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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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