What are the features of M.N. Srinivas’ concept of dominant caste? How effective is it in understanding today’s reality? (2013)
M. N. Srinivas built the concept from the field rather than from texts: asked who actually runs a village, Rampura answered not the Brahmin but the landowning Okkaliga peasant. Introduced in The Social System of a Mysore Village (1955), sharpened in The Dominant Caste in Rampura (1959) and restated in The Dominant Caste and Other Essays (1987), it detaches local power from ritual rank.
Features of the concept
- Numerical preponderance over other castes in the locality.
- Economic strength, above all ownership of much of the arable land, which commands others’ labour.
- Political power in village affairs and, later, in party and panchayat arenas.
- A ritual status that is not too low — it need not be highest, only clean enough for command to be accepted.
- Later additions: Western education, jobs in the administration and urban sources of income — dominance becomes convertible across spheres.
- The attributes work in conjunction, and dominance is territorial — over a village, a cluster or a region. The dominant caste is also the local reference model for Sanskritisation and arbiter of caste disputes.
Where it still reads today’s reality well
Jats, Patidars, Marathas, Reddys, Kammas and Yadavs remain the units in which local power is organised, and land, numbers and party still decide panchayat and assembly outcomes. Srinivas’s deeper claim has held: caste’s ritual role declines while its secular role grows, dominance now working through associations, agitation and electoral bargaining.
Where it has weakened
- Dipankar Gupta finds the criteria loose and numbers unreliable: Jats dominate western Uttar Pradesh at roughly a tenth of the population while more numerous Dalits do not.
- The agrarian base is thinning — average operational holdings fell to 1.08 hectares by 2015-16, with 86 per cent small or marginal — so land no longer delivers the old command; migration and urban work supply exits from dependence.
- Dominance has fragmented. Adrian Mayer at Ramkheri and André Béteille at Sripuram found ritual, economic and political pre-eminence lodged in different castes.
- The concept is village-bounded and underplays the state: transfers, contracts and reservation now flow through bureaucracy and party.
- The sharpest anomaly is the paradox of dominant castes claiming backward status — Maharashtra’s 2024 law for Marathas and the September 2025 order easing Kunbi certificates, alongside Jat and Patidar agitations. Village dominance now coexists with claimed backwardness before the state.
Conclusion
As a description of who commands a locality it remains the most useful single tool Indian sociology has produced, and Census 2027’s caste enumeration will make that arithmetic visible again. But it needs rewriting for a field larger than the village, where dominance is negotiated with the state and not secured by land alone.