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Sri Lanka Nature of Caste
When the Portuguese began to trade extensively with South
Asia, they quickly noticed a fundamental difference between South
Asian societies and those of other world areas. In India and Sri
Lanka, societies are broken up into a large number of groups who
do not intermarry, who are ranked in relation to each other, and
whose interactions are governed by a multitude of ritualized
behaviors. The Portuguese called these groups casta, from
which the English term caste is derived. In South Asia,
they are described by the term jati, or birth. According
to traditional culture, every person is born into a particular
group that defines his or her unchangeable position within
society.
One of the most basic concepts underlying caste is purity. On
one level this idea translates into a concern for personal
hygiene, but the concept ultimately refers to a psychic or
spiritual purity that lies beyond the physical body. A religious
interpretation associated with Indian thought asserts that
personal salvation or enlightenment is the ultimate goal of life,
and that the individual goes through many lives and experiences
before attaining sufficient knowledge to transcend the material
world. Those beings who have gone farther on this road to
enlightenment have purified their consciousness and regulate
their lives in order to prevent more gross experiences from
interfering with their progress toward salvation. Those groups of
people whose life-styles are the purest are farthest along on the
spiritual road and are most deserving of respect. These ideas
about purity offer a rationale for dividing society into a large
number of groups, ranked according to the purity of their lifestyles or occupations. The persons in each group must be careful
to preserve the relative purity of their own group and to avoid
close contact with persons of lower purity; otherwise, they may
sully or "pollute" themselves or the members of purer groups.
The idea of psychic purity blends with a series of
traditional notions about pure or polluting substances and about
behaviors and rituals, resulting in a rich system that explains
caste segregation and modes of caste interaction. It is possible
for people to transmit their qualities to others by touching them
or by giving them objects. In extreme cases, even the shadow of a
very low-caste individual can pollute an individual of the
highest, priestly castes. If the physical contact is intimate or
if people have manipulated certain objects for a long time, the
intensity of the transmitted qualities increases. Simple objects
such as tools, for example, may change hands between persons of
different caste without problem. Food, however, which actually
enters and becomes part of a person's body, is a more serious
matter. Cooked food, involving processing and longer periods of
contact, is more problematic than uncooked food. There is thus a
series of prohibitions on the sharing of food between members of
different castes. Members of higher castes may avoid taking food
from members of lower castes, although lower-caste persons may
not mind taking food from members of the higher orders. The most
intimate contact is sexual because it involves the joining of two
bodies and the transmission of the very substances that determine
caste for life. Sexual contact between persons of different
castes is discouraged, and intercaste marriage is rare. When
intercaste sexual affairs do occur, they are almost always
between men of higher caste and women of lower caste, for it is
less polluting to send forth substances than to receive them. In
the distant past, women who had sexual contact with men of lower
caste were killed, and they would still be ostracized today in
some villages. When polluting contacts occur between members of
different castes, personal purity may be restored by performing
cleansing rituals. In general, these concepts of purity prevent
partaking of meals together and intermarriage between different
castes, regulate intercaste relations through a wide variety of
ritual behaviors, and preserve deep-seated social cleavages
throughout Sri Lanka.
There has been a strong tendency to link the position of
different castes in the social hierarchy to their occupations.
Groups who wash clothes or who process waste, thus coming in
contact with undesirable substances from many persons, are
typically given low status. In both Hindu and Buddhist thought,
the destruction of life is very ignoble, because it extinguishes
other beings struggling for consciousness and salvation. This
idea has rationalized views of fishermen or leather workers, who
kill animals, as low and impure groups. In many cases, however,
the labeling of an occupational group as a caste with a
particular status has depended on historical developments rather
than theories of purity. As the village farming economy spread
over time, many tribal societies probably changed from hunters
and gatherers to low-status service castes, ranked below the
landowning farmers. Many poor agricultural laborers in Sri Lanka
remain members of low castes as well. Other immigrant groups came
to Sri Lanka, fit into particular occupational niches, and became
known as castes with ranks linked to their primary occupations.
Castes with members who accumulated wealth and power have tended
to rise gradually in their relative positions, and it is not
uncommon for members of rising caste groups to adopt
vegetarianism or patronize religious institutions in an attempt
to raise their public ritual status.
Data as of October 1988
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