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SECTION
7. Caste and Kingship
Harald Tambs-Lyche
SHAPING OF CASTE
8. Transformations of Caste in Colonial India
Dilip M. Menon
9. Census, Caste Enumeration and the British Legacy
Leigh Denault
10. Caste Disputes in Colonial India: Conflicts and the Legal Shaping of Caste
Julie Marquet
11. Caste and the Law
Gautam Bhatia
12.
Ashwini Deshpande
13. ‘Backwardness’: Reviewing the Emergence of a Concept
S. Anandhi and Kalpana Kannabiran
Voix
George Kunnath
Joel Lee
Julien Levesque
Rajeshwari Deshpande
Christophe Jaffrelot
Michelutti
Haripriya Narasimhan
Zoe E. Headley
29. Caste, Ethnicity, and the State in Nepal
David N. Gellner
SECTION VI. DALIT LIVES AND PREDICAMENTS OF CHANGE
30. Ambedkar’s Legacy
Anand Teltumbde
31. Changing Dynamics of Untouchability
Suryakant Waghmore
32. Dalit Movements in India
Hugo Gorringe and Karthikeyan Damodaran
33. The Mahars and Dalit Movement of Maharashtra
Harish Wankhede
34. Dalit Activism and Transnational Mobilization
Eva-Maria Hardtmann
35. Caste, Race and Ethnicity
Deepa S. Reddy 36. Caste and Tribe
Jai Prasad
37. Denotified Communities
Kalpana Kannabiran
SECTION VII: EMERGING ENTANGLEMENTS
Guilhem Cassan
39. Caste and Merit
Ajantha Subramanian
Acknowledgements
As editors of this volume, we wish to acknowledge the help and support we have received from colleagues, friends, and family, without which it would not have been possible for us to complete the Handbook.
We are grateful to the institutions where we are employed for providing us with a conducive environment and continuous support for our academic work. Surinder S. Jodhka greatly benefitted from the support of his colleagues and students at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS) at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Jules Naudet is grateful to the CNRS as well as to the Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CEIAS, EHESS, Paris). He is particularly indebted to its directors Michel Boivin, Vanessa Caru, Rémy Delage, and Zoe Headley who spared no efforts to support him while he was learning to live with his new disability. Jules Naudet also thanks the staff of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Behavioural Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University, where he completed the final bit of work on the Handbook while being offered the best mix of material conditions and intellectual atmosphere that he has ever experienced. The Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities (CSH) in New Delhi deserves a special mention as this was where we began collaborating and discussing about the possibility of working on such a project.
We also wish to thank Vanessa Caru, Bruno Cousin, Sébastien Chauvin, Mathieu Ferry, David Gellner, Lise Guilhamon, Sneha S. Komath, and Ujithra Ponniah for their valuable feedback on the drafts of our Introduction. Their critical comments helped us sharpen the framework that we have tried to propose as an alternative to existing ‘theories’ of caste.
We express our gratitude to the editors and staff at the Oxford University Press. Barun Sarkar and Moutushi Mukherjee showed exceptional flexibility with regard to the timeline. We thank Thomas Perridge for taking this project toward completion with a great deal of enthusiasm despite the interruptions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Most of all, we heartfully thank the contributors who, despite the trying times, readily agreed to share their in-depth and empirically rich understanding of the subject that have been put together in this volume. We particularly appreciate their patience and grace as we were painstakingly compiling this monumental collection of chapters.
Surinder S. Jodhka Jules Naudet
Notes on Editors and Contributors
EDITORS:
Surinder S. Jodhka is a Professor of Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He researches on social inequalities, caste, and its articulation in contemporary India, rural/agrarian change, and the political sociology of community identities. His recent publications include India’s Villages in the 21st Century: Revisits and Revisions (co-edited with Edward Simpson, OUP, 2019); Mapping the Elite: Power, Privilege, and Inequality (co-edited with Jules Naudet, OUP, 2019); A Handbook of Rural India (Orient Blackswan, 2018); Contested Hierarchies, Persisting Influence: Caste and Power in Twenty-First Century India (co-edited with James Manor, Orient Blackswan, 2018); Inequality in Capitalist Societies (co-authored with Boike Rehbien and Jesse Souza, Routledge, 2018); The Indian Middle-Class (co-authored with Aseem Prakash, OUP, 2016); Caste in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2015/2018); Caste: Oxford India Short Introductions (OUP, 2012). He is among the first recipients of the ICSSR-Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists, for the year 2012.
Jules Naudet is a CNRS Associate Research Professor at the Centre for South-Asian and Himalayan Studies (CESAH) at EHESS, Paris, an Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, and a 2021–2022 CASBS Fellow at Stanford University. His earlier work looked at upward social mobility in India, the US, and France and he is the author of Stepping into the Elite (OUP, 2018), a book that revisits the classical question of the experience of moving from one class to another. He also co-edited Justifier l’ordre social with Christophe Jaffrelot (University Press of France, 2013) and is the co-author, with Serge Paugam, Bruno Cousin, and Camila Giorgetti, of Ce que les riches pensent des pauvres (Le Seuil, 2017), a comparative analysis of the representations of the poor by the inhabitants of upper-class neighbourhoods in Paris, Delhi, and São Paulo. Naudet holds several editorial positions. He is a member of the editorial board of SAMAJ (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal) as well as the co-editor-in-chief of La Vie des Idées/ Books & Ideas, an online journal hosted by the Collège de France. Along with Surinder Jodhka, he co-edits the book series Exploring India’s Elite. He also co-organizes the research seminar ‘Sociology of Inequalities in India’ at the EHESS, in Paris (along with Joël Cabalion, Mathieu Ferry, Odile Henry, Clémence Jullien, and Olivier Roueff). Naudet currently devotes his research to the study of the Indian and French economic elites.
CONTRIBUTORS
Janaki Abraham is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Her research interests include the study of kinship, gender and caste, visual anthropology, sexual harassment, and gender and
space, particularly the study of towns. She is the co-editor, with Sanjay Srivastava and Yasmeen Arif, of Critical Themes in Indian Sociology (SAGE, 2019) and the author of several articles in journals and edited books. From 2012 to 2016, she was co-editor of the Book Reviews section of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology
S. Anandhi is a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. She is a historian with research interests in political movements and social processes in colonial and postcolonial Tamil Nadu, India. She has contributed several articles on caste, gender, and sexual politics in the Dravidian movement and on Dalit Women’s Struggles. Her recent publications include Rethinking Social Justice (co-edited, Orient Blackswan, 2020); and Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics (coedited, Routledge, London and New York, South Asia edition in India, 2017).
Sarbani Bandyopadhyay teaches sociology in St. Xavier’s College (autonomous) Kolkata. She has a PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. Her PhD thesis is titled ‘The Lives of Caste among the Bengali Middle Class: A Study of the Contemporary’. She has published a couple of papers from her thesis and presented at several international conferences. Currently she is working on the intersections of the caste and the Muslim questions in post-Partition West Bengal.
Gautam Bhatia graduated from the National Law School of India University. He has BCL and MPhil degrees from the University of Oxford and an LLM from Yale Law School. His essays have appeared in the Oxford Handbook for the Indian Constitution, Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law, and in journals such as Constellations and Global Constitutionalism. He has published three books—Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Freedom of Speech under the Indian Constitution, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts, and a novel, The Wall. As a lawyer, he has been part of legal teams involved in contemporary constitutional cases such as the challenge to criminal defamation, the nine-judge bench right to privacy case, the Section 377 challenge, and the Aadhaar challenge. His work has been cited thrice by the Indian Supreme Court, and once by the High Court of Kerala. He founded and writes the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog (http://indconlawphil.wordpress.com).
Guilhem Cassan is a Professor of Economics at the University of Namur and Fellow of the CEPR. His work revolves around the study of the role of identity—caste and gender—in economics behaviour as well as the study of the political economy of inequality, both in history and in contemporary times. His research has notably been published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and the Journal of Development Economics. Mathieu Claveyrolas is an Anthropologist at the CNRS, Paris and Member of the Center for South-Asian Studies (EHESS/CNRS). He specializes in Hinduism through ethnographic methods focusing on temples, actors, and practices. He first studied Indian Hinduism (in Varanasi) before turning to Mauritian, Creole, Hinduism, and, more recently, Guyanese Hinduism in New York City. Among his main publications are Quand le temple prend vie. Atmosphère et dévotion à Bénarès (2003), Quand l’hindouisme est
créole. Plantation et indianité à l’île Maurice (2017), Les territoires du religieux dans les mondes indiens (edited, 2016), and Les Hindous, les Autres et l’Ailleurs (edited, 2021).
Karthikeyan Damodaran is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Goettingen. He has previously held posts at Goettingen and Jain (deemed-to-be) University, Bangalore. His research interests include Dalit politics, caste, commemorations, Urban Cultures, and Tamil Cinema. He is the author of numerous articles on Dalit politics and Tamil cinema.
Leigh Denault is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge University. Her first monograph focused on the social, cultural, and legal history of the family in colonial North India at the University of Cambridge (Publicising Family in Colonial North India, c. 1780–1930, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, 2009). Her current research focuses on conceptions of social welfare in 20th-century India. She is also working on a digital history project mapping newspaper networks and debates about press freedom across mid-19th-century India.
Ashwini Deshpande is a Professor of Economics, and Founding Director of Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University, India. Her PhD and early publications have been on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action, with a focus on caste and gender in India. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. She is the author of Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India (OUP, hardcover 2011 and paperback 2017); and Affirmative Action in India (OUP, Oxford India Short Introductions series, 2013). She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IERA Award) in 1994, and the VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45 in 2007.
Rajeshwari Deshpande is a Professor of Politics at the Savitribai Phule Pune University. She was the ICCR Visiting Professor (Rajiv Gandhi Chair in Contemporary Indian Studies) at the University of Technology, Sydney, and UKIERI Visiting Fellow at King’s India Institute, London. Her research interests are in areas such as intellectual traditions of Maharashtra, politics of the urban poor, urban caste-class realities, women’s politics, and politics and policies related to social welfare. Her recent publications include Last Fortress of Congress Dominance: Maharashtra since the 1990s (with Suhas Palshikar, SAGE, 2021), Gandhinchya Shodhat Javdekar (Marathi-Javdekar in search of Gandhi, Samkaleen Prakashan, 2019), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States (edited, with Louise Tillin and KK Kailash, OUP, 2015).
Martin Fuchs is trained in Sociology and Anthropology. He is Professor of Indian Religious History at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany. He is also a member and temporarily Director of the M.S. Merian—R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP) in Delhi, India. He has published books and articles on Max Weber, Louis Dumont, B. R. Ambedkar, Indian social movements, religious individualization (bhakti), Indian modernity, urban poor
(Mumbai), reflexive anthropology, ethnographic representation, intercultural translation, and comparison.
David N. Gellner is a Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. He has worked on religion, ethnicity, class, politics, activism, and borderlands in Nepal, and occasionally over the border in eastern UP, since the 1980s. Among his many publications are Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal (Harvard University Press, 2005), Global Nepalis: Religion, Culture, and Community in a New and Old Diaspora (OUP, 2018), ‘Masters of Hybridity: How Activists Reshaped Nepali Society’ in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2019), and ‘Nepali Dalits in Transition’ in a special issue of Contributions to Nepalese Studies (2019).
Hugo Gorringe is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and the Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the interplay between caste, politics, and Dalit movements in Tamil Nadu. He is author of Untouchable Citizens (SAGE, 2005) and Panthers in Parliament: Dalits, Caste and Political Power in South India (OUP, 2017), as well as numerous articles and chapters on identity, violence, space, caste, and politics.
Eva-Maria Hardtmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research areas include social movements, citizenship, transnationalism, gender, and power relations. She specializes in South Asia and her fieldwork has been carried out mainly in northern India, but also among immigrated Dalit activists in Great Britain, in relation to the U.N. and among Dalit activists in the Global Justice Movement. Her writings include the ethnographies Dalit Movement in India: Local Practices, Global Connections (OUP, 2009) and South Asian Activists in the Global Justice Movement (OUP, 2017).
Zoe E. Headley is a CNRS Associate Research Professor and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at EHESS, Paris.
Christophe Jaffrelot is Director of Research at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS in Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was elected President of the French Association of Political Science in July 2020. He is the author of numerous books, including Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (2021), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (2007), and India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (2003).
Kalpana Kannabiran is a Distinguished Professor at the Council for Social Development. Her work focuses on the intersections of sociology, law, gender studies, and social movements. She is a co-founder of Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Secunderabad. She has taught in NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and was the Director of the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad. She is the author of Tools of Justice: Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution (2012), co-author of Gender
Regimes and the Politics of Privacy: A Feminist Re-Reading of Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2021), and author of Law, Justice and Human Rights in India: Short Reflections (2021). She was a recipient of the VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research in 2003, and has also received the Amartya Sen Award for Distinguished Social Scientists in 2012, for her work in the field of law.
Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues. He has recently published an edited volume entitled Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2022). He also serves on the international advisory committee of the Community Development Journal (OUP).
George Kunnath is a Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE. Kunnath received his PhD in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London. His work focuses on caste and class relations; relationality of inequality, conflict, and development, and research ethics. Kunnath has published his research in Current Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Dialectical Anthropology, among others. His book Rebels from the Mud Houses: Dalits and the Making of the Maoist Revolution in Bihar (Social Science Press, 2012; Routledge, 2017) discusses Dalit agency and the Maoist movement in the eastern Indian state of Bihar.
Roland Lardinois sociologist is a Senior and a Research Fellow emeritus at the French National Center for Scientific Research, Paris. His field of research deals, on the one hand, with modern and contemporary India, in particular the sociology of engineers and, on the other hand, on the history of Indian studies in France. He has published Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India in France in the 19th–20th centuries, translated from the French by Renuka George (Social Science Press, 2013), and edited, in collaboration with Charles Gadéa, Les mondes de l’ingénieur en Inde xixe–xxie siècle, Paris, Classiques Garnier (Classiques Garnier, 2022).
Joel Lee is the author of Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He teaches anthropology at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Julien Levesque is currently a Senior Teaching and Research Assistant in Indian Studies and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Indian Studies, Asien-Orient Institut, University of Zürich. He has previously worked at Ashoka University and the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi. He is also affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), EHESS, Paris. He holds a PhD (2016) in Political Science from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. His first monograph, published in 2022, investigates nationalism and identity construction in Sindh after Pakistan’s independence. His ongoing work examines the politics of the Muslim caste in North India and Pakistan.
Julie Marquet is an Assistant Professor at the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale in France. She works on caste disputes in the French settlements of India in the 18th and 19th centuries and on citizenship under colonial rule.
Nicolas Martin is an Assistant Professor in Indian/South Asian studies at the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies of the University of Zurich. He was trained as a social anthropologist at the London School of Economics where he produced a dissertation and a subsequent book about landed power in the rural Pakistani Punjab. Since 2012 he has shifted his attention to the Indian rural Punjab where he has been researching democracy, elections, violence and criminality, clientelism, caste, and local government.
Peter Mayer is an Associate Professor of Politics and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He has written on many aspects of Indian politics, international relations, economics, history, anthropology, and sociology—especially the sociology of suicide. His recent publications have examined issues including a zone of weak governance in the Indus-Ganges plains, India’s engagement with economic reforms, longterm trends in the real wages of agricultural labourers in the Kaveri Delta, the foreign relations of Australia and India, why elections in India appear to defy Duverger’s Law of party competition, and the declining rate of massacres of India’s Dalits.
Dilip M. Menon is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies in Africa and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand. He works on South Asian history, oceanic history, and the idea of knowledge from the global south. His recent publications are a co-edited volume Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (OUP, 2020) and the forthcoming Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South (Routledge, 2022).
Lucia Michelutti is a Professor of Anthropology at the University College London. She writes on issues of democracy, politics, leadership, violence, and crime in South Asia, specifically Uttar Pradesh and in Latin America in Venezuela. She is the author of The Vernacularization of Democracy (Routledge), co-editor of The Wild East (with Barbara Harriss-White, UCL Press) and co-author of Mafia Raj (with Hoque, Martin, Picherit, Rollier, Ruud, and Still, Stanford University Press).
Radha Modi is an Associate Teaching Professor at Florida State University. She specializes in research on race relations, immigrant incorporation, and economic inequality. Her research and publications investigate the role of skin colour in the racialization of second-generation South Asians in the US with a publication in Ethnic and Racial Studies. She also has publications on wealth inequality during the Great Recession of 2008. In collaboration with South Asian Americans Leading Together, a national nonpartisan organization working on civil rights, she authored a report entitled Communities on Fire: Confronting Hate Violence and Xenophobic Political Rhetoric, documenting the hate violence experienced by South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Arab communities following the 2016 election. In addition to research, she works with national organizations such as South Asian American Digital Archive.
Haripriya Narasimhan is an Anthropologist and a Faculty in the Department of Liberal Arts at IIT Hyderabad. Her research interests are in the areas of media, health, and globalisation. She has previously worked on caste, and with C.J. Fuller
(Prof Emeritus, LSE), published Tamil Brahmans: A Middle Class Caste (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Ujithra Ponniah is a Wealth Inequality and Elite Studies Fellow in the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Previously she taught at the School of Gender Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, India. She has a doctorate in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (2018) and a master’s in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She works on inequality with a focus on elites and ascriptive hierarchies. She is in the process of converting her doctoral thesis into a book manuscript.
Jai Prasad is a Doctoral candidate and Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, South Asia Institute, Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Universität Heidelberg, Germany. Prior to this, he was a publishing editor with a renowned academic press in New Delhi. He is currently researching the ideational roots of institutional change in forest governance in India, with particular focus on the landmark Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. His broader research interests include policy and politics of redistributive welfare, and political sociology of indigeneity and sustainable natural resource use.
Ramnarayan S. Rawat is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware. He co-edited the Dalit Studies (2016) with K. Satyanarayana. He is currently co-editing the second Dalit Studies volume. His second book, The Language of Liberalism: The Dalit Public Sphere in Late Colonial India, is in the advanced stages of completion. His first book, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India, received Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (2009) awarded by the American Institute of Indian Studies and a honorable mention in the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize (2013) awarded by the Association of Asian studies.
Deepa S. Reddy received her BA in Anthropology and English Literature from the University of Toronto, and her PhD in Anthropology from Rice University. She teaches anthropology and cross-cultural studies at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Her research foci have ranged from religious nationalism and identitarian politics, the internationalization/globalization of ‘caste’, bioethics and biopolitics, to air quality and environmental governance in India. She blogs on paticheri.com
Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India (Stanford University Press, 2009; Yoda Press, 2013), chronicles the struggles for resource rights by Catholic fishers on India’s southwestern coast, with a focus on how they have used spatial imaginaries and practices to constitute themselves as political subjects. Her second book, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), analyses meritocracy as a terrain of caste struggle in India and its implications for democratic transformation.
Harald Tambs-Lyche is a social anthropologist. He received his PhD from the University of Bergen in 1972, becoming a Professor at the University of Picardie in 1996. He has
written four monographs: London Patidars (1980); Power, Profit and Poetry: Traditional Society in Kathiawar, Western India (1997); The Good Country: Individual, Situation and Society in Saurashtra (2004); and Business Brahmins: The Gauda Saraswat Brahmins of South Kanara (2011), edited several books and written a large number of articles.
Anand Teltumbde was a Senior Professor and Chair of Big Data Analytics at the Goa Institute of Management. He is a leading Indian intellectual and the author of several books on Ambedkar and the Dalits in India, including Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (Navayana, 2008).
Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist and a Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India, where she leads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Her research interests include Indian software capital and labour, the reconstitution of the Indian middle class, transnational migration and regional diasporas in India, and real estate development and the urbanization of rural landscapes. She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (2016) and co-editor of Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics (2018).
Divya Vaid teaches sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has an MSc and DPhil from Oxford. Her research interests include the study of social mobility and inequalities, social stratification and educational attainment, and the application of quantitative methods. Her work has appeared in the Annual Review of Sociology, Contemporary South Asia, Asian Survey and the Economic and Political Weekly among others. She is the author of Uneven Odds: Social Mobility in Contemporary India (OUP, 2018).
Raphaël Voix is a social anthropologist, Research Fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research, member of the French Institute of Pondicherry (MEAE/ CNRS), and associate member of the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies, Paris. His research focuses on sectarian Hinduism through fieldwork done mainly in Bengali communities. He has published extensively in journals and edited books on the themes such as asceticism and violence, Hindu utopia and millennial movements, contemporary uses of Vedic texts, Hinduism and the courts, politics and contemporary yoga.
Suryakant Waghmore is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the IIT Bombay. He is the author of Civility against Caste (2013) and co-editor of Civility in Crisis (2020).
Harish Wankhede is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Political Sciences, JNU. He is recipient of the prestigious Raman Fellowship for conducting Post-Doctoral Research at Stanford University as Visiting Scholar. His research interests are political theory, public institutions, secularism and social justice, and Hindi cinema. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited books, and regularly contributes opinion pieces to national newspapers and magazines.
Introduction Studying Caste
Conceptual Currents and Emergent Perspectives
Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet
‘Caste’ often invokes tradition, as if a remnant of the ancient past. According to this popular view, caste was a closed system of hierarchy, unique to South Asia, which presumably tied everyone to the social collective that they were born into, with no individual choice of occupation, mobility, or marriage. Privileges and statuses were all pre-given, with no one ever questioning the social order. This notion of caste also claimed that the source of its origin and legitimacy lay in the religious cosmos of the Hindus, who practised it as a matter of dharma or faith. The traditional order thus persisted without any change and reproduced itself for ages in the spatial universe of its innumerable village communities.
A corollary to this textbook formulation of India’s past tradition would go on to suggest that it was only during the British colonial rule that Indians were first introduced to modernity. This march of India becoming ‘modern’ was significantly accelerated after Independence from colonial rule when the post-colonial state initiated the process of development with much enthusiasm. With India moving ahead on the path of development and modernization, caste ought to have become a thing of the past. The lingering traces of survival in modern times could only be a product of social, mental, and political anomalies, often attributed to the crooked world of electoral politics and the quota system born out of it. These lingering traces of it are also sometimes perceived as an evidence of the inability of the Indians/Hindus to move forward on the path of modernity and progress. Fixing these anomalies would, in this narrative, lead to the disappearance of caste, at least from the urban and modern landscapes of India’s national life.
This is an outdated and, dare we say, deceptive or misleading view of India’s past as well as of the experiences of caste on the ground in contemporary times. However, such a view persists across sections of the world community, in textbooks of social sciences, in popular writings and media representations and even amongst large sections of Indian middle classes as well as the elite. This is despite the fact that, academic or social
science writings on the subject have come a long way and their understandings of the lived realities of caste have undergone profound transformations.
Where do such views come from and why do they persist? As historians have pointed out, such notions of India’s past tradition were largely drawn from the early conceptualizations of South Asian societies by the Orientalist scholarship and the colonial administrators (Bayly, 2001; Cohn, 1996; Dirks, 2001). They drew their conceptions almost entirely from select classical texts, which indeed represented ‘the caste system’ as an aspect of ‘native’ religious tradition, an ideology that shaped minds and behaviour patterns of the Hindus in the Indian subcontinent, and had remained unchanged over centuries. Such a representation of the ‘orient’ was to also contrast it with the West, which was presented as a land of progress, science, and reason. However, this view completely ignored the easily observable empirics of ascription-based hierarchies (Jodhka, 2016). On the ground, caste had been very diverse across regions, often fluid, occasionally contested, and ever changing. Nevertheless, this view was accepted quite uncritically even by western-educated Indians, which included a large section of the nationalist leadership, who also later on came to be the first generation of native rulers and elite in independent India. Such an understanding of caste was also accepted by the elite in other countries of the region where caste exists in some form and impacts social structures: Sri Lanka (Lecamwasam and Peiris, 2020), Nepal (see David Gellner’s chapter on Caste in Nepal), Bangladesh, and Pakistan (see Julien Levesque’s chapter on Caste among Muslims in North India and Pakistan also see Jodhka and Shah, 2010).
Such a conceptual trajectory of caste has had lasting impact. According to this evolving common-sense view of caste among India’s emerging middle-class elite during the late colonial period and soon after Independence, the introduction of western-style liberal democracy as a system of political organization (along with economic growth) was to dismantle caste on its own. The working assumption was that with equal rights to participate, without any weight of status and class, electoral democracy would undermine, and eventually erase caste-based divisions and hierarchies. The founding leaders of India’s constitutional democracy explicitly expressed such a view in their writings. The first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it quite sharply:
In the context of society today, the caste system and much that goes with it are wholly incompatible, reactionary, restrictive, and barriers to progress. There can be no equality in status and opportunity within its framework, nor can there be political democracy . . . Between these two conceptions conflict is inherent and only one of them can survive. (Nehru, 1946, p. 257)
Another important architect of the Indian democracy, chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, put it even more emphatically:
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation; you cannot build up a morality. Anything you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole. (Ambedkar, 2002, p. 102)
With the exception of B. R. Ambedkar and a few others, this early generation of India’s elite that inherited power from the colonial rulers thus saw caste primarily from a culturalist perspective, informed by the apolitical ideas of tradition and modernization. A direct implication of this was that caste was not seen as a relevant variable shaping and structuring deprivations and the economic well-being of different sections of India’s populace. Even when it was included in the policy, it was not seen as a reality that structured poverties and privileges. As David Mosse puts it:
The manner in which caste has entered social policy largely overlooks caste as a continuing structural cause of inequality and poverty in present-day market-led development, and instead treats it as an archaic Indian cultural and ritual phenomenon erased by such development, or as a social disability subject to (in principle, temporary) ‘special measures’. (Mosse, 2018, p. 423)
Despite many changes over time, such a view persists within the Indian state system. For example, when a section of civil society activists mobilized for recognition of the caste system as a form of racism at the Durban conference in 2011, the Indian government actively lobbied against it (see Deepa Reddy’s chapter on Caste, Race, and Ethnicity and Eva-Maria Hardtmann’s chapter on Dalit Transnational Mobilization). It obviously feared that such recognition would create ground for the close monitoring of caste-related violence and other forms of discrimination by UN treaty bodies. Upper-caste Indian diaspora groups in the UK lobbied against caste being included under ‘race’ as a ‘protected characteristic’ under the new Equality Act (see Dhanda et al., 2014).
However, given its centrality in India’s social and political life, caste did enter the institutional process and state policy-making right from the days of colonial rule. It was in the british colonial period, during the 1920s and 1930s that a system of classification that identified communities suffering from caste-induced disabilities began to be developed. Under pressure from some of the non-Brahmin castes, the colonial state initiated affirmative action to provide representation for them in the emerging political system. Such a policy perspective also found space in the Constitution of independent India (see Gautam Bhatia’s chapter on Caste and Law). Those who framed the Indian Constitution mostly agreed on working towards making India a society free of caste-based inequality and discrimination.
Not only does the Indian Constitution affirm its commitment to the value of equality among all, it also assigns the task of defending such values to the Indian State. It goes on to recognize social, economic, and political disabilities that caste has historically inflicted on a section of the Indian population. It even lays down provisions for a range of pro-active legal interventions and affirmative action policies that would expand the domain of citizenship and help create a level playing field (see Ashwini Deshpande’s chapter on Reservations and Affirmative Action). Over the years, India has indeed expanded its policies of affirmative action that have produced positive outcomes. However, despite these forces at play, the deepening of democracy or India’s economic
growth and its increasing globalization, caste shows no sign of fading away. In some ways, the salience of caste seems to have grown in Indian public life since the early 1990s.
It is this paradox of contemporary Indian society and its economic and political processes that shapes the contributions to this volume. The essays presented in the volume help us make sense of this puzzle and contribute to the understanding of the forces behind the continued reproduction of caste, with many of its features intact— hierarchy, patriarchy, humiliation, deprivations, exclusions, and economic disparities— even while changes on the ground are surely not insignificant.
In our attempt to engage with this paradox, we argue for a new narrative of caste, going beyond the Orientalist formulations of Indian culture or the modernization theories of change. As is evident from the wide range of essays written by a diverse galaxy of authors from various academic disciplines, such a narrative is clearly emerging. This innovative literature draws from grounded and empirical studies of the different aspects of caste that have flourished since Independence. The perspective we present in this Introduction and those presented in the chapters also reflect emerging diverse voices from the margins, articulated through social movements, autobiographies, and scholarship.
Conceptual Currents: Caste, like other social phenomena, is not simply a thing out there, a sui generis social fact, as Emile Durkheim would have put it. It is also a construct, a conceptual framing of the ‘thing out there’. Concepts in the social sciences have a life of their own. They are not simply words that denote a certain reality or process. While some are indeed used as technical terms with a limited descriptive or explanatory value, some others have capacious, and complicated careers. Their origins are important but their meanings and significations change over time, moulded, and twisted by the world in which they travel and the contexts in which they get deployed. Some of them even have the potential to shape, or at least influence, the very process, and realities they describe. As sources of meanings and meaningful/interpretative systems, they carry within them political possibilities and potentials for a wide range of imaginations and actions.
Caste is one such category. Even though it has been widely regarded as the most popular and lasting signifier of Indian social life and its ancient tradition, the term— not the reality that it has come to signify—has its origin in the western European linguistic cosmos. Native words such as jati and varna did not easily translate into its European counterpart. Over the years, it has also evolved into a category that did not simply describe a system of inequality or hierarchy that marked social and economic life almost everywhere in the subcontinent but a unique cultural universe that was fundamentally different from that of the Western world. In the evolving Orientalist scholarship of 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the Portuguese word casta was no longer a generic category. It came to be associated with Hindu religion, and its ritual life, as the Europeans had imagined it, their ‘other’. Coupled with this was also the claim that everything Indian was determined by or reducible to the Hindu religious worldview, which, they underlined, had also remained stable and static for centuries, bereft of any history, contestation, and agency.
However, the Orientalist and colonial narratives simplified it as a pan-Indian ‘system’ (see Roland Lardinois’s chapter on The Idea of Caste through the Ages: Concept, Words, and Things) and caste came to be imagined as being devoid of any materiality, constructed simply as a feature of the Hindu mind, shaped and structured by the dialectics of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’, with which it has presumably been forever obsessed. As Louis Dumont translates this classical orientalist view in his much-celebrated book Homo Hierarchicus, the hierarchy that the Hindu mind produced was purely ideological, of status, and not of power or the material world (see Martin Fuchs’s chapter on Hierarchy and Mathieu Claveyrolas chapter on Hinduism and Caste System). While such an autonomy or separation of status from power was unthinkable in the western world, this was not the case in India, Dumont had argued. Thus, by implication, in this culturecentric orientalist view of caste, the inequality that caste produced was not to be seen through questions of distribution and discrimination or through the deprivations and exclusionary patterns of life and residence that it produced. Even untouchability was a matter of cultural consensus and not of violence and humiliation, which it most obviously is and would always have been (see Suryakant Waghmore’s chapter on Dynamics of Untouchability). Caste, as we see it, was never simply an ideological system, prescribing a social order of hierarchy based on cultural consensus. It always carried with it a system of domination and power, which produced deprivations and material inequalities.
As historians have rightly pointed out, the popular orientalist view of caste and India also ignored the significant regional diversities of the social arrangements on ground, as they would have evolved over time, intersecting with local economies, political histories and ecological possibilities (see Harald Tambs-Lyche’s chapter on Caste and Kingship). Even when caste was ideologically embedded in the religious and ideational frameworks of the South Asian region, it was not simply a mental construct. Moreover, like some other religious philosophies, Hinduism too had its fluidities and varieties that were evolving and changing over time and space (see Raphaël Voix’s chapter on Hindu Sects and Caste). The religious universe of South Asia has always been marked by diversities and contestations from within and from without (Raheja, 1988a; Thapar, 1989; Frykenberg, 1989; Lorenzen, 1999; Fuller, 1992). A case in point is the Nepal experience, where in absence of colonial encounter, caste, and its narratives evolved very differently (see David Gellner’s chapter on Caste, Ethnicity and the State in Nepal).
Most importantly, the Orientalist framing of Hinduism and the ascription-based hierarchies in the region produced a hegemonic narrative of caste as a static and closed system, which the British colonial rulers strategically deployed to legitimize India’s colonization. The colonial rulers used this formulation with their own people to make a case for India’s colonization and show to them how their presence in the region was an act of benevolence (Cohn, 1987; Metcalf, 1997). They, thus, implicitly professed that the colonizers were there to help India get out of its inherent inertia and enable it to move forward on the path of progress, which the western civilization had already accomplished and charted out for others. The classical orientalist writings by scholars such as Hegel had already produced an account of the Indians and Hindus as being people with no agency (see Inden, 1986) and who hence could not move on the path of
‘progress’ on their own. Even radical scholars like Karl Marx accepted the Orientalist and colonial view of India and saw British rule as being positive for India, in the sense that it would help the country to extricate itself from its ‘asiatic mode of production’ (see Thorner, 1966).
Thus, caste conceptualised as a Hindu religious value, along with its presumed spatial locale, the ‘village communities’, came to be deployed as a foundational category of classification in the colonial administrative system. As has been widely documented by historians of colonial India, the use of such a framework in the Colonial Census, initiated during the latter half of the 19th century, had far-reaching implications for the realities of caste on ground. The process of enumeration with a varna model as an operative framework across regions of the subcontinent set in motion a process of mobilizations and self-identification across significantly diverse cultures and communities through identities that best fitted the varna model of caste. Many also wanted to be placed in a higher varna than what they had been granted by the enumerators (see Leigh Denault’s chapter on Census, Caste Enumeration, and the British Legacy). The colonial categorization involved a very tedious and thorough process of engagements with the ground realities of caste. The data collected by colonial ethnographers continues to be a valuable source of information for scholars, though the though the publications they addressed to their European counterparts interpreted facts drawing upon a biased imperial lens, which perpetuated stereotypes of making caste appear as a part of the Hindus’ religious practices.
As we have mentioned above, the Orientalist and colonial framing of caste had been so hegemonic that it came to be accepted uncritically by nearly everyone, including those fighting for India’s independence from colonial rule. Even when they actively campaigned for reforms within their communities or in the broader relational frames of caste, they tended to work with the Orientalist/colonial view of caste. Thus, the Hindu religion-centric view of caste emerged as a hegemonic frame in yet another way. Conflation of caste with Hinduism also implied that all other religious communities of India, who too had caste or caste like divisions, implicitly shared a Hindu worldview based on the opposition between the pure and the impure. On this view, the Jains, the Buddhists, the Sikhs (Jodhka, 2004) or even the Muslims (see Julien Levesque’s chapter on Caste among Muslims in North India and Pakistan), and Christians (Mosse, 2012) of the region had either converted out of Hinduism (such as the Indian Muslims or the Indian Christians) or their faith systems were branches and varieties of the broader Hindu family (such as the Buddhists and the Jains, or even the Sikhs) (see Gellner and Quigley, 1997).
Such a view of India and its pasts also found interesting synergies with the emerging social science theories and thinking of the time in the Western world. The Eurocentric social science frameworks on social and economic change that developed in the mainstream of Western academy tended to view caste as a classic case of ‘tradition’ stuck in time, not having reached yet the realm of reason and rationality. The classical functionalist and evolutionary thinking dominant within the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology found the colonial/orientalist view of caste as a form of traditional social
order fitting very well in the theories of modernization and development that emerged in the western hemisphere during the middle of the 20th century.
Caste also acquired a special spatial identity, as an institution originating from India that came to be seen as being synonym of extreme social closure and anti-meritocratic in spirit. Caste was thus invoked to describe processes of social closure present in Western societies while at the same time ‘othering’ them by pointing to their oriental and Indian origin. For example, it often came to be invoked to describe enclosed elite formations or political establishments through expressions such as ‘the Boston Brahmins’ or ‘the political pundits’. The term had also been popular with scholars of race studies as a metaphor to describe impermeable boundaries and ascription-based status hierarchies across racial groupings, presumably found among the Hindus of India (Cox, 1945; Myrdal, 2017; Ogbu, 1979; Berreman, 1960). ‘Caste’ thus came to be inscribed in the textbooks of sociology as a form of social stratification that was closed and rigid with no possibility of mobility across strata, that was to be found in its purest form among the Hindus of India and its South-Asian neighbourhood.
Such an understanding of caste and its invocation as an example of ‘a type of society’ could also be witnessed in the sociological theories of social change; whereby all societies move from one kind of order to another. As these functionalist theories of change suggested, the social structure of pre-modern societies was characterized by ‘status’ and ‘communities’, which are ultimately bound to transform into associational collectives of individuals marked by distinctions of class. While the former and traditional social order was invariably a closed system of hierarchy based on the logic of ascription, the latter was an open system of stratification, which reflected differential individual achievements. Even the Marxian theory of capitalist transformation underlined the radical nature of change in social relations that capitalism had been able to bring about, dissolving all the pre-capitalist structures of belonging and distinction.
Interestingly, the functionalist thinking on a subject like caste, or its counterpart, the orientalist view of Indian tradition, or even the nationalist common-sense did not view caste as a ‘problem’ that produced deprivations and marginalities. They did not see the need for an active political engagement with such exclusionary realities on ground that produced poverty, conflict, and violence. As indicated above, in the eyes of the modernizers and of the developmental state, caste was primarily a cultural hangover that needed to be dealt with ideologically, like a deceptive myth. Caste, had thus to be overcome mentally. Its eventual disappearance, as a natural consequence of the forward march of history, was taken for granted. It is this imperative of disappearance that has informed much of the common-sense view of caste, and pervasively continues to do so even today.
Social Science Engagements with Caste: The early social science research and writing in India was also informed largely by a similar understanding of the caste system. This naturally made it a subject of lesser significance. In the given context where the ‘new nation’ was preoccupied with questions of development and change, thinking of caste appeared to be a regressive move. The economists, who were in the driving seat along with the political elite during the initial decades after Independence, designed India’s
path of development while hardly recognizing caste as a variable of any critical significance even when studying subjects such as poverty (Mosse, 2018). Surprisingly, the early historians too did not take caste seriously. They tended to work with categories such as class, community, religion, and region to make sense of India’s pasts. Even their accounts of rural life focused mostly on the land revenue system and the changing relationships between the peasantry and the state(s).
However, there were also counter-currents that this Handbook draws upon in order to lay the foundations of a re-framing of caste. The size of social science academy and institutional funding for field-based research expanded quite significantly after India’s Independence from colonial rule. India’s development planning was accompanied by the introduction of new systems of data collection. The process of evaluating the impacts of development planning and programmes also required qualitative empirical studies. India’s development planning and its choice of political democracy thus generated a great deal of interest in the ‘new’ nation-state among the academics of the western world. A wide range of scholars from the United States and Western Europe began to engage with the empirics of the Indian social, economic, and political life. This process has continued over time, including a growing number of collaborations with local scholars. Many of the Indian scholars who initiated surveys and qualitative empirical studies were also trained in Western universities.
With growing engagements of the social science scholarship, the Orientalist reading of caste drawn mostly from select classical texts and loaded with a Eurocentric bias began to be revised. One of the most popular subjects of enquiry that emerged during the 1950s was the empirical study of India’s rural life, mainly pursued by social anthropologists, many of whom later began to identify themselves as sociologists. Unlike their counterpart economists and political scientists of the time who were mostly preoccupied with questions of change, sociologists and social anthropologists were far more comfortable with exploring what existed on the ground. Given the popular view of India as a land of villages, the Indian village emerged as an obvious methodological entry point for the study of its social structure. For a social anthropologist approaching rural life from a cultural perspective, caste was its obvious core—the life blood of rural communities. Post-independence social scientists were thus sharing a common assumption with their colonial predecessors. Though this common interest in caste in its rural setting helped bridge the production of knowledge on caste from one epistemic moment to the other, the tireless fieldwork of social scientists from the post-colonial period led them to gradually emancipate themselves from the assumption that religion is the cornerstone of caste.
Over the years, caste thus came to be described as the stock-in-trade of the social anthropologists and sociologists working in/on India. Even when many of them shared the mainstream middle-class elite view of caste being a cultural hangover of the past, and that with India moving on the path of modernization it would die out on its own, they could rarely ignore its all-pervasive presence while constructing their ethnographic ‘field-views’ of village life, the presumed signifier of its authentic native self. They extensively explored the nature of jajmani relations, the inter-dependence among
caste groups, the nature of hierarchy, and structures of domination through which it reproduced itself (for a review of village studies, see Jodhka, 1998; Madan, 2002; Thakur, 2013; Cabalion and Thivet, 2019).
The early generation of sociologists and social anthropologists worked with the received notions of caste, inherited from the colonial and orientalist constructs of ‘Indian tradition’. However, they soon started to question the stated and unstated assumptions about the so-called unity of caste as an ideological construct and its ‘continuity’ with virtually no internal changes over the centuries. The early social anthropological monographs on individual villages pointed to the fluidities and diversities of rural social structures. They also pointed to aspects of power and dominance as being inherent to caste relations and the possibilities of mobility even within the so-called traditiongoverned hierarchies (see Nicolas Martin’s chapter on The Dominant Caste, and George Kunnath’s chapter on Sanskritization). They underlined the need to move away from the simple ‘book-view’ of caste to a ‘field-view’ to unearth its varied manifestations and internal dynamics of change and adaptability. They argued that the complexities of caste in the real world were often not easily captured in neatly worked-out theories and conceptions of the ‘system’ as present in some of the Western writings on the subject. Through empirical studies of village life and caste communities, they showed how caste changed with time and revealed possibilities of movement within this so-called ‘closed’ system of stratification (see Jules Naudet’s chapter on Caste and Class, and Divya Vaid’s chapter on Caste and Mobility). In particular, these studies documented caste’s capacity to adapt and change, which underpinned its remarkable endurance.
As studies on the subject progressed, some of them also looked at broader processes that were being shaped by caste. They underlined the need for taking it seriously as a lived reality that structured social life even beyond its rural settlements. Some of them also looked at caste-based community networks and the ways in which they were mobilized to achieve social and economic mobility (Hardgrave, 1969; Béteille, 2012). Still others looked at the emerging regional networks of caste communities, the ‘horizontal consolidations’ of the jatis (Srinivas, 1959).
Parallel to the shifts brought about by the field-view on caste, another epistemic change began to unfold itself during the 1980s and 1990s with a growing participation of Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs in academic debates. Following the path opened by Ambedkar and drawing upon new upward mobility pathways created by the implementation of reservations, they gradually entered the well-guarded upper-caste bastion of academia. Their voice and their scholarship slowly gained influence in intellectual debates. They brought to these debates their experiences of exclusion and humiliation and insisted on recognizing its persistence, even beyond the space of village and tradition, in labour markets, urban settlements, and the rapidly globalizing India. The popular view of caste was thus provincialized as the brahminical view on caste.
This growing influence partly drew upon the consolidation and radicalization of the Dalit movement, epitomized by the invigorating emergence of the Dalit Panther movement (see Hugo Gorringe and Karthikeyan Damodaran’s chapter on Dalit Movements and Harish Wankhede’s chapter on The Mahars and Dalit Movements of
