Describe the process of social mobility among lower castes and discuss the role of the Backward Classes Movement in strengthening this process. (2005)
Caste was long theorised as a closed system permitting no individual movement. Empirical Indian sociology showed otherwise: mobility occurs, but historically as group mobility over generations, not individual achievement. The question therefore has two parts — how lower castes have moved, and how the Backward Classes movement converted that slow, positional drift into a collective structural claim.
The process of mobility
- Sanskritisation. M. N. Srinivas described how a lower caste adopts the ritual practices, diet, dress and mythology of a higher one and, over two or three generations, claims a higher position. Crucially it is positional, not structural: one group rises while the hierarchy and its premises survive intact.
- Census and genealogical claims. From 1871 groups petitioned census officers for Kshatriya or Vaishya status, a practice peaking by 1931. Enumeration made ritual rank publicly contestable.
- Westernisation and secularisation. English education, salaried employment, urban residence and the law weakened the link between ritual rank and life chances.
- Occupational and economic diversification. Land reform, the Green Revolution’s benefits to middle peasants, and non-farm work created caste groups economically ahead of their ritual station.
- Political mobility. André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) argued that in the traditional order ritual status, land and power were cumulative; modern differentiation disperses them, so the political apparatus becomes an independent avenue of mobility for those whom caste and class deny it. Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) named the mechanism: the politicisation of caste.
- Reference group behaviour. M. S. A. Rao (Social Movements and Social Transformation, 1979) explained the motive: relative deprivation measured against a reference group, not absolute poverty, generates mobility striving.
How the Backward Classes movement strengthened it
- It converted individual imitation into collective assertion. Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873), the SNDP Yogam among the Ezhavas and the non-Brahmin movement in Madras turned scattered status claims into organised demands for schooling, temple entry, employment and representation.
- It supplied counter-ideology. E. V. Ramasamy’s Self-Respect Movement (1925) and the Dravidian movement rejected the Brahmanical scale altogether, so that mobility no longer required conceding the hierarchy — the decisive advance over Sanskritisation.
- It built durable organisation. Caste associations and federations from the 1920s became vote banks, pressure groups and welfare bodies, giving mobility an institutional carrier.
- It captured the state. The Mandal Commission (1979, reporting 1980), implemented in August 1990 and upheld in Indra Sawhney (1992), made 27 per cent reservation a legal entitlement and reorganised north Indian politics around backward-caste blocs.
Assessment
The movement made mobility structural rather than merely positional, but the gains are unevenly distributed: the Rohini Commission (2023) found roughly 97 per cent of OBC reservation benefits reaching about 25 per cent of OBC communities. T. K. Oommen had already noted that success required prior advantages — numbers, local wealth, education and leadership — which the weakest castes lacked.
Conclusion
Lower-caste mobility moved from emulation to organisation to political power, and the Backward Classes movement was the hinge in that shift. The caste enumeration notified for the 2027 Census will test whether the movement can now redirect its gains towards those within its own fold who have never received them.