¹ Marx, Karl, Selected Works (2 vols., New York, International Publishers, n.d.) II, 415Google Scholar.

² Ibid., pp. 414–415.

³ Ibid.

⁴ See Erdman, Howard L., “India's Swatantra Party,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 36 (Winter, 1963–1964), pp. 394–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the political role of India's feudal classes. For its business classes see Lamb, Helen B., “Indian Business Communities and the Evolution of an Industrial Class,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 28 (06, 1955), pp. 101–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gadgil, D. R., Origins of the Modern Indian Business Class (New York, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1959)Google Scholar. For India's social and political development see Misra, B. B., The Indian Middle Classes: Their Growth in Modern Times (London, Oxford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Heimsath, Charles, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McCully, Bruce T., English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1940)Google Scholar. For industrial development see Anstey, Vera, The Economic Development of India (4th ed., London, Longmans, Green, 1952)Google Scholar; Venkatasubbiah, H., Indian Economy Since Independence (Bombay, Asia Publishing House, 1961)Google Scholar; and Myers, Charles A., Labor Problems in the Industrialization of India (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Weiner's, MyronThe Politics of Scarcity (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar, provides a useful analysis of interest groups in Indian politics.

See the Government of India, Central Statistical Organization, Department of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of the Indian Union, 1961 (Delhi, Manager of Publications, 1961)Google Scholar, for particulars on the distribution of national income among sectors of the economy. Agriculture, not including Forestry and Fishing, accounted for 46.8 per cent of National Income in 1959–60. See p. 21.

⁵ See for example, Mitrany, David, Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism (New York, Collier Books, 1961)Google Scholar.

⁶ Marx, II, “Brumaire,” p. 419.

⁷ For a discussion of the structures, processes and roles which link the society and culture of the locality in India with that of its civilization, see Singer, Milton, “The Social Organization of Indian Civilization,” Diogenes, 45 (Spring, 1964), pp. 84–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It surveys and integrates the relevant monographic literature, particularly the work of Singer himself, M. N. Srinivas, Bernard S. Cohn and McKim Marriott.

⁸ For India's modern constitutional history see Coupland, Reginald, The Indian Problem, Report on the Constitutional Problem in India (London, Oxford University Press, 1944)Google Scholar.

⁹ Marx, Karl, Selected Works, II, “The British Rule in India,” p. 652Google Scholar (underlining mine).

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 658.

¹¹ “The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins,” he observes. “Neverheless it has begun.” Ibid.

¹² Ibid., pp. 658–660.

¹³ Marx quoting Chapman, The Cotton and Commerce of India, ibid. at page 661 (underlining mine).

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 661–662.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 660.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 661.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 654–655.

¹⁸ See Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, “The Political Role of India's Caste Associations,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 33 (03, 1960), pp. 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

^18a See below, section IV, for the Vanniyars. Although the Nadars and the Vanniyars are Madras (southern India) castes, developments similar to those detailed here can be found in other states and regions of India. Some indication of them in Gujarat (western India) is given in the discussion of the Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha, also in section IV, below. Nirmal Kumar Bose deals with two Bengali (eastern India) caste associations, of the Yogi, and the Namasudra, , in “Some Aspects of Caste in Bengal,” in Singer, Milton, ed., Traditional India (Philadelphia, 1959), pp. 199–200Google Scholar. William Rowe has explored the history of caste associations among two castes distributed throughout northern India, the Noniya, and the Kayastha, , in “The New Cauhans: A Caste Mobility Movement in North India,” in Silverberg, J., ed., Social Mobility in Caste in IndiaGoogle Scholar (forthcoming) and “Mobility in the Caste System,” a paper delivered at the Conference on Social Structure and Social Change, University of Chicago, June 3–5, 1965. For social and cultural change at the local level among the Chamars, an extensive “untouchable” caste found primarily in Uttar Pradesh, see Cohn, Bernard S., “The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste,” in Marriott, McKim ed., Village India (Chicago, 1955)Google Scholar and “Changing Traditions of a Low Caste,” in Milton Singer, op. cit. above. Lynch, Owen M., “The Politics of Untouchable,” another paper at the University of Chicago Conference, 06 1965Google Scholar, above, describes the origin and changing ideology and functions of Chamar caste association in Uttar Pradesh. Robert J. Miller dealt with the Mahars, a numerous “untouchable” caste of Maharashtra (western India), in “Button, button … Great Tradition, Little Tradition, Whose Tradition,” mimeo., University of Wisconsin, 1 March 1965.

Returning to the South, two well established and powerful caste associations represent the Nairs and the Ezhavas in Kerala, while in Mysore the Lingyats and the Okaligas are well organized and highly influential.

¹⁹ Thurston, Edgar, Castes and Tribes of Southern India (7 vols., Madras, Government Press, 1909), VI, 365Google Scholar.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., pp. 365–366.

²² Ibid., p. 367.

²³ Ibid., p. 369.

²⁴ There are two Nadar Caste Associations, the Nadar Maha Jana Sangam of Madurai and the Dakshina Mara Nadar Sangam of Tirunelveli. The Nadar Maha Jana Sangam, the larger and more influential of the two, has organized annual Nadar conferences since 1910.

²⁵ Thurston, op. cit., VI, 355.

²⁶ Sankaralinga Nadan v. Rajeswara Dorai, Indian Law Reports, 31 Madras 236 (1908). The quotations below are all drawn from this report of the case.

²⁷ For a discussion of the critiques of the Madras High Court, particularly its Brahmanic bias, see Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, “Barristers and Brahmans; Legal Cultures and Social Change,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (12, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ 163 U. S. 537 (1896). “If one race,” the Court observed, “be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.” “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument [that by enforcing segregation between whites and negroes the states were denying the equal protection of the laws assured by the Fourteenth Amendment] to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” (p. 551).

²⁹ Thurston, op. cit., VI, 364.

³⁰ Census of India, 1921, Vol. XIII, Madras (Part I) Report (Madras, Superintendent, Government Press, 1922), p. 153Google Scholar, note. The relevant Government Orders are: Government of Madras, Law (General) Department, G.O. No. 56, dated 8 April 1921 and G. O. 785, 7 July 1921. Circulars No. 4 and No. 5 of the Nadar Maha Jana Sangam contain the instructions of the caste association to its followers concerning the responses to be given to census enumerators. Census Commissioner Boag's description and analysis of changes in caste names generally on pp. 153–155 of Vol. XIII is particularly instructive for the shift from Shanan to Nadar. I wish to thank Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. for his help in obtaining the texts of the relevant G.O.s and the Sangams circulars and the Nadar Maha Jana Sangam for its courtesy in making its archives available to him.

³¹ Census of India, 1921, Vol. XIII, Madras, p. 154.

³² See Man in India, Vol. 39, No. 2 (04–June 1959)Google Scholar, particularly McKim Marriott's “Interactional and Attributional Theories of Caste Ranking,” for discussions of the relationship between caste mobility and caste ranking. Marriott is critical of Srinivas for being too “attributional.” For Srinivas', views see his Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (Bombay, Asia Publishing House, 1962)Google Scholar. Milton Singer in his “… Indian Civilization …,” Diogenes, tries to accommodate both views but suggests that Marriott may have overstated the case against attributional ranking. See particularly the sections on “Sanskritization and Cultural Mobility,” “… Attributes vs. Interactions in Caste Mobility” and “Westernization and Sanskritization,” pp. 99–108.

The case of the Shanans who became Nadars seems to suggest that the study of caste ranking, like the study of social change generally, has not paid enough attention to middle sector analysis, which examines change as it occurs in the social space between village and jati on the one hand and society and varna on the other and takes several generations as its relevant time span. It is less (narrowly) behavioral and philosophical, more historical and sociological, initsideasand methods.

How much and in what ways the Shanans' changing social standing was reflected over time in village consciousness and behavior is not yet entirely clear. Because their rise was accompanied by increasing wealth and education, decreasing pollution and the emulation and appropriation of high caste behavior and symbols, it seems reasonthey would, and has not developed revolutionable to assume that locally the Shanans' change of name and status was in considerable measure recognized over time by appropriate changes in the evaluations and behavior of non-Shanans of all ranks and castes.

³³ See L. Rudolph and S. H. Rudolph, “Caste Associations,” op. cit., passim.

³⁴ The caste association can be viewed as both an independent and dependent variable in the processes of decompression and deparochialization. A few studies that highlight these processes are F. G. Bailey, who describes how the extension of the economic and political frontier (by which he means primarily the State administration) has liberated several castes, particularly the Boad Outcastes, from the social, cultural and governmental authority of the village of Bisipara: Caste and the Economic Frontier (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; T. Scarlett Epstein, who shows how in the “dry” village of Dalena (but not in the wet one of Wangala) in Mysore, radical economic change led to its integration into the regional economy, undermined the principle on which its society was organized (p. 325) and displaced ritual by economic aspects of prestige (p. 334): Economic Development and Social Change in South India (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; and William S. Rowe, who has shown how the Noniyas, an aggressively upward mobile caste of Senapur, loosened the hold of the village's dominant caste by building a school with tiles purchased outright from a potter's village adjacent to Banaras twenty-five miles away: “Changing Rural Class Structure and the Jajmani System,” Human Organization, Vol. 22 (Spring, 1963.)Google Scholar For the concept of empathy, its role in modernization and its relation to communication, see Lerner, Daniel, Modernizing the Middle East; The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, 1958)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 1 and 2.

^34a M. N. Srinivas, op. cit., chs. 1–3.

³⁵ The burden of Edward Shils' argument in The Intellectual Between Tradition and Modernity; The Indian Case (The Hague, Mouton, 1961)Google Scholar, seems to me to be consistent with these thoughts.

³⁶ Express (Chittoor), 03 7, 1962Google Scholar. I should like to acknowledge the very helpful extensive and detailed articles of the Expresss's Special Correspondent, M. Mohan Ram, on the 1962 election in North Arcot, Salem, Tiruchirapalli, Tanjore and South Arcot Districts; see the Express (Chittoor) for March 7, 15, 17, 20 and 21, 1962Google Scholar, upon which much of the analysis below is based.

³⁷ For an analysis of it and Dravidian politics generally, see Rudolph, Lloyd I., “Urban Life and Populist Radicalism; Dravidian Politics in Madras,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 20 (05, 1961), pp. 283–297CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Express (Chittoor), 03 21, 1962Google Scholar.

³⁹ For the Kalians, Parumali-nadu see Dumont's, LouisUne Sous-Casle de L'Inde du Sud; Organisation Sociale et Religieuse des Pramalai Kallar (Paris, Mouton, 1957)Google Scholar; for Kalians generally see Thurston, , Castes, III, 53–91Google Scholar; for Maravans, , Thurston, , Castes, V, 22–48Google Scholar; and for the Agamudiar, Thurston, , Castes, I, 5–16Google Scholar. The link among these castes is older than the present beginnings of political federation. They share common mythological ancestors (see Thurston, , Castes, I, 7Google Scholar for two versions of the Agamudiar creation myth) and a common mobility pattern in traditional society. “There is a Tamil proverb,” Thurston writes, “to the effect that a Kalian may become a Maravan. By respectability he may develop into an Agamudiyan, and, by slow degrees, become a Vellala, from which he may rise to be a Mudaliar.” Ibid. Vellala and Mudaliar are traditionally ranked above Agamudiyan.

⁴⁰ W. H. Morris-Jones' analysis of the “languages of politics” and of the “dialogue” between government and political forces have been very helpful for the formulation and statement of the argument here. See his The Government and Politics of India (London, 1964)Google Scholar, ch. 2, “Politics and Society” and ch. 6, “The Ordering Framework” for these two ideas.

⁴¹ The discussion below is based in part on an interview with Mr. Ramanchandran, MLA, Chief Whip of the Congress Party in the Madras Assembly. He is in no way responsible for my judgments.

⁴² Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming). Myron Weiner's excellent study “Segmentation and Political Participation: Kaira District, which came into my hands too late to be taken into account in this text, also deals with the [Gujarat] Kshatriya Sabha. His analysis complements and sharpens that of Kothari and Maru.

⁴³ The new identity and organization brings within its fold a fairly broad social spectrum ranging “from Rajputs who are highest in the Kshatriya hierarchy to Bhils who are semi-tribal, with Bariyas middle on the way.” Kothari and Maru, “Secularism,” pp. 7–8.

⁴⁴ See Srinivas, op cit., ch. 2, “A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization.”

⁴⁵ Kothari and Maru, “Secularism,” p. 55.

⁴⁶ For America, see Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday Anchor, 1960)Google Scholar; Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, M.I.T. and Harvard University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; and Gordon, Milton M., Assimilation in American Life; The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins (New York, Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For a recent critical view of social pluralism as it has hardened and subordinated itself to bureaucratic leadership, see Kariel, Henry, The Decline of American Pluralism (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Kariel is so concerned that he “would have us move … from the much celebrated ideal of Tocqueville toward the still unfashionable one of Rousseau.”

Gordon, Milton in Assimilation in American Life (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, mounts an impressive case for the rigid compartmentalization of American communal life at the rank and file level. Lipset, S. M., Trow, Martin and Coleman, James in Union Democracy; The Inside Politics of the International Typographical Union (Glencoe, 1956)Google Scholar, examine the rigidities and bureaucratic domination of union and professional associations by analysing the exceptional case. Hughes, Everett C. in Men and Their Work (Glencoe, 1958)Google Scholar, suggests how occupational associations in America, like castes in India, upgrade themselves by changing their names and histories and purify themselves and their rituals by emulating “higher” occupational groups in the matter of educational requirements, licensing standards and ceremonial niceties. John R. Murphy's “Professional and Occupational Licensing: A National Problem with State Control,” a term paper in Government 155a, Government Regulation of Industry, Harvard University, 1959–60, along with Hughes' analyses, suggested these comparisons with caste mobility in India.

For social and political statements of the viability and benefits of social pluralism based on individuality, voluntarism and liberty, see Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960)Google Scholar and Truman, David B., The Governmental Process; Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York, 1951)Google Scholar.

Kariel and Lipset, Trow and Coleman emphasize the inability of members of formally voluntary associations, like peasants in Marx's analysis, to represent and rule themselves; therefore they fall victim to the executive power (the bureaucracy). Whyte, William H. Jr., in The Organization Man (New York, 1956)Google Scholar, while not ignoring structural factors, emphasizes the ways in which formally voluntary organizations absorb and tend to monopolize the affective life and identities of their members and their families.

⁴⁸ See Maquet, Jacques J., The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda (London, Oxford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar. For the genocide charge see Keesing's Contemporary Archives, Vol. 14 (1963–1964), pp. 20085–86Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ For Walloon-Flemish differences in Belgium see Mandel, Ernest, “The Dialectic of Class and Region in Belgium,” New Left Review, No. 20 (Summer, 1963), pp. 2–31Google Scholar; Keesing's Contemporary Archives, Vol. 13 (1961–1962), pp. 17968, 18391, 18623, and 18941Google Scholar and Vol. 14 (1963–1964), p. 19601. For the differences in Canada between the French Catholics and English Protestants see the Preliminary Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Ottawa, 1965)Google Scholar. The Commission warned that Canada was undergoing “the greatest crisis in its history.” (p. 13). See also Wilson, Edmund, O Canada (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ See Lipset, S. M., “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” this Review, Vol. 53 (March, 1959)Google Scholar for a proposition and supporting evidence which strongly suggest that democracy should be an utter failure in India. On almost every statistical measure of the “requisites of democracy” (per capita income, literacy, industrialization and urbanization) India stands at or near the bottom, yet it is a democracy. Lipset derides those who use a deviant case to challenge the validity of the notion that there are “social conditions which are regularly associated with a given complex political system” (p. 70) such as democracy. Theoretical propositions “must be subject to test by a systematic comparison of all available cases …” A deviant case, according to Lipset, is properly treated as one out of many. Only woolly minded and unscientific political philosophers would argue that “a given situation clearly violates [a] thesis …” (p. 70). Yet Lipset, in selecting his cases on the basis of “whether a country had had a history of more or less free elections for most of the post-World War I period” (pp. 73–74) does not consider India, although she meets the test. It seems reasonable to question, therefore, whether all available cases have been considered. It also seems reasonable to inquire whether it is valid to treat this deviant case “as one case out of many.” In the name of aggregative characteristics of systems and multivariate analysis of causality, we are asked to treat the experience of India's almost 500,000,000 people as equivalent to that of the smallest Latin American “nation.”

Lipset himself, drawing upon Weber, suggests an alternative theory of cumulative causation (see below) to explain the existence and persistence of democracy, but unfortunately abandons it in favor of aggregative social characteristics, on the basis of what seems at best a marginal and at worst a meaningless distinction between the “social conditions” which “support” democracy and the “internal mechanisms” which “maintain” it. It would seem that both theories deserve a place in the sun: the theory of cumulative causation explains better the supports for and the continued existence of democracy in India, while the aggregative social conditions theory, which Lipset advances as a general theory, does not. This suggests that the Indian case may very well be a “universe” unto itself rather than “one case out of many.” A general theory would then have to “explain” the Indian case and the cases with which Lipset deals. Instead, Lipset claims to deal with all cases but does not do so and treats, by implication, “universe” differences as “deviant” cases.

The theory of cumulative causation would explain the support and maintenance of democracy by proposing that “… unique events may account for either the persistence or the failure of democracy in any particular society … key historical events … set one process in motion in one country, and a second process in another … once established, a democratic political system gathers momentum …” (p. 72). Lipset warns us, in the light of this line of analysis, not to “overstress” the high correlations he displays between democracy and his measures for requisites. He also allows that what he calls “premature” democracies which survive will do so by “facilitating the growth of conditions conducive to democracy …” But his choice of examples here, universal literacy and autonomous private associations—presumably not ones based on caste—highlight his bias toward certain “modern” aggregative social characteristics as the requisites of democracy. The Indian “universe” radically contradicts Lipset's view (as it does Marx's) but supports the abandoned theory of cumulative causation.

⁵¹ Morris-Jones, op cit., ch. 2.

⁵² Democracy in America (Anchor, ed.), II, 173, 175–6Google Scholar.

⁵³ Op. cit., note 35 above, p. 70.

⁵⁴ Democracy in America, ibid.

⁵⁵ “Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma; Their Bearing on Economic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries,” World Politics, Vol. 11 (10, 1958), pp. 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ This is more apparent at the national and state than at the local level of government. The literature on village factionalism and the failures of panchyati raj suggest that oppression, license and might in some localities are stronger than authority, liberty and right. But much of this literature reflects an administrative not a political view. A recent study by Adrian C. Mayer sees the problem rather differently. He finds that “caste ties help a leader to gain power in the rural committee system; but that his allocation of development funds does not unduly favor supporters of his own caste …. His favours may stem from the influence he has with officials and politicians as a leader of the rural system; but the favours do not form part of that system, while his allocation of development funds does. Hence, the rural leader controls the committee system and the attached development allocation as much to attain the external benefits (for which the system provides the springboard) as to hold power within the system.

“Community development is therefore a factor in rural politics; but its role is part of a much wider process, in which rural leaders are asserting themselves in a changing balance of general political power. For rural leaders are using the influence which they are gaining as brokers outside the rural system to compete for power with the incumbent, mainly urban-oriented, politicians of the national parties.” “Some Political Implications of Community Development in India,” Arch. Europ. Sociol. Vol 4 (1963), p. 106Google Scholar.

This headline from the Statesman of June 19, 1961, CASTE HIERARCHY DECLINES, AS CASTEISM RISES, sums up some of the case for the modernity of tradition through the democratic incarnation of caste.