Caste in modern India : The Legacy of a Colonial Invenon by Kaveri Anna Modayil Introducon Nicholas Dirks starts his seminal work on caste by stang that ‘when thinking of India, it is hard not to think about caste.’ The literature on caste, as Samarendra describes it, has come to be divided into two main ‘camps’ - those who think that caste was not a colonial invenon, and those who believe that it constuted a rupture in society. This paper thus largely follows the aforemenoned division; the first secon of this paper describes the views of historians such as Susan Bayly, who belong to the former group, and the second part of this paper analyses the views of historians who feel that caste acquired new dimensions with the pracses adopted by the colonial government. The third secon of this paper provides an insight into two concepts linked to caste namely that of maral races and criminal tribes. I The term caste comes from the Portuguese term ‘casta’, which is a term used to refer to a pure blood line or species. By the mid-seventeenth century, Dutch and English wring on India had adopted these usages from the Portuguese, employing them with equal ambiguity and in conjuncon with other imprecise terms including race, class, naon, sect and tribe. Susan Bayly argues that caste was not a colonial invenon on two grounds. She refers to specific cases, one of which would be shortly cited, to prove that the idea of caste was pervasive in Indian society prior to the advent of the Brish; all that the laer did was add a new dimension to it. She refers to the case of South India, where the Europeans were amazed at the vitriolic manner in which the idangai and vallangai (which mean leſt hand and right hand caste groups respecvely) used to clash over the seemingly trivial issue of temple