> How are non-Indians classified in the cast system? It's very complicated. TLDR: if you are a high-caste foreigner (meaning white, well educated, successful)

> How are non-Indians classified in the cast system? It's very complicated. TLDR: if you are a high-caste foreigner (meaning white, well educated, successful), you will probably be accepted. If you aren't that, your mileage may vary. After all, caste in large part a codification of the hierarchical social structures found throughout the world. Historically, just like all other old world societies, foreigners were considered barbarians. But if those foreigners brought more powerful technologies (weapons, tools, or social structures) they were quite often accommodated and absorbed. So in reality, the Indian subcontinent has absorbed wave after wave of foreign immigration over millennia, each adding a facet to the complex and fractal social structure and hierarchy. That dynamic - the foreigners with more power subjugating and marrying into a local population - plays a large part into how the caste system (both the theoretical model from scripture and the on-the-ground instances) formed in the first place. Again this is very similar to how the societal estates (clergy, aristocrats, merchants, and serfs) formed in other parts of the world. An innovation of the Indian system is a category of people completely outside the system, the Dalits, who by consequence of both their ancestry and traditional professions, are completely ostracized by people in all layers of the caste system. At some point however in India, the castes became very rigid - meaning endogamous - and also provincial, with caste being interpreted and enforced primarily on a local level. Overall, it's not very different from what you see in the social structure of Latin America, which is not surprising because the Spanish/Portuguese colonists were directly inspired by the social structure they observed in India when they established the post colonial social structure of Latin America. The English word caste is itself a borrowing from Portuguese that subsumes two subtly different Indian terms: varna (the theoretical 4-level social structure) and jati (the actual "tribe" or "community" that identifies with one level of the structure). Today, many Indians are actually more willing to accept an upper class educated foreigner than a lower caste Indian in matters such as marriage, but only usually if the foreigner is white, which is to say they have just adopted the racial hierarchy used in the western world. This tells you a little bit about how much similarity there actually is between the caste system and western racial hierarchies, despite the often heard claim that they have nothing in common.