Caste in India

Whether it is Australian attacks on Indians or atrocities committed on dalits by Indians, or discrimination and oppression of the people of the north-east, they are basically issues that concern humanity and cannot be prevented from being internationalised.

Age-old restrictions on access to capital by certain social groups continue to reflect themselves in the scheduled caste and scheduled tribes owning far fewer private enterprises than warranted by their share in the population in both rurual and urban India. Recent nationwide data also reveal that when they do run business establishments these are mainly household enterprises organised around family labour. Poverty rates among the enterprises of the socially disadvantaged groups are also much higher than among the other castes.

The Marathas, who have traditionally positioned themselves as a warrioragriculturist caste, have a stranglehold on Maharashtra's political leadership and have always opposed reservations. But the declining returns from agriculture, the desire to take advantage of the postglobalisation boom in the services and knowledge-based sector and apprehension at the perceived rise of the other backward castes on the political ladder have led the community to demand inclusion in the Other Backward Classes category.

Marking a century of debate, scholarship and politics, three texts by B R Ambedkar, M N Srinivas and Kancha Ilaiah, when read in intersection, present rich possibilities both for an understanding of caste and more importantly for a re-examination of the sociology/legal ethnography of caste and its genealogy. Ambedkar offered a multilayered, counter-hegemonic reading of caste that was lost on at least three generations of sociologists and possibly accounts for several of the conservative trends we have seen in the social sciences in institutions of higher learning. What is particularly interesting is the silence in the field of sociological work for at least five decades after Ambedkar's contribution to the sociology of caste.

The argument that while caste as a system is more or less dead, individual castes are flourishing is widely accepted. However, the notion of "caste as a system" is derived mainly from studies of the rural rather than the urban community. In this article, individual caste is seen in the context of both rural and urban communities and its several aspects, particularly the rule of endogamy as its defining criterion, are analysed at some length and some implications of the analysis are pointed out.