Page 96 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Unit 5: Forms of Social Stratification

Labour market, labour legislation, caste and class background of workers, class consciousness, Notes
working class movements and their leadership are some of the issues taken up in these studies of
the working class in India.

Self-Assessment
Fill in the blanks
1. In Bihar, the number of female illiterates rose by .............
2. Kerala had the highest female literacy rate of .............., while Bihar had the lowest literacy rate
of
3. The overall gender gap between male and female literacy rates fell from 24.85% in 1991 to
............. in 2001.
4. In 2001, female literacy has risen to .............
5. The middle classes in India are a product of both ............. development and the state.

5.3 Summary

• “The arrangement of persons in a society is enormously more complex than the arrangement
of layers of the earth; and social strata are not visible, to the naked eyes in the way that
geological strata are”.
• ‘Caste’ has come to be associated with a social science concept. The phenomenon which we
now call ‘caste’ was named by western observers of India at an early stage in the colonial
period. The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other
aspect of Indian life and thought. Some scholars see India’s caste system as the defining
feature of ’Indian culture’. Caste is such a complex phenomenon that it is difficult to define
and the definitions pose lot of problems.
• The system which the Brahmins perfected was founded on five main divisions, four caste
groups (Varna) and an out caste group (Pancham Varna), the untouchables. The four caste
groups were the Brahmis, the priestly class having religious authority, the Kshatriyas, the
secular and military ruler and landlord caste, the Vaishyas the mercantile middle class and
the Shudra - the servants and slaves class. The untouchables performed only the most
degrading and ritually impure/polluting tasks.
• Class, commonly known as social class, is one of the major forms of social stratification along
with estate and caste. In the course of the first three decades of the nineteenth century the
term class gradually replaced ‘estates’, ‘ranks’ and ‘orders’ as the major word used to denote
divisions within society.
• In simpler terms, a class is a category or group of persons having a definite status in society
which permanently determines the relation to other groups. The relative position of the class
in the social scale arises from the degree of prestige attached to it.
• The major theoretical tradition within class analysis is derived from the works of Karl Marx
and Max Weber on the newly emerging class structure of industrial capitalism in the
nineteenth century. Marx analysed class in relation to the ownership of capital and the
means of production. A class is formed by an aggregate of persons who play the same role
in the production mechanism. Marx divided the entire human population into those who
owned property or means of production and those who did not - the capitalist class and the
proletariat.
• In Weber’s analysis all people with similar economic interests and with similar economic
power belonged to the same class. By economic factor, Weber meant not simply the relations
of production but also the relations that develop in the market. Weber divided the population

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