travelers to the region.

Originally a Brahman-inspired social and religious system, caste divisions were intended to define people by birth on the basis of the religious merits and demerits believed to have been accumulated in their past lives. Many of our modern ideas about caste, however, have come to us from the observations of 19th- and 20th-century British officials and scholars. These men saw caste as a fixed hereditary system based on arbitrary customs and superstitions that forced Indians to live within a predetermined hierarchy of professions and occupations and created the unchanging villages of rural India. To such observers caste was a complete anachronism, a system that was anathema to egalitarian and competitive modern (that is to say, European) ways of life. Many Western-educated Indians also believed that caste was an outdated system; in the early decades after Indian independence in 1947, such men believed that caste would simply wither away, an unneeded and outmoded appendage in a modern India organized on the principles of electoral democracy. But caste did not disappear in modern India. Instead it showed the flexibility and resilience that has characterized this institution almost from its origins. Caste reemerged in modern India as an organizing category for Indian electoral politics and as an important component within new ethnicized 20th-century Indian identities. This brief history will have much to say about caste. A short book cannot do justice to the complex historical variations or local and regional expressions of this system. But A Brief History of India will describe the ancient origins of the caste system, what scholars think it was and how scholars think it functioned, and it will suggest the many ways in which communities and individuals have adapted caste and caste categories and practices to their own needs and for their own purposes: to increase their own community s status (or decrease that of another); to incorporate their own community (or those of others) into broader local, regional, and/or imperial Indian political systems; and, in the modern world, to turn caste categories into broader ethnic identities and adapt them to the new demands of modern electoral politics. Caste has existed in some form in India from at least 600 B.C., but over the many centuries of this unique institution s existence, the single truth about it is that it has never been static.