Merit Is My Foot: Brahmin, Rajput Power and Dalit Betrayal – Tararam Gautam (4K)

Tararam Gautam is a historian and Buddhist scholar who studies caste, Rajput identity, and the politics of religion in India. What if everything you were taught about Rajputs, Mughals and “Hindu pride” was built on half-truths, genealogy fiction and political convenience? In a country where nationalism is sold through movie plots and WhatsApp forwards, the uncomfortable questions are simple. Who actually invited Muslim rulers in and married their daughters to them? Who first converted to Islam and why? And why do the people at the bottom of the caste pyramid keep changing their religion while the people at the top keep changing the story? Expect to learn why Rajputs and Kshatriyas are not the same thing, how 36 “royal” clans were manufactured through Mughal alliances and Brahmin scripts, why many Rajputs who lost wars quietly slid down into OBC and Dalit castes, how Dalits became “Hindu” on paper in 1950 to access reservations, why Hinduism collapses without caste, how Brahminism stole Buddhist philosophy while erasing Buddhist history, why Ambedkar warned that India could lose its freedom if the Constitution is ignored, how the North South split over tax and representation is reopening old fractures, what “merit is my foot” really means in a society built on inherited advantage, and why the real battle today is between constitutional morality and manufactured religious identity. The video covers topics such as Rajput–Mughal marriages at 00:04:54, Mughals versus earlier Muslim invaders at 00:10:01, Rajput alliances at 00:16:12, the creation of the Rajput caste at 00:23:33, British martial race mythmaking at 00:30:04, Dalits and the varna system at 00:36:06, caste as India's social unit at 00:42:01, Rajput clans at 00:47:52, downward mobility at 00:56:03, merit and Dalit elites at 01:03:02, cow politics at 01:10:46, Shramana versus Brahmin civilizations at 01:17:14, Sanatan debates at 01:23:18, Buddhism merging into Hinduism at 01:30:04, Ambedkar and untouchability at 01:36:02, political Hinduism at 01:40:22, and closing reflections at 01:44:17.