Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum

Introduction

Caste has been a subject of peripheral interest to South Asian agrarian studies, and almost of no interest to agrarian studies in general. Until around the turn of the century, the dominant trend among its practitioners towards caste had been that of near complete indifference. Though its presence in the rural life of the South Asians was far too obvious to be completely ignored, it was commonly viewed as being of very little relevance to the dynamics of agrarian life, as if a topic outside the prescribed syllabus. Even when its significance was conceded, it was seen more like an old custom, a cultural hangover from the past that ought to have been forgotten, a signifier of India’s “backwardness,” than a living reality that, besides doing other things, also shaped and structured the relational frames of rural economic processes, including agriculture.

This article attempts to engage with the question of caste and the possible value additions that recognizing it may offer to the study of agrarian realities. Though the primary context of the article is India, or South Asia, it may also have a broader and comparative bearing. I also argue for a simultaneous recognition of the problems with the conceptualizations of caste. A study of caste in relation to the land question or to the larger realities of economic process would significantly enhance our understanding of the obvious materiality of caste, which makes it persist in contemporary times. In other words, the widespread “blindness” towards caste in agrarian studies and, likewise, the imaginations of “caste” primarily as a cultural phenomenon, have been mainly responsible for the “lacuna” with which this article is attempting to engage. Bringing them together would require us to recognize and open up this academic conundrum by critically engaging with the disciplinary framings of both agrarian studies and, perhaps more importantly, caste studies.

Mainstream Framing of Agrarian Studies

Like other disciplinary practices, “agrarian studies” too has a history and contexts, which have shaped its conceptual apparatus and empirical preoccupations. Its core focus and primary concerns in the South Asian region have not been very different from those considered relevant elsewhere in the agrarian worlds. The “mainstream” of agrarian studies since its inception in the “Russian debate” during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has remained pre-occupied either with the agrarian question and peasant differentiation in the Marxist tradition of class analysis and historical transition, or with the Chayanovian idea of autonomy of the “peasant economy.”

The populist scholarship that argues for the autonomy of peasant economy has mostly bypassed the question of caste. Its primary assertion concerning the ability of the peasant economy to survive in the regimes of capital also takes for granted the presence or existence of a largely undifferentiated peasantry in all the pre-capitalist agrarian contexts and cultural regions of the world. Could a caste-divided agrarian formation be treated as a peasant economy or peasant culture? Such questions have rarely been asked or engaged with, either conceptually or empirically.

The dominant paradigms in the field, particularly among its practitioners in the South Asian context, have evolved out of the Marxist tradition of class analysis. Mostly using the conceptual language of economics and/or political economy, their primary focus has revolved around the “agrarian question.” Drawing from the writings of Byres (1991) and Bernstein (1996), Levien et al. (2018, p. 854; see also Lerche et al., 2013, pp. 338–339 for a similar kind of summary) provided a useful summary of how it has come to be understood, encompassing three interrelated questions:

…how capitalism seizes agricultural production and differentiates agrarian classes; the contributions of agriculture to industrialization or the overall establishment of a capitalist mode of production; and the implications of all this for the political behaviour of agrarian classes.

Such a framing has been the dominant paradigm for much of agrarian studies since the 1960s. Though it was propounded by a group of scholars located in the Western Europe, with their main centre being Great Britain, its influence has been quite wide and extensive, including in the South Asian region. It, thus, also shaped the framing of empirical questions. They ranged from the patterns of the ownership and non-ownership of land to the nature of “class” relationships that the “landless” as labouring hands or as tillers of the land enter into with the owners of agricultural land; to the relationship of surplus producing cultivators with the suppliers of credit and the buyers of their produce; to the broader processes of marketing and circulation/distribution of food, locally and globally. The political regimes or the state systems have also been an important subject for agrarian studies: their policies towards farming, as a reformer through policy, as a provider of subsidies, their role in making investments in developing agricultural infrastructure, such as the irrigation network, or as a collector of land revenue in the historical writings on the colonial and pre-colonial pasts.

It is also within this framework that agrarian studies in India have explored questions such as the successes and failures of land reforms, the development of the capitalist mode or persistence of pre-capitalist or semi-feudal modes of production; the development of capitalist agriculture and the extent to which it has freed the labouring poor from pre-existing relationships of bondage and attachment; the manner in which Indian agriculture is being integrated into the global commodity and food regimes, often focussing on specific crops; the internal dynamics of the Indian agrarian economy in relation to the state system and market processes; labour mobility, agrarian distress, diversifications and its decline. Most of the empirical research on agrarian change was, until some time back, carried out using a “class model” or using other abstract and comparative conceptual categories, drawn from the Marxist political economy framework and woven mostly around economic and statistical variables. Subjects like caste, in such a framework, tend to get assigned to the sphere of culture and tradition, often seen as signifiers of India’s “backwardness” rather than needing a serious academic and political engagements. I return to this in the concluding section.

Despite its fluctuating value as an academic fashion, agrarian studies has continued to be a flourishing area of research in the global academy. Though its practitioners have mostly been working within the framework of political economy, as mentioned above, it has been open to emerging challenges. Some scholars working from the Global South have also pointed to a Euro-centric bias in the dominant or mainstream paradigm of the “agrarian question” that elevates “the European historical experience … to a universal theory” (Mafeje, 1997, p. 7).

Empirically, concerns such as gender and ecology have become important areas of interest over the past few decades. Questions of ethnicity and race too are being recognized as areas needing engagement. Though the subject of caste has come to be seen as empirically significant, and is beginning to be mapped in the emerging literature on subjects like landlessness, patterns of land ownership and other aspects of agrarian demographics, it is mostly done using the officialized categories around which aggregate data sets are available. They tend to take the official framings and classifications of caste for granted. Categories such as Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) or Other Backward Classes (OBCs) as official aggregates do not tell us much about the relational processes of caste and land. In fact, as indicated above, the main challenge of the caste conundrum, particularly in the context of a subject like agriculture, lies in the “academic” and “popular” conceptions of caste itself. It is from these framings that the official categories have been derived. Thus, a critical engagement with the underlying sources of its popular notions becomes crucially significant in the context of this article.

Disciplinary Framings of Caste

For an average or lay person familiar with the South Asian context, the reality of caste is a rather simple and straightforward fact of life and easy to comprehend. Its common understanding, its media representations and its exposition in the school textbooks all present it as a system of varna hierarchy embedded in the Hindu scriptures. Even the popular anthropological textbooks tend to endorse such a view. In this view, the system of caste hierarchy is an ancient Indian/Hindu practice, inscribed most clearly in an ancient scriptural text, the Manusmriti. This text is believed to have been authored by an ascetic named Manu, sometime in the first century of the Common Era. As this popular view goes, Manu was not the one who invented caste. Its practice had existed for centuries before, since the Vedic period. Manu’s smriti was a codification of what was already practiced.

Following the textual dictum enunciated by Manu, caste is thus understood as a neatly segregated system of social divisions where groups and their boundaries are clearly marked; they are assumed to be observing occupational monopolies, which are also ranked in terms of their social positions in an order of pan-Indian hierarchy. This order of hierarchy corresponds with the religiously assigned ritual status based on the ideas of purity and pollution. The dialectics of purity and pollution thus produced an all-encompassing system of inequality, which is inherently legitimate and universally accepted. The absence of any kind of contestation, presumably kept it going, without change, for centuries and millennia. Given that the everyday practice of caste was reproduced through a neatly worked out hierarchy of occupations, sanctified by religious belief and producing a mutually exclusive division of social groups, everyday life acquired a kind of self-regulating equilibrium. The mundane realities of economic life were also reducible to the religious beliefs, the ideology of caste. Notions of karma (worldly action) and dharma (ethical duty) implied an otherworldly orientation of the Hindu mind. In this classical construct, the reducibility of the “economic” to the “ritual” also produced a hierarchical separation of the “social” (which included economic) from the “political” in the everyday life of the Hindus, with political being subordinate to the social. “Status encompassed power,” as Dumont (1971) had famously argued in his theory of the Indian caste system.

The idea of varna as spelt out in the Manusmriti, it is popularly believed, divided the Hindus into four mutually exclusive categories, the Brahmin (priest), the Kshatriya (warrior), the Vaishya (trader), and the Shudra (peasant/artisan/labourer). Beyond the four varnas were the achhoots (the untouchables). These categories occupied different positions in the status hierarchy, with the Brahmins at the top, followed by the other three varnas in order listed above, with the achhoots at the very bottom, and technically, outside the varna system.

Early sociology and social anthropology of caste too accepted such a textual view but expanded it further by proposing that the idea of varna was further divided and sub-divided into empirically identifiable jatis and their sub-units, upp-jatis. While varna provided a normative model of hierarchy, jatis were concrete groupings with each varna being divided into innumerable jatis. The jatis were groupings of kinship communities that maintained their symbolic borders by strictly following rules of exogamy and endogamy in marriage practices. They further conceded that while jatis were regionally specific, varnas provided a pan-Indian model. Thus emerged a view of the Hindu social order. Everyone living in the subcontinent was believed to have been a part of this system, for ever, except for the “primitive tribes” presumably living in isolation in far-away jungles. However, they too were being slowly submerged into the system through a Hindu model of assimilation, argued G. S. Ghurye (1977; also see Upadhya, 2002). According to this view, so powerful and hegemonic had been the influence of caste that even those who converted out of Hinduism and embraced “foreign” religions, such as Islam and Christianity, found it hard to transcend their original identities and their sense of status emanating from their positions in the Hindu caste hierarchy. This has also been often cited as a proof of the fact that the ancient Hindu society had endured all onslaughts by outsiders and the source of its resilience had been the institution of caste.

A more sophisticated version of this view of caste was propounded by the French sociologist, Louis Dumont in his globally acclaimed Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, first published in French in 1966, with its English translation appearing in 1969. Using the Western theoretical concepts, he reworked this popular view by building on the writings of his fellow French scholar, Celestin Bougle, who, in an essay first published in 1908, had passionately argued against looking at the Indian caste system merely as a system of occupational specialization or division of labour. Caste, Bougle argued, was a system consisting of hierarchically arranged hereditary groups, separated from each other in certain respects, but interdependent in others. “Caste” not only segregated hereditary groups specializing in certain occupations but also assigned differential rights to different groups, arranging them in an order of hierarchy, which made them socially unequal. Along with inequality, the element of pollution was an important feature of caste, he emphasized. Different groups, in a caste society, tended to “repel each other rather than attract, each retired within itself, isolated itself and made every effort to prevent its members from contracting alliances or even from entering into relations with neighbouring groups” (Bougle, 1971, p. 65). He thus identified hereditary occupation, hierarchy and mutual repulsion, as the three core features of the Indian caste system.

Extending Bougle’s conception, Dumont argued for a single “true principle” to which the three features of the caste system could be reduced. He proposed that such a principle did exist: “the opposition of the pure and the impure.” This opposition underlies hierarchy, which is the superiority of the pure to the impure; underlies separation because the pure and the impure must be kept separate and underlies the division of labour because pure and impure occupations must likewise be kept separate. The whole is founded on the necessary and hierarchical coexistence of the two opposites (Dumont, 1971, p. 43).

While Dumont, following Bougle, also pointed to “inequality” as being a core feature of caste, he was in no way referring to the inequality of material possession or power. On the contrary, as mentioned above, he argued against any kind of comparison of caste with class. Class, for him, was a Western reality, where social inequalities were shaped by differences of economic life. Economic differences also shaped structures of domination and power, and one’s social status in the Western societies. India was different. Status in India was not determined by logic of political economy, as was the case with the West. The idea of inequality, too, was differently conceived in the Indian/Hindu culture. It was by itself a cultural and religious value, and it alone shaped the sphere of social life. Indians were always preoccupied with status and hierarchy. They functioned independently of the worldly power. As mentioned above, for him, for Dumont, status in Indian society encompassed power. Its empirical reference point would be the presumed superiority of the Brahmin over the king.

Since inequality or hierarchy was a religious value, it also produced a social consensus. No one disputed its value, not even those who were at the lowest end of the system of hierarchy. The Hindus lived by their faith, across their locations in the order of hierarchy. They cherished inequality, not egalitarianism, which, for Dumont, was an ideological invention of the modern West, the land of homo-equalis.

Dumont was obviously talking from an orientalist standpoint. His arguments have been widely criticized by the members of his fraternity, both as theoretical propositions as well as in terms of their empirical validity or value. It articulates the popular view on caste, which has its origin in the Western Indological and Orientalist writings and actively propagated by the British colonial rulers. Dumont, in fact, did not say anything significantly different from what had already been written by a wide range of Western writers of the nineteenth century on India. As has been widely shown by the more recent critical scholarship on the colonial period, such a singular view of India gained ascendance, globally, through the writings of the European Indologists and Orientalists (Cohn, 1996; Dirks, 2001; Inden, 1990; Ludden, 1999; Washbrook, 1993). This had happened partly because they had explored the “essentials” of Indian civilization by selectively reading its ancient texts, accessed through the locally recruited Brahmin interlocutors. They soon concluded that everything could be understood by referring to its ancient religious texts. Everything about India was opposed to everything in the West. While the modern West was a land of reason, materiality and progress, India was caught in its religious tradition, incapable of reason and unable to materially progress, or even undergo any change.

However, such a view of the caste system, and Indian society in general, finds a lot of purchase as it has come to be part of the nationalist common-sense. As argued elsewhere, the mainstream of the Indian nationalist leadership found the Orientalist view of India attractive and useful as it presented India as a singular culture (Jodhka, 2004; 2015). Such a framing of caste ipso facto also assumes that caste is essentially a Hindu religious value, a culturally unique institution found only in India. Furthermore, it confirms the view that many in India wish to hold that India is, and has always been, a land of the Hindus. In the process, it also produces an imagination of Hinduism as a unified and singular faith system, comparable to the theological systems of the semitic religions, such as Islam and Christianity.

The British colonizers had propagated such a view of India because they found such an essentialist construct of India politically useful. As Cohn (1968, 1996) argues, it helped them legitimize their colonization of India. While they plundered India’s riches and systematically drained its wealth to enrich Britain, they presented themselves to their fellow Britishers and the rest of the Western world as saviours come to civilize India, to take it out of the darkness and misery of stagnant life. The colonial theories of the “native social life” in India and the Orientalist writings on the region thus concurred that on its own, India had no ability of breaking out of the cyclical framework of life in which it had been trapped since the ancient time. Their active presence and interventionist policies would help the Indians to come out of their static and cyclical view of time, as the colonial policies were introducing reason and science to the “other worldly” Hindus of the region. Even scholars such as Karl Marx and Max Weber bought into their bluff and accepted this to have been a true representation of the prevailing situation in pre-colonial India. Some of these ideas were even incorporated into the theories of capitalist development that they proposed.

While political colonialism ended in 1947, the social imaginations of India took longer to change. An influential section in the Western social sciences continued to see the region from the Orientalist lens until much later. Some of it still continues. Louis Dumont’s work is just an example of this, but he is not the only one. The entire gamut of social science literature that emerged during the early decades after decolonization, modernization theory and development studies, continued to propagate an understanding of social change and economic growth which was founded on the tradition-modernity binary. Such a binary view of the world was also invoked to explain all the problems of societies like India. They were all seen in terms of the cultural hangovers of their past. Caste was also a signifier of the Indian tradition. What followed from this was the widely shared presumption that institutions like caste should and would disappear on their own, provided developing nations like India continue to pursue the path of modernization, which, in the Indian case, had already been commenced by the British rulers in the nineteenth century through a series of initiatives, from the introduction of Western-style education to the laying of railways. We have described this popularly shared assumption that emanates from an evolutionary view of change in relation to caste, as an “imperative of its disappearance” (Jodhka & Manor, 2019). In other words, in the mainstream development thinking, caste did not require a political onslaught.

An Alternative View of Caste

Besides the conceptual problems associated with the popular textbook view of caste, for it being located it the Orientalists writings and the “colonial forms of knowledge,” to use Cohn’s (1996) expression, the rich empirical literature on caste generated by sociologists, social anthropologists and historians clearly shows that the ground reality of caste has been very diverse and fluid. Though caste is not class, it is as much embedded in material processes as it is in the cultural pasts of India. However, the idea of India’s cultural past is also a modern construct. While some elements of caste have indeed existed since the ancient times, its practice did not follow a singular form. Like any other region of the world, social life in the Indian subcontinent was also shaped by a variety of factors. Ecological diversities, political regimes and economic possibilities significantly varied over space and time. As historians have shown with extensive evidence, the South Asian region had also been witness to frequent ideological debates and battles, often articulated through the diversity of religious traditions, sometimes culminating in bloody wars. From Buddhism and Jainism questioning the Brahminic ideas during the ancient times to the varieties of Bhakti traditions in the medieval times that completely bypassed the need for “Brahmanical rituals” in their religious life, many challenges were raised against the ideas of hierarchy/inequality and the ideology of caste (Lorenzen, 1999; Thapar, 1989). Islam and Christianity too had arrived in the region soon after their birth in the Arabian Peninsula.

Historical scholarship on the pre-colonial agrarian life also points to diversities, mobilities and contestations. The more recent, and no so recent, writings on rural India clearly show that, besides caste, the social life was also divided on class lines. Writing on the northern India of the Mughal period, Irfan Habib (1982) (as quoted in Chatterjee & Rudra, 1989, p. 1172) says,

…economic differentiation had progressed considerably among the peasantry. There were large cultivators, using hired labour, and raising crops for the market, and there were small peasants, who could barely produce food grains for their own subsistence. Beyond this differentiation among the peasantry, there was the still sharper division between the caste peasantry and the “menial” population.

Another historian of South India highlights in her work the presence of a sizable population of landless agricultural labourers, who invariably all belonged to some specific caste groups, ranked lower down in the local hierarchy (Kumar, 1992). The precolonial villages were also not isolated. They were linked to the central authority through a revenue bureaucracy. The primary source of income for rulers of the time would have been the taxes that they collected from the cultivators, for which they created specialized classes, some of whom were part of the village. Pre-colonial rural and agrarian life was not free from conflicts and tensions. Even though we do not have evidence of any widespread peasant revolts, there were cases of unrest due to the conditions of excessive oppression by the ruling establishment. A more frequent response of the peasants to situations where the demand for taxes became unbearable was to flee en masse to other territories, where conditions were more favourable for land cultivation (Habib, 1963; Moore, 1966, p. 332).

More importantly, rural life and agrarian economy had also been dynamic in nature, changing in many different ways. Writing on the history of the region in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, historian Ludden (1999, p. 113) presents a very vivid account of this dynamism:

In the fourteenth century, South Asia became a region of travel and transport connecting Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. This redefined the location of all its agrarian territories…. New technology, ideas, habits, languages, people and needs came into farming communities. New elements entered local cuisine. People produced new powers of command, accumulation, and control, focused on strategic urban sites in agrarian space. By 1600, ships sailed between China, Gujarat, Europe, and America.… A long expansion in world connections occurred during centuries when a visible increase in farming intensity was also reshaping agrarian South Asia.… Regional formations of agrarian territory came into being, sewn together by urban networks….

Ludden goes on to show how certain communities moved across regions, bringing about significant change in the agrarian economies and their social composition. Speaking about the present northwest of India, he writes how the drying up of the Saraswati river forced the Jat farmers of Rajasthan region to move “into the upper Punjab doabs and into the western Ganga basin in the first half of the second millennium” (Ludden, 1999, p. 117). He adds:

All these trends combined to open new agricultural territories from Panipat to Sialkot along very old trade routes running from Kabul to Agra. By the sixteenth century, Jalandhar and Lahore were thriving towns surrounded by lush farmland. Wheat lands expanded west of the Ganga and in Punjab doabs astride trade routes and around old trading towns where distinctively urban commercial and administrative groups were already prominent… As farmland expanded in spaces between the plains and high mountains, new opportunities for trade arose at ecological boundaries, and this stimulated more commercially oriented production and processing. By the sixteenth century, tobacco, sugarcane, honey, fruits, vegetables, and melons fed Punjab commercial life, along with profits from sericulture, indigo, and all the elements of cloth manufacturing. (Ludden, 1999, pp. 117–118)

Besides the north-western region, historians of other regions too have found dynamics and diverse nature of caste-agriculture relationship (Kumar, 1992; Washbrook, 1993). British colonial rule, however, did play a significant role in transforming caste and to an extent restructuring it in the form in which we know it today. Working with a textual view of caste as varna hierarchy, they initiated its mapping through the pan-Indian Census, introduced in 1870. However, their questions to average Indians asking them about their caste status made no sense to them. As Charsley (1996, p. 3) writes,

…the Census Commission for India complained from Bengal that “the ignorant classes have very little idea of what caste means and are prone to return either their occupation, or their sub-caste, or their clan, or else some title by which they are known to their fellow villagers” … but in the twentieth century with census after census and more and more inquiries from strangers requiring people to identity caste, many became schooled in the proper answer.

This is not to suggest that caste did not exist on the ground or that it was a British colonial invention or imposition. Hierarchies that could broadly be described as “caste” have been a part of social life across regions of the subcontinent but their frames and formats varied significantly across regions. The term “caste” itself has its origin in European languages and was first invoked in the Indian context by the Portuguese seafarers when they arrived on the western coasts. The local/native linguistic lexicon used to describe them differed across regions. The textual view of caste, the ideas of varna and jati were occasionally invoked, mostly by the Brahminic urban elite. However, even their position or presence varied significantly across regions. For example, the middling categories of Kshatriya and Vaishya were mostly region specific, mostly present in the western, central and northern regions of the subcontinent.

It is in this context that the popular textbook view of caste or its version popularised by Louis Dumont made little sense on ground. Dumont may argue in his defence that he was only trying to construct an ideal type of caste, identifying its underlying structure and not referring to its everyday practice, but as Berreman who studied hill villages of north India argues, caste did not exist except empirically, in the lives of people as they interacted with each other.

Arguing in a similar vein, Joan Mencher who studied the lower end of caste hierarchy in a South India village, claimed that “from the point of view of people at the lowest end of the scale, caste had functioned and continued to function as a very effective system of economic exploitation” (Mencher, 1978, p. 469).

Speaking theoretically, Chris Fuller too makes a similar point when he writes that it is not only the relations of power that Dumont’s theory undervalues; such a notion of caste also undermines the obvious facts about the inequalities in material life and the role caste played in their reproduction (Fuller, 1977). Perhaps the most serious problem with Dumont’s conceptualization is his uncritical use of an Orientalist binary that presents India through categories of holism and hierarchy and the West through individualism and equality (Beteille, 1986). By implication, it presents an image of Indian society as having been eternally static, timeless and space-less. As Cohn (1968, pp. 7–8) observed:

[s]tatements about customs, which are derived from third century A.D. texts and observations from the late eighteenth century, were equally good evidence for determining the nature of society and culture in India. In this view of Indian society there was no regional variation and no questioning of the relationship between prescriptive normative statement derived from the texts and the actual behaviour of individuals and groups.

Every Hindu presumably followed every bit of the prescribed rule, religiously!

Such a view also obfuscates the more recent development, the nineteenth and twentieth century history of caste, when the British colonial rulers brought about profound changes in its practice and self-imagination. As Nicolas Dirks argues, through a process of enumeration and ethnographic surveys, they raised the consciousness about caste. They also produced social and intellectual conditions where “caste became the single term capable of expressing, organizing, and above all ‘synthesizing’ India’s diverse forms of social identity, community and organization” (Dirks, 2001, p. 5).

It is during the colonial period that the idea of caste was crafted in a manner that fitted in with the grand theories/narrative of evolutionary social transformations being worked out in post-Enlightenment Western Europe. At another level, it was during this period that the process of institutionalizing caste in the Indian state system began. As indicated above, the Colonial Census introduced in the late-nineteenth century, produced far-reaching changes in the self-imaginations of caste communities. The official ranking of local level communities and kinship groups into a pan-Indian schema of varna hierarchy produced a new kind of status and representation anxieties among them. The early twentieth century saw a wide range of local communities mobilizing themselves, asking for reconsideration of their positioning in the official framework of status ranking of caste grouping.

It was in this context that the idea of “pollution line” gained an administrative endorsement. The clubbing and enumeration of the so-called “depressed classes” became a ground for their later classification as the SCs after the introduction of the Government of India Act of 1935. Such a classification also found its way into the Constitution of India and it continues to be used for the official policy of affirmative action. Its sphere and scope have since been expanding.

The Materiality of Castes

A large volume of empirical literature produced on rural social change over the past 70 years or so provides rich accounts of the lived realities of caste, its close relationship with processes of power and economy. They loudly expose the fallacious nature of the Orientalist claims about caste being a static and harmonious system, shaped and sustained by an imagined view of Hindu religious belief. Even in the 1950s, when F. G. Bailey did his fieldwork in a village of Orissa, he found the functioning of caste hierarchy being through the coercive power of the locally dominant caste (Bailey, 1960, p. 258). Reporting around the same time, Thomas Beidelman also pointed to a similar pattern. The power of the dominant caste did not emanate from any kind of religious dictum. It was their control over land, and the institution of caste worked to facilitate their exercise of domination and ensure an unquestioned subjugation of the landless and the untouchable castes to the prevailing structures of economic exploitation (Beidelman, 1959).

Rural social change in India too has not simply been a consequence of state benevolence, a result of its developmental strategies. Pro-poor state policies were often shaped by pressure from “below.” Caste has also been a site of assertion and mobilizations, particularly for those located at its lower end and those occupying the middling positions across regions of the subcontinent (see Jaffrelot, 2003; Omvedt, 1976; O’Hanlon, 1985; Pandian, 2006). When M. N. Srinivas reported that social status in the caste system was often negotiable, through a process he described as Sanskritization, he underlined the point that even though the group seeking higher status needed to change its lifestyle, its prerequisite was a change in the economic status of the given group. Only those who had already experienced an economic mobility through some form of entrepreneurship could succeed in pursuing the path of Sanskritization (Srinivas, 1995).

As indicated above, there was no single pan-Indian hierarchy. Its form, and sometimes even its contents, differed across regions. In parts of rural South India, empirical studies reported a clear overlap between the ritual status of caste groupings and the patterns of land ownership; while the Brahmins and the middling castes tended to own land, the Dalit groups tended to be landless (Srinivas, 1959; Beteille, 1971). The pattern was different in parts of north India. As Lewis (1958, p. 81) reported from a Jat village of Delhi:

[w]hile the landowners are generally of higher caste in Indian villages, it is their position as landowners, rather than caste membership per se, which gives them status and power. In Karimpur, where Brahmins are landowners, the traditional caste hierarchy prevails. But in Rampura the Jats own the land and the Brahmins are subservient to them.

The more recent process of rural development and the agrarian transformations experienced in different regions of India since the 1960s, have also been caste-mediated. Even though the introduction of new technology nearly completely changed the older systems, such as the jajmani relations, it did not end the caste hierarchy, or even weaken it. New social classes emerged within the pre-existing social groupings. As is widely known, the introduction of Green Revolution technology significantly enhanced the power of specific caste communities, generally those which owned and cultivated agricultural lands, the regionally “dominant caste” (see Frankel & Rao, 1989; Jodhka, 2010; Rudolph & Rudolph, 1989). Even when the labouring poor were freed from older structures of bondage and traditional dependencies, their caste boundaries remained intact and actively constrained their social and economic mobility. For example, out-migrations of the labouring poor also has a caste mediation built into it. Most of the rural-to-urban migration happens through community networks and the destination of an out-migrating person is often channelled through kin-based networks. The rural Dalits and those from the rural dominant/upper caste are likely to follow different paths of mobility, even when they both may be equally poor and landless, and are pushed out of the village by very similar kinds of livelihood desperations (see Jodhka & Kumar, 2018).

Their entry into the urban non-farm informal economy too is also shaped by the social resources they possess and bring along with them to the city. As I found in my study of mobile Dalits in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, the growing redundancy of old caste-based occupations and their growing dislike for agrarian employment is pushing the members of ex-untouchable castes out of the village for alternative sources of livelihoods. In the absence of any viable salaried employment, some of them try to set up their own businesses. However, they find it very hard to make much headway beyond the “informal” margins of the urban economy. Caste matters in the urban markets in many different ways for Dalits trying to establish themselves in business. Urban markets have never been as open as they are made out to be in the textbooks of economics and sociology. The new entrants have to often compete with those who are already entrenched in the urban economy; caste and kinship-based communities actively try to preserve their “monopolies” in the urban markets (see Jodhka, 2015).

Apart from working as gatekeepers, kinship networks matter in mobilizing capital, through banks and otherwise, the most critical requirement for businesses anywhere in the world. Given their past economic deprivations, those from the historically deprived communities also do not own collaterals, such as agricultural lands or urban property. The lack of “social capital” and economic resources is further compounded by the active “prejudice” they encounter in their everyday business life. Such processes aid in the reproduction of both, social/economic inequalities and caste identity among the Dalits, a sense of being different and unequal (Jodhka, 2015; also see Iyer et al., 2013; Hoff & Pandey, 2004). Based on her study of a South Indian town, Harriss-White (2003, pp. 178–179) concludes,

[c]aste … provides networks necessary for contracts, for subcontracting and for labour recruitment within the informal economy … liberalisation makes these caste-based relationships more important because it places a new premium on the advancement of interests … caste is ultimately connected with all the other organizations of civil society that comprehensively regulate economic and social life.

The neoliberal turn during the post-1990s has made caste a far more salient resource in the economic process. The growth of Indian economy during 1990–2015 significantly enhanced the value and influence of the urban corporate economy, also resulting in a relative decline of the agricultural sector. While the value and volume of the corporate economy has grown, it has not generated as many high-value jobs. When the college educated wards of rural farmers appear for job interviews, they often find it hard to compete with those from the urban upper caste backgrounds. Caste does not work merely as identity. It is also a resource, an embodiment of social and cultural capital (Deshpande & Newman, 2007; Jodhka & Newman, 2007; Thorat & Newman, 2010).

Political mobilizations of the educated youth from rural dominant castes, such as Marathas of Maharashtra, the Pattidar Patels of Gujarat, or the Jats of Haryana, asking for their inclusion in the official category of the OBC during the second decade of this present century is a direct reflection of this newly experienced exclusion and a realization of their steady marginalization in the emerging politico-economic scenario (see Jaffrelot & Kalaiyarasan, 2019; Tilche, 2016).

The Way Forward

As I have mentioned above, South Asian agrarian studies have come a long way from their earlier preoccupation with a specific view of class and agrarian structure. Questions of gender, caste, and other forms of ascription-based identities have come to be recognized as important aspects of rural lives that shape opportunities and relational processes, in economy, in politics, and in everyday social life. However, such a recognition has not yet translated into the development of a viable alternative theoretical and conceptual framework. The dominant paradigm of agrarian studies continues to draw its conceptual framings from a kind of Eurocentric Marxist thinking, which tends to operate with assumptions similar to developmentalist view of modern history where questions such as caste get assigned a particular meaning and value, as belonging to a traditional culture, and hence being more or less irrelevant to “serious discussions” of class and land questions in contemporary times. As Moyo et al. (2013, p. 95) argue, good evidence of this is the invocation of the notion of “backwardness” in writings of the European Marxist scholars on the subject and their “obsession with the question of industrialisation.” As Moyo et al. (2013) write, “[i]n its most conservative rendering, backwardness was posited as a quality innate to non-European societies, and industrialisation as an end in itself, best left to trained economists and development planners,” be it in terms of “stages of growth” by W. W. Rostow or “dual economies” by Arthur Lewis (also see Moyo et al., 2015).

It is in this context that this article argues for a non-teleological view of caste and also of agrarian change. Their social contours in the contemporary time are shaped as much by their local and regional contexts emanating from their specific historical experiences, as by the larger global processes. If the “agrarian question” is above all a “political” question and a question of democracy, things like caste have to be a part of it. As is evident from the discussion above, such a “revision” has already been underway for some time now, through the writings of scholars working from across the world.

However, the bigger problem lies with the popular framings of caste and its deep roots in the Orientalist and nationalist imaginings of the Indian self. Although in the emerging new research on its materiality caste has come to be widely recognized as a source of deprivation, exclusions and denials, it is still largely seen as a practice belonging to the domain of “culture.” Its mobilizations, and sometimes even its recognition, are seen as conceding to divisive politics of identities, which invariably also get counter-posed to the politics of interests, the class-based mobilizations (see, e.g., Herring & Agarwala, 2006). Mobilizations around caste, even if it is of those from the lower end of hierarchy, are then seen as a handiwork of political entrepreneurs for representational gains. While there may be an element of truth in such formulations, the common poor are not always amenable to elite manipulation. Their identification with such a politics also suggests their own understanding of their interests. Gaining voice and visibility, or recognition, may also be a critical aspect of class struggle in a context where it is also lived through identities of caste and the accompanying marginalities. More importantly perhaps, this may be a consequence of the near complete lack of any political engagement with the materiality of caste and the manners in which it has historically come to shape the realities of class in rural India. A near blindness to caste still persists among many practitioners of agrarian studies.

A possible example of this is the “Introduction” to a special issue in the journal of Agrarian Change (2013) devoted to the “Agrarian Questions and Left Politics in India,” edited by Jens Lerche, Alpa Shah and Barbara Harriss-White. Early in their intervention, they refer to caste as “forming a structure of Indian capitalism,” which “does not make Indian capitalism semi-feudal any more than ethnic divisions or expressions of gender subordination under capitalism make relations of production and distribution pre-capitalist” (Lerche et al., 2013, p. 343). However, they make no mention of it in their substantive discussions on its absences in the framings of the “agrarian question,” or even in their proposals for future articulation of left politics, which could be inclusive of caste. In fact, reference to caste does not make a second appearance in their long “Introduction” to the Special Issue. This is particularly surprising because all three of them have themselves researched on caste.

The proposal of approaching caste with the notion such as “conjugated oppression” and “its co-constitution by and through class relations” (Lerche & Shah, 2018) is indeed a way forward. However, such a framing too gets limited by a clubbing of caste with other non-economic and pre-capitalist/cultural forms of oppressive systems, thereby undermining its materiality and adaptive nature. For example, there could be contexts where relations of class may also be co-constituted by and through structures of caste hierarchy! To put it differently, caste is not only about oppression and exploitation; it is also a relational structure. It simultaneously structures domination and privilege. The grammar of its inequalities or relational structures may, in fact, embed class processes. Thus, caste is neither reducible to class, nor does it always function parallel to class even when the two are often very similar in terms of their effects. It is for this reason that categories such as peasantry do not work very well in contexts like those of India, sociologically as well as politically.

As I have discussed above, a part of this problem also lies with the dominant framings of caste as a religious value. Even though the origins of such a framing lay in the Orientalist and colonial imaginations of the region, it has come to be accepted by almost everyone. As I have repeatedly mentioned above, a possible explanation of this could be the deep influence that modernization theory and the mainstream paradigm of development studies have had on the social science academia. The Orientalist view has also come to be a part of the popular common-sense that we all tend to inhabit. Such assumptions inhibit us from exploring the contemporary realities of caste.

The alternative perspective presented here can help us make sense of the persistence of caste even when its traditional “eco-system” is significantly weakened or altered. Caste survives as a resource, positive and/or negative, a kind of social capital that reproduces inequalities in different spheres of life in contemporary India. The classical theories, including the popular Marxist formulations have their spatial bias. In other words, engaging with caste is not possible only through an additive strategy. It would require a much greater effort, critical and empirical. This is not to propose a move towards cultural relativism but to underline the need for refinement of categories that are capable of encapsulating diverse experiences and does not presume that European history and the categories emanating from the nineteenth century as a model for the rest of the world. Some of this has already been done, within the Western social sciences itself, in the writings of scholars like Pierre Bourdieu and many others working on persistence of ascription and the so-called pre-modern forms of inequalities. This needs to be extended further, critically and actively, by scholars and scholarship from the Global South. The way forward lies in recognizing the materiality of caste and adopting a non-deterministic approach to class.