Breaking down the question
The instruction write a note signals a compact, structured exposition of G. S. Ghurye's conception of caste. You are to set out how Ghurye defined and characterised the caste system, drawing chiefly on his classic Caste and Race in India (1932).
The key phrase is conception of caste: the emphasis falls on Ghurye's own analytical framework — famously his enumeration of the defining features — rather than on caste in general. A good note also places his approach within his Indological method.
How to approach it
Begin by identifying Ghurye's Indological, textual-cum-comparative approach and his caution against a single tight definition. Then present the core of his conception — the six features of the caste system — explaining each briefly. Close with a short evaluative comment linking his work to later scholarship, including Srinivas, and noting its influence and its limits.
Model answer
G. S. Ghurye, regarded as the father of Indian sociology, offered in Caste and Race in India the most influential early sociological account of caste. Working in the Indological tradition, he combined textual scholarship with comparative and historical evidence. Rather than force caste into one rigid definition, he characterised it through a set of features that together capture its working.
Ghurye identified six such features. First, the segmental division of society: caste divides Hindus into distinct, well-bounded groups, each with its own membership, mode of life and, in the past, its own governing councils, so that the individual's status is fixed by birth into a segment. Second, hierarchy: the segments are ranked in a graded order of superiority and inferiority, with Brahmins at the summit. Third, restrictions on feeding and social intercourse: elaborate rules govern from whom one may accept food and water and with whom one may associate, encoding purity and pollution.
Fourth, civil and religious disabilities and privileges: access to temples, wells, streets and public office was distributed unequally, the higher castes enjoying privileges and the lower suffering disabilities that could amount to untouchability. Fifth, the lack of unrestricted choice of occupation: occupation was largely hereditary, each caste associated with a traditional calling. Sixth, restrictions on marriage: caste is strongly endogamous, marriage confined within the group and often within its sub-divisions, which Ghurye saw as the very keystone of the system.
Ghurye also engaged the race question, examining the relation between caste and the physical types of the Indian population, and he read caste historically as a Brahmanically driven institution that spread across the subcontinent. His conception is thus descriptive and structural, built from textual and comparative materials.
The approach has been criticised for its reliance on classical texts — the book view — over the lived reality of caste that later fieldworkers such as M. N. Srinivas captured through concepts like dominant caste and Sanskritisation. Even so, Ghurye's six features remain a standard starting point for analysing the institution. For a fuller account, see the note on Indology and Ghurye.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look above all for accurate recall of Ghurye's six features, each explained rather than merely named, and set within his Indological method. Marks accrue to candidates who show that this is a textual conception and who contrast it briefly with the later field view of Srinivas. A short evaluative close on the book-view limitation, balanced against the framework's lasting utility, secures the top band.