Well before films glamourised movie stars as giant killers, almost every caste, in old fashioned India, claimed some kind of martial status. For instance, the Baniyas are frequently presented as crafty, chatur, peace-seeking merchants, but many of their origin tales spin a different story. The Khandelvals and Maheshwaris, two major Rajasthani Baniya castes, notwithstanding their claimed Rajput ancestry, found the Kshatriya practice of animal sacrifice a real turn off. We should take serious offence when caste stereotypes degrade Dalits, but that ought to alert us to many other forms of community slurs that are routinely in circulation. At the end of the day, consider this: was Gandhi, the Baniya, a crafty merchant or a noble ruler?

Source: Times of India June 16, 2017 20:46 UTC