Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c14.19

c14.19

In spite of the servile status and miserable conditions of the śūdra masses, particularly in pre-Gupta times, there is hardly any direct evidence of śūdra revolts, excepting the references to their violent anti-brāhmaṇical activities during the second and third centuries A.D. The epic and Purāṇic descriptions of the Kali age and statelessness (arājaktā), which focus on social convulsions and mixing of the social orders (varṇasaṃkara) and highlight the manifestation of the śūdra antagonism towards the brāhmaṇa, may be taken as echoes of śūdra revolts, but their exact time and place cannot be fixed. In comparison with the slave revolts in Rome, occasional and sporadic anti-state activities of the śūdras are insignificant. The śūdras may have contributed to people's wrath called janapada-kopa¹ and prakṛti-kopa² it is suggested that the lower vaiśyas constituted the middle class ('petty bourgeoisie'), which held the balance between the śūdra and dvija classes.¹ The use of the term dvija classes is inaccurate, for the vaiśyas were also regarded as such. But even the fact of the vaiśyas acting as a stabilising sector between the first two varṇas on the one hand and the śūdras on the other can be true only of the period before the beginning of the Christian era, since roughly from that time the two lower varṇas began to approximate to one another till in the Gupta period they practically lost their independent identities.