Write short note: Industrialisation and Caste. (1988)
Industrialisation was expected to be caste’s solvent: factory work is contractual, anonymous and rewarded by output, and Talcott Parsons‘ pattern variables place it squarely on the side of universalism and achievement. Indian evidence shows something less tidy — industry corroded caste’s ritual and occupational scaffolding while absorbing caste as network and as class location.
Why dissolution was expected
Karl Marx, writing on British rule in India, thought railways and machine production would break the village’s hereditary division of labour. A. R. Desai argued the same materially. The mechanism is real: a wage paid for a task cannot be graded by purity, shared transport and canteens make pollution rules unenforceable, and skill acquired in a training school is not inherited.
What actually happened
- Recruitment was communal. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar‘s work on Bombay’s mills showed that the millhand’s village and caste tie was not a hangover awaiting extinction but a rational strategy in an economy without social security. Dipesh Chakrabarty, on Bengal’s jute workers, argued their consciousness was organised by community and hierarchy rather than being an immature form of class consciousness.
- Capital had a caste address. Parsi, Marwari, Gujarati bania and Chettiar mercantile communities converted trading capital into industry, making caste and kin networks the infrastructure of Indian capitalism rather than its obstacle.
- Tradition was compartmentalised, not abandoned. Milton Singer, in When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972), found Madras industrialists keeping industrial and ritual roles in separate spheres and delegating rites to wives and priests — modernity in the office, orthodoxy at home.
- Discrimination survived the transition. The correspondence study by Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell, published in 2007, sent matched résumés differing only in the applicant’s name to private-sector vacancies and found Dalit-named applicants significantly less likely to be called for interview.
- Liberalisation reproduced the pattern. A 2025 review in the Sociological Bulletin by D. N. Kiran Kumar and R. Santhosh concludes that market reform has not transcended caste: entrepreneurship, credit access and market entry remain structured by caste-based social capital, so the neoliberal economy is caste’s new medium rather than its antidote.
Verdict
Industrialisation has weakened caste as a ritual order and largely destroyed its occupational monopoly, but has strengthened it as a network and a class position. André Béteille‘s point holds: caste, class and power have come apart analytically while remaining correlated in fact.
Conclusion
Industry changed caste’s function without abolishing its structure. Caste endures because it is convertible into precisely the resources industrial capitalism rewards — capital, credentials and contacts.