Is caste system changing, weakening or disintegrating in India? (2015)
The question offers three verbs that are ordinarily treated as synonyms and are not. Changing asserts that caste’s form has altered; weakening that its grip on conduct has loosened; disintegrating that it is ceasing to exist as a system at all. Each is a separate claim with a separate test. The evidence answers them differently: caste is changing decisively, weakening selectively, and disintegrating nowhere.
The three claims and the tests they must pass
| Claim | What it asserts | Test |
|---|---|---|
| Changing | Form and functions have altered | New units, new functions, altered relations between castes |
| Weakening | Caste governs less of conduct | Rules of marriage, food and occupation losing force |
| Disintegrating | Caste is ceasing to be a system | Endogamy failing; the corporate group dissolving |
Caste is changing — the best supported of the three
- The jajmani order that tied caste to hereditary service has gone. Occupation is now allocated by markets, schooling and migration rather than by birth.
- André Béteille, in Caste, Class and Power (1965), found caste, class and power in Sripuram moving from cumulative to dispersed; ritual rank no longer predicts land or office.
- Louis Dumont named the change himself — substantialisation, a relational hierarchy turning into competing blocks that assert identity and interest.
- M. N. Srinivas added secularisation in Social Change in Modern India (1966): ritual considerations withdraw from conduct even as caste becomes a more effective instrument of political and economic action.
- The direction of claims has inverted. Locally dominant peasant castes now agitate for backward status — unintelligible in an order that ranked by purity.
Caste is weakening — but only along one dimension
Where it has weakened. Ritual distance is unenforceable in the shared spaces of urban life. Occupational fixity has gone, the caste panchayat has lost authority over members who migrate, and, most fundamentally, hierarchy has lost its legitimacy. Béteille’s contrast is exact: a harmonic order that avowed its inequality has become a disharmonic one that professes equality while practising it unevenly.
Where it has not. Endogamy is intact. Telangana’s caste survey of 2024-25, covering 3.55 crore people across 242 caste groups, found only 5.6 per cent of households reporting a marriage outside the caste — 8.7 per cent in towns, 3.3 per cent in villages. Boundary violence persists: 55,698 cases of crime against Scheduled Castes were registered in 2024. Caste in association, election and enterprise is stronger than in 1947.
The honest formulation is therefore dimensional. Weakening is true of caste’s ritual dimension and false of its secular one — which is why the same decade can produce both a collapse of commensal rules and a surge of caste mobilisation.
Caste is not disintegrating
- Disintegration would require endogamy to fail and the corporate group to dissolve. Neither has occurred; the marriage rule that B. R. Ambedkar identified as the mechanism is the least altered feature of the system.
- The state now actively reconstitutes caste as an official category. After Bihar in 2023 and Telangana in 2024-25, the schedule notified in August 2026 for Census 2027 carries a caste question recorded in open form — the first national caste enumeration since 1931.
- Ambedkar’s graded inequality explains the durability: each stratum has someone below it to defend, so no united assault on the order forms.
- What has changed is caste’s form of existence — from a ritual hierarchy of interdependent groups to a field of endogamous identity-and-interest blocs. That is transformation, not dissolution.
Conclusion
Caste is changing rapidly, weakening where it was ritual, strengthening where it is political, and disintegrating not at all. A system can lose its ideology and keep its boundaries; in India it is the boundary, not the belief, that makes caste a system — and that boundary is now being redrawn by the state’s own categories rather than erased by them.