Caste

1. Caste and hierarchy have long been seen as the distinctive and defining features of the Indian society. It was during the colonial period that caste was, for the first time, theorized in modern sociological language. The colonial administrators also gathered extensive ethnographic details and wrote detailed accounts of the way systems of caste distinctions and hierarchies worked in different parts of the sub-continent Social anthropology in the post-independence India continued with a similar approach that saw caste as the most important and distinctive feature of Indian society. While caste was a concrete structure that guided social relationships in the Indian village, hierarchy was its ideology.
2. An individual in caste society lived in a hierarchical world. Not only were the people divided into higher or lower groups, their food, their dresses, ornaments, customs and manners were all ranked in an order of hierarchy. Anthropologist invariably invoked the Varna system of hierarchy which divided the Hindu society into five major categories. The first three, viz., Brahmins (the priests or men of learning), Kshatriyas (rulers and warriors) and Vaishya (traders) were regarded as dvijas or the twice born. The fourth category was that of Shudras, composed of numerous occupational castes that were regarded as relatively ‘clean’ and were not classed as “untouchables”. In the fifth major category were placed all the untouchable castes. According to Dube the Hindus all over India, accepted this classification.
3. The legitimate occupations to be followed by people in these major categories were defined by tradition. Within each category there were several sub-groups (jati or castes), which could be arranged in a hierarchical order within them. According to Dube, despite a general framework, there were considerable variations in different regions where several socially autonomous castes, each fitting into one of the five major divisions, were otherwise practically independent in there socio-religious sphere of life.
4. According to Majumdar, Caste divisions determined and decided all social relations. Most scholars saw caste as a closed system where entry into a social status was a function of heredity and individual achievement, personal quality or wealth had, according to the strict traditional prescription, no say in determining the social status’. However, Srinivas is of the view that, there were some who admitted that the way caste operated at the local level was ‘radically different from that expressed in the Varna scheme. Mutual rank was uncertain and this stemmed from the fact that mobility was possible in caste’.
5. Dube identified six factors that contributed towards the status differentiation in the village community of Shamirpet religion and caste; landownership; wealth; position in government service and village organization; age; and distinctive personality traits. Attempts to claim a higher ritual status through, what Srinivas called sanskritisation, was not a simple process. It could not be achieved only through rituals and lifestyle imitation. The group had to also negotiate it at the local power structure. Similarly, stressing secular factors, Dube pointed to the manner in which the caste panchayats of the lower or the menial castes worked as unions to secure their employment and strengthen their bargaining power vis-a-vis the land owning dominant castes.

However, a large majority of them viewed caste system as working within the framework of jajmani system and bound together different castes living in the village or a cluster of villages in enduring and pervasive relationships.

Land and Class

1. As is evident from the above discussion, the social sociologists studying India during the fifties and sixties generally worked in the framework of caste. The manner in which social science disciplines developed in India, class and land came to be seen as the concerns of economists. However, since sociologists advocated a prospective that studied “small communities”in holistic terms, agriculture and the social relations of production on land also found a place in the village monographs.
2. While some of them directly focused on economic life as one of the central research questions, most saw it as an aspect of the caste and occupational structure of the village. Land relations to them reflected the same patterns of hierarchy as those present in the caste system. Srinivas has argued that ‘There was a certain amount of overlap between the twin hierarchies of caste and land. The richer landowners generally came from such high castes as Brahmins and Lingayats while the Harijans contributed a substantial number of landless labourers. In contrast to the wealthier household, the poor one was almost invisible’.
3. Some others underlined the primacy of land over all other factors in determining social hierarchy in the village. Comparing a Brahmin dominated village with a Jat dominated village, Oscar Lewis argued that ‘While 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. However, despite such references to the crucial significance of land ownership in village social life, village studies did not explore the details of agrarian social structures in different regions of the country. Caste, family, kinship and religion remained their primary focus.

Gender Differences

1. Most village studies looked at gender relations within the framework of the household, and participation of women in work. These studies highlighted the division of labour within the family and the overall dominance that men enjoyed in the public sphere. Women, particularly among the upper castes, were confined within the four walls of the house.
2. According to Srinivas ‘the social world of the woman was synonymous with the household and kinship group while the men inhabited a more heterogeneous world’. Compared to men in the Central Indian village studied by Mayer ‘women had less chance to meet people from other parts of the village. The village well provided a meeting place for all women of non-Harijan castes, and the opportunity for gossip. But there was a limit to the time that busy women could stand and talk while they drew their water and afterwards they must return home, where the occasions for talking to people outside their own household were limited to meeting with other women of the street’.
3. Dube in his study of the Telangana village observed that women were secluded from the activities of the public space. ‘It was considered a mark of respectability in women if they walked with their eyes downcast’.

Village community in today’s India

The present day villages all over India are not similar they are different in physical structure, ecological setting, their functional importance, internal composition, economy and power structure.

Even then some common features can be derived;

1. Economic Dimensions : In present day discourse Deepankar Gupta said, majority of the villagers are now engaged is non- agricultural activities. Jodhka said about his Haryana villages that peasant landowning castes and families have now started multiple occupations, one of them manages rural land, another manages business in city and are is employed as a doctor or engineer or professor. All sociologists do not agree to this situation. But at least this can be easily said that today the economic situation is very diverse which has been contributed by (1) Developmental Programme (2) Green Revolution (3) The role of market in the age of liberalization.
2. Political Dimension : Louis Dumont said village is political community. It has power. It want to decide its affairs on its own. This nature of political dimension has changed in the last sixty years. Yogendra Singh said, In the fifties and sixties of the last century the power structure in village mostly confired to land ownership and caste hierarchy. This has changed because of democratic institutions, lower caste assertion and the increasing competitiveness among caste group.
3. Social and Cultural Dimensions / Village still have that identity and a sense of attachment Jan Bremen said, although competition and conflict have enormously increased even then the sense of fictive kinship exists among villagers. In cultural dimensions the religions festival of the village have come under dispute. On the one hand on John Byres said, either there are more than one functions in the village or as Balai Gopal said, the backward caste have taken the initiative in organizing them. So the cultural metrics of village communities have changed.

Dube further mentions that the rules of patriarchy were clearly laid out. After caste, gender was the most important factor that governed the division of labour in the village. Masculine and feminine pursuits were clearly distinguished. Writing on similar lines about his village in the same region Srinivas pointed out that the two sets of occupations were not only separated but also seen as unequal. ‘It was the man who exercised control over the domestic economy. He made the annual grain-payments at harvest to the members of the artisan and servicing castes who had worked for him during the year. The dominant ‘male view’ thought of women as being incapable of understanding what went on outside the domestic wall’ (Srinivas).

Men also had a near complete control over women’s sexuality. In the monogamous family, popular among most groups in India, ‘a man could play ground but not so a woman. A man’s sense of private property in his wife’s genital organs was as profound as in his ancestral land. And just as, traditionally, a wife lacked any right to land she lacked an exclusive right to her husband’s sexual prowess. Polygyny and concubinage were both evidence of her lack of such rights. Men and women were separate and unequal.

Patriarchy and male dominance were legitimate norms. Dube has stated that ‘according to the traditional norms of the society a husband is expected to be an authoritative figure whose will should always dominate the domestic scene. As the head of the household he should demand respect and obedience from his wife and children. The wife should regard him as her ‘master’ and should ‘serve him faithfully’.

Conclusive analysis

1. The studies of Indian villages carried out by social anthropologists during the 1950s and 1960s were undoubtedly an important landmark in the history of Indian social sciences. Even though the primary focus of these studies was on the social and ritual life of the village people; there are enough references that can be useful pointers towards an understanding of the political and economic life in the rural society of India during the first two decades of independent India.
2. More importantly these studies helped in contesting the dominant stereotype of the Indian village made popular by the colonial administrators. The detailed descriptive accounts of village life constructed after prolonged field-works carried out, in most cases, entirely by the anthropologists themselves convincingly proved how Indian villages were not ‘isolated communities’. Village studies showed that India’s villages had been well integrated into the broader economy and society of the region even before the colonial rule introduced new agrarian legislation. They also pointed to the regional differences in the way social village life was organized in different parts of the country.
3. Social anthropological studies also offered an alternative to the dominant “book-view” of India constructed by Indologists and orientalists from the Hindu scriptures. The “field-view” presented in the village monographs not only contested the assumptions of lndology but also convincingly showed with the help of empirical data as to how the idealized model of the Varna system as theorized in Hindu scriptures did not match with the concrete realities of village life.While caste was an important institution in the Indian village and most studies foregrounded caste differences; over other differences, empirical studies showed that it was not a completely closed and rigidly defined system. Caste statuses were also not exclusively determined by one’s position in the ritual hierarchy and that there were many grey and contestable areas within the system. It was from the village studies that the concepts like sanskritisation, dominant caste; segmental structures; harmonic and disharmonic systems emerged.
4. However, village studies were also constrained by a number of factors. The method of participant observation that was the main strength of these studies also imposed certain limitations on the fieldworkers, which eventually proved critical in shaping the image they produced of the Indian village. Doing participant observation required a measure of acceptability of the field worker in the village that he/she chose to study. In a differentiated social context, it was obviously easy to approach the village through the dominant sections. However, this choice proved to be of more than just a strategic value. The anxiety of the anthropologist to get accepted in the village as a member of the “community” made their accounts of the village life conservative in orientation.
5. It also limited their access to the dominant groups in the local society. They chose to avoid asking all those questions or approaching those subordinate groups, which they thought, could offend the dominant interests in the village. The choices made by individual anthropologists as regard to how they were going to negotiate their own relationship with the village significantly influenced the kind of data they could gather about village life. Unlike the “tribal communities”, the conventional subject matter of social anthropology, Indian villages were not only internally differentiated much more than the tribes they also had well articulated world views. Different sections of the village society had different perspectives on what the village was. Though most of the sociologists were aware of this, they did not do much to resolve this problem. On the contrary, most of them consciously chose to identity themselves with the dominant caste groups in the village, which apart from making their stay in the village relatively easy, limited their access to the world-view of the upper castes and made them suspect among the lower castes.
6. Apart form the method of participant observation and the anxiety about being accepted in rural society that made the sociologists produce a conservative account of the rural social relations, the received theoretical perspectives and the professional traditions dominant within the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology during the time of village studies also had their influences on these scholars. Sociologists during the decades of fifties and sixties generally focused on the structures rather than changes. This preoccupation made them look for the sources that reproduced social order in the village and to ignore conflict and the possible sources of social transformation. 

The End of the Blog : Caste, class and gender in Indian village