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While legal codes and state administration were emerging in India, with the rising power of the European powers, Dirks states that the late 18th-century British writings on India say little about caste system in India, and predominantly discuss territorial conquest, alliances, warfare and diplomacy in India. [160]
Ambedkar views that definitions of castes given by Émile Senart [5] John Nesfield, H. H. Risley and Dr Ketkar as incomplete or incorrect by itself and all have missed the central point in the mechanism of the caste system. Senart's "idea of pollution" is a characteristic of caste in so far as caste has a religious flavour.
The evolution of the lower caste and tribe into the modern-day Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe is complex. The caste system as a stratification of classes in India originated about 2,000 years ago, and has been influenced by dynasties and ruling elites, including the Mughal Empire and the British Raj.
The devotees rushed to collect soil from the ground the man had just walked on, thousands thronging to the front of a venue densely crammed with a quarter of a million people, under stifling heat.
The British institutionalised caste into the workings of the major government institutions within India. The main benefactors of this indirect rule were the upper castes or forward castes, which maintained their hegemony and monopoly of control and influence over government institutes long after independence from the British.
Scholars have not determined the scope of tribal casteism; there are no systematic surveys of the over 700 tribes and 2,000 tribal petitioning communities in India—a population of more than 100 million. There are specific ethnographers who either focus on tribal casteism [4] or reference it in their work. [5]
The community claims to be descended from the god Vishvakarma, who is considered by Hindus to be the divine architect or engineer of the universe.He had five children — Manu, Maya, Tvastar, Shilpi and Visvajna — and these are believed by the Vishwakarma community to have been the forebears of their five subgroups, being respectively the gotras (clans) of blacksmiths, carpenters, bell ...
These caste groups retained their identity even after conversion to Islam or Christianity. Each of the caste groups was thus the unit within which cultural and perhaps genetic evolution occurred, at least for the last 1500 years when the system was fully crystallized and probably much longer.