Did British colonial powers invent the Indian caste system?

Pre-colonial documents indicate a more socially mobile society.

Question: Did British colonial powers invent the Indian caste system?
Position1 of 5›: Yes, British colonial powers invented the Indian caste system
Argument1 of 4›: Pre-colonial documents indicate a more socially mobile society.

Documents indicate that caste oppression was not a major prohibiter of social mobility prior to British rule.

The argument

Proponents of this argument hold that the documentary record from before British rule points to a society whose social identities were far more fluid than the rigid caste hierarchy later associated with India. On this view, the strongest evidence against caste being an ancient, fixed institution is behavioral: pre-colonial documents indicate that families could relocate to new towns and, in doing so, achieve significant social mobility. A farmer's family was not permanently bound to farming; its members could become soldiers, merchants, or laborers, and they could make these transitions without facing caste oppression. The inferential chain runs as follows. If caste had operated in pre-colonial India as a rigid, hereditary system, occupation and social standing would have been fixed at birth, and changing one's station — particularly across the boundary between agricultural labor and soldiering or commerce — would have been blocked or punished. Yet the documents proponents cite show precisely such movement occurring, and occurring without the sanctions a genuinely oppressive caste order would impose. Mobility of this kind is, advocates argue, incompatible with the existence of the caste system as it is conventionally understood. The system's defining features — rigidity, heredity, and oppression — are therefore absent from the pre-colonial record. From this, proponents draw the conclusion that supports the broader position: the rigid, oppressive caste system did not predate colonialism but emerged only under British rule. If social fluidity was the norm before the British arrived, and rigidity appears afterward, then the fixed caste hierarchy must be a product of the colonial encounter rather than an indigenous inheritance. On this reasoning, the British did not merely describe an existing system; they created one, and the mobility documented in pre-colonial sources is the key evidence that there was no such system for them to find.

Context

In the pre-colonial era, social identities were more malleable. This indicates that the caste system was a colonial construct.

Premises

[P1]Pre-colonial documents show that Indian social identities were far more fluid before the British arrived. [P2] Families could move towns and change occupations — farmers becoming soldiers or merchants — without facing caste oppression. [P3] The rigid, oppressive caste system thus emerged only under British rule. [C] Therefore, because pre-colonial society was socially mobile, British colonial powers invented the Indian caste system.

Counter-arguments

Relative social mobility prior to British rule does not prove that the British created the caste system. It is possible that the caste system was already in place prior to the British arrival, but had a lesser impact on social mobility. In this case, the British could not be attributed with inventing the caste system but may have played a role in rolling it out across the country or manipulating it to suit their purposes.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P4] The British didn't invent the caste system, they merely modified the existing caste system.