User:Jeffrw/sandbox

indian caste system

I have rewritten the lead of this article under the guidelines of WP:BOLD and WP:Lead. NO PREVIOUS MATERIAL HAS BEEN DELETED, but it has been moved to later sections in the article. Thanks to X and Y for the very helpful feedback. I have incorporated your notes into the rewrite, although obviously by WP:Lead some of the more complex issues have to be dealt with more thoroughly in later sections.

I understand that the caste system is very complex and defies any simple definition, but for the lead I wanted to try summarize the literature's general consensus on its broad outlines. One has to start somewhere. But I agree it might be better to add more qualifications to the opening paragraph and I have rewritten it accordingly. It seemed to me better to save concepts like gotra, hypergamy, exogamy, the formation of new castes and so on for later in the article, rather than try to overburden the lead. Obviously it would be better if in an expert wrote this but but since no one is willing to jump in so I'm going by the principle of WP:BOLD. Regarding the equivalence of caste and jati, I'm following T.N. Madan in the Britannica article, but I don't understand the subtlety of your distinction; perhaps you could give me a pointer into the literature.