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From what I've heard, the castes represent bloodlines, so if you're of type A, you'd be in caste 1, if you're a mix of A and B, then it's caste 2 and so on. The
by akomtu 5y ago
From what I've heard, the castes represent bloodlines, so if you're of type A, you'd be in caste 1, if you're a mix of A and B, then it's caste 2 and so on. The goal is to preserve the bloodlines by forbidding intercaste marriages. You also need to understand, that a cornerstone of many indian religions is reincarnation, so the caste system applies to human bodies only, while the reincarnating entities, call them souls if you want, may jump from caste to caste or even a different nation. Whether castes are still necessary is a big question.
- fault1 5y agoYeah, I think this is the gist of it in traditional* practice. * for what it's worth, Hinduism has a lot of heterodox interpretations, and at least historically there is large number of variations of it. Modernity (incl' British administration) helped homogenize it partially. I think very loosely, it can be categorized as putting a label on the various collections of folk belief structures popular with the people of south asia formed from the admixture of vedic and pre-vedic practices syncretized together.