ABSTRACT
Hindu society is usually described as divided into a number of castes the boundaries of which are maintained by the rule of caste endogamy. There is enormous literature on these caste divisions from about the middle of the 19th century: census reports, gazetteers, castes-and-tribes volumes, ethnographic notes and monographs, and scholarly treatises such as those by Baines, Blunt, Ghurye, Hocart, Hutton, Ibbetson, O’Malley, Risley, Senart, and others. The census operations in particular, spread as they were over large areas, gave a great impetus to writings on what Srinivas has called the horizontal dimension of caste (1952: 31f.; 1966: 9, 44, 92, 98-100, 114-17). What may be called the census approach infl uenced a great deal of scholarly work. Census offi cials-turned-scholars, from Risley to Hutton, wrote many of the earlier general works on caste.
