Discourse on Caste System

Many claimed that caste had become ‘a vital symbol for India, marking it as essentially distinct from other places and reflecting its core’ in both comparative sociology and common language in 2001. This section will explain how that happened. There is no Indian language word for ‘caste’, according to Morton Klass, an anthropologist. English got the word from Portuguese, in the same way it borrowed ‘taboo’ from Polynesian. He points out that jati may have been translated as ‘people’, ‘race’, ‘country’, ‘tribe’, ‘clan’, or ‘ethnic group’, or it could have been adopted, as many other Indic terms have been. In the end, though, the Portuguese phrase prevailed and became the preferred term. Arrian’s citation (c. 180 CE) of Megasthenes’ reports from India, for example, reinserted the phrase in translations of older terms.