Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Caste

What makes Indian society unique is the phenomenon of caste. Economic, religious, and linguistic differentiations, even race-based discrimination, are known elsewhere, but nowhere else does one see caste but in India (and, by extension, the subcontinent). This entry reviews the history of caste and discusses its impact on individuals and society.

Background

Caste is unique because it ordains a hierarchy that is based on the extent of purity, or lack of it, that supposedly characterizes the bodily substances of every person. Accordingly, the earliest Hindu text, the Rg Veda (c.1500 BC) puts the Brahmans, as the purest, on top, followed by warriors (Kshatriyas), commoners (Vaisyas), and helots (Sudras) at the bottom. This schematization is known as the Varna system. There is also a fifth category, the Untouchables, but this cluster of castes came to be designated as such much later, perhaps around the 1st or 2nd century AD.

In addition, as time went on, the fourfold Varna category in the Rg Veda yielded to hundreds of endog-amous units, or jatis. Technically speaking, only the latter are called castes. These units prescribe the frontiers of marriage alliances, and each jati has specific rituals peculiar to itself and, in a large number of cases, a traditional occupation attached to its members. All jatis are regional in character; none of them have an all-India spread. In fact, most jatis are relevant and recognized only within a radius of about 200 to 300 miles.

Hindu children of high caste, Bombay, India (1922). Caste still continues to function in India as discrete ethnic groups rather than as constituents of a continuous hierarchy of purity in which every Hindu acquiesces. Today it is possible to say that caste as a system is dying but that identities are alive and well, and it is taking many generations for caste to wither away.

None
Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-103634.

Race and Caste

There are clear differences between race and caste. Unlike in race, the physical markers are not visible in caste. The bodily substances that are meant to distinguish between castes are intangible and culturally coded, but the belief is that they can be easily transferred through touch and proximity. This is why the caste order includes strict rules of social intercourse and of sexual/marital relations to ensure that bodily substances of different provenances do not commingle. Further, caste ideology holds that such commingling of substances pollutes both parties, not just members of the so-called superior caste, though the latter are more seriously affected. Each caste has its domain, and it is the duty of everybody in that community to strictly maintain norms regarding pollution.

Again, unlike with race, in the caste system, a child whose parents belong to different castes is not considered to carry equal amounts of both substances from the parents, but is characterized by a third. In this sense, all children born of intercaste sexual liaisons are anomalous in that they are actually outcastes. This is why many of the ancient Hindu texts warned against alliances between members of different castes. The same sources also legitimize the abhorrence of low-caste Untouchables, as they are deemed to be offspring of illicit, intercaste sexual unions. As a result, it is reasoned, low-caste people are polluting in the extreme.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution