Abstract
The common intuition and understanding of caste is that it is something that enforces hierarchy, social stratification, and division (Dummont, 1980) based on a pure-impure distinction and birth-based assignment of identities from which one cannot escape. In some senses, it is stranger than any hierarchy that has levels of stratification in which it is impossible to move from one level to another across generations. There is no predecessor or successor system in human societies, including intergenerational slavery through the ages, Western feudalism, or Jim Crow white-Black segregation in America, that compares with the caste system. And this dynamic of caste continues inter-generationally and has for over two millennia (Anand, 2014). A seemingly eternal order that never seems to change or die repeats itself over time. What is imperceptible to the outsider (someone not born into Hindu caste), who sees an unchanging social stratification system, is something far worse for those trapped in a system that regenerates itself silently, secretly, and invisibly. And that each caste then in a tribal way preserves its own identity precisely by denying other castes entrance into that identity. This is a hallmark feature of impenetrable social exclusion. All of this occurs in a precolonial phase to a Muslim Moghul empire, to British colonialism, and onto the postcolonial reality of India's liberal, secular, pluralistic, legal, constitutional democracy. Nevertheless, we want to open this chapter with a hypothesis; namely, that there are still lingering mysteries as to the origins of caste, its nature, and self-perpetuation that can be examined using philosophical-speculative tools. This will require turning to other contexts that philosophers of history have explored, which at face value have nothing to do with caste or the Eastern context of postcolonial, Global South India.