The caste-class association in India: An empirical analysis

Asian Survey

Volumn 52, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 395-422

  Vaid, Divya ^a  

^a CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF DEVELOPING SOCIETIES   (India)

Author keywords

Caste; Change; Class; India; Social mobility

Indexed keywords

CASTE SYSTEM; CLASS; EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS; MOBILITY; SOCIAL CHANGE;

INDIA;

EID: 84860780249     PISSN: 00044687     EISSN: 1533838X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/as.2012.52.2.395     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. For a general discussion, see Satish Deshpande, Contemporary India: A Sociological View (Delhi: Viking, 2003), especially ch. 5.
2. Andre Béteille, "Classes and Communities", Economic and Political Weekly 42:11(March 2007), pp. 945-52. Béteille has stressed the need to maintain "as consistently as possible" the distinction between class and status.
3. See Andre Béteille, "The Mismatch between Class and Status", British Journal of Sociology 47:3(September 1996), pp. 513-25, esp. p. 513.
4. For a discussion, see Divya Vaid, "Class Mobility of Women and Men in India", unpublished Ph. D. diss., Oxford University, 2007.
5. Some exceptions include Sanjay Kumar, Anthony Heath, and Oliver Heath, "Determinants of Social Mobility in India", Economic and Political Weekly 37:29(July 2002), pp. 2983-87;
6. Divya Vaid and Anthony Heath, "Unequal Opportunities: Class, Caste, and Social Mobility", in Diversity and Change in Contemporary India, eds. Anthony Heath and Roger Jeffery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 129-64;
7. Alistair McMillan, Standing at the Margins: Representation and Electoral Reservation in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
8. Rajeshwari Deshpande and Suhas Palshikar provide a study of Pune city in "Occupational Mobility: How Much Does Caste Matter?" Economic and Political Weekly 43:34(August 2008), pp. 61-70.
9. Also see S. Deshpande, Contemporary India, especially ch. 5.
10. see Andre Béteille, "Caste, Inequalities, and Affirmative Action", International Institute for Labour Studies (Geneva), 2002.
11. Pauline Kolenda, "Caste in India since Independence", in Caste, Marriage, and Inequality: Essays on North and South India, ed. Pauline Kolenda (Delhi: Rawat Publications, 2003), pp. 390-412.
12. See also, S. Deshpande, Contemporary India, especially ch. 5;
13. and Satish Deshpande, "Mapping a Distinctive Modernity: 'Modernization' as a Theme in Indian Sociology", Institute of Economic Growth: Occasional Papers in Sociology 1 (November 1999).
14. see Donald J. Treiman, "Industrialization and Social Stratification", in Social Stratification: Research and Theory for the 1970s, ed. Edward O. Laumann (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 207-34;
15. Harry B. G. Ganzeboom, Ruud Luijkx, and Donald J. Treiman, "Intergenerational Class Mobility in a Comparative Perspective", Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 8(1989), pp. 3-79;
16. Robert Erikson and John Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
17. Furthermore, Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities", analyze the relevance and application of this thesis to the Indian case.
18. See also, K. L. Sharma, "Introduction: Some Reflections on Caste and Class in India", in Caste and Class in India, ed. K. L. Sharma (New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 1998), pp. 1-17.
19. see Noel P. Gist, "Caste Differentials in South India", American Sociological Review 19:2(April 1954), pp. 126-37;
20. G. K. Karanth, "Caste in Contemporary Rural India", in Caste-Its Twentieth Century Avatar, ed. M. N. Srinivas (New Delhi: Penguin, 1996), pp. 87-109;
21. N. Jayaram, "Caste and Hinduism: Changing Protean Relationship", in Caste-Its Twentieth Century Avatar, pp. 69-86;
22. M. N. Panini, "The Political Economy of Caste", in Caste-Its Twentieth Century Avatar, pp. 28-68;
23. and Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities."
24. Yogendra Yadav, "Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s", in Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, eds. Francine R. Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeeva Bhargava, and Balveer Arora (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 120-45.
25. Palshikar and Kumar observe the more privileged backgrounds of the "active participants" in politics in Suhas Palshikar and Sanjay Kumar, "Participatory Norm: How Broad-Based Is It?" Economic and Political Weekly 39:51(December 18-24, 2004), pp. 5412-417. (Pubitemid 40133281)
26. Among others, some examples of these studies are Béteille, "Classes and Communities";
27. K. L. Sharma, "On Understanding Caste and Class", in Structure and Transformation: Theory and Society in India, ed. Susan Vishwanathan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 58-70;
28. and various chapters in Sharma, ed., Caste and Class in India.
29. Gist, "Caste Differentials", provides a summary of caste and other dimensions such as caste and marriage and caste and occupations in South India.
30. Andre Béteille, Caste, Class, and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). However, these characteristics need not have a universal meaning for all castes, or indeed, in all parts of the country
31. (see, for example, Elisabetta Basile and Barbara Harriss-White, "Corporative Capitalism: Civil Society and the Politics of Accumulation in Small Town India", Queen Elizabeth House (Oxford), Working Paper, no. 38 (2000). By necessity, the current paper presents a sketchy view of caste. For more on caste and other religions
32. see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), ch. 10.
33. Also see, Vibha Pingle, "Caste", in Understanding Contemporary India, ed. Sumit Ganguly and Neil De Votta (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), pp. 231-54;
34. and a collection of articles in Srinivas, Caste-Its Twentieth Century Avatar.
35. See M. N. Srinivas, "An Obituary on Caste as a System", Economic and Political Weekly 38:5(February 2003), pp. 455-59, esp. p. 456.
36. See Vaid, "Class Mobility", for a discussion on this.
37. Béteille, "Classes and Communities", p. 945.
38. James Silverberg et al., eds., Social Mobility in the Caste System in India: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Supplement 3 (The Hague; Paris: Mouton, 1968).
39. Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), p. 31.
40. Panini, "Political Economy of Caste", p. 60.
41. See Srinivas, "An Obituary on Caste", p. 457.
42. Basile and Harriss-White, "Corporative Capitalism", p. 41.
43. Vaid, "Class Mobility."
44. Jayaram, "Caste and Hinduism", p. 82.
45. Sanjay Kumar, Anthony Heath, and Oliver Heath, "Changing Patterns of Social Mobility", Economic and Political Weekly 37:40(October 2002), pp. 4091-96.
46. See also Kumar et al., "Determinants of Social Mobility."
47. Karanth, "Caste in Contemporary Rural India", pp. 89, 91.
48. See also Panini, "Political Economy of Caste", for examples of continuing association between caste and occupation.
49. Leela Dube, "Caste and Women", in Srinivas, ed., Caste-Its 20th Century Avatar, pp. 1-27.
50. See Karanth, "Caste in Contemporary Rural India."
51. Panini, "Political Economy of Caste";
52. and Srinivas, "An Obituary on Caste."
53. Karanth, "Caste in Contemporary Rural India."
54. Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities";
55. see also Kumar et al., "Determinants of Social Mobility."
56. Basile and Harriss-White, "Corporative Capitalism."
57. See the special issue of the Economic and Political Weekly 39:51 (December 2004)
58. for details on the collection and use of this data. The data used in this paper are un-weighted. Social mobility studies that have used NES data include N. K. Nijhawan, "Inter-Generational Occupational Mobility", Economic and Political Weekly 4:39(September 1969), pp. 1553-557;
59. Kumar et al., "Determinants of Social Mobility"; idem, "Changing Patterns";
60. McMillan, Standing at the Margins;
61. Vaid, "Class Mobility";
62. Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities." The last two of these sources use the NES 2004 data.
63. (see, for example, Dube, "Caste and Women").
64. Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
65. See Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities";
66. and Vaid, "Class Mobility, "
67. for discussions on this schema. Kumar et al., "Determinants of Social Mobility", use a similar schema but disaggregate eight big classes. The placement of an occupation in a particular class has been determined theoretically and tested empirically using tests of predictive validity;
68. see Vaid, "Class Mobility", for more details.
69. Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities", p. 160;
70. for a broader discussion on class, see John Goldthorpe, Catriona Llewellyn, and Clive Payne, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980);
71. Erikson and Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux. 55. In the class schema, Classes I through IV are Indian government classifications for public sector employees.
72. see Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities", p. 142, for a discussion. Their paper also discusses the changes in the distribution of social class over two generations.
73. Kumar et al., "Determinants of Social Mobility", p. 2985.
74. Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities", p. 140.
75. For model specification, see Alan Agresti and Barbara Finlay, Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1997). For why adjusted residuals are preferred to standardized residuals
76. see Shelby J. Haberman, "The Analysis of Residuals in Cross-Classified Data", Biometrics 29:1(March 1973), pp. 205-20.
77. We use models generally applied to social mobility studies (e.g., Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities") but adapt these to suit the questions at hand. We derive our models from those used by Erikson and Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux;
78. 3and also Richard Breen, Social Mobility in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
79. Kumar et al., "Changing Patterns", use the constant association model in their paper.
80. From Erikson and Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux, fn. 24; the unidiff model is also called a log-multiplicative layer effect model. For model specification
81. see Yu Xie, "The Log-Multiplicative Layer Effect Model for Comparing Mobility Tables", American Sociological Review 57:31(June 1992), pp. 380-95.
82. Heather Turner and David Firth, "Generalized Nonlinear Models in R: An Overview of the GNM Package (for GNM Version 0.10-0, 2009)", p. 34, available online at , accessed October 20, 2009.
83. See also Breen, Social Mobility, p. 24.
84. Erikson and Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux, p. 89;
85. Breen, Social Mobility, p. 24.
86. We use Jeroen Vermunt's statistical program Lem to fit the log-linear and the unidiff models (available online at ).
87. Anthony Heath, Social Mobility (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1981), p. 81.
88. Erikson and Goldthorpe, Thhe Constant Flux, describe the term "quasi-cohort."
89. Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities", p. 162;
90. Heath, Social Mobility.
91. For a discussion, see Richard Breen and Jana Jonsson, "How Reliable Are Studies of Social Mobility? An Investigation into Consequences of Unreliability in Measures of Social Class", Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 15(June 1997), pp. 91-112.
92. For other applications of this method, see Erikson and Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux;
93. and Anthony Heath and Clive Payne, "Social Mobility", in Twentieth Century British Social Trends, eds. A. H. Halsey and Josephine Webb (Basingstoke, U. K.: Mcmillan, 2000), pp. 254-78.
94. Erikson and Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux, p. 71.
95. This is as expected; see Kumar et al., "Changing Patterns."
96. Vaid and Heath, "Unequal Opportunities";
97. see also Kumar et al., "Determinants of Social Mobility", who use a similar model with the NES data from 1996.
98. Kumar et al., "Changing Patterns", p. 4096.
99. Jonathan Parry, "Ghosts, Greed, and Sin: The Occupational Identity of the Benares Funeral Priests", Man 15:1(March 1980), pp. 88-111.
100. See also Basile and Harriss-White, "Corporative Capitalism";
101. the role of the "family" has been mentioned by Andre Béteille, "The Family and the Reproduction of Inequality", in Family, Kinship, and Marriage in India, ed. Patricia Uberoi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).