Caste in India: The Facts and the System c7.s4.30

c7.s4.30

I have accepted up to now the popular view that varṇa, in the Brahmanic theory, is the term which corresponds exactly to the idea of caste. The concession was merely provisional, and needs to be qualified. It was used at first to denote a contrast of colour between two rival races, and was later split up, if I may so express it, so that it might apply no longer to these two primitive varṇas, but to more numerous categories. It has not lost all trace of its origin. It does not signify caste in general and in the strict sense, but only ‘ the four castes ’. It applies only to what an epic book, the Harivaṃśa, calls in one passage the ‘ four legal castes ’. To designate the others, those secondary or mixed castes which correspond, not to the theoretic divisions, but to the true castes which actually exist, the law-books have another term, *jāti*. This term is the exact equivalent of our word ‘caste’, as it means ‘birth, race’. It is, I think, in this acceptation, not in that of ‘family’, that it should be understood wherever it is employed by Manu, Yājñavalkya, and others. It has been a mistake not to attribute sufficient importance to this distinction between the two terms, which signalizes up to a fairly late period the two elements which are combined in the Brahmanic theory.