[x]

Is that really what happened? It does seem that a caste society that segregates people off into various segments it plants the seeds of its own decline. When lower castes can't make their way up very far in society and upper castes can't make use of the expertise of arrivistes and aren't regenerated by newcomers, revolution or decline looks to be the likely result. The "fresh blood" justification of immigration is suspect, but within societies there does seem to be a dying away of high castes if intermarriage is restricted.

[koba]

The rich upper castes genrally limited thier reproduction because they wanted their children to inherit the land. The illiterate lower castes needed children because the children could be used as farm labor or even as sexual labor for the upper castes. That kind of thinking goes on even today. The Rolling Stones song "Brown Sugar" gives a pretty good example of this, though they were talking about slavery in America. When a small educated group is outnumbered by a huge pool of uneducated people, the educated upper middle-class people try to flee if they can. Land becomes premium, jobs scare, infrastrucutre crumbles etc. India tends to double its population every thirty years, so by 2035 there should 2.4 billion people living there, 40% of whom will be completly illiterate and only a thin veneer of people with marketable skills. The same thing, though on a more muted scale, happens in this country. The lower classes have births rates of 3.5-5 children per woman. The upper class birth-rate is 1.84, less than replacement rate. This is why many parts of the country are slowly crumbling. More power, land, and money have to be ceded to the uneducated lower classes because of their sheer weight of numbers. It will be interesting to see how things will turn out here.