Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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expectations of the down-trodden masses, but no one attempted to
fulfil those aspirations. As such, the gospel of these Bhaktas remained
confined, at its best, only to the field of religious inspiration.
Niharranjan Ray has expressed the view that, ‘Agriculture being
the main prop of Indian social economy and hence land the main
focal interest for centuries past, early Indian society built up slowly
and steadily a social organisation in which all social and economic
professions and occupations, from priesthood, intellectual and
scholastic pursuits, kingship and military vocations to leather tanning
and scavenging, were arranged in a vertically stratified hierarchical
order based on birth and biological heredity. This order being jati,
know today to English-knowing people as caste (wrongly, to my mind),
revolved primarily round land and agriculture and only secondarily
round trade and commerce and arts and crafts. Jati was thus not merely
a socio-religious system but also a system of production and hence an
economic system; indeed, it was a very complex system into which
was woven a pattern of social, religious and economic relationships in
a vertically hierarchical order based on birth, as I said before.’ 7
It is not relevant to our subject to discuss the genesis of the
caste. But, we have to point out the inadequacy of the view expressed
above, because Niharranjan Ray form it the basis for drawing a lopsided
inference. We have been stressing the point that caste is
qualitatively different from class. The rudiments of social exclusiveness
and rigidity, which had the potentialities of developing into caste like
formations, were present in other countries as well, but nowhere else
these developed into a caste system like that of India. 8 At that period,
when the Indian caste system developed, agriculture ‘was the main
prop,’ and hence land ‘the main focal interest for centuries past’, of
not only of Indian social economy but of that of the economy of
many other countries. The Indian agricultural productive system
was just one of the many variations of feudal patterns prevailing
in the world. It has not been shown, much less proved, how
these petty variations could lead to caste formation in one case
only and to class formations in all others. Apart from the points
made in the earlier chapters, the comparison of caste with