Caste: Structure, Theory, and Contestation

Caste (jati and varna) has been among the most theorized social institutions in Indian anthropology, generating competing frameworks about its nature, origin, and persistence. Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus (1966) proposed a structuralist analysis centred on the opposition between purity and pollution as the organizing ideological principle of caste, arguing that hierarchy, not power or economics, was the fundamental value structuring Indian society, with the Brahmin-dominated ritual order encompassing and relativizing secular political and economic power (the king or Kshatriya).

This influential but heavily criticized framework was challenged on multiple grounds. B.R. Ambedkar, writing decades earlier from lived experience and rigorous historical-sociological analysis, had already argued in Annihilation of Caste and other works that caste was fundamentally a system of graded inequality maintained through endogamy and enforced by Brahminical religious sanction, and that its abolition required annihilating the sacred textual authority (the Shastras) that legitimized it, not merely reforming its excesses — a materially and politically grounded critique sharply at odds with Dumont's more purely ideological/structuralist reading.

M.N. Srinivas's fieldwork-based concepts of Sanskritization and the 'dominant caste' (a numerically and economically powerful, though not necessarily ritually highest, caste that exercises local social and political dominance in a region) provided empirically grounded correctives to Dumont's abstraction, showing that actual caste dynamics on the ground involved considerable local variation, mobility strategies, and the interplay of ritual status with land ownership and political power, rather than a single fixed pan-Indian hierarchy.

Marxist and materialist anthropologists, following threads from D.D. Kosambi, have emphasized caste's economic function as a system of labour control tied historically to jajmani-style patron-client relationships and the appropriation of surplus from lower castes and 'untouchable' communities performing stigmatized labour, situating caste within a political economy of production rather than treating it primarily as a religious-ideological system, and connecting historical caste oppression to contemporary economic disparities documented in NSS and Census data on land ownership and occupational segregation by caste.

Contemporary caste studies increasingly engage with Dalit anthropology and standpoint scholarship that centres the experience and analysis of Dalit scholars and activists themselves, alongside quantitative sociological work on caste discrimination in urban labour and housing markets, caste-based reservation policy debates, and the intersection of caste with gender, as explored by scholars examining how caste patriarchy regulates women's sexuality and marriage specifically to maintain caste endogamy and property control — a synthesis moving anthropological caste studies well beyond the classical Dumont-versus-materialist debate toward more intersectional and policy-engaged analysis.