The Structure of Indian Society

Then and Now

A.M. Shah

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367193195
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429685224
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the structural features of Indian society, such as caste, tribe, sect, rural-urban relations, sanskritization and untouchability. Based on a wealth of field research as well as archival material, the book

• Interrogates the prevailing thinking in Indian sociology on these structures;
• Studies Indian society from contemporary as well as historical perspectives;
• Analyses caste divisions vis-à-vis caste hierarchy;
• Critically examines the public policies regarding caste-less society, reservations for Backward Classes, and the caste census.

This second edition, with four new chapters, will be a key text for students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, political science, modern history, development studies and South Asian studies.

1
Caste in the 21st Century

From System to Elements^*

In 1955, M.N. Srinivas presented a paper on ‘Castes: Can They Exist in the India of Tomorrow?’ at a national seminar on ‘Casteism and Removal of Untouchabilty’ in Delhi, attended, among others, by such distinguished persons as S. Radhakrishnan, Jagjivan Ram, Govind Ballabh Pant, V.K.R.V. Rao, Kaka Kalelkar and Irawati Karve. The paper was published in the seminar report as well as in the Economic Weekly (1955). After a lifetime of scholarship on caste, in 1999, the last year of his life, he gave a lecture under different titles in Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata, on the passing away of caste as a system. It was published posthumously in 2003 in Economic and Political Weekly under the title, ‘An Obituary on Caste as a System’. Srinivas expanded this title into a sentence, ‘While caste as a system is dead, individual castes are flourishing’ (ibid.: 459). He made this statement almost at the end of the 20th century, after publication of his book, Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar (1996). It is time now to think of the 21st century.

Caste as a System and Individual Castes

Let me first present briefly Srinivas’s thoughts on death of caste as a system, using mainly his language.

The localized system of production of food grains and other necessities based on a caste-wise division of labour, which has endured for over two thousand years, is fast breaking down all over rural India, and is likely to disappear in the near future. Production will become freed from jati division of labour, economic relations will become autonomous, and grain payments will be replaced by cash. Indian rural society is moving from status to contract. An essential characteristic of the system was hierarchy, which expressed itself in the idiom of ritual purity and impurity. This hierarchy is breaking down under the impact of new ideas of democracy, equality, and individual self-respect. While caste as a system is dead or dying, individual castes are thriving.

(Srinivas 2003: 459; emphasis in the original)

G.S. Ghurye, one of the founders of sociology in India, had observed long ago in his classic work on caste (1932: 26–28) that the community aspect of caste and caste patriotism were increasing at the expense of harmony of parts — of course, parts which were subordinated to one another. Srinivas made similar observations in his 1955 paper: ‘The horizontal solidarity of a caste gained at the expense of the vertical solidarity of castes in a region. … In general, it may be confidently said that the last hundred years have seen a great increase in caste solidarity, and the concomitant decrease of a sense of interdependence between different castes living in a region’ (p. 136). Subsequently, a number of scholars formulated their understanding of changes in caste in substantially the same way though in different words: from cooperation to competition; from hierarchy to difference, division, separation, repulsion; from whole to parts; from system to elements, units; from structure to substance.

Rural versus Urban Caste

While I agree with the main thrust of the above formulation, I have one major disagreement: the idea of caste as a system is that of caste in the rural community, and ignores caste in the traditional, pre-modern urban community.¹ After all, India has had urban communities since the time of the Indus Valley Civilization centuries before Christ. They have grown in number and size over the centuries, and caste has existed in them for as long as we have knowledge about their social systems. I have argued at some length elsewhere (1982, 1988, Chapters 5 and 8 in this book), and I.P. Desai joined me in arguing in our book (Shah and Desai 1988), that it would be false to assume that the nature of caste in cities was the same as in villages in the past, and therefore our understanding of changes in caste would be unreal if it was based entirely on our understanding of rural caste. In fact, urban caste has acquired increasing salience with the steady march of urbanization during the second half of the 20th century and its rapid march projected by demographers for the 21st century. Already, practically one out of every three Indians now lives in an urban area, and the figure is likely to be one out of every two during this century. Some parts of India, such as Goa, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, are likely to reach this figure sooner than other parts.² Along with this demographic possibility, we should keep in view two social facts. One, since the population of most castes is spread both in villages and in towns, the culture of the urban section in such a caste spreads easily to its rural section. And two, the urban centres wield disproportionately greater influence in society as a whole in comparison with the size of their population. It would not be an exaggeration to predict that urban caste will overwhelm rural caste during the 21st century.

An understanding of urban caste, both in the past and the present, is therefore imperative for a comprehensive understanding of caste. Unfortunately, however, most sociologists and social anthropologists during the second half of the 20th century, i.e., during the first phase of modern Indian sociology and social anthropology, focused their attention on rural rather than urban caste, and their general formulations about both structure and change in Indian society were based largely on observation of rural society. One often encountered the statement, ‘India is a land of villages.’ Many stated that although people lived in towns, their social institutions were rural in character. Many considered caste as essentially rural, or as having its origin in rural society, and therefore rural even if it occurred in cities. For example, Andre Beteille wrote in one essay, ‘Caste merely represents a systematization and elaboration of ideas and values which are present as important ingredients in most agrarian societies’ (1974: 39). In another essay, he wrote, ‘One cannot help being struck by the remarkable association between caste or caste-like organizations and the agrarian way of life’ (ibid.: 60). He then quoted with approval Michael Young’s statement, “The soil grows caste, the machine makes classes” (ibid.: 64). Apart from such statements involving the view that the Indian village consisted of mainly, if not only, agricultural castes, they assumed that castes were rural in origin wherever they existed. I do not belittle the significance of village studies — I myself carried out two such studies — but I would submit that Indian sociology has suffered from a certain imbalance on account of its relative neglect of intensive studies of towns and cities.

Due to this approach, the dominant view of the caste system has remained rural. For my present purpose, it is not necessary to dwell at length on the nature of pre-modern urban caste. I have dwelt on it at some length elsewhere (1982, 1988, Chapters 5 and 8 in this book, 2002) and in my book with I.P. Desai (1988). I will mention here only briefly how urban caste was in general different from rural caste roughly at the beginning of the 19th century.

The village was a small community divided into a relatively small number of castes; the population of each caste was also small, sometimes only one or two households, with little possibility of existence of sub-castes. Inter-caste relations operated in a face-to-face community and overlapped with relations of a number of different types; in brief, they were multiplex. In the city, on the other hand, the population was divided into a large number of castes, and most of them had each a large population, often subdivided up to what I have called divisions of the second, third and even fourth order, i.e., sub-caste, subsub-caste, and sub-sub-sub-caste (1982, Chapter 8 in this book). Sometimes a division could even be a self-contained endogamous unit. The members of one caste would interact with members of only some of the other castes and that too with different degrees of intensity. There were many different spheres of interaction, with partial or minimal overlap between them.

In most, if not all, urban centres Hindu castes lived along with one or more non-Hindu groups, such as Christians, Jains, Jews, Muslims, Parsis and Sikhs.³ Many also included Europeans, the most common being the British. This fact, along with the fact of multiplicity of castes and sub-castes among the Hindus, restricted the jajmani type of inter-caste relations to only a few castes and made the economic relations between most castes contractual and market-oriented.

The relations of a Hindu merchant with other merchants and craftsmen, both Hindu and non-Hindu, provided a model in respect of economic and social relations in the town.⁴ Even the service castes could be a part of contractual and market relations. Let me give just one example. In a small town in Gujarat I know well, there were both Hindu and Muslim barbers, and many Hindus used the services of either, paying in cash per piece of work. The Hindus required a Hindu barber’s services only in the context of certain rituals, and here also he was paid per piece of work.

On the whole, as I have argued elsewhere (1982, 1988, Chapters 5 and 8 in this book, and in Shah and Desai 1988), the principle of difference, division or separation competed with the principle of hierarchy in urban caste. In other words, the relations between castes were marked more by juxtaposition than by hierarchy, and more by a sense of being different than by a sense of being higher and lower. This does not mean that the principle of hierarchy did not operate in the city, but the principle of separation imposed limitations on it.

We should go a step further. The social and cultural heterogeneity of the city provided a congenial ground for innovation and change, including ideas and movements against caste hierarchy. Romila Thapar is perhaps right in attributing the rise of heterodox sects such as Buddhism and Jainism in ancient India to the growth of urban centres (1984: 109, 153–54). A large number of social thinkers who later propagated against the hierarchical features of caste came from urban centres.

Even Louis Dumont, the most ardent advocate of hierarchy as the over-arching principle of caste, did not rule out the possibility of separation existing as an independent principle. He wrote in his book, Homo Hierarchicus, ‘It is not claimed that separation, or even ‘repulsion’, may not be present somewhere as an independent factor.’ He did not give importance to this possibility because, as he stated, ‘What is sought here is a universal formula, a rule without exceptions’ (1972: 346, n. 55b). At least one of these exceptions was, I think, urban caste. Dumont himself clarified that he neglected urban caste (ibid.: 172). In my view, this neglect was due to the city being the prime site for the principle of difference, division, separation, or repulsion.

The main point is that an emphasis on individual caste was already a feature of pre-modern urban caste to a certain extent. The new economic, political, social and ideological forces of the 19th and 20th centuries affected first the urban centres, and strengthened the emphasis on individual caste in them. Gradually, the rural economy and society also came under the impact of these forces, and caste as a system lost its strength, giving way to emphasis on individual caste.

Boundaries of Individual Caste

With the growing emphasis on individual caste, its identity emerged as the prime characteristic of caste during the 20th century. What shape it takes during the 21st century should be considered a prime sociological problem. I discuss some aspects of it here.

Every caste, in its quest for maintaining its identity and unity, faces the problem of maintaining its boundaries. As long as a caste unit is small, with its population spread over a small number of villages and towns in an area, it is able to maintain its boundaries more or less successfully. A large caste, with its population spread continuously in village after village and in towns over a large area, often in two or more districts in a state and sometimes even in two or more states, faces enormous problems of maintaining its identity. Two major developments during the 20th century have complicated the problems: one, a tendency to break the boundaries of sub-castes and amalgamate them into the larger caste; and two, dispersal of the population of almost every caste over a larger area due to migrations, not only within but also outside India. A few castes became huge conglomerates, each with its population spread over two or more states within India and substantial population in other countries of the world. We now live in an era of mega-castes. Castes too are globalized.

Four traditional mechanisms for maintaining caste boundaries became weak and more or less broke down during the 20th century. (a) The prohibition on exchange of water and food (called roṭi vyavahār in northern and western India) between castes, even between the former Untouchables and the others, has practically disappeared in urban areas and is on the way to becoming so in rural areas. This development is part of the general decline in ideas of purity and pollution throughout Hindu society.⁵ (b) The distinctive customs and institutions — the diacritical marks — of every caste are gradually disappearing, and a certain cultural uniformity is emerging in the society. In the past one could identify a person’s caste by looking at his/her dress, listening to his/her speech, and watching his/her general bearing. Gone are those days not only in towns but also even in many villages. Similarly, the rites of passage and other rituals are also becoming uniform. The uniformity is emerging because of increasing spread of both sanskritization and westernization.⁶ To take just one example regarding sanskritization, the wedding rituals in a section of the Dalits in Gujarat I observed recently are as Sanskritic as those of the upper castes.⁷ And to take just one example regarding westernization, even village girls have begun to wear jeans. (c) The traditional close, though not invariable, relation between caste and occupation has more or less disappeared, and almost every caste is now multi-occupational. (d) The caste panchayat as the custodian of rules and regulations of caste, an important boundary maintenance mechanism, has practically disappeared not only in towns and cities but also in most villages. There are very few castes now with a mechanism for imposing punitive action against violation of its rules by its members. On the whole, the defenders of caste boundaries have a hard time.

Caste Endogamy versus Inter-Caste Hypergamy

It is widely believed that, among the traditional boundary maintenance mechanisms of individual castes, the most powerful has been the rule of caste endogamy. It is the hardest nut to crack, as is often said. It is considered the defining characteristic of caste, because it alone decides the hereditary nature of caste membership. It has also acquired legal sanction since protective discrimination was provided on the basis of caste and tribe in the Indian Constitution in 1950. Every caste or tribe included in the three categories of backward classes (Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes) is assumed to have discrete boundaries due to the assumption of endogamy. Nevertheless, the rule of caste endogamy requires critical examination.

Although the scriptures enjoined upon all Hindus to observe the rule of caste endogamy, they also provided for anuloma (hypergamous) and pratiloma (hypogamous) marriages, both of which violated the rule. The Dharmashāstras sanctioned anuloma marriage (see Kane 1941: 50–66). In hypergamy, a woman of a lower caste married a man of an upper caste, but the latter did not reciprocate. In hypogamy it was the reverse. Almost every large caste used to have internal hypergamy related to its internal hierarchy. Internal hypergamy created surplus of marriageable women at the upper rungs and their shortage at the lower rungs. The latter usually led men to marry women from acceptable lower castes and caste-like groups such as tribes. Intra-caste hypergamy was thus intimately linked with inter-caste hypergamy.

While hypogamy was rare, hypergamy was widespread. The historical as well as ethnographic literature mentions innumerable castes arising out of hypergamous marriages, with appropriate myths of origin concocted by bards and by authors of purāṇas to legitimize them. Such myth-makers, Brahman as well as non-Brahman, have existed since ancient times (see Shah and Shroff 1958, Das 1968, Thapar 1984, Shah, A.M. 1986).

In early ethnography, Denzil Ibbetson, superintendent of the 1881 census of Panjab, was perhaps the first to report on hypergamy (1883: 356). Not only that, Herbert Risley, the commissioner of the 1901 Census of India,⁸ in his monumental work, The People...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 Caste in the 21st Century: From System to Elements
• 2 Purity, Impurity, Untouchability: Then and Now
• 3 Sanskritization Revisited
• 4 Sects and Hindu Social Structure
• 5 The Rural–Urban Networks in India
• 6 The ‘Dalit’ Category and Its Differentiation
• 7 Can the Caste Census be Reliable?
• 8 Division and Hierarchy: An Overview of Caste in Gujarat
• 9 Untouchability, the Untouchables and Social Change in Gujarat
• 10 The Tribes — So-called — of Gujarat: In the Perspective of Time
• 11 The Mirage of a Casteless Society in India
• 12 A Government Programme to Train Scheduled Caste Priests
• 13 The Village in the City, the City in the Village
• 14 Myths, Rural and Urban
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index