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ostly with the Kshatriyas, 'Brahmins' have been portrayed by various historians as essentially the main custodians and keepers of 'Dharma', due to which they enjoyed a lot of prestige and several advantages.

A Buddhist pilgrim, called Fa Xian, from China had visited India around 4th century. He mentioned in his travel memoirs that except for 'Chandals', who were outcastes due to the nature of their work as disposers of the dead, no other caste or section of the society was disadvantaged in any manner. Around that period, the kings of both 'Sudra' as well as 'Brahmin' castes were as common as the ones of 'Kshatriya' caste. All in all, the caste system was not exercised as a prohibitive or a repressive system.

However, the advent of British led them to treat the Indian caste system like their own social class system. They noted caste as a symbol of occupation, social status and intellectual capability. That led to the caste system turning into a more rigid system during the British rule, since they had started enumerating castes during their ten-year census process and codified the entire caste system during their rule.

Among all the castes, the 'harijans' had the lowest status in the society, since they were considered to be the people outside the caste system. Also referred to as 'untouchables' by some, they worked in mostly unhealthy, unbecoming or polluting professions. Apart from their impoverished status, they also had to endure social segregation and several social restrictions. They were never allowed to worship in temples along with others, nor were they allowed to take water from common sources. No person from higher castes was supposed to interact with them. If anyone ever came into physical contact with an untouchable person, the person of the higher caste was considered to be defiled and had to take a thorough bath in order to purge himself. Even among the Harijans, there were a few sub-castes like 'dhobi' and 'nai', who would normally avoid any interaction with lower order 'Bhangis', who were treated as 'outcastes among the outcastes'.

Many sociologists have researched on the specific historical benefits that were offered by such a rigid social structure, while also commenting on its drawbacks. In its original form, caste system functioned as a tool to bring order to a society where people were ruled more by mutual consent rather than by compulsion, where people inherited merit, where equality was present only within the caste, but not between different castes. Such a division of labour created a strictly defined system of mutual interdependence, creating a feeling of security within a community. The division of labor, with its roots in ethnicity, allowed different immigrants and various foreigner tribes to integrate into the society creating their own caste niches.

Economically, the caste system played a crucial role, functioning very much like medieval European guilds, and creating a division of labor ensuring the training of apprentices and achieving some level of specialization. For example, in few regions, tailoring each type of cloth was a speciality for a specific sub-caste. Moreover, some philosophers have commented that the majority of people would have been acceptably comfortable in segregated endogamous classes, because they resided in ancient times.

It is generally believed that the comparative ranking of all castes was non-