Jāti (in Devanagari: जाति Tamil:சாதி) (the word literally means 'birth') is the term used to denote clans, tribes, communities and sub-communities in India. It is a term used across religions. In Indian society each jāti typically has an association with a traditional job function or tribe, although religious beliefs (e.g. Sri Vaishnavism or Veera Shaivism) or linguistic groupings define some jatis. A person's surname typically reflects a community (jati) association: thus Gandhi = perfume seller, Dhobi = washerman, Srivastava = military scribe, etc. In any given location in India 500 or more jatis may co-exist, although the exact composition will differ from district to district.
The British, since 1901, for the purposes of the Decennial Census, fitted all the Jatis into one or the other of the varna categories as described in Brahminical literature, ignoring that there are many Jatis that would straddle two Varnas, based on occupation. As a community in south India put it,"We are soldiers and saddle makers too". The Indian society since pre-historic times had a complex, inter-dependent and cooperative political economy. One non-sacred text, the Laws of Manu, c. 200, codified the social relations between communities from the perspective of the Varna castes. Although this book was almost unknown south of the Vindhyas, it gained prominence when the British administrators and Western scholars used it exclusively to gain an understanding of traditional Hindu law in India.
Crispin Bates noted in 1995 that
In India, anthropologists now more often speak of 'sub-castes' or jatis, as the building blocks of society [rather than castes]. However, unless there is a strong element of political control or territoriality associated with such groups these too tend to disintegrate upon closer inspection as soon as essentially exogamous practices such as hypergamy are taken into account. Needless to say, all such endogamous groupings are increasingly irrelevant when talking about modern India, where large-scale migrations are commonplace, where economic and social change is radically re-shaping society, and where marriage taboos are being overthrown at an accelerating rate.[1]