Caste in India: The Facts and the System c7.s5.34

c7.s5.34

Theory has concealed and falsified reality in them. Correlating, by a more or less artificial compromise, actual facts with the tradition of a vanished past, it identifies caste-distinctions with the old distinctions of class, and superimposes the one upon the other, giving to those classes that it represents as castes a borrowed name which at first denotes a racial division. If it allows some hint of the real complexities and confusion to peep through all this symmetrical and systematic construction, it is relegated to the background, and concealed, as in the theory of mixed castes, under an artificial regularity.