Why a Brahmin Abandoned His Caste

Damodar K. Mavalankar · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages carrying a personal statement rather than an essay — Damodar K. Mavalankar's Castes in India, first published in The Theosophist volume I number 8, May 1880, pages 196 to 197, and republished in Sven Eek's Damodar and the Pioneers of the Theosophical Movement, Adyar, 1965. The frontispiece is by Aurelie Philippe. *It is one of the few documents in this library in which someone describes what the teaching cost him personally.*

He explains why he is writing at all: no man of sincerity and moral courage, he says, can read Mr G.C. Whitworth's Profession of Faith, reviewed in the April number, without feeling challenged to be worthy of the respect of one who professes such honourable sentiments — so he too is called upon to make his own statement of personal belief. The reason it has to be public is stated plainly and is the most affecting part: it is due to his family and caste-fellows that they should know why he has deliberately abandoned his caste and other worldly considerations, and if there is henceforth to be a chasm between them and himself, he owes it to himself to declare that the alienation is of his own choosing and that he has not been cut off for bad conduct. He would be glad, he adds, to take with him into his new career the affectionate good wishes of his kinsmen — but if that cannot be, it cannot. The argument he then makes against the caste system is the one the running heading states, that it is a Kali-Yuga invention: instead of a love for one's countrymen, the observance of caste distinction leads a man to hate even his neighbour, because his neighbour happens to be of another caste. Damodar was among the most devoted of the early Indian theosophists, and files elsewhere on this site carry his other contributions.

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