The old and the unfamiliar is often incorrectly interpreted by writers. For example, European writers a hundred years ago, latching on to a children's story in the Puranas, declared that Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are Gods of Creation, Preservation, and Destruction, respectively. Indians who learn about Hinduism from secondary sources and school texts have internalized this “meaning”, no matter how stupid it is to believe that people in the past, any more than people now, would want to worship God of Destruction. It is somewhat like being taught in a serious book that Santa Claus visits Earth from the North Pole on Christmas day.

Another Indian idea that is badly misunderstood is that of varna. Newspapers and magazines discuss it endlessly, reporting on grievances related to the under-representation of one “caste” or the other at some job and demands of the politicians for quotas to correct the imbalance. Intellectuals claim that the root cause of all ills is the varna system.

Varna is commonly, and wrongly, translated as caste. The Purusha Sukta hymn of the Rigveda (10.90) speaks of the brahmin, rajanya (kshatriya), vaishya, and shudra as the four varnas that have sprung from the head, the arms, the thighs, and the feet of Purusha (God visualized as the Cosmic Man). For someone who has a superficial understanding of the Vedas, it is easy to interpret this hymn as sanctioning caste. But, the texts insist that varna is a state of the mind. Since each person is in the image of Purusha, he has all the four varnas in him.

The varna verses of the Purusha Sukta describe one of the central Vedic ideas, which is that reality has a recursive basis. Organizations and organisms have four broad functions, and so does the individual.

The varnas do not manifest in a person simultaneously; they sweep over a person as an emotion. Each person is sometimes a brahmin, a kshatriya, a vaishya, or a shudra. When considering questions of meaning, he is a brahmin; when fighting for personal or group justice, he is a kshatriya; when concerned with sustenance, he is a vaishya; when serving others, he is a shudra. The varnas are colours of the mind, and we have one or the other at different times of the day.

The varnas are different from the gunas (sattva, rajas, and tamas) of the Samkhya-Yoga system, which are tendencies of transparence, energy, and inertia that constitute one's nature in accordance with biological inheritance, education, and culture. Our cycling through the varnas is irrespective of the mix of gunas.

It is common to conflate varna with jati (community). This confusion may be traced all the way to the first use of the term “caste” by the Portuguese, for whom casta was a word that was meant to describe the jatis, but slowly it came to have a much broader connotation. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to India about 2,300 years ago, noted the existence of seven classes, namely that of philosophers, peasants, herdsmen, craftsmen and traders, soldiers, government officials and councilors. These classes were apparently jatis. Nowhere does Megasthenes speak of four varnas.

Medieval texts in India do sometimes speak of jatis dedicated to the values of one varna or another, but lineage is never taken to guarantee character. Of late it has become politically correct to claim that whereas varna is not by birth, it is determined by one's qualities. This view is wrong since it takes varnahood to be fixed.

Each jati, as a microcosm of the larger society, has within it specialized professions that correspond to warrior, priest, trader, and worker.

Caste and Empire

Scholars now believe that public preoccupation with caste goes back to the beginning of the British Empire in India. Charles Grant (1746-1823), East India Company chairman, highlighted caste as the cause of India's ills and obstacle in the spread of Christianity. Grant made an immense fortune in Bengal and returning home in 1790, he entered parliament in 1802, becoming member of the Court of Directors and eventually chairman in 1805.

Grant was an influential member of the Clapham sect, a reform and evangelical group, which included celebrities like Zachary Macaulay (the father of Thomas Macaulay), Henry Thornton, Henry and John Venn, James Stephen and William Wilberforce. In 1792, he wrote a pamphlet entitled Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain in which he portrayed Indian society as not only heathen, but also immoral, corrupt, licentious, depraved, lascivious and wicked. He argued that it was the moral responsibility of the East India Company government to reform Indian society and that this goal might be achieved with the assistance of Christian missionaries.

James Mill's History of British India, which appeared in 1826, promoted the ideas of Charles Grant. Carter's and Mill's views slowly became the official view of the Indian government, although they were repackaged in a manner which underplayed the matter of conversion. Once internalized, they were used by Indian politicians and scholars in a variety of ways to further their goals.

“Tribe” was another anthropological category used by the British to further their goals. Writing in Economic and Political Weekly in 2003, the distinguished Indian sociologist A.M. Shah had this to say about this usage:

Division of the people of Gujarat, as in the rest of India, into Hindus consisting of many castes on the one hand and aborigines or tribals on the other is a creation of the British colonial administration, influenced by the evolutionist and diffusionist theories of 18th and 19th centuries anthropology in Britain. The British thought the tribes in India were similar to primitive tribes they had known in Africa, Australia, the Pacific islands, and many other parts of the world. The colonial view was also articulated by certain anthropologists in India, the most well known among whom was Verrier Elvin. The British prepared lists of tribes in the territories under their jurisdiction and took special administrative measures to deal with their problems. The nomenclature 'tribe' was later built into the Constitution of independent India under the denomination of 'scheduled tribe', and the lists of tribes prepared by the British were more or less accepted by the new government. Some Indian intellectuals had reacted against this division of Indian people during the time of British rule itself. The foremost among them was the doyen of Indian sociology, G S Ghurye, who wrote a well known book with a telling title, The Aborigines - So-Called - And Their Future (1934). He argued at length with wealth of evidence to show that the so-called aborigines were backward Hindus and not a separate category of people in India. Most of them lived in hilly and forest areas and their technology and economy were poor, but they were basically Hindu in religion, he thought. The British view, however, prevailed throughout their regime.

The terms 'adivasi', 'adimjati' and 'janjati' now used in Indian languages are not originally Indian. They are translations of English terms introduced by the British and we may continue to use them since they have now been in use for nearly 200 years… [It] is noteworthy that neither at the elite nor at the popular level any generic social category was used in the earlier times to refer to the groups we now call tribal.

Bernard Cohn (1928-2003) provided a fresh perspective on the caste system by showing that the British approach to caste was a part of their enterprise to control knowledge. Although there was a complex social system in India before the British, the caste system took on new meaning when the British established laws to codify it. Imagining India to be a hierarchical society, the British used laws to make it more hierarchical. According to Cohn: “[The British] reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms … India was redefined by the British to be a place of rules and orders; once the British had defined to their own satisfaction what they construed as Indian rules and customs, then Indians had to conform to these constructions.”

Louis Dumont's influential Homo Hierarchicus (1966) presented the caste system as a consequence of an opposition between pure and impure. Viewing the hierarchy as religious, he explained why the king's power was circumscribed by the priest, although this misrepresented Indian political theory. In my own essays in Mankind Quarterly (1993) and the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (1996), I have argued that the reality is much more complex than a simplistic focus on purity and that Hocart was right to emphasize the primacy of the cultivator. The anthropologist Ronald Inden identified caste as one of four major essences constructed by westerners in order to control India by denying it a history of its own.

The clearest exposition of the history of caste is the highly regarded Castes of Mind of Nicholas Dirks (2001) who explains how the British construction of caste changed social equations in India and that it is not “traditional” social reality but rather a modern phenomenon that has emerged out of the colonial encounter.

Dirks shows how missionaries projected caste as an impediment to conversion and to rational politics, and colonial administrators defined caste as custom in order to promote state control over revenue and law and order, and how the Indian census constructed caste and religion as pre-eminent social identities. Since it was projected as an apolitical and an irrational social order, caste became for the colonizers the justification for their rule. Caste was also viewed as the consequence of early interaction between advanced and primitive human populations that could only be understood by seeing it through an anthropological lens.