Discuss the process of mobility that has taken place in the caste structure in India. In this context, explain the convergence of caste and class. (1990)
The caste system proscribes individual mobility but never prevented group mobility. What has changed is the currency in which mobility is claimed — from ritual emulation to land, education, jobs and votes — and that shift brings caste and class into closer alignment.
Ritual mobility: Sanskritisation
M. N. Srinivas, in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) and Social Change in Modern India (1966), described Sanskritisation: a low caste, tribal or other group adopts the ritual, diet and lifestyle of a twice-born caste to claim a higher position. Two qualifications matter here.
- It produces positional change, not structural change. One group rises within the ladder; the ladder and its principle of graded purity survive intact.
- It is rarely purely ritual. A claim is conceded only where the group has first improved its numbers, land or political weight, so economic mobility precedes ritual mobility.
Secular mobility: land, votes, education, law
- Dominant caste, Srinivas’s other concept, names the vehicle: numerical strength plus landholding plus local political power. Land reform and the Green Revolution turned tenant cultivating castes into a capitalist farming stratum in Punjab, western Uttar Pradesh, coastal Andhra and Maharashtra.
- Adult franchise made numbers into a resource. Rajni Kothari, in Caste in Indian Politics (1970), showed caste associations converting ritual segments into political constituencies; Christophe Jaffrelot later read the rise of backward-caste parties after Mandal as a silent revolution.
- Reservation, urban employment and education opened individual mobility, producing an administrative and professional stratum among Scheduled Castes.
- André Béteille found in Sripuram that prospering non-Brahmins did not want to become Brahmins; under Dravidian mobilisation secular mobility was an end in itself, so Sanskritisation is not an all-India process.
The convergence of caste and class
Convergence means that caste rank and class position increasingly predict each other, at the two ends of the order rather than in the middle.
- At the bottom, correspondence is strong and hardening. Scheduled Caste workers remain heavily over-represented in casual wage labour and under-represented in regular salaried and proprietary work, so the ritually lowest castes still supply the bulk of the propertyless.
- At the top, the older ritual elite has converted ritual and cultural capital into education, professions and capital ownership, so upper-caste concentration in the propertied and professional classes persists.
- In the middle, dispersal prevails. Béteille’s finding that caste, class and power have moved from cumulative to dispersed inequality still holds for the intermediate castes, which contain rich farmers and landless kin alike.
Convergence checked by class differentiation
Convergence is not homogenisation. Classes now form within castes: the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling permitting sub-classification of Scheduled Castes rested on evidence that benefits had pooled among a few sub-castes. Telangana’s caste survey, released in February 2025, recorded Backward Classes at about 46 per cent of the population — a bloc far too internally stratified to be a class.
Conclusion
Mobility has shifted from imitation to competition for secular resources, and that competition converts castes into class-like interest groups. Convergence is therefore real at the poles and weak in the middle: caste becomes more class-like without ceasing to be caste.