From the Rigvedic Period to the Later Vedic Period: The Continuity of Vedic Society from Karma (Action) towards Janma (Birth)

Abstract

This paper offers an expanded historical-sociological examination of one of the most contested questions in the historiography of ancient India: whether the fourfold varna order of the Rigvedic period rested, in its origin, on karma (individual action, conduct, and occupational merit), and whether this principle was progressively displaced, over the course of the Later Vedic period, by janma (birth) as the primary criterion of social placement. The paper argues that this transition should be understood neither as a single rupture located at one textual moment, nor as a linear, uncontested process, but as a centuries-long, unevenly documented, and actively contested reworking of social classification, in which structural continuity in the fourfold frame coexisted with a decisive ideological and practical shift in the mechanism of ascription. The paper integrates historical materialism, Weberian social closure theory, and Dumont's account of hierarchical ideology into an explanatory framework, and extends this framework with a postcolonial-historiographical caveat, following Nicholas Dirks and Thomas Trautmann, that cautions against reading even the concept of a rigid, birth-determined "caste system" as a simple textual given rather than as a category partly shaped by later, including colonial, processes of codification. Methodologically, the paper combines close textual analysis of the Rigveda, Samhita, Brahmana, Aranyaka, and Upanishadic corpus, together with early Dharmasutra literature, with a synthesis of archaeological evidence on the Painted Grey Ware culture, iron technology, and agrarian expansion into the Gangetic plain, and a critical engagement with the historiography of R. S. Sharma, D. D. Kosambi, Romila Thapar, Louis Dumont, Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton, Brian K. Smith, Vivekanand Jha, and B. R. Ambedkar. The paper further incorporates Ambedkar's counter-reading of the Shudra as a fallen Kshatriya lineage rather than an originally servile category, and considers Buddhist and Jaina critiques of birth-based status as contemporaneous internal contestations of the Brahmanical model. It concludes that the shift from karma to janma is best explained as the outcome of a historically specific alignment between the material conditions of an emergent agrarian state, a strategy of social closure pursued by a priestly-warrior elite, and an ideology of ritual purity that rendered that closure legitimate, while also acknowledging that this narrative of gradual closure, though well supported by the Brahmanical corpus, was neither uncontested in its own time nor free from later reconstruction.