In all Traditional Civilizations, and not just the Hindu, the castes existed. Most recently in the West, this could be seen in the Christian Middle Ages. Christians saw the three classes of clergy, noble, and merchant/peasant (the bourgeois were first seen to be in the same class as famers) as a perfect civilizational expression of the tripartite soul of man: spirit, soul, and body. The claims of Republicans and Constitutionalists that they have attained the Christian form of government are the result of the modern deviation and should not be seen as ‘improvements’ on Old Europe’s civilization. Evola points out that both Saint Thomas and the reformer Luther agreed that God “assigns to each and every one his or her own state” and to “go from one profession to another” contradicted his law.
-from the Gornahoor blog
Also, with unrelated bonus quote:
Instead, our approach to studying traditions should be neither the romanticism of the new age believer, nor the skepticism of the academic debunker, but should contain both the openness of the former, and the discernment of the latter.
To some extent, the belief that there must be somewhere where human beings do and are better than here is an expression of the intuition that the divine is real, and that we ourselves can be better. In the world of Tradition, this intuition and longing found expression in the idea of a better world in the ancient past, in the coming future, or in another realm…
Reditus 