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The Caste system does not demarcate racial division. The Caste system is a social division of people of the same race." [333] Various sociologists, anthropologists and historians have rejected the racial origins and racial emphasis of caste and consider the idea to be one that has purely political and economic undertones. Beteille writes that ...
A subject of much scholarship by sociologists and anthropologists, the Hindu caste system is sometimes used as an analogical basis for the study of caste-like social divisions existing outside Hinduism and India. In colonial Spanish America, mixed-race castas were a category within the Hispanic sector but the social order was otherwise fluid.
However, the knowledge about actual history of Brahmins or other varnas of Hinduism in and after the first millennium is fragmentary and preliminary, with little that is from verifiable records or archaeological evidence, and much that is constructed from ahistorical Sanskrit works and fiction.
In the course of Indian history, various economic, political and social factors have led to a continuous closing and churning in the prevailing social ranks which tended to become traditional, hereditary system of social structuring. This system of thousands of exclusive, endogamous groups, is called Jāti.
The term Dalit is for those called the "untouchables" and others that were outside of the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy. [6] [7] Economist and reformer B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) said that untouchability came into Indian society around 400 CE, due to the struggle for supremacy between Buddhism and Brahmanism. [8]
Despite being outlawed in 1950, the caste system, which categorizes Hindus at birth and once forced the so-called “untouchables” or Dalits to the margins of society, is still omnipresent in ...
Ambedkar views that definitions of castes given by Émile Senart [5] John Nesfield, H. H. Risley and Dr Ketkar as incomplete or incorrect by itself and all have missed the central point in the mechanism of the caste system. Senart's "idea of pollution" is a characteristic of caste in so far as caste has a religious flavour.
The evolution of the lower caste and tribe into the modern-day Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe is complex. The caste system as a stratification of classes in India originated about 2,000 years ago, and has been influenced by dynasties and ruling elites, including the Mughal Empire and the British Raj.