Is Indian society moving from ‘hierarchy’ towards ‘differentiation’? Illustrate your answer with suitable examples. (2021)
Louis Dumont held that India was ordered vertically by one value, purity, which made it homo hierarchicus. Dipankar Gupta replied in Interrogating Caste (2000) that castes are discrete and mutually repelling, and that difference, not rank, holds them apart. India is moving from the first condition to the second — but unevenly, and along one axis rather than all.
The two principles distinguished
Hierarchy requires a single encompassing value by which all groups are graded, the whole prior to its parts. Differentiation requires only that groups be distinct and formally comparable, ranking between them becoming contested or irrelevant. André Béteille supplies the connecting vocabulary: stratification in Sripuram moved from cumulative — caste, class and power in the same hands — to dispersed, and a harmonic order that avowed its inequality has given way to a disharmonic one that professes equality while practising inequality.
Evidence of movement towards differentiation
- Caste has come loose from occupation. Traditional jajmani obligations have collapsed; salaried, service and platform work is recruited through markets rather than birth-right, and a single jati now spans landlords, migrants and professionals.
- Urban anonymity weakens ritual distance. Commensality was the first casualty: Harold Gould‘s study of Lucknow rickshaw-pullers found caste rules suspended at work and resumed at home, and the shared canteen and bus have made that the urban norm.
- Caste has become associational. Rajni Kothari argued in Caste in Indian Politics (1970) that politics is not caste-ridden so much as caste is politicised; Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph called caste associations paracommunities — voluntary, interest-pursuing bodies with office-bearers rather than ritual rank.
- Competitive politics inverts the ladder. Christophe Jaffrelot‘s India’s Silent Revolution (2003) traces the post-Mandal rise of Other Backward Classes to power in the Hindi belt. The clearest proof of inversion is that Marathas, Patidars and Jats — locally dominant castes — have agitated for backward status, unthinkable where purity ranked.
- The state now counts difference. Bihar’s 2023 survey and Telangana’s 2024 caste enumeration treated castes as countable blocs, and the notified schedule for Census 2027 carries a caste question — the first national caste count since 1931. Differentiation is being written into the state’s own categories.
Where hierarchy has not moved
- Marriage remains closed. Inter-caste unions are roughly one in twenty; endogamy, not commensality, is what B. R. Ambedkar identified in Castes in India (1916) as caste’s real mechanism, and it has changed least.
- Untouchability has changed form, not existence. Sanitation work remains caste-assigned, atrocity cases against Scheduled Castes run to tens of thousands a year, and honour killings police the endogamous boundary.
- Discrimination survives in modern institutions. The correspondence study of job applications by Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell found identically qualified Dalit and Muslim applicants called back less often by private firms — hierarchy in the language of merit.
- Upper-caste invisibility. Satish Deshpande argues that the privileged now present themselves as casteless, so that only the reserved categories appear to have caste at all, while Surinder S. Jodhka shows business networks of trust remain caste networks.
A weighed answer
India is moving decisively towards differentiation in the public sphere — politics, occupation, association and the state’s categories — and hardly at all in the domestic sphere, where endogamy and stigma survive. Gupta’s sharper point is that the move is partly an illusion of perspective: difference was always there, concealed by the Brahmanical account Dumont mistook for the whole society.
Conclusion
The trajectory is real but partial: caste is becoming a horizontal system of competing identities that keeps a vertical residue of humiliation. Béteille’s disharmonic society describes the present exactly, and the open question is whether a census that counts difference will dissolve hierarchy or re-arm it.