Caste in Wikipedia

The information in Wikipedia usually is accurate - but sometimes it is slanted.  Caste, and whether it is religious, cultural, or political in nature, is a topic that is controversial in India, and very much so among Indian-Americans as well.  It is easy to misstep. But this is Wikipedia, they always seem to err on the side of liberal activists, don't they?

Scholars believe that the Varnas system was never truly operational in society and there is no evidence of it ever being a reality in Indian history.

There is a 20th C woke mythology, now fully exploded, that caste was never really a big deal in India, it was something the the British exaggerated in order to keep control of the population.  The above sounds like a dead-ender attempt to keep that going. The problem is that the genetics show that these groups have been endogamous for 1500 years*, and in some cases are farther apart from each other than they are from Scandinavians.  So the phrase "never truly operational" rings a little hollow. One wonders what would count operational, if less than 1 in 200 marrying outside the group every generation for fifteen centuries doesn't cut it. 

Once you know that, the followup evidence they provide looks almost humorous.

*In some groups, only 1000.  But there is quiet but deep evidence of it going back 4000 years in some groups. Let me go all Indo-European on you: The Brahmins have considerably more Steppe ancestry than the groups around them, in all regions. As there is more Steppe ancestry in the north, some non-Brahmin jatis there have more of it than even Brahimins in the south.  But those southerners still greatly exceed the local castes in Indo-European DNA.