Write short note: Dominant caste and the agrarian power structure. (1984)
M. N. Srinivas coined “dominant caste” from his Rampura fieldwork, setting it out in “The Social System of a Mysore Village” (1955) and “The Dominant Caste in Rampura” (1959), and elaborating it in The Remembered Village (1976). Its analytical force is that it makes local power secular: a caste can rule a locality without ranking highest ritually, which neither the varna scheme nor Louis Dumont‘s purity-based hierarchy can accommodate.
The criteria
A caste is dominant when it combines:
1. Numerical strength in the locality; 2. Preponderant economic power, above all ownership of arable land; 3. Political power over village affairs; 4. A fairly high, though not necessarily the highest, ritual rank;
to which Srinivas later added Western education, jobs in the administration and urban sources of income. The Okkaligas of Rampura were dominant while ranking below the Brahmins. The pattern repeats across India — Jats in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, Reddys and Kammas in Andhra, Marathas in Maharashtra, Patidars in Gujarat, Nairs in Kerala, Lingayats and Vokkaligas in Karnataka, Yadavs and Kurmis in Bihar.
How dominance works in the agrarian structure
- Land is the master resource. Owning it means controlling employment, tenancy, grazing, credit and the terms on which labour is hired — the landless must come to the same doors for work and loans.
- Dispute settlement. The dominant caste’s elders constitute the effective court, defining custom and enforcing it.
- Command of formal institutions. The statutory panchayat, cooperative society and procurement channel are captured, converting local dominance into state resources.
- Patronage and the vote bank — Srinivas’s own term — translate economic dependence into electoral blocs.
- Sanction. Social boycott, denial of wages and physical coercion enforce the order; caste violence in rural India is typically dominant-caste violence against assertive Dalits.
Critiques and change
- T. K. Oommen (“The Concept of Dominant Caste: Some Queries”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1970) argued that the concept describes a power situation without explaining it, that the solidarity it produces is authoritarian rather than integrative, and that adult franchise and Panchayati Raj make numerical strength decisive in its own right.
- Marxist scholars, and studies of agrarian conflict such as Ghanshyam Shah‘s, read the “dominant caste” as a class coalition of landholders, so that caste names the idiom while property supplies the substance.
- André Béteille‘s Sripuram showed caste, class and power decoupling: land passing to non-Brahmins, power to the numerically strong, ritual rank left standing alone.
- Dipankar Gupta argues dominance today is fragmented and contested rather than concentrated in one caste per locality.
- Structural change has been real: reservation of panchayat seats for Scheduled Castes and women under the 73rd Amendment (1992) — over 14.5 lakh women now hold about 46% of panchayat seats — Dalit assertion, and the exit of dominant-caste youth into urban employment.
Conclusion
Dominance has not ended; it has changed currency. Where it once rested on land and ritual deference, it now works through numbers, political parties, control of cooperatives and credit, and the capacity for violence — the National Crime Records Bureau logged 57,789 cases of crime against Scheduled Castes in 2023. Agrarian power has been democratised in form and reorganised, not dissolved, in substance.