The organic solidarity of caste has given way to competitive solidarity. Discuss this statement in the context of the processes of fission and fusion in the Caste System. (1988)
The statement borrows Émile Durkheim‘s vocabulary from The Division of Labour in Society (1893) to describe a historical shift: from castes bound to one another by complementary function to castes organised as internally cohesive blocs competing for scarce modern resources. The borrowing must be handled with care, and the shift is best traced through the twin processes of fission and fusion.
‘Organic solidarity’ used loosely
For Durkheim, organic solidarity arises where specialisation makes individuals unlike and therefore mutually necessary, sustained by contract, restitutive law and a widening space for individual personality. Traditional caste has the interdependence but not the rest: specialisation is ascribed at birth, not chosen; the bond is ritual and customary, not contractual; and the individual is subsumed in the group — closer to Durkheim’s mechanical pole in its segmental, repressive character. What the jajmani village had was a quasi-organic, ascriptive interdependence, which Louis Dumont read as the practical form of ritual complementarity and M. N. Srinivas as an order of secure but unequal claims. Calling it organic solidarity flatters it; the label is a description of appearance, not of principle.
What replaced it
Once land, jajmani obligations and ritual monopoly stopped organising village life, castes ceased to need one another and began to confront one another. Dumont named the result substantialisation: caste turns from a relational hierarchy into competing self-contained substances, each asserting identity and interest. That is precisely what “competitive solidarity” means — solidarity within the caste, competition between castes, over reservations, land, contracts, political office and now digital and educational opportunity.
Fission and fusion
- Fission is the splitting of a jati into endogamous sub-units over status disputes, territory, sect or commensal practice. It is also modern: the Supreme Court’s seven-judge ruling in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) permitted states to sub-classify Scheduled Castes for reservation, formally recognising that the SC bloc contains unequally placed jatis with rival claims — fission written into constitutional law. The Justice Rohini Commission on OBC sub-categorisation is the parallel move within the Other Backward Classes.
- Fusion is the merging of sub-castes and neighbouring jatis into larger federations able to act as electoral units. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, in The Modernity of Tradition (1967), called these caste associations paracommunities and identified horizontal mobilisation — a caste organising its own members across villages — as the characteristically modern form. The Kshatriya Sabha in Gujarat, the Nadar and Vanniyar associations in the south, and the continuing Maratha demand for Kunbi certificates, which led the Maharashtra government to constitute a committee on the issue in September 2025, are fusion in action: a large caste seeking to merge into a broader backward-class bloc.
Conclusion
Caste has not lost solidarity; it has relocated it. The bond that once ran between castes now runs inside each enlarged caste bloc, and competition, not complementarity, orders the relations among them. Rajni Kothari‘s formulation holds: politics has not been caste-ridden so much as caste has been politicised, and fission and fusion are the two moves by which it keeps adjusting the size of the unit that competes.