Caste and Race in India c11.2

c11.2

SOCIAL differentiation with its attendant demarcation of groups and of status of individuals is a very widespread feature of human society.¹ In by far the larger number of communities this status depends on the individual's achievement in those fields of activity which are prized by those communities. They range from capacity for certain types of supernatural experience to ability to acquire wealth. The visible marks of this differentiation are, as we have seen, special rights for some groups and disabilities on others in the matter of dress, occupation, and even food. In other communities the status of an individual is determined by birth. People, speaking Indo-European tongues, carried this theory of status by birth to a farther extent than any other peoples, both in the matter of the number of differentiated groups within a society as well as in the matter of their rights and disabilities. Some of them even enjoined that members of a group shall marry in their own group. Thus it would be seen that the Hindu system is unique only in this that it alone classified some groups as untouchable and unapproachable.² In other respects it only differs in the thoroughness with which the scheme is worked out and in the number of differentiated groups.