Caste

One of the world's oldest and most elaborate surviving hierarchies of birth — a system that ranked South Asian people into hereditary, endogamous, occupational groups, placed some communities outside the order altogether as 'untouchable,' and rested on ideas of ritual purity and pollution drawn from Hindu texts. Now illegal in India yet far from dead, caste has structured marriage, labor, worship, and violence for millennia, produced the Dalit liberation movement and B.R. Ambedkar's foundational challenge, and spread with the South Asian diaspora into new legal and political contests abroad.

In the village, a child born into the wrong family could not use the same well. She could not enter the temple. She could not sit beside certain classmates or touch the food of families above her. None of this depended on anything she had done. It depended entirely on the group she was born into — a group ranked, fixed at birth, that determined every path her life could take. This is caste: one of the world's oldest and most elaborate surviving systems of social hierarchy by birth. India abolished untouchability in 1950, but caste itself has not gone away.