‘The soil grows castes: the machines make classes’. Comment. (1989)
The aphorism compresses a classical expectation: an agrarian, land-based order reproduces ascribed ritual groups, while industrial production generates achievement-based classes. It is half true. Machines have made classes in India, but they have not unmade castes — they have re-tooled them.
What the statement claims
Land is fixed, inherited and locally monopolised, so the relations built on it are hereditary, face-to-face and ritually coded. Machinery is mobile, impersonal and bought with capital, so the relations built on it are contractual, anonymous and market-defined. On this reading caste belongs to the village and class to the factory.
The case for the statement
- The jajmani system, described by William Wiser in The Hindu Jajmani System (1936), tied service castes to landowning patrons in hereditary, non-monetised exchange — an economy in which occupation, rank and ritual duty were the same fact.
- Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus (1966), grounded that order in the ideological opposition of pure and impure, sustained by the village’s dense ritual life.
- Industry breaks several of caste’s supports at once: the factory pays a wage for a task, mixes bodies on a shop floor and in transport, and makes purity rules unenforceable. M. N. Srinivas noted that pollution norms collapse on a crowded bus.
- A. R. Desai, and Karl Marx before him on British rule in India, expected exactly this: railways, markets and machine production would dissolve the “little republics” and put bourgeoisie and proletariat in their place.
The case against the statement
- Caste travelled with the worker: recruitment into early textile and jute mills ran through the jobber, who hired along caste and village lines, segmenting the workforce from the start.
- Capital itself is caste-marked. Indian business has been concentrated in a few merchant communities, and research on the boards of India’s largest listed companies finds directors drawn overwhelmingly from the upper castes, with Scheduled Caste and Tribe presence negligible.
- The city does not dissolve caste; it rearranges it spatially. A study of residential patterns across roughly 1.5 million Indian neighbourhoods, led by Sam Asher and Paul Novosad, found segregation of Scheduled Castes and Muslims comparable to Black–white segregation in the United States, with predominantly Scheduled Caste neighbourhoods markedly worse served by piped water, drainage and schools.
- Caste has entered the most machine-intensive economy of all: Seattle in February 2023 became the first American city to prohibit caste discrimination, after complaints from workers in the technology industry — caste survives software as it survived the mill.
- Platform and gig labour reproduces the old pattern, with sanitation and waste work still drawn from the same castes under new contractual forms.
A position
The statement is right about class formation and wrong about caste dissolution. Industry produced genuine classes, but caste supplies the networks through which capital, credit, skills and jobs are distributed within them. André Béteille‘s formulation is the accurate one: caste, class and power have become dispersed rather than identical — dispersal, not disappearance.
Conclusion
Soil and machine are not successive stages but simultaneous conditions in India. Caste persists because it has proved convertible: into landed dominance in the village, into capital and credentials in the city, and into network advantage in the digital economy.