Not Only Hindu, Not Only Indian: Caste and Caste-Like Hierarchy Across Religions and Continents

Comparative Sociology · Caste & Hierarchy Worldwide

Not Only Hindu,
Not Only Indian

Documented Caste and Caste-Like Hierarchy Among Indian Muslims and Christians – and Across Continents

By Tarun Goyal · Long Read

“Casteism and untouchability are all-pervasive social and cultural characteristics of the whole Indian society.”
– National Council of Dalit Christians, submission to the Balakrishnan Commission, 2022

Preface

A Pattern Bigger Than One Religion

Caste in India is often discussed as though it were exclusively a Hindu theological artefact – a system of varna and jati with no life outside Hindu scripture and Hindu society. The documented record does not support that framing. Hereditary status hierarchies, complete with endogamy, occupational stigma, segregated worship, and even segregated burial, are independently documented among Indian Muslims and Indian Christians – communities whose founding theology explicitly rejects caste. And strikingly similar hereditary “outcaste” systems, built on different theological foundations entirely, have been documented in Japan, Korea, Yemen, Nigeria, and elsewhere.

None of this erases or excuses the specific, well-documented history of caste discrimination within Hinduism, which remains real and remains India’s largest instance of the phenomenon by sheer population. What the comparative record does is correct a narrower, specific error: the idea that caste is a uniquely Hindu invention that egalitarian conversion or migration automatically dissolves. It doesn’t appear to work that way, in India or elsewhere.

Part I

Caste Among Indian Muslims

The Hierarchy

Ashraf, Ajlaf, and Arzal

South Asian Muslim Social Stratification · Documented Since Colonial Ethnography

Sociologist Ghaus Ansari’s landmark 1960 study of Muslim caste in Uttar Pradesh identified a three-tier hierarchy that persists in scholarship and lived experience today. Ashraf – Sayyeds, Sheikhs, Mughals, and Pathans claiming foreign or high-Hindu-convert descent – form roughly 15% of India’s Muslim population but dominate religious and political leadership. Ajlaf are descendants of converts from intermediate Hindu castes; Arzal – sometimes translated as “degraded” – are descendants of Dalit converts, historically confined to occupations like scavenging and butchering. Ajlaf and Arzal together, known collectively as Pasmanda Muslims, make up roughly 85% of India’s Muslim population.

The representational gap is measurable. Ashraf Muslims, at roughly 2% of India’s total population, held 4.5% of Lok Sabha seats won by Muslim MPs between the first and thirteenth general elections – a share far out of proportion to their share of the Muslim population, let alone the national one.

Documented Instances

Separate drinking-water vessels for Dalit-Muslim Halalkhor and Mehtar communities have been reported in mixed Muslim neighbourhoods.
Segregated seating by caste during mosque prayers – Ashraf in front rows, lower-caste Muslims behind – has been documented in multiple regional studies.
In a village outside Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, a Dalit Muslim child was assaulted by a Muslim Rajput family after touching one of their children – an incident specifically cited in caste-discrimination literature as evidence untouchability practice persists, even if rarely, within the community.
Some Arzal communities are excluded from public burial grounds reserved for Ashraf Muslims.

Part II

Caste Among Indian Christians

Twice Alienated

Dalit Christians

Estimated 60–65% of India’s Christian Population

A majority of Indian Christians descend from Dalit converts – communities that turned to Christianity in part to escape caste stigma. The documented record shows that stigma largely followed them. A widely cited case from a parish in Trichy, Tamil Nadu found a physical wall built through a Catholic cemetery, allocating burial space for Dalit Christians on one side and “dominant-caste” converts on the other. In a Nellore diocese, roughly 88% of priests came from upper-caste backgrounds – mostly Reddy and Kamma communities – while the diocese’s Catholic congregation was around 90% Dalit.

The academic study Margins of Faith: Dalit and Tribal Christianity in India describes Dalit Christians as facing a “five-fold discrimination” – from the state, from caste Hindus, from Hindu Dalits, from upper-caste Christians, and at times from within Dalit Christian sub-groups themselves.

Documented Practices

Separate churches or segregated seating within shared churches, reported across Gujarat, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.
Separate cemeteries or segregated burial sections, documented in multiple dioceses.
Exclusion from parish leadership committees and festival participation, the subject of an ongoing Supreme Court petition from a Kumbakonam diocese parish.

The Legal Anomaly This Creates

The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 initially restricted SC status to Hindus; it was later extended to Sikhs (1956) and Buddhists (1990), but not to Muslims or Christians.
Dalit-origin Christians and Muslims are therefore excluded from SC reservation benefits despite documented caste discrimination within their own religious communities – an inconsistency that has drawn multiple government commissions (Ranganath Misra, 2007; the pending Balakrishnan Commission) without resolution as of this writing.
This is worth noting because it undercuts a simplistic reading in either direction: the exclusion isn’t proof caste doesn’t exist among converts, and its persistence for over seven decades isn’t proof of any single party’s design – successive governments across the political spectrum have left it unresolved.

Part III

Beyond India Entirely

Hereditary, endogamous, occupationally stigmatised “outcaste” groups are not unique to South Asia. Comparative sociologists have long pointed to structurally similar systems on other continents, arising from entirely separate religious and cultural histories.

System	Region	Basis of Stigma	Status Today
Burakumin	Japan	Historic association with “impure” occupations – tanning, butchery, execution	Legally abolished 1871; employment and marriage discrimination documented today
Baekjeong	Korea	Butchery and leather work, linked to 11th-century Khitan settlement	Formal movement (Hyeongpyeongsa) for equality from 1923; largely dissolved as a distinct status
Al-Akhdam / Muhamasheen	Yemen	African descent; confined to menial manual labour	An estimated 3.5 million people still face systemic exclusion
Osu	Nigeria (Igbo)	Traditional religious “dedication” status treated as ritually unclean	Persists in marriage and social exclusion despite legal abolition
Songbun	North Korea	State-assigned hereditary political loyalty ranking, not religious	Actively enforced; 53 hereditary categories determine access to education, housing, and food

The Songbun example is worth pausing on, because it shows the underlying pattern doesn’t require religion at all: North Korea’s modern hereditary ranking system is explicitly political, assigned to families based on their perceived loyalty to the state at the time of the Korean War, and passed down regardless of individual merit or belief – a caste system with no scripture behind it whatsoever.

Part IV

What the Comparison Is – and Isn’t – Good For

This comparative picture gets misused in both directions, and it’s worth naming both misuses plainly. It is sometimes deployed to suggest that because hereditary hierarchy exists everywhere, India’s caste system is therefore unremarkable or that criticism of it is somehow unfair or selective – a “everyone does it, so stop singling us out” move. That doesn’t follow: the existence of Songbun in North Korea does not make a documented act of caste-based violence in Uttar Pradesh less real, and it shouldn’t be invoked as a deflection when specific, sourced harms are being discussed.

It is equally misused in the other direction – to suggest caste is so specifically and exclusively a feature of Hindu theology that documenting its presence among Indian Muslims or Christians is itself an attack on those communities, or evidence of a “Hindu conspiracy” to smear them. The Pasmanda movement’s own leaders, and Dalit Christian organisations petitioning India’s Supreme Court, are the ones making these documentation efforts – not outside critics. Taking their evidence seriously is not an attack on Islam or Christianity in India; it’s taking Pasmanda and Dalit Christian activists at their word.

“Caste survives conversion.”

– A finding accepted by Indian courts, per the 2008 Ranganath Misra Commission review

✦ ✦ ✦

A Human Pattern, Not a Hindu Exception

The evidence assembled here supports a specific, narrow conclusion, and it’s worth being precise about what that conclusion is. Hereditary, endogamous status hierarchy with occupational stigma and social exclusion at its lowest rung is a pattern documented across religions within India and across entirely unrelated cultures worldwide. It is not a phenomenon that Hindu scripture invented and that conversion or migration automatically cures.

That conclusion sits alongside, rather than replaces, the specific and separately documented history of caste discrimination within Hinduism in India – the largest instance of this pattern in the world today by any measure. Neither fact licenses ignoring the other. The Pasmanda Muslim seeking recognition, the Dalit Christian denied a shared cemetery, the Yemeni Muhamasheen family, and the Hindu Dalit family facing an atrocity case are each entitled to have their specific, documented experience taken seriously on its own terms – not flattened into a talking point for someone else’s argument.

The comparison broadens the picture. It does not settle any single case.

Principal Sources

Caste system among South Asian Muslims – Wikipedia, citing Ghaus Ansari’s Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh (1960) · Casteism in Indian Muslim Society (Organiser, 2024) · Caste Among Indian Muslims Is a Real Issue (The Wire) · Dalit Christians push for inclusion in Scheduled Caste status – Balakrishnan Commission submission coverage · Dalit Catholics fight for equality within Church · The Tablet – Dalit Catholics allege caste discrimination in south Indian parish · Scroll.in – on the Ranganath Misra Commission and SC-status exclusion · Burakumin – Wikipedia · Caste system in Korea (Baekjeong) – Wikipedia · The Seduction of Comparisons: Untouchability Beyond Caste in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (POMEPS) · Rowena Robinson & Joseph Marianus Kujur (eds.), Margins of Faith: Dalit and Tribal Christianity in India (Sage, 2010)

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