There is a great deal of dispute about which varn.aa particular ja ̄tishould be
associated with because everyone wants to be linked with the most noble lin-
eages possible, and to dissociate themselves from anyone who might threaten
their status. Thus, from one perspective, someone may say: “All those people are
landowners and come from the Ra ̄jputja ̄ti; their varn.aisks.atriya.” Yet some of
the people referred to may not go along with this. They may say: “it is true that
other people consider those people over there as Ra ̄jputs like us, but in fact they
come from different lineages and are not nobles like us. Our varn.aisks.atriya, but
theirs is s ́u ̄draand we would never marry them” (see especially Parry 1979).
Similarly one group of priests may say that they are the priests of the former
kings and nobility and that this is made clear by the name of their ja ̄ti(e.g.
Ra ̄jopa ̄dhya ̄ya in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal). They might then claim that their
varn.aisbra ̄hman.abut distinguish themselves from other people in the commu-
nity who call themselves Bra ̄hman.as but who perform rituals for “low caste”
households. They might insist that they would never marry with this other
group ofsoi-disantBra ̄hman.as and might insist that the latter are “really” s ́u ̄dra.
Considering yet another group of people who also call themselves Bra ̄hman.as,
they might point out that the ritual role of this other group is restricted to the
performance of funeral rites and that they, the “real” Bra ̄hman.as, consider them
to have a very low status, indeed to be “in fact” kinds of Untouchables.^7
These kinds of invidious distinctions are part and parcel of how caste works.
Contrary to the impression given by some earlier commentators that caste dis-
tinctions were rigid and universally agreed upon, others have always realized
that there is a great deal of dispute about status:
By organization and propaganda a caste can change its name and in the course of
time get a new one accepted, and by altering its canons of behaviour in the matter
of diet and marriage can increase the estimation in which it is held... [A number]
who claimed to be some special sort of Kshatriya or Vaishya at the 1921 census
claimed to be some peculiar kind of Brahman in 1931. (Hutton 1963 [1946]: 98,
113)Bothvarn.aascription and ja ̄tiascription are subject to claim and counter-claim,
though there is a kind of obvious upper limit in that the more kingly a lineage
can present itself, the less will its claims to ks.atriyastatus be open to contest. Sim-
ilarly, the more that a lineage can present itself as the domestic priests of kings
and nobility, the less will its claims to bra ̄hman.astatus be disputed. One should
not, however, assume that because certain people claimto be ofks.atriyaor
bra ̄hman.astatus, that other people accept this claim. And one should not assume
that there is an automatic correspondence between varn.aandja ̄tiany more that
one should assume there is any inherent correspondence between English people
called “Smith” and people who are smiths by occupation.
Readers of this book who wish to approach the problem of caste from the per-
spective of Hindu religious beliefs may be surprised that I have not referred to
either of two indigenous Indian concepts: karmaanddharma. Clearly this results
504 declan quigley