‘Caste is becoming weaker and stronger at the same time in present day India.’ Discuss the factors responsible for continuity and change. (1997)
The statement looks like a contradiction and is not. Caste is a compound institution with a ritual dimension and a secular dimension, and the two have moved in opposite directions. M. N. Srinivas‘s account of secularisation in Social Change in Modern India (1966) supplies the key: as ritual considerations retreat from conduct, caste becomes a more effective unit of political and economic action. What is weakening and what is strengthening are not the same thing.
Weakening: caste as a ritual order
- Commensality and pollution rules cannot be enforced where people share transport, canteens, hostels and offices. The rule survives in the kitchen and dies in public.
- Occupational fixity has gone with the jajmani order; birth no longer allocates work, and the hereditary calling has ceased to be a dharma.
- Untouchability’s open forms — denial of wells, temples and roads — are unlawful under Article 17 and have largely lost their public defenders, though they persist covertly.
- The sanction itself has been withdrawn. André Béteille‘s distinction is the precise one: a harmonic system whose values legitimated its inequality has become a disharmonic one in which an egalitarian ideology coexists with unequal practice. Nobody now argues in public that hierarchy is good.
Strengthening: caste as a political and identity resource
- Numbers became valuable. Universal franchise turned jatis into constituencies; Srinivas coined ‘vote bank’ in 1955, and Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph showed caste associations working as paracommunities — voluntary bodies with office-bearers, funds and candidates.
- Quota politics has institutionalised caste as a claim. Dominant peasant castes agitating for backward status show caste being used downwards, for entitlement, rather than upwards, for rank.
- Endogamy has not yielded. Telangana’s caste survey of 2024-25, covering 3.55 crore people across 242 caste groups, found just 5.6 per cent of households reporting an inter-caste marriage — 8.7 per cent urban against 3.3 per cent rural. The marriage market remains the system’s engine.
- Caste as economic network. Trust, credit and recruitment in the informal economy run along jati lines, so caste is functional to modern business rather than residual to it.
Why both at once: the mechanism of the paradox
The weakening of the whole is what strengthens the parts. Once the encompassing value of purity loses authority, castes stop being rungs of a single ladder and become discrete, mutually repelling blocs — which is Dipankar Gupta‘s argument in Interrogating Caste (2000) that difference, not hierarchy, now organises inter-caste relations, and what Louis Dumont himself anticipated with substantialisation. A ranked order cannot mobilise; a set of equal-standing competitors can. Democracy then rewards exactly the solidarity that ritual once supplied, and Yogendra Singh‘s finding in Modernisation of Indian Tradition (1973) applies precisely: Indian tradition did not retreat before modernity, it took up modern functions.
Conclusion
Caste is weaker as a system of graded ritual worth and stronger as a system of bounded identity and organised interest. The statement is therefore not paradoxical but analytically exact — and its sting is that the dimension which has weakened is the one that could be abolished by law, while the one that has strengthened lies in marriage, network and the ballot, where law reaches least.