What are the changes in the cultural and structural aspects of the caste system since independence? (2017)
The question turns on a distinction that must be stated before anything is described. The cultural aspect of caste is its ideological and ritual content — purity and pollution, ritual ranking, commensal rules, hereditary calling understood as duty. The structural aspect is the framework of relations — endogamy, the graded order of jatis, the jajmani division of labour, and the caste as a corporate group. Since 1947 both have moved, at very different speeds.
Cultural change: the idiom has lost its authority
- Purity and pollution no longer justify anything in public. Article 17 made untouchability an offence, and what André Béteille called a harmonic order, which avowed its inequality openly, became a disharmonic one professing equality.
- Commensal rules have collapsed outside the home, surviving in the kitchen and at ritual occasions rather than in shared public space.
- The model of emulation has changed. M. N. Srinivas‘s Sanskritisation described low castes adopting twice-born custom; post-Mandal Dalit and Other Backward Class assertion more often repudiates that model, celebrating its own icons, histories and cuisine.
- Hereditary occupation has ceased to be a value. Work is now defended as contract and right, not as dharma.
Structural change: relations reordered by state and market
- Jajmani ties have dissolved under wages, migration and mechanised services; land reform and the dispersal of caste, class and power ended the old correspondence between ritual rank, landholding and authority.
- Caste has become associational — federations, associations and parties give the corporate group a voluntary and electoral form instead of a ritual one.
- The state is now the chief structuring agent. Reservation, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, and above all the Supreme Court’s seven-judge ruling in State of Punjab v Davinder Singh of 1 August 2024, permitting states to sub-classify within the Scheduled Castes, show that the rules of distribution inside a caste category are themselves now a structural variable.
- Endogamy has not moved, and with it the boundary of the group survives intact.
The two aspects compared
| Cultural aspect | Structural aspect | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction of change | Ritual sanction delegitimised | Relations reordered, boundaries intact |
| Chief agents | Constitutional values, education, assertion movements | Reservation, market, franchise, judiciary |
| Residue | Classification outlives belief | Endogamy and segregation outlive law |
Conclusion
Cultural change has run ahead of structural change: India stopped believing in hierarchy faster than it stopped practising closure. That gap — a delegitimised ideology resting on a largely intact structure — is the defining condition of caste since independence, and the reason abolition by statute has changed the language of caste more than its arithmetic.