The Myth of India’s Unchanging Caste System

One sometimes stumbles upon a stereotypical vision of Indian society as an unchanging structure, as if carved in rock or molded in steel. This is perhaps most common when it comes to images of the caste system.

There is admittedly no doubt that the caste system is still powerful in India and that it often imposes rigid social norms. It continues to subject the lowest of castes and untouchables (Dalits) to various cruelties and forms of exclusion. And yet the assumption that it is “unchanging” perhaps stems from a Westernized, reformist view that expects social transformations to take place promptly. Or, to put it in a very simplified form: This assumption is like a young man talking to his grandfather and calling for a revolution, while the elderly person replies: “Yes, son, but everything happens in its own time, and change must appear gradually…”

Social change is continuously occurring in India, only it does not happen quickly (especially when compared to some periods of social revolution in Europe). The gradual transformation in India can be observed when looking at longer periods, however. Approximately a century ago there were communities in India’s southern state of Kerala that were treated as not only untouchable, but also not-to-be-seen – their representatives had to announce their arrival in villages by making loud sounds, so that members of the higher castes could avoid seeing the incoming “impure” people. In that period, the same region also had a custom of contactless shopping – an untouchable customer had to leave his money before the shop, while the shopkeeper would also place the sold goods before it, both doing this in turns, so that the two sides would not come into physical contact. While untouchability as such remains a powerful social notion in today’s India, both of those particular orthodox solutions are gone and largely forgotten, just like a number of others.

Castes can be best understood in their particular regions, and especially so in rural settings. In villages, members of a specific caste may be recognized by their surnames, the professions they have, the clothes they wear, the locality they live in, the rituals they may or cannot take part in, the people they dine and intermarry with, and sometimes even the way they speak. 

All of this becomes much more complex and hard to identify in a large city. A metropolis will be inhabited by millions of people coming from various regions, speaking various languages and dialects, and representing thousands of various castes – much more than a single person may know of. While housing apartheid remains a social reality in India, identifying a person’s caste only by the neighborhood they live in is next to impossible in urban settings. I have been, for instance, to a small Indian village partitioned into roughly three localities, each with a separate well: for the lowest cates, the middle castes, and the upper castes. As shown by recent incidents, such divisions over access to water are usually one of the pillars of the caste system remaining prominent in the rural areas. But in cities such clear divisions are hard to come by and very difficult to arrange. The urban housing apartheid usually divides communities more broadly into rich and poor, or sometimes more specifically chalks out zones of middle and upper classes of a particular group. 

Similarly, while even recent cases show that Dalits may not be allowed to enter private ceremonies arranged by upper castes (such as in the 2019 incident of a Dalit man being beaten to death for consuming food at an upper caste wedding), over the decades the state has done a lot to open public spaces to lower castes and make sure they will be allowed in them. While in the early 20th century, many Indian temples did not allow Dalits into their precincts, past campaigns by Gandhi and others made this custom partially disappear. In his childhood in late 19th century, one of India’s greatest lawmakers, Bhimrao Ambedkar, being a Dalit had to sit outside the classroom and listen to the teacher’s voice through the window, in order to not come into contact with upper caste pupils. Nowadays, however, the Indian public schools formally give access to every child.

Very importantly, urban settings allow one to pursue a job completely outside one’s caste. The easiest way to define the caste system is to call it a system of inherited professions, inter-community marriages, as well as shared or exclusive religious customs. Of these three elements, however, the first is no longer so obvious. Traditionally, the caste system would force the son of a potter to be a potter as well. Indeed, a caste surname is often a name of a profession, such as Kumhar (potter) or Pandit (priest). New technologies, a more fluid economy, and industrialization are gradually making the traditional divisions of labor redundant. One reads of various professions, from snake charmers to blacksmiths, disappearing across India. The son of a potter may still have Kumhar as his surname, but he neither has to follow his father’s profession nor do his parents and community necessarily want him to pursue it.

But does this mean that castes have melted away too? Unfortunately no; rather, one’s caste no longer must overlap with one’s job and the caste system may no longer expect people to follow their parents’ professions. But other parts of the system hold fast. These include religious customs; especially the solutions called roti-beti ka rishta in Hindi – “the bond of bread and daughter,” i.e. the rules of dining and intermarrying. It is hard to imagine the persistence of the caste system without arranged marriages, and indeed most marriages are still arranged in India (even if a bit less in the cities and among the richest classes). Castes may no longer be professions, but they still are communities.

The caste system has also adapted to modern times, evolving and partially hiding itself from debates on political correctness, while remaining a harsh and outspoken social reality in villages. Indian politicians and intellectuals do their best to condemn caste divisions in public (while usually arranging the marriages of their children within their own castes). Many parties, companies, and other institutions are dominated by upper castes, the members of which do their best to stress that they, of course, support equality and that the situation has nothing to do with the rules of the system. And, indeed, this dominance is not about keeping the rules and rites of the caste system itself, but more about keeping the majority of economic and political privileges for upper castes. It is still dominance, however, even though more silent and less systemic.

In a nutshell, a city may, at least theoretically, give one an opportunity to be somebody else, to cross the border outlined by one’s own birth, even though such chances are usually much more slight for poorer and village-born people, and even more for women and Dalits. 

In this context it must be noted that while the urbanization rate of India was 11.4 percent as of the 1901 census, over the century it rose to 31.16 percent, per 2011 data. The overall statistics may not show how many people only live in the cities to work, with their families staying in the villages, and how many remain generally connected to the rural areas in other ways (such as coming back to one’s own community for marriage). Still, the weakening rigidness of caste is more observable in urban surroundings. For instance, a 2016 India Human Development Survey study tells us that 27 percent of its rural respondents knew somebody who married outside his caste, but the number of such respondents in the cities was 36 percent. Another study – conducted by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in 2004 – revealed that 60 percent of its rural respondents favored a ban on inter-caste marriages but the number was 47 percent among urban respondents. Similarly, while most of the marriage announcements in Indian newspapers openly advertise the caste of the sought bride or bridegroom, their numbers are also very slowly declining.

Thus, while India’s urbanization may be progressing not much quicker than the changes that occur in its caste system, both processes can be observed over the span of decades. Social revolution – as least as attempted by radical communists – has failed in India, but gradual evolution is invariably taking place.