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Unit 5: Forms of Social Stratification

celibacy and renunciation of worldly pleasures in middle age. However, a caste based stratification Notes
system in which public adherence to these symbols and rituals confers high status on a caste may
create tremendous social pressures on women to confirm (Liddle and Joshi 1989) and for men to
ensure compliance from their wives (Derne 1994). As Srinivas’s discussion of Sanskritization
suggests, restrictions on women’s sexuality, particularly injunction against remarriage of widows,
confers higher status on a caste than lower castes where women may marry and divorce far more
freely (Srinivas, 1977). Over time many of these ideals have so deep rooted that even, Mahatma
Gandhi, one of the most feminist men who encouraged Indian women’s participation in politics,
once said that a woman should kill herself if she is in danger of being raped to preserve her
honour.
There is considerable agreement in the literature about the association between performance of
gender roles and higher caste status and the way in which hierarchies of caste are articulated
through gender (Dube 1996). However, there is also considerable disagreement about whether
caste in modern India retains the same significance as it did during the colonial times. There are
many reasons to believe that the impact of caste may be substantially diluted in modern India.
Urbanization, rising education and increasing Westernization are each hypothesized to lead to
decreased importance of caste (Collins 1989, Gupta 1991). Emergence of anti-Brahmin political
movement and the power of lower caste political parties may result in a decline in the emphasis
on Brahminical modes of behaviour (Srinivas 1996).
India has seen a thriving women’s movement over the past thirty years and middle class women
from higher castes have been at the forefront of this movement (Dube 2001), potentially reducing
the association between visible performance of gender and upper caste status. Most importantly,
new scholarship on social construction of caste during the colonial era suggests that caste
differentiation and hierarchies during the time of colonial administration in the two centuries
preceding the independence in 1947, may well have been created by the colonial discourse and
real caste differences in the Indian society may be fairly small (Dirks, 2001). So whether the
Brahminical emphasis on gender-performance still persists in modern India remains an open
question which this paper seeks to address. Although a portion of our theoretical framework
draws on ethnomethodological studies, we rely on quantitative research for this analysis in order
to ensure that our results are not conflated with geographic bias. We use data from a survey of
40,000 households that we designed and fielded in all 25 states and union territories of India. The
sample includes both urban and rural households. For this analysis, we restrict our sample to
32,362 ever married women of age 15-49.
Gender inequality in food intake, medical care, income, access to employment and education, and
control over productive resources is well recognized in the literature (Desai, 1994). Consequently
empirical research on gender-performance faces a formidable methodological challenge. How do
we distinguish between behaviours that occur in response to a desire to visibly perform gender
and thereby differentiate one’s family and caste from those below one in the hierarchy from
behaviours that are rooted in economic and institutional choices facing families in a highly unequal
society. For example, when parents choose to educate a son while withdrawing a daughter from
school are they doing it because they want to signal their adherence to a particular code of
conduct befitting their family and caste or is it simply a rational response to a labour market in
which women earn far less than men ?
In order to address this question, we rely on specific markers of behaviour that mainly serve a
signaling function and have far less important to issues of intra-household resource allocation. In
particular we focus on two sets of behaviours : (1) Signaling behaviour which is externally visible
and demonstrates to others that men and women in a household subscribe to certain codes of
conduct; and, (2) Hidden behaviours which reflect construction of day-to-day gender within a
household but are not easily visible to outsiders. We argue that if caste superiority is demonstrated

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