When a Hindu organisation produced an official report about caste in Britain, it found representatives of more than 14 castes around the country. The report — Caste in the UK — by the Hindu Forum of Britain noted that caste was a term created by 16th-century Portuguese voyagers based on the word casta, meaning lineage.
The British colonial anthropologist Sir Herbert Hope Risley, who devised the 1901 Indian Census, counted 2,378 main castes and tribes, competitively arranged according to social precedence. These old identities are being kept alive in the young generation of British Asians, particularly Hindus and Sikhs, reluctant to see their distinct cultural inheritance vanish.
Selina Rawal, 27, a biochemist, is president of the youth wing of the Brahmin Society North London,