A lack of consensus among caste scholars on the basics of the caste system, which gets further complicated by the claims that the various principles and properties attributed to the caste system are not completely applicable to the way people live, means that the very possibility of having any serious and meaningful discussion on any aspect of the caste system is impossible. For, it makes the caste system so nebulous an entity that no finding can contradict or confirm it. There is only one way out of it: to look for the majority opinion on the issues or aspects of the caste system. And there is indeed a minimum consensus on a text-book version of the story about the caste system, which allows scholars to continue their research without questioning its existence. Consider how a current NCERT text book for the CBSE classes in India, the Social Science textbook for the Class 10 on “Democratic Politics”, talk about caste. It says,
caste division is special to India. All societies have some kind of social inequality and some form of division of labour. In most societies, occupations are passed on from one generation to another. Caste system is an extreme form of this. What makes it different from other societies is that in this system, hereditary occupational division was sanctioned by rituals. Members of the same caste group were supposed to form a social community that practiced the same or similar occupation, married within the caste group and did not eat with members from other caste groups. Caste system was based on exclusion of and discrimination against the ‘outcaste’ groups. They were subjected to the inhuman practice of untouchability. [Democratic Politics, p. 49. See: http://ncertbooks.prashanthellina.com/]
That is, in short, the caste system rests on the following four principles:
It is this basic notion of the caste system that can be called the Classical Conception of the Caste System (CCC). Not many ‘serious scholars’ working on caste today may talk about the caste system so bluntly. Nevertheless, the CCC is present in all discussions on caste in various different ways. Two of them are important. First, it often takes the form of a tacit assumption in most of the works on caste issues. Second, it is presented as the ‘textual’ or ‘ideal’ version of the caste system. It is this textual or ideal notion of the caste system, called CCC here, which was taken to the field in the 19th century. The field work data did not corroborate the CCC. The disjunction between the CCC and the field data was routinely observed and critiqued. However, we can see another curious development in the works produced in the last five to six decades. Caste scholarship has in this period even moved away from accepting this disjunction as a problem. The disjunction is now presented as a unique feature of the caste system.