> There are also something like 25,000 castes and subcastes.
That makes it sound like castes are professions (which IIRC used to be somewhat inherited in the UK, hence names like Smith and Cooper), but where people then tried to assign ranks to those professions (like the family names Bishop and King)?
I am almost totally ignorant of how it really works, but I'm an omni-curious nerd, if you want to enlighten me :)
Yup. In the West one of the Byzantine emperors calcified the economy by making trades heritable (Justinian?). We don't know the historic source of the same in India, just that it happened earlier and was allowed to develop for much, much longer.
That makes it sound like castes are professions (which IIRC used to be somewhat inherited in the UK, hence names like Smith and Cooper), but where people then tried to assign ranks to those professions (like the family names Bishop and King)?
I am almost totally ignorant of how it really works, but I'm an omni-curious nerd, if you want to enlighten me :)