Following the publication of the book by E. R. Leach, ed., Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (1960), much additional information was gathered on caste hierarchies in South Asia, and two major attempts were made to identify the underlying unity of this material - a structuralist one by Louis Dumont and a ethnosocialogical one by McKim Marriott et al. This quest for unity seemed attractive, yet at the same time, as the contributions to the present volume indicate, premature. The four papers collected here and published in 1982 are all concerned with caste ideology and caste interaction in different locales of South Asia.
