Write short note with a sociological perspective: André Béteille’s definition of class. (2013)
André Béteille‘s Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (1965), built on fieldwork in Sripuram, gave Indian sociology its working definition of class. He writes in a Weberian frame: class is one of three analytically distinct dimensions of stratification, alongside status (caste, ritual rank) and power (political office and influence), and none of the three can be collapsed into the others.
Class as position in the system of production and distribution
For Béteille a class is a category of persons occupying a similar position in the system of production and distribution. In agrarian India that position rests on three bases he later set out in Studies in Agrarian Social Structure (1974): ownership of land, control over land, and the nature of the work done — to which income must be added. Sripuram showed all three separating: Brahmin mirasdars owned without cultivating, non-Brahmin tenants controlled cultivation without title, and Adi-Dravida labourers worked without either.
Caste and class distinguished
| Criterion | Caste | Class |
|---|---|---|
| Membership | Ascribed by birth | Achieved through economic position |
| Basis | Ritual rank, purity and pollution | Ownership, control, occupation, income |
| Boundaries | Sharp, corporate, with its own panchayat | Open-ended, with no clear dividing line |
| Sanction | Religious and ritual | None; purely economic |
| Mobility | Closed; individual mobility barred | Open |
| Form | A self-conscious community | An analytical category |
Continuum, consciousness and the disharmonic turn
Because ownership, control and work vary by degree, class in the Indian countryside is a continuum rather than a set of bounded groups; Béteille’s classes are therefore analytical constructs, not corporate communities. Class is objective in position but only intermittently subjective in consciousness — a peasantry ranked by acres need not act as a class. His central historical claim follows: stratification moves from a harmonic system, where caste, class and power are cumulative and inequality is legitimated by shared values, to a disharmonic one, where an egalitarian ideology coexists with practised hierarchy and the three dimensions disperse. In Inequality among Men (1977) and The Idea of Natural Inequality (1983) he insists on separating inequality (gradational, everywhere) from hierarchy (a ranked value system), and traces a new middle class defined by education and occupation rather than land.
Critique
- Marxists object that this is a distributive, gradational account: it ranks positions without naming the relation of exploitation, and has no place for class-in-itself becoming class-for-itself.
- Louis Dumont denies class any autonomy, holding that hierarchy encompasses economic difference ideologically.
- Béteille’s continuum fits the evidence: Agriculture Census 2015-16 records 86.08% of holdings as small and marginal, operating only 46.94% of the area — a graded spread, not two camps. Surinder S. Jodhka (“On the Futures of Caste”, Economic and Political Weekly, 2024) nonetheless urges attention to caste’s stubborn materiality.
Conclusion
Béteille’s definition endures because it is deliberately modest: class names an economic position, not a destiny. By holding caste, class and power apart while tracing their historical decoupling, he supplied the standard toolkit for studying Indian stratification — one that neither dissolves class into caste nor caste into class.