(a) What, according to you, are the factors responsible for the continuance of caste system in India? Explain. (10 marks) (b)…

(a) Factors behind the Continuance of Caste

• Endogamy: Ambedkar ("Castes in India", 1916) saw endogamy as the essence of caste. Most marriages are still within caste; the India Human Development Survey (2011–12) found only about 5% inter-caste marriages. Matrimonial columns and apps keep this going.

Economic factors:

• landownership remains concentrated among dominant castes (Srinivas), while Dalits are over-represented among landless labourers;
• caste networks supply jobs, credit and business contacts, and Barbara Harriss-White shows caste regulating the informal economy.

Political factors:

• democracy politicised caste rather than ending it (Rajni Kothari, Caste in Indian Politics, 1970);
• caste associations, vote banks and "ethnic head-counting" (Kanchan Chandra);
• reservations and demands for sub-classification and caste enumeration keep categories alive; the Union Government decided in 2025 to enumerate caste in the next Census.
• Ritual and cultural factors: ideas of purity and pollution (Dumont), socialisation within family and community, and caste-based religious sects and festivals.
• Adaptation to modernity: caste shifts from hierarchy to identity and difference (Dumont's "substantialisation"; Dipankar Gupta), and persists in housing segregation, surnames, "merit" talk and online networks.
• Enforcement by violence: "honour" crimes and atrocities punish those who cross boundaries.
• Conclusion: caste continues because it is useful to people as network, identity and political resource, and because endogamy and property keep reproducing it.

(b) Changes in the Industrial Class Structure

• Industrial capitalists: alongside old family business houses, liberalisation after 1991 brought new entrepreneurs, multinationals and start-up founders. Wealth has become more concentrated at the top.
• Managerial and professional middle class: a growing "new middle class" of managers, engineers and IT professionals (Leela Fernandes, India's New Middle Class, 2006), linked to services and global capital.

Working class:

• Informalisation: over 90% of workers are informal. Even in organised manufacturing, contract workers now make up nearly 40% of workers (Annual Survey of Industries);
• Jan Breman's "footloose labour": migrant, casual workers moving between sites without security;
• Decline of the permanent, unionised worker and of trade union strength; conflicts such as the Maruti Manesar dispute (2012) show tension between permanent and contract workers;
• Gig and platform workers: formally "partners", outside the employment relationship;
• Feminisation in garments, electronics assembly and care work, often at low wages;
• the four Labour Codes (in force from 21 November 2025) make hiring and contract work more flexible while extending some social security.
• Caste–class overlap: upper castes dominate professional and managerial jobs, and Dalits and Adivasis are concentrated in the most insecure work; Ajantha Subramanian (The Caste of Merit, 2019) shows how "merit" hides caste advantage.
• Conclusion: the industrial class structure is becoming more polarised and fragmented, with a shrinking core of protected workers and a large insecure periphery.

(c) Patriarchy and Inequalities

• Patriarchy: a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women (Sylvia Walby, 1990), operating through the household, paid work, the state, violence, sexuality and culture.

Why it is a key:

• Gender inequality itself: India's female labour force participation was about 42% in PLFS 2023–24, much of it unpaid family work; there are gaps in wages, property, health and political representation;
• Caste: Uma Chakravarti's "Brahmanical patriarchy" (1993) shows that caste purity depends on controlling women's sexuality through endogamy, and Ambedkar linked child marriage, enforced widowhood and sati to maintaining endogamy;
• Class and property: patrilineal inheritance keeps land in male hands, despite the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 giving daughters equal coparcenary rights;
• Demography: son preference and a skewed sex ratio at birth;
• Violence: dowry deaths, domestic violence and "honour" crimes;
• Everyday bargains: Deniz Kandiyoti's "patriarchal bargain" (1988) explains why women sometimes uphold the system for security.

Limits:

• Intersectionality: a Dalit woman's disadvantage cannot be understood through gender alone; caste and class shape which women suffer what (Crenshaw; Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint, 1998);
• some inequalities, such as landlessness or regional backwardness, affect men and women together;
• variation: matrilineal Khasi and Garo communities and the historical Nayar taravad show different arrangements;
• patriarchy also constrains men through norms of masculinity and breadwinning.
• Conclusion: patriarchy is a key, but not the only key. It is best seen as intertwined with caste, class and region, which together produce Indian inequality.

(d) Kinship Change and Family Bonds

• Kinship patterns in India: Irawati Karve (Kinship Organisation in India, 1953) contrasted the North, with village exogamy and marriage outside close kin, and the South, with cross-cousin and uncle–niece marriage that keeps daughters within the kin circle.

Changes in kinship:

• Nuclear households, but functional jointness: A.M. Shah and I.P. Desai show that kin continue to share resources, rituals and support across households;
• Smaller kin networks: falling fertility means fewer siblings, cousins and aunts or uncles;
• Bilateral turn: closer ties with the wife's natal family and married daughters, who increasingly support ageing parents;
• Marriage changes: more self-chosen and some inter-caste marriages, later marriage, a decline of close-kin marriage in the South, and recognition of live-in relationships by the courts;
• Migration and transnational families: kin ties kept through phones and video calls;
• Law: daughters' equal inheritance rights (2005) change relations between brothers and sisters.

Effect on family bonds:

• Weakened: elderly care is strained when children migrate (the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India, 2017–18, documents this), and wider kin obligations are thinner;
• Strengthened or reshaped: conjugal and parent–child bonds become more emotional and companionate (Patricia Uberoi), and support becomes more selective and negotiated;
• New tensions: property disputes, intergenerational conflict over marriage choice, and the double burden on working women.
• Conclusion: family bonds are being reorganised, not dissolved, from obligations fixed by kinship rules towards chosen, emotional and negotiated ties.

(e) Persistence of Bonded Labour

• Bonded labour: labour extracted to repay a debt or advance, with the worker unable to leave or bargain. Jan Breman calls modern forms "neo-bondage": less permanent and less hereditary, but still unfree.

Legal efforts:

• Article 23 prohibits forced labour;
• the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 abolished it;
• the Supreme Court in PUDR v. Union of India (1982) held that paying below the minimum wage is forced labour, and in Bandhua Mukti Morcha (1984) directed identification and release;
• the Central Sector Scheme for Rehabilitation of Bonded Labourers (revamped in 2016) provides cash and rehabilitation;
• offences are now punishable under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (unlawful compulsory labour, Section 146; trafficking, Section 143, replacing IPC Sections 374 and 370).

Why it continues:

• Economic: poverty, landlessness, lack of institutional credit and distress migration push families to take advances (peshgi) from employers or contractors;
• Sectors: brick kilns, stone quarries, agriculture, construction, carpet-weaving, and domestic and sex work;
• Social: most bonded labourers are Dalits and Adivasis, whose caste position and lack of social power make escape hard; women and children are drawn in as family units;
• Intermediaries: contractors (thekedars, jamadars) recruit across states, so workers are far from home, unaware of rights and without local support;
• Administrative: under-identification (officials deny its existence), few prosecutions, delays in release certificates and rehabilitation;
• Scale: the Walk Free Foundation's Global Slavery Index (2023) estimated about 11 million people in modern slavery in India.
• Conclusion: bonded labour persists because it is rooted in caste, debt and informal labour markets. Ending it needs enforcement, together with credit, land, social security and the organisation of migrant workers.