• The caste machine strains its origins in India which had social groupings regionally known as the “varnas.” The history of the varnas in India goes again to the first Millennium BCE wherein the device is discovered in historical Hindu texts written greater than 3000 years in the past. Varnas may be described as the class of individuals based totally on their respective career. According to the varnas gadget, Indian society is categorized into four distinct social instructions:-the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas, and the Shudras.
• Maximum of the historians still accept as true with that today’s caste device is based on those varnas. Also there has been the fifth category that changed into even not so good as shudras and that changed into of “untouchables” or Dalits. Those were the persons who used to carry out duties of putting off faces or lifeless animals. They were now not allowed to go in to temples, drink from the equal water supply, and so on. Untouchability is the most not unusual form of discrimination that is primarily based at the caste gadget in India. However while and how such a lot of castes originated in India isn''t always clear. Many theories were recommended regarding the starting place of caste system but, up to now, no solid evidence has been gathered on this regard.
• There are four sociological approaches to caste by distin­guishing between the two levels of theoretical formulation, i.e., cultural and structural, and universalistic and particularistic. These four ap­proaches are cultural-universalistic, cultural-particularistic, structural- universalistic and structural-particularistic.
• • Structural-particularistic view of caste has maintained that the caste system is restricted to the Indian society
  • Structural-universalistic category holds that caste in India is a general phenomenon of a closed form of social stratification found across the world.
  • The third position of sociologists like Ghurye who treat caste as a cultural universalistic phenome­non maintains that caste-like cultural bases of stratifica­tion are found in most traditional societies. Caste in India is a special form of status-based social stratification. This viewpoint was early formulated by Max Weber.
  • The cultural-particularistic view is held by Louis Dumont who holds that caste is found only in India.

One of the reasons castes has excited sociological imagination is because it is seen as a representation of pure status, based on religious and ideological grounds  with class inequalities being epiphenomenal to caste. This disjunction between the sacred and the profane gives the Indian caste system a “sociological” character that sets it apart from other forms of social inequality based on material resources.  

While Weber largely relied on writings by colonial bureaucrats in the Indian Civil Services (acting as amateur anthropologists) for data on Indian society, anthropological villages studies of the 20th century by Indian as well as western scholars provided a foundation for Louis Dumont’s work (Dumont 1980). With the publication of Homo Hierarchicus in 1966, Dumont presented a canonical formulation that has framed the conversation about caste over the past four decades and provided a rationale for status hierarchy. In emphasising the ideological over the material his formulation has much in common with his predecessors and successors. This narrative of caste has excited tremendous passions from diverse groups with wide-ranging critiques.

Status theories of caste hierarchies have a tendency to focus on ageless and timeless India as represented in vedic traditions, partly because they draw upon the religious foundations of caste. This focus often ignores modern India, particularly urban India, in which concepts like purity and pollution are difficult to implement in day-to-day life.