Caste’s core structure pairs purity-entitlement at top with pollution-duty at bottom

Evidence

The origins of caste will continue to be debated by anthropologists for years to come, but its organising principles, based on a hierarchical, sliding scale of entitlements and duties, of purity and pollution, and the ways in which they were, and still are, policed and enforced, are not all that hard to understand. The top of the caste pyramid is considered pure and has plenty of entitlements. The bottom is considered polluted and has no entitlements but plenty of duties. The pollution–purity matrix is correlated to an elaborate system of caste-based, ancestral occupation. In “Castes in India”, a paper he wrote for a Columbia University seminar in 1916, Ambedkar defined a caste as an endogamous unit, an “enclosed class”. On another occasion, he described the system as an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.” — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 43

Categorization

• DEFINE: Ambedkar’s two canonical definitions — ‘enclosed class’ (1916) and ‘ascending scale of reverence and descending scale of contempt’ — give precise, quotable anchors for explaining caste’s structure.