The origin of the caste system is a contentious subject. There are historians and anthropologists who trace a highly stratified society, divided by occupation, back to the ancient Hrappans, who built an elaborate civilization on the Indus River about 4,500 years ago. Others say caste came later, with the nomadic Aryans, or emerged out of a melding of these and other cultures native to the subcontinent.
None of those theories can be decisively proved. But by 200 BC, the Laws of Manu, a key text of Hinduism, had been recorded. These laws, said to be the word of Brahma the creator, laid out the vision of an “ideal society” in which social classes were divided. It lays out four varna, or categories: At the top are Brahmins, who are priests and teachers; then the Kshatriyas (governors and soldiers); then the Vaishyas, the merchant class of traders and business people. At the bottom are the Shudras, who are artisans and labourers.
And then there is the fifth category – the people who fall outside the varna system, and who are by virtue of their occupations impure and “untouchable” – the outcastes.
Other early texts laid out that a person is born into a certain caste and cannot change it regardless of actions in this life – it was determined before birth by their karma, their deeds in a previous life. If the karma is good, one could come back in the next life as a member of a higher caste; if not, as an outcaste or an animal.
It is impossible to know whether the Laws of Manu were actually being followed at the time of its writing. We do know, however, that by 700 AD, “untouchability” was fully enforced – Chinese travellers visiting India wrote home describing a society in which some outcaste people were considered so unclean that they were forced to live in communities apart.
The idea of a social hierarchy based on ritual purity became core to Hinduism, and survived even through centuries of Muslim domination on the subcontinent. Each of the four varnas came to subdivide into thousands of castes, called jati, and be further divided by specific occupations as well as geographic and linguistic lines. Endogamy – not marrying outside one’s group – was unusually highly enforced, compared with many other social systems.
But it is the highly codified concept of “untouchablility” that really distinguishes Hinduism. People who perform a list of given occupations (varied slightly by region) are deemed unclean – some of these are obvious, such as cleaning sewers, and some are less so, such as picking coconuts. “Untouchables” are also divided into subgroups: In north India, for example, leatherworkers tend to dominate over street cleaners and the “manual scavengers” who collect human waste from “dry latrines” – a corner of the house with a slot accessible to the outside – and carry it away in baskets. That’s the bottom of the system in most parts of the country, but in Bihar and its environs, that spot is reserved for the Mushahar, the “rat eaters.”
In addition, there are unpaid jobs that “untouchables” do for the community, including collecting and burying the dead, both human and animal.
The system prescribes that outcastes cannot use the same dishes as caste Hindus. They cannot meet their eyes, and should they their shadow fall upon a caste Hindu as they walk by, they will have defiled him or her. They are not to enter temples, or use the same wells as caste Hindus. These practices were routine in most parts of the country well into the colonial period; while some, such as the shadow pollution, are largely extinct, others – such as separate dishes and having to stand for a caste Hindu – remain common in rural areas.
The arrival of the British in India did little to end the rigid enforcement of caste. The traders, and then colonizers, happily associated themselves with the Brahmins, and the elaborate stratification of caste appealed to their love of the bureaucratic. The British included caste in the censuses they began to conduct in their new colony from the early 1800s.
