Comment on the distinction between ‘hierarchy’ and ‘social stratification.’ Which of the two will be a more appropriate term to describe the caste system and why? (1985)
The two words are often used interchangeably, but Louis Dumont made the difference a matter of principle: hierarchy is a religiously grounded ordering of a whole by a single value, whereas social stratification is the general sociological category for any arrangement of ranked strata. Which term suits caste depends on whether one is describing caste’s ideology or its working.
Hierarchy
For Dumont in Homo Hierarchicus (1966), hierarchy is not merely inequality. It is holistic — the whole precedes its parts and each group has value only by its place in the whole; it is ordered by one encompassing value, the opposition of pure and impure, so that the superior term contains its negation; and it disjoins status from power, the Brahmin outranking the king ritually while the king rules. Inequality here is avowed, sacralised and consensual in principle.
Social stratification
Stratification is the wider, comparative concept: the division of a population into layers with unequal rewards. Karl Marx grounds it in the relation to the means of production; Max Weber treats class, status and party as analytically separate orders; Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore read it functionally. It is individualist and multi-dimensional, its rankings are usually disavowed rather than celebrated, and it presumes at least formal mobility.
| Criterion | Hierarchy | Social stratification |
|---|---|---|
| Ordering value | One encompassing value (purity) | Several independent bases — property, status, power |
| Unit | The whole; groups exist through it | The individual or the stratum |
| Legitimation | Openly avowed as a religious value | Denied or explained away as merit |
| Status and power | Disjoined; ritual rank above temporal power | Tendency to converge |
| Mobility | Positional, of groups, within a fixed ladder | Individual and structural, formally open |
| Typical case | Traditional varna-jati order | Modern class society |
Which term fits caste better
- For the traditional order, hierarchy is the exact word. Ranking was a declared value, not an embarrassment; André Béteille calls such an order harmonic, since its ideology and its inequalities agree.
- For contemporary India, stratification is the better description. Béteille’s Sripuram showed caste, class and power moving from cumulative to dispersed; the professed ideology is now egalitarian while practice remains unequal, which is his disharmonic case. M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste already separated local power from ritual rank, and Dipankar Gupta argues that what actually orders caste today is horizontal difference, not one agreed ladder.
- Béteille further rejects the dichotomy itself as Eurocentric: no society is wholly open or wholly closed, and every society holds an ideology of equality in tension with a pursuit of inequality, so “hierarchical India against stratified Europe” is a false contrast.
- “Hierarchy” also travels badly: it cannot register caste among Muslims and Christians, class differentiation within a jati, or the new urban middle class.
Conclusion
Hierarchy names what caste claims; stratification names what caste does. Since sociology must explain change and internal inequality, stratification is the more serviceable term — as the Supreme Court’s seven-judge ruling of August 2024 in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh, permitting sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes, effectively conceded when it recognised graded inequality inside a single ritual category.