Jinamanjari 1996 04 No 13

Author(s): Jinamanjari
Publisher: Canada Bramhi Jain Society Publication

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found among the urban proletariat in other stratified high cultures. "24 While we may not be able to determine many of the details of the social stratification of India's earliest civilization, the archaeological documentation informs us on the social history of a culture that was strikingly similar to those described by Gimbutas, i.e. a peaceful, endogamous, agrarian society that was equitably governed in the name of the Great Goddess. During the second millennium B.C.E., the declining Harappan civilization was supplanted with a social construct that was radically different, one based on inequality and privileged position for males. Likewise, the religious paradigm of the Great Goddess was replaced by a new one befitting the warrior race known as the Indo-Aryans.
As the Indo-Aryans settled in India, they formulated the caste system in an effort to bring about the disenfranchisement of the older indigenous order. There can be little doubt that war was introduced on the subcontinent after the Indo-Aryan entry into India. War was a direct corollary of maintenance of the caste system. The glorification of war as portrayed in India's great epic literature was a literary device justifying and supporting caste distinctions. To consolidate the power of the new ruling elites, priestesses/shamanesses of the older order were stripped of spiritual authority, women were stripped of their decision-making powers, 25 and Brahman priests exercised the dominating religious authority as they spread out across the subcontinent. We cannot know if the Indo-Europeans exerted physical force in an attempt to demolish the visible signs of the religion of the Goddess and her priestesses, but generally, their actions took a more insidious form of attack by denigrating a woman's body and specifically her powers of generation -- menses and sexuality. The older religion of the Goddess was attacked by reacting against women rather than allowing them to be active participants in their own right.26 In this manner, the Indo-Aryan male began a process in which the inbred
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