CASTE. — From the Latin *castus* with the meaning of “pure race”; a term adopted in the 15th century by the Portuguese colonizers of Malabar and corresponding to the Sanskrit *varṇa* “colour” and *jāti* “race.” It refers to that particular form of social coexistence characteristic of India and marked by the following three features: 1) hereditary specialization, from father to son, of profession and trade; 2) strict prohibition of contact, especially marriage and commensality, with individuals of other castes; 3) respect for the Brahminical hierarchy as the supreme regulator and enforcer of caste laws. If any one of these elements is lacking, the institution is not a *caste* in the proper sense.
The four fundamental castes of India—Brahmin (priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishya (merchants), and Shudra (farmers)—still constitute the social framework of the country. Yet from their intermingling there have arisen numerous subcastes (*jāṭaya*), whose status is higher if the father belongs to a superior caste and lower if it is the mother who belongs to one.
As early as the 17th century, official documents entitled *jāṭi veka* “distinction of subcastes” (India Office MSS 1638, 1639, partially translated by R. Nobile, V. BIBLICA.) listed sixty subcastes. Since then their number has grown enormously, and despite the leveling policies of the British government—unifying many aspects of social life such as roads, commerce, and access to public office—the basic structure of Indian social life, sanctified by Brahminical tradition as issuing from the limbs of Brahma, has not been abolished. The differentiation among groups and subgroups, with its consequent prohibitions on intermarriage and commensality with outsiders, continually reasserts itself for various reasons: migration that makes emigrants strangers to the groups they leave behind; membership in different religious sects; the absorption of marginal races that end up forming new castes of their own.
The origin of the caste system is explained by the fact that the fair-skinned, blond Aryans, invaders of a land already inhabited by dark-skinned peoples, though they adapted to marrying women of the conquered races, refused to give their own daughters to men of colour and even degraded the offspring of such unions. Thus a strict endogamy took hold within the higher castes; and it is perhaps this endogamous norm, which restricts a girl’s marriage prospects, that accounts for the prohibition on widow remarriage and the custom of marrying girls at a very early age.
The caste system has ensured in India, among a people made indolent by the climate, the continuity of labour; it has preserved the country’s physiognomy despite the succession of Asian and European dominations; it has legitimized the social order by placing it under divine sanction, since the four castes are said to have issued from the limbs of the god Brahma; and it has legitimized, and still legitimizes, the inevitable changes wrought by social development by submitting them to the judgment of the Brahmins, who are the depositories of religious tradition.
Now the castes have been abolished; and this is a good and an achievement, for from the standpoint of Christian brotherhood they constituted a grave obstacle both to conversions and to the life of the converts.
In a broader but improper sense, and without the three elements mentioned at the outset, the word is sometimes used to mean “social class.” Only in this sense should one understand Herodotus’ report (II, 164) of the division of the Egyptian people into seven classes (priests, warriors, herdsmen, etc.), a division based more on specialization of trades than on the corporate guilds of Rome or the medieval guilds.