Write short note: Caste and occupational mobility. (1994)
G. S. Ghurye listed lack of unrestricted choice of occupation among the defining features of caste in Caste and Race in India (1932), and varna theory assigned each order its calling. Yet the tie between caste and work was always looser in practice than in doctrine — and it has loosened further without dissolving the stigma attached to particular kinds of work.
The theoretical presumption
- Occupation was ascribed and hereditary, transmitted with caste membership and sanctioned by dharma.
- The jajmani system institutionalised it: William Wiser (The Hindu Jajmani System, 1936) described hereditary, multi-stranded service relations in which the kamin family served the same jajman family across generations, paid in grain rather than cash.
- Louis Dumont read the division of labour as an expression of purity and pollution — the barber, washerman and scavenger ranked by the pollution their work absorbs.
How far it actually held
- Only a minority of jatis had a distinctive traditional occupation. Agriculture, the livelihood of most Indians, was open to almost all castes, and trade, soldiering and service were widely shared.
- M. N. Srinivas noted that the fit between varna theory and jati practice was poor: rank could be claimed and occupations changed while caste names stayed.
- The correspondence was therefore strongest at the two ends — priestly work and polluting work — and weakest in the middle.
What loosened the link
- Industrialisation, urban anonymity, cash wages and the decay of jajmani; the state’s impersonal recruitment; education and reservation.
- New occupations carry no caste label, which is why information technology, transport and retail have absorbed mobility most readily.
What persists
- Stigmatised work remains caste-assigned. Of the sewer and septic-tank workers profiled under the sanitation workers’ scheme and reported to Parliament in December 2024, 67.8 per cent were Scheduled Caste and only about 8 per cent general category.
- Mobility is unequal across generations. Working on survey data from Uttar Pradesh, Rukmi Pradeep and Srinivas Goli found the gap between Brahmins and Jatav-Chamars in higher-grade service jobs widening from 6.4 to 20.3 percentage points across three generations.
- Hiring itself is not caste-blind: a correspondence study of private-sector applications by Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell found equally qualified applicants with Dalit names called for interview less often.
- Caste networks still allocate credit, contracts and apprenticeships in business, reproducing occupational clusters without any formal rule.
Conclusion
Caste never determined occupation as tightly as the texts claimed, and modern employment has cut the link further. What survives is the reverse relation: occupations do not follow caste so much as the most degraded occupations still find the same castes waiting to fill them.