Transition in the Caste –Class divide

Human society has undergone tremendous transformation since its evolution. In the process it
has been greatly affected and influenced by several factors which imparted it an extreme
diversity. The diversity emerged in the form of caste, class, religion, language, ethnicity etc. has
greatly affected people political and cultural orientations and also significantly affected levels of
developmental process of human society. Thus, it has become important to understand the
concept like caste, gender, ethnicity and class in order to understand the forces that shape and
determine the human society. The notions of caste, gender, ethnicity and class cannot be
understood properly without having in depth understanding of the mutual interactions and inter
connectedness of these concepts. For instance, in order to understand the status and position of
women in society one has to understand the caste system because high caste women do not enjoy
the liberties that low caste women have for example going to market to sell commodities,
working in the fields along with men and so on so forth . At the same time lower caste women
come under undue criticism inter alia entangled with different issues like humiliation, atrocities
at the hands of higher castes, denial of education and various other basic rights as well.

Every civilization whether it is ancient, medieval or modern restructures its society in a

particular pattern. In each civilization stratified society appeared in one form or the other for
example masters and slaves, feudal lords and serfs, capitalists and proletariats etc. Thus it cannot
be denied that the possibility of absence of any stratification in any society is almost absent.
Societies are stratified on the basis of caste, class, status, income groups etc. In India one can
find social stratification in the form of caste which is based on the birth of the individual in a
particular family belonging to a particular caste . The word "Caste" originates from the Spanish
word 'Casta' which means 'breed, race,or kind.' The Portuguese used this word to refer the
different classes of people in India who are also known by the name of 'jati'. In Indian context,
the first literary traces of the caste system could be found in Rigveda and Pursasukta hymn.
Bhagavad Gita, the sacred hindu religious scripture, justified the caste system on the basis of the
idea of Guna Karma (deed/actions) and Dharma (Religion). During the age of Simritis and
Sutras, the Indian society had been divided into various castes. Strict principles regarding
occupation, food conduct and marriage were framed. These castes became so diversified that
they could not meet together in course of time. The feeling of untouchability also sprouted which
led to emergence of higher caste and lower caste leading to exploitation and suppression of lower
caste by the higher. The term caste is used interchangeably with other terms like such as Varna,
Jati, biradri and samaj. However these terms are entirely different from each other. M.N. Srinivas
defined “caste as an hereditary endogamous, usually localised group having a traditional
association with an occupation and a particular position in the local hierarchy of castes. Relations
between castes are governed among other things by concepts of pollution and purity and
generally maximum commensality occurs within the caste.”

Various feature of caste system: 1) Importance of hereditary and birth—caste system is based on
two important element – birth and hereditary. When a child is born immediately the caste of his
father becomes his caste with which he lives and dies so by birth a child gets his caste. Caste is
hereditary. From birth a child carries his father’s caste and as he grows up, marries and has his
own progeny, the progeny carries the same caste as that of his father. The caste status never
changes. 2) While in case of female before marriage her father’s caste becomes her caste and
after marriage her husband’s caste becomes her caste. Caste status of a female may change if
there is an inter caste marriage, which is against endogamy (another feature of caste system). 3)
Role of rigidity and immobility – Caste is rigid and immobile i.e if one is born into a caste he
cannot change it nor can he move up and down the status ladder. Hence it is immobile. 3.
Restrictions on social interaction and feeding:-Numerous restrictions were put on lower castes in
matter related to residence, marriage, eating habit, social interaction etc. The theory of pollution
is an innovation of caste system. 4.Endogamy - an essential element- In Hindu society members
of one particular caste can marry within their caste or sub-caste. A person is not allowed to marry
outside their caste. 5.Lack of unrestricted choice of occupation:- Occupations of castes are fixed.
The higher castes like Brahmin, Khsatriyas and Vaisyas are entrusted with occupation like
priestly duties, protection of country and trade and agriculture where as lower castes were given
only the menial jobs and are not allowed to change to other occupation of their choice. In caste
system a person is allowed to do only that occupation which is allotted to him by his caste. He
cannot change his occupation to a better one, this absence of upward social mobility obstruct one
from achieving higher status economically and socially. 6. Several civil and religious
disabilities:-Lower castes are not allowed to perform certain ceremonies for example upnayana
i.e wearing of sacred thread. They were also not allowed to enter temple nor had right to get
education in schools and colleges. The upper castes were considered as pure and touch of lower
casts could pollute them, this belief restricted the movement of lower caste people. In case a
Brahmin is accidently touched by lower caste he had to perform certain rites to get purified. 7)
Caste Panchayats--Every caste has its own group representation in a regional unit.

The anti caste movement emerged out of the exploitation and domination of lower castes by
higher caste. In course of time the movement in order to eradicate the system began taking
shape in various parts of the country at various times. Buddhism attacked the monopoly of the
Brahmans in respect of sacred knowledge and placed the Kshatriyas first in the hierarchy of the
caste system, replacing the Brahmins. His dethroning of Brahmans from their centuries old social
status and replacing kshatriyas on the top of caste system shows Budhdha’s protest against the
hierarchal system and reflects his radical thinking. The rise of devotional movements both
among the Vaishnavite and Saivaite sects could be looked upon as protest movements against the
paths of knowledge and action which were the monopoly of certain sections of the Brahmans.
The masses were deprived of these paths which had become highly specialized and closed. The
devotional movements upheld the path of devotion which could be followed by all, irrespective
of caste and sectarian differences. They also replaced Sanskrit by the vernacular languages, and
this led to a significant development of devotional literature in different regional languages.
Protest movements in pre-British India were largely characterized by their concern with religious
beliefs and practices, as those constituted the chief area of relative deprivation. Brahminical
Hinduism had established a monopoly over paths of salvation and denied the common man
access to them. An awareness of the deprivation grew in different degrees among various
sections including the Brahmans and the untouchables.

The English educational system, along with its legal and administrative system all encouraged
the spread of the secular egalitarian ideology. The National Movement buttressed these ideas and
helped the Scheduled Castes to fight for their basic rights in the diverse areas of social life. The
lower caste movements that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in different
parts of colonial India had some identical themes like claim to higher varna status, facilities in
education, removal of social disability, reservation in governmental services etc. Under British
rule caste consciousness was enhanced and almost every caste across India developed its own
identity. In Maharashtra Dr.Ambedkar developed an autonomous movement from 1920’s. He
demanded separate representation, the right to use tanks and enter temple. E.V Ramaswamy
Naicker founded Self Respect Movement. He advocated wedding without Brahmin Priest,
forcible temple entry, burning of Manusmriti. Swami Dayanand Saraswati started Arya Samaj
movement in Punjab for the dalits. It included them in its fold and condemned untouchability.
AdiDravid and Adi Andhra Movement had spread in South India. These movements portrayed
dalit as the indigenous people. The organization like Andhra Mahajan Sabha and DravidMahajan
Sabha were formed for undertaking the programmes for dalit upliftment. In Bengal Namasudra
Movement emerged against the domination of upper caste. The old use of the term ‘caste’
somewhat changed in present day society. Some believe that the Caste prejudices have lessened
and caste sanctions do not operate with the same force in all sections of Indian society due to
widespread education, modern outlook and emergence of new values brought by globalisation.
But in the realm of marriage caste still plays a important role. Endogamy is still the dominant
mode in contemporary Indian society but inter-caste marriages are becoming popular now days

Class Divides

Class refers to a status group in a society. Here status indicate economic prosperity. Thus Class is
a person’s economic position in a society. If an individual is having good education, receiving
handsome salary, owns palatial house and vehicle of a particular brand is regarded as an elite
class where as a person who has no land of his own, no earning source nor owns any vehicle is
regarded as lower class. Thus the economic prosperity defines a person’s class. The word Class
has been defined in numerous ways— For Sociologist class is one of the fundamental type social
stratification. Individuals are grouped into classes according to their economic positions and
similar political interest with in the stratification. Most societies have their own notion of social
class. Marx defined class in term of social group having control over the means of production.
According to Marx society consisted of two classes capitalist or bourgeois class (those who own
means of production) and proletariat class ( those who don’t own means of production or the
labour class). In Max Weber’s opinion class is not merely a product of the economic relations in
society there are other factors that influences class like ‘status’ (the differences between social
groups in the social honour or prestige) and ‘party’(a group of individuals who work together
due to the fact that they have common backgrounds, aims or interests) in society. In societies
where classes exist ,a single class is determined by few factors like occupation, education,
income ,wealth family background etc. According to VM Dandekar, there are five major classes
in India 1)Pre Capitalist (cultivator, agricultural labour and household industry) (2) Independent
workers in capitalist society (3)Employers (4) white collar employees (5) blue collar works. The
main classes in India today can also be referred to as (1) the agrarian classes (2) the industrial
classes (3) the professional classes and (5) the business and mercantile classes. Marx has talked
about class antagonism but class harmony and multiplicity of classes between haves and the
have-nots are other important factors that cannot be ignored. The existence of middle class has
not attracted the attention of Marx. The rapid growth of Indian economy in the last few decades
contributed to a large expansion of India’s middle class. The middle class refers to a large group
who are neither rich nor poor but having internal diversities in the form of occupation, income,
caste, community and region. This middle class played an important role in providing leadership
to various sections of the Indian society. The traditional leadership had been displaced by these
middle class. This middle class forms a large consumer base for the market-based economy.
Some important features of Indian middle classes are ---- they are globally mobile, dwell in
urban places , use the language of modernity and are active participate in the articulations of
identity politics of both the dominant “majorities” and of the “minorities”. Unlike the Western
context, the Indian middle class lacks autonomy. It remains dependent on patronage and
perpetuates the patronage culture6 . Besides the middle class, OBC or Other backward classes
play another important role in political realm. Originally the word ‘Backward Classes’ was used
around 1919 to refer to a section of population which was backward in socio- economic sense.
The term did not limit itself to the matrix of caste, it encompassed the Depressed Classes, the
aboriginal tribes as well as the other backward classes. The Constitution of India does not clearly
defines OBCs. It only refers to "socially and educationally backward classes". For their
upliftment Constitution has taken several steps. Under Article 340 of the Indian Constitution, it is
obligatory on the part of government to promote the welfare of the OBCs. In 1953, the Backward
Class Commission was appointed. Kaka Kalelkar became its Chairman. The Commission was
given the task of determining the criteria that was to be adopted for providing concessions to
“socially and educationally backward classes”. The Commission was also asked to prepare a list
of such socially and educationally backward classes. The Commission prepared a list of about
2400 castes. Since the late 1980s, there was decline of upper-caste representation in the Lok
Sabha, and on the other hand there was simultaneous rise of OBCs. This scenario emerged due to
the decline of the Congress — a party dominated by upper castes — and to the rise of regional
parties, primarily supported by large, dominant OBC groups. OBCs, since early 1990’s occupied
the centre of the political space in northern India.

Rural-Urban divide

India over the past three decades has been on exactly such a path of structural transformation.
Prodded by a sequence of reforms starting in the mid 1980s, the country is now averaging annual
growth rates routinely is excess of 8 percent. This is in sharp contrast to the first 40 years since
1947 (when India became an independent country) during which period the average annual
output growth hovered around the 3 percent mark, a rate that barely kept pace with population
growth during this period. This phase has also been marked by a significant transformation in the
output composition of the country with the agricultural sector gradually contracting both in terms
of its output and employment shares. The big expansion has occurred in the service sector. The
industrial sector has also expanded but at a far lower pace.

this period has been marked by significant narrowing of the gaps between rural and urban areas
in most of these measures. The shrinking of the rural-urban gaps have been the sharpest in
education attainment and wages, but there have also been important convergent trends in
occupation choices. Thus, there has been a significantly faster expansion of blue-collar jobs
(primarily production and service workers) in rural areas relative to urban areas, which was
surprising given the usual priors that blue and white collar occupations are mostly centered
around urban locations. We also detect signs of some interesting distributional aspects of the
changes in wages and consumption in that the rural poor (10th percentile) appeared to have
gained relative to the urban poor during this period whereas the rural rich (the 90th percentile)
failed to keep pace. the incentives generated by the institutional structure of the country are
providing useful signals to the workforce in guiding their choices. As a result, there is significant
churning that occurs at the micro levels of the economy in response to the aggregate churning.
Moreover, some of the changes have been truly striking with the median wage premium of urban
workers declining from around 100 percent in 1983 to just around 25 percent by 2005. This is a
welcome sign. There is a large body of work on inequality and poverty in India. A sample of this
work can be found in Banerjee and Piketty (2001), Bhalla (2003), Deaton and Dreze (2002) and
Sen and Himanshu (2005). While some of these studies do examine inequality and poverty in the
context of the rural and urban sectors separately (see Deaton and Dreze (2002) in particular),
most of this work is centered on either measuring inequality (through Gini coe¢ cients) or
poverty, focused either on consumption or income alone, and restricted to a few rounds of the
NSS data at best. An overview of this work can be found in Pal and Ghosh (2007). Our study is
distinct from this body of work in that we examine multiple indicators of economic achievement
over a 22 year period. This gives us both a broader view of developments as well as a time-series
perspective on post-reform India.

This period has been marked by a sharp and significant convergent trend in the education
attainment levels of the rural workforce towards the levels of their urban counterparts. This
process has also been accompanied by some convergence in the occupation choices being made
in the two sectors. Specifically, the contraction in agrarian jobs in rural areas that has
accompanied the ongoing structural transformation of economy away from agriculture has been
met by an expansion of blue-collar occupations in rural areas at a significantly faster rate than the
corresponding expansion of blue-collar occupations in urban areas. As a result there appears to
have set in a process of convergence in the rural and urban occupation distribution as well (even
though the absolute diffrences between the two sectors continues to be very large). Moreover,
there has also been a significant convergent trend in rural wages towards urban areas over this
period with the median urban wage premium having declined from 100 percent in 1983 to
around 26 percent by 2005. We find this rate of wage convergence to be very large and
somewhat unexpected. We also found that the convergence in consumption between rural and
urban households has been more muted than that for some of the other indicators we examined.
Importantly though there were some shared features of the consumption and wage dynamics in
that the rural poor did better over time than the corresponding urban poor (10th percentile) in
terms of both indicators so that by 2005, the 10th percentile wage and consumption in rural areas
exceeded that of their urban counterparts. There was however divergence in the fortunes of the
90th percentile in both wages and consumption where the pre-existing urban advantage became
more pronounced over time. We believe these results to be indicative of the fact that the massive
macroeconomic changes that have been underway in India during this period have led to a
healthy churning of the labor force in the country. The results we have obtained here for the
rural-urban gaps are similar in spirit to those in Hnatkovska, Lahiri, and Paul (2012) and
Hnatkovska, Lahiri, and Paul (2011) for the gaps between scheduled castes/tribes and others in
the Indian workforce. There too we found significant convergence across the two groups in
education, occupation choices, wages and consumption. Clearly, some of the market incentives
that were unleashed by the economic reforms have been providing the right signals to economic
agents to make the appropriate market based private choices in terms of their schooling and
employment decisions.