Ghurye on caste and race

Ghurye's reputation rested on his Cambridge doctoral thesis, published as *Caste and Race in India* (1932), which criticised the then dominant theory linking caste to race.

Risley's racial theory. Herbert Risley, a British colonial official interested in anthropology, held that humans can be divided into distinct races by physical features such as the circumference of the skull, the length of the nose, or the volume of the cranium. (Measuring the body to classify races in this way is called anthropometry.)

• Because caste banned intermarriage for centuries, Risley saw India as a 'laboratory' for racial types.
• He argued that caste originated in race: higher castes resembled Indo-Aryan types, while lower castes seemed to belong to non-Aryan, aboriginal, Mongoloid or other groups. The lower castes, he suggested, were the original inhabitants, subjugated by Aryans who came from elsewhere.

Ghurye's reply. Ghurye did not reject the argument outright but thought it only partly correct. On his evidence, Risley's thesis was broadly true only for northern India ('Hindustan proper'). In most other regions, measurements showed no large or systematic differences between groups, suggesting that racial groups had been mixing for a very long time, and that endogamy was introduced into groups that were already racially varied.

• Today the racial theory of caste is no longer believed, though it was taken seriously in the early 20th century. (Historians still disagree about the Aryans and their arrival.)

Ghurye's six features of caste:

• Segmental division: caste is divided into closed, mutually exclusive segments. Membership is decided by birth and cannot be acquired any other way, avoided or changed.
• Hierarchical division: every caste is higher or lower than every other; in theory, no two castes are equal.
• Restrictions on social interaction, especially the sharing of food, governed by ideas of purity and pollution, most extremely in untouchability.
• Differential rights and duties for different castes, in religious and secular life.
• Restricted choice of occupation, which is hereditary: caste acts as a rigid division of labour.
• Strict restrictions on marriage: caste endogamy (marrying within the caste), often with rules of exogamy (whom one may not marry).

Ghurye's definition made the study of caste more systematic, but it was based on what the classical texts prescribed. In practice many of these features were changing, though all still exist in some form; later fieldwork described what was happening to caste in independent India.

Example (new): a city restaurant where people of every caste eat side by side shows how one of Ghurye's features (restrictions on sharing food) has weakened in public life, even if it may persist in some homes and marriages.