Sanatana Dharma - Aka Hinduism (2nd Bin)

[Bharatvarsh]

sarangadhara this is what I found on that incident:

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Brahmin writers have not only codified and justified the existing caste system, and possibly hardened it; in the final editing of many influential classics of Puranic Hinduism, they have also unnecessarily extended caste distinction beyond the social sphere, incorporating spiritual liberation in the calculus of karma and caste duties.  The crassest example of this tendency is the Shambuka story in what experts consider the youngest layer of Valmiki’s Ramayana, where Rama “has to” kill the low-caste ascetic Shambuka because the latter’s spiritual vocation is contrary to his caste duties and therefore harmful to society as a whole.83

In anti-Hindu polemic, this episode is always held up as proving the true and irreducible inhumanity of Hinduism.  However, J.L. Brockington contrasts this episode of the Ramayana (7:67) with the contrary evaluation of a similar act in an older layer of the Ramayana, viz.  Dasharatha’s paying dearly for his killing Shravana, an ascetic of mixed Vaishya-Shudra descent (2:57): “There has been an enormous shift in attitudes between the period of the former, among the earlier additions, and the latter, among the latest parts included in the text”, viz. an appalling hardening of caste discrimination.84 The harsh caste discrimination of recent centuries is a vaguely datable innovation in Hindu social history, not an age-old conditions.85

http://voiceofdharma.com/books/wiah/ch11.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Take the Ayodhya case. The Ramajanmabhoomî case has everything in its favour. But with what face can the Sangh Parivar approach the “low”-caste Hindus of certain areas in, say, Marathwada - where they are not allowed to enter a temple, but would be allowed to enter a mosque if they became Muslims, or perhaps even without that prerequisite - with the suggestion that the Babri Masjid be replaced once more with a Rama temple? Especially if those “low”-caste Hindus happen to be aware of certain Sangh publications which glorify or whitewash the interpolated story in the Valmiki Ramayana where Ram cuts off the head of a “low”-caste Shambuka for the sin of performing ritual austerities?

http://voiceofdharma.com/books/tfst/chii42.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->