Caste, gender and everyday hierarchy
Gender is a central carrier of caste: rules about marriage, work, touch and honour fall unevenly on women.
- Caste is not only a male status order: women’s labour, marriage rules and bodily codes carry purity–pollution ideas into the household.
- Endogamy, hypergamy and control of women’s sexuality are classic mechanisms that reproduce caste boundaries across generations.
- Leela Dube’s seed-and-earth imagery shows how kinship ideology naturalises unequal gender roles inside caste society.
- Occupational and ritual exclusions often hit Dalit women twice—as caste subordinates and as gendered labourers (manual scavenging, agricultural work, domestic service).
Examples
- Village studies repeatedly show that water, temple entry and seating at feasts are policed through women’s daily routines as much as through male councils.
Untouchability, pollution and related concepts
Untouchability is the sharp edge of caste hierarchy—pollution rules that segregate bodies, work and sacred space.
- Untouchability operationalises purity–pollution: avoidance of touch, food exchange, wells, temples and residential space.
- Attributional views emphasise inherited impurity; interactional views emphasise how ranking is performed in food, service and honour exchanges.
- Constitutional abolition (Art. 17) and the Protection of Civil Rights / SC-ST (Prevention of Atrocities) framework criminalise practice, but social enforcement can persist locally.
- Related concepts: hierarchy vs difference (Dipankar Gupta), graded inequality (Ambedkar), and Sanskritisation pressures that may shift style without dissolving exclusion.
Factionalism in rural politics
- Factions are rival leadership sets inside a village or caste cluster, organised around patrons, kin and short-term interests rather than a single ideology.
- Oscar Lewis (Rampur), David Pocock (Patidars) and S.C. Dube’s Madhya Pradesh village work show factions cutting across and within castes.
- Faction vs caste: caste is a durable status/identity frame; factions are competitive coalitions that may recruit across jatis when resources or elections demand it.
- Impact: mobilises votes and disputes over land/irrigation, but can fragment collective bargaining of poorer groups.
Examples
- Pre-Mandal dominant-caste brokers vs post-Mandal OBC assertion illustrate how reservation politics re-wires who leads factions.
Caste among non-Hindus
Caste-like stratification appears inside Muslim, Sikh and Christian communities even where theology stresses equality.
- Muslims: colonial census and later scholarship record ashraf/ajlaf/arzal-type stratifications; Sachar (2006) and Pasmanda politics highlight internal inequality.
- Sikhs: Khalsa egalitarianism coexists with historically recognised divisions (e.g. Jat, Mazhabi, Ravidasia patterns in regional practice).
- Christianity: indigenisation adapted liturgy and organisation to Indian contexts; caste-like distinctions can persist in marriage, burial and church seating in some regions.
- Teaching point: conversion may change religious label without automatically erasing ranked social practice.
Pair with syllabus short notes for clause-by-clause Paper coverage.