Give a critical analysis of Andre Beteille’s study of Tanjore village. (2018)
André Béteille‘s Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (1965), based on fieldwork in Sripuram in the Kaveri delta in the early 1960s, is the most influential empirical challenge to Louis Dumont‘s reading of Indian society. Its claim is Weberian: caste, class and power are three distinct orders of inequality, and modern India is defined by their progressive separation.
What the study actually argued
- Three dimensions, not one hierarchy. Against Dumont’s single principle of purity and pollution, Béteille distinguished caste as ritual status, class as economic position and power as political capacity — Max Weber‘s class, status and party.
- Hierarchy written into space. Sripuram was laid out as the Brahmin agraharam, the non-Brahmin streets and the Adi-Dravida cheri — settlement itself enforced rank.
- Cumulative to dispersed inequality. Historically the Brahmin landlord held ritual status, land and authority together. Béteille traced land passing to non-Brahmin cultivating castes, while adult franchise, party politics, the Dravidian movement and reservation opened power to numerically strong non-Brahmins. The three came apart.
- Harmonic to disharmonic. In a harmonic system the value order and the distribution of inequality agree, so hierarchy is legitimate. A disharmonic system professes equality and practises hierarchy — Béteille’s diagnosis of modern India.
- Caste blocs are not homogeneous. Brahmins were themselves segmented between Srivaishnava and Smarta, endogamous and economically stratified — undercutting any claim to continuous Brahmanical superiority.
The critical objections
- Regional atypicality. A deltaic, irrigated, Brahmin-landlord village with its own agraharam is unrepresentative even of Tamil Nadu, and the microcosm fallacy runs through the generalisation.
- Access and informant bias. Béteille entered through the agraharam and could not move freely in the cheri — a limitation he candidly acknowledged. The voice thinnest in the book is the one whose position the argument most needs.
- Decoupling overstated. Caste did not dissolve into three free-floating dimensions; it reconstituted itself as class and as a political bloc. Non-Brahmin “power” in Thanjavur became the dominance of landowning Vellala and Mudaliar castes — a transfer of cumulation, not its end.
- The Marxist objection. Béteille treats class as a distributive category of income and style of life rather than a relation of production. On Daniel Thorner‘s malik–kisan–mazdur classification, Sripuram’s landlords and landless Adi-Dravidas remain a single antagonistic relation however the ritual order moves.
- Conflict written out. Kathleen Gough, studying Kumbapettai and Kirippur in the same district, reported class polarisation and communist mobilisation among landless Pallars and Paraiyars. Three years after the book, on 25 December 1968, forty-four Dalit agricultural labourers were burnt to death at Kilvenmani during a wage dispute — the delta was an arena of struggle, not of gently dispersing gradients.
Conclusion
The two halves of the study aged very differently. The decoupling thesis survived: ritual rank, wealth and office no longer move together, and Béteille’s vocabulary remains the working language of Indian stratification — an ethnographic revisit to Sripuram five decades on, by L. N. Venkataraman, found this loosening in access to education. The harmony reading did not survive. With 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes recorded by the NCRB in 2023, the disharmonic condition Béteille named has proved not a transitional phase but the settled form of rural inequality.