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Social Structure and Social Change

Notes actually destroyed mats or other property lent to visitors when they had used them and had gone.
Like commensal taboo, other taboos also were imposed to save people from the mana. Hutton (Ibid:
189) further points out that the mana principle appears in other religions also. In Buddhist religion, it
appears as iddhi, in Islamic beliefs as kudrat, and in Hinduism it is familiar as shakti. It seems likely,
however, that it was largely the social and political impact of the Rig Vedic invaders with their
definitely graded social classes that was responsible for introducing the principle of social precedence
into a society already divided into groups isolated by taboos.
D.N. Majumdar (1952) has criticized Hutton’s explanation of caste in terms of mana. He maintains
that though tribes in other societies also believe in mana but we do not find caste system there. In
India, it is the result of racial differences and racial conflicts. But it will be erroneous to think that
Hutton has explained the origin of caste only in terms of belief in mana. In fact, he considers caste as
an outcome of interaction of a number of geographical, social, political, religious and economic factors
not elsewhere found in conjunction. He writes (Ibid: 188): “It is not suggested that the caste system
has developed from ideas of mana, magic and taboo alone; only that without these ideas, it could not
have developed.” Identifying these factors, he (Ibid: 190-191) has referred to factors like the ideas of
pollution, clash of races, racial conquests and colour prejudices, clash of antagonistic cultures, guilds
and associations of trades and crafts, deliberate economic and administrative policies, exploitation
by intellectuals, geographical isolation of the Indian peninsula, belief in reincarnation and magic and
so on. He has thus supported the multiple factor theory of scholars like S.C. Roy. Roy (Man in India,
Vol. 17, No. 4: 254) holds that caste is an outcome of the interaction between the Indo-Aryan varna
system on the one hand and the tribal system of the pre-Dravidian and the occupational class system
of the Dravidian on the other. These were cemented in the caste system by the Indo-Aryan concept of
karma and a certain taboo holiness that came to be attached to the Brahmin for his accredited possession
of a special spiritual energy. R.K.Mukherjee (1957: 61) also writes that several factors working cojointly
led in course of time to the emergence of the Indian caste system.
We may now conclude the discussion on the origin of castes. Accepting the multiple-factor approach,
it may be maintained that the superiority feeling of the Vedic Aryans over the natives due to the
racial differentiation, occupational distinctiveness, the monopolistic priesthood of Brahmins, and the
religious ideas of ceremonial purity and pollution first applied to Sudras (native aboriginals) in
connection with the sacrificial ritual and then expanded and extended to other groups because of the
theoretical impurity of certain occupations were the important factors in the origin of the caste system
in India. The geographical and the philosophical, etc. factors though important yet cannot be given
too much weight in the interpretation of caste. The fissiparous tendency of groups and the spirit of
unity and we-feeling in each caste was fostered by the socio-political factors like lack of rigid military
control of the state, the unwillingness of the rulers to enforce a uniform standard of law and custom,
their readiness to recognize the varying customs of different groups as valid, and their tendency of
allowing things some-how to adjust themselves. All these factors encouraged the formation of castes
based on petty distinctions.
6.5 Dominant Caste

The concept of ‘dominant caste’ was propounded by M.N. Srinivas. It was for the first time appeared
in his essay on the social system of a Mysore village. While constructing the concept, perhaps Srinivas
was unconsciously influenced by African studies on the dominant clan and dominant lineage. Srinivas
developed the concept in his study of Rampura village which is a little away from Mysore city in
Karnataka state. Srinivas, in fact, wanted to give a comprehensive study of Rampura. To write down
the details of the village he had gone to Stanford for writing down a monograph on Rampura. But
there “by a strange quirk of fate all the three copies of my fieldwork notes, processed over a period of
eighteen years” were destroyed when a fire took place in his Stanford office. Everything was destroyed
for Srinivas. Whatever he remembered about Rampura, later on came in the form of The Remembered
Village (1976).

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