The category we today call “caste” did not emerge fully formed from the ancient Indian past as an unchanging essence of the subcontinent’s social order. Rather, it took shape through layered historical processes of translation, classification, and power. Portuguese colonial encounters in India, particularly in Goa from the early sixteenth century onward, played a formative role in circulating and reshaping the term casta. Later British colonial rule further systematized and universalized it. Drawing on the scholarship of Ângela Barreto Xavier, this article examines how the Portuguese experience in Goa contributed to the discursive formation of caste, understood in a Foucauldian sense as a regime of knowledge and power that produces the very objects it describes. It then links this earlier history to Nicholas Dirks’s analysis in Castes of Mind, which shows how British colonial practices transformed diverse and fluid social identities into a singular, hierarchical “caste system” that came to stand for India itself.
The Portuguese word casta, derived from the Latin castus (pure, chaste, cut off), originally carried meanings of breed, race, lineage, or species. In early modern Iberia it could refer to the purity of bloodlines in plants, animals, or people, and it was already entangled with emerging ideas of social hierarchy and religious orthodoxy. When Portuguese traders, soldiers, administrators, and missionaries arrived on the western coast of India in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they began applying this vocabulary to the social groups they encountered. Duarte Barbosa, writing around 1516, is among the earliest to use casta in relation to Indian society, though not always in a strictly technical sense. The term appeared alongside descriptions of laws, customs, occupations, and degrees of civility or colour. Over the course of the sixteenth century, in chronicles, letters, legal documents, vocabularies, and missionary reports produced within the Estado da Índia, casta gradually acquired more specific associations with endogamous, hereditary, and hierarchical groupings.
Ângela Barreto Xavier’s research places this linguistic and conceptual circulation at the centre of analysis. In her examination of sixteenth-century narratives and later sources, she demonstrates that the Portuguese did not simply discover a pre-existing “caste system” and give it a name. Instead, colonial experience actively shaped the meanings of casta. The word moved through the multinational networks of the Portuguese empire, especially Jesuit missionary circuits, and was applied unevenly. It did not map perfectly onto every Indian social formation, nor did it refer exclusively to endogamous groups. Yet through repeated use in administrative, religious, and ethnographic texts, it gained traction as a key language of social difference. Xavier’s work on Goa is especially revealing. The long Portuguese presence there (from the conquest of 1510 until 1961), the intensive project of Catholic conversion, and the presence of local elites who navigated both Indian and Iberian cultural resources created a dense laboratory for the renegotiation of hierarchy.
In Goa, conversion to Catholicism raised acute questions of legal and social equality. Converts retained many of the social distinctions of their birth, and caste identities persisted among Christian communities. At the same time, Iberian notions of purity of blood (limpeza de sangue) entered the local repertoire. Xavier shows how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century identity narratives produced by Goan elites both those of Portuguese descent and local converts, especially Brahmans and Chardós deployed purity of blood and caste in competing ways. Some writers insisted on the purity of their lineage to claim nobility or ecclesiastical preferment; others naturalized caste as an atemporal, almost biological difference that survived religious change. These debates were not mere reflections of an ancient Indian order. They were products of colonial encounter: the destruction and replacement of temples, the creation of new Christian institutions, the granting of privileges to converts, and the persistence of local power structures in the villages. Goan elites internalized and redeployed the complex cultural resources made available by empire, narrating their own histories and myths while participating in the broader discursive elaboration of social difference.
This process can be understood through Michel Foucault’s notion of discursive formation. For Foucault, discourse is not simply language that reflects a pre-existing reality; it is a historically specific set of rules, statements, and institutional practices that constitute objects of knowledge and subjects of power. Caste, in this sense, became an object produced by colonial archives, missionary ethnographies, legal classifications, and elite self-representations. The Portuguese did not invent Indian social hierarchy, but they helped assemble a particular way of seeing and naming it, one that linked blood, religion, occupation, and rank into a coherent category. Goa was a privileged site for this formation precisely because conversion forced questions of continuity and rupture into the open. When Hindu Brahmans became Catholic Brahmans, or when lower-status groups sought material and spiritual advantages through baptism while retaining community distinctions, the category of casta had to accommodate both change and persistence. The resulting discourse travelled beyond Goa, influencing how other Europeans later described Indian society and how Indians themselves came to speak of their social world in the languages of empire.
The British phase of colonial rule did not simply inherit this Portuguese vocabulary; it transformed it into something more systematic and consequential. Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India provides the classic analysis of this later process. Dirks argues that caste was not an unchanging survival of ancient India, nor a single system reflecting a core cultural value. Pre-colonial Indian society contained multiple, overlapping forms of identity like jati, varna, occupation, kinship, political affiliation, and locality that were fluid, competitive, and deeply entangled with kingship and land control. Under British domination, however, caste became “a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India’s diverse forms of social identity and organization.”
This transformation occurred through the institutions of the ethnographic state. Colonial officials, missionaries, and scholars collected vast amounts of information about customs, marriage rules, occupations, and hierarchies. The census operations of the late nineteenth century, in particular, forced populations to declare caste identities that were then ranked, counted, and mapped. Anthropology and ethnography turned caste into a scientific object, while administrative practices used it to classify loyalty, criminality, and martial character. Dirks emphasizes that the British did not invent caste out of nothing; they reconfigured existing materials. Yet the effect was profound: caste was detached from its earlier political contexts and elevated into the primary, almost essential, feature of Indian civilization. This colonial sociology influenced nationalist and anti-caste thought as well, shaping how Indians themselves came to understand and contest hierarchy in the twentieth century.
Placing Xavier’s account of Portuguese Goa alongside Dirks’s analysis of British India reveals both continuity and rupture in the discursive career of caste. The Portuguese contribution was earlier, more localized, and more entangled with religious conversion and purity-of-blood ideologies. Goa’s experience shows that the language of casta was already being refined and contested in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, long before the British ethnographic state reached its mature form. The British, building on earlier European observations (including Portuguese and Jesuit ones), scaled the category up, made it exhaustive, and linked it tightly to the technologies of modern governance. In Foucauldian terms, both empires participated in the formation of a discourse that produced “caste” as a knowable and governable object, yet the British phase gave that discourse unprecedented institutional force and pan-Indian reach.
The implications of this history remain significant. Treating caste solely as an ancient, indigenous, or purely religious institution obscures the ways colonial knowledge and power helped stabilize and universalize the category. At the same time, acknowledging colonial construction does not mean denying the reality of hierarchy, discrimination, or the agency of Indian actors who shaped, resisted, and reinterpreted these categories for their own purposes. In Goa, local elites actively participated in the elaboration of purity and caste narratives. Across British India, communities responded to census categories by mobilizing, claiming higher status, or challenging Brahmanical rankings. The discursive formation of caste was therefore never a one-way imposition; it was a field of struggle in which multiple parties produced knowledge and claimed authority.
By examining the Portuguese moment in Goa through Xavier’s scholarship and linking it to the British systematization described by Dirks, we gain a more layered understanding of how the category we call caste came into being. It emerged at the intersection of Iberian notions of blood and purity, Indian social practices, missionary and administrative writing, and later ethnographic and census technologies. Foucault’s concept of discursive formation helps us see that caste is not simply a social fact waiting to be discovered, but a historically produced object of knowledge that continues to shape politics, identity, and inequality. Recognizing this history does not dissolve the lived realities of caste; it clarifies the conditions under which those realities have been named, ranked, and contested across five centuries of colonial and postcolonial experience.
