Casteand tribes

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

I wander down sandy lanes, past godowns and a fishing-boat shoreline, heading for St. Francis Church, where a group of boys are playing cricket on the village green, a knockabout game. I find some shade and watch them awhile, browsing through the day's newspaper in slack moments before turning to a copy of Hello Cochin I had picked up at a bookstall near my hotel. It is a thick glossy pamphlet along the lines of Hello! Madras, filled with the same style of adverts, the same bus/plane/train timetables and general tourist information. The one thing it lacks is useful words and phrases in Malayalam, the state language - the youngest in the Dravidian family, the book informs me. The four main languages of the South are all Dravidian languages: Tamil; Telugu (state language of Andhra Pradesh), Kannada (of Karnataka), and Malayalam itself, which, until it began to assume its own discrete identity in the 14th century, had been simply a dialect of Tamil. The languages of the South provide further evidence of its relative isolation in India's history, a fossilization in tongue. The languages of the North, Hindi of course being chief amongst them, are all descended from the language of the Aryan invaders who swept down from the north in the 2nd millennium BC. Their language, also called Aryan - from arya, meaning noble - spawned Sanskrit amongst other dialects, and it is Sanskrit that is the language of classical Hinduism, as expressed in the Vedas and the epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. It was the invading Aryans who had brought with them the notion of caste, the Sanskrit word for which, varna, means literally colour. The Aryans themselves, light-skinned, pushed the dark-skinned native inhabitants, the Dravidian stock, to the bottom rungs of the social ladder just as they forced them to the lower reaches of the Subcontinent.

As a tourist, the mysteries of caste have remained just that, dark and mysterious. I know some of the details, but have not really seen their practical application. Caste is in many ways a misnomer, a legacy of the first Portuguese traders. The Portuguese word castas means tribes or clans, and really therefore refers, not to varna, but to jati, caste proper, a much more crucial aspect of Indian daily life, centring on region, race, profession, religion, providing a multitude of categories. Varna, caste in the more obvious sense, has only four divisions: Brahmins, the priestly class; Kshatriyas, the warriors; Vaisyas, the trading class; and Sudras, the artisans. Below them all, occupying a social category long outlawed by the constitution although still existing in practice, are the untouchables, those so low as to be without caste.

I wonder where the boys playing cricket fit into the scheme of things. They are typically Dravidian, small of stature, broad-nosed, skin almost black, a stark contrast to the much fairer Northerners. Indeed many of the Brahmins of the North are light enough to pass for white. But caste has long since ceased to be a matter of colour. The fact that the boys have the freedom to bat balls around the wide spaces of green beside St. Francis Church suggests a certain amount of social standing. But quite where they fit in is impossible for me to guess.