‘Despite all the fusion and fission that the caste system has undergone through the ages, it has binded to maintain the permanency of it form’. Comment. (1986)
The proposition claims that caste’s units are endlessly reorganised while the system’s form endures. Read as a statement about organising principles it is largely right; read as a statement about the architecture of the system it is wrong. The distinction between the two is what the answer turns on.
Fission: how castes divide
- The operative unit of caste has never been the varna but the jati and its sub-divisions. Irawati Karve insisted that the endogamous sub-caste, not the fourfold model, is where people actually live, and G. S. Ghurye made segmental division the first of the six features in Caste and Race in India (1932).
- Fission works through recognisable mechanisms: a prospering section tightens its rules and stops taking brides from poorer kin; occupational specialisation hardens into separate groups; migration and region divide a jati into non-intermarrying branches; sectarian affiliation and hypergamy do the rest.
- The result is measurable proliferation. Bihar’s caste survey, released in October 2023, had to assign codes to some 215 castes within a single state.
Fusion: how castes combine
- Sub-castes merge to widen the marriage circle and pool numbers. Colonial enumeration accelerated this: to petition the census for a higher classification, scattered jatis had to speak as one.
- Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, in The Modernity of Tradition (1967), called the result horizontal mobilisation by caste associations acting as paracommunities, and caste federations — Yadav, Nadar, Vanniyar — are its mature form.
- Fusion continues under electoral incentives. The Maratha campaign for Kunbi certificates, extended in 2024 on the strength of old revenue records to sage-soyare kin, is a dominant caste seeking absorption into a larger administrative bloc for a share of quota.
What persists through both
Fission and fusion alter the membership of groups without disturbing the rules by which groups exist: endogamy, ascription by birth, corporate identity with its own discipline, and the reflex of ranking. M. N. Srinivas‘s field view describes exactly this — groups move, rank is disputed, the system endures. To that extent the statement is correct: the units are variables, the grammar is constant.
But has the form itself been permanent?
- The encompassing ritual hierarchy has not survived. Louis Dumont‘s own term for modern change, substantialisation, concedes that a relational order has become a set of competing blocks, and Dipankar Gupta argues in Interrogating Caste (2000) that difference has displaced hierarchy.
- The sanction has shifted from scripture to numbers, and the validating authority from the shastra and the local dominant caste to the state, its schedules and its courts.
- The direction of claims has inverted: groups once climbed towards twice-born status; they now petition downwards for backward classification.
Conclusion
The permanency is real at the level of principle and illusory at the level of form. Caste has kept its elements — endogamous, ascriptive, corporate groups — while losing the ritual architecture that once ranked them into a whole. What fission and fusion demonstrate is not immobility but a remarkable capacity to re-form: the system survives precisely because its units are disposable.