In the paper, titled ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’, Ambedkar argued that caste was a distinct social category that could not be accounted for either by theories of race or by class antagonism. Rejecting the standard explanation of the racial origins of caste popular in colonial ethnography (i.e., a consequence of Aryan invasions, wherein the darker-skinned earlier inhabitants were subjugated) and also the dominant sociological claim that caste was maintained through a hierarchy of purity and pollution, Ambedkar boldly asserted that the essence of caste was the
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