Caste: Varna, Jati, and Sociological Theory

Caste is among the most studied and most contested subjects in Indian sociology, requiring careful distinction between varna, the fourfold classical ritual classification of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra found in textual sources like the Manusmriti, and jati, the thousands of localized, endogamous occupational and kinship groups that actually structure everyday social life. Conflating the two, as early colonial ethnographers often did, produces a distorted, overly schematic picture of Indian society.

G.S. Ghurye, often called the father of Indian sociology, approached caste through a historical and comparative lens, emphasising features such as segmental division, hierarchy, restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, civil and religious disabilities, lack of choice of occupation, and restrictions on marriage. Ghurye's Indological approach drew heavily on textual and historical sources, situating caste within a broader civilizational framework, though later scholars criticised this method for underplaying caste's regional variation and lived, practised dimensions.

M.N. Srinivas shifted sociological method toward fieldwork, introducing influential concepts including 'Sanskritization,' the process by which a lower caste or tribal group adopts the customs, rituals, and lifestyle of a higher caste to claim upward mobility, and the 'dominant caste,' a group commanding numerical strength, economic power, and local political influence regardless of its ritual rank in the varna order. His studies of Rampura village in Karnataka became foundational texts in the village-studies tradition of Indian sociology.

Andre Beteille's comparative studies, particularly Caste, Class and Power in Tanjore district, examined how caste, class, and political power could align or diverge across changing agrarian contexts, demonstrating that economic liberalisation and land reform did not simply dissolve caste but often recombined it with new forms of class power. Beteille's work insisted on empirical specificity against sweeping generalisations about caste's supposed disappearance or permanence.

B.R. Ambedkar offered a structurally different account, insisting that caste was not merely a division of labour but a 'division of labourers,' organised through a graded system of inequality enforced by endogamy and reinforced by Brahmanical religious sanction. Ambedkar's sociological and political critique in Annihilation of Caste anticipated later Dalit sociological scholarship that centres lived experience of caste violence and exclusion rather than functionalist explanations of caste's social utility.