The human society offers a vast field of study in any context, and for this volume of essays devoted to the study of ancient Indian society we have selected only a few of its aspects. The first essay is an introduction to the modern anthropological studies on caste whereas the second one is a detailed study of how the ancients perceived the caste differences through time and how the complexity of the system was matched even in the ancient context by some of the complexities that one observes today on the ground. The third essay is basically about the rural and urban contexts in which the caste system operated.