“A Caste is an Enclosed Class”: Ambedkar's 1916 theory of how caste began

In May 1916, a 25-year-old student from India stood before an anthropology seminar at Columbia University in New York and offered a theory of caste. “I am not so pessimistic as to relegate it to the region of the unknowable,” B. R. Ambedkar said, “for I believe it can be known” (p. 5).

His answer was short. Caste, he argued, is marriage closed within the group. Everything else follows from the work it takes to keep it closed, and much of that work is done on women’s lives.

What Ambedkar did

He began with the definitions of caste offered by the leading scholars of his day: Émile Senart, John Nesfield, Herbert Risley and S. V. Ketkar. Each, he said, includes “too much or too little” (p. 7). The idea of pollution belongs to caste only “in so far as Caste has a religious flavour” (p. 7). Refusing to eat with outsiders is an effect of caste, not its cause (p. 8).

He kept one feature. Endogamy, marriage only within the group, is “the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste”, and so “if we succeed in showing how endogamy is maintained, we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of Caste” (p. 9).

What he argued

Caste was laid on top of an older rule. In India, Ambedkar pointed out, people must marry outside their clan, or gotra. “Exogamy means fusion,” and with exogamy as the rule “there could be no Caste”. Making castes therefore meant “the superposition of endogamy on exogamy” (p. 9). “Caste in India means an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy” (p. 9).

Keeping a group closed needs control over women. A closed group must keep the numbers of marriageable men and women equal, or its members will marry outside. A widow or widower upsets that balance (p. 10). Ambedkar set out four ways a group could deal with them: burning the widow on her husband’s pyre, forcing widowhood on her for life, imposing celibacy on the widower, and marrying the widower to a girl “not yet marriageable” (p. 12). The three customs he found in Hindu society were sati, enforced widowhood and girl marriage (p. 13).

The praise came after the practice. Writers of his time defended these customs as ideals of devotion and chastity. Ambedkar turned that round: “they were honoured because they were practised” (p. 14). The customs were means to keep the group closed, dressed up as ends, and “caste without endogamy is a fake” (p. 14).

One class closed first. “A Caste is an Enclosed Class,” he wrote (p. 15). The customs were kept in full only among Brahmins, and only partly by other castes, so he concluded that the priestly class was the first to enclose itself (p. 15). He rejected the idea that Manu, or the Brahmins, imposed caste on everyone else. “Manu did not give the law of Caste,” he argued. “Caste existed long before Manu”, and spreading it across India was beyond the power of any one man or class (p. 16).

Others followed, or were shut out. “Some closed the door: Others found it closed against them” (p. 18). Drawing on Gabriel Tarde’s laws of imitation, Ambedkar argued that other groups copied the Brahmins’ closed marriage, and the castes nearest the Brahmins copied more of their customs (pp. 18–20). “Imitation is easy and invention is difficult” (p. 19). At the same time, by closing themselves in, the first castes closed others out, and anyone excommunicated for breaking caste rules had to form a new caste (pp. 20–21). That is why “caste in the singular number is an unreality. Castes exist only in the plural number” (p. 20).

Colour was the wrong clue. European scholars, “themselves impregnated by colour prejudices”, had made skin colour the key to caste. Ambedkar argued that nothing could be “farther from the truth” (p. 21).

Why it matters

The paper is one of the founding texts of the study of caste. It moves the question away from occupation and colour, and away from scripture as an explanation, and towards marriage and the control of women. That link between caste and patriarchy has been taken up by Dalit feminist scholars: Sharmila Rege included this paper in her collection of Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical patriarchy, Against the Madness of Manu (2013).

It also sets out a method. Ambedkar treats caste as a system of relations between groups, not a set of separate units, and he asks why a custom is practised before asking why it is praised. He ends by inviting refutation: “if it can be shown to be untenable I shall be equally willing to give it up” (p. 22).

What the paper does not show

• Evidence. It is an argument from customs and from other scholars’ work, not a study of records or of people.
• Why the Brahmins closed first. Ambedkar leaves that as “a different question” for “another occasion” (p. 15).
• The language of its time. It speaks of racial “stocks” and of India’s “primitive” survivals, as the ethnology of 1916 did.
• His later thinking. Ambedkar wrote further on the origins of caste and untouchability in later books. This brief covers only the 1916 paper.

Talking points

• If closed marriage is what holds caste together, what does that say about the resistance that couples who marry across caste still meet?
• Ambedkar argued that customs are praised because they are practised. Which practices around caste and marriage are praised today, and what work do they do?
• A counter-view: some scholars put occupation, purity or land at the centre of caste. What does an account built on marriage explain better, and what does it leave out?

The work

B. R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development”, paper read at Columbia University, 9 May 1916; Indian Antiquary 46 (May 1917), pp. 81–95. Reprinted in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1 (Government of India), pp. 3–22. Read the reprint (PDF)