Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Shudra" in English language version.
Although varying degrees of literacy were present among the first three castes, there was absolute illiteracy among Shudras.
His emphasis on the education of the Shudras is well explained in his own words: For want of education intellect deteriorated, For want of intellect morality decayed, For want of morality progress stopped, For want of progress wealth vanished, For want of wealth Shudra perished and all these sorrows sprang from illiteracy.
Among the most vocal of these supporters was Dr. Shastri, a professor of Ayurvedic medicine at a well-known university, who associated the Caraka Samhita use of shudra for lesser conditions with the shudra (peasant) castes, linking both
The ancient texts designate the sudra as a peasant. The distinction between the all-India category of varna and the local and omnipresent category of jati is well brought out by M. N. Srinivas in his famous book The Remembered Village, ...
The Shudra included peasants and artisans
an extract from Pali work Majjima Nikaya tell us ... shudras [live] by the sickle and ears of corn. A large number of Shudras appear to be agricultural laborers. Shudras were not entitled to learn Vedas, and a precept says, 'Vedas are the destroyer of agriculture and agriculture is the destroyer of Vedas.'
In same texts, the pure Shudras were described as giver of grain (annada) and householder (grhastha). The reason was that the actual cultivation was generally done by peasants belonging to the Shudras caste.
At its beginning or a little before the millennium, the Manusmriti considers the pursuit of agriculture blameworthy because the 'wooden [plough] with the iron point injures the earth and the [beings] living in the earth'. Thus, by an appeal to the doctrine of ahimsa, so much promoted by Buddhism and Jainism, the plough became unclean, and the peasant who worked the plough earned opprobrium that has stuck till our own times. R. S. Sharma shows how in the legal texts, peasants were generally regarded not as Vaishyas as earlier, but as Shudras. This is confirmed in the seventh century by Xuan Zhuang (Hsuan Tsang) who found that in India peasants were held to be Shudras. Such varna ranking of most peasant castes (now usually given the designation of 'Other Backward Castes') is thus more than 1300 years old, and was in place by the early medieval times. If certain older communities were thus reduced in status, it is possible that other communities, previously held to be outside the pale of the varna system, were absorbed as Shudra castes once they took to agriculture. We have such an example in the Kaivartas.
For the shudras now took their position as cultivators and the origin of the modern peasant castes of kurmis in Bihar and kunbis in Maharashtra may be traced back to the early medieval period
In contemporary India, Shudras constitute 52% of the population and Dalits, as per the 2011 census, constitute 16.6%.
