The meaning of the term 'Caste.' The two main ideas denoted by a caste are a community or persons following a common occupation, and a community whose members marry only among themselves.

A third distinctive feature is that the members of a caste do not as a rule eat with outsiders with the exception of other Hindu castes of a much higher social position than their own.

None of these will, however, serve as a definition of a caste.

In a number of castes the majority of members have abandoned their traditional occupation and taken to others.

Less than a fifth of the Brahmans of the Central Provinces are performing any priestly or religious functions, and the remaining four-fifths are landholders or engaged in Government service as magistrates, clerks of public offices, constables and orderlies, or in railway service in different grades, or in the professions as barristers and pleaders, doctors, engineers and so on.