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In 1498 the colonial explorer Vasco da Gama reached Kerala, on the West Coast of present-day India The Portuguese first came as traders, but soon moved to consolidate their rule of the region in order to ensure a monopoly over the profitable spice trade The writings of early settlers in Kerala offer a historical account of the ‘varna’ system – an endogamous, hereditary hierarchy sanctioned by key Hindu religious texts The varna system was premised on the inheritance of occupation from parent to child, whereby menial and ritually polluting roles that involved dealing with human waste and corpses were performed by those at the bottom of the hierarchy, often in exploitative arrangements with those at the top This hierarchy pervaded all aspects of social life: touching, dining, marriage, access to education, public spaces, land and even water were circumscribed by one’s position within the system In the Book of Duarte Barbosa, written in 1516, Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese commercial agent and interpreter, termed this system ‘casta’, meaning breed or lineage In an attempt to define the varna system, writers such as Barbosa drew from anti-Semitic ideas of bloodline purity, which were then pervasive in the Iberian Peninsula   The term ‘caste’ thus has its roots in the persecution and pathologising of Jewish people during the Black Death of 1348, and in the anti-Semitic pogroms of 1391 in Spain, events which resulted in the mass conversion of Jewish people into Christianity The old Christians viewed the new converts, the ‘conversos’, with scepticism In the mid-fifteenth century, the Spanish Court of Inquisition installed blood purity (limpieza de sangre) laws, which decreed that any Christian with a Jewish ancestor was a converso, and thus restricted from holding prominent trade or political positions; these laws form the foundation of racial anti-Semitism in the Western world Spanish colonialists fashioned similar racial hierarchies in the Americas, based on typologies of mixed-race individuals In the subcontinent, the Iberians identified their