the warrior Kshatriya; the merchant and artisan Vaishya; and the manual worker Sudra—are embedded in the traditional Hindu texts. But some ancient texts clearly show that movement between varnas is possible. That fluidity gave way to the exigencies of the struggle for economic dominance between different groups in Indian society. In other words, a religious justification was used to buttress a material advantage of one group of people over another. Thus the originally loose definitions of caste were tightened into a set of defined groups often based rigidly on occupation, and from which members could not escape.
This owed more to the need to provide a docile agricultural labor force than it did to clear theological prescription. One theory of agricultural development, chiefly used to explain slavery, goes as follows. In agrarian societies with a scarcity of people and plentiful land, it is not possible for these three things to coexist: free labor, free ownership of land, and a nonworking upper class. Where people are sparse on a large amount of land, some way of tying the workers to the land is needed if landowners are to live off their labor. In land-rich North America, for example, free laborers could simply have wandered off and started their own farms rather than work for a subsistence income on the plantations. The ability of plantation owners to sit on their verandas, drinking mint juleps and living off the labor of others, would have been sharply reduced had it not been for slavery.
Various means have been used to tie workers to the land. Less drastic ones than slavery include indentured servitude and limits on migration. But often they required a functioning bureaucratic state to enforce them. On the