A Brahman who looses caste does not become a Kshatriya; he does not fall to a lower caste. He becomes casteless, though he may, by appropriate rites and purifications, regain his old caste.

Thousands of years ago, Brahman elites began to devise and perfect a system for ranking castes according to degrees of inherited "purity" or "pollution." They fitted jati or caste into a ...

Battle of the CastesF or centuries a rigid caste system governed social mobility among Hindus in India. High-ranked Brahman priests, for example, were forbidden to share food, water or even ...