Here is a question that sounds impertinent but isn’t: what if the world’s oldest system of social oppression and the world’s oldest philosophical inquiry are about the same thing? Caste, at its bones, is a machine for telling people what they are worth and what they can become based on where they were born. The pursuit of happiness, across all philosophical traditions, is an inquiry into what human beings are capable of when nothing is telling them what they are worth. Put the two side by side and something clicks into focus. Caste is a precise, institutional answer to the happiness question, and the answer is: Not you. Not your kind. Not in this lifetime.
The word happiness gets used loosely, so it is worth pausing on what the serious traditions actually say. Almost none of them mean feeling good; that is a by-product, not the thing itself. For Aristotle, happiness was an activity, the sustained exercise of one’s highest capacities, across a full life, in accordance with virtue. The Indian traditions arrive at a similar place from a different direction, and, I have come to think, with even greater precision. The Upanishads identify the deepest happiness, ananda, not as something to be achieved but as already present in the nature of reality; the Taittiriya Upanishad maps the path to it through successive sheaths of being, the koshas, culminating in the anandamaya kosha, accessible in principle to every being without exception. What stands between a person and that sheath is not effort but obstruction, the conditioning that prevents recognition of what is already there. The Buddhists make a parallel point more starkly: dukkha locates the problem in craving, and the path is to see that structure so clearly it dissolves. The literature, East and West, keeps returning to this: something is in the way. Remove it and what you seek is already present.
Modern neuroscience reaches similar conclusions by another route, in the gut-brain axis and its inhibitory circuitry. This is not a rival explanation; it is the same inquiry conducted in a different laboratory, where Krishnamurti located freedom from conditioning in a quality of attention, and the neuroscience is trying to locate and measure the substrate of that same quality.
None of these traditions is naive about external conditions, and this is the hinge on which the argument turns. Amartya Sen made it the cornerstone of his capabilities approach: whether a person can pursue happiness is prior to how they should pursue it. A person who does not eat reliably, who cannot access clean water, who is denied education, who internalises from birth that they are less than fully human, has a neurobiological substrate already shaped by those conditions before any inward work of attention can begin. Chronic stress, humiliation, and deprivation are neurobiological events as much as social ones. The space to develop and exercise one’s capacities is not a luxury. It is the precondition for everything else.
Strip caste of its religious and cultural clothing and you find something structurally simple: a society administers its scarce resources, land, water, knowledge, dignity, opportunity, through hereditary hierarchy, and tells everyone this is the natural order. Those at the top inherit access; those at the bottom inherit exclusion, and the mechanism perpetuates itself not primarily through force but through the deeper violence of making both groups believe the arrangement is inevitable.
It is worth being precise about where that inevitability was first asserted. The Purusha Sukta, in the tenth mandala of the Rig Veda, describes the four varnas emerging from the body of the cosmic Purusha: Brahmin from the mouth, Kshatriya from the arms, Vaishya from the thighs, Shudra from the feet. The hierarchy is encoded in the cosmological origin story itself, prior to any colonial distortion. A more defensible counter-argument exists for jati specifically: the hereditary, endogamous lock on occupation intensified over centuries and was hardened further by colonial census-taking. The historical record supports this. But it concedes the essential point. Hierarchy preceded colonialism. The Manusmriti, the devadasi system, the denial of water and temple access, the violence used to enforce untouchability, all predate British arrival. The census made caste more legible to the administrative state. It did not invent what it found. Ambedkar rejected the colonial-distortion thesis for exactly this reason: taken as the primary explanation, it locates the problem outside Indian society and lets pre-colonial perpetuation escape accountability.
In 2024, the Supreme Court of India rebuked lower courts in Odisha for ordering Dalit and Adivasi accused persons, not yet convicted of anything, to clean police stations as a condition of bail. The Court called the practice obnoxious, unconstitutional, a regression to a colonial mindset, and noted that no such condition was imposed on accused persons from privileged communities. The Constitution had abolished untouchability in 1950. Seventy-four years later, a court designed to uphold that abolition was imposing it, apparently without noticing. The judges were not consciously endorsing untouchability. They were acting from conditioning so embedded it registered not as discrimination but as common sense. Ambedkar, who designed the Constitution they were violating, had seen this coming. His 1936 speech Annihilation of Caste, never delivered because the organisers withdrew the invitation once they read it, remains the most precise diagnosis of the machine ever put on paper. His word was not reform but annihilation. Reform adjusts the scaffold. Annihilation removes it.
Isabel Wilkerson, in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, extended Ambedkar’s analysis across India, the American South, and Nazi Germany, finding the same machine running under different operating systems, different costumes, same fuel. Martin Luther King understood this viscerally when a school principal in Kerala introduced him to his students not as a great American leader but as a fellow untouchable from another country; he had come to study Gandhi’s tactics, and left understanding that the struggles of Black Americans and of Dalits were the same struggle, seen from opposite ends of the same machine.
The strongest anti-caste movement in Indian history, though, came from entirely within the tradition, in the Bhakti saints. Kabir attacked Brahminical hierarchy with the plain logic of direct devotion: if God is in every heart, by what reasoning is one heart more eligible than another? Mirabai abandoned the conventions of upper-caste Rajput womanhood, making her own freedom a theological argument, and Tukaram, a Shudra told by Brahmin opponents he had no right to compose verse, composed anyway, and the poetry survived him by centuries. These are not marginal figures; they are among the tradition’s greatest voices, and they reached the same conclusion by different roads: direct access to the divine does not pass through the hierarchy, it bypasses it entirely. The Bhakti tradition is an annihilation of caste conducted in the language of devotion.
The Bhagavad Gita is more complicated, having been read both to justify caste and to subvert it. The conventional reading of “better is one’s own dharma” has long been used to tell people to stay in their assigned station. But svadharma, read carefully, is not the dharma of one’s jati. It is the dharma of one’s atman: the unique path corresponding to what one actually is, against what one has been assigned by birth. This is precisely what caste prevents. Ambedkar at Columbia in 1913, a young Dalit in a library reading everything, building the framework that would become the Constitution of India, was living his svadharma. The caste machine had told him what his dharma was. He refused the assignment and found his own. Read through svadharma rather than jati-dharma, the Gita is a call to the self-knowledge that caste makes structurally impossible for those it excludes.
This is where Jiddu Krishnamurti enters, and the register changes again. Born in 1895 into a Telugu Brahmin family and groomed for decades by the Theosophical Society to become the World Teacher, he dissolved the organisation built around him in 1929 and spent sixty years thinking for himself about what prevents human beings from living freely. His central observation: the self pursuing happiness is itself the obstacle. Not because happiness is unreal, but because the thinker is not separate from the thought. The observer is the observed. The mind compares, identifies, I am a Brahmin, a Dalit, a success, a failure, and reaches, always for the next thing. This movement of thought mistaking itself for a permanent self is, he argued, the source of most human suffering: not circumstance, but the structure of the conditioned mind itself. What is required is not a method but attention, the direct observation of what is happening in the mind without the observer separating from what is observed, what he called choiceless awareness.
It is tempting, faced with all this, to reach for the Advaita reading that the world is maya, and caste therefore a fabricated signal, noise to be filtered once one sees that nothing apparent is ultimately real. But this move has a long, uncomfortable history of being used not to dismantle caste but to accommodate it. If the suffering at the bottom of the hierarchy is ultimately unreal, the urgency of changing material conditions evaporates. The scaffold is left standing, because it is, after all, only a scaffold in an illusory world. This is part of why Ambedkar, rather than resting on the metaphysics he was born into, converted to Buddhism in 1956 with hundreds of thousands of Dalit followers. It is also why the philosopher Ramanujacharya, centuries earlier, had qualified non-dualism altogether, insisting the world is real and is Brahman, a genuine manifestation in which Brahman is fully present rather than an illusion to escape. Read through either corrective, the suffering of the person cleaning the police station floor is spiritually significant, something to be responded to rather than transcended. It is a real distortion of a real divine order in which every atman has equal standing, which makes the dismantling of caste a theological imperative, not only a secular one.
Hold Krishnamurti’s conditioned mind alongside Ambedkar’s caste machine, and the structural identity is impossible to miss. Both are scaffolds presenting themselves as the natural order. Both run on the same fuel: the belief, installed before a person has words to question it, that one’s place in a hierarchy is a fact of nature rather than a product of history. Both reproduce without continuous enforcement, because they live inside the minds of oppressor and oppressed alike. Both are entirely contingent rather than permanent. Caste is a historical arrangement, made by people, for purposes that served some at the expense of others. The conditioned self is a movement of thought, sustained by the belief that it is more stable than it is.
And both prevent the same thing: happiness. Caste prevents it externally, by denying the material conditions and dignity flourishing requires. The conditioned mind prevents it internally, by keeping the self in perpetual reaching and comparing, which forecloses the attention in which flourishing lives. They are the same structure at two scales, social and psychological, the scaffold outside and the scaffold inside holding each other up. In the deepest reading of the Upanishadic framework this is not only social injustice but metaphysical obstruction, a machine for preventing the anandamaya kosha from being reached by those it excludes. Read this way, it is the framework’s most precise indictment, not its comfort, because it makes the denial of those conditions not merely unjust but cosmologically wrong.
Jefferson wrote that the pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right, not happiness itself but the pursuit of it: the space in which seeking happens, the condition of being able to look, strive, fail, and grow. Caste’s deepest violence is not only that it makes people miserable, though it does. It removes the standing to pursue. It decides in advance what a person is worth. For most people, for most of history, it has simply removed the door.
If the machine is visible, if Ambedkar wrote it down in 1936 and Krishnamurti spent sixty years pointing at it from another direction, why does the scaffold stand? Temporal discounting offers an answer: humans systematically undervalue future benefit against present cost. The person who maintains caste privilege knows, somewhere, that the system is wrong. But the present cost of dismantling it, the loss of advantage, weighs more heavily than the future good of a just society. This is the same mechanism Krishnamurti described at the individual scale: thought generating more thought to protect the structure thought created.
Two forces now are changing the material conditions in which the machine operates, something moral argument alone has never managed. Climate change is disrupting the ecological basis of agrarian hierarchy: the monsoon patterns, groundwater tables, and control of land and water that made caste dominance possible for three millennia. The energy transition carries the possibility of decentralised access to the resource that has always instrumented dominance. Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, is attacking caste’s most durable channel of reproduction, the knowledge monopoly. A person without social capital or the right surname can now get a serious answer to a serious question without passing through any gate. AI is doing at scale what Ambedkar did individually. This is no guarantee, of course. Every prior emancipatory technology, the printing press, the Green Revolution, the mobile phone, was eventually captured by the existing hierarchy, and an algorithm trained on the outputs of a caste-administered society does not need to know about caste to reproduce it.
Whether it does depends on something neither technology nor policy can fully supply: a quality of attention, in those building and governing these systems, that sees the machine clearly enough to refuse to rebuild it. Here Krishnamurti’s psychological clarity becomes practical prerequisite, not philosophical indulgence. One cannot dismantle hierarchy with minds still running on its logic, unseen and unexamined. And if neuroscience can ever show what the Bhakti saints and Ambedkar already knew by other means, that flourishing’s neurobiological signature is suppressed in populations subject to structural hierarchy, that would be the most powerful case against caste yet made. It would demonstrate what Ambedkar knew and the courts in Odisha forgot: caste does not just make people miserable. It damages them.
The pursuit of happiness and the annihilation of caste are the same project. The outside of it is the dismantling of the legal, economic, and institutional structures through which dignity, knowledge, and opportunity have been rationed. The inside of it is the freedom from conditioning that Krishnamurti spent a lifetime pointing toward. The Indian tradition, read without the hierarchy’s permission, supplies a third term neither the capabilities argument nor Krishnamurti’s psychology quite reaches alone: a metaphysics, running from the Upanishads through the Bhakti saints to Ramanujacharya, in which the two are inseparable in a way that carries spiritual weight, not only analytical weight. All three are necessary, none sufficient alone; they have to come down together.
The happiness that three thousand years of philosophy has been describing is not a reward for those lucky enough to be born at the top of a hierarchy. It is what becomes available to any human being when the structures that prevented it are no longer in the way. That is not a utopian claim. It is a structural one. The scaffold is not natural. It is made. And what is made can be unmade.