- published: 31 Aug 2015
- views: 655747
Caste is a form of social stratification characterized by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a lifestyle which often includes an occupation, ritual status in a hierarchy and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultural notions of purity and pollution. Its paradigmatic ethnographic example is the division of Indian society into rigid social groups, with roots in India's ancient history and persisting until today. However, the economic significance of the caste system in India has been declining as a result of urbanization and affirmative action programs. A subject of much scholarship by sociologists and anthropologists, the Indian caste system is sometimes used as an analogical basis for the study of caste-like social divisions existing outside India.
The English word "caste" derives from the Spanish and Portuguese casta, which the Oxford English Dictionary quotes John Minsheu's Spanish dictionary (1599) to mean, "race, lineage, or breed". When the Spanish colonized the New World, they used the word to mean a "clan or lineage." However, it was the Portuguese who employed casta in the primary modern sense when they applied it to the thousands of in-marrying hereditary Indian social groups they encountered upon their arrival in India in 1498. The use of the spelling "caste," with this latter meaning, is first attested to in English in 1613.
You were born into the wrong family
You got categorized from day one
Are you any worse than anyone else is
Or did your genes determine your fate?
It is time to learn to get by in your life
To accept where you came from
No sense in fighting back
You are born to be less than the others are
Poverty was invented to make smart people simple
The poor class is sustained to make right people wrong
There's no way to educate that unselected mind
The classified brain is destined to be untalented
No way to educate the useless brain
People from below shall breed into a class that stays low
You were born into the wrong family
You got categorized from day one
Are you any worse than anyone else is
Or did your genes determine your fate?
Poverty was invented to make smart people simple
The poor class is sustained to make right people wrong
There's no way to educate that unselected mind
The classified brain is destined to be untalented
No way to educate the useless brain