Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1916)

A series reading Ambedkar’s foundational essay on how caste was built — not born. Each part follows one step of his argument, in his own logic, drawn directly from the 1916 text.

Part 1 — The Origin of Caste: From Exogamy to Endogamy

In 1916, a 25-year-old B. R. Ambedkar presented a paper at Columbia University that remains one of the earliest attempts to explain not what caste is, but how it actually works — the mechanism that holds it together and keeps it alive across generations. Most writing before him had described caste. Ambedkar set out to explain its genesis: how it was assembled, and why it endures.

His answer turned on one deceptively simple distinction: the difference between marrying outside your own group and marrying within it — exogamy versus endogamy. That single distinction, he argued, is the key to the entire structure of caste.

In this first part, we begin where Ambedkar begins — with the open, mixing society that India was, before caste closed it in