Louis Dumont (1911-1998), a French social anthropologist, was directeur d’etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en sciences Sociales in Paris.  Dumont''s theory, emphasises the following core points.

• In India, castes at the local level are ranked, forming a hierarchy.
• A higher caste person is polluted or made impure by a lower caste person if the higher takes food or water from the lower, or has other intimate physical relations (including sex and marriage) with him or her. So persons of higher caste keep their distance from lower caste; thus, customary rules of purityimpurity form boundaries between castes.
• According to Dumont, those, like Fred Bailey and some other social anthropologists who have interpreted local Indian caste-ranking as based upon differences in political power and wealth, are mistaken; it is based rather on differences in degrees of purity-impurity, a religious phenomenon.
• The brahman is at the apex of the caste hierarchy, with the king second in rank. Other castes absorb impurity, so that the brahman priest can be in a pure state when he transacts with the gods. In the village,the dominant caste plays the role of the king, subordinate to the brahman priest. So the religious encompasses the politicoeconomic in Hindu India, and, according to certain ancient Sanskrit texts, has long done so.
• In the west (France, the US), in contrast to India, the politico-economic encompasses the religious.
• In India, it is not just the caste system that involves hierarchy or rank, but also marriage (there are secondary marriages, for example).
• Different peoples have different ideologies. The essence of Hindu ideology is hierarchy, while that of the west is equality. Homo Hierarchicus contrasts with Homo Aequalis (HA). This difference is seen in the collectivity-orientation or holism of India in contrast to the individualism of the west.
• Equality in the shape of the renouncer (or sectarian holy man) balances the hierarchical caste system in Hindu India, while hierarchy in the form of racism exists in a “shame-faced way” in the egalitarian west.
• In modern conditions in India, blocks of castes might form to compete for political power.

Louis was attracted and gave importance to the ideology behind the caste system. He analyzed caste by understanding all the characteristics of caste. This is why he was said to use the attributional approach. According to him, caste has a relationship with each other in terms of economy, political and kinship surviving by following certain values that are said to be religious. He says that caste is a special type of inequality therefore sociologist have to understand its essence and solve it. Louis Dumont on Three main characteristics of the caste system:

• • There should be separation among different castes in terms of marriage and contact ( not even sharing of food)
  • Division of labor, people can only depart certain professions and limitations were set.
  • A range of status which arranges different groups differently some are superior and some are inferior

According to Dumont castes that are placed on higher strata enjoy political, economical, social powers and the one which is placed at the bottom of the strata suffer the most and are exploited.

Dumont''s sociological interpretation of the caste system is both widely acclaimed and highly criticised. The most radical criticism emphasised that Dumont''s brilliant analysis of the caste system is taken from a dominant internal viewpoint, whether from its priests (Brahmins) or its princes (Kshatriya), which is well expressed in and legitimised by the classical Sanskrit texts that Dumont widely used. From a sociological point of view, however, scholars need to question, first, the social conditions of the production of these representations that cannot be taken for granted, and, second, their social usages. The relations of power and domination that structure the Hindu caste system, which are partly denied from a textual viewpoint (and this, of course, cannot be ignored), have to be clearly recognised and analysed. Furthermore, the comparative sociology that Dumont developed was quite often reduced to a binary opposition between individualism and holism, or to a radical confrontation between the equalitarian West and the hierarchical traditional pre-modern societies, like India, towards which the anthropologist publicly confessed to having a nostalgic inclination.