Brahma, Jesus & The Body Politic
How two divine bodies created vastly different societies—and how one heals the other
Christianity is widely seen as an opposite to Hinduism for many reasons—monotheistic to polytheistic, Abrahamic to Indic, sin and salvation to karma and enlightenment—but among these is their stark difference in body politic.
The body politic is a metaphor that organizes society or institutions as a physical body. The very first depiction of a body politic is the Brahmanical story of caste. The idea prominently reemerged nine centuries later in one of Aesop’s Fables, and later in Plato’s philosophy of the state. The Christian body politic arrived in the Roman era and was eventually instituted in papacy and monarchy. Today, we hear semblances of the body politic in statements like, “We all belong to one another” or “We are all interconnected.” It describes why and how we relate to one another, as a society. If society was architecture, the body politic would be the blueprint.
Religious narratives don’t have a one-to-one effect on social processes, but they are nonetheless meaningful influences. I admit my obvious bias here as a Christian. I think both Hindu and Christian body politics are hugely consequential, between their religious roots and applications, but I believe one liberates us from the other.
The Primordial Warden & His Human Tower
In 1500 BCE, a composition of sūktas, Indo-Aryan hymns, took shape in the early Vedic period of the Indian subcontinent: the Rigveda. One of its hymns, Purusha Sukta, describes Purusha, an omnipresent cosmic being. Purusha is also known commonly as Brahma or Brahman, the Hindu god(s) of creation. In the story, Brahma sacrifices himself to create life, including plants, animals, and humans. From his mouth comes the Brahmin; from his arms the Kshatriya, from his thighs the Vaishya, and from his feet the Shudra. These are the four human varnas, or castes. His body also gives rise to the moon, sun, air, and other elements.
This isn’t an unusual tale. Across early civilizations, many cosmogonic myths involved the sacrifice and dismemberment of a primordial deity to create the world. The Mesopotamian epic Enuma elish tells of the god Marduk dividing the body of Tiamat, the primeval mother, into the heavens and earth. In Norse prose Edda, the cosmos is formed from the body of dismembered giant Ymir. But Brahma’s sacrifice is unique in that his body inaugurates a social hierarchy—one that survived millennia to thrive even today.
Brahma’s mouth-arms-thighs-feet distinctions represent the duties and roles of their castes. Brahmins, emerging from his head, are the intellectuals, priests, and teachers. Kshatriyas, children of his arms, are warriors and merchants. Vaishyas derive from his thighs, and are farmers. And Shudras, born of his feet, are servants and laborers. Society was therefore classified, from head-to-toe, with clear dharmic (divine duty) protocol for each caste.
Some Hindus hope to vindicate this cosmogony by interpreting caste as “separate but equal,” but the ranking is clear. The head has universally been regarded as more important, valuable, and pure, and the feet unimportant, less valuable, and impure. This gradient stained the members of these castes with varying, immutable levels of purity and value. Most fatally, it was deterministic. Humans did not have any choice over their caste, and caste boundaries were enforced through endogamy. Years after, a new “out-caste” category was formed for a class of people regarded as subhumans—not shaped out of Brahma’s body but of another, ungodly origin. These were Chandalas, the people we now know as Dalits. As the body politic implies, these people were situated below the feet of God and denied all the privileges enjoyed by those above them.
It isn’t clear how caste operated in this Vedic society, but it’s apparent that caste remained a social ideal across India’s changing civilizations. In the four thousand years that followed this ancient song, caste durably permeated all of South Asian society—often in violent ways. People were locked into caste-specific professions for generations on end. Knowledge-creation and literacy was the sole domain of Brahmins, with others barred from participating. Castes were forbidden from inter-marrying, constraining genetic distribution and reifying caste lines. Wealth, health, and virtually every other socioeconomic outcome was staggered along this pyramid—and remains this way today. The privileged castes enjoy disproportionate power and access, and the marginalized castes endure humiliation and violence.
The irony of the body politic is that it, in turn, politicizes bodies. It affects how human bodies live and move throughout society. The Dharmasutra of Gautama, a Hindu text of laws and codes, describes bodily punishments for a caste-oppressed person that listens, recites, or remembers Hindu scriptures: “If a Shudra has criminal intercourse with an Āryan woman, his organ shall be cut off, and all his property be confiscated… If he listens intentionally to (a recitation of) the Veda, his ears shall be filled with (molten) tin or lac… If he recites (Vedic texts), his tongue shall be cut out… If he remembers them, his body shall be split in twain.”
In line with these religiously sanctioned crimes against humanity, the privileged castes take liberty to punish those who trespass the boundaries of the caste body politic. Just last July, when nine-year-old Indra Meghwal reached for a clay pot of water that apparently belonged to his upper-caste teacher Chail Singh, Chail responded by beating him to death. The Brahmanical body politic is not only projected across South Asian society, but enforced onto South Asian bodies. It’s constantly reproducing and performing itself in our brains, behaviors, and bodies.
In his inaugural newspaper Mooknayak, Dalit polymath Dr. B.R. Ambedkar described caste as a tower without stairs—the inhabitants of each floor can never escape to another, effectively being incarcerated. That is what Brahma’s body created: a society shaped like a tower, operating like a prison. It meshed so well with the human tendency to dominate that it enjoyed continued prevalence into modernity. Across India’s changing empires and eras, Brahma’s thick-skinned body politic remained unbothered. Its bodies belong to it, unless they are liberated from their prison.
The Dying Dalit & His Upside-Down Kingdom
In 5 BCE, a Jewish baby was born to a teenage mother in a stable: Jesus of Nazareth. He called himself the Son of God, preached about a certain “Kingdom of God,” and was ultimately killed by the Roman government—before resurrecting three days later, catalyzing a religious movement that transformed the world. The Christian body politic is primarily explained in the body of Jesus Christ, but like the Rigveda, it also has roots in a creation story.
In the Book of Genesis, God creates humanity in his image—male and female. There is no sacrifice or dismembering here. God is said to form man out of dirt and breathe into him. This phrase imago dei or “image of God” is a bedrock of the Christian body politic. It describes that humanity is a reflection of God’s own image, and is therefore imbued with equal, divine value. Dalit scholar Ram Surat remarked, “When a Dalit hears [Genesis 1:27], it is the first time in their entire life that they feel like a human.”
In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he describes what has come to be known as an “Upside-Down Kingdom.” Those cast as vulnerable, marginalized, and other-ed are empowered, centered, and welcomed in this kingdom. Conventional directions of status, importance, and power are reversed, and participants in this kingdom are called to adopt entirely countercultural attitudes towards lifestyle, money, morality, and one another. Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus embodied this ethic: “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Like Brahma, Jesus undergoes a sacrifice—though his is simultaneously a murder. The Roman government, emboldened by the Jewish religious elite, sentence the innocent Jesus to death by crucifixion—a criminal’s death. Jesus complies without complaint, intending to fulfill his mission of saving humanity through the cross. The torture device on which he dies became the defining symbol of Christianity—a paradox that the Apostle Paul describes as “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Black liberation theologian James Cone compares the cross with America’s lynching of Black people: “The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society… Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock... Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.”
This is precisely what makes Jesus ‘the prototypical Dalit,’ according to Dalit theologian Arvind P. Nirmal. His death was one of humiliation, persecution, and injustice by a religiopolitical elite—the exact features of Dalit suffering. In an Easter poem, Daniel Sukumar writes: “Did you die a Dalit’s death? Where you were stripped and flogged, tied to a pole like a thief… Did you die a Dalit’s death when the state washed its hands after touching you?”
The physical sufferings of Christ situate him at the feet of society, among the oppressed. Those who embrace his sufferings as a sacrifice on their on behalf, along with his resurrection as an invitation into a new life, become part of “The Body of Christ,” known also as “the church.” There are many instructions given to this body—namely, Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians:
“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many… But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”
Paul gives special care to those dishonored and suffering, claiming that if one part of this body politic suffers, the entire body should suffer along with it. In an earlier chapter, he says that to eat while some members of the body go hungry is to “despise the church of God… Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” While the body described here is the church, the church is meant as a model to wider society—a reflection of the Upside-Down Kingdom.
The Christian body has taken various shapes and iterations across history, yet its calling is always the same: a body intentionally forged across racial, social, and economic divides, a body that privileges those otherwise disempowered, and a body that shares in the joys and sufferings of its members. But despite its egalitarian anatomy, the Christian body politic has been consistently misinterpreted to promote hierarchies and subordination—just in a different skin. In a sense, the originating body politic of caste remained too influential over the body politic of Christ. It is only by embracing the latter, that we discover freedom from the former.
Wounded To Heal
“God is broken, crushed, and torn asunder on the cross for a ‘re-membering,’ or putting together of the body in Christ,” Dalit theologian Joseph Prabhakar Dayam explained to me. “Neither Jew nor Gentile. Neither female nor male. That’s what the gospel vision is: Jesus, the Dalit, re-members the otherwise broken body politic.” Jesus The Dalit was torn apart on a lynching tree so that a world torn apart by caste could be restored to unity.
The prophet Isaiah foretold this about Jesus: “by His wounds we are healed.” If the Brahmanical body politic is a pyramid of power, Christ’s body politic is an upside-down pyramid. If Brahma’s broken body breaks society across caste boundaries, Christ’s body is broken so the formerly broken society can be repaired. If Brahma’s body politic dismembers itself, Christ’s body politic re-members itself. And indeed, the central Christian tradition of The Eucharist, or Communion, is a practice of remembering this re-member-ing through the death of Jesus Christ with all the members of the body of Christ.
Brahma’s body represents a cosmic hierarchy designed to divide and dominate humanity. Christ’s body represents an upside-down kingdom that privileges the least of society. Though the Christian body politic makes a lofty promise, its church routinely fails at achieving it. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “11a.m. Sunday is our most segregated hour,” describing profound racial divisions across Christian society. Its tradition is full of bigotry, abuses of power, and oppression of the vulnerable—even by caste. But these are all failures to achieve the religion’s “ideal” body politic of Christ, whereas the Brahmanical ideal itself is one decorated with caste violence.
Ambedkar articulated this distinction in 1936, writing: “Though castes exist among Christians and Muslims, it is not the chief characteristic of their body social… The caste system among the Hindus has the foundation of religion. The castes in other religions have no sanction of their religion… Muslims and Christians need not destroy their religion for eradication of the castes. Rather, their religion will support such movements to a great extent.” While we should urgently reform traditions like Christianity towards the ideal they profess, there is no reason to sanitize or adopt ideals like that of the Brahmanical caste politic. Our efforts should be squarely focused on liberating ourselves from it.
To me, the cross of Christ is the solution to the spiritual and social catastrophe of the Brahmanical body politic. By turning to the cross, “in repentance to broken communities,” Dayam says, we can discover healing in the wounded-yet-healing body of Christ.