The word 'caste' began as a Gothic term for a group of animals
Caste is not an Indian word. It traces back through Spanish and Portuguese casta to Gothic kasts, a group of animals, and first meant a type of beast before shifting to races of people and then social classes. Portuguese sailors, who reached India by sea in 1498, first applied it to hereditary Indian groups.
John Minsheu's Spanish dictionary of 1569 glossed casta as race, lineage, tribe or breed. Spanish colonists in the Americas used it for a clan or lineage, and colonial Spanish America later ranked people as castas according to European, Indigenous or African descent, though that social order was otherwise fairly fluid. English first recorded the spelling caste, in its Indian sense, in 1613.
Sociologists define a caste as a group one is born into, usually marrying only inside it, often tied to a hereditary occupation and a ritual rank, with some groups treated as more or less pure than others. India's Hindu society is the textbook example, and scholars use it as a yardstick for caste-like divisions elsewhere. Nepal shows a close parallel: inscriptions trace its caste system to the Licchavi period, and King Jayasthiti Malla, who reigned from 1382 to 1395, sorted the Newars into 64 castes. The anthropologist Fredrik Barth argued that hereditary, closed strata in western Pakistan also amounted to castes.
British rule reshaped the system on paper. From the census of 1901, the commissioner Herbert Hope Risley slotted every jati, or birth group, into one of the four ancient varna categories, ranking them by the social precedence local opinion recognised. In 1950 the Indian Constitution listed 1,108 jatis as Scheduled Castes eligible for positive discrimination and banned caste discrimination outright.
Change since then has been uneven. Dalits, once called untouchables, made up 16.2% of India's population in 2001. Rapid urbanisation, with bigger job markets and less dependence on farming, has encouraged marriage across caste lines, and members of the Chhattisgarh Potter Caste Community now include urban middle-class professionals who no longer make pots. Arranged marriage nonetheless remains the most common practice.
Source: Caste
