Caste in Itself, Caste and Class, or Caste in Class

Caste in Itself, Caste and Class, or Caste in Class

A fter the British conquered Bengal and eventually the whole of India, they set out to administer the colony. In this context they encountered two phenomena with which they were not familiar: (1) the relation of people to land for production (and not for revenue receiving, household living, etc.), and (2) the caste system of India, viz. the jati stratifi cation of society. Soon they realized th...

Class and Caste

But the conclusion that he arrives at is that the Marxian system is as much an idealistic system, an instrument of social reorganisation, as the Indian system of four varnas happened to be in the past. One may, of course, claim that Marx worked for 'human emancipation, while Mann worked for preserving the rights ami privileges of Brahmins. That is, however, an argument which can he modified and...

Caste versus Class: Social Mobility in India, 1860- 2012

Using surname distributions, we compare long run social mobility rates for elite and underclass groups in India 1860-2012, with those of other societies such as Sweden and the USA. It is not clear whether recent social mobility rates in India should be higher or lower than in the West. The caste system notoriously embedded privilege in elite castes. But since Independence a quota of places in h...

Caste, Class, and Social Change: An Institutionalist Perspective

Working-class royalty: bees beat the caste system.

The struggle among social classes or castes is well known in humans. Here, we show that caste inequality similarly affects societies of ants, bees and wasps, where castes are morphologically distinct and workers have greatly reduced reproductive potential compared with queens. In social insects, an individual normally has no control over its own fate, whether queen or worker, as this is sociall...