India's cardinal sin: The curse of caste in the 21st Century

Bryan S. Turner (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017

This entry discusses the transformation of caste in the Indian context. The entry starts with a discussion of the Indological and anthropological accounts of caste and then examines whether “caste” is essentially unique to Hinduism. Furthermore, the entry discusses the possibility of mobility within the ritual hierarchy of caste. In the final section, the entry shows how caste, once described by the Christian missionaries and the colonial state as an irrational traditional institution, has transformed into a modern entity and become a vital instrument of democratic mobilization in contemporary India.

Community Development Journal

A short write up on caste. It analyses how caste reigns and functions in India in the spheres of Indian society.

PURVADEVA, Peer Revied Bilingual International Research Journal, 2022

The caste system categorizes people into various hierarchical levels, which determine and define their social, religious, and hegemonic standings within the society. The caste system has also maintained a nexus and a sense of community for caste members for more than 2,000 years. A classic example of the caste system is the one found in India, which has existed there for hundreds of years. The caste system in India was traditionally a graded hierarchy based on a purity-pollution scale; it has undergone many changes over the years. After India’s independence, there has been a de-ritualization of caste, and it has moved toward being a community based on affinity or kinship rather than representing a fixed hierarchy. The association of each caste with a distinct occupation has weakened considerably, and inter-caste marriages across different ritual strata, even crossing the Varna boundaries, are not uncommon. In present day society because of industrialization, urbanization, modern education system, modern means of transport and communication, remarkable changes have been experienced in features of caste system, such as occupation, marriage, food, drink, social intercourse etc. But at the same time there are some factors like emergence of political parties, method of election, constitutional provision for S.C., S.T. and other backward classes have gradually encouraged the problem of casteism in India. So, it is difficult to predict about the future of caste system in India. In this context, I am trying to find out the present position and future of Indian caste system. The aim of this paper is to understand the continuity and the changes in the caste system in India.

The Caste System of India has played an integral role in the shaping of Indian Society. With time and under diverse circumstances, it has changed its form and role, fulfilling different functions while evolving. The aim of this paper is to briefly track the evolution of the Caste System within Indian society focusing on how its role has changed, especially in a contemporary Indian setting.

This book posits the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) vis-à-vis their upper-caste Hindu peers and establishes how caste is a lived reality in everyday life in modern India. It explores areas where caste and religious exclusion are most visible, such as human development, inequality, poverty, educational attainments, child malnutrition, health, employment, wages, gender, and access to public goods. With an in-depth theoretical foundation and empirical analysis, it establishes that in each of these sectors, the performance of upper caste Hindu households is far better compared to that from the SC, ST, and Muslim households.

Contemporary South Asia

This special issue of Contemporary South Asia seeks to capture the diversity and situatedness of the caste experience and deepen our understanding of caste dynamics and lives in the twenty-first century. In this Introduction, we highlight the continuing salience of caste, offer an overview of theoretical understandings of caste and foreground the importance of analysing caste in the present as a dynamic form of human relations, rather than a remnant of tradition. Following on from this, we highlight the increasingly global spread of caste and reflect on what happens to castebased social relations when they traverse continents. In conclusion, we introduce the papers that make up this special issue. Taken together, they speak to changes in attitudes towards caste, but also the persistence of caste-based identities and dynamics in India and Britain. Even though the papers presented in this special issue work with the assumption of caste being a reality in and among the Indians, caste-like status hierarchies have existed in most, if not all, societies, and they continue to persist and intersect with other forms of differences/inequalities.

The Indian Caste System is historically one of the main dimensions where people in India are socially differentiated through class, religion, region, tribe, gender, and language. Although this or other forms of differentiation exist in all human societies, it becomes a problem when one or more of these dimensions overlap each other and become the sole basis of systematic ranking and unequal access to valued resources like wealth, income, power and prestige. The Indian

2015

Caste as a social system has always been in limelight for those who made effort to understand the Hindu culture, and often vaguely interpreted due to its complexity and genesis. Caste is expansion of Varna due to further development of social needs. However, they both are different things. The article focuses on the influence of various cultural elements and concurrent process happened in course of time which propelled to emerge a system that became a reality and has been affecting the Indian social setup positively and negatively both respects. Indian society is divided into several castes and groups. Each Caste group is distinctive than the others and reflects in various ways such as life style, thinking process, professional choice as well as social behavior etc. Indeed, caste system is a social institution full with unique reality and as an institution with hierarchy giving professional choice for those living in it as part. It concludes that Caste is a professional group with ...

Economic and political weekly, 2012

Recent debates regarding inclusion of caste in 2011 Census have raised questions about whether caste still matters in modern India. Ethnographic studies of the mid-20th century identified a variety of dimensions along which caste differentiation occurs. At the same time, whether this differentiation translates into hierarchy remains a contentious issue as does the persistence of caste, given the economic changes of the past two decades. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 41,554 households conducted in 2005, this paper examines the relationship between social background and different dimensions of well-being. The results suggest continued persistence of caste disparities in education, income and social networks.