Society
“So, you want to marry my daughter?” The Caste System: An Overview
A summary of the first lecture in the IK Foundation Lecture Series, ‘Indian Culture in the Modern World’. 23rd October 2002, London First speaker: Prof. M Narasimhachary, Senior Associate Fellow, Oxford Centre for Vaishnava and Hindu Studies Preamble The phenomenon of Caste has aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Some see India’s caste system as the defining feature of Indian culture and some have dismissed it as a colonial artefact. Since the days of the British rule, both historians and anthropologists referred to India as a ‘caste society’. Obviously this is an overstatement of the importance of caste. But for many leading personalities, caste was, and is, a real force in Indian life. As explained by experts in the field such as Dr Susan Bayly, caste is not the essence of Indian culture and civilization. It is rather a contingent and variable response to the enormous changes that occurred in the subcontinent’s political landscape both before and after the colonial conquest1. Definition of Caste : the concepts of Jāti and VarŠa: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines Caste as “a Hindu hereditary class of socially equal persons, united in religion and usually following similar occupations, distinguished from other castes in the hierarchy by its relative degree of purity or pollution.”2 The term Caste is commonly used to refer to two distinct concepts of corporate affiliation: the ‘Jāti’ (birth group) and the VarŠa (order, class or kind). The term Jāti is used for the units of thousands or sometimes millions of people with whom one may identify oneself for such purposes as marriage. There
1
Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press ,2001 2 Ed. Lesley Brown. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993
2 are thousands of titles associated with specific Jātis in different parts of the
A summary of the first lecture in the IK Foundation Lecture Series, ‘Indian Culture in the Modern World’. 23rd October 2002, London First speaker: Prof. M Narasimhachary, Senior Associate Fellow, Oxford Centre for Vaishnava and Hindu Studies Preamble The phenomenon of Caste has aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Some see India’s caste system as the defining feature of Indian culture and some have dismissed it as a colonial artefact. Since the days of the British rule, both historians and anthropologists referred to India as a ‘caste society’. Obviously this is an overstatement of the importance of caste. But for many leading personalities, caste was, and is, a real force in Indian life. As explained by experts in the field such as Dr Susan Bayly, caste is not the essence of Indian culture and civilization. It is rather a contingent and variable response to the enormous changes that occurred in the subcontinent’s political landscape both before and after the colonial conquest1. Definition of Caste : the concepts of Jāti and VarŠa: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines Caste as “a Hindu hereditary class of socially equal persons, united in religion and usually following similar occupations, distinguished from other castes in the hierarchy by its relative degree of purity or pollution.”2 The term Caste is commonly used to refer to two distinct concepts of corporate affiliation: the ‘Jāti’ (birth group) and the VarŠa (order, class or kind). The term Jāti is used for the units of thousands or sometimes millions of people with whom one may identify oneself for such purposes as marriage. There
1
Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press ,2001 2 Ed. Lesley Brown. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993
2 are thousands of titles associated with specific Jātis in different parts of the