| Summary: | When we talk about the caste system today, among other things, we talk about the wily, crafty and the boasting Brahmins who founded and maintained a set of self-serving rules that effectively took the form of the caste system. How do social scientists know about these Brahmins? As a set of new scholars are demonstrating today, the ancient Indian texts - such as the Vedas or the Mahabharata - do not talk about the caste system or the rule-setting priestly class of Brahmins. These texts do not even exhibit an impulse to put into place a system that even remotely resembles the so-called caste system. Whence is this idea of Brahmin then? Ever since Wilhelm Halbfass’s Imagining India (1990), a growing but a small number of Indologists talk about the 11th century Al-Bīrūnī as one of “the greatest scholars ever” to speak about the Indian caste system. There is, however, neither a comprehensive study to show what his contributions measure up to nor any attempt to dig into the Islamic culture that culminates in Al-Biruni’s quite detailed picture of the Brahmin and the caste system. This paper sifts through the earliest available Islamic writings on India, from the early 8th century to Al-Biruni’s time, to chart a genealogy of the figure of the law-making crafty Brahmin that we confront by the 11th century in Muslim writings.
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