Western Foundations of the Caste System

This book argues that the dominant descriptions of the 'caste system' are rooted in a Western Christian experience of India. Thus, caste studies scholarship tells us more about the West than about India. It further demonstrates the imperative to move beyond this scholarship in order to generate descriptions of Indian social reality.§§The dominant descriptions of the 'caste system' that we have today are results of originally Christian themes and questions. They reflect European experiences of, and thinking about, Indian culture and society much more than the real state of society or its domestic understanding in India. The authors of this collection explore this hypothesis and show how it is applied beyond South Asia to the diasporic cultures who have made a home in Western countries. The book explores how caste studies has inherited its foundational assumptions from Christianity, its views of social structure and the early Orientalist scholarship on India; the sources of the ideas about a social hierarchy with priests at the top; how Europeans came to the explanation of the origin of the caste system while discussing the Aryan invasion of, or immigration to, India; whether the idea of an anti-brahmanical and anti-caste stream of movements in Indian history is conceptually and empirically tenable; whether there is data to show that the caste system leads to violence; and how the inheritance of caste studies as structured by European scholarship impacts on our understanding of contemporary India and the Indians of the diaspora.§§This collection will be of interest to scholars and students of caste studies, India studies, religion in South Asia, postcolonial studies, history, anthropology and sociology.§