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Unit 6 : Caste


            •   The members of a caste have to marry in their own caste and sub-caste. Endogamy has, thus,  Notes
                been permanently enforced within caste groups.
            •   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.
            •   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.
            •   In India, both caste and class are used as basis of hierarchical ranking and exist side by side.
                However, caste, which is rooted in religious belief, is considered a more important basis of
                social stratification for social, economic, and religious purposes. ‘Caste’ is a hereditary social
                group which does not permit social mobility to its members. It involves ranking according to
                birth which affects one’s occupation, marriage, and social relationships.
            •   Caste is used both as a unit and as a system. As a unit, caste is defined as ‘a closed-rank
                status group’, i.e., a group in which the status of members, their occupations, the field of
                mate-selection, and interaction with others is fixed. As a system, it refers to collectivity of
                restrictions, namely, restrictions on change of membership, occupation, marriage, and
                commensal and social relations. In this context, there is a presupposition that no caste can
                exist in isolation and that each caste is closely involved with other castes in the network of
                economic, political, and ritual relationships.
            •   The structure of the caste system is such that it has an organised pattern of interrelated rights
                and obligations of members of each caste and individual castes as groups, in terms of statuses,
                roles and social norms.
            •   D’Souza (1969 : 72) has referred to the definition of caste system as “the integration of the
                interacting and heterogeneous but internally homogeneous hereditary groups into a structure
                of status hierarchy”. This concept not only describes the caste system as a superior or
                subordinate relationship among hereditary groups in a society, but also explains the conditions
                under which such a relationship takes place.
            •   As a segmental reality, each caste or a sub-caste tends to articulate mutual repulsion, social
                distance and social inequality, but as an organic system, the caste segments are mutually
                interlinked by a principle of reciprocity through the jajmani system. Bailey (1960) has referred
                to caste stratification as a ‘closed organic stratification’ in contradistinction with the class
                principle which is based on ‘segmentary stratification’. In the former, the social segments
                (castes or sub-castes) interact through cooperation and in the latter through competition.
            •   The  indological perspective  takes its cue from the scriptures about the origin, purpose and
                future of the caste system. Those who have used this perspective maintain that varnas have
                originated from Brahma’s body and castes or jatis are fissioned units within the varna system,
                developed as the result of hypergamy and hypogamy practices. Though the customs and the
                rituals, etc., to be followed by different castes are prescribed in the Smrits written in about
                200-100 B.C. but the regional, linguistic, ethnic, and sectarian variations have gradually




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