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Unit 6 : Caste

military, etc. Under certain circumstances, some members in a caste were permitted to change Notes
their occupations. Similarly, different sub-castes of the same caste are found engaged in
different occupations. For example, four sub-castes of a Khatik caste (a caste of butchers) in
Uttar Pradesh are engaged in different occupations of butchery (bekanwala), masonry (rajgar),
rope-making (sombatta) and selling of fruits (mewa farosh). Similarly, Teli caste in Bengal has
two divisions—Till and Teli—the former engaged in pressing oil and the latter in selling oil
since the pressing of oil-seeds is stigmatized as a degrading occupation because it destroys
life by crushing the seeds. Tilis are treated as untouchable but not the Telis. Telis will outcaste
a member who should venture to press it. The change of occupation did not necessarily
involve the change of caste unless it involved the change of status. According to Blunt (1911
: 13), when such a change of status occurs, it will take one of the three forms : (i) segregation
into a new caste, or (ii) affiliation of the new group to another already existing caste, or (iii)
the creation of a new endogamous sub-caste within the original caste.
Though generally the occupational restrictions imposed by caste have a religious motive but
sometimes they may have a purely economic purpose also. For example, O’Malley (Indian
Caste Customs, 1932 : 134-135) refers to Sonars (goldsmiths) of one district in Madhya Pradesh
who have a feast at which the caste men take oath that they will not reveal the amount of
alloy decided to be mixed with gold by the Sonars on pain of being outcasted.
After the industrialization of the country, particularly after the two World Wars, a significant
change has come to be observed in this characteristic of the traditional occupation of caste.
Restriction on change of occupation has been weakened and occupational mobility has become
feasible.
(d) Caste Councils
Each caste has a council of its own, known as caste panchayat. This panchayat exercised
tremendous power over its members till recently. Today, though some caste panchayats are
found to have branches all over India because of the development of the postal system and
rapid communications of various kinds but till few decades back, these panchayats acted
only for a limited area, an area small enough for the members of the council to assemble and
for members of the caste within the area to have some knowledge of each other as a general
rule. Local conditions, such as ease of communication, etc., determine the area within which
the caste council functions. Thus, since the ideal of a council for the whole caste or even a
sub-caste is impossible to attain, the members of a caste or a sub-caste usually form a nearly
related group called biradri (association of kinsmen) which constitutes an exogamous unit
within the endogamous sub-caste or caste. This group acts for the caste or the sub-caste as a
whole in enforcing sanctions on the members within their sphere of action. Some of the
offences dealt with by these panchayats till recently were : eating and drinking with other
castes and sub-castes with whom such intercourse was forbidden, keeping as con-cubine a
woman of other caste, adultery with a married woman, refusal to fulfil a promise of marriage,
non-payment of debt, petty assaults, breaches of customs, and so on. The mode of punishment
usually adopted was outcasting, fine, feast to caste men, corporal punishment, etc. (Ghurye,
1961 : 4). All the members of the caste were obliged to accept the verdict of their panchayat.
Even in the British period, these panchayats were so powerful that they could re-try cases
which were once decided by the civil and the criminal courts. In a way, thus, a caste panchayat
was a semi-sovereign body.
The officials of the panchayat who perform executive and judicial functions may either be
nominated or elected or may be hereditary some may be elected while others may be
hereditary. Blunt (1911 : 104), Sleeman O’Malley (1932 : 52), and Hutton (1961 : 100) point
out that lower the caste in the social scale, stronger its combination and the more efficient its
organization. The procedure observed for trial is extremely simple, informal and untrammelled
by the law of evidence.

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