
Abstract
This article deals with generational marriages within the same caste and occupation skills of men and women over many generations. It examines how this practice has affected the brain capacity of Indians, particularly in terms of creativity and speculative abilities. The article proposes that avoiding marriages within the same caste and hereditary occupations for a few generations could unlock the imaginative and creative potential of Indians.
This article is not based on laboratory experiments on the human caste brain, but rather on a rigorous examination of the historical contributions – or lack thereof – of Indian intellect to the global knowledge pool. It examines how millennia of caste-endogamous and caste-inclined hereditary occupational marriages affected the Indian brain thinking capacity. Unfortunately, no anthropological or gene mutational studies have been conducted to investigate how the caste system impacted the Indian brain. Though a serious epigenetic study focusing on the impact of caste and hereditary occupational marriages on the brain cells of children born from such unions is required. This is a preliminary study with all its limitations, aimed at flagging the issue in social and natural science discourses.
As I continue to study and reflect on the lack of creativity in India, I have come to realize that it is closely tied to the practice of endogamous marriages, which also invariably follow a mono-occupational hereditary system. Over time, procreation within caste-based communities and single occupations seems to have stalled the brain potential of Indians. In other words, caste-based marriages appear to have restricted cognitive and creative development across all castes, whether one is born into a Dalit, Shudra, or Brahmin family. Two fundamental factors seem to contribute to this: the small social networks created by caste-based marriages and hereditary occupations, whether in farming, pottery, or the recitation of mantras. Each generation’s creative energies and experiences are limited to one specific skill. Though there may be some innovations within that occupation, caste-based marriages are generally confined to small geographical areas, as caste groups typically don’t form connections with distant members of the same caste. When caste groups move beyond their linguistic regions (now linguistic states), they often become unacceptable or suspicious, even if the occupation remains the same. The caste marriage system always confines individual choice in selecting a spouse by prescribing arranged marriages and thereby limiting personal agency.
MEMORY STORAGE AND CREATIVE THINKING
As we now clearly understand, the human brain alone has unlimited memory storage capacity, along with exceptional creative thinking abilities. It possesses an incredible capacity to generate, store, and disseminate new ideas — an ability unmatched by any other animal brain. In fact, we are unaware of the storage capacity of animal brains, as they do not have the means to communicate their memory power like humans. The lack of speech in animals is a key difference between humans and animals.
No advanced technology can match and replicate the human brain’s capacity for generating new ideas and storing them within a single lifetime. Moreover, the brain has an immense ability to share those ideas with others, and with modern education, this capacity has grown exponentially and plays a much bigger role. Nevertheless, the contribution of the Indian caste brain to the global episteme and knowledge pool remains very limited.
In my view, three factors have limited the development of the human intellect in India. First, there is the phenomenon of inner circle genetic mutation of the brain. Second, the generationally arrest of knowledge accumulation in caste-based vocations. The hereditary nature of caste-controlled professions has stunted the expansion of knowledge and the mutation of skills among Indians. Whatever knowledge was acquired through one occupation in a lifetime was passed down to offspring, generation after generation. This resulted in very limited creative energy, as individuals were unable to obtain multiple skills through brain cell mutation, being confined to a single occupation for several generations. While this occupational knowledge was stored in the brain, its potential for generating new ideas became exceedingly limited and circumscribed. Third, for millennia, education was denied to the productive castes of Shudras and Dalits, further curbing the capacity to spread the knowledge stored within family lines. This lack of education severely limited the dissemination of knowledge within these communities.
HUMAN BRAIN Vs AI
The presently available computers or any form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can store pre-existing ideas but cannot generate new ideas independently. Perhaps, in the future, AI may gather and store all the ideas already produced by humans across the world, facilitating the distribution of these ideas by pooling and organizing them. AI could help in bringing the existing ideas to the remote corners of the world and communicate them to individuals who seek to use them for their advancement. In this regard, AI might be more effective than any single human in mobilizing and disseminating stored ideas. However, it is only the human brain that, over time, has the capacity to create new ideas and store them within an individual. Through speaking and writing, humans have left behind a legacy of ideas for future generations. The power of the human brain, combined with the ability to communicate through speech and writing, has shaped the world as we know it. In this sense, the human brain is far more powerful than any AI tool.
THE CASTE BRAIN
The caste brain has limited creative faculties across all the castes. Even after reading and writing were discovered and used in India, the Brahmins as Vedic ritual class primarily accumulated knowledge through recitation of classical texts. Meantime, the Shudras and Dalits could only orally communicate their caste occupational knowledge to their successors. Even the diverse skills of different artisanal occupations did not go into brain storage of caste brains.
Genetic and medical sciences have yet to study whether the creative and memory-related genes of parents are transmitted to the brain of their children. However, some studies have already established that the experiential knowledge of parents, through gene mutations in the parental brain, is passed on to their offspring. For example, Dr. Odeb Rechavi et al[1], School of Biochemistry Neurobiology Biophysics, Tel Aviv University, mentions “the memory cells carry brain capacities of generations to newborn.” In India the human brain of parents certainly passes on the to the children the memory cells. This transfer takes place within the caste and mostly from uni-occupation experience. The new attempts to study this process in animals and humans in the West through Epigenetics and Eugenetics2 has begun in the recent past. Indian genetic scientists must move in that direction too, keeping caste and uni-occupation history of India in mind.
GENERATIONAL BRAIN CELL MUTATION
The brain capacity of children inherits not only from a single generation of parents, but also from several generations that precede the child birth. Even in our general observations, it is found that children inherit their parents’ physical traits as well as their intellectual abilities. Since the formation of intellectual faculties and foundations of a child are likely to be inherited, when the parents’ intellectual infrastructure is based on caste occupations and culturally conditioned, the children are bound to get that intellectual framework from generational parentage. This seems to have resulted in limited imagination and creativity in Indian population. We have no proper estimation when heirarchized caste system and caste based occupations stabilized limiting marriage system within a caste in country. But it is certain even if we go by the literary evidence available in Sanskrit texts like Vedas it is quite old and sustained for millennia. The Indian population has inherited several generational caste brain.
INTERCASTE MARRIAGE
Inter-caste marriages will be begun to unlock the brain’s chip in children in two ways. One, by changing the bloodline and gene formation of the children through such inter-caste marriages. When parents come from two separate, generationally restricted occupations, the child born to them gradually develops a broader brain capacity. For example, if one parent is a shoemaker and the other is a blacksmith, the child inherits the knowledge and experiences of both occupations, as Odeb Rechavi has argued. However, this change will not immediately unlock the brain’s knowledge potential in just one generation of inter-caste or inter-occupational alliances. It takes several generations for the brain of future descendants to fully free itself from the limitations of past caste-based professions. Nevertheless, there is no other way to enhance Indian brain creativity, which has been constrained by caste-occupation limitations for centuries. Therefore, the state must take decisive steps to promote inter-caste marriages, with stronger measures from both central and state governments.
Notes:
[1] But there is view that epigenetics would also study the experience mutations of brain genes from parents to offspring. Dr. Odeb Richavi and some others are trying to study human brain how experiences and brain memory and creative abilities get transferred from parents to offspring. Though it is not fully developed science, the Indian caste and same occupation societies have shown a lot of behavioural similarities in India.
2 Epigenetics is the study of how environmental and behavioural factors can alter the genes function. Epigenetic changes are reversible and do not alter the DNA sequence, but they can change how the body reads the DNA sequence.
Richard C. Francis, Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes throws some light on the study of Epigenetics. For example, cross-breed animals like Mules and Nilgai indicated their physical and intellectual abilities by using epigenetics. Even the development of different animal breeds by our shepherds has also shown some such characteristics.. Unfortunately, our genetic scientists do not apply the epigenetics to study our caste society to examine the brain mutations of humans. However, Genetics, Epigenetics and Eugenics are promising areas of research in India in the coming future.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a social scientist with a rural childhood experience. He is a retired professor of Political Science at Osmania University and also the former Director of the Center for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Hyderabad. He is the author of several books, including Why I Am Not a Hindu? Post-Hindu India, Buffalo Nationalism, Clash of Cultures, and others. His latest book is ‘The Shudra Rebellion’