Caste classification into four classes fails against human diversity

Evidence

There is a second difficulty which the protagonists of chaturvarnya must grapple with, if they wish to make the establishment of chaturvarnya a success. Chaturvarnya presupposes that you can classify people into four definite classes. Is this possible? In this respect, the ideal of chaturvarnya has, as you will see, a close affinity to the Platonic ideal. To Plato, men fell by nature into three classes. In some individuals, he believed, mere appetites dominated. He assigned them to the labouring and trading classes. Others revealed to him that over and above appetites, they had a courageous disposition. He classed them as defenders in war and guardians of internal peace. Others showed a capacity to grasp the universal—the reason underlying things. He made them the law-givers of the people. … All this is demonstrably wrong. Modern science has shown that the lumping together of individuals into a few sharply marked-off classes is a superficial view of man, not worthy of serious consideration. Consequently, the utilisation of the qualities of individuals is incompatible with their stratification by classes, since the qualities of individuals are so variable. Chaturvarnya must fail for the very reason for which Plato’s Republic must fail—namely, that it is not possible to pigeon men into holes according to class. That it is impossible to accurately classify people into four definite classes is proved by the fact that the original four classes have now become four thousand castes. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 916

Categorization

• XREF: Ambedkar’s chaturvarnya criticism mirrors Plato’s Republic critique familiar from political theory; connects to broader caste-annihilation argument strands in this set.
• SEED: The observation that four classes collapsed into four thousand castes is falsification-by-history — worth spinning into an essay on why classification systems breed ever finer subdivisions.