ABSTRACT
The considerable range of understandings of caste held by Protestant Anglo-Saxon missionaries which it is the concern of this chapter to investigate is mirrored in the lively and sometimes acrimonious disputes of today. Among the missionaries the normative and prescriptive element was more prominent than it is today among social scientists. The other pole in the interpretation of caste is represented today by Louis Dumont. For him caste is something totally sui generis, integrally connected with Hinduism, and quite inconceivable apart from the Hindu context which provides the ideology without a grasp of which no adequate understanding of caste is possible. Both missionaries and more secular western thinkers for the most part shared the pervasive assumption of modern western social thought that inequality is a problem, that it is, as the very term suggests, a deprivation of the proper, desirable, and natural state of equality.
