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The caste system is one of the most prominent global images of Indian culture and society. ‘When thinking about India it is hard not to think of caste’, says Nicholas Dirks (2001, 3) when opening his book on caste. The picture of the caste system is regularly projected both within India and increasingly so in Western settings such as the United Kingdom and United States where Indians have settled over the last few decades. The constant iteration of the caste system reinforces the impression that there is some stability to the idea and that its referent is existent. At the same time, multiple accounts and ideas of the nature of the caste system exist (e.g. Banerjee-Dube 2008), and there is, it appears, no consistent and coherent theory of caste out there (Jalki and Pathan 2015). Several chapters in this book question the classical conception of the caste system. This chapter examines one such invocation of the caste system in the context of the enactment of the Equality Act 2010 in the United Kingdom which contains the first provision on caste discrimination in the anti-discrimination legislation of any country, as well as in the linked case law.

‘When thinking about India it is hard not to think of caste’, said Nicholas Dirks as the opening statement of his book Castes of Mind (Dirks 2001). Even though the book seemed to indicate some reservations about such a situation, neither the book, nor anything that has followed, has altered the situation. The study of India across disciplines has been significantly shaped and driven by the study of caste. Caste is still considered the ‘master key to unlocking the Indian world’ (Guha 2013, 21). References to caste in literature about India go back at least to the sixteenth century. Thus, it certainly has a well-established lineage of scholarly interest and research.