The Uneasy Origins of Caste

An Unpleasant Story Triangulated from Scripture, Genetics, and Archeology

Jean-Antoine Dubois, a French priest, arrived in Pondicherry, shortly after his ordination in 1792. His own country was convulsing in the throes of a violent revolution that would last a decade. Three years earlier, a new beheading machine had tasted royal blood and was now thirsty for more. This was a period of great social upheaval in France where the Church had received a dangerous amount of negative attention from the Revolutionaries. Dubois’ flight to India was to save two lives—his own and that of his missionary order. Pondicherry, as the seat of the French government in India, made a perfect staging ground for his work. He saw this densely populated heathen land in the east as theologically fertile land ready for harvest. In order to convert them out of their heathen ways, he found it necessary to understand those heathen ways. Therefore, he put himself to the study of the local culture and language. Alongside, as was common among foreign visitors in India, he took extensive notes. Over time, he had a great compilation of his understanding of the Indian way of life.

Dubois wasn’t the only one doing this. When he came to India, Britain’s William Jones was also in the process of exploring the Hindu way of life in order to better understand their theology. He was studying and translating an ancient work on Hindu code and, by extension, caste—the Manusmriti. This translation came out in 1794 when Dubois was still working on his caste treatise.

Four years later, neighboring Mysore went to war with the British for the fourth time and lost. Its king Tipu fought valiantly and died fighting. His two sons were taken prisoners, and they spent the rest of their lives as pensioners of the British East India Company as Mysore slid under British rule. With this new development, Dubois saw opportunity and moved to Mysore. Here, he handed the British resident the notes he had taken over half a decade hoping to get it published. The resident, in turn, sent it to the then Governor of Madras, Lord William Bentinck. Although Bentinck didn’t last in Madras and got recalled to London in 1807 over his handling of the Vellore Mutiny in 1806, Dubois’ work remained on track to publication. By 1816, it was in press.

Dubois’ work on caste is not the first and certainly not the best known on the subject today. But at the time, it was among the most influential in the subcontinent. Its effects would be seen decades after his death in 1848. While the British researched caste to improve administration, Dubois researched caste to improve conversion. Ultimately, both failed. Instead of converting Hindus to Christianity, he wound up himself converting to Hinduism. Jean-Antoine Dubois became Dodda Swami who wore saffron and ate no meat. In fact, in one of his letters, from 1820, he called the whole conversion business “impractical” and regretted that the authority of such a large body of “enlightened and independent” people was being disregarded and subverted by “men of mediocrity.”¹

Fast forward to 1857. India revolted and lost, crystallizing its position as a British Colony. Out went the Company, in came the Crown. This pivotal moment offered the British not only a victory but also lessons. Thus far, the preoccupation was with revenues. The East India Company had the charter, and the British Crown had the share in its revenues. India was merely a source of that revenue. How that revenue came was none of the Crown’s business. The Company had pretty much a free hand in how it ran its affairs in India. Which is why there was enough unrest to ultimately foment a nationwide rebellion. This was lesson number one. The preoccupation needed to shift from mere revenues to order. Without order, there was no economy. It’s to that end that a thorough understanding, appeasement, and exploitation of the subcontinent’s caste dynamics became an immediate imperative.² After all, a prime trigger for the Mutiny was Pandey’s Brahmin sentiments.

This is where Dubois’ work and Manusmriti acquired mainstream prominence. They helped the new administration understand the strengths and weaknesses of each caste group and also their equations with each other. This way they could put their strengths to better use while also minimizing the odds of different caste communities joining forces against the government.

American academic and an authority on the subject of British colonialism Nicholas Dirks even goes on to claim that the British essentially “reinvented” caste as we know it. A rather bold assessment, one could argue, but given how they went all-out on reinforcing all caste fault lines in their administration, it does seem to hold water. One could say the social organization along caste lines became increasingly canonical and institutionalized.³ So much so that entire communities were labeled “criminal tribes” for efficient policing. Regiments were formed on the basis of caste for the first time. Even laws were codified as applicable differently to different castes. All of this was done with a singular objective—to improve governance through better organization. A kind of a scientific approach to a sociological matter, so to speak.

Before we even begin to scrutinize Dirk’s claim, let’s define caste. In the Indian discourse, two terms are bandied about all the time—varna and jati. Which of these maps to caste, only the inventors of the term can tell, namely the good old Portuguese.⁴ To Barbosa, a Portuguese writer who used the term in a 1516 work, it referred to a kind of occupational assortment that had little to do with birth or lineage.⁵ But then, an even earlier work from 1444 defined casta as race or breed.⁶ A 1563 work termed it as an occupational division that passed from father to son, i.e. hereditary. Then a 1567 work introduces the idea of hierarchy:⁷

“In some parts of this Province the Gentoos divide themselves into distinct races or castes of greater or less dignity, holding the Christians as of lower degree, and keep these so superstitiously that no one of a higher caste can eat or drink with those of a lower...”

So, to them, caste seems to be three things—hierarchical, occupational, and mutually exclusive. Now whether we map it to jati or varna, is immaterial to this conversation. In fact, let us reduce it further with a presupposition—the story of caste is the story of endogamy. Then the question is, did the British invent endogamy or reinvent it? Sure, they made caste more visible in administration and census—the first, in 1870, listed over sixty for Bihar alone⁸—but was that the cause, or effect? This question is particularly pertinent because in the 1870 census, the British reported a great deal of cross-pollination across caste lines at least in Bihar and UP:⁹

“In fact, no line whatever exists. Even in the higher castes there is reason to believe that considerable intermixture with aboriginal tribes took place, and Mr. Carnegy, in his tract on the Races of Oude, gives instances where Rajputs, such as the Ponwars, have taken wives from Pasi and other aboriginal races within the last hundred years, and that without any degradation of caste resulting to their descendants.”

If the caste lines did not prevent interbreeding in 1870 but they did later, does that mean people were less particular about such divisions in the past? The reason endogamy is so crucial to this conversation is because a lack thereof indicates an insignificance, if not absence altogether, of another caste dimension—untouchability. In the Indian context, endogamy and untouchability go pretty much hand-in-hand. Both are two sides of the same uniquely Indian coin. We will discuss untouchability a little later but first let’s establish if endogamy was truly nonexistent or even less prevalent before the British. Which brings us to Manusmriti, the ideological fount of all caste discourse in India.

Fig. 1: A 19th century hand painted illustration of a fishmonger, typically counted among Shudras. [courtesy Daniel Poor in “Fishmonger (Malabar),” Seventy-Two Specimens of Castes in India, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1837.]