This book is the outcome of my considerations regarding the information I gathered while conducting field research in various regions of India over the past 20 years, as well as my reading of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and contemporary Indian language literature. Some of my ideas were very briefly expressed in four pieces headed "What is Caste" that were published in the Economic Weekly of Bombay in the years 1958?1959 They were further developed in a series of lectures I delivered prior to the University of California at Berkeley's South Asia Colloquium in 1959?1960. I owe a great deal of gratitude to countless colleagues in India and the United States, too many to mention by name, for their criticism, advice, and support following reading the first draft. I must however mention the name of one who I was sure would have read this book and offered helpful comments as he did after he read my book on Kinship ??I mean the late Professor Clyde Kluckhohn.