Caste in India: The Facts and the System c6.s6.32

c6.s6.32

The caste as such never presents itself in a religious light. Various beliefs often rub elbows there without hostility or apparent inconvenience, and religious conversion alone in no way affects the individual’s position in the caste.¹ Mixed castes are, for example, composed of Jains and Hindus. Difference of religious belief forms no obstacle to *connubium*.² Even the influence that Islam has been able to exert over the system has been gradual and indirect. In cases where dissolution has occurred, it is because certain rules of purity have been violated or endangered by contrary practices, and not in the name of a new dogma. The caste-system is regularly practised by certain non-Aryan tribes whose peculiar beliefs are but little in harmony with the theories of the degraded Brahmans who act as their priests.³