The colonial British administration in India used the concept of caste in a principal way to understand the society it administered.
The British derived the term ‘caste’ from the Portuguese word caste. The Portuguese observation of a social institution called caste during early maritime voyages led in due course to the elaboration of the concept of ‘caste system’. This happened in the nineteenth century, in course of which the colonial administration came to understand the entire social formation (minus the tribes) in terms of the caste system.
Colonial administrators commented on the existence of the institution of caste, in an imperfect form, even among the Muslims and the first to conceive ‘the caste system’ was the French Missionary, Abe Dubois. In a work of 1816, entitled ‘Description of the Character, Manners and Customs of the People of India, and of their Institutions, Religious and Civil’, he referred to the caste system of India. He said, ‘I am persuaded that it is simply and solely due to the distribution of the people into castes that India did not lapse into a state of barbarism and that she preserved the arts and sciences of civilization whilst most other nations of the earth remained in the state of barbarism.’
Other Christian missionaries did not share his favorable view of the civilization value of caste and the Madras Missionary Conference of 1850 held caste to be ‘one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of the gospel in India.’ Indian social reformers, while unwilling as yet to condemn the caste system as a whole, also dwelt on some of the harmful social consequences of the institution.
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Colonial social ethnology debated the origin and function of caste extensively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s. On the basis of the census of 1881, two colonial administrators speculated in their reports from the Punjab and Northwestern Provinces and Oudh that caste was basically a frozen occupational system
A brilliant Bengal official named H.H. Risley disagreed with this view and put forth the influential contention that caste had a racial origin, to be found in the Aryan conquest of India’s darker original inhabitants. Not all colonial officials agreed with this view which was set forth in Risley’s The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, and The People of India (Calcutta, 1908). William Crooke, an official in sympathy with Ibbotson and Newfield in his matter, argued against Risley’s race theory, and emphasized occupational criteria for understanding caste.
Risley and Crooke based their official reports on the census of 1891. Risley’s attempt to establish the social ranking of caste through the census set off a keen competition among various caste groups about matters of rank. In due course the colonial administration fostered political rivalries among the various castes and the proposal for separate legislative representation of ‘the depressed classes’ led to Mahatma Gandhi’s fast unto death and a compromise between the caste Hindus and the untouchable leader B.R. Ambedkar. The keen interest regarding caste at this time is reflected in works by both Indians and foreigners.
Speculation about the nature of caste continued in the period after independence. Louis Dumont’s modern sociological classic, Homo Hierarchic us: Essai sur les systems des castes (1967, English translation 1970) argued that the purity-pollution hierarchy, by which all castes are placed in relation to each other, was the central feature of the caste system. Morton Klass, in his Caste, The Emergence of the South Asian Social System (1980), argued on the other hand that a caste, in its irreducible essence, was a marriage circle, common occupation or other features being secondary to the system.