What’s Changed (and What Hasn’t) in India’s Caste System?

Anyone browsing through the matrimonial announcement sections of the weekend editions of Indian newspapers may notice a certain discrepancy. Hardly any announcement appears in the “caste no bar” section, a statement signaling that the parents do not care about the caste of the potential groom, or bride, for their child. But that it is not the main discrepancy. What is striking is that while most of the announcements are grouped by caste – thus serving as a declaration that grooms or brides are only accepted from the same community – the education and profession of those advertised, yet-unmarried children may have nothing to do with caste.

Parents of a son from an Agarwal caste – traditionally, merchants of sweets – may be advertising their child as an Indian Institute of Technology graduate, currently working for a major IT company. Parents of a son from the community of Brahmans – traditionally, priests – may declare that he has a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree, and is employed, say, in a hospital in the United States.

In short: castes are still important as communities, but within them, professions are no longer necessarily inherited. Parents still seek to arrange a union for their children within the same caste from which they come – it is still a community, therefore, though no longer one defined by profession.

Most marriages in India are still arranged. According to a 2018 study conducted on 180,000 households in India by Oxford University and the Lok Foundation, 93 percent of the respondents had their marriage arranged. One of the main reasons to arrange a marriage is to make sure that a child weds someone from the same community. And thus, nearly always, an arranged marriage means a marriage within the same caste. At the same time, there is little evidence that 93 percent of Indians have inherited their job from their parents – such a ratio stands as extremely unlikely in the permanently fluctuating capitalist job market.

The elaborate rules of Indian castes cannot be covered in such a short text, but in Hindi they are often summed up as the roti-beti ka rishta: the bond (rishta) of the bread (roti) and the daughter (beti). In academic terms, the complex social interactions within the caste system are marked by the rules of marriage and of ritual purity, one of the aspects of which is dining together. Or, put another way: the hierarchy and the divisions of the caste system are defined by whom you can marry and whom you can eat with, not necessarily by what you do. But castes themselves have long been defined by profession.

There is, of course, the question of sources selected for the above example: the matrimonial sections. A Sunday column in a newspaper mostly sold in the cities, and often printed in English, is addressed at middle to high classes (and thus, very often, at middle to high castes, though there is not complete overlap between the two). In the Indian villages, differences between the jobs of the parents and those of the children may appear less often. Still, even here, they would be very common.

It is not only about the gradually crumbling orthodox social order but, perhaps even more, about shifting economic opportunities. For some, those have multiplied, offering opportunities outside their caste. For many, those have dwindled, forcing them to look for other jobs. As summarized by David Mosse in 2018:

[I]n recent decades, land and agriculture have weakened as a basis of caste power; and across India, upper-caste village elites are found withdrawing from the village economy and politics, their dominance replaced by fragmented centers of power or diffuse brokerage networks mediating access to scarce but necessary credit, state schemes, markets, or jobs… Alongside a relative decline in agriculture, the post-1991 liberalization period saw an explosion of diverse non-farm employment in rural areas.

According to Action Aid Association India estimates published in 2011, a half of Indian rural families do not own any land. Millions of such people may be simply forced to seek any job, often a temporary one; such gigs may have nothing to do with their traditional occupation. Moreover, as per the same estimates, 7 percent of rural Indian families owned 47 percent of land. This means that even among those who are formally farmers, and who may be farmers by caste, it may be not possible to live off their agricultural land, or live off it alone. The millions of Indian manual laborers may often not be “laborers by caste,” whatever that would mean – they are simply poor people looking for opportunities, whatever their caste may be.

This marks a sea change in Indian social history. As far as the previous centuries are concerned, the caste system has been rightly described as one that divides labor within societies. Two rules were essential. First, communities were allotted occupations by those in power. Second, within communities, children were to inherit the jobs of their parents (often the sons taking the jobs of their fathers, as many women were not permitted to work). This was the cornerstone of the social and economic order – and, yes, of the exploitation of the lowest communities, who were forced to fulfill duties that no one else wanted.

Ambedkar, India’s famed crusader against caste discrimination, once wrote that “the caste system is not merely a division of labor. It is also a division of laborers.” Now, however, it is primarily a social division of communities that had once been divided, and defined, by labor.

This system had not been set in stone even prior to the 20th century; it was always changing. The social processes that led to the current state spun across centuries and millennia. An Indian farmer who abandons his village in the 21st century, due to poverty, and becomes a bus driver in a city, eventually finds a job that does not belong to a caste: there is no caste of bus drivers. He will likely marry a woman from his original community, through a union arranged by his parents, however. But there are plenty of such instances before the 20th century.

There is no such caste for professional soldiers, even though professional armies had existed in India since at least the 18th century. While there had been a traditional class of warriors, the kshatriyas, it is uncertain if they were the only ones who did the fighting. If so, that could have been true only in ancient times. In the early modern period, for instance, there are myriad examples of professional soldiers being recruited from a vast number of communities, from peasants to priests. Not unlike what we see now, such people, whatever their origins, may have been simply joining the army in search of better pay – or of any job.

On the other hand, it does seem that the process of separation between jobs and castes is taking place more quickly in urban areas than in rural areas. Studies such as the one conducted by Iversen, Krishna, and Sen (2016) have shown that that the persistence of jobs across generations is strongest among the tribes and the Dalits, i.e. the untouchables. In other words: the link between one’s community and one’s job is deepest among the most backward communities. These are the same ones that had often been forced, for centuries, to do what they do. It is likely that, despite such discrimination being illegal in today’s India, such communities are still under pressure from local, ruler orthodox communities to pursue traditional jobs. An even more likely and widespread factor causing this is the fact that due to their deep backwardness, including in terms of education, the representatives of such communities are unable to find other jobs.

This is a grim irony. Those who most need to be freed from inheriting the profession of their parents are often those who are still forced to retain it. Social work conducted by Bindeshwar Pathak showed that the practice of manual scavenging, while greatly reduced, still persists in some pockets of rural India. There are still people in India, the Dalits of the lowest castes, who are forced to manually clean the latrines of other communities. According to the estimates of one movement of these workers, the Safai Karmachari Andolan, as of 2021, there were still over 700,000 such laborers in India.

However, outside the lowest levels of Indian society, the broader picture is that while there has largely been a divorce between caste and profession, castes as such remain strong – and are retained through arranged marriages.