Revision summary
Modernisation theory presupposed achievement and class in place of ascription. Marx’s class remains real; it does not erase caste, ethnicity, and race. Srinivas, Weber, Barth, and Du Bois explain persistent closures. These ranks organise marriage, votes, and labour inside markets. Predominance is empirical gating, not the death of class.
Model answer
Introduction
Modernisation theory expected industrial growth to replace ascriptive ranks with class in a market. Karl Marx made class the motor of capitalist society. Yet caste, ethnicity, and race still organise marriage, votes, and work. The presupposition was a hope, not a completed history.
Body
The presupposition
- Marx treated capitalist modernity as polarising owners and workers. Status leftovers would thin.
- Talcott Parsons and later modernisation writers expected achievement, universalism, and a class society of occupations.
- Max Weber already warned that status groups and ethnic honour can close the market.
Why caste persists
- M. N. Srinivas showed Sanskritisation and vote banks, not a simple melt.
- Endogamy, ritual rank, and discrimination in hiring keep caste as a property of the modern economy, as later census-blind markets still show in NSSO work gaps.
- Louis Dumont overstated holism, but he was right that rank did not vanish at the factory gate.
Ethnicity and race
- Fredrik Barth treated ethnicity as boundary, not as leftover culture. Urban labour markets reproduce those boundaries.
- W. E. B. Du Bois and later racialisation theory show race as a modern classifier of labour, not a pre-modern residue.
- Immanuel Wallerstein placed race and ethnicity inside the world-system’s labour hierarchy.
Predominance without the end of class
- Class still structures land, capital, and informal wage. Caste and race organise who enters which class slot.
- Yogendra Singh’s modernisation of Indian tradition is a mix, not a replacement.
- Political ethnicity and communal mobilisation use modern media and the census category itself.
Explanation
- Modernisation needs a class map to think the market. It does not dissolve ascription.
- Predominance means these identities still gate life-chances, as NFHS and education gaps show.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD MOD[Modernisation script] --> CLASS[Class society] REAL[Actual modernity] --> CLASS REAL --> CAST[Caste] REAL --> ETH[Ethnicity] REAL --> RACE[Race] CAST --> GATE[Gate life-chances]
Conclusion
Class society was the modernisation script. Weber, Srinivas, Du Bois, and Barth explain why caste, ethnicity, and race remain predominant as closures inside capitalism. Marx’s class is not cancelled; it is cross-cut. The factory did not finish the work of the varna or the colour line.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Why is gender dimension of social stratification ? How does gender intersect other dimensions of inequality based on caste, class, race and ethnicity ?
Next question on this syllabus topic (2019 · Q6(a)). View answer →
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Did Marx ignore caste?
He centred class in Europe. Indian modernity shows class working through caste.
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Is predominance the same as unchanging tradition?
No. These identities are reorganised by parties, jobs, and the census.
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