Did British colonial powers invent the Indian caste system?

The caste system derives from a Portuguese labeling system.

Question: Did British colonial powers invent the Indian caste system?
Position‹5 of 5: The Portuguese invented the Indian caste system
Argument: The caste system derives from a Portuguese labeling system.

There was a history of religious conflict in Portugal that led to the development of a kind of classification system. When Portuguese colonists came to India, they applied similar practices to the native people.

The argument

In the 1300s, the Christian Portuguese were persecuting the Jewish people. Under pressure from the empire, many Jews converted to Christianity. However, when those converts rose to prominent positions in the Church, they drew the resentment of "original" Christian clergy. Furthermore, those converts' subsequent affiliation with tax collectors made them unpopular with poor Christians. Thus, persecution continued against Jewish-descended Christians. Christian leaders began to declare that only "original" Christians were worthy of acknowledgement. The idea of a "casta," a classification based on descent, was formed. And members of the Jewish "casta" were barred from opportunity. When Portuguese colonists came to India, they applied the same classification system to the native people. They believed that different groups stayed separate to preserve a purity of bloodline, just as they did in Portugal. This idea propagated in India and became integral to its history. Not only the title, but also the very nature of the caste system, was given by the influence of the Portuguese.

Premises

[P1]In Portugal, persecution of Jewish-descended Christians produced the idea of 'casta' — a classification based on descent that barred certain groups from opportunity. [P2] Portuguese colonists applied this same descent-based classification to India's native people, believing groups stayed separate to preserve bloodline purity, and the idea became integral to Indian history. [C] Therefore, both the title and the very nature of the caste system derive from Portuguese labelling, so the Portuguese invented the Indian caste system.

Counter-arguments

The Portuguese influence on the caste system was nothing more than putting a name to a pre-existing practice of separation they observed on arrival, as Guha's article implies. They didn't invent the practice; they simply gave it the name we know it by today. But the practice itself has deep historical roots - far earlier than when the Portuguese arrived.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The account of Iberian anxieties about descent is broadly accurate, but the word casta and the practice it named in Portugal belong to Iberian history. The premise establishes the origin of a term, not of an institution. [Rejecting P2] The inference to India does not hold. Varna and jati are attested in Indian texts and inscriptions for well over a millennium before the Portuguese arrived, with endogamy, hereditary occupation and ranked status described in sources long predating the sixteenth century. The counter-argument concedes what the evidence supports — that the Portuguese supplied the label — while this premise's far stronger claim, that "the very nature" of the system came from them, is asserted without a single Indian source. The position also sits oddly among the alternatives on offer: an argument that colonisers named and later reshaped an existing system is a sibling position, not this one.