Abstract
AbstractWhat place does the caste system have in modern India with its globally integrating market economy? The most influential anthropological approaches to caste have tended to emphasize caste as India's traditional religious and ritual order, or (treating such order as a product of the colonial encounter) as shaped politically, especially today by the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Less attention has been paid to caste effects in the economy. This article argues that the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy ‘enclosure’ of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and ‘caste politics’, while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy. Village-level fieldwork in South India finds a parallel public narrative of caste either as ritual rank eroded by market relations or as identity politics deflected from everyday economic life. But, locally and nationally, the effects of caste are found to be pervasive in labour markets and the business economy. In the age of the market, caste is a resource, sometimes in the form of a network, its opportunity-hoarding advantages discriminating against others. Dalits are not discriminated by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation. The caste processes, enclosures, and evasions in post-liberalization India suggest the need to rethink the modernity of caste beyond orientalist and post-colonial frameworks, and consider the presuppositions that shape understanding of an institution, the nature and experience of which are determined by the inequalities and subject positions it produces.
Highlights
What do we learn about the Indian caste system if we begin not with ‘traditional’ Hindu religious ideas or contemporary political competition, but with relations of the modern economy—a domain in which caste identity and hierarchy are often understood to be absent or eroded by market processes? In this article, I want to draw attention to a growing body of research that has precisely this focus and consider the implications of this evidence for how we conceptualize caste as a contemporary phenomenon in Indian society and economy
The market economy has become the privileged site for political investment in Indian modernity and development
I have argued that the neo-liberal framing of social transformation separates out caste as a matter of religion/culture or special-interest politics, making it harder to acknowledge caste as a social structure of the modern market economy itself that works to help some get ahead and sorely burdens others, as does the way of talking or not talking about caste
Summary
What do we learn about the Indian caste system if we begin not with ‘traditional’ Hindu religious ideas or contemporary political competition, but with relations of the modern economy—a domain in which caste identity and hierarchy are often understood to be absent or eroded by market processes? In this article, I want to draw attention to a growing body of research that has precisely this focus and consider the implications of this evidence for how we conceptualize caste as a contemporary phenomenon in Indian society and economy. Successful cultivators (of Utaiyar caste) benefitting from secure property rights and regional markets for cotton and groundnut cash crops advanced by the British upturned the old village establishment by privatizing control of land and common property, but ensured that new dyadic landlord–labourer/ artisan relations took on the form and idiom of an (older) public hierarchy of village arrangements This caste-rank coding provided the symbolic language for challenges to established collective caste power, such as when Dalits grab the festival statues, or change the festival or funeral procession routes, or enter the village temples and teashops (Mines ; Mosse )—part of a subordinated group’s unfolding drama of change made apparent to them by their own ritual-political acts (Hastrup , ). Why did a majority ( per cent) of Dalits questioned in our Alapuram village survey say that caste was a barrier or obstacle (tatai) to their family advancement, meaning economic welfare? How does caste shape opportunity?
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