Caste

G. S. Ghurye's six features are the classic enumeration and are worth naming as his: segmental division of society; hierarchy; restrictions on feeding and social intercourse; civil and religious disabilities and privileges; lack of unrestricted choice of occupation; and restrictions on marriage.

Theories of its origin

Given briefly, because the origin is not recoverable and the question is less examined than the features.

The traditional or religious theory, deriving varna from the creation account in the Purusha Sukta. It explains the classification's authority, not its social existence.

The racial theory, associated with Herbert Risley, holding that caste arose from the subordination of an indigenous population by incoming groups. It is not accepted: the biological premise is unsound, and the theory served colonial classification purposes.

The occupational theory, associated with Nesfield, deriving caste from hereditary occupational guilds that closed themselves by endogamy.

The political theory, associated with Abbe Dubois, treating caste as a device created and maintained by the Brahmins.

The evolutionary theory, treating it as a gradual growth from many sources: occupation, tribe, sect, migration and ritual practice, hardening over long periods.

Colonial consolidation. Modern scholarship, associated with Nicholas Dirks and others, argues that colonial administration, and above all the census enumeration of castes from the nineteenth century, hardened fluid local identities into fixed, countable and ranked categories. This is the most important recent contribution and is worth including: whatever caste was before, the modern system was substantially shaped by being counted.

Change in the caste system

Organise the answer by cause, then state honestly what has and has not changed.

The causes of change

Legal and constitutional. The abolition of untouchability and the forbidding of its practice in any form; the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of caste; equality of opportunity in public employment; reservation in legislatures, public employment and education; the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955; and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, which creates specific offences and a separate machinery for them.

Economic. Industrialisation and urban employment, which recruit by qualification rather than by birth; the decline of the jajmani system in [The Jajmani System]; and land reform.

Urbanisation. Anonymity, shared transport, restaurants and workplaces make the older rules of contact impossible to enforce.

Education, which opened occupations and produced articulate leadership.

Social and religious reform movements, from the nineteenth century onward, and the movements led by Jyotirao Phule, Periyar and B. R. Ambedkar, whose contribution belongs in any answer on caste and law.

Politics. Adult franchise made numbers matter, so the castes that are numerous acquired a resource they had never had, which is [Political Parties and Voting Behaviour] and Kothari's politicisation of caste.

Sanskritisation, Srinivas's concept, treated fully in [Sanskritisation and Westernization]: a group of lower rank adopts the practices of a higher one and claims a higher position. Its sociological significance is that it produces mobility for the group while leaving the hierarchy itself intact, which is why Srinivas called it positional change rather than structural change.

What has changed and what has not

Changed substantially: the rules of commensality and physical contact, especially in cities; the tie between caste and occupation, in the middle and upper reaches of the occupational structure; the open imposition of disabilities, which is unlawful; and the political weight of numerically large castes.

Changed little: marriage. Caste endogamy remains the general rule and is the feature that has proved most durable, which is why [Recent Trends in Marriage] treats inter-caste marriage as a small and rising proportion.

Newly visible: caste in urban and professional settings, where it operates through networks, recruitment and marriage rather than through ritual rules; and caste-based political mobilisation and organisation.

Persisting sharply at the bottom: the association between the most stigmatised occupations and particular communities, which is why legislation prohibiting manual scavenging and providing for rehabilitation exists and why it has repeatedly had to be strengthened.

Caste and class: the relation

Caste and class are different systems that overlap without coinciding, and the standing statement is Weber's threefold scheme in [Class]: caste is primarily a status order and class an economic one.

The two correlate broadly, since the historically disabled groups are disproportionately poor. They do not coincide: there are poor households of high ritual rank and prosperous households of low ritual rank, and the mismatch is precisely what makes Indian stratification irreducible to class. An answer that treats caste as merely a form of class misdescribes the society, and so does one that treats it as purely ritual with no material content.

A worked example

Two households in a small town. The first is of high ritual rank and owns no land; its head is a schoolteacher on a modest salary. The second is of low ritual rank and prosperous; its head owns three trucks and employs eleven people.

On class, the second household ranks above the first: more income, more property, more command over others' labour.

On status, the older ritual order ranks the first above the second, and this shows in whom each may marry, who is invited to whose ceremonies, and how each is addressed.

On party, in Weber's third dimension, the second household may hold more organised power, since it has employees, money and a local political connection.

The three do not align, and the tension between them is a large part of what Indian social life consists of: economic advance that does not convert into ritual standing, and ritual standing that does not convert into income. It is also why questions about caste cannot be answered with data on income alone, and why the sociologist's questions in [Social Stratification] are about mechanism rather than aggregate.

Quick revision

1. Varna is the fourfold textual classification; jati is the thousands of actual endogamous groups. Almost every general statement is true of one and false of the other.
2. Ghurye's six features: segmental division, hierarchy, restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, civil and religious disabilities, lack of unrestricted choice of occupation, restrictions on marriage.
3. Purity and pollution is the organising idea; Dumont made it central and was criticised for neglecting power and land.
4. Endogamy is the mechanism that reproduces the system, and it is what has changed least.
5. Origin theories: traditional, racial (Risley, rejected), occupational (Nesfield), political (Dubois), evolutionary; and colonial consolidation through census enumeration (Dirks).
6. Causes of change: constitutional and legislative, economic, urban, educational, reform movements, and adult franchise.
7. Sanskritisation produces positional change for a group without altering the structure of the hierarchy.
8. Caste is a status order, class an economic one (Weber). They correlate and do not coincide.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish varna from jati. Varna is the fourfold classification of the classical texts, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, uniform across the subcontinent, textual in origin and corresponding to no actual group in daily life. Jati is the operative unit: thousands of regional, endogamous groups, each with a traditional occupation and a local rank. Endogamy, occupation, ranking and mobility all belong to jati, and statements true of the varna scheme are frequently false of jatis, and the reverse.

2. State Ghurye's features of the caste system. Segmental division of society into groups with fixed membership and defined status; a hierarchy in which those groups are ranked; restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, governing from whom food and water may be accepted and what contact is permitted; civil and religious disabilities and privileges attaching to different sections; lack of unrestricted choice of occupation, occupation being hereditary; and restrictions on marriage, that is endogamy.

3. What is Sanskritisation, and what is its limitation as a form of mobility? Srinivas's term for the process by which a group of lower rank adopts the customs, rituals, diet and practices of a higher one and claims a higher position in the hierarchy. Its limitation is that it changes the position of a particular group without altering the hierarchy itself: the ladder remains, its rungs remain ranked by ritual purity, and only the group's place on it moves, which is why Srinivas described it as positional rather than structural change.

4. What has changed in the caste system and what has not? Substantially changed: the rules of commensality and physical contact, particularly in cities; the connection between caste and occupation in the middle and upper reaches of the occupational structure; the open imposition of disabilities, now unlawful; and the political weight of numerically large castes under adult franchise. Little changed: marriage, since caste endogamy remains the general rule, and the association between the most stigmatised occupations and particular communities.

5. Why can caste not be reduced to class? Because they are different dimensions, in Weber's terms a status order and an economic order, and they do not coincide. There are poor households of high ritual standing and prosperous households of low ritual standing, and each is advantaged on one dimension and disadvantaged on the other. Ritual rank governs marriage, commensality and social recognition, which income does not purchase, while economic position governs command over resources, which ritual rank does not confer.