Write short notes with a sociological perspective on the following in about 150 words : Features of caste system. (2014)
Caste is a closed system of ascribed, ranked and endogamous groups whose boundaries are maintained by ritual rules. Its features have been specified three ways — as a list of attributes, as a single generative principle, and as a mechanism of domination — and the differences among them are sociologically more instructive than the list itself.
The attributional list and its present status
The classical enumeration is G. S. Ghurye‘s six features, from Caste and Race in India (1932), set out below. Earlier, Célestin Bouglé, in Essais sur le régime des castes (1908), had reduced caste to three principles — hereditary specialisation, hierarchy and mutual repulsion or separation.
| Feature | Condition today |
|---|---|
| Segmental division; membership by birth | Intact; caste councils now caste associations |
| Hierarchy of ritual rank | Contested; ranking claims multiplied |
| Restrictions on food and social intercourse | Much weakened in towns, alive in villages |
| Civil and religious disabilities | Illegal under Articles 15 and 17 |
| Hereditary occupation | Loosened, but the bottom rungs persist |
| Endogamy | Strongest surviving feature |
The rival specifications
- Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus (1966), argues that all the features reduce to one relation, the opposition of the pure and the impure, and that caste is therefore ideology before it is organisation. Hierarchy is the essence; separation and occupation merely follow.
- B. R. Ambedkar, in Castes in India (1916), locates the essence in endogamy superimposed on a formerly intermarrying population, sustained by sati, enforced widowhood and girl marriage. Caste for him is not a division of labour but a division of labourers arranged as graded inequality — an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.
- M. N. Srinivas adds what the lists omit: jati, not varna, is the operative unit, and its rank can move through Sanskritisation while the ladder itself survives.
What has changed
Cultural features have eroded faster than structural ones. Commensality and dress codes have largely gone in urban India; endogamy, residential segregation and the association of the most degrading work with the lowest castes have not. Graded inequality now operates within the reserved categories — the Supreme Court’s seven-judge ruling in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (August 2024) permitted sub-classification of Scheduled Castes, conceding that the most deprived jatis had been crowded out by relatively better-placed ones.
Conclusion
A bare list describes caste; it does not explain it. Dumont’s single principle explains its coherence, Ambedkar’s endogamy explains its persistence, and the 2024 judgment shows why Ambedkar’s graded inequality remains the sharpest of the three in contemporary India.