Caste System studies in India have been dominated by the ‘book-view’ initially. How did the entry of ‘field-view’ bring about a balance in the study of Indian caste system? Discuss. (2021)
The book-view derives knowledge of caste from scripture; the field-view from observation of living communities. Indian sociology began with the first and was corrected, though not replaced, by the second. The balance the question asks about lies precisely in that “not replaced”.
The book-view and what it produced
Indologists, orientalists and their Indian successors read caste from the Vedas, Dharmashastras and epics. G. S. Ghurye‘s Caste and Race in India (1932) and, later, Louis Dumont‘s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) worked this way. The picture that resulted was of a fourfold varna order, fixed rank derived from the purity–impurity opposition, hereditary occupation and no mobility — India seen from the top, and from the Brahmin’s text.
What the field-view found instead
Village studies of the 1950s reversed the method. M. N. Srinivas at Rampura and in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952), S. C. Dube‘s Indian Village (1955), the essays in McKim Marriott‘s Village India (1955) and Srinivas’s India’s Villages (1955), Oscar Lewis in a Delhi village, F. G. Bailey in Bisipara and André Béteille in Sripuram found:
| Book-view | Field-view |
|---|---|
| Four varnas | Thousands of jatis, locally ranked |
| Rank fixed and agreed | Rank disputed in the middle zone |
| No mobility | Sanskritisation: positional mobility |
| Ritual status governs | Dominant caste: land, numbers, votes |
| One all-India system | Sharp regional variation |
Gerald Berreman, in Sirkanda, added the view from below: what looks like consensus to a visitor is coercion to those it ranks.
How this produced balance rather than replacement
- Varna survived as an idiom, not a map. Srinivas held that groups claim mobility in varna vocabulary, so the field view still needs the text to explain what climbers imitate.
- Ritual and material rank were disentangled: Béteille‘s Caste, Class and Power (1965) showed caste, class and power moving from cumulative towards dispersed inequality.
- Caste was shown to be dynamic without ceasing to be hierarchical, so neither the static text nor the fluid village alone is adequate.
The field-view has its own limits: it took informants from the dominant sections, bounded caste within one village, and froze it in a synchronic present. Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), problematised both by arguing that colonial census and ethnography themselves hardened caste.
Conclusion
Balance means using each view for what it explains — ideology from the book, practice from the field. Bihar’s 2023 caste survey, which counted Other Backward Classes and Extremely Backward Classes at 63.13 per cent against 15.52 per cent for the general category, and Telangana’s survey of 2024–25, are the field-view enlarged to state scale: numbers, not scripture, now set the terms of caste politics.