argumentative essay on caste system

Essay on Caste System for Students and Children

500+ words essay on caste system.

Today the caste system is one of the major issues that people are facing. It is basically a system that separate peoples on the basis of their caste. However, it is a very common issue in India. It is present for a very long time in our country. Many people believe in it and many people don’t. It depends on the thinking and mindset of an individual. Some people are against this system and on the other hand, some are in support of this. It is basically a kind of division between the people.

Problems Due to Caste System

The higher caste children are facing a lot of difficulties in finding jobs. Earlier it was not this difficult to find job. The Scheduled Caste (SCs), Schedule Tribes (STs), and the other backward classes (OBCs) needless grades than a general candidate. This is because they get a reservation and the qualifying marks or grades for them are less as compared to the required marks of a general candidate.

This happens because of the caste system. People say that the Lower caste people deserve and need the reservation. They need it because people treat them unequally because of the discrimination occurring through the caste system. The generals see them as lower category people, not all but many. Many people are still there who don’t believe in the caste system.

Many talented students don’t get admissions in good universities and colleges. This happens because of the reservation given to the lower caste people. They get reserved seats in schools and colleges and they need to study less for the entrance exams as they need fewer marks or less performance as compared to a general student.

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Present Scenario of the Caste System

The interpersonal relations among the members of the various castes are changing for better. Inter caste marriage is still a problem in society. For many people inter-caste marriage is wrong. On the other hand, many people believe that it is not a bad concern. The higher castes are processing either money or education or even both.

Often take lead in the new commercial, administrative and industrial institutions that are now present in the planning era. Thus, those located high in the order of castes. These are still at the top of the bar and the old degrees of the prestige of caste have been replaced by an equivalent degree of economic and social power.

Attempts by the Harijans for exercising the rights provided to them by the constitution have led to attacks on them by the castes that are dominant. They are beaten and also their huts are burning in the fire that is occurring by the dominant class. Moreover, they are coming under the social boycott.

A significant development in the period before the independence of the nation is the emergence of the caste as a political force. In the life of the urban areas, new institutions are rising. In many states, the politics is turning out in caste-politics. When it comes to choosing a candidate the first thing that is considered is the caste.

FAQs on Caste System

Ques.1.Discuss any one problem due to caste system:

Ans. The most faced problem due to the caste system in society is reservation. It is a topic for which many are in favor and many are against as well. It is a major issue today and is also very sensitive.

Ques.2.What impact does the caste system create in society?

Ans. It depends on the thoughts and mindset of every particular person differently. However, it creates thinking in the mind of people because of which they judge people on the basis of the upper and lower class.

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It's More Than Racism: Isabel Wilkerson Explains America's 'Caste' System

Terry Gross

In her new book, Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson examines the laws and practices that created what she describes as a bipolar, Black and white caste system in the United States. Above, a sign in Jackson, Miss., in May 1961. William Lovelace/Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

In her new book, Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson examines the laws and practices that created what she describes as a bipolar, Black and white caste system in the United States. Above, a sign in Jackson, Miss., in May 1961.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson says racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. Instead, she prefers to refer to America as having a "caste" system.

Wilkerson describes caste an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources.

"Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that's used to determine one's place in that," she says.

Wilkerson notes that the concept of caste has been around for thousands of years: "[Caste] predates the idea of race, which is ... only 400 or 500 years old, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade."

Caste, she adds, "is the term that is more precise [than race]; it is more comprehensive, and it gets at the underlying infrastructure that often we cannot see, but that is there undergirding much of the inequality and injustices and disparities that we live with in this country."

Author Interviews

Great migration: the african-american exodus north.

Wilkerson's 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns , focused on the great migration of African Americans from the South to the North during the 20th century. In her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Wilkerson says that acknowledging America's caste system deepens our understanding of what Black people are up against in the United States.

Interview Highlights

On hearing a Nigerian-born playwright say that there are no Black people in Africa

It's so shocking to our ears, because, of course, we say that there is an entire subcontinent of people who we would view as Black, but what she was saying was that until you come to the United States, they themselves do not see themselves as Black, they are Igbo ... or they are Yoruba or whatever it is that they are in terms of their ethnicity and identity.

It is only when they enter into a multilayered caste structure ... a hierarchy such as this, do they then have to think of themselves as Black. But back where they are from, they do not have to think of themselves as Black, because Black is not the primary metric of determining one's identity.

On how being "white" is an American innovation

It's an innovation that is only several hundred years old, dating back to the time of the transatlantic slave trade. And that is because before that time, there were humans on the land wherever they happened to be on this planet, and because of the way people were living on the land, they were merely who they were.

They were Irish or they were German or they were Polish or Hungarian, and only [thought of themselves as white] after the transatlantic slave trade, only after people who had been spread out all over the world converged in this one space — the New World — to create a new country, a new culture where all of these people were then interacting and having to figure out how they were going to relate to one another.

That is when you have a caste system that emerges, a caste system that emerges that instantly relegates those who were brought in to be enslaved ... to the very bottom of the caste system, and then elevated those who looked like those who had who created the caste system — meaning those who were British and Western Europeans — at the very top of the caste system. And anyone who entered that caste system had to then navigate and figure out how were they [were] going to manage, how are they [were] going to survive and succeed in this system. And also upon arrival, discovering that they were assigned to a particular category, whether they [wished] to be in it or not.

That means that until arriving here, people who were Irish, people who were Hungarian, people who were Polish would not have identified themselves back in the 19th century as being white, but only in connection to the gradations and ranking that occurred and was created in the United States — that is where the designation of white, the designation of Black and those in between came to have meaning.

On where people of color who are not Black fit into the caste system

There was a tremendous churning at the beginning of the 20th century of people who were arriving in these undetermined or middle groups that did not fit neatly into the bipolar structure that America had created. And at the beginning of the 20th century, there were petitions to the Supreme Court, petitions to the government, for clarity about where they would fit in. And they were often petitioning to be admitted to the dominant caste.

One of the examples, a Japanese immigrant petitioned to qualify for being Caucasian because he said, "My skin is actually whiter than many people that I identified as white in America. I should qualify to be considered Caucasian." And his petition was rejected by the Supreme Court. But these are all examples of the long-standing uncertainties about who fits where when you have a caste system that is bipolar [Black and white], such as the one that was created here.

On the surprising origin of the term "Caucasian"

Wilkerson won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book about the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. Joe Henson/Penguin Random House hide caption

Wilkerson won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book about the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There was a physician, a German physician in the 18th century who had this obsession with skulls, and he collected these skulls from all over the world and his effort to determine who was supreme in humanity. So he had skulls from all over the world, and he identified the most beautiful skulls as having come from the area around the Caucasus Mountains. And as a result of that, because they were, in his view, so beautiful, he decided to identify this skull as Caucasian clearly, and to name the group to which he belonged as Caucasians.

In other words, this was the group that was the most beautiful and perfect of all groups of humanity. This was a group that he presumed himself to belong to — though he was German. And this was the group that he described as European, and thus the word "Caucasian" actually refers to people who come from the Caucasus Mountains.

Now, what's fascinating about that as well is that the very people who were from that region of the world actually are among those who had the most difficult time gaining entry to the United States as citizens as white in the early 20th century, because they did not qualify based upon the preferences for those who were from Northern European ancestry.

On how the U.S. used immigration as a legal way to maintain the caste system

Code Switch

With trump at the border, a look back at u.s. immigration policy.

Curating the population means deciding who gets to be a part of it and where they fit in upon entry, and so there is a tremendous effort at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of eugenics and this growing belief in the gradations of humankind that they wanted to keep the population closer to what it had been at the founding of the country. And so there was an effort to restrict who could come into the country if they were not of Western European descent.

Tremendous back and forth, tremendous efforts on the part of eugenicists who then held sway in the popular imagination, tremendous effort to keep out people who we now would view as part of the dominant group. It was a form of curating who could become a part of the United States and where they would fit in, and they used immigration laws to determine who would be able to get access to that dominant group.

On why the Nazis studied American Jim Crow laws

Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today, Journalist Says

I have to say that my focus was not initially on the Nazis themselves, but rather on how Germany has worked in the decades after the war to reconcile its history. But the deeper that I got, and the more that I looked into this, the deeper I searched, I discovered these connections that I would never have imagined.

It turned out that German eugenicists were in continuing dialogue with American eugenicists. Books by American eugenicists were big sellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich. And then, of course, the Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. But what they did was they sent researchers to study America's Jim Crow laws. They actually sent researchers to America to study how Americans had subjugated African Americans, what would be considered the subordinated caste. And they actually debated and consulted American law as they were devising the Nuremberg Laws and as they were looking at those laws in the United States.

They couldn't understand why, from their perspective, the group that they had identified as the subordinated caste was not recognized in the United States in the same way. So that was the unusual interconnectedness that I never would have imagined.

On the Nazi reaction to America's "one drop rule," which maintained that a person with any amount of Black blood would be considered Black

That idea of the one drop rule, that was viewed as too extreme to [the Nazis]. It was stunning to hear that. ... The Nazis, in trying to create their own caste system, what could be considered a caste system, went to great lengths to really think hard about who should qualify as Aryan, because they felt that they wanted to include as many people as they possibly could, ironically enough, and as they looked at the United States, it did not make sense to them that a single drop of Black blood would make someone Black, that they could not and did not accept. And in defining and creating their own hierarchy, they ended up coming up with a different configuration that actually encompassed more people into the Aryan side than would have been considered than the equivalent would have been in the United States.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web.

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America’s Enduring Caste System

Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries.

Credit... Photo illustration by Chris Burnett

Supported by

By Isabel Wilkerson

• Published July 1, 2020 Updated Jan. 21, 2021

W e saw a man face down on the pavement, pinned beneath a car, and above him another man, a man in uniform, his skin lighter than the man on the ground, and the lighter man was bearing down on the darker man, his knee boring into the neck of the darker man, the lighter man’s hands at his sides, in his pockets — could it be that his hands were so nonchalantly in his pockets? — such was the ease and casual calm, the confidence of embedded entitlement with which he was able to lord over the darker man.

We heard the man on the ground pleading with the man above him, saw the terror in his face, heard his gasps for air, heard the anguished cries of an unseen chorus, begging the lighter man to stop. But the lighter man, the dominant man, looked straight at the bystanders, into the camera, and thus at all of us around the world who would later bear witness and, instead of heeding the cries of the chorus, pressed his knee deeper into the darker man’s neck as was the perceived right granted him in the hierarchy. The man on the ground went silent, drained of breath. A clear liquid crept down the pavement. We saw a man die before our very eyes.

What we did not see, not immediately anyway, was the invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man, were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste.

[Listen to Sway: A Black and Asian Female V.P. Doesn’t Mean We’ve Escaped Caste .]

In the weeks leading up to the country’s commemoration of its founding, protests and uprisings took hold in cities in every state, in Bakersfield, Charleston, Buffalo, Poughkeepsie, Wichita, Boise, Sioux Falls. Protesters tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus in St. Paul, Minn. They toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Va. And the country was forced to contemplate the observation of Frederick Douglass a century and a half before : “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” What, we might ask in our day, is freedom to those still denied it as their country celebrates its own?

An Old House and an Infrared Light

The inspector trained his infrared lens onto a misshapen bow in the ceiling, an invisible beam of light searching the layers of lath to test what the eye could not see. This house was built generations ago, and I had noticed the slightest welt in a corner of plaster in a spare bedroom and chalked it up to idiosyncrasy. Over time, the welt in the ceiling became a wave that widened and bulged despite the new roof. It had been building beyond perception for years. An old house is its own kind of devotional, a dowager aunt with a story to be coaxed out of her, a mystery, a series of interlocking puzzles awaiting solution. Why is this soffit tucked into the southeast corner of an eave? What is behind this discolored patch of brick? With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be.

America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation. When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.

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Does America have a caste system?

Professor of English (Postoclonial Literature and Creative Writing), University of Hawaii

Disclosure statement

Subramanian Shankar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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In the United States, inequality tends to be framed as an issue of either class, race or both. Consider, for example, criticism that Republicans’ new tax plan is a weapon of “ class warfare ,” or accusations that the recent U.S. government shutdown was racist .

As an India-born novelist and scholar who teaches in the United States, I have come to see America’s stratified society through a different lens: caste .

Many Americans would be appalled to think that anything like caste could exist in a country allegedly founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. After all, India’s atrocious caste system determines social status by birth, compels marriage within a community and restricts job opportunity.

But is the U.S. really so different?

What is caste?

I first realized that caste could shed a new light on American inequality in 2016, when I was scholar-in-residence at the Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown .

There, I found that my public presentations on caste resonated deeply with students, who were largely working-class, black and Latino. I believe that’s because two key characteristics differentiate caste from race and class.

First, caste cannot be transcended. Unlike class, people of the “low” Mahar caste cannot educate or earn their way out of being Mahar. No matter how elite their college or how lucrative their careers, those born into a low caste remain stigmatized for life.

Caste is also always hierarchical: As long as it exists, so does the division of people into “high” and “low.” That distinguishes it from race, in that people in a caste system cannot dream of equality.

It’s significant that the great mid-20th-century Indian reformer B. R. Ambedkar called not for learning to “ live together as brothers and sisters ,” as Martin Luther King Jr. did, but for the very “annihilation of caste.”

Caste, in other words, is societal difference made timeless, inevitable and cureless. Caste says to its subjects, “You all are different and unequal and fated to remain so.”

Neither race nor class nor race and class combined can so efficiently encapsulate the kind of of social hierarchy, prejudice and inequality that marginalized Americans experience.

Is America casteist?

In Houston, that sense of profound exclusion emerged in most post-presentation discussions about caste.

As children, the students there noted, they had grown up in segregated urban neighborhoods – geographic exclusion that, I would add, was federal policy for most of the 20th century . Many took on unpayable student loan debt for college, then struggled to stay in school while juggling work and family pressures, often without a support system.

Several students also contrasted their cramped downtown campus – with its parking problems, limited dining options and lack of after-hours cultural life – with the university’s swankier main digs. Others would point out the jail across from the University of Houston-Downtown with bleak humor, invoking the school-to-prison pipeline .

Both the faculty and the students knew the power of social networks that are essential to professional success. Yet even with a college degree, evidence shows, Americans who grow up poor are almost guaranteed to earn less .

For many who’ve heard me speak – not just in Houston but also across the country at book readings for my 2017 novel, “ Ghost in the Tamarind ” – the restrictions imposed by India’s caste system recall the massive resistance they’ve experienced in trying to get ahead.

They have relayed to me, with compelling emotional force, their conviction that America is casteist.

Caste in the US and India

This notion is not unprecedented.

In the mid-20th century, the American anthropologist Gerald Berreman returned home from fieldwork in India as the civil rights movement was getting underway. His 1960 essay, “ Caste in India and the United States ,” concluded that towns in the Jim Crow South bore enough similarity to the North Indian villages he had studied to consider that they had a caste society.

Granted, 2018 is not 1960, and the contemporary United States is not the segregated South. And to be fair, caste in India isn’t what it used to be, either. Since 1950, when the Constitution of newly independent India made caste discrimination illegal, some of the system’s most monstrous ritual elements have weakened.

The stigma of untouchability – the idea that physical contact with someone of lower caste can be polluting – for example, is fading. Today, those deemed “low caste” can sometimes achieve significant power. Indian President Ram Nath Kovind is a Dalit, a group formerly known as “untouchable.”

Still, caste in India remains a powerful form of social organization . It segments Indian society into marital, familial, social, political and economic networks that are enormously consequential for success. And for a variety of practical and emotional reasons, these networks have proven surprisingly resistant to change .

Casteist ideologies in America

At bottom, caste’s most defining feature is its ability to render inevitable a rigid and pervasive hierarchical system of inclusion and exclusion.

What working-class Americans and people of color have viscerally recognized, in my experience, is that casteist ideologies – theories that produce a social hierarchy and then freeze it for time immemorial – also permeate their world.

Take, for example, the controversial 1994 “The Bell Curve” thesis, which held that African-Americans and poor people have a lower IQ, thus linking American inequality to genetic difference.

More recently, the white nationalist Richard Spencer has articulated a vision of white identity marked, caste-like, by timelessness and hierarchy.

“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created unequal,’” he wrote in a July 2017 essay for an alt-right website. “In the wake of the old world, this will be our proposition.”

Add to these ideological currents the evidence on the race gap in higher education , stagnant upward mobility and rising inequality , and the truth is damning. Five decades after the civil rights movement, American society remains hierarchical, exclusionary and stubbornly resistant to change.

Caste gives Americans a way to articulate their sense of persistent marginalization. And by virtue of being apparently foreign – it comes from India, after all – it usefully complicates the dominant American Dream narrative.

The U.S. has a class problem. It has a race problem. And it may just have a caste problem, too.

• Economic inequality
• Untouchables
• Caste system
• Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK)

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Isabel Wilkerson’s World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste

As the summer of 1958 was coming to an end, Martin Luther King, Jr., was newly famous and exhausted. All of twenty-nine years old, he had been travelling across the country for weeks promoting his first book, “ Stride Toward Freedom ,” a memoir of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott—a protest that, at three hundred and eighty-two days, was the most sustained mass action in American history. It had led both to a Supreme Court decision that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional and to retaliatory bombings of Black churches. The book tour was meant to mobilize support for the movement’s next phase, but days after his first event he’d been kicked, choked, and arrested by the Montgomery police. And now, in Harlem on September 20th, he was being denounced as an Uncle Tom for not appearing at a Black-owned bookstore whose politics conflicted with the mainstream image he was trying to project. So he sat at a table with a pile of books at the white-owned Blumstein’s department store on West 125th Street. It was a store that didn’t even sell books—a store whose management refused to hire Black clerks until a boycott forced the issue. The staff had put his signing table at the back, by the shoes.

“Is this Martin Luther King?” a woman in sequinned cat-eye glasses asked when she got to the table. He said yes, and she plunged a steel letter opener deep into his chest.

Later, King viewed his months of recovery as a period of productive recalibration. It became clear to him how much stamina he would need to withstand the battles and backlashes ahead. He marked the end of his convalescence by going to India, the birthplace of a man whose self-discipline he had admired since he was in theology school: the late Mohandas Gandhi , the leader of the mass movement that secured India’s independence from the British, in 1947. King had most recently enacted Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence by publicly forgiving his would-be assassin, a woman who struggled with mental illness.

King liked to say afterward that he’d gone to India as a pilgrim. Arriving home, though, spiritual lessons weren’t what he wanted to share. He was more animated by the concrete political steps that leaders had taken to redress the wrongs of India’s age-old caste system. Gandhi fought for the right of “untouchables”—known today as Dalits—to gain entry to Hindu temples that had long barred them as “impure.” “To equal that, President Eisenhower would take a Negro child by the hand and lead her into Central High School in Little Rock,” King wrote. The Indian Constitution of 1950 had officially abolished untouchability, declared caste discrimination a crime, and created affirmative-action quotas for Dalits and indigenous tribes—in part because a formidable Dalit thinker and leader, B. R. Ambedkar, had played a crucial role in writing it. “Today no leader in India would dare to make a public endorsement of untouchability,” King told reporters. “But in America, every day some leader endorses racial segregation.”

In “ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents ” (Random House), Isabel Wilkerson contends that the brutal Indian system of hierarchy illuminates more about American racial divides than the idea of race alone can, and early in her book she relays a story that King told about his India trip. He was visiting a school for Dalit children when the principal introduced him as “a fellow untouchable.” The comparison made King flinch—but then its truth overwhelmed him. “In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life,” Wilkerson writes. “It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.”

This story is almost certainly apocryphal, borrowed from a sermon that one of King’s mentors gave more than two decades earlier. In later years, King took little interest in how the idea of caste might apply in his own country. But the anecdote at once lends a civil-rights hero’s weight to Wilkerson’s bold thesis and provides the model response to it: a lightning flash of insight about the mechanics of white supremacy. In her view, racism is only the visible manifestation of something deeper. Underlying and predating racism, and holding white supremacy in place, is a hidden system of social domination: a caste structure that uses neutral human differences, skin color among them, as the basis for ranking human value.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal,” she writes. “It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” The caste model moves white behavior away from subjective feelings (what motivates these people to do what they do) and into the objective realm of power dynamics (what they do, and to whom). The dynamic that concerns Wilkerson the most is how a dominant caste stops a low-ranking caste from gaining on it.

The most enduring caste system, India’s, turned a division of labor into a division of lineage. In the Laws of Manu and other ancient Hindu texts, caste was inscribed with rigid precision, slotting occupations into four varnas , or ranks—priest, ruler-warrior, merchant, laborer—and a fifth category, outcastes (another old name for today’s Dalits). Caste as a lived Indian reality, though, is crueller than any study of scriptural texts would indicate; it’s also more fluid. Each varna comprises innumerable subcastes, or jatis , and, over generations, some jatis have climbed up the ranks as others have slipped down. New occupational groups have been incorporated into the system as others have vanished. In the nineteenth century, the hierarchy, vicious enough by its own design, was entrenched by taxonomies imposed by the British Raj—categories used as instruments of colonial control. What fascinated King, during his sojourn in the subcontinent, was how the newly independent state intended to weaken the caste order by insuring entry for low-caste citizens into schools, universities, and government jobs. What fascinates Wilkerson, like many progressives before her, is the ossified model—heritable hierarchy in its purest form.

Writing with calm and penetrating authority, Wilkerson discusses three caste hierarchies in world history—those of India, America, and Nazi Germany—and excavates the shared principles “burrowed deep within the culture and subconsciousness” of each. She identifies several “pillars” of caste, including inherited rank, taboos related to notions of purity and pollution, the enforcement of hierarchies through terror and violence, and divine sanction of superiority. (The American equivalent to the Laws of Manu is, of course, the Old Testament.) In Wilkerson’s first book, “ The Warmth of Other Suns ,” which documented the Great Migration of American Blacks in the twentieth century, she wrote about past lives with finer precision and texture than most professional historians have done. So she must have considered the risks involved in compressing into a single frame India’s roughly three-thousand-year-old caste structure, America’s four-hundred-year-old racial hierarchies, and the Third Reich’s twelve-year enforcement of Aryanism. Even on her home terrain, where she focusses on what she calls the “poles of the American caste system,” Blacks and whites, her analysis sometimes seems more ahistorical than transhistorical, as temporal specificities collapse into an eternal present. But this effect is consonant with the view of history she presents in her book—one involving more grim continuity than hopeful departures, more regression to the mean than moments of progress.

In the nineteen-thirties, Allison Davis, a pathbreaking African-American social anthropologist whom Wilkerson calls her spiritual father, risked his life to examine the interplay of caste and class in Natchez, Mississippi. The work that he and his collaborators ultimately produced, “ Deep South ” (1941), was the first systematic, empirical study of post-Reconstruction life in the region. Confirming the work of other social theorists of the time, they concluded that the structures that kept Blacks immiserated and imperilled were so entrenched that they constituted a caste system. When Gunnar Myrdal incorporated their research into his own classic report, “ An American Dilemma ” (1944), the idea of caste fully entered the twentieth-century American conversation about race.

Twenty years after Myrdal published his report, and five years after King travelled to India, the dream of seeing aggressive anti-discrimination legislation in America was realized: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Wilkerson emphasizes the recoil that followed this victory. No Democratic contender for President has won the majority of the white vote since. In her analysis, the arc of the political universe bends toward caste, as progressive legislative or electoral victories activate the threatened dominant group. Had observers better grasped white anxieties unleashed by the growth of America’s nonwhite population and the two-term Presidency of Barack Obama, Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 would have come as no surprise. In the voting booth, Wilkerson argues, whites across the board set aside considerations like gender affinity and such class concerns as access to health care in order to support a man who had signalled his commitment to the continued dominion of their caste.

Trump didn’t need to tweet out “You will not replace us.” Throughout American history, Wilkerson says, white-supremacist ideas deemed taboo have simply gone undercover. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, the Postmaster General banned the grotesque postcards that certain whites liked to send, featuring the corpses of the lynched (“This is the Barbecue we had last night”), the cards kept on circulating in envelopes. With Trump, a twenty-first-century version of these clandestine networks produced what Wilkerson sees as a “consolidation of rank among the historic ruling caste” following the disruption represented by a Black First Family.

The Obamas have been touted, in some circles, as proof of progress toward racial equality. The experience of élite Black Americans is central to Wilkerson’s account, but for the opposite reason. She sees in their attempts to transcend their assigned place in the hierarchy a natural caste experiment—and a failed one at that. Regardless of their wealth or refinement, the system tries to shove them back down. To illustrate this phenomenon, she ranges across disciplines from sociology to economics to medicine, interspersing her analysis with what she calls “scenes of caste,” among them wrenching personal ones.

One evening, violating caste’s pre-written script, she is flying first class. As she stands in the aisle and waits to disembark, the lone African-American passenger in the cabin, a white man retrieving his bag from an overhead compartment thrusts his full weight onto her body, while other travellers watch, their faces determinedly blank. “Over the course of American history, black men have died for doing far less to white women than what he did to me,” she writes. The men and women in the cabin would have suffered no material consequence for defending her, she notes, yet every one of them chose “caste solidarity over principle, tribe over empathy.”

One of those impassive witnesses, the lead flight attendant, is a Black man, and she imagines his own caste calculations. This low-caste man doesn’t know what power the upper-caste man might possess. To defend a low-caste woman, even if it is his professional responsibility to do so, could bring negative consequences. “In a caste system,” she concludes, “things work more smoothly when everyone stays in their place, and that is what he did.”

In Wilkerson’s book, one senses that each word choice has been carefully weighed, and her tone remains measured even when describing her own assault. But she conveys a particular frustration with those members of her caste, from the flight attendant to the Black police officers involved in the deaths of Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, who try to rise by rejecting their own. The caste system, she says, in an echo of Malcolm X, has always rewarded “snitches and sellouts.”

Mustering old and new historical scholarship, sometimes to shattering effect, “Caste” brings out how systematically, through the centuries, Black lives were destroyed “under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath.” In considering the present, though, she often focusses on questions of dignity. Many scenes involve whites failing to recognize the status of successful Blacks—like the white man, having recently moved into a wealthy suburb, who mistakes his elegant Black neighbor for the woman who picks up his laundry. As for how caste dynamics affect those Black Americans who really do pick up the laundry—or shell the shrimp, or clean the motel rooms—Wilkerson has little to say. At one point, she implies that poor people of color are in some ways more fortunate than wealthier ones, because they have fewer stress-related health problems. She surmises that this has to do with low-income people of color getting less white pushback. But the claim isn’t supported by most recent research, and she doesn’t mention the significant diagnostic gap created by unequal access to health care. Considerations of material resources, in her analysis, can disappear in the shadow of status.

Applying a single abstraction to multiple realities inevitably creates friction—sometimes productive, sometimes not. In the book’s comparison of the Third Reich to India and America, for example, a rather jarring distinction is set aside: the final objective of Nazi ideology was to eliminate Jewish people, not just to subordinate them. While American whites and Indian upper castes exploited Blacks and Dalits to do their menial labor, the Nazis came to see no functional role for Jews. In Nazi propaganda, Jews weren’t backward, bestial, natural-born toilers; they were cunning arch-manipulators of historical events. (When Goebbels and other Nazis reviled “extreme Jewish intellectualism” and claimed that Jews had helped orchestrate Germany’s defeat in the Great War, they were insisting on Jewish iniquity, not occupational incapacity.) The violence exercised against Dalits in India and Black people in America provides an ill-fitting template for eliminationist anti-Semitism.

Even in this country, as Wilkerson prosecutes the case for her caste model, she occasionally skirts facts that resist alignment with her thesis. To clinch her argument that Trump was elected because whites were protecting their caste status, she says that he won them over at every education level. According to the Pew Foundation’s 2018 validated-voter analysis, though, most whites with a college education or higher voted against him. Wilkerson seems at times to have a sophisticated idea of how caste operates in the modern world, with all its internal diversities. But at this and other points in her book she appears to be reaching back toward older understandings of the system, in which each group is a monolith, consistent in its interests and political allegiances, impervious to contingencies or context.

Indeed, reading Wilkerson’s chapter on Allison Davis, one could forget that “Deep South” pointedly billed itself as “a study of caste and class.” She leaves out the fact that Davis and his co-authors were fascinated by the ways in which the two gradients could complicate each other—the ways in which solidarities of class sometimes trumped those of color. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and James Foreman, who encountered “Deep South” in college, read its findings more instrumentally than Wilkerson does. The structural and individual outrages committed by Mississippi whites would not have been news to them. The news was that white élites often despised the white poor more than they did Black workers. Black and white landlords coöperated to protect their interests and exploit poor tenant farmers. And some white shopkeepers, however racist, knew that they had to be courteous to Black customers or lose their business. Many civil-rights activists concluded that, if Blacks gained more wealth and political power, they could compel whites to modify their behavior. Altering that key variable might start the process of eroding the caste system itself.

Today, Republican political strategists are no doubt at work trying to capitalize on similar class and caste variables in the hope of dividing the Black vote, and undermining Black-equality movements. As it happens, a middle-caste Indian immigrant, the economist Raj Chetty, has given us an illuminating forensic picture of the complexity of the castes in question. Gender matters: Black women now slightly outearn white women who were raised in financially similar family circumstances, while the incomes of Black men account for most of a still appalling Black-white income gap. Location matters, too: Black people who moved to “better neighborhoods” as children have significantly different earning prospects as adults. (Counties with the least social mobility today often had a great density of slaves in the antebellum era.)

Decades after King celebrated the laws Indian leaders had enacted to break down the caste system, that system has proved much tougher to dismantle than many observers had hoped. One thing quotas have achieved, though, is increased economic diversity within lower castes—a change that shows how labile the corresponding political alliances can be. After independence, Dalits, who constitute more than sixteen per cent of the population, were a reliable vote, first for the Congress Party and then, in some states, for their own caste-based regional parties. They were nearly as unified as the white Trump voters Wilkerson conjures. That’s no longer true. For the past six years, India has been ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), a party with Brahminic roots which was established to promote upper-caste interests and advocates an ideology of Hindu supremacy. Dalits and lower castes were largely aligned against the B.J.P.—until it began courting them by exploiting the economic divisions within their ranks.

Some Dalit communities had benefitted disproportionately from the quotas for government jobs that Ambedkar (whom Wilkerson dubs “India’s Martin Luther King”) fought to write into the Constitution. Over time, a small Dalit élite, known as “the creamy layer,” emerged. The B.J.P. recruited Dalits who were beneath that layer and resentful of it, promising them economic advancement. Simultaneously, the Party’s networks tried to draw them into the Hindu-supremacist fold by inciting fear about a group even lower in the social hierarchy: Indian Muslims. In 2019, fully a third of Dalits voted for the B.J.P. in national elections that returned Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power.

Suraj Yengde, a Dalit scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, sees possible benefits in his caste’s lack of unity. As parties compete for their votes, he has argued, Dalits may have a wider and less corrupt range of candidates to choose from, and more effective representation. But Yengde’s sometime collaborator, the astringent, seventy-year-old Dalit intellectual and activist Anand Teltumbde (currently imprisoned by the Modi government on dubious charges of inciting violence), perceives a larger political failure; he believes that “the debacle of the Dalit movement” today lies in its inability to recognize how class intersects with caste.

Starting in the nineteenth century, low-caste Indians looked to America’s progressives for ideas about fighting inequality. Jyotirao Phule, an anti-Brahmin agitator from a lowly gardener caste, dedicated his 1873 book, “Ghulamgiri,” or “Slavery,” to American abolitionists. A century later, young Dalits who had studied the Black Power movement launched the Dalit Panthers. In Wilkerson’s estimation, what America may teach the world in the coming decades is, alas, how a numerically vulnerable dominant caste can cling to power. She recounts a conversation she had with the civil-rights historian Taylor Branch about how American democracy will fare when it reaches a demographic watershed: the moment in the twenty-forties when non-Hispanic whites are expected to see their majority disappear. “So the real question would be,” Branch says, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

Whites, Wilkerson anticipates, will rush to co-opt insecure mid-caste nonwhites—ethnic groups who have profited from affirmative-action programs that Blacks fought for. She chillingly envisages Latinos, Asians, and other citizens of color entering the voting booth and making an “autonomic, subconscious assessment of their station,” privileging features of their identity that align them with the dominant caste over features they share with other voters of color. “They will vote up, rather than across, and usually not down,” she predicts. As these new “honorary” whites bolster the ranks of the dominant caste, Blacks will remain on the bottom. In Frank B. Wilderson III ’s stark phrasing, those middle castes will become “junior partners” in white supremacy.

There’s some precedent to support this argument: Italian-Americans, who now tend to vote Republican, were nineteenth-century pariahs, seen as nonwhite and sometimes lynched. But, given the increasing range of America’s contemporary middle castes—consider the economic chasm between an Indian tech C.E.O. and an Indian security guard, or the ideological one between a Ted Cruz and an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez —it’s hard to see a concerted march toward whiteness. Too many of those mid-caste Americans seem, in this moment, to be an impediment to the second term of the white-supremacist-in-chief. Wilkerson’s conception of social rigidities may itself prove too rigid to accommodate the complexities of what’s unfolding around us. Today, the Confederate emblem has been chased off the Mississippi state flag, and talk of reparations has moved into the political mainstream. But Wilkerson’s model does not encourage optimism: backlash follows legislative and electoral progress so reliably in her account that hopes for change begin to feel naïve. No law is etched in granite, she reminds us; each one can be chiselled away.

Although Wilkerson considers herself more a diagnostician than a clinician, she advances, toward the end of the book, two ideas for toppling the American caste system. She’d like to see a public accounting of the American past modelled on postwar Germany, which paid restitution to Holocaust survivors, made displaying the swastika a crime, and erected memorials to victims. But her greater faith lies in what she calls “radical empathy.” She has described her work as a moral “mission”: “to change the country, the world, one heart at a time.” And she concludes her book by celebrating individuals like Albert Einstein, who came to the U.S. shortly before the Nazis took power, empathized with Blacks facing discrimination, and began advocating for their rights. “Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps break the back of caste,” Wilkerson writes. “Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.”

This resort to moral psychology—a self-oriented Gandhian move of the kind that infuriated Ambedkar—seems a retreat from her larger argument that white supremacy should be seen as systemic, not personal. Perhaps, boxed in by her caste model, she is seeking hope by reaching outside it. But, if the caste model can feel unnuanced and overly deterministic, the turn toward empathy can feel detached from history in another way. After all, were every white person in America to wake up tomorrow cured of what Wilkerson terms the “disease” of caste, the change of heart alone would not redress the deprivation of human, financial, and social capital to which Blacks have been subjected for centuries. Talk of “structural racism” is meant to highlight this difficult truth; Wilkerson’s understanding of caste, by emphasizing norms of respect over the promptings of distributive justice, can sometimes obscure it.

One soggy evening in July, I visited the area where “ BLACK LIVES MATTER ” has been painted on a street leading to the White House. As young white people stood on the street taking selfies, I did my best to imagine a lasting equality built on what was in their hearts, and those of millions like them. Yet their baseball caps took me back to an argument in “Caste,” about the great Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige. Wilkerson argues that, if Paige had been allowed to play in the white leagues while he was in his athletic prime (he wasn’t tapped by the majors until he was in his forties), his uncanny skill would have been further honed, spectators would have flocked to see him, his team would have risen in the rankings, and the sport as a whole would have reaped the profits. This line of argument recurs in her book, and turns up in a lot of other places lately: if you level the playing field, everyone wins.

But what about the not-quite-great white player whose major-league career happened only because Paige was barred from the competition? In a fair world, dominant-caste individuals who have historically benefitted from prejudice and discrimination would lose out. When I multiplied the injury of disinheritance by, to use Wilkerson’s phrase, “millions in a given day” in a foreseeable future of economic insecurity, the sustained radical empathy of downwardly mobile whites became a hard thing to envision. I started to wonder if Wilkerson’s faith in psychology had underestimated a particularly treacherous aspect of Indian caste, which is how well it insulates the hearts of individual oppressors from the injustices they perpetrate and profit by. Radical empathy is exactly what caste societies preclude. The system’s fictitious gradations extinguish, by design, a sense of common humanity.

Pinned on the new iron fence protecting the White House from the public were photos of Black people killed by the police in recent years. In the photo of the Minnesota cafeteria worker Philando Castile, I could make out the motto on his school-issue lanyard: “Live Well.” Why, I wondered, should justice for a low-wage worker murdered while complying with a law officer’s order have to depend on anything as discretionary as empathy?

I recalled a detail about King’s trip to India, when, looking for psychological strength, he’d found political strategy. A reporter in New Delhi had asked him about those who had fought him in Montgomery: had he, in the end, “transformed the hearts of the white people”? Maybe some hearts, King replied. Others remained bitter. He moved on to another question. Changing power differentials in order to redress vile histories of discrimination, he knew, was bound to be ugly. Sometimes hearts barely figured at all. ♦

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All the Arguments You Need: to Advocate for Caste‑Based Reservations

Caste-based reservations address the roots of social injustice — and shouldn’t be replaced by economic status-based reservations.

In All The Arguments You Need , we take on mindsets standing in the way of progress and rebut them with facts and logic.

This week, the Supreme Court began hearing petitions challenging the validity of a Constitutional Amendment, passed in January 2019, that grants a 10% quota to those belonging to Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) in previously unreserved, upper-caste communities. The amendment fundamentally altered the spirit of caste-based reservations – one of the most hotly debated topics in the country.

The Constitution of India recognizes affirmative action in public education and employment for people belonging to historically discriminated and marginalized castes and tribes as a fundamental right. But when said people – Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and communities recognized as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) – claim their right to equal opportunity, historically privileged, upper-caste, unreserved communities allege that reservations discourage “merit” and “genuine talent” by providing the former an “unfair advantage.” Many deem poverty to be eligible for reservations in education and employment over caste-based marginalization.

However, pitting economic deprivation against casteism leaves the latter pervasive, and doesn’t get to the heart of what drives social inequality in India – even 75 years after its Independence. Here are all the arguments you need to debunk prevalent notions against caste-based reservations.

“Casteism is a thing of the past.”

Barely a month ago, a nine-year-old Dalit child from the Jalore district in Rajasthan succumbed to injuries after his privileged-caste teacher beat him for trying to drink water from the teacher’s pot. Almost all the matrimonial advertisements in any newspaper seek out partners from their own castes. In urban residential and housing societies, a common feature across cities is the existence of two distinct elevators — one for the residents and their guests and the other (and only the other) strictly for service workers employed to clean up after the residents: waste collectors, delivery agents, domestic workers. Many homes do not even offer a glass of water to their household workers. Those who do, often keep a different set of utensils. When someone is on the hunt for a new house , they are often asked for their last names — ostensibly to determine their caste. At times, house owners give out cryptic messages like they let their house out to only “pure veg” tenants — yet another caste marker. These are all discriminatory practices rooted in caste, showing how it is deeply entrenched in the societal organization of South Asia, even when it isn’t obvious. In fact, the discreet nature of how casteism plays out isn’t a sign of its decline, but its normalization.

“Reservations should only exist to level the playing field initially; they should be discontinued for higher positions/promotions.”

At present, only 6% and 9% of the faculty in IIMs and IITs respectively comprise persons from scheduled categories, whereas the state mandates the reservation of a collective 22.5% — 7.5% for STs and 15% for SCs – of faculty positions. Some central institutions do not reserve faculty positions for marginalized communities at all. Others often deliberately mark reserved category Ph.D. candidates or applicants poorly during interviews so that they fail to clear the admission criteria, and then justify reallocating those seats to general category candidates.

The situation is not very different in public service , where SCs and STs rarely fill up white-collar positions with higher pay and administrative-level work. On the other hand, they are overrepresented in low-income, labor-intensive professions such as peons, cleaning staff, delivery persons, etc — reinforcing the idea that scheduled communities are best left to tend to the same jobs that the caste system has determined for them – and, moreover, that privileged caste communities are meant for more “respectable” work with better pay, perks, and power. To deny reservations in promotions or higher examinations will only worsen this status quo, and push communities further to the margins.

“Financially well-off SCs and STs should not avail benefits of reservation.”

Reservation is not a poverty alleviation scheme. SCs and STs remain in the margins today due to discrimination based on their ascribed caste status, and not their acquired economic position. Exclusion from resources is among the most visible consequences of marginalization, but it comes from a much older, systematic prejudice and discrimination. Past incidents have shown that economic or social mobility isn’t enough to prevent discrimination. In fact, it may even be a catalyst for carrying out caste crimes, as happened in Khairlanji , Maharashtra – the site of one of the most brutal hate crimes in modern India – where the dominant caste villagers targeted the lone Dalit family in the village for their upward economic mobility.

Further, while economically well-off members of marginalized communities may have more access to capital within their own community, they still have significantly less capital than an economically well-off person from a privileged caste.

Another logical flaw in this argument is that it imagines only those SCs and STs who are deeply deprived as “genuinely” marginalized. The idea of an economically well-off SC or ST person is outside the scope of such an image. But making a value judgment on who “deserves” affirmative action” more can be dehumanizing – as it requires individuals to “prove” their oppression visibly.

“Why should upper-castes face higher cut-offs based on their caste? Isn’t that casteism too?”

These arguments rarely take into account the generational social, cultural, and economic capital — access to not only money but also other resources like free time to study, networks for support and guidance, and schools and coaching institutions — that a vast majority of unreserved upper-caste candidates have access to. Candidates can be judged on the same level of marks only if there is an already level playing field. But that is hardly the case.

The argument on cutoffs also disproportionately blames reservations for a flaw with the system. There are very few quality public institutions for higher education in the country, and most of them admit a very limited number of students. According to a 2021 report , while the Harvard Medical School had an acceptance rate of 3.5%, the Christian Medical College at Vellore had an acceptance rate of 0.25%, and New Delhi’s AIIMS had an acceptance rate of 0.05%. Cut-off rates will automatically come down if candidates had more educational institutions, and more seats in every educational institution, to compete for. Blaming marginalized castes for the lack of adequate public education infrastructure is a bigoted approach that views the failure to obtain a seat as an individual issue instead of a systemic defect.

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“By giving a break to those with lower marks, reservations are not advancing the most deserving candidates”

Another argument that people have against low-cutoffs and eligibility criteria for reserved candidates is that it brings down the overall caliber of an institution or organization. Research and data, however, suggests otherwise. A 2018 study by Stanford University researchers observed , for instance, that SC and ST candidates in engineering colleges were faster, better learners than their unreserved category counterparts. People from SC communities have also appeared in the top ranks, including the first rank , in the Civil Services Examination in the recent past. This indicates that when provided with equal opportunities, SC and ST candidates can indeed perform at par with the General categories. To insinuate that their inclusion hinders growth and progress, then, is just another excuse to justify their exclusion from education and employment.

“Even Ambedkar said reservations were only a temporary measure.”

Those who argue against reservations often cite alleged sentiments of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar — one of the fiercest and most articulate opponents of casteism, and the architect of the Indian Constitution — to claim that continued reservation in education and public service goes against his own vision for the country. There is evidence to suggest that these comments are, in fact, grossly misinterpreted , misrepresented, and even misreported. Anurag Bhaskar, assistant professor at Jindal Global University, states in a paper that the much talked about ten-year limit was never meant for education and services, only for political representation. Further, Dr. Ambedkar was opposed even to that time limit, and in fact, was the one to suggest introducing constitutional amendments to keep increasing the initial time limit on political reservations.

“ Reservations aren’t working, so we may as well get rid of them.”

Reservations address only a very particular consequence of ages-long marginalization: the denial of access to education and employment opportunities. Over the years, they have genuinely improved the collective living conditions of those on the margins. While it is true that the pace of this progress has been slow, the problem with the scale and pace is more of an implementation issue. Most senior public servants continue to be upper-caste – this only bolsters the case for more, rather than fewer, reservations.

Indeed, despite equal opportunities, the pervasiveness of caste may make one believe that their “birth was a fatal accident”, and prevent them from realizing their dreams, as happened with scholar Rohith Vemula , and countless others before and after him. Reservations, then, need to be supported with other regulations and laws which check and discourage everyday casteism, and there need to be systems in place that implement these regulations robustly.

Amlan Sarkar is a staff writer at TheSwaddle. He writes about the intersection between pop culture and politics. You can reach him on Instagram @amlansarkr.

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UNDERSTANDING CASTE SYSTEM: A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Synopsis : Caste is an important topic of discussion under the umbrella of social segmentation, especially in the context of India where the caste system exists even today. To understand any social concept, which in this case is caste, there are three theoretical frameworks in Sociology. These act as tools which help examine a subject from three different perspectives, which facilitates the diversity in human viewpoints. Through the lenses of structural-functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory, one is better able to comprehend what caste is from perspectives which might match their own, and also which they do not agree to.

Caste is one of the major categories of social stratification in India. Caste is present in the everyday lives of India’s people and in the structure of our very existence. The lawlessness of the action does not deter caste-based discrimination. The ‘Chaturvarna’ system (under Hinduism) fragments society into four central hierarchical divisions (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra), and an ultimate grouping of the so-called untouchables, or ‘Dalits’, depending on their birth. Castes are further split up into sub-castes or sub-groups. This segregation gives rise to atrocious acts of prejudice of all kinds–socio-cultural, political, and economic. Caste issues are important for human development and progress. Being a social institution that affects human lives, it is necessary to analyze caste from a sociological perspective.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON CASTE:

These three theoretical perspectives form the backbone of sociological analysis and can help in exploring the matter of caste from a sociological point of view.

Caste from Functional Perspective :

Caste plays various functions in society. Caste affects the different caste groups in society, each of the caste-based social groups themselves, and also each individual from any of the several caste groups. First , caste determines an individual’s position in society starting at birth. Because each caste is arranged in a hierarchy, each individual gets the ascribed status of belonging to a particular caste, either higher or lower in the stratification. Since it is a matter of birth, no life event can affect the status of a person, i.e., no change in occupation, education, and financial status of any individual can change their social position as formed by caste. For individuals, caste serves the purpose of distinguishing themselves from others in society. Second, caste helps in developing solidarity among the people who belong to a particular caste. In Durkheim’s theories, this type of solidarity would be mechanical because it arises from a feeling of having similarities. People belonging to a particular caste feel a connection and fellowship towards others within the same group, consequently creating a well-knit and cohesive group whose members can rely on each other for support. Third, caste facilitates economic distribution in society because the occupation of each individual is pre-decided by their caste. Strict rules render a generational feature to the economic activities. Given that individuals are already aware of their destined occupations, they learn the ropes and master the skills from a young age, increasing the efficiency of the task. Fourthly, caste relieves a person from the worries of marriage, as it strictly suggests endogamy, especially in places where arranged marriages are still practiced (such as India). By restricting marital relations within a caste, the system also allows for maintenance of the ‘purity’ of castes and strengthening of the groups. Finally, caste determines the daily activities of an individual, ‘relieving’ them of having to decide for themselves.

Several theorists have used the structural-functionalism perspective to analyze the caste system. M.N. Srinivas, an Indian sociologist, John Henry Hutton, an English anthropologist, French anthropologist Louis Dumont, e tc., are a few whose works on caste reflect functionalism.

Caste from Symbolic Perspective :

The symbolic-interactionist perspective considers caste as composed of symbols that determine the interrelations between within a particular caste group, or the entire society. Because caste is a feature that is ingrained into a person and their lives from their very birth, there remains no part of an individual’s life left untouched by caste. In contemporary times these differences are more visible in rural areas than in urban areas, but their remnants are visible even in urban regions.

Religious practices are also divided according to castes. Similar to eating, practices and symbols of religious worship have also changed several times. Even though the rituals are significantly changed today, usually animal sacrifice, animism, etc., are practices of the ‘lower caste’. Offerings of flowers, fruits, sweets, etc., are ‘upper caste’. The caste system also homogenizes religious customs by disabling people from the so-called ‘lower caste’ to take part in rites of the ‘upper caste’.

Endogamy is the preferred choice of marriage but is rigid for upper castes, especially women, who cannot marry any person from the ‘lower’ castes. This is done to maintain the homogeneity of castes (and ‘purity’ for ‘upper castes’). Marriages are patrilocal, and families follow a patrilineal system of generational succession. Certain marriage rituals are also restricted from being used by a particular caste.

Regardless of castes, women are subjected to oppression and abuse by men. However, the so-called ‘lower caste’ women enjoy greater public freedom than the ‘upper caste’ women. ‘Upper caste’ women are expected to stay indoors and not take part in any economic activity which requires public exposure. Here, racism and colorism also enter the context, as a fairer skin is valued as ‘pure’, and therefore, by default, a characteristic of the ‘upper caste’, while darker skin, which is a hereditary feature and a clear outcome of working outdoors, is looked down upon as ‘lower caste’.

Caste from Conflict Perspective :

The feminist perspective, a sub-category of the conflict theory, contends that caste discrimination is felt the worst by women. In a patriarchal system, where women are already considered ‘inferior’ to men, caste adds to the problem by placing ‘low-caste’ women at the very of the hierarchy. ‘Upper caste’ men impose control over ‘upper caste’ women, who oppress and exploit ‘lower caste’ men and women, and ‘lower caste’ men exercise power over ‘lower caste’ women.

While each theoretical framework offers a unique way of understanding caste as a social issue, sociologists apply a comprehensive combination of all three viewpoints to approach any matter concerning the society.

SOCIOLOGISTS VIEW ON CASTE SYSTEM

Henslin, J. M. (2017). Sociology: A down-to-earth approach (pp. 2–33). Pearson Education.

Soumili is currently pursuing her studies in Social Sciences at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, focusing on core subjects such as Sociology, Psychology, and Economics. She possesses a deep passion for exploring various cultures, traditions, and languages, demonstrating a particular fascination with scholarship related to intersectional feminism and environmentalism, gender and sexuality, as well as clinical psychology and counseling. In addition to her academic pursuits, her interests extend to reading, fine arts, and engaging in volunteer work.

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Dr. Ambedkar and the Annihilation of the Hindu Caste System

Dr Ambedkar was the 20th century’s most influential Dalit leader. He drafted the Indian constitution and was a powerful critic of the Hindu caste system.

Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is often thought of as a jurist, economist, and social reformer. It is certainly hard to find many figures who can be said to have had a comparable influence in modern Indian history. However, above all, Ambedkar was an arch-critic of the Hindu caste system and a leader in the fight for Dalit liberation. Modern India cannot be understood without an appreciation of Ambedkar’s life and work. Read on to find out more about Dr. Ambedkar and his call for the annihilation of caste.

The Hindu Caste System Explained

The word “caste” was applied to the Hindu system of social stratification by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Derived from the Latin castus , in Portuguese, casta means “lineage”, “pure”, or “chaste”.

For well over one thousand years , South Asia has been governed by caste relations — also known as the Jati system. Simply put, caste — or Jati — refers to a system of vocational guilds that over time, have become organized in relation to principles of purity and impurity.

Each Jati — of which there are literally thousands — has its own norms of conduct (rules around marriage, social interaction, permissible food, occupation, etc.), and from each Jati follows a series of sub-castes.

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The caste system as it actually works on the ground is called Jati. However, each Jati also fits into the overarching hierarchy of the four-fold Varna system. The authority of Varna is derived from its codification in the Vedic-Brahmin Manusmriti (Laws of Manu) — one of Hinduism’s most holy books.

The Varna system outlines four castes, or savarna : Brahmins (priests; intellectuals); Kshatriyas (warriors; administrators); Vaishyas (farmers; traders); and Shudras (workers; laborers). Outcastes from the Hindu fold are those who do not belong to any varna ( avarna ): the Adivasi tribes of the subcontinent, and the Untouchables or, Dalits (“depressed” or “broken” people) who are seen to pollute Hindu society. As the lowest of the low, Dalits are assigned the most “unclean” tasks; the removal of waste; tending of funeral pyres; butchery, etc.

Accordingly, the Hindu caste system has two main aspects. On the one hand, men, women, and children are divided up into separate communities . On the other hand, these communities are placed in graded order, one above the other in social rank according to their Varna.

Agitate, Educate, Organize 

Born in 1891 to a Mahar family (an Untouchable caste), Ambedkar set out on a lifelong journey to agitate, educate, and organize against the injustice of the Hindu caste system.

Curiously, due to Ambedkar’s father being an officer in the British Army , he had been allowed to attend school. Nonetheless, despite this privilege, the actual experience served to acquaint the young Ambedkar with the viciousness of caste discrimination from an early age.

Throughout his school days, Ambedkar was segregated from the other children and forced to sit in a corner of the classroom by himself. If he was thirsty, he was forced to wait for the tap to be opened by a touchable person — lest he touch and pollute it. If such a person was unavailable, he would go without water.

Yet, despite considerable barriers, Ambedkar became the first from his community to complete high school education. He went on to gain a BA in Economics and Politics from Bombay University and later won a scholarship to study economics at Columbia University, New York City. He subsequently completed his doctoral studies at the London School of Economics.

After finishing his studies Ambedkar dedicated himself to the uplifting of the Dalit people for the rest of his life. Throughout the 1920s he led agitations, addressed conferences, and published in various journals. He founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (Group for the Wellbeing of the Excluded) and called for the mobilization of all Dalits against caste inequality. The motto of his organization was: agitate, educate, organize.

In 1926, Ambedkar famously led a march to exercise the right of the Untouchables to draw water from the Chavdar water tank at Mahad. The march ended with Ambedkar taking a ceremonial drink from the tank. In response, local Hindus rioted, and the local Brahmin community enacted an elaborate ritual purification of the tank. Throughout his life, Ambedkar’s desire to organize the oppressed never waned.

The Annihilation of Caste 

Dr. Ambedkars activism and his views on the Hindu caste system have been immortalized within his masterful critique, the Annihilation of Caste (1936). The Annihilation of Caste was first prepared by Ambedkar to be delivered as a speech to a society of Hindu reformers in Lahore. However, his critique of the Hindu caste system was considered so incendiary, that society rescinded his invitation to speak. Accordingly, Ambedkar self-published his speech as a book in May 1936.

Ambedkar’s speech opens with a volley of evidence on the daily tyranny practiced by Hindus against the Untouchables. Written approximately ten years before India would achieve its independence , the thrust of Ambedkar’s critique is that in its current state, Hindu society is unfit for political power.

To start with, Ambedkar points out that a significant proportion of the population — the Untouchables — are banned from using public schools, public wells, and public roads, eating certain foods, and dressing how they wish.

Economically, he claims that caste is a harmful institution. The subjects of the Hindu caste system are not allowed to choose their occupation freely, and by allowing no readjustment in occupation, caste becomes a direct cause of unemployment and underdevelopment.

In terms of politics, Ambedkar argues that caste disorganizes and demoralizes Hindu society. There is no Hindu consciousness for Ambedkar, only “a collection of castes, with their own anti-social caste interests”. Hindus, in this regard, are less a collection of castes as they are an assortment of warring factions — and no basis for a modern nation.

Accordingly, for Ambedkar, the annihilation of caste — and the destruction of belief in the sanctity of the sashtras (precepts and rules of the Hindu religion) — is an essential prerequisite if India is to become a modern, progressive, and moral nation.

Ambedkar and Gandhi 

The Annihilation of Caste aside, the 1930s was a controversial decade for Ambedkar. He was attacked by nationalists as a traitor and found himself frequently at odds with the Indian National Congress — in particular, with Mahatma Gandhi himself.

Gandhi objected to the Annihilation of Caste . But moreover, he profoundly disagreed with Ambedkar’s position on the issue of separate electorates and reserved seats for the Untouchables. When Ambedkar’s desire for separate electorates was granted by then British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award, Gandhi chose to fast until death

In the end, Ambedkar very reluctantly caved into the pressure and accepted Gandhi’s preferred choice of representation through joint electorates, and accordingly, Gandhi called off his fast. The result was the signing of the Poona Pact. Such was Gandhi’s popularity that Ambedkar faced an impossible choice. Nonetheless, he claimed to bitterly regret his decision for the rest of his life.

For Gandhi, the matter of a “separate electorate” was not political, but one of “pure religion.” The Untouchables according to Gandhi were “Harijans” (“Children of God”) and they were to be brought closer into the Hindu fold, as opposed to liberated from their chains.

Taken together, both Ambedkar and Gandhi looked toward a better future for the Untouchables. Where they differed, is that while Ambedkar believed in political power and self-determination, Gandhi advocated for the Hinduization of the Untouchables and respect for their position within Hindu society.

For Gandhi, the varna system was a just system of equal duties: the duties of a Brahmin and a Dalit carried “equal merit before God”. For Ambedkar, a dignified future lay in the annihilation of caste.

Ambedkar’s Legacy and the Hindu Caste System Today

Ambedkar played a pivotal role in the movement for Indian independence. After the fact, he headed the committee that drafted the Indian constitution and served as India’s first Minister of Law and Justice (1947-1951). Ambedkar was a member of Parliament from 1952 until his death in 1956.

Yet his bitterness toward the Hindu caste system and his position outside of it never diminished. Just a few months before his death, Ambedkar and approximately 500,000 of his followers converted to Buddhism in a mass public ceremony.

Ambedkar’s legacy has left a deep imprint on modern India. His initiatives, such as affirmative action policies and legal incentives for better treatment of “Scheduled Castes” (Dalits) remain intact. However, the interpretation of his legacy has been mixed.

On the one hand, legions of “Ambedkarites” remain faithful to Ambedkar’s critique. On the other hand, Hindu political parties — such as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — have worked to co-opt Ambedkar’s image, while erasing his foundational critique of the Hindu caste system from his legacy.

Today — over 75 years after India’s independence — the Hindu caste system remains firmly entrenched. Although the caste system was officially abolished in 1950, caste continues to organize the social life of modern India: the lowest strata of society are still forced to do the most dangerous, dirty, and menial jobs. Dalits are theoretically ensured certain rights and protections, but in reality, face daily social discrimination and caste-based violence.

Since the beginning of India’s democracy, caste has played a crucial role in politics . Major caste groups vie for political power, and caste is used as an instrument by politicians in need of votes. To be sure, Amberkarism is a living force in today’s modern India. Yet, as long as the Hindu caste system remains in place, the concept of the annihilation of caste will remain as relevant as ever.

Hinduism’s Controversial Origins: Primordial or Colonial?

By Scott Mclaughlan PhD Sociology Scott is an independent scholar with a doctorate in sociology from Birkbeck College, University of London.

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Essay on Caste System in India

List of essays on caste system in india, essay on caste system in india – for children (essay 1 – 250 words), essay on caste system in india – short essay on the caste system in india (essay 2 – 300 words), essay on caste system in india – for school students (class 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 standard) (essay 3 – 400 words), essay on caste system in india – introduction, types, effects and conclusion (essay 4 – 550 words), essay on caste system in india – origin, implications and solution (essay 5 – 600 words), essay on caste system in india – for college and university students (essay 6 – 800 words).

• Essay on the Caste System in India – Long Essay for Competitive Exams like IAS, IPS and UPSC (Essay 7 – 1000 Words)

The caste system in India is defined as the identification of a person as to from which family he belongs to. Since centuries, the caste system in India has been the basis of division among the Hindus. But, how has it affected society as a whole? Or how has it evolved over time is something which the students should definitely know about.

There are positives and negatives of everything including the caste system in India which should be known to the students. Therefore, we have come up with long essays for students along with some short essays so as to give them an insight on this ancient system of division of the society, prevalent even today.

Audience: The below given essays are exclusively written for school students (Class 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 Standard) and college students. Furthermore, those students preparing for competitive exams like IAS, IPS and UPSC can also increase their knowledge by studying these essays.

The caste system in India is one of the world’s oldest form of social stratification that is still surviving. Originally, the caste depended on a person’s work but it soon changed to hereditary. The caste system in India has been modified and evolved over the centuries by the rulers and those in power. There was a significant change in the caste system in India during the Mughal Raj and the British Rule. Although four primary castes were defined by Vedas – Brahmins, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Shudra, there are thousands of sub-castes and communities within the Indian society.

Independent India has banned any discrimination based on caste and in an attempt to correct the previous injustices against traditionally disadvantaged, the government has announced quotas in government jobs and educational institutions. It was meant to support scheduled castes and tribes but now it has transformed into a whole different issue. Many communities are fighting and protesting violently to be recognized as OBCs. And even though most of such communities are prospering, they still want the caste quota by claiming that they are poor and suffering.

This problem is exacerbated by politicians and media. During the times of election, politicians woo a particular caste block by offering them certain benefits and such. Even though, the support to unprivileged was necessary, it has now become a vote-grabbing exercise for politicians and a short-cut to gain quotas for some communities. Caste system in India has simply become a system to gain reservation and benefits when people are acquiring education or applying for jobs.

Caste System in India came into existence in the period of ancient times and it still holds a sturdy base in the Indian society. On the other hand, the Caste system in India might not be incorrect to tell that the mentality of people is also changing with the passing time.

People who are living in the urban areas that comprise of an educated section are overcoming the firm caste system in India that was established eras back. The modifications in our laws have also transformed our old Indian society into a modern one.

Law against Caste System in India:

The caste system in India was always criticized by everybody and numerous people volunteer to battle against it, however, such effort could not shake the base of this evil system. After India got freedom from the British, the constitution of India declared to place a prohibition on discrimination over the basis of the caste system in India. It was a clear and loud message to all such people who mistreated the lower caste people.

Introduction of the Reservation System:

The formation of law against the caste system in India was a smart step but one more decision i.e., introduction of the quota or the reservation system has shown to be damaging for our modern Indian society. In such a system, there are reserved seats for the lower caste people in the government jobs and in the education sector. Such type of system was introduced to raise the backward class’ standard of living.

But, it has turned into a reason of great worry in modern India. Owing to this quota system, numerous times the worthy contenders from the general group do not have an employment opportunity whereas the applicants from the scheduled tribe or scheduled caste acquire the same without being enough capable or skilled.

Conclusion:

The system of the caste system in India has already spoiled the image of the nation on various international levels. The caste system in India must be totally abolished in modern India for the country to prosperous growth and development.

Introduction:

One of the ugliest words of human races is Caste. Caste system in India is one of the unjustifiable acts of our ancestors. Caste system in India appeared in the Vedic ages itself and distinguished people based on their tribe, region, class, and religion. It is very similar to the concept of racism in Western Countries. Caste System is a huge hindrance to the development of a country and it stops a country from becoming an absolute empowered entity.

Meaning & Origin:

Jati or Varna are the two terms alternatively used in the place of Caste , which merely enhances the cruelty of the word usage. The four major hereditary castes prevalent in India are Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra . The scholars and the priests form the top most in this structure and are termed Brahmins. Kshatriyas are soldiers and political leaders while the Vaisya and Sudra’s are the merchants and servants respectively. They even had a sect of people not categorized in any of these called untouchables who were mostly janitors.

Negative Effects of Caste System in India:

Some of the negative impacts of the caste system earlier were that not all people can access the temple, take water from wells, and eat with lower caste people. Modern India still has the impacts but in a different way whereby occupation of a certain family is carried down and mobilizes the other sect of people to pick up jobs in that Job family. Inter-caste marriages and honor killings have become common. National development has gone downhill since Caste System still exists in India.

Government Reforms:

The upper castes usually treated the lower castes people as their slaves and mostly occupied the higher positions in all the institutions.To rectify the past unfairness effects of the Caste System in India, Government has introduced quotas and reservation systems thereby giving access to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to help them ramp up to positions that matter. Discrimination based on Caste System is a crime.

It is a common say that Caste System in India would’ve long gone if the politicians didn’t fan it up for their conveniences. Despite many reforms and government regulations it is unfortunate that caste system in India still exists. We as citizens must take cautious steps and uphold discrimination as a serious offense. Equality of human race regardless of their gender, tribe, race, colour and the Job they do is a must. Whilst we look out to human kind for the paradigm shift, it is necessary stricter rules apply when inequality shows up.

Caste system in India is a huge hindrance to the development of our country. During British rule, millions of lives were lost in the struggle for freedom, only to establish a society of equality. But their efforts seem fruitless due to the divide caused by caste system in India. Caste system in India is derived from the ancient Varna system. Varna means colours and denotes various races of people. As India is a country of many races having their own language, customs, traditions and dressing, caste system in India was introduced to celebrate the differences between castes and eliminate discrimination. However, the caste system in India only established a complete divide between each caste.

Different Types of Castes in India:

Initially caste system in India was based on the work a person did. Priests in the temples were called Brahmins and regarded highly in the society as they were close to God in work. Secondly, those who were involved in ruling the country, chiefs of army and warriors were called Kshatriyas and regarded next to Brahmins.

Caste system in India defined a third class of people called Vaishyas who were tradesmen, artists and farmers and made up the business class of the society. Below them came the Shudras, people who did manual work and were called labourers. There was a class even below Shudras, the Dalits which referred to people who did cleaning works.

Due to caste system in India, Dalits were regarded as untouchables by the other four castes. Since the kind of work done by a person determined his status in the society, as time went by, a priest’s son became a priest, a king’s son became the next ruler and so on and even before anybody realized, caste system in India was firmly established.

People retained the work line of their older generations to retain their identity in the society. Finally, caste system in India divided people into different classes of status and nobody could move up a class or down a class. It became hereditary and a child was labelled with the caste of his parents’ right at birth.

Effects of Caste System in India:

Caste system in India totally eliminated the freedom of choice of occupation and every person was forced to take up the occupation of his family. Its workings are against that of a democracy which preaches equal rights and opportunities to all while caste system in India inflicts discrimination based on status. Inter-caste marriages were considered immoral and unholy and even punished by death.

Marrying with sub-castes was also not allowed. This resulted in poor health of descendants as marrying within the family or with close relatives led to children being born with immunity disorders. Untouchability came into practise due to caste system in India.

Caste system in India is still prevalent; however, today the impact of caste has diminished subsequently due to education and modernization of the society. People of different castes live side-by-side and inter-caste marriages are encouraged and have become a norm. Still it is necessary that caste system in India is fully abolished in papers and in the minds of people to truly realize and experience democracy in the country. This is possible only when the educated members of the society join hands in denouncing orthodox beliefs that have been passed down from generation to generation and take measures against the caste system in India.

The origin of caste system in India can be traced back to the ancient times, more importantly the Mughal Empire. It is hard to pinpoint a specific era wherein the caste system in India became prevalent but it has been mostly seen that just when the Mughal era began to collapse, there was a strata of the society who rose to power and they started this segregation of people into several caste. The British rule farther strengthened the principle of caste system in India and thereby led to this vice getting a strong grip in the Indian society.

Let us check out more details pertaining to the caste system in India.

What is the caste system in India?

The caste system in India essentially refers to segregation of people on the basis of their race, lineage and breed. Therefore, this is the form of segregation wherein people are positioned not on the basis of talent or merit rather by their birth and descent.

The Origin of the Caste System in India:

There are different theories with regards to the origin of caste system in India. Some people believe that the caste system can be traced back to the divine origin. It is also perceived as an extension of the varna system because there are 4 varnas which are:

Brahmins – the top class

The Kshatriyas – the warrior section

The Vaishyas – the traders

The Shudras – the lowest caste

As it is believed that Shudras were made from Lord Brahma’s feet, they were designated to serve others and so they were not allowed to be at par with people of other caste.

Further, the segregation was also done on the basis of occupation. People who were employed doing dirty and filthy jobs were hailed to be untouchables and they were segregated from the upper caste and labelled to be the ones belonging to lower caste.

The Implications of Caste System in India:

There were several implications of the caste system in India. As per the dogma of the caste system, people hailing from the lower caste could only marry within their caste. They were not allowed access to temples and other religious buildings. At the same time, there was also restriction on their use of food and drinks. They were not allowed to touch the same vessels as the ones used by the members of the upper caste. It was believed that if a person from the lower caste would touch a vessel, the food would become polluted.

The treatment met out to members of the lower caste was so harsh that it led to scholars fighting for the need of reforms.

The Solution:

There were a lot of scholars who put forth their voice against the caste system in India. They fought for the need of reforms. Raja Ram Mohan Roy and even Mahatma Gandhi were phenomenal in their work. It is believed that it was with the right awareness that things started taking a turn for the good.

However, we are far away from reaching the state of equality. Even today, the fighting for the need of reforms still needs to go on.

Caste system in India still has its root firmly set. The lower segment of the society does not have easy access to all the facilities and they cannot walk with their head held high. It is important to create education and awareness campaign because such vices can cripple not just the society but the nation as a whole.

The youth needs to understand the futility of the concept behind the caste system in India and come forth with the right ideas to eradicate the problem once and for all.

The caste system in India has been prevalent in Hindus since ancient times. In fact, it has remained the main basis of division of the society and now is the main basis for reservation in education and jobs as well. But who laid down the principles of the caste system in India and what is it that this system has been followed as it is for centuries?

History of Caste System in India:

Early available evidence about the caste system in India shows up in the Vedas, Sanskrit-dialect writings from as back as 1500 BC, which is the base on which the Hindu scriptures rest. The Rigveda, from 1700-1100 BC, also makes reference to caste system in India and shows that social division was acceptable. The Bhagavad Gita, dated as back as 200 BC, also mentions the significance of caste. Likewise, the Laws of Manu or Manusmriti from a similar period characterizes the rights and obligations of the four unique castes or varnas. Therefore, it appears that the Hindu castes system in India started to set at some point somewhere in the range of 1000 and 200 BC.

The caste system in India was not an absolute reality during some part of Indian history. For instance, the prestigious Gupta Dynasty, which ruled from 320 to 550 BC, were from the Vaishya rank as opposed to the Kshatriya. Numerous later rulers likewise were from various caste system in India, for example, the Madurai Nayaks (1559-1739) who were Balijas, commonly known as dealers.

Divisions under the Caste system in India:

There are four major divisions of the caste system in India namely, the Brahmins which are considered as the priests, the Kshatriyas who take on the role of warriors and rulers, the Vaishyas who are the farmers, artisans and traders and lastly the Shudras who are servants and tenants.

The Significance of the Caste System in India:

Practices related with the caste system in India changed through time and crosswise over India, however, all have some regular features which are integral to the caste system in India. The three key everyday issues ruled by caste system in India are marriage, religious worship and meals.

Marriage crosswise over different castes was entirely prohibited in earlier times, a great many people even wedded inside their own sub-position or jati, although a lot has been changed now. Similarly, at feast times, anybody could acknowledge meals from the hands of a Brahmin, however, a Brahmin was not allowed to accept a meal from a lower caste. The lower castes, were in fact not allowed to even drain out water from particular wells which were meant for the upper castes. As far as religion, as the Brahmins managed religious ceremonies and other services related to the festivals as well as funerals. The Kshatriya and Vaisya ranks had all the rights to worship, yet in a few spots, Shudras were not permitted to offer their goods in the temples.

The Darker Side – The Untouchables of the Caste System in India:

Although widely it is considered that the Shudra were considered as the untouchables among the caste system in India, the reality, however, is that it was not the case in earlier times. The people who did not follow the social rules or did something which was not acceptable by the society were punished and termed as untouchables. They were considered as impure and were kept out of villages and had to do their chores themselves. They were not even allowed to eat with others and in fact, it is believed that they were not even cremated as per the rituals. However, with time, the untouchables went on to be referred to as the Shudras which created a divide and imbalance in the Hindu culture leading to frequent revolts by the Shudra for the claim to equality with others.

The caste system in India was originally built in order to divide the society as per the role in the development of the society. However, with time the upper castes started thinking of themselves as the superior ones and look down upon the lower castes with disgrace. But, with changing times, awareness among the people and initiatives by the Government things have started to change. Now, we see a lot many inter-caste and even faith marriages happening which was a prohibited act in earlier times.

Moreover, the Shudras are also allowed to enter the temples and there have been efforts to treat all as equal irrespective of their castes. This is in fact has been guaranteed to us in the Constitution of India as well. However, there are still places where the caste system in India in is practiced blindly and it is only through education that we can spread awareness among the people so as to treat all around them as equal and not to have a bias against person belonging to any particular caste system in India.

Essay on the Caste System in India – Long Essay for Competitive Exams like IAS, IPS and UPSC   (Essay 7 – 1000 Words)

Caste System in India: An Overview:

The caste system in India has been dominant since ancient ages. The caste system in India is supposed to be introduced to the Indian society by the Aryans. Even today, both rural and urban areas remain under the spell of the caste system in India. However, the obsession is much more intense in the rural areas.

The caste system in India divides the whole society into many sections. In other words, the caste system in India results in the social stratification of the people. Our ancient Vedas refer to the Chaturvarna system. Here, Chatur means ‘four’ and Varna means ‘color’. So, basically, the caste system in India relies on four main pillars (castes) in the typical Hindu culture.

People were categorized into these four castes depending upon their skin color. From higher to lower status in the society, the four major divisions of the caste system in India are Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra. As stated, Brahmins hold the superior most position in Hindu society whereas Shudras were considered to be the lowest, only above the Dalits.

According to the orthodox rules related to the caste system in India, people belonging to one of the four castes could only opt for a particular set of occupations. For instance, Brahmins were basically involved in the academic and priestly tasks. Kshatriyas were known to become Kings and soldiers.

Trading, farming, and merchant tasks were available to Vaishyas. And lastly, the manual labor was assigned to the Shudras. Dalits were considered so low that they were not even included in the caste system in India and were left with the heinous jobs of manual scavenging.

Factors Flourishing the Caste System in India:

If we look at the factors that have contributed to the caste system in India since the ancient time, the first one happens to be patriarchal mindset and superiority complex of a particular section. This type of caste system in India aided the Kings and priests (religious authorities) to exploit the lower sections and manipulate them to their benefits.

Strict adherence to old customs, traditions, and superstitious beliefs, such as the concept of reincarnation and deeds of past life etc., have played a vital role in nourishing the caste system in India. Even in modern times, such conventional practices exist on a large level in society.

Thanks to our politicians banking on the gullible nature of the Indian public, their political careers and election results thrive on the caste system in India. Indian politics has a significant part in the existence and flourishing of the caste system in India.

Lack of education indirectly strengthens the caste system in India. When people are not well educated, their mindset remains rigid and orthodox. They are never able to develop an inner power to question the unfair practices such as the caste system in India which has been going on for thousands of years.

Perilous Effects of Caste System:

The 18 caste system in India has paralyzed the country in countless ways. First of all, it’s a huge blot on the progressive, democratic, and developing image of India. The caste system in India is also a severe violation of the basic human rights of the citizens of India.

The caste system in India prevents a wholesome and uniform growth of the country. Due to the evil practice of casteism, some sections enjoy a lot of social and economic luxuries whereas other sections struggle for their survival.

Untouchability is one of the many outputs of the caste system in India. It is the most degraded form of human behavior that is practiced in our country. But that is just the tip of the Iceberg. For several years, unreported and unpunished atrocities and killings of the lower castes have been going on.

The unshakable caste system in India is the foundation of honor killings in our society. People are so adamantly attached to their castes that when a couple opts for an inter-caste marriage, their ultimate punishment is death. What a shame!

Even in the job sectors, the caste system in India contributes to so many disparities and partialities when it comes to providing equal opportunities to all the citizens of India. Those occupying high ranks in the offices, do not want people from other castes entering into the system. As a result of the caste system in India, the jobs are given on the basis of caste, not talent.

In the rural areas, the situation is worse. People belonging to lower castes are often stripped of their basic income. Their lands are snatched away from them. Due to the caste system in India, rapes, murders, lynching, and ostracized of particular sections are too common to file a report for.

Counteracting the Caste System in India:

After several amendments in the constitutional rights and resulting influence of human rights, the scenario of the caste system in India is finally changing. Huge credit goes to social reformers like Dr. B R Ambedkar and Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Mahatma Gandhi was also against the practice of untouchability and tried his best to end the caste system in India.

Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes have been given special protection in the legal system of India. Many laws have been created to stop any kind of discrimination on the basis of the caste system in India. The constitution has also abolished the shameful practice of untouchability.

Although it has been a controversial topic, the reservation system has been created for the backward classes, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes in the education and job sectors to help them progress.

There are acts that make it formidable to employ a person for the job of manual scavenging. To weaken the caste system in India, the constitution states reckless tortures and atrocities against the lower castes as criminal offenses.

To sum up, we can say that, our country is taking honest steps to end the caste system in India. Hopefully, in the coming years, the nation would be able to make a significant amount of progress in this context.

Caste System , Social Issues

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Holi And Caste System Argumentative Essay Example

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: Equality , Discrimination , Festival , Religion , Hinduism , Society , Democracy , India

Words: 1500

Published: 02/06/2020

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The caste system has been in existence for centuries in Asian countries such as India. The system involves placing individuals in occupational groups. The caste system is rooted in religion and is implemented based on labour division. It dictates the occupations an individual can pursue, as well as the kind of social interactions the person may engage in their lifetime. The caste system is only practised in the Hindu religion. The system has an order of hierarchy. Initially, there was no hierarchy but an order based on birth or occupation and personality. However, during the Holi event just before spring, people of Hindu religion get the chance to disregard the caste system and interact without respect to the caste. One can regard the Holi season as the pressure valve that gives the Hindu faithful a chance to forget about the caste system for a few days before the system’s rules come back into force and normalcy returns. The Holi is a famous event among the Hindu religion faithful that is held during the spring. The event involves celebrations indicating that it is a day of joy, playfulness, music and dance. The event is characterized by the throwing or spraying of colours around. Everyone who takes part in this annual event paints themselves with the colours. They go out on the streets carrying paint containers, gulal buckets- highly pigmented substances in powder form and water guns. The painting is done by anyone on everyone. The old paint the young and the vice versa. Employees also throw the paint at their bosses or top government officials in what is perceived to be a fair game. Holi is a great opportunity for the people in society who were regarded as the lowest group or rank to interact with the other people. The caste system in the Hindu religion is quite strict where people are expected to respect their senior groups. For instance, people in a lower caste are expected to respect people in a higher caste irrespective of age differences. Holi gives people in low castes the chance to interact with those people whom they may never interact with all year round. The caste system rules are quite unfair in that people at the bottom of the hierarchy cannot interact and learn from those at the top. Holi is that only chance to get close to the top members of the hierarchy and learn from them on various social and economic issues. The Holi event also provides a rear chance to see a society where equality is practised. The caste system is so strict that it prohibits equality from seeing the light of day. The society stays in a segregated form where only people perceived to be of the same class can interact. Therefore, the Holi enables the society to disregard this segregate trend and mingle. This boosts the esteem of the poor and low level members of the hierarchy. They feel good and proud to interact with their seniors, bosses and politicians. Generally, opinions indicate that the Holi is one of the happiest moments in India for those who are Hindu faithful. Therefore, the Holi is a welcome festival to demonstrate an equal society and forget about the discriminatory pressure in the society. Holi is also an opportunity for the Hindu faithful to celebrate their religion and other Indian cultures without the restrictions of the caste system. The caste system prohibits interaction between people of various age groups and backgrounds. However, the Holi festival is a chance for these people to celebrate the good times in the Indian religion and society without discrimination. The Holi festival is preceded by a celebration named the recreation of the Prahlad’s saving of the Vishnu. The burning of the Holika is a celebration that signifies the victory of Vishnu. This is an indication of the rich culture of the Hindu community. The Holi festival is a unifying factor in these celebrations as all people of the hierarchy will celebrate together and do the same things. Therefore, the Holi festival does away with the pressure of the caste system for the whole period it lasts as the Hindu community to celebrate its culture. The caste system has affected the economic progress of many Indians. Those who are regarded to be on the low end of the caste system hierarchy are always restricted in terms of economic progress. These people can rarely access the resources and connections enjoyed by the people on the top of the hierarchy. This has led to many people living in poverty simply because of this unhealthy socio-economic belief. The Holi is a celebration that symbolises the prosperity of good over bad. Therefore, it is an opportunity for the Hindu faithful to get away from the economic tension arising from the restrictions of the caste system. Several evil and bad things have been attributed to the caste system. For example, the poor are denied access to basic resources that enable them to make economic progress. However, the Holi celebration comes in as a break from these evil activities instigated by the caste system. During the Holi celebrations, people celebrate the prosperity of goodness over evil. They have the chance to stop practising the bad and demonstrate that they are good people and show unity and equality. For those affected by the caste system, they have the chance to enjoy the equality and happiness. The pressure and sadness that engulfs them during the rest of the year is relieved and they can feel appreciated and involved in important issues of religion and society. However, the Holi event cannot be regarded as the event that does away with the negative impacts of the caste system in the Hindu religion. The event has some disadvantages on the people, which are often overlooked when weighing the benefits of the Holi event. The Holi event lasts for only two days on the Indian calendar just before the spring. This is a very short time for people to witness the fruits of equality. The event comes right in between the prevalence of the casts system. It is just a break from the ever-present caste system. What the Hindu society needs is the end of the caste system and not the Holi event. The Holi does not make Indians any better because immediately after the event, the caste system is back in full force. Therefore, the people who live in poverty remain poor. Furthermore, the Holi festival has recently been subject to various negative incidents. The colours used to paint each other in the streets have recently been said to cause colour poisoning. This is because of the chemicals contained in the colour. This leads to eye damage, as well as allergic skin reactions. For the rich and other members of the upper caste, they are lucky because they have the resources to seek medical treatment. However, the less privileged will suffer because they will have extra expenses to cope with yet they are already financially strained. Therefore, the Holi can be viewed as a celebration whose impact is not permanent. Even though people enjoy the moments of equality and unity, the aftermath is devastating. The poor remain poorer while the rich continue living comfortably. Furthermore, the Holi festival is just an event that does provide consolation rather than solutions to the caste system in India. The caste system is a cruel system that has crippled the socioeconomic systems in the Hindu community. There should be radical actions to be taken to do away with the system and promote equality in society. The Holi is an event that masks the real problem rather than expose or solve it. It does not ease any pressure on the socioeconomic setup in the country. In conclusion, the Holi is regarded as an event that promotes goodness over evil and bad deeds. People of all backgrounds are able to interact comfortably in the streets smeared in colour. This offers break from the devastating caste system that has crippled the caste system in India. People can relate without fear of being segregated. Therefore, the Holi is a pressure valve that saves the people from the caste system for a few days before normalcy returns. All in all, it is an event that gives people of all backgrounds the chance to interact and enjoy as an equal society. However, the event does not give immediate solutions to the problems caused by the caste system. It simply acts as a consolation to these people.

Chandra, R. (2005). Identity And Genesis Of Caste System In India. New Delhi: Gyan Books. Leigh, A. (2003). A Primary Source Guide to India. New Delhi: The Rosen Publishing Group. Morrill, A. (2009). Easter, Passover, and Other Spring Festivals. New York: Infobase Publishing. Oman, J. C. (2003). Religious Festivals and Caste System in India During 19th Century. Mumbai: Khama Publishers.

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Essay Service Examples Sociology Caste System

Critical Analysis of Caste System In Ambedkar's “Annihilation of Caste”

Table of contents

Issues relating to the caste system:, grounds for the defense of caste system, effects of caste system on hindus itself, why hindus are bound to the caste system why they don’t show the courage to destroy it, the solution to eradicate caste system:.

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• Caste is a system in which the determination of position, rights, and duties of an individual is done on the basis of the birth of such individual in a particular group. In other words, we can say that the status of an individual is determined by birth. As we have evidence of the Varna system in Hinduism which divides its society into 4 classes or castes the upper is Brahmins including priests and intellectuals. They themselves claim to have all good qualities like honesty, integrity, cleanliness, purity, austerity, knowledge, and wisdom. They are assigned to spiritual tasks like teaching and studying Vedas, perform sacrifices and religious ceremonies, etc. Then after Brahmins, Kshatriyas were the warriors, police, and administrators basically protectors of society. They are expected to show considerable strength of body and character. Then Vaishyas, were farmers, merchants, and business people. Their duty is to protect animals and the land, to create wealth and prosperity, and to give taxes to the Kshatriyas. The lowest class are the Shudras, consisting of artisans and workers. They have to render service to the other upper class above them.
• Under the caste system an individual is not allowed to change its status for instance, in November 1935 some untouchable women of village Zanu in Ahmedabad started fetching water in metal pots which was considered as one of the luxury items, this enraged the upper caste Hindus and they assaulted the untouchable women for their shamelessness. This means that untouchables cannot have access to any luxury items even if he/she can afford to buy it as this was considered as an affront to their dignity.
• We can say that it is the rigid form of stratification system, which restrict the mobility and distinctness of status. Due to the caste system, several evil prevails in the society and the untouchables were subjected to oppression for instance oppressed untouchables in Maratha under Peshwas. They were being made to attach brooms on their waists so that used paths by them could be clean by the broom in order to stop Hindus from being polluted. They had to carry an earthen pot hung in their neck so that they could spit in.
• Caste system leads to untouchability. The caste system has condemned large groups of people to a life of degradation without any hope of redemption. It has created untouchables, an evil that has been sapping the very vitals of society. This untouchability is reduced to the state of natural slavery and hindered the growth of brotherhood; holding off the national unity as it disallowed any type of social intercourse. As BR Ambedkar rightly said, ‘untouchability of Hindus is a rare phenomenon, humanity in any other part of the earth has never experienced it. There is no such thing in any other society. It restricts the growth of brotherhood among people and also it holds off national unity and creates obstacles to social progress. According to Mahatma Gandhi, untouchability is the hate fullest expression of caste. There is an anti-social spirit in Hindus because of the caste system. This anti-social spirit is not confined to caste alone but can be seen in sub-castes as well. For instance, Brahmin’s foremost concern is to avoid interaction with other groups as those of non- Brahmins and non- Brahmins' foremost interest is to avoid any interactions or social gatherings with Brahmins. This led to a lack of brotherhood among Hindus. Till the caste system prevails Sanghatan(unity) would be impossible among Hindus. For instance, a Hindu would never come to rescue a Hindu as they lack fellow feeling and also the reason in difference due to caste. On the other hand, a Muslim and a Sikh would come to rescue their brothers respectively because they have fellow feelings in them.
• Caste system denies equal rights of the individual, that’s why it is considered as undemocratic. As Ambedkar himself said, “If i find the constitution being misused, i shall be the first one to burn it”.Democracy is based on principles of equality, fraternity, and liberty.On the other hand, the caste system is based on inequality of status and opportunities, which often creates conflict and tension in society. It acts as an obstacle in the normal and smooth functioning of democracy. No doubt India has got political freedom but it must be the concern of every individual that real freedom cannot be cherished without the attainment of social and economic democracy. It is unfortunate that the Indian society is sharply divided into various castes and sub-castes which acts as a barrier due to rigidity and division of society based on caste consideration.
• Disintegrating Factor: The caste system has literally split up the society into hundreds of hereditary caste and subcastes and encouraged a spirit of exclusiveness and class pride, narrowed the outlook, and created wide gaps between the various sections of the community. The caste system resulted in a lot of evils because of its rigid rules. It perpetuates the exploitation of the economically weaker and socially inferior caste. For instance, we have evidenced in the text the oppression by Hindus to the Balais, the untouchable community. Hindus asked the Balais that if they wanted to live with them they have to obey certain rules. These rules were discriminatory to a large extent, like they couldn’t wear dhotis with colored or fancy borders, couldn’t wear gold-lace bordered purees, in Hindu marriages, balais must play music, they must render services without demanding their income, etc. And if they disobey any rules they were kicked out of the villages. Also, Balais had no access to the land and wells which were surrounded by Hindus even they didn’t have access to their lands. After continued oppression and being persecuted by their upper castes they submitted petitions to darbar but didn’t get any relief and were finally compelled to leave their homes. The caste system protects the privileged caste and thus, builds up economic discontent and social prejudices. A person born in one caste was doomed to remain in it forever, and keep a check on economic and intellectual advancement and a great stumbling block in a way of social reforms because it keeps economic and intellectual opportunities confined to a certain section of the population only and denies them to other. For example, Shudras and untouchables had to perform all the menial tasks. They could not do anything for their own development even if they afford to do so. The worst thing is that they could not have access to education as they cannot be permitted to devote themselves to any educational or scientific profession, even when they have natural aptitudes and physical and intellectual equipment for it. A worthy and capable person are prevented by caste rigors from getting their proper and rightful places, even there next generation has to follow the same rigidness of the caste system, and they too remain closed slaves and bonded laborers. The caste system however is guilty of just the opposite demerit. It does not make proper provision for low-born talents or high-born incompetence.
• Barred to religious practices: As far as Hinduism is concerned the lower caste people were not even allowed to touch the holy scriptures and they were devoid to enter temples. They were even not allowed to recite or hear the Vedas. They couldn’t make sacrifices as Brahmans could do. Everyone was compelled to abide by these rules when the penal system came into effect as there was a requirement of the penal system to maintain Chaturvarnya (a division of society into four classes). For example, we evidenced in the text that Manu-smriti prescribes such heavy sentences as cutting off the tongue or pouring of molten lead in the ears of the Shudra, who recites or hears the Veda.
• Origin of caste system: It is difficult to establish when the caste system originated, but there is no doubt that the institution of caste for the convenience of the ruling class leading to their successful administration by them. There are different theories about the establishment of the caste system. These are Religious mystical, Biological, Socio- historical theories.
• On the basis of the profession: The caste system is being defended on the basis of labor but in reality, it is the division of laborers as Ambedkar asserted that the ‘caste system is not merely division of labor. It is also a division of laborers. It means that the laborers are graded as one above the other, but this stratification is not based on the innate capabilities of an individual but rather based on the social status or social background of his family and this stratification based on the occupation has harmful effects. According to Ambedkar unemployment in our country which exists at a high rate is the result of the caste system. A Hindu is not free to change his occupation according to his changing circumstances. For instance, if a Hindu remains to starve because of his financial condition and he aspires of a better occupation that does not belong to his caste, then he has to abandon his desires. So, this division of labor is based on the division of choice and individual preferences and desires nothing matters as they are bound by the caste system. There is no efficiency in a system where neither men’s heart nor their minds are in their work. So caste proved to be pernicious for economic organization.
• On a biological basis: Some defenders defend the caste system biologically in order to preserve their blood and race but even ethnologists have claimed that men of pure blood and race does not exist anywhere in the world. The caste system was said to preserve the mixture of races but in fact, the caste system came into effect long after the mingling of blood and culture of different races. Ambedkar claimed his argument by asking several questions for instance, what racial difference we find in the untouchables of Madras and untouchables of Punjab? What racial difference is between the Brahmin of Madras and Pariah of Madras? The untouchable of Punjab and madras are of the same race and Brahmin of Madras and Pariah of madras are of the same race Caste system is negative as it prohibits intermarrying of different castes just to preserve their purity but what’s the problem in interdining between different castes as it cannot impure the blood. So-called superior Hindus By claiming the caste system as based on eugenics is just an excuse in order to preserve their superiority and social status. Even scientists have claimed the caste system based on eugenics a futile or worthless argument.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Brave New World — The Caste System in Brave New World

The Caste System in Brave New World

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Overview of the caste system, impact on individual lives, impact on society, comparison to real-world caste systems.

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