By the early 20th century, the word ‘caste’ was comfortably entrenched in the social science discourse produced about the Indian subcontinent. It referred to the institution of chāturvarnā – the fourfold varnā system propounded in the Manu Smrītī (Laws of Manu). The two illustrative cases for this entrenchment are texts produced by two Maharashtrian scholars studying in the universities in North America. The first was a book titled ‘History of Castes in India’ (1908) by Shridhar Vyankatesh Ketkar. Ketkar’s book was an elaborated version of his thesis submitted at Cornell University. Ketkar defined caste in its relation to a system of castes and characterised it as an institution that prohibits intermarriage and its membership being autogenous.
The second text was a seminar paper titled ‘Castes in India – Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’ delivered by a young B.R. Ambedkar in 1916, as a part of the Anthropology seminar taught by Prof A.A. Goldenweizer at Columbia University. In fact, Ambedkar was building of off Ketkar’s thesis with a minor yet important correction. Ambedkar noted that Ketkar has perhaps confused two aspects of one and the same thing and that prohibition of intermarriage implied the limiting of membership.
It is important to note that both these texts were produced as an act of translating a concept of social organisation to be understood by a non-Indian audience, as prefaced by both the writers and hence, I turned to them in an attempt to recover any etymological and conceptual history of the word caste. While Ketkar spends a few lines talking about the Iberian genesis of the term ‘casta’ and its eventual grafting onto the Indian social landscape, Ambedkar does not engage in any such exercise.
The process of mapping the word caste by British colonial officials and anthropologists onto the larger Indian subcontinent is fairly undertaken by modern scholars such as Susan Bayly, Nicholas Dirks, and Barnard Cohn, among others. However, its existence and spread in the early modern colonial world (not limited to the Indian subcontinent) is seldom studied to gain a long durée view of the term caste. The two significant attempts in that direction are Sumit Guha’s book Beyond Caste (2013), and Angela Barreto Xavier’s essay titled ‘Languages of Difference in Portuguese Empire’ (2016).
Caste is said to have developed from the Portuguese word casta. Guha defines it as an ethnic group within a larger society, one which tended to marry endogamous and be ranked relative to others. There’s a tacit assumption that caste is atemporal, immobile, rigid and is intrinsically linked with Hinduism, as propounded in the Laws of Manu. This is a belief that was largely popularised by and within the European scholarship where the long term and extensive nature of the caste system helped Europeans to think of India as its main Other. There is also another strand which questions the timelessness of caste by downplaying the aspect of religion: it sees the manifestation of caste as significantly different from the classical form of textualisation.
In his book, Guha argues that the Iberian idea of bounded, normatively endogamous groups based on biological descent was added to the ‘chaotic mix’ of social categories in southern Asia in the 16th century. He attributes this addition to the arrival of the Roman Catholic church as a governing institution on the southwestern Indian coast. The Roman Catholic church itself was obsessed with the notions of pure blood, in the suspicion of feigned belief from the former Jews and Muslims who had recently converted to Catholicism. However, purity of blood, Guha says, was only one among many forms of social classification that existed in the Indian subcontinent prior to the Portuguese arrival.
However, Xavier argues that Guha overplays the role of the Portuguese in the characterisation of Indian social order upon their arrival in the Indian subcontinent. She argues that Portuguese did not understand the word casta on the Indian terrains the same way they understood it back home. She takes up an analysis of the term ‘casta’ through early modern treatises, dictionaries, official letters, etc, to see how a gradual consolidation of the meaning evolves between the 16th to the end of the 17th century.
In the Glosario Luso-Asiatico compiled and published by Sebastiao Dalgado between 1919-21, the word casta referred mainly to ‘race’ or ‘species’. Using this as a modern reference point, she draws a longer genealogy of the word. In Alvaro Velho’s Diario da Viagem da Vasco da Gama (1498), there is no reference to the word ‘casta’. It is a time when expelled Jewish and Muslims are being categorised as New Christians upon converting, and the early modern notion of purity of blood was taking its first steps.
In Duarte Barbosa’s Livro em que da relaçao do que vio e ouvio no Oriente Duarte Barbosa (1512-15), he used the word casta to specific groups he encountered on the Malabar coast that combined endogamy and practice of certain occupations; for example, casta de Nayres (caste of Nairs). However, the broader category that Barbosa was working with was ‘type’, and that were marked by distinct racial colours, that is, alvo, branco, quase branco, baço, and preto (niveous, white, almost white, dim, and black). Even though Barbosa is known to be the earliest Iberian traveler to ascribe the word casta to denote Indian social groups, Xavier notes that its use was random since he also used the term to connote civility and colour.
In his Summa Oriental, Tomé Pires used the word casta to describe Brahmans and Nairs and other social groups, as well as used the same word to differentiate between several ‘nations’ within Asia. Similar uses of the word casta are found in letters sent to the Portuguese monarch from Asia. João de Barros – Décadas da Ásia (1550) and Fernão Lopes de Castanheda – Historia do descobrimento e conquista da India pelos Poruguezes (1550s) in contrast with the others, they also applied the word to differentiate ‘religions’; for example, “casta dos mouros” (caste of Muslims). Xavier argues that the spread and use of the word ‘casta’ to other parts of the world was mainly through the ‘multinational’ networks of Jesuit missionaries. However, despite its popularity, it neither identified all Indian society nor identified only endogamic groups.
Xavier also argues that we should give special attention to legal and administrative use of the word ‘casta’ which may have resulted in organising local societies into ‘castes’. She cites the case of Mateus de Castro, who invoked the caste nobility in the confrontation between Padroado and the Propaganda, two arms of the Roman Catholic church who oversaw proselytizing missions in the colonies, as a best illustration of this case. By the second half of the 17th century, Christians and non-Christians appropriated the word completely. The use of casta in other Europeans to identify Indian social groups was due to the Jesuit mobility across Europe and the colonised world.
Xavier then goes on to investigate the meaning of the word caste native to the Iberian landscape. She considers two dictionaries, one edited by Ralph Bluteau (published between (1712-28) titled Vocabularia portuguez & latino and Diccionario de Autoridades (1726-39). In Diccionario de Autoridades, the word casta (or casto, castizo) identifies social groups, meaning the generation or lineage of well-known parents. This meaning evokes a purity of blood. Secondly, casta refers to animal lineages. Castizo referred to people whose origins and caste were known, and were also pure. This excluded mixed blood people. Its Latin root castus, or castanum meant brown and chestnut. This could again refer to purity in the former, and the colour of skin in the latter root word. In Bluteau’s dictionary, casta refers to generation and lineage, and secondly to noble people, and thirdly to family. Bluteau too refers to the word in the realms of plants and animals.
In conclusion, Xavier argues that as compared to the eventual ossification of its meaning in India, the usage of the word casta in Portugal was random. It was applied as a category mainly to the realm of plants and animals and also as a qualifier of good behavior; for example, being chaste, a central virtue in early modern Portugal. In early modern south Asia, however, it was not used to the same effect. Xavier further argues that a deeper history of the word casta could be extracted through a comparative analysis between the usage in the Atlantic world focusing on Mexico, an immediate counterpart of the Indian case, keeping in mind several dissimilarities that mark these two geographies. For instance, in Mexico, mixed blood people could constitute singular caste groups, something that would have been an impossibility within the Indian subcontinent.
References
- The History of Caste in India: Evidence of the Laws of Manu on the Social Conditions in India During the Third Century AD. Vol. 1. Taylor & Carpenter, 1909.
- Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. Castes in India: Their mechanism, genesis, and development. DigiCat, 2022.
- Guha, Sumit. Beyond caste: Identity and power in South Asia, past and present. Brill, 2013.
- Barreto Xavier, Ângela “Languages of Difference in the Portuguese Empire. The Spread of” Caste” in the Indian World.” Anuario Colombiano de Historia social y de la Cultura 43.2 (2016): 89-119.