Ask the Scholars

I was in Japan back in September, and I met an Indian scholar there who had done a survey of the literature on caste in India. She had come to the conclusion that it was the British who essentially established the caste system in India. She points out that part of the Hindu religion identified people as having unequal spiritual, or unequal religious, identities. These jatis or castes - and there are thousands of jatis - were people who had different spiritual status, not that they were u...

Well, I think Audrey knows more about that than I do. I base my understanding of the caste system on a French sociologist, Louis Dumont, who wrote about hierarchical societies, and tried to make a distinction with societies where hierarchy and inequality are accepted as a religious belief - in this case, spiritual inequality. It is basically consensual in the fact that, as far as we know anyway, the lower castes buy into the system. They accept this as a legitimate way of ranking, but th...

Actually, the caste system has been made illegal, as you know, and the Dalits are now able to occupy many different positions. They are getting an education, they are occupying many positions in the government and so forth. But the fundamental difference, I think, between race and caste is that, and as I said, my colleague believes that it was imported from Europe and she's tried to analyze the distinctions between what was present in India in the early 18th century before the British ca...