A nation of tribes and priests : the Jews and the immorality of the caste system

In the currently dominant discourse about Indian society, the caste system appears as an immoral social structure: its principles represent immoral behaviour as moral obligation. The chapter raises the question as to how this inherently implausible conception of the caste system crystallised in the European understanding of India. It argues that the Old Testament account of the Jewish nation and religion became the framework for describing the people and religion of 'the Gentiles' or 'Hindus' in India. The Hindus were viewed as a nation divided into a hierarchy of tribes and united by one religion led by the tribe of the priesthood. In the course of the nineteenth century, Protestant authors then came to the conclusion that caste was a religious institution: dominated by Brahmin priests, this institution imposed the civil laws of a nation as religious obligations of divine origin. If we were to discard the overtly biblical elements from the nineteenth-century missionary descriptions of Hinduism and caste, it would become difficult to distinguish them from the contemporary moral discourse