Caste in India: The Facts and the System c7.s2.6

Language: English

c7.s2.6

The extreme sentence is exclusion from the caste, but it is not as a rule without appeal: a whole code of graduated penances permit those who undergo them to re-enter their own social sphere. But the very name of the grave offences (*pātaka*—‘that which causes to fall’, and *upapātaka*) clearly asserts that their natural effect is to cause the guilty man to fall from his place in the caste assigned to him by birth.

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