Caste: how a Spanish word, carried by the Portuguese, came to describe social order in India

The word ‘caste’ is often used to describe India’s unique social system, but the term did not come from India. So how did a foreign word come to describe such a central element of Indian society?

‘Casta’: a colonial inheritance

In India, caste is seen as an ancient Hindu social system based on the concepts of varna (class), karma (action), and dharma (duty), as described in the legal text Manusmriti. The varna system divided society into four main groups—Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras—with the “untouchables” placed outside and below this hierarchy.

Despite its deep roots in Indian tradition, the modern understanding and usage of the word “caste” came through European intervention. As sociologist Surinder S Jodhka notes in Caste: Oxford India Short Introductions (2012), the term “caste” is the English translation of the Spanish word casta, meaning “race”. Portuguese traders, who arrived on India’s west coast in the 15th century, were the first to use the term in relation to Indian society. Anthropologist Morton Klass points out that there is no exact equivalent for “caste” in Indian languages.

The Portuguese played important roles as interpreters, sailors, and clerks. Their language, according to historian Sumit Guha in Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2013), “became a major lingua franca in the Asian seas.” Through the Portuguese lingua franca, Westerners began to understand and describe Indian society, with the British taking the lead.

To understand the impact of this European framing, it is useful to look at the origins of casta in Iberian thought (from the eastern and southern coasts of what is now Spain and Portugal). Spain and Portugal led early European overseas expansion and started the Atlantic slave trade in the 15th and 16th centuries. Guha explains that casta originally meant a pure bloodline or species. When applied to people, it described a social order based on biological parenthood, where keeping a group pure and noble depended on the chastity of its women. Iberian explorers used this idea to classify the groups they encountered during colonial expansion in the Americas and Asia, seeing them as biologically different and ranked.

This way of thinking echoed some Indian ideas. In a parallel to the Indic concept of jati, Guha notes that certain occupations—like executioners and tanners—were believed to “stain” the character of those who performed them and their descendants due to their association with death. These concerns were central to the Indian caste system, “though in it fear of the contamination of body substance by impure food or touch was much more prominent,” Guha adds. As Iberian empires expanded, casta increasingly came to mean people of mixed descent and took on negative meanings.

Guha also points out that Spanish American laws in the 18th century banned intermarriage between high and low-status groups—similar to what Sanskrit texts called varṇa-saṁkara (mixing of castes). The Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to engage with Indian society, “were evolving a system of ethnic and social stratification by biological ancestry” and so, as Guha argues, they assumed Indian jatis were also designed to preserve “purity of blood.”

Given their leading role in the Atlantic slave trade, he says, it is not surprising that Spain and Portugal were also early developers of Western racial ideologies. British historian Charles Boxer remarked: “Attitudes and convictions formed as the Iberian mariners, missionaries and men-at-arms spread around the globe lasted for centuries, and are still with us in varying degrees. Race prejudice and black slavery were for centuries inseparable.”

Further reading:

1. 1. Caste: Oxford India Short Introductions (2012) by Surinder S Jodhka
   2. Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (2013) by Sumit Guha
   3. Against Caste in British Law: A Critical Perspective on the Caste Discrimination Provision in the Equality Act 2010 (2015) by Prakash Shah