“In our society Hierarchical relations are influenced by social mobility. Explain how?” (2012)
Hierarchical relations are the everyday patterns of deference, dominance, distance and dependence between ranked groups: who sits where, who serves whom, who decides. In Indian society these were governed mainly by caste, gender and land. Social mobility changes them because every move up or down alters how groups deal with one another, not just a group’s own rank.
1. Status incongruence and re-ranking
Gerhard Lenski’s idea of status crystallisation (1954) holds that people whose ranks on different dimensions do not match push to bring them into line. A caste that gains land or office while keeping a low ritual rank claims honour to match. Max Weber’s separation of class, status and party explains the lever: gains in one order are used to press claims in another. The Nadars of southern Tamil Nadu, once toddy-tappers, turned commercial success into claims of Kshatriya descent and the right to enter temples.
2. Secular power reorders local dominance
M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste, strong in numbers, land and political clout, displaced priestly authority as the arbiter of village disputes. Patron–client (jajmani) ties declined as mobile service castes left hereditary obligations for wage work and the city. In Srinivas’s Rampura, the landowning Okkaligas, not the Brahmins, settled disputes. The obligations of dependence gave way to contract.
3. Imitation and conflict between neighbouring ranks
- Sanskritisation makes a higher caste the reference group, which fits Robert K. Merton’s idea of anticipatory socialisation. Upward claims are contested most fiercely by the castes just above, so conflict clusters between castes close to each other on the scale.
- Mobility can tighten gender hierarchy. Srinivas noted that castes adopting upper-caste norms often imposed stricter controls on women, such as seclusion and a ban on widow remarriage.
4. From imitation to rejection
Dalit mobility through education, reservation and urban jobs has increasingly meant rejecting the hierarchy rather than copying those above. Owen M. Lynch’s study of the Jatavs of Agra traced this move to Ambedkarite Buddhism. Assertion also provokes backlash: violence over land, weddings or inter-caste marriage often follows visible Dalit mobility, as dominant groups try to restore distance.
5. New hierarchies within mobile groups
Mobility is uneven, so internal elites form. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024), a seven-judge bench ruled 6:1 that states may sub-classify Scheduled Castes on empirical evidence of relative backwardness. Several judges also called for a creamy-layer test for SCs and STs. Uneven mobility has thus turned an administrative category once treated as uniform into a graded one.
6. Stability through mobility
Mobility can also stabilise hierarchy. Frank Parkin described upward mobility as a safety valve: when able members of lower strata rise, the strata they leave lose leaders, and the ordering itself goes unchallenged. André Béteille found in Sripuram that caste, class and power had separated without equality following.
Conclusion
Mobility changes hierarchical relations in several directions at once: it re-ranks groups, turns patronage into contract and imitation into assertion, and it breeds new internal inequalities and backlash. In Indian society, hierarchy is being reorganised by mobility rather than dissolved by it.