that's a rather wishy washy comment, there was no pan India authority to enforce one particular form of institutionalization.
contrary to popular perception fueled by JNU historians, the only pan India code of law we know of has no such discrimination against people of so called lower castes. keeping in mind that arthashastra strongly influenced rulers in India for a thousand or more years after it was written, the extent of the supposed institutionalized bias can be called into question.
in case of criminal law it makes no distinction between castes barring a handful of cases. in places where such distinction exists, there is no consistent discrimination against any caste.
let's take one example, the offence of selling an arya (all 4 castes) minor into slavery. only a man in debt could mortgage himself to bonded labour till he repaid his debts, his wife and children (if not minors) could join him if they so wanted. otherwise, they would stay free. an arya minor could not be used as a slave under any circumstance.
brahmins were to be fined for selling a brahmin minor but put to death if the minor was a kshatriya, vaishya or shudra.
the same offence for a shudra carried the lowest stipulated fine with the amount of fine increasing for vaishyas and still higher for kshatriyas and brahmins.
on the other hand of the scale, for rape of a brahmin woman a sudra was to be put to death but a brahmin were to be only fined with progressively higher fines for kshatriyas and vaishyas.
clearly, while it was not equal rights for all by our modern sensibilities it wasn't exactly ruthless exploitation of lower castes either, as the modern narrative runs. 100 years from now people will question the equality of rights in today's India pointing to the caste reservations.
but they would be wrong to do so. they do not live in our times and can't know our compulsions.
likewise, we would be wrong to question the concept of rights in a world which was quite different from the one we live in. they enacted and followed equality and human rights as they saw fit, some of which were superior to our modern concepts. the so called higher castes were considered more educated and expected to act the part. higher the caste more severely were they punished for certain crimes. offences by so called lower castes were often treated leniently since it was assumed they didn't have the same level of education.
for nearly all other criminal cases, punishments were same irrespective of caste. distinctions again crop up when it comes to personal law. reminds you of today's India with its various personal laws ?
it surely was bad but probably not as bad as it is made out to be, until the late middle ages. certainly not any worse than social systems that existed in rest of the world.
yes, a resounding yes, primarily because of democracy. but there is still a long way to go. I dream of an India where a person's caste, religion or region has no bearing on his worth. our best history is hopefully in our future. but we are never going to reach that point if people continue to be divisive about caste or religion, as some in this thread have been with their "evil brahmins" or "evil muslims" rant. Indians need to think of themselves as Indians, not as this caste or that religion.
I think you missed a few turns in that analysis. even if the cholan kings defeated your powerful ancestor, they did not come back to oppress each and every subsequent generation right up to the british era, since they themselves lost power by the 13th century. the caste of your ancestors would have been determined by what profession they were forced to take up given their reduced circumstances. choice of profession was not always a happy one, many times it would have been forced by social circumstances and economic situation. is that so different from what we have today ? how many clerks are there who would have rather be engineers ? we are always forced to make choices we would rather not.
