Caste in India: The Facts and the System c7.s3.30

c7.s3.30

I must make my meaning clear. The official doctrine acknowledges four castes only, but reality bursts these narrow confines and reveals them in infinite numbers. And here there is a conflict of vital importance between facts and theory—the only one indeed which is not readily settled. Is it possible to argue a difference of time? But, as we have just seen, theory observes and admits by more than one indication and also by the very contradictions in which it is involved that from an early date castes have been very much more numerous than theory appeared at first sight to assume. I have already mentioned how unlikely it is that a Kshatriya and a Vaiśya caste ever really existed. These huge categories are, moreover, incompatible with the very rules—that jealous exclusivism, that corporate and autonomous organization—which characterize caste as it is to-day.