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WHAT DID EUROPEANS CONTRIBUTE TO THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA?

Sumit Guha, University of Texas, Austin
Closed, normatively endogamous communities have a long history in Southern Asia. Over the
past millennium, they have been labeled with the Sanskrit ‘jati’, Arabic ‘qaum’, Persian ‘zat’ and
others. But we have long known that there is no equivalent word for “caste” in any Indian or
Asian language. It came as a loan-word but is today firmly embedded in Indian public and policy
discourse. We also know that the first users of the term (as ‘casta’) were Iberians – Portuguese
and Spanish, first in the Iberian peninsula and then in Asia and the Americas. But how the term
was used – descriptively, administratively, and sociologically – is less known. The connection of
Asia and the Americas has not been made.

Two Iberian Empires initiated and, for more than a century, controlled all the trans-Oceanic
ventures of modern Europeans. These were the Spanish in the Americas and the Portuguese in
Asia. Several Iberian kingdoms had begun a campaign of religious persecution against Jews in
the 1300s. Many converted under duress. But to the dismay of many ‘old Christian’ churchmen
in cushy sinecures, the educated and affluent among the Jewish converts then began to rise in
Church and royal service. Furthermore, converts’ prominence among tax-collectors naturally
made them unpopular with poorer Christians. The interests of clerics and plebeians thus
coalesced first in pogroms and then in justifying their hostility via a doctrine of ‘purity of blood’
– the idea that only ‘old Christians’ were worthy of favor in Spanish and Portuguese society.
Protagonists of the new idea had to contend against long-established Church doctrine of all
humans are redeemable through Christ. Quite remarkably, they nonetheless succeeded in
prioritizing biological descent above spiritual redemption. It followed that ‘New Christians’,
‘conversos’ etc., especially those belonging to the “casta de judios”, should be carefully watched
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and vigilantly excluded from offices of status. (The above is drawn largely from Albert
Sicroff, Le Controverse de Statuts de Pureté de Sang 1960.) This grew into a settled prejudice
that intensified into the nineteenth century. ‘Casta’ before 1500 had tended to refer to type or
breed of plant or animal: but it now came to mean a species of human marked by descent. It was
thus verging on the emerging concept of race. Even today a standard dictionary illustrates its
meaning with the phrase “eso me viene de casta” rendered as “it’s in my blood”.
It is not surprising that when the Iberians came to Asia and the Americas, they promptly began
classifying people by descent. Even at the time, Indians did not marry outside a specific set of
families, or ‘caste’ defined as a ‘marriage-pool’. Iberians however promptly decided that this
was motivated by a drive to preserve the purity of their “blood”. This was pointed out by the
American anthropologist Morton Klass. At the same time, the Spanish and Portuguese also
began creating a ‘sistema de castas’, a caste system in the Spanish Americas.
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Ignacio María Barreda, Depiction of the Casta System in Mexico

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Spain and Portugal were united under one monarchy from 1580 to 1640. More importantly, they
were also bound by the powerful racial ideology well embedded in the Iberian Catholic Church.
The Portuguese introduced later-coming Europeans to the Indian subcontinent and Indians to a
new kind of Westerner. Many Portuguese loanwords entered the languages of Asia. One of these
was ‘casta’, anglicized to ‘cast’ or ‘caste’. But while this etymology is well-known, most
discourse has assumed that the loan-word was applied to a pre-existing and very old indigenous
social institution, an institution that has remained unchanged until the present. In the twentieth
century, with the mounting cultural power of the USA, proponents of this view have increasingly
assimilated ‘caste’ to the Western idea of ‘race’. They have also assumed it to be confined to the
Hindu segment of the Indian population.
This has been a powerful and persistent trope, even though many specialists, such as the
veteran sociologist Joseph Elder, have listed seven errors in the popular Western understanding
of caste. One of these was that ‘Castes are uniquely Hindu’. He wrote that in India, ‘castes exist
among Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Muslims.’ Frequently the rules about marrying
within one’s caste and avoiding interactions with other castes are as strict among Christians,
Jains, etc. as they are among Hindus. Elder also puts his finger on a key element of its durability.
This was that the British colonial regime – the most influential of South Asian empires—
deployed it in its legal and political system.
The American anthropologist Morton Klass also attempted a historical account of the origin of
caste as a concept and a practice. He pointed out that the Portuguese and Spanish were
themselves just evolving a system of ethnic and social stratification by biological ancestry; it was
for this reason that they immediately assumed that Indian jāti endogamous groups were aimed at
maintaining ‘purity of blood’. The early response was, however, not to attack caste but to reduce
most features of it to a concern of civil society, external to the faith (adiaphora). Converts of
different castes were thus permitted separate churches. According to the famous Jesuit
missionary Nobili, this was an established practice by 1615. Indeed, Nobili approvingly quoted a
Brahman convert who had responded to the criticism that Nobili’s colour was evidence to his
being a despicable ‘prangui’ (barbaric Westerner).
You reproach the saniassi [ascetic, meaning Nobili] with being a vile Prangui and cite his color
as proof. …by that argument I prove that you are a paria [a Dalit caste-name]. You are black,
parias are black so you are therefore a paria. What! Can you not conceive that in another country
where all men, brahmans and parias alike are white, there will be among the whites the same
distinction of castes, the same distinction between nobles and commoners? Everyone applauded
this reply, which was as substantive as it was spirited.
This use of ‘casta’ to mean any kind of descent group entered other European languages. The
Dutch, for example, were by 1640 describing the wives of some sailors as of “Portuguese casta”.
It also travelled into English.
Early colonial governments recognized the administrative value of caste as a means to organize
“civil society”. The Dutch conquered Sri Lanka from the Portuguese and enforced a strict caste
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system there. Different tax and labour dues were extracted from each caste in order to sustain
Dutch colonial enterprise. To check evasion of the service requirement attached the land,
subjects could not mortgage or sell their lands without leave, and the customs and distinctions of
caste were rigorously enforced by Dutch penal regulations. This continued under the early
British rule in Sri Lanka. Similarly, in Bombay island, the first British colony in India, the early
administration decided that the “severall nations at pres[ent] inhabiting or hereafter to inhabit on
the Island of Bombay be reduced or modelled into so many orders or tribes & that each nation
may have a Cheif (sic) or Consull of the same nation appointed over them by the Gover[nor] and
Councell”. As late as 1900, the British government in India passed the Land Alienation Act, a
major agrarian law regulating property transfers among two specified sets of “Tribes and Castes”
described as ‘agriculturist’ and ‘non-agriculturist’. Both sets included Hindus, Muslims and
Sikhs.