Castes continue to operate in contemporary India, while the caste system itself, as a theoretical understanding of a mode of social organisation, no longer has any validity in the context of a modern State. However, an analysis of ritual relations which can still be observed in part, as intermediary data between the representations and the hazards of human relations, highlights the ‘Brahmin’ and ‘god’ figures as pointers to what constitutes a system in the Hindu conception of social order. This enables us to identify the main orientations of current transformations.