Discuss the changes in the structure of power relationships of various castes at the regional levels. (1991)
In the traditional order ritual rank, landholding and local authority tended to coincide. André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) called this cumulative inequality and showed in Sripuram how it was becoming dispersed. The decisive point is that dispersal has taken a different shape in every region, because the identity of the old apex and of the rising challenger differed.
What drove the change
- Abolition of intermediaries and tenancy reform dislodged the zamindar, jagirdar and mirasdar, and confirmed ownership in the hands of the substantial cultivating castes.
- Adult franchise converted numerical strength into political weight, prising local power loose from ritual rank — the sense in which M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste was a genuinely new concept.
- Commercialised agriculture and the Green Revolution concentrated surplus in the middle peasant castes of the north-west, as S. C. Dube observed for western Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana.
- Caste associations, reservation and education gave organisation and credentials to groups that had neither.
The regional variations
| Region | Older apex | Power today |
|---|---|---|
| Tamil Nadu | Brahmin | Non-Brahmin and Dravidian parties; Thevars, Gounders, Vanniyars locally |
| Kerala | Nambudiri–Nair | Ezhava and Nair blocs organised as associations; land reform of 1969 |
| Maharashtra | Brahmin and landed elite | Marathas through cooperatives, sugar and education, now quota claimants |
| Gujarat | Rajput–Kshatriya | Patidars, with a Kshatriya–Harijan–Adivasi–Muslim counter-coalition in the 1980s |
| Andhra and Telangana | Brahmin and deshmukh | Reddys and Kammas as rival dominant castes |
| Punjab, Haryana, western UP | Rajput and Brahmin | Jats through land and commercial farming |
| Bihar and eastern UP | Bhumihar, Rajput, Brahmin | Yadavs, Kurmis and Koeris after the 1990s |
The southern shift began earliest — the non-Brahmin movement from the 1910s — while the north’s arrived only with the Mandal moment, which is why Christophe Jaffrelot (India’s Silent Revolution, 2003) treats the two as the same process on different clocks. The mechanism also varied: in Kerala an association and a communist peasant movement did the work, in Maharashtra and Gujarat the cooperative and the educational trust, in the Hindi belt electoral arithmetic alone.
The entry of Dalit power, and its limits
Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party and reserved seats in panchayats under the 73rd Amendment (1993) carried Dalits into office for the first time, and Béteille’s Sripuram evidence already warned that formal office does not confer command where land and employment lie elsewhere. Yet land and agrarian employment largely passed from the old upper castes to the intermediate peasant castes, not to the landless, which is why the sharpest rural violence is now between backward and Dalit groups rather than between Brahmin and Shudra. Numbers themselves have become the new political resource: Telangana’s caste survey, released in February 2025, counted Backward Classes at 46.33 per cent and Scheduled Castes at 17.43 per cent, and was immediately converted into claims on reserved representation.
Conclusion
Regional power structures have moved from fused to dispersed, and from ritual sanction to numbers and organisation. What has changed is who dominates, not that domination has ended — Béteille’s dispersal describes the middle of the structure far better than its extremes.