Caste

In a caste system, an individual's social position is determined almost entirely by birth — by the status attributes a person is born with — rather than by anything they personally achieve over the course of their life. This does not mean class societies offer perfectly equal opportunity either: attributes like race or gender can systematically constrain achievement there too. The difference is one of degree: birth-ascribed attributes define a person's position far more completely and rigidly in a caste society than they do in a class society, where at least in principle a person's position can shift through their own efforts.

In traditional India, different castes were arranged in a hierarchy of social precedence, with each position defined by how 'pure' or 'polluting' it was believed to be relative to the others. Brahmin priestly castes were placed at the top of this hierarchy as the most pure, while the Panchamas — those historically labelled 'outcastes' — were placed at the very bottom. The commonly cited four-fold varna scheme (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra) is a simplified textbook version of a much more complicated reality made up of innumerable occupation-based caste groups, known as jatis. Practices like endogamy (marrying only within one's own caste) and the ritual avoidance of contact with so-called 'lower' castes were historically treated by upper castes as essential to maintaining this purity. …