What, according to you, are the factors responsible for the continuance of caste system in India? Explain.

Ideology, ritual and everyday rank

Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus argued that caste is a system of status, organised around purity and pollution, in which the priest encompasses the king. That ideology is weaker in a factory canteen than in a wedding kitchen, but it has not disappeared. Temple entry disputes, separate eating, and the stigma of sanitation work show that untouchability remains a living practice, not only a colonial census category. Gopal Guru and field reports on manual scavenging show how occupation and pollution still stick to Dalit labour even when the law forbids it.

Ghurye’s features—segmental division, hierarchy, restrictions on feeding and marriage, civil and religious disabilities, and lack of free occupational choice—have loosened unevenly. Occupation opened more than marriage. That unevenness is itself a factor of continuance: people can work together and still refuse kinship.

Endogamy, kinship and the household

Ambedkar’s 1916 essay treated endogamy as the key that closed the caste as a corporation. Matrimonial advertisements, caste-filtered apps, gotra and biradari councils, and honour violence keep that closure. Irawati Karve mapped regional kinship; those maps still organise who may marry whom. Residential nuclearisation, as A. M. Shah and I. P. Desai noted, does not dissolve the joint property and ritual unit. A software engineer in Bengaluru may still need a caste match for a sister’s wedding. Kinship is therefore not a leftover. It is a daily factory of caste.

Economy, class and the village-city continuum

A. R. Desai read caste as ideology covering class. Land, tenancy and agricultural labour still follow jati lines in many regions. André Béteille’s Tanjore work showed that caste, class and power overlap but are not identical; the overlap is enough to reproduce rank. In cities, Nandini Gooptu and labour studies show caste in informal work, domestic service, and hiring networks. The mill has declined; the contract and gig worker often still enters through a caste-kin chain. Sanskritization (Srinivas) and dominant-caste politics keep groups investing in caste identity because it yields honour and votes, not only ritual purity.

State, law and democratic politics

The Constitution abolished untouchability and promised equality. Reservation, SC/ST law, and the Prevention of Atrocities Act also named caste as a public identity. Caste associations became interest groups (Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph: the modernity of tradition). Mandal politics, OBC lists, and sub-quotas made caste a language of rights. Dipankar Gupta noted that caste today is often a competition among blocks rather than a single ladder, yet competition still requires the block. The census debate, creamy-layer fights, and local panchayat seats reserved by caste all keep the category administratively alive.

• So continuance is over-determined: ideology, endogamy, labour markets, and the democratic state each give caste a job to do.