Tied conveniently as it was to what one looked like, member-ship in either the upper or the lowest caste was deemed immuta-ble, primordial, fixed from birth to death, and thus regarded asinescapable. “He may neither earn nor wed his way out,” wrotethe scholars Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner in DeepSouth, their seminal 1941 study of caste in America.