Discuss Andre Beteille’s account of the relationship between caste, class and power as a change from symmetrical to asymmetrical One. (2016)
André Béteille‘s Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (1965), based on fieldwork in Sripuram in Thanjavur, asks what Louis Dumont‘s single-principle system cannot: what happens when ritual rank, wealth and political power stop coinciding. His answer is a movement from cumulative to dispersed inequality.
Three orders, held analytically apart
- The framework is Max Weber‘s: caste as status, class as economic position and hence life chances, power as political control. Dumont derives all three from purity and pollution; Marxist writing dissolves caste into class. Béteille refuses both.
- His grounds are structural: caste is closed, corporate and ritually bounded, with membership by birth and its own panchayat, while class has no boundary, no ritual and no corporate existence.
The symmetrical past
- Sripuram’s map is the argument: the Brahmin agraharam, the non-Brahmin streets and the Adi-Dravida cheri at the edge fix the ritual order in settlement.
- Historically the Brahmin mirasdar was at once highest in ritual rank, principal landholder and seat of local authority. The three hierarchies were congruent, each reinforcing the others, and their coincidence made the arrangement appear natural — the symmetrical, mutually legitimating order Béteille calls harmonic.
What broke the congruence
- Land. Abolition of intermediaries, tenancy legislation and sales by absentee Brahmin owners moved land to non-Brahmin cultivating castes.
- Politics. Adult franchise, elective panchayats and party competition transferred power to numerically strong non-Brahmin castes, while the Dravidian movement turned non-Brahmin identity into a political programme.
- Education and occupation. Brahmins converted ritual standing into modern schooling and left for urban professions and the bureaucracy, retaining high ritual status alongside diminished local power; reservation and non-agrarian work widened these exits.
The asymmetrical present
- Rank on one dimension no longer predicts rank on the others, and the bases of power turn secular — numbers, land and party — which is why M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste, not the Brahmin, names who runs a locality.
- Asymmetry runs within caste blocs too: Sripuram’s Brahmins were segmented into Srivaishnava and Smarta, endogamous and stratified by wealth, so no unified apex survives.
- Normatively the order turns disharmonic: equality is professed while hierarchy is practised, and inequality loses the legitimacy congruence supplied.
Critical assessment
- Dumont objected that treating power as a separate dimension imports a Western category: for him the disjunction of status from power is the system’s premise, not a modern development.
- Marxist critics hold that Béteille’s class is distributive — income and style of life — not a relation of production. On Daniel Thorner‘s malik–kisan–mazdur scheme, landlord and landless Adi-Dravida remain one antagonistic relation. Kathleen Gough, in the same district, found class polarisation and communist mobilisation, and the burning of forty-four Dalit labourers at Kilvenmani in December 1968 showed the delta to be an arena of struggle.
- Re-convergence. Satish Deshpande and Surinder S. Jodhka show caste and class partially re-aligning: Dalits concentrated in casual, stigmatised labour, upper castes in professional and managerial work. Dispersal is real but incomplete.
- Representativeness. An irrigated, Brahmin-landlord delta village is atypical, and entry through the agraharam thinned Béteille’s access to the cheri.
Conclusion
The direction of the finding has held: ritual rank, wealth and office no longer move together. Asymmetry has even become constitutional doctrine — in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) a seven-judge bench allowed States to sub-classify Scheduled Castes on evidence of relative backwardness and endorsed a creamy-layer test: the State legislating on class differentiation inside a ritual status category. What has not held is the calm the model implied: status fragmented faster than class equalised, and asymmetry is now the setting of conflict rather than its resolution.