Unit 2: Caste structure and change

I. Orientation

Caste is a historically layered system of social classification, hereditary membership, hierarchy, and regulated social interaction in South Asia. It is best understood through the relationship between the idealized four-fold varna model and the thousands of locally organized jatis, while also examining how colonial administration, democratic politics, law, economic change, and social movements reshaped caste from the eighteenth century onward.

• Core distinction: Varna is a broad textual classification; jati refers to concrete, usually localized, endogamous communities.
• Defining principle: Caste traditionally connected birth with social status, occupation, marriage rules, food practices, and ritual rank.
• Hierarchical structure: Caste ranking was often expressed through ideas of purity and pollution, though actual rankings differed across regions.
• Institutional change: Colonial censuses, courts, land settlements, and administrative categories made caste more formally recorded and politically significant.
• Modern contradiction: The Constitution prohibits caste discrimination, but caste continues to influence access to land, education, employment, political power, and social dignity.
• Analytical convention: Caste should not be treated as either completely unchanged or entirely abolished; it has been transformed and reproduced in new forms.

II. Varna and caste — textual model and lived communities

A. Orientation

Varna and caste are related but non-identical concepts: varna presents a four-part ideological order, whereas caste in everyday social life is organized mainly through jatis.

B. varna and caste

This distinction explains why a simple four-category model cannot describe India’s actual caste formations.

• Varna model: Classical texts commonly describe four varnas—Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra—associated respectively with learning and ritual, political-military authority, commerce, and service or productive labour.
• Excluded groups: Communities historically placed outside the varna order were stigmatized as “untouchable”; the Constitution later used the administrative category Scheduled Castes, while many communities prefer terms such as Dalit.
• Jati structure: A jati is a birth-based, usually endogamous group with a regional name, customary occupation, internal leadership, and distinctive marriage and food rules.
• Numerical difference: India has thousands of jatis, not merely four castes. A potter, leatherworker, pastoralist, or weaver community may occupy different positions in different regions.
• Relationship: Varna supplied a broad language of ranking, while jatis constituted the practical units through which people married, worked, ate, and organized community life.
• Mobility within limits: A jati could claim a higher varna status through changes in ritual practice, wealth, or political power, but such claims were negotiated locally rather than automatically accepted everywhere.

III. Caste and hierarchy — rank, purity, and inequality

A. Orientation

Caste hierarchy is a system of unequal social ranking traditionally justified through ritual notions of purity and pollution and maintained through everyday rules of interaction.

B. caste and hierarchy

The hierarchy of caste operated through both symbolic status and material control over labour, land, education, and public resources.

• Purity and pollution: Practices involving birth, death, menstruation, bodily substances, food, and occupations such as handling leather or human waste were often used to assign ritual status.
• Rules of distance: Restrictions could concern temple entry, use of wells, seating arrangements, clothing, forms of address, and whether food or water could be accepted from another caste.
• Endogamy: Marriage within the caste or sub-caste was a central mechanism for reproducing status, property, and group identity across generations.
• Occupational association: Caste frequently linked families to occupations, but this was never a perfectly fixed division; landownership, migration, markets, and political power altered occupational patterns.
• Material inequality: Ritual ranking was reinforced when dominant groups controlled land, credit, education, village offices, or the labour of subordinated communities.
• Regional variation: M. N. Srinivas’s idea of the dominant caste highlights groups that combine numerical strength, landownership, and political influence, even when they are not ritually highest.
• Resistance: Anti-caste traditions associated with Buddhism, Bhakti movements, Phule, Periyar, Ambedkar, and Dalit movements challenged hereditary inequality and the authority of caste hierarchy.

IV. Caste and colonialism — classification and institutional transformation

A. Orientation

Colonial rule did not invent caste, but British administration reorganized its meanings by surveying, classifying, enumerating, and governing populations through caste categories, especially from the nineteenth century.

B. caste and colonialism

Colonial institutions converted flexible and locally negotiated identities into more standardized administrative classifications while also creating new opportunities for caste-based political organization.

• Census classification: From the late nineteenth century, colonial censuses asked officials to classify communities by caste and rank. The 1901 Census under H. H. Risley notably attempted to relate caste status to racial and anthropometric ideas.
• Administrative simplification: Officials often treated the varna model as if it were a complete map of Indian society, even though local jatis did not fit neatly into four categories.
• Competition for rank: Census labels encouraged communities to submit petitions, histories, and genealogies claiming higher status, producing what scholars describe as processes of “caste association” and status assertion.
• Land and law: Revenue settlements, property rules, courts, and recruitment policies connected caste more closely with landholding, legal recognition, and access to government employment.
• Colonial knowledge: Ethnographic reports and district manuals presented caste as an enduring “Indian tradition,” sometimes freezing practices that had previously been flexible or contested.
• New political organization: Print, education, urban associations, and representative institutions enabled caste sabhas to mobilize beyond the village.
• Limits of the colonial explanation: Caste predated British rule and cannot be reduced to a colonial creation; colonialism intensified, codified, and administratively reshaped existing institutions.

V. Caste and politics — representation, power, and democratic mobilization

A. Orientation

Modern politics has not simply removed caste; it has turned caste identities into resources for representation, collective bargaining, welfare claims, and electoral coalition-building.

B. caste and politics

Caste enters politics through both the struggle against discrimination and the pursuit of power by numerically significant communities.

• Constitutional framework: Articles 15 and 17 prohibit discrimination on specified grounds and abolish untouchability; Article 16 permits provisions for the advancement of disadvantaged groups in public employment.
• Reservations: Seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in legislatures, and reservations operate in education and public employment. The system treats historical exclusion as requiring compensatory representation.
• Backward-class politics: The Mandal Commission, established in 1979 and implemented nationally in 1990, recommended 27 percent reservation in central government employment for Other Backward Classes, subject to later legal conditions.
• Electoral mobilization: Parties build coalitions among Dalits, Other Backward Classes, dominant agrarian groups, minorities, and upper castes. Caste arithmetic may influence candidate selection and constituency strategy.
• Dalit assertion: Organizations and leaders have used elections, protest, literature, and law to demand dignity, land, security, and implementation of anti-discrimination measures.
• Caste associations: Community organizations collect resources, lobby governments, promote education, and negotiate classifications such as Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, or Other Backward Class.
• Democratic tension: Political recognition can empower subordinated groups, but it can also reproduce caste boundaries by making group identity central to competition for state resources.
• Violence and backlash: Conflicts over land, inter-caste marriage, reservations, and local authority demonstrate that formal equality has not eliminated caste power.

VI. Changes in caste — continuity, adaptation, and transformation

A. Orientation

Changes in caste refer to alterations in caste occupations, authority, practices, identities, and political forms caused by law, education, markets, urbanization, migration, social movements, and democratic institutions.

B. changes in caste

Caste has become less rigid in some settings while remaining influential through adapted forms of identity and inequality.

• Legal change: The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, provide legal mechanisms against untouchability and caste-based violence.
• Education and employment: Schools, universities, reservations, and public-sector recruitment have enabled mobility for many members of historically excluded communities, although unequal schooling and discrimination limit equal outcomes.
• Urbanization: Cities weaken some village-based restrictions because people work and live across caste boundaries; however, housing discrimination, matrimonial preferences, and occupational segmentation may continue.
• Occupational change: Industrial and service-sector work has reduced the direct connection between birth and occupation, but caste networks still influence recruitment, business partnerships, and access to credit.
• Sanskritization: Srinivas used this term for lower or intermediate groups adopting practices associated with higher castes—such as vegetarianism or particular ritual forms—to claim improved status. It changes status claims without necessarily abolishing hierarchy.
• Westernization and modernization: English education, bureaucratic employment, constitutional rights, and individual-oriented institutions have challenged inherited authority, but modernization has not affected all communities equally.
• Inter-caste marriage: Marriage across caste boundaries has increased in some educated and urban groups, yet most marriages remain caste-endogamous, and couples may face family pressure or violence.
• New identities: Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, OBC, and regional identities can unite people politically across many jatis while preserving internal differences.
• Persistence of inequality: Caste remains visible in land distribution, manual scavenging, residential segregation, school treatment, digital and workplace discrimination, and unequal exposure to violence.
• Analytical conclusion: The major change is not a simple movement from caste to a casteless society; caste has shifted from a primarily ritual-village order toward a system operating through law, markets, institutions, identity politics, and social networks.