Caste System: Origin of Ideology of Exclusion

Abstract

This article is purported to examine the Nepali caste system as the unique ideology of exclusion, which has its distinctive and continuous impact on Nepal's social, political, cultural and daily life. Unfortunately, in the democratic of Nepal, caste is a criterion of making one as the part of a society. In fact, caste may be one of the prime factors with which we look at each other. It implies the idea that one's ‘being’ is constituted and re-constituted by the other and the other in turn constitutes the one. What is central to the suggestion is that even today, caste has not lost its ontological status. Philosophically considered, they are the explicit manifestation of two kinds of ontologies that this tradition and culture has brought forth; the first one may be called as the ontology of permanence, and the second may be called as the ontology of impermanence. Thus, there are two conceptions of reality in this culture and the philosophies and world-view in this tradition may be categorised in terms of these two categories of ontologies. This is the most formidable, intellectual, cultural, political and social anxiety that modern Nepal faces with regard to the humanisation of Nepali societies.