How do caste and class interact with each other in Indian politics? (1993)
Caste is an ascribed, endogamous status group ranked by ritual purity; class is a position in the structure of property, occupation and income. Historically the two overlapped — the ritually low were also the landless — which made caste a proxy for disadvantage. Indian politics is largely the story of their divergence, and of groups converting a surplus on one axis into gains on the other.
Rival readings of the relationship
- Marxist reading: caste is the superstructure of a semi-feudal agrarian order that land reform and class struggle would dissolve. It explains why hierarchy loosened where tenancy ended, not why a prosperous Dalit still faces boycott.
- B. R. Ambedkar reversed the sequence: caste is “not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers”, so graded inequality divides the workers themselves and social reform must precede economic reform.
- André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) found in Sripuram (Tanjore) that caste, class and power, once closely aligned, were diverging — inequality moving from cumulative to dispersed, in Robert A. Dahl’s terms.
- Anand Teltumbde (Republic of Caste, 2018) treats the two as fused: identity politics delivered symbols while Dalit material conditions worsened.
Class working through caste
- Dominant caste: M. N. Srinivas showed that land plus numbers, not ritual rank, gives power. The Green Revolution made Jats, Yadavs, Kurmis and Marathas a rich-peasant class, and Chaudhary Charan Singh’s AJGAR coalition voiced class demands — remunerative prices, cheap inputs — in a caste idiom. Kisan politics and OBC politics became one.
- Distress as quota demand: as farm incomes fell and public jobs shrank, the same castes sought backward status — Patidars (2015), Jats (2016), Marathas. Class decline is voiced as caste grievance because reservation is the currency the state recognises.
Class inside caste: differentiation and policy
- A “creamy layer” within the backward classes forced class criteria into caste policy — Indra Sawhney (1992), with the income ceiling unrevised at ₹8 lakh since 2017.
- The Rohini Commission (2023) reportedly found about 97% of central OBC benefits going to about a quarter of OBC castes; State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) allowed sub-classification within Scheduled Castes. Bihar’s 2023 survey counted Extremely Backward Classes at 36%, a bloc now courted separately.
- The 103rd Amendment (2019) created an EWS quota for the non-reserved, upheld in Janhit Abhiyan (2022) — class entering through the upper-caste door.
Dalit-bahujan politics and the new middle class
- Kanshi Ram’s “bahujan” (85%) and Kancha Ilaiah’s productive “Dalitbahujan” (Why I Am Not a Hindu, 1996) recast caste as a coalition of labouring classes against non-producing elites.
- D. L. Sheth (1999) showed that the secularisation of caste produced a new middle class drawn from all castes, acquiring middle-class consciousness while retaining caste identity.
- In voting, Abhijit Banerjee, Amory Gethin and Thomas Piketty (2019) found caste and religion structuring party support while income and education matter little — class refracted through caste, not absent.
Conclusion
Caste and class interact rather than replace each other: class interests are expressed through caste idioms, while class differentiation now splits caste blocs from within. The creamy layer, sub-classification, EWS and the caste census are attempts to measure both axes at once.