Did British colonial powers invent the Indian caste system?

Regional differences over castes were eradicated under the British

Question: Did British colonial powers invent the Indian caste system?
Position‹3 of 5›: British colonial powers reshaped the caste system
Argument1 of 2›: Regional differences over castes were eradicated under the British

The caste system existed prior to British rule, but the colonial powers created a uniform hierarchy.

The argument

Before the British colonisation of India, caste was not a single system but many. Which groups ranked as superior and which as inferior varied from region to region across the sub-continent, so that a community's standing in one place bore no fixed relation to its standing elsewhere. Caste operated as a set of local hierarchies, each embedded in particular customs, occupations and relationships, rather than as one ladder running the length of India. What the British introduced was uniformity. Administering a territory of that scale required categories that held everywhere — a single scheme into which any subject could be placed regardless of where they lived — and the colonial state built one, imposing a common hierarchy across regions that had previously ordered themselves differently. Proponents of this position stress that this was a reshaping rather than an invention: the materials were already there, but the flattening of regional variation into one continent-wide ranking was the colonial contribution. The source chosen for that ranking compounded the change. The British based the new uniform system on the Law Code of Manu, a text written in the second century, and applied it far more literally than it had initially been intended. A text that had functioned as one prescriptive account among others, honoured unevenly and read loosely in practice, was treated instead as an authoritative code — the definitive statement of who stood where. Local practice was then measured against it rather than the other way around. The result was a caste order more rigid and more standardised than anything that preceded it, and one carrying the authority of the state behind it. On this argument British colonial powers did not conjure caste from nothing, but they eradicated the regional differences that had defined it and left a reshaped system in their place.

Premises

[P1]Before British colonization, the caste hierarchy varied significantly from region to region across the Indian sub-continent. [P2] The British imposed a uniform caste hierarchy based on a literal application of the Law Code of Manu, overriding these regional variations. [C] Therefore, British colonial powers reshaped the caste system rather than leaving it as they found it.

Counter-arguments

The Law Code of Manu wasn’t translated into English until 1794, nearly half a century after the British had arrived in India. This means that if the British imposed the caste system as outlined in the Code, they were relying on Indian pandits for guidance and interpretation. In this context, it is clear that the British didn’t reshape the caste system. The Brahmins, the learned caste, used the British colonization of India to cement their dominance of Indian civil and social society.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] The legal system upon which the modern caste system is based wasn't available in English until after the caste system had been established. Therefore, the British could not have been the driving forces behind this change.