Introductory - Global Sikh Studies

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is that to connect the caste purely or mainly with the economic system
is an over-simplification that confuses the main issue. We are here
dealing mainly with caste and not class. The Radical Bhakti school
failed to have any appreciable social impact mainly because it did not
show the masses the way to shake off their caste shackles. Nor were
they led by it to do so.
2. The Caste Ambit
The Radical Bhakti ideology made a strong frontal attack on the
ideological base of the caste system, and its contribution in this respect
is no to be under-rated. But, the Radical Bhaktas, somehow, did no
take into account the patent fact that the caste ideology had
institutionalised itself into a hidebound social system. All institutions
and systems, once developed, have apart from their ideological basis,
a compulsive mechanism and a drive of their own. Max Weber writes,
‘Ones established, the assimilative power of Hinduism is so great that
it tends even to integrate social forms considered beyond its religious
borders. The religious movements of expressly anti-Brahmanical and
anti-caste character, that is contrary to one of the fundamentals of
Hinduism, have been in all essentials returned to the caste order.
‘The process is not hard to explain. When a principled anti-caste
sect recruits former members of various Hindu castes and tears them
from the context of their former ritualistic duties, the caste responds
by excommunicating all the sect’s proselytes. Unless the sect is able to
abolish the caste system altogether, instead of simply tearing away
some of its members, it becomes, from the standpoint of the caste
system, a quasi-guest folk, a kind of confessional guest community in
an ambiguous position in the prevailing Hindu Order.’ 12 And what
happens to the excommunicated person has been noted earlier.
As pointed out by Max Weber, there were only two alternatives
before the anti-caste movements: either to abolish the caste system or
to be engulfed by it. As the abolition of the caste system at one stroke
could happen only through a miracle, the only practical way was to
form a society outside the caste system and give it a battle from outside.
None of the medieval Bhaktas, or their followers, made a determined
attempt to found a society outside the caste orbit. The natural result