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rigid or differed from one place to other before the advent of the British.[24] Sociologists like Bernard Buber and Marriott McKim comment how the understanding of the caste system as a rigid and textual classification has led to the perception of the caste system as a more process-oriented, fundamental and contextual segregation. Other sociologists like Y.B Damle have used theoretical models in order to explain mobility in the caste system of India.[25]

As per these scholars, sections of lower-caste population could attempt to improve the status of their caste by trying to copy the social customs of higher castes. The mobility in caste laws allowed very low-caste clerics like Valmiki to write the Ramayana, which later became a central body of Hindu religious scripture. There is another precedent of a few Shudra families in South India, within the temples of the Sri Vaishnava sect, elevating their caste.[25] The following lists a few changes in varnas that have been cited in Hindu texts:

Priyavrata, the eldest son of Manu, became king, a Kshatriya. Seven out of his ten sons became kings while three of them became Brahmans. They were Mahavira, Kavi and Savana. (Ref bhagwat puran chap.5)

Kavash -ailush, who was the son of a Sudra, achieved the varna of a Rishi. He later became mantra-drashta to a number of Vedic mantras contained in Rig-Veda 10th Mandal. Satyakama, the son of Jabala, born from an unknown father, became a Rishi because of his qualities.

Some psychologists have found that the mobility across different caste lines may have been very low, although different sub-castes (or jatis) may have moved to a different social status over a few generations by the process of fission, re-location, or adoption of some new rituals.[26]

M. N. Srinivas, a sociologist, has also reviewed the key question of rigidity in Indian Caste system. During an ethnographic research of the Coorgs in Karnataka, he found considerable mobility among their caste hierarchies.[27][28] He concludes that the caste system is quite different from a rigid system wherein the status of each caste is fixed forever; instead, the movement in social status has always been possible, particularly in the middle levels of the hierarchy. According to him, it was always feasible for people born into a lower caste to move to a higher social position by simply adopting the practices of vegetarianism and teetotalism, the key customs of the higher castes. Although theoretically the mobility was forbidden, the process in practice was not uncommon. Such is the concept of 'sanskritization', or the acceptance of upper-caste rituals and norms by the people from lower castes, which demonstrates both the complexity and the fluidity of Indian caste relations.

This is further corroborated by the fact that many of the Indian dynasties were of obscure origins suggesting some social mobility. Many sources in this period mention a number of new castes, like the Kayasthas (the scribes) and Khatris (the traders). According to some Brahmanic literature, these new castes originated because of intercaste marriages, but this might be an attempt at positioning their rank in the hierarchy. Khatri, for example, appears more to be a Prakritised version of the Sanskrit word 'Kshatriya'.[29]

Reforms and Revolutions against Caste system Swami Vivekananda once said that caste system of India is 'point