Which is more significant, the principle of ‘hierarchy’ or the principle of ‘difference’, in intercaste relations in the present day? (2017)
Dipankar Gupta, in Interrogating Caste: Understanding Hierarchy and Difference in Indian Society (2000), argued against Louis Dumont that caste was never a single agreed ladder but a field of discrete, mutually repelling jatis. The present-day evidence supports him for public life, while hierarchy survives where caste is most intimate.
Why difference now organises inter-caste relations
- Every jati’s purana claims a high origin, so hierarchies are multiple and incompatible; castes agree on their separateness far more than on their ranking.
- Dumont’s own term for modern change, substantialisation, concedes the point: caste has become a set of competing blocks asserting identity and interest, not a relational order.
- Politically, caste now works horizontally. Caste associations function as interest groups, and the Maratha, Patidar and Jat agitations of the past decade demanded backward-class status, not higher ritual rank — the ladder is climbed downwards for entitlements.
- The recent state caste enumerations reinforce the logic, treating castes as countable blocs whose share of population grounds a claim on quotas and offices.
Where hierarchy still binds
- Marriage. Inter-caste unions remain about one in twenty of all marriages, a share that survey evidence finds barely changed across generations; an algorithmic audit of India’s leading online matrimonial platforms found caste still built into their matchmaking recommendations, so even the digital marriage market reproduces endogamy.
- Untouchability and violence. Atrocity cases against Scheduled Castes run to tens of thousands a year, and honour killings follow inter-caste elopement — enforcement, not ranking, but enforcement of a rank.
- Space and stigma. Neighbourhood-level studies of Indian metros by Naveen Bharathi, Deepak Malghan and Andaleeb Rahman find residential segregation by caste persisting inside city wards.
The verdict
Difference is the more significant principle in inter-caste relations — in politics, association, occupation and public interaction, castes now meet as rivals of formally equal standing rather than as ranked partners. Hierarchy has receded from relations between castes and concentrated in the boundary that separates them: whom one marries, whom one lets into the kitchen, whom one rents to. André Béteille‘s disharmonic society is the exact description — egalitarian ideology, competitive politics, and an unequal practice that reveals itself at the point of intimacy.
Conclusion
Gupta’s correction stands: what looks like a fall from hierarchy is largely the surfacing of a difference that always existed beneath the Brahmanical account. The sociological task is no longer to rank castes but to explain why horizontal competition and vertical humiliation now coexist so comfortably.