http://dx.doi.org/10.15446/achsc.v43n2.59071

Languages of Difference in the Portuguese Empire. The Spread of "Caste" in the Indian World^*

Lenguajes de diferencia en el Imperio portugués. La difusión de "casta" en la India

Linguagens de diferença no Império português. A difusão de "casta" na Índia

ÂNGELA BARRERO XAVIER^**
Universidade de Lisboa
Lisboa, Portugal

^* This essay refers to a project that Maria Elena Martínez and I wanted to put forward. It is, in the first place, a tribute to her. The article is also part of the project "Imperios de Papel: textos, cultura escrita y religiosos en la configuración del Imperio portugués de la Edad Moderna (1580-1640)", HAR2014-52693-P, coordinated by Federico Palomo and funded by Ministerio de la Economía y Competitividad (España). Fernando Bouza, Federico Palomo, and Isabel Seara were very generous for bibliographical help. I am also indebted to the members of the Research Group "Empires, Colonialism, and Post-Colonial Societies" of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and to the organizers and participants of the Symposium "Race and processes of racialization in colonial societies" (New York University, April 24, 2015), where a first version was presented. Finally, I am grateful to the comments of the anonymous reviewer of this text. His or her comments were very helpful to make it more consistent.
^** angela.xavier@ics.ulisboa.pt

Cómo citar este artículo
Ângela Barreto Xavier, "Languages of Difference in the Early Modern Portuguese Empire. The Spread of 'caste' in the Indian World", Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 43.2 (2016): 89-119.

Abstract

This essay discusses the circulation of the language of caste in the Indian world in the context of the Portuguese Empire. Caste is an inevitable word in the moment of considering the Indian social system as well as when comparing it with European/Western societies. Since it was a word initially brought by the Portuguese to the Indian world, it is relevant to ask whether the Portuguese played an important role in its transformation into such a relevant social category. Six of the most important sixteenth-century narratives about the Portuguese presence in India as well as treatises, letters, legal documents, vocabularies and dictionaries of the early-modern period will be under scrutiny in order to identify the variations of the word "casta", its circulation in Estado da Índia, and beyond it. The analysis of these sources will also permit an understanding of how Portuguese colonial experience shaped the future meanings of "casta", and therefore, the ways "casta" shaped Indian society (and not only).

Keywords: (Author) power, Portuguese Empire; (Thesaurus) caste, language development, India, colonialism.

Resumen

Este ensayo discute la circulación del lenguaje de casta en la India en el contexto del Imperio portugués. Casta es una palabra inevitable a la hora de considerar el sistema social indio, así como para compararlo con sociedades europeas/occidentales. Al ser un vocablo llevado en inicio por los portugueses al mundo indio, es importante preguntarse si estos jugaron un papel importante en su transformación como categoría social de gran importancia. Seis de las narrativas más importantes del siglo XVI sobre la presencia portuguesa en la India, así como tratados, cartas, documentos legales, vocabularios y diccionarios de la temprana Edad Moderna, se estudian aquí para identificar las variaciones de la palabra casta y su circulación en el Estado de la India y más allá. El análisis de estas fuentes también permitirá entender cómo la experiencia colonial de Portugal le dio forma a los futuros significados de la palabra, y así, cómo "casta" le dio forma no solo a la sociedad de la India, sino también a otras.

Palabras clave: (Autor) poder, Imperio portugués; (Theasaurus) casta, evolución del lenguaje, India, Colonialismo.

Este ensaio discute a circulação da linguagem de casta na Índia no contexto do Império português. Casta é uma palavra inevitável na hora de considerar o sistema social indiano bem como para compará-lo com sociedades europeias/ocidentais. Ao ser um vocábulo levado inicialmente pelos portugueses ao mundo indiano, é importante perguntar-se se estes desempenharam um papel importante em sua transformação como categoria social de grande importância. Seis das narrativas mais importantes do século XVI sobre a presença portuguesa na Índia, como tratados, cartas, documentos legais, vocabulários e dicionários do início da Idade Moderna, estudam-se aqui para identificar as variações da palavra casta e sua circulação no Estado da Índia e mais além dela. A análise dessas fontes também permitirá entender como a experiência colonial portuguesa deu forma aos futuros significados da palavra e, assim, como "casta" deu forma não somente à sociedade da Índia, mas também a outras.

Palavras-chave: (Autor) poder, Império português; (Thesaurus) casta, evolução da linguagem, Índia, Colonialismo.

Introduction

This essay presents the first results of wider research on the connections between the construction and circulation of the language of caste as a social category in early-modern India and Mexico and the role played by Iberians in this process. In the next pages, I will provide an introduction of the Indian case, followed by an analysis of the uses of the word "casta" in the context of the Portuguese Empire. Even if the wider horizon is a comparison between the Spanish and the Portuguese empires as well as of the Atlantic and the Indian worlds, this exercise is explicitly modest, limited and introductory.

Subject of multiple meanings, caste can be defined today as "an ethnic group within a larger society, one which tended to marry endogamously and be ranked relative to others".¹ Endogamy worked as a system of inclusion and exclusion, and caste belonging was kept by a series of ritual practices, many of them related with religion and occupation.² Albeit present in many and different societies across the world, India has been considered the place where caste knew its more sophisticated expression. Indeed, as Sumit Guha puts it, caste-system is still "the master key to understanding India", even if, as Guha argues, Indian society is "like any other complex civilization, multi-stranded or polyadic".³

One of the popular assumptions about Indian caste-system is the intemporality, immobility and rigidity of its castes, and its intrinsic relationship with Hinduism. Apparently extensive to all India, the Laws of Manu, a "Hindu" treatise produced between the first century bce and the second century ce, provided a synthesis of this system. In 1794, William Jones translated into English the accepted original version; a version commonly used by Orientalists in search for the structure of Indian society.⁴ Laws of Manu exposed the theory of the four varnas (which, in Sanskrit, means color),⁵ which stated that Indian society was divided into four main social groups (Brahmans, Kshatryas, Vaysias and Sudras), hierarchized in function of their ethnic origins, their endogamic practices, and their grades of purity.

The in-depth belief in the long-term and extensive nature of the Indian caste-system helps to explain why European social theory considered the Indian society as the "main other" of the European/Western one. Scholars, among whom we can find Orientalists and some founding fathers of sociological knowledge (like Marx, Weber, or Durkheim) considered that while social mobility (and equality and class) characterized the modern Western social systems, India was, instead, encapsulated in a social system based on immutable inequality.⁶ The Homo Hierarchicus of Louis Dumont is iconic of this kind of social theory in which caste was a powerful metaphor for inequality, with a strong impact until recently in the scholarship about Indian society, as well as in the ways the majority of Indians perceived themselves.⁷

Alternative to this tradition, another line of scholarship questioned many of the topoi on the fixity and extensiveness of caste in Indian society, downplaying too, the role of religion in it. Inspired by the work of M. N. Srinivas (published in the same year of Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus),⁸ this literature has demonstrated that the struggles for upward mobility and status elevation were characteristic of early-modern and modern India, showing, as well, that the experience and the practices of caste were significantly different from their classical forms of textualization.⁹ This literature has also stressed the role played by European colonialism in the perception and production of Indian dynamics of caste, in its rigidification (helped by British censuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example),¹⁰ as well as in its dissemination throughout all India.¹¹

The findings of this literature inspire this essay, which intends to revisit the role played by the Portuguese (Iberian) imperial presence in India in the dissemination of the word caste as the most important social category in the Indian subcontinent, a category that has a longstanding impact beyond India, too. As Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, changes in conceptual systems affect the ways people perceive the world, and therefore, the way they act in the world.¹² The word caste became not only another word in the shared social vocabulary, but also what Koselleck would call a "basic concept", a word that became inevitable. Without it, it is "no longer possible to recognize and interpret social and political reality."¹³ Indeed, the word "casta" helped to shape the "ways people perceived the world", as well as "the way they acted in it".

Even if I agree, in general, with this interpretation, I am convinced that Guha overplays the role of the Portuguese in the "ordering" of the Indian "chaotic mix", even if he considers that the Portuguese "were evolving a system of ethnic and social stratification by biological ancestry" when they arrived in India. I wonder whether what the Portuguese experienced in India helped them to define their own template of constructing difference at home and abroad, too.¹⁶ In fact, the growing relevance of blood in the Iberian social ordering was parallel to the Portuguese arrival in India, and parallel to their uses of the word "casta" to identify certain Indian social groups. Until then, it was religion, not blood, which was the main criteria of social differentiation.¹⁷ In addition, the word "casta" was not as successful as a social label in the Iberian metropolitan territories as it was overseas.

How and why did the Portuguese select this word from the available encyclopedia of social vocabulary to identify, compress, and translate into Portuguese terms, a social world that was extremely rich and diversified? Did the semantic features of the word "casta" stimulate its selection in certain historical situations? Furthermore, why was this word (and not another one), later adopted by the English, Dutch and Indians to identify Indian society? Finally, how did the uses of this word affect European and Indian conceptual and social systems?

While the answer to the last questions has already received much attention from scholarship, in the next pages I will engage into responding to the first through an analysis of the uses of the word in the context of the Portuguese Empire in Asia.¹⁸ This analysis is based on six narratives about the Portuguese presence in India, several letters and religious treatises, as well as legal documents produced in India where the word appears. Eighteenth-century vocabularies and dictionaries were also considered in order to map the semantic evolution of "casta" and understand whether the colonial experiences added new meanings to it, shaping its future uses by people acting in the world, but also by people theorizing about it.

Even if in this essay I mainly concentrate on the sixteenth-century Portuguese experience in the Indian Ocean, I bear in mind (and invite the reader to do so, as well) the Atlantic, the Mexican case, and the Iberian Union period (1580-1640), when the circulation of this word through the four parts of the world occurred more frequently.¹⁹ The period usually called "the early-modern period" (from the sixteenth century up to the eighteenth century) is the larger scenario of this enquiry. However, caste experiences went well beyond the presence of the Europeans in Asia and in the Atlantic, and their chronologies. In the case of India, namely, it is unavoidable to discuss the role of the Mughals and other princes and principalities (as well as the Dutch and the French, besides the British, of course) in the shaping of caste as a social category.

The Uses of the Word "Casta" in the Early-modern Indian World

If we follow the Goan Sebastião Dalgado's Glossário Luso-Asiático, published between 1919 and 1921, Portuguese had brought to the Indian world the word "castas", meaning, mainly, "race" and "species": "The Portuguese used this word of their language, later adopted by other Europeans, with the meaning of 'species, race', to refer to the singular social systems of division of the people that operates in India".²⁰ Dalgado considered that the word matched perfectly the Indian social system developed since the Rig Veda (the period of the Laws of Manu). He also remembered that the original local name for "casta" was "varna", which meant color: white corresponding to the Aryans, who had conquered the north of India, and black to the dasyas, the local population. The migration of the Aryans to the south had helped to propagate the system throughout all India, as well as its complexification.

Albeit helpful, since it offers a list of quotations where the word "casta" was used since the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century,²¹ the Glossário of Dalgado is a typical orientalist product, subject to a specific intellectual imagination, and should be read carefully. Dalgado does not question, for example, the junction of the words "varna" and "casta". He just assumes that one means the other. In addition, he does not question why caste had become the main Indian social category. For Dalgado, castes existed, and that was it. Like Dalgado, the majority of scholarship of Portuguese origin on Indian castes followed (and frequently follows) the same kind of understanding.²²

What happens when we revisit the original historical sources where the word appeared and identify their contexts of utterance (both external and internal to the respective texts)? Which words were used, and with which meanings? How did "casta" appear in the text?

Álvaro Velho, author of the Diario da Viagem de Vasco da Gama (1498), the very first synthesis about Portuguese-Indian encounters, did not use the word "casta". In a rich description of the trip of Vasco da Gama, and the encounters with African and Asian populations, Velho chooses, instead, a typical social vocabulary in order to identify the people he met. He combined the words "men", "women" and "children", "kings" and "soldiers", "lords" and "knights", "honored people", as well as "Christians" and "Moors", to describe different societies.²³ On one hand, Velho probably did not have the necessary cognitive distance to find a "new word" to describe "new societies". He used, of course, those words he found familiar. On the other hand, the word "casta" did not occur to Velho's memory probably because it was not in common use in the Portuguese kingdom yet. When Velho writes, Jewish and Moors were being expelled and converted, "New Christians" was the newborn social category, and the "early-modern" question of purity of blood (which would be associated with caste and would become a crucial principle of distinction), was taking its first steps.

In short, even if he was the first to assign the word "casta" to certain Indian social groups, its use was random when compared with the two other languages of difference Barbosa was more familiar with (civility and color). Nevertheless, Barbosa used the word as a common noun, and in analytical terms, as in the sentence "guardandose de misturar ha casta com outra casta" (avoiding the mixing of one caste with another caste), allowing its upgrading to the position of a social category. In addition, the lengthy descriptions of Brahmans and Naires of Vijayanagar and of the Malabar Coast, as well as of eighteen different "leys de gente" with severe restrictions in communicating with the others, helped to consider that "leys de gente" and "castas" were, somehow, one and the same thing.²⁶

In the same years, Tomé Pires also used the word "casta" to refer to certain social groups of South India. Like Barbosa, Pires in his Summa Oriental used it to describe the Brahmans, the Naires, and other social groups, considering that there was a hierarchy between them: there were the upper castes (the Brahmans and the Naires, for example) and the lower ones, being the lower tendentially poorer and less virtuous. Adding to that, Pires also used the word to differentiate the several "nations" that inhabited Asia.²⁷

Besides travelers, other agents of the Portuguese Empire and abroad used the word "casta". This is very explicit in a translation of a letter of an ambassador of the zamorin of Calecut to king D. Manuel, which refers to the "casta" of "Chatins". Since we do not know anything further about the ambassador, it is impossible to know, from this translation, whether the Indians had already adopted the word to identify themselves when they were communicating with the Portuguese. However, the translation of this letter shows that since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were selecting "casta" as a convenient label of identification of certain Indian social groups and/or nations.²⁸

In Lendas da Índia (another classical narrative about the Portuguese presence in India, in the first half of the sixteenth century), Gaspar Correia uses it a few times. On one hand, to identify the nation of Gonçalo de Pavia, from the Canary Islands; on the other, to describe the Naires, showing that this group had a strong identity that attracted the attention of the Portuguese, both by its familiarity and its difference. Correia reports, too, that when Vasco da Gama asked an Indian man about his caste in 1502, he answered "Naire Bramane". This was a kind of social impossibility, since Brahmans and Naires were different social groups. Inventing the group "Naire Bramane", the Indian man combined in one person the two most powerful social groups of Malabar society. He was playing with the Portuguese ignorance about the inner characteristics of Malabar society, and perhaps trying to take advantage from it. Correia also refers to a dialogue with the Adil Shah of Bijapur, in which a Portuguese captain used, again, the word.²⁹

Like Barbosa and Pires, Correia was writing from India. João de Barros, who wrote his Décadas da Ásia, published for the first time in the 1550s, mainly sitting in his office at Casa da Índia, in Lisbon, operated with a similar world of meanings. The same happened with Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, the author of Historia do descobrimento e conquista da India pelos Poruguezes, also published in that decade, who wrote in Portugal after being in India for several years. However, in contrast with the others, they also applied the word to differentiate "religions" ("casta dos mouros", for example), helping to build the association between "religion" and "blood" as part of caste characteristics.³⁰

Nonetheless, some specific aspects of Indian behavior were recurrent in the uses of the word "casta" in these narratives: namely, the fact that many Indians could neither marry nor eat together with people of another "casta". In the Chronica de D. Manuel (1566) written by Damião de Góis, one of the most important Portuguese historical and identity narratives of the sixteenth century, this topos structured the description Góis provided of the Brahmans and of the Naires of the Malabar Coast, contributing to its dissemination among the Portuguese elites, its main audience.³¹ Religious narratives and documents discussed these characteristics too. Jesuit letters of this period were full of references to them, as well as to strategies of conversion that were aware of caste differences. The first Provincial Council of Goa, of 1567, and as later councils, stated that in "certain parts of this Province" (that is to say, in certain parts of Estado da Índia), Indians were divided into "generations" (lineages) and "castes" of higher and lower dignity. For the clerics in these assemblies, lineages and castes were different things, with caste rules stricter than lineage ones. They reminded, for example, that eating together could be a reason to lose one's position in the local caste hierarchy, a restriction that did not apply to lineage.³²

Further analysis of sixteenth-century Portuguese writings from India or about India continues to be illustrative. It shows that the Portuguese and Europeans settled in the overseas territories used the word more frequently, either when communicating with the kingdom or between themselves, than those that lived in Portugal.³³ Secondly, it demonstrates that by the end of the sixteenth century, in the context of the Iberian Union, "casta" had truly become a common sense word among the Portuguese settled in Asia. Thirdly, the spectrum of meanings continued to be wide, even if among certain groups (namely missionaries) there was a gradual compression of them. Still, until the eighteenth-century Estado da Índia, "casta" was mainly used to identify social groups and nations. Some people used the word in one way, others, in the other, while a few combined both meanings. Frequently, it referred to endogamic practices, namely constraints relating to marriage and commensality.³⁴ In all cases, the uses of the word presupposed a conscience of hierarchy and difference.

Still, caste neither described all Indian society nor identified only endogamic groups. The full condensation of meanings and its expansion as a social category with certain characteristics resulted from a combination of different discursive practices, different channels of communication (Portuguese, British, Dutch, French and Indian, at least), and several contexts of reception (Indian, European and other).

The "multinational" Jesuit networks (among other missionaries) contributed to these dynamics. The intense debates that opposed members of the Jesuit order, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and their diffusion throughout all Europe, helped this word to gain relevance not only in India, but also beyond. The debate between Roberto di Nobili and Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso, studied by Ines Zupanov, is illustrative.³⁵ However, previous and future discussions were taking place, and other books were produced. Many of them, long before these debates; others, at the same time or after them, like the Livro da Seita dos Índios Gentios (which includes a list of prohibited behavior of people belonging to certain castes of South Asia) or the later Franciscan book, Viagens pela India, which has detailed references to castes, their occupations, and their differences in India.³⁶

For the Indian case, these criticisms have in Mateus de Castro the best seventeenth-century illustration.³⁸ In the treatise Espelho de Bramanes, this catholic Goan questioned the superiority of the Portuguese in relation to the Indians. Castro openly accused the Portuguese in Goa of being mixed-blood, sons and daughters of low-caste Indian women (market-women, Malabars, Bengalis and blacks) and low condition Portuguese men, very inferior to the Brahmans to which he belonged. Therefore, there was no reason for the Brahmans to continue to be subaltern to the Portuguese, at least in the way they were until then.³⁹ In the previous sentence, Mateus de Castro's meaning of "casta" still oscillated between the idea of a social group and that of a nation or, even, of a race. In fact, it is not clear whether Castro considered the Brahmans as a nation or as a social group, and this hesitation persisted in the way he introduced himself to the ecclesiastic authorities in Rome, where he said that he belonged to the "casta dos brâmanes".⁴⁰

A similar oscillation continues to be present in other texts of this period. Half a century later, the understanding of "casta" as a nation is still present in the Espelho de David contra o Golias do Bramanismo, a book against the Brahmans of Goa, written by father João da Cunha Jaques, of the caste of Charodos. For Jaques, caste was the right word to differentiate nations:

Someone/a person who has been born Portuguese will always be a Portuguese, and will never be an Italian, even if he wants to, because the nation and the Portuguese caste that differentiates him from the Italian is inseparable, and he can never leave or lose.⁴¹

Because of that, Jaques refused to attribute the label "casta" to the Brahmans, whom, he argued, were not a nation but only a social group of lower origins. This thesis about the lower status of the Brahmans was already present in previous books, like the Livro da Seita dos Gentios of Jacopo Fenicio, where, in contrast with Jaques, Fenicio uses the word "casta" to describe the Brahmans as "a nation".⁴²

By the second half of the seventeenth century, Goan local elites, Christian and non-Christian, had completely appropriated the word. Reports of the first decades of the next century, written by non-Christian Goans, demonstrate the intensity of this appropriation. For example, one of these reports associated caste with other familiar social rules, and stated:

No one ignores that the first requisite to marry is the equality of blood and nobility of husband and wife; if there is difference between them concerning the blood, the superior one refuses the alliance. This is a common practice in the world, especially among the natives of this land. They belong to different castes and do not mix with those that do not belong to the same caste.⁴³

Parallel to these Portuguese and local (id est, Indian uses in the context of the Portuguese Estado da Índia) uses of the word, when did the word "casta" start to be used by other Europeans to identify Indian social groups?

Again, Jesuits were important actors of this process, since there were Spanish, Italian, Flemish, British and French among those that arrived in Asia, already in the sixteenth century, in the context of the Portuguese "padroado". Many of them used the word "casta" in their letters to Rome or to other counterparts in Europe.⁴⁴ The word was also present in some of the best-sellers of this period, like Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's Itinerario and Gianbattista Ramusio's Navigazioni. Linschoten used the words "kaste" and "kasten" to identify social groups of the Malabar Coast, like the Naires; and before him, the Navigazioni used the word "casta" too.⁴⁵ A very similar word, at least, phonetically, was already in use in Northern European countries. Since the Middle Ages, "casten" (in English), "kasta" (old Norse), "kastōną" (in old German), "kaste" (among the Danish) and kasta (in Swedish) circulated in those countries. Their meanings were very different (mainly "to throw") from the Iberian ones.⁴⁶ Still, the phonetic affinities between all these words probably facilitated future borrowings. Mapping these uses is not possible in this short essay, but this diagnosis is essential in order to have a deeper understanding of the semantic evolution and the future "success" of "casta".

The Semantics of "Casta" in Eighteenth-century Iberia

In Diccionario de Autoridades, the search of the words "casta", "casto" and "castizo" is enlightening. "Casta" identifies social groups, meaning the "generation and lineage of well-known parents".⁴⁸ This positive meaning evokes, of course, the role that "purity of blood" still had in Iberian social imagination. Secondly, "casta" refers to animals, but with the same meaning: "it is also applied to different lineages of horses, bulls and other animals, because they were generated by fathers known for their loyalty, bravery or other circumstance that makes of them distinct and singular".⁴⁹ In both cases, the word differentiated certain groups of people and animals, elevating them (because of their well-known lineage, generation, genealogy). Physical reproduction and "the origins" are also the meanings associated with its uses in the realm of plants.⁵⁰

If "casta" meant that, "castizo" was, consequently, the person whose "origins" and "caste" were known, but also "pure".⁵¹ This is an important addition, since it associated good origin with "purity of blood", therefore, excluding from the "castizos" mixed-blood people.

In the Diccionario, the roots of "casta" and "castizo" were the Latin words stirps, natio, genus, and progenies, even if it is likely that the gothic word "kastan" was underlying them. However, the word "casta" was etymologically close to the Latin word castus (chaste), or castanum (brown and chestnut). This proximity is relevant in the moment of understanding its broader meanings too. In fact, being "casto" meant to be "honest, pure, and virginal", virtues that should be followed both by single and married people. "Castos" were prohibited to have sexual intercourse or sexual thoughts outside the marriage vows. This was a condition of their and their children's "purity". Similarly, the proximity to castanum, simultaneously the fruit (chestnut) and the color (brown), may have helped its attribution to people who had a color closer to brown than the Iberians did. This means that even if they were not directly evoked in the definitions provided by the Diccionario, there were elective affinities between "casta", "castizo","casto", "estirpe", "nacion", "puro", and castanum, castus, stirps, natio, genus, progenies, purus, incorruptus. They all could belong to the same order of discourse.

The definitions provided in Bluteau's Vocabulario are similar. "Casta" refers again to generation and lineage; secondly, to noble people; and thirdly, to family, being associated also to the Latin words genus and stirps. In addition, Bluteau refers the uses of the word in the realms of plants and animals. However, the fact that Bluteau evokes the experience of "casta" among the "gentiles" of India is more relevant. For him, Indians were so "superstitious" and concerned with "difference", "nobility", and "caste", that they did not want any kind of communication and contact with a member of another "caste". The difficult relationship between Indians and Portuguese was, according to Bluteau, a confirmation of this. An Indian considered that communication with a Portuguese would corrupt him. For this reason, after meeting one, he would perform rituals of purification. Bluteau referred the treatise Jadulgatutan (translated by the Portuguese as Pomar das Castas), which circulated in the Indian territories under Portuguese dominion, to explain the existence of four main "castas" in India (the Rajas, the Brahmans, the Chatins and the Balalas), sub-divided into one hundred ninety-six. In Bluteau, who cites seventeenth-century sources, the Manu's theory of varnas had already been translated into a theory of castes where the Rajas were the first and the Brahmans the second (against other narratives, which proposed the inverse ordering). There was still another division of castes: the castes of the right hand, and the ones of the left hand. All of them were inferior to the first four.⁵²

This "Asian" presence in the understanding of the world of "casta" reappears when Bluteau considers the word "castiço". "Castiço" was a son of a Portuguese father and mother, born in India. After this initial definition, the meaning of "castiço" is similar to its meanings in Autoridades. However, Bluteau adds to the "positive meanings" of "castiço", the possibility of "degeneration". Explaining that the word "degenerado" belonged to the same etymological family of gens, and therefore of "generation", Bluteau reminded that "castiço" was "generous", that is to say, the one that had not "degenerated" (in opposition to the mestizo, for example, frequently the result of fornication).⁵³ Then and again, the "castizo" was tendentially "chaste", since he was the product of the moral virtue of "chastity".⁵⁴

Besides all these variations, there were interesting affinities between the words "casta" and the early-modern uses of "raza" or "raça". When exploring Vocabulario and Diccionario, the results are surprising, indeed. The first definition Bluteau attributes to the word "raça" is no other than "casta". However, he immediately associates "raça" with "bad generation" and "bad lineage". As Bluteau explained, "ter raça" was the same as saying to be of Jewish or Moorish ascent. Similarly, in Diccionario de Autoridades "raza" is also defined as caste or quality of the lineage, which, when applied to humanity, referred to a negative genealogy.⁵⁵ In this period, "casta" and "raza" could be interchangeable, but the positive meanings of "casta" are probably related with its affinity with the world of "chastity". In contrast, "raza" pointed immediately towards the realm of animals, and to the kind of behavior associated with them. Depending on the concrete uses of the word and the concrete contexts of interpretation, "caste" was somehow between "chaste" and "race", between the purity of blood and the infected one, between the realm of humans and the realm of animals.

From the Indian World to the Atlantic

As said before, the frequency of the word was higher in India than in the kingdom of Portugal. The Portuguese living in Portugal used the word, but its use was random. People applied it, as a category, mainly to the realms of plants and animals. The presence of caste was overwhelming, instead, when used as a qualifier of good behavior, like being chaste, a central virtue in the early modern Portugal.

However, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese and other Europeans settled in India commonly applied the word to distinguish certain Indian social groups. It had already become a social category. Furthermore, "casta" was fully incorporated by the metropolitan world as a social category used to identify Indians, as it can be seen by the relevance given to it in Bluteau's Vocabulary (in contrast with what happens in Diccionario de Autoridades, for example). Colonial experience did have an impact in the construction of caste as a common sense social category in the Portuguese world. This category would mainly be applied, eventually, to Indian social groups.

Further analysis is needed in order to answer properly these questions. Still, in contrast with the previous hypothesis, the findings of this essay show that in early modern India, the uses of "casta" associated it more with "chaste" and "castus" than with "raza". The association with "raza" (which evoked immediately the realm of animals, as well as the people of Jewish and Moorish ascent) was rare in early modern India. When Sebastião Dalgado later associate the two words, he did it in an ideological context (the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century) where the word "race" had become a Koselleckian "basic concept" too.⁵⁶

If in India the "animal link" does not explain the selection of the word by the Portuguese, some data indicates that in Brazil these uses could be otherwise, as John Manuel Monteiro has already demonstrated.⁵⁷ What happened in the Atlantic, then? Can we find differences in the uses of the word "casta"? Did it have a similar impact in the Atlantic societies as it had in the Indian (Asian) one?

These questions invite us to expand this enquiry to the Atlantic world. My aim is to engage, in the near future, in a comparison between the circulation and dissemination of the word "casta" in the Indian and in the Atlantic worlds, focusing on Mexico, the immediate counterpart of the Indian experience. This comparison requires, obviously, several methodological precautions. However, I am convinced that we need to pursue it in order to complexify our understandings of the experiences of caste in the early-modern period.

The Mexican system has not been interpreted yet as the key to understanding contemporary Mexico, even if some of its diachronic consequences were very explicit in the nineteenth-century "guerra das castas".⁵⁸ Neither has it had a similar impact in the building of Western social theory. Also in contrast with the Indian castes, where endogamy prevailed, mixed-blood people constituted Mexican castes. Another difference is that occupation (a variable that was important in the Indian case) was not crucial in Mexico either. Instead, the quality of people "calidad", somehow absent as such in the Indian experience, was a relevant variable to assign someone to a certain Mexican caste.⁵⁹ Finally, the question of race has been considered as an essential part of the Mexican case, while for the Indian castes, race discussions are almost absent.⁶⁰

In spite of the differences of longevity, scale, interest of scholarship, and impact in social theory, there are similarities between the Indian and the Mexican cases (and castes) that justify a parallel enquiry. In both cases, ethnicity was an important variable. Literature has demonstrated that depending on their origins and their blood, people from Mexico were registered either in the libro de españoles (the book of Spaniards) or in the libro de castas (the book of castes). This means that for ethnic reasons (or for reasons of "nation") the "pure Spaniards" were not included in the Mexican caste-system; somehow a positive parallel of the exclusion of the "untouchables" from the Indian one. Both systems excluded some people, and in both for ethnic reasons. Adding to that, similarly to its Asian counterpart, depending on the marriages and the social groups involved in them (which had more or less Spanish blood), Mexican people could be ranked in different positions in a very complex and nuanced hierarchy. It was not by chance, therefore, that both in India and Mexico practices of blood origin certification (frequently "genealogical fictions", as María Elena Martínez has called them) were crucial. They intended to verify (as in the Mexican case) the amount of Spanish blood of a certain person in order to locate him or her in the scale of "castas", or out of it; or to ensure (as in India) the purity of blood of another one, permitting to ascribe (or expel) him or her to (or from) an upper caste (those that claimed purity of blood). In both cases, castes were tools of inclusion and exclusion, as well as forms of differentiation, organization and hierarchization of multi-ethnic and multicultural societies.⁶¹

Can the parallels identified in these two geographically and culturally distant territories be attributed to the Iberian imperial presence in both? Independently of the pre-existing local systems of ranking people, the interference of Iberian imperial rule was surely relevant for the discursive invention (and therefore, and in certain ways, social invention) of both systems. Still, this assumption does not explain why the word "casta" became so powerful. Only further research can provide data that will help us to understand these new problems.

Notas

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