The following is an excerpt from the introduction – ‘Studying Caste: Conceptual Currents and Emergent Perspectives’ – of The Oxford Handbook of Caste. It has been written by Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet, who have edited the volume.
The excerpt has been edited lightly for style and to facilitate its coherence as standalone text.
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As is evident from empirical and historical research, caste is not simply a fossilised tradition embedded in a pre-modern religiosity, waiting to dissolve, and disappear with the onset of modernity. Its survival in the present time is not simply a result of India’s ‘progress deficit’, nor is it a problem of mental evolution or a cultural and religious hangover. It is a living reality that structures social, economic, and political life, ever changing but still persisting. It is capable of resilience, agility, and flexibility.
‘The Oxford Handbook of Caste,’ Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet (editors), OUP Oxford, 2023.
Caste in fact was, and is, a profoundly diverse and dynamic institution. It does not adhere to a singular view, which is reducible to one definite principle, a timeless character, of the so-called Indian culture, as Louis Dumont had once attempted. Such a view also tends to essentialise, overgeneralise, and explain everything about the subject, making the need for any further research unnecessary. The dynamics of social institutions are always fluid, with multiple dimensions, and varied possibilities of articulation with other structures and processes of social life.
The social science scholarship and its conceptual tools should be such that they help us explore and understand its dynamic without suggesting a teleological path of its dissolution into a known phenomenon: from caste to class or tradition to modernity. Such attempts simplify complex processes of change and mislead political action. As an alternative to such simplistic views, we approach caste both as a complex social reality and also a conceptual tool, a kind of heuristic device, that enables us to look at ascription-
based structures of hierarchy and inequality.
It could help us explore and understand how ascription-based hierarchies persist in contemporary times – in capitalist social and economic order – and intersect with other aspects of social, economic and political life. Agreeing with Max Weber, we see caste as a form of status group, a kind of ethnic formation, with vertically drawn boundaries. As he argued,
The ‘caste’ is, indeed, the normal form in which ethnic communities usually live side by side in a ‘societalized’ manner. These ethnic communities believe in blood relationship and exclude exogamous marriage and social intercourse. Such a caste situation is part of the phenomenon of ‘pariah’ peoples and is found all over the world. These people form communities, acquire specific occupational traditions…
We further follow B. R. Ambedkar when he argues that what shapes the specificity of caste vis-à-vis other forms of ethnic groupings is the very high number of such endogamous groups among South Asian societies. The principle regulating the relations between such an innumerable myriad of endogamous groups is, according to him, the idea of ‘graded inequality’.
In his own words, this refers to the fact that:
There is no such class as a completely underprivileged class except the one which is at the base of the social pyramid. The privileges of the rest are graded. Even the low is a privileged class as compared with the lower. Each class being privileged, every class is interested in maintaining the social system.
For Ambedkar, ‘graded inequality’ is the key explanation to the stability of India’s unequal social order. Ascription-based relational structures and status groupings are nonetheless not unique to India or Hinduism. They exist in all societies. What we learn from the study of caste is not the uniqueness or exceptionalism of India but its being a useful conceptual tool for the comparative understanding of inequalities.
Thus, a non-teleological approach to caste must not only recognise its pervasive character, but also its multi-dimensionality, its ability to manifest itself in a wide variety of forms and practices. It being an aspect of the Brahmanical Hindu religious philosophy does not exhaust the reality of caste. Caste has also shaped agrarian land relation even in absence of Brahmanical Hinduism. It could similarly play a critical role in shaping aspects of secular and modern institutions, ranging from elected bodies of local governance to elite urban housing societies and top-end corporate offices.
We propose a polythetic definition of caste, that is, a definition that invokes a number of different criteria, not all of which will necessarily be present in every case and no one of which is all-determining or ever-present. Caste, we argue, is a status group based on an ideal of endogamy that is the result of several heterogeneous dimensions being twisted together, just like ‘the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that someone fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres’.
We suggest that there are five different dimensions structuring caste. This implies that caste hierarchies are necessarily multidimensional and cannot be reduced to one single criterion (purity, dominance, etc.). While these dimensions are all related, none of them totally prevails.
When some of these dimensions weaken, others may not, and could even become stronger. The intensity of these dimensions also varies in time and in space and their effects may manifest themselves in a variety of different forms and practices, leading to a perpetual re-shaping of the contours of caste as an endogamous group.
First, caste has a religious dimension within Brahmanical Hinduism where ideas of purity and pollution play a critical structuring role in shaping cultural values and everyday social practices. However, Hinduism, as we know it today, is an internally diverse religious system and there are sects and sections within Hinduism which question the sanctity of such ideas and practices. Further, there are religions in India, such as Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam, whose religious ideologies do not advocate caste but many of whose adherents practice it in their everyday social life.
A religion-centric view of caste has its roots in the Orientalist writings on India and Louis Dumont later developed it into an elaborate theory of caste and Hindu society. While we do not deny its presence and influence, the reality of caste is much more than simply an ideological system of a specific religion. Further, unlike Dumont, we see such a structure of hierarchical relations embedded by ‘power’ and shaped by as well as shaping materialities, thereby constricting the possibility of building a democratic culture grounded on the values of common humanity and equal citizenship.
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Second, ‘power’ is also an independent dimension of caste, which is not always reducible or even related to religious ideology. Caste has, for example, widely come to be seen as an important aspect of India’s democratic politics. It functions as a site or platform of mobilisation or networks of influence and/or coercion at different levels of the Indian political system: local, regional, and national.
Beyond the electoral politics, caste is also by itself political, structuring power relations, institutionally, and in everyday life.
It interacts and intersects with gender and shapes interpersonal relations, within and across caste communities. The distribution of power, in all its different forms, is intimately tied to caste and caste often also functions as a power resource.
A related, third dimension of caste is its relationship with the state system. Beyond the classical debate around the question of the relationship between the ‘king’ and the ‘priest’, hierarchies of caste are often sustained, shaped, and transformed by the state system. In the process of its institutional regulation, the state may become source for its legitimacy. It could also make it illegitimate through its legislative systems. It often superimposes a classificatory order through enumerative strategies and/or the policies of affirmative action.
Categories such as Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), introduced by the state for administering its policies of affirmative action tend to acquire a life of their own and begin to shape ideas of the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’.
Fourth, the ‘economic’ dimension of caste has always been important and widely recognised. It remains so even today, in urban India and the modern sectors of the economy. As Ambedkar famously argued, it facilitates the division of labour by dividing the labourers on caste lines. Such an ethnic segmentation of labour markets has increasingly become a feature of modern-day capitalist economy in different parts of the world.
Such hierarchies produce exclusionary outcomes, often in correspondence with the pre-existing social differences of caste. It does so because of the widespread cultures and practices of discrimination, co-optation and ‘opportunity-hoarding’ that perpetuate
around pre-existing social identities.
Finally, caste thrives because it continues to be an important aspect of living culture.
Its religious or institutional dimension does not encompass its entire cultural dimension, as we understand it. Cultures of caste present themselves around notions of collective histories of communitarian pride, which inspires them to mobilise and form collective institutions such as caste associations, caste-community specific temples, restricted urban neighbourhoods, and sometimes even political parties.
They collectively promote specific values and belief systems, which in some cases could even be ‘secular’ in nature.
Surinder S. Jodhka is a Professor of Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Jules Naudet is a CNRS Associate Research Professor at the Center for South Asian Studies, EHESS, Paris, and a CASBS Fellow at Stanford University (2021-2022).