There are nothing called as Races based on Caste and Religion in India. Indians are basically Indians. All our life we are hearing that someone is a North Indian and someone is South India and caste-ism always played a role in India. I always wanted to learn about Ancient Indians as that gives us an idea of the habits of India. What matters most is all of Indians are found to have similar Genetic markers which means that a person born in New Delhi cannot say whether his ancestors came from Hyderabad or a person in Tamil Nadu cannot say that if his ancestors were distinctly similar to the genetic mark up of Bengalis. What matters the most as we create a linguistic and secular divide in our country based on caste, we tend to forget that Ancient India from 0 CE onward to the present era have become racists as a direct change of climate along the Tropic of Cancer.All castes are a direct gradient of the change in patterns and our eating habits. However if we look inwards we all belong to a migrant population that underwent a severe mixing that is why our population grew to this extent. The present genetic markers have been able to make our ancestral lineage which was a mixture of polytheistic customs because of Iranians and Zoroastrians. South Asia is a mix of four groups of people who have settled at various points in Time. Looking at the link makes it easier to understand
I would ask people to read
The peopling of South Asia: an illustrated guide
There were four major migrations into India
Ancient Migrants who came to South Asia and stayed there (Proto Asians/Eurasians) - 50kya Neolithic Farmers from Iran - 10kya - 7kya (The world's first farmers were surprisingly diverse) East Asian expansion from the Northeast into India (Y-chromosome diversity suggests southern origin and Paleolithic backwave migration of Austro-Asiatic speakers from eastern Asia to the Indian subcontinent) Yamnaya (PIE) expansion from the Pontic Steppe into India. They are mix of ANE (Ancestral North Eurasians) plus (Caucasian Hunter gatherers) - 3kya - 4kya (Yamna culture - Wikipedia) Modern day Indians are a mix of these four groups.
Frantz Fanon, black thinker from a French colony in the Caribbean of the American continent whose name is Martinique, identifies in the "Race" the dividing line of the human.
According to this thinker, since the colonial imposition of Europe in America race, as a hierarchy from which superiority / inferiority relationships are articulated that assign privileges and / or oppression to each other, has been imposed as a hierarchy based on which are marked social distances with respect to access to wealth, goods, services, knowledge and / or socially produced wisdom. The puertorican sociologist based in the United States, Ramon Grosfoguel, has a large work that would be worth revising to think the Race from other epistemic horizons. The pertinent thing of the previous is to try to think the race beyond the ethnic or culture. If not to think about its coherent relationship with the set of social relationships that assign to one / another conditions of privilege / oppression.
Marcel Detienne, France, has a reflection on what means to be autochthonous in France that contributes to what I have previously indicated.
I hope this can add to your reflection.
I think that there a a number of inconsistencies: 1) when we talk of race we refer to genetic differences; when we refer to language, culture and social organizations (such as caste, jati) then we refer to ethnicity, which does not look at genes, but at cultural aspects. 2) there is little doubt that South Indian Dravidians differ from north Indian Aryans. Usually it is assumed that Drawidians are the older population, which once was spread over most of what is India today, but they withdraw to the South and to marginal locations (e.g. mountai areas) when Aryan groups evaded from the north-west. In Baluchistan there are groups who speak Drawidian language.
Having lived many years both in North India (Rajasthan, New Delhi) as well as in South India (Tamil Nadu, Kerala) it seems to me that the distinction between Aryans and Dravidians is not just a distinctions of culture (language, ethnicity), but of genes (race). This would make much sense as the different groups came from different regions and also appear in their physical features considerably different.
I agree that such differences have been used to separate people, to create hierarchies (castes and jatis; the name for caste is varna, which means color, skin color). The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu was (and partly still is) a response to discrimination of Drawidians by Aryans. Again it is difficult to exactly say, if such discrimination was racial or ethnical. The Drawidian movement was an anti-Brahmin movement; a movement directed against representatives of Aryans in the South in form of high caste Brahmins........
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