Caste in scholarship: religion, politics, and economy

The question of what makes caste appear or disappear from view is not new. Indeed, a considerable part of anthropological scholarship on caste over the past half-century has been given over precisely to debating the conditions of knowledge about caste. In his ambitious book, Homo Hierarchicus, Louis Dumont (Reference Dumont1980) insisted that the reality of caste could only be known at the ideological level, the empirical multitude of in-marrying groups, or jatis, acquiring coherence in terms of the complementary hierarchy of ‘the pure’ and ‘the impure’ that, as a pre-eminent value, ‘encompassed’ matters of power and politics, just as Brahman priesthood hierarchically encompassed Kshatriya rulership in the ancient varna classification. The reality of caste was not to be grasped in the realm of politics or economics.

Critics of this ontological rendering of caste folded into Brahmanic ideology were no less insistent that caste came into reality as an ideological effect reordering a complex empirical reality, but this time—as Nicholas Dirks sets out in his book, Castes of Mind (2001)—an effect of the British colonial system of knowledge that produced caste as India's ‘traditional’ religious and ritual order. Dirks maintained that caste became the quintessential colonial idea of Indian civil society through the imposition of an orientalist idea onto diverse forms of identity and community, masking the true ‘political struggle and processes’ of caste as a product of the colonial encounter (Dirks Reference Dirks2001, 11).

While nationalist notions of Indian civilization continued to locate caste in the Hindu religious system, with its archetypal victims (the polluted ‘untouchables’) subject to Gandhian reform or social mobility construed as ritual emulation or ‘Sanskritization’ (Rawat and Satyanarayana Reference Rawat and Satyanarayana2016, 10), a post-colonial sensibility has drawn caste (in its public form) primarily into a framework of ‘politics’, reaching its ‘apotheosis’ (Dirks Reference Dirks2001, 6) with debates over the state's affirmative-action ‘quotas’, and the dynamics of caste-based electoral politics. Secularized and horizontalized by liberal democracy, caste reappears no longer as a system, but with a new core characteristic as competing ethnic-like or cultural identities (Gupta Reference Gupta2005), entrenched and reproduced by electoral dynamics or caste-based ‘quotas’, sometimes criticized as a colonial legacy (Rawat and Satyanarayana Reference Rawat and Satyanarayana2016, 13).

If I want to claim that caste, first enclosed within ‘religion’, is now enclosed within ‘politics’, it is only possible to do so with reference to a third category: the ‘economic’. Dumont's use of religion (that is Hindu ideology) was challenged because it was seen as a category of analysis of Indian society produced by colonial claims about the Western modernity of the public domain of politics that rendered caste as Hindu religious tradition, denying its politics. What I am suggesting here is that an enclosure of caste within politics is, in parallel, an effect of contemporary (neo-liberal) claims to the modernity of the market economy, which renders caste a matter of politics by denying caste economics. Unlike Brahmanic or Orientalist ideological effects that make caste visible, economic knowledge (and derivatively development discourse) makes caste phenomena disappear through discursive exclusion.

The question of how this might be so takes us back to Dumont, not to his oft-challenged separation of the religious from the political, but to his separation of the sphere of the ‘economic modern’ (in India no less regarded a product of colonial rule) as the categorical opposite of caste society. Dumont insists that, from a caste-system viewpoint, economics as a separate category (and value) does not exist, since resource rights are only complementary parts of an ordered whole that is religious (1980, 164–66). In his later work, Dumont (Reference Dumont1977) develops the implication, namely that peculiarly modern economic values (with individual property rights, land and labour as marketable commodities, and so on) are incompatible with a holistic system such as caste.Footnote ²

Dumont (Reference Dumont1977) is far from alone in paying attention to the conditions of existence of ‘economy’ as a peculiar social, ethical, and discursive domain. He follows Karl Polanyi (Reference Polanyi1957) in seeing the thought/value of ‘economics’ rising in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, when relations between people and things (wealth and property) were no longer subordinated to relations between people (the political) and when exchange was newly viewed as volitional and mutually advantageous, leading to the conception of an economic system with laws and morality of its own—‘a self-contained sphere, distinct from the social, the cultural, and other spheres’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1998, 91). Others, such as Kalpagam, find in British colonial India—its systems of private property, practices of measurement and standardization, accounting and statistical analysis (and so on)—both the administration of an economy and maintenance of ‘a discourse of “the economy”’ (Kalpagam Reference Kalpagam2000, 430).

Birla (Reference Birla2011; Reference Birla2008) takes two further significant steps, first showing how, from the late nineteenth century, the British introduced a legal infrastructure that institutionalized ‘the market’, disembedded from earlier social arrangements and now standing in for ‘the public’ and comprised of colonial subjects governed (and ‘civilized’) as economic agents and consumers (namely by principles, rules, and relations of contract). Second, Birla argues that this ‘market governance’ and its modern abstraction, ‘the economy’, required that the excluded socialities of economic life—the negotiable codes of kinship, caste, trust, or honour of ‘vernacular capitalism’—were recoded as ‘culture’, as the ‘private’ to the market's ‘public’, stabilized under scripted logics of religious-personal law and preserved as custom through the post-1859 colonial policy of ‘non-interference’ (Birla Reference Birla2011, 1023–25). In short, colonial liberalism that abstracted or disembedded ‘the economy’ rewrote ‘the social’ as the market and, in doing so, placed relations of caste (and kinship) in a non-market-protected domain of religion and culture, institutionalizing a disjucture between the spheres of the economic-public and the cultural-private (Birla Reference Birla2011, 1031). As Birla (invoking Dumont) puts it, ‘colonial law grappled with the embeddedness of vernacular capitalism by casting Homo aequalis (economic man) as the public actor and Homo hierarchicus, his private cultural counterpart, as his effect’ (Birla Reference Birla, Pandian and Ali2010, 94).

The idea of a distinct, or antecedent, pre-colonial Indian caste society separate from monetized market economy is of course demonstrably false (see Fuller Reference Fuller, Parry and Bloch1989) and the argument that Indian villages (the classic locus of caste tradition) have for centuries been integrated into this economy through trade and commerce no longer needs to be made. But the dichotomy of caste tradition and market modernity that made those arguments necessary (outliving the separation of non-monetary and monetary exchange) persists in the idea that, ultimately, it is the modern market economy that will ensure that caste itself is but an incompatible fading residuum. Indeed, even Marxist historians such as Irfan Habib, who supply much of the evidence against Dumont's premise (Habib Reference Habib, Raychaudhuri and Habib1982 in Fuller Reference Fuller, Parry and Bloch1989) and conceive the history of caste in terms of its economic base, conclude that the modern economy (industrial development or the commercialization of agriculture) has so shaken the traditional hereditary division of labour that caste survives only in its religious and personal aspects that Dumont is criticized for privileging (Habib Reference Habib2002, 164, 178). And F. G. Bailey (Reference Bailey1957), who was among those anthropologists who regarded caste as a system of village political and economic organization, saw access to new commercial activity beyond land, and the introduction of the state administration, as eroding the politico-economic function of caste. Caste was a necessarily localized structure, engaged with a new ‘economic frontier’ (in Bailey's 1950s rural India). Caste either ‘canalized’ forces of economic change into its own system or, by trying to inhibit these forces, destroyed itself (Bailey Reference Bailey1957, 269–71). To adapt Hirschman's (Reference Hirschman1982) triad of rival interpretations of market society in Europe (from the eighteenth century), it could further be said: that the market and its demand for respectful mutual utility civilizes caste as an archaic system of honour and prejudice; or that the individual self-interest of market capitalism corrodes caste as traditional moral value; or that caste persists as a pre-capitalist remnant obstructing capitalist development. Always in opposition, caste is never integral to modern market economy.

A more recent focus has been on the effect of the economy, or economics, as a discourse (and this in part is Dumont's point) in relation to caste, and this takes two forms. On the one hand, economics (and ‘the market’) is an ideology or a representation abstracted from actual socio-cultural relationships (including those in markets) as the ‘virtual’ world of economists (Miller Reference Miller2002) misconstruing the actual social (and caste) embeddedness of economic relations. On the other, economics is performative, its models effecting self-fulfilling re-arrangements, dissociations, or the social ‘disentanglement’ of agents necessary for markets to exist—that is, for the alienation, possession, and exchange of commodities or services (Callon Reference Callon1998; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu Reference MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu2007; Slater Reference Slater2002). In this sense, ‘[t]he economy’, as Timothy Mitchell argues, is a representation (perhaps of mechanical flows) that is made true through a new field of practices of planning, regulation, or development management (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1998), while economics itself is a science that ‘helps make of the wider world places where its facts can survive’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2008, 1119).

These two perspectives entail each other. The ‘framing’ Callon refers to as necessary for market exchange is not a given, but requires work, investment, and a kind of ‘staging’ of social ‘disentanglements’ that are contingent, unstable, that cross agent networks and are separated from life outside the market by boundaries that are negotiable (Slater Reference Slater2002). Moreover, actual markets work only through specific cultural entanglements and social categorizations, including those of caste (see below) (Slater Reference Slater2002, 247; Miller Reference Miller2002). A market framing of actors and their relationships is thus not disembedded from caste relations, but in fact becomes part of the renegotiation of caste (both erased and reasserted). But, as a representational domain, the market economy involves a constitutive exclusion of closely aligned relations of caste, gender, and family, as part of the ‘non-economic’ upon which, of course, the economic nonetheless depends to reproduce labour or access to markets (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1998, 99). Caste characterized by this ‘exclusion-yet-dependence’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1998, 99) is both changed and disguised in a pervasive market-economy common sense. Caste has indeed become tradition in relation to the modern economy, or the pre-capitalist in relation to the capitalist, culture in relation to economy, private to public, or as that into which economic relations are ‘socially embedded’ (as Granovetter (Reference Granovetter1985) and others suggest), an idea which, Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2008) points out, presumes an actual realm of pure economic actors and processes with social identity/location-less buyer–seller exchanges, when what is really at issue is the social structuring, indeed the caste structuring, of the economy itself (a point returned to at the end of the article, drawing on the analysis of Pierre Bourdieu).

Arguably, then, the working of caste in the modern market economy has not attracted the attention that caste in politics has (the exceptions are discussed below) because of the more general way in which the economic sphere is produced (through a dispersed set of discourses, practices, and subjectivities (Slater Reference Slater2002)). But the specific occlusion occurs because the public common-sense relegation of caste to politics (or religion) and alignment of ‘the modern’ to the market economy is itself an ideology of modern caste.

In a brilliant article, ‘One Step Outside Modernity’, on caste and the public sphere, the late M. S. S. Pandian drew attention to the sharply divided contemporary discourse on caste—an upper-caste silence on caste is counterpoised to the politics of difference in lower-caste struggles. He points to how the language of caste is delegitimized in the modern public domain, annexed as the religious/cultural ‘inner’ domain of the non-modern, and, by extension, how ‘caste politics’ is the non-modern to the market economy; but he goes on to say that the ‘Indian modern, despite its claim to be universal—and of course, because of it—not only constitutes lower castes as its “other”, but also inscribes itself silently as upper caste. Thus, caste, as the other of the modern, always belongs to the lower castes’ (Pandian Reference Pandian2002, 1738).

Regarding the inattention to caste in economy, what concerns me here, then, is the cultural logic within which markets and economics are located, bounded-off, deployed politically (or as a moral discourse) in the reproduction, refusal, or renegotiation of caste (in nation and village)—economics, that is, as a ‘category of practice’ (Curtis and Spencer Reference Curtis, Spencer and Fardon2012, 179). The challenge here of sustaining attention to caste in modernity especially in the market economy, in the universal discourses of planning, economics, or human rights, focused on unequal relations (rather than religion and culture, or even politics)—a challenge inaugurated most obviously by Dalit leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar—is of course also the refusal to align the experience of discrimination to the condition of underdevelopment or to permit caste itself to be taken as ‘a subaltern formation’ (Subramanian Reference Subramanian2015, 296). Implicitly, there is also here a claim against caste from the morality of the market—that it should be caste-free.

The scholarly and political shift here was inaugurated by the activism of inferiorized caste groups such as Dalits in the 1990s, coinciding with the liberalization of the Indian economy, and the struggles for dignity born of social experiences of continuing discrimination and humiliation in the age of the market (Rawat and Satyanarayana Reference Rawat and Satyanarayana2016, 2–4). Dalit intellectuals posed a challenge to prevailing categories and distinctions. They refused to see colonialism as a unified discourse of power or as the decisive historical break (retrieving from the nationalist narrative a history of Dalit protests, partly enabled by colonial institutions and configurations of power, Rawat and Satyanarayana Reference Rawat and Satyanarayana2016, 10) and they reinterpreted propositions about ‘caste’ being a cultural mode of oppression of the colonized by the colonizer as actually a means to allow ‘a postcolonial elite to masquerade as the oppressed rather than the oppressors’ (Dirks Reference Dirks2001, 312).Footnote ³ Taking inspiration from the work of Bhimrao Ambedkar on the pervasiveness of caste effects, Dalit scholars rejected the submersion of caste into the analysis of class as much as into colonialism and the post-colonial elite claim to modernity that invisibilized ascriptive caste in society and economy.

Most important here, Dalit studies have fostered a body of research,Footnote ⁴ chiefly by economists, focused on the caste-regulated and caste-networked nature of the Indian market economy, discarding categorical separations of religion, politics, or economy, while indicating the need for a new model of modern caste.

Before turning to this evidence, I have two further perspectives on the public discourses that organize attention away from ‘caste economics’. The first concerns Indian social policy and the way in which it has separated caste from the realm of the modern economy and (as mentioned) excluded caste from policy on development. The second comes from village life, where my fieldwork finds a parallel separating-out of caste as ritual rank eroded by market relations, on the one hand, and identity politics, on the other, in ways that hide the growing importance of caste in shaping new economic opportunity.

Caste in social policy: socio-religious disability and political empowerment

Caste in the village: receding rank and rising politics

As a prelude to the study of ‘Caste Out of Development’, I visited the Tamil village in Ramanathapuram District (which I call Alapuram) in which, three decades earlier, I first tried to make sense of caste. I cannot possibly explain the complex transformations of caste, as I have tried to in my book, The Saint in the Banyan Tree (Mosse Reference Mosse2012), but what struck me here was a parallel narrative of archaic caste erased by market relations, and caste rising as identity politics, that rendered undetectable the structural effects of caste on new economic opportunity.

While it has never been possible, for this village, to describe the varied identities and social relations as anything like a ‘caste system’, the idea of an archaic caste order has always been present as a kind of public representation. Referenced through its symbols, spaces, rituals, and exchanges, this ceremonial order was a way of encoding or loading labour and artisanal services (of barbers, potters, water-turners, dhobis, and, of course, Dalit labourers) as well as the priesthood, ritual, and temple worship with caste identity and hence obligation and social status, such as when a landlord invokes symbols of honour/subordination from a long-gone royal order and pays artisans or Dalit workers with certain grains and gifts coding rights/duties that are caste-linked, hereditary, and non-negotiable. Exchanges were far too integrated into markets of all kinds for this to mark a kind of non-market, non-monetary, or jajmāni-type relationship (let alone a ‘system’).Footnote ¹⁶ But such caste coding could extend to various economic transactions such as Dalit tenants’ share-cropping (paṅku) arrangements. This caste-rank coding also provided the symbolic language for challenges to established collective caste power, such as when Dalits grab the festival statues, or change the festival or funeral procession routes, or enter the village temples and teashops (Mines Reference Mines2005; Mosse Reference Mosse2012)—part of a subordinated group's unfolding drama of change made apparent to them by their own ritual-political acts (Hastrup Reference Hastrup2006, 156).

These ‘bound-mode’ caste relationships, as David (Reference David and David1977), working in Jaffna, glosses the Tamil kaṭṭupāṭu totarpu (part of what he terms the ‘aristocratic schema’), find their counterpart in the ‘nonbound-mode’ (iṣtamāna totarpu) indicated by voluntary contracts, negotiated rates, cash payment, choice, mutual satisfaction (cantōṣam), tradeable skill or art (for artisans or drummers)—in short, what we might now characterize as relations of ‘the market’ (or a ‘mercantile schema’). Not a stable code of conduct, this is a ‘frame [that] emerges with the act’ (Hastrup Reference Hastrup2006, 155)—an implicit reference for artisans and Dalits who, in the early 1980s, attempted to change the social meaning of work, replacing caste-referencing grain transactions with the market idiom of cash payments that rewarded individual skill, not inherent (caste) attributes (Good Reference Good1982). The liberating idea (rather than actual practice) of transactions freed from caste ‘entanglements’ and closed off from a nexus of obligations was captured in the Alapuram Dalit dhobi's comment to me in 1983 that ‘services paid for in cash have no pollution (tiṭṭu)’.

In the early 1980s, among artisans, participation in caste-referencing transactions symbolized inclusion in what was represented as the village community or ūr, while other, ‘market’, transactions (albeit practically pervasive) were exceptional to this order (cf. Miller Reference Miller2002). So when, in 1983, Rayappar, a village carpenter (caste/occupation), explained to me the grain-share entitlements (known as cutantaram) he received as his family's hereditary right (urimai) from Utaiyar caste and other farmers (calculated in terms of the pairs of ploughing bullocks of the patron's household) for work on their ploughs and farm implements, his ritual role at house-building ceremonies, and his maintenance of the temple festival chariots (see Mosse Reference Mosse2012, 112, 140), he contrasted this with ‘private’ work (using the English word) paid for separately in cash (tāṉikkācu, ‘independent money’). Apart from odd jobs on tables or chairs (and the like), such work falling beyond the purview of caste-defined cutantaram was that done for outsiders to the village or for Dalits within it (the few owing draft cattle).Footnote ¹⁷

By 2009, what had been residual in common representations of the work of village carpenters—the separately paid ‘private’ work—now seemed to define it, exceptionalizing caste-referencing work. When I enquired from carpenter Michael Acari about cutantaram grain for repairing farmers’ ploughs, he quickly replied: ‘[I'm] not going for slave work (aṭimai vēlai) nowadays; if [we] work, [we] get wages (kūli).’ He explained how no longer was he at anyone's beck and call, readying ploughs in the early hours. ‘For kindness (aṉpukku) we will fall at the feet, but [we] will not submit to power (atikāram),’ he said, adding, ‘We've become social (cōcalāyirucci)’ (Mosse Reference Mosse2012, 249). Even when describing his ongoing work on processional chariots and door-frame ceremonies (nilai vaikkiṟatu), he emphasized payment for his skill and knowledge (or possession of an almanac), explicitly disconnected from caste. A changed ethical judgement had refigured the relationship between vēlai (work or current employment) and tolil (caste-specific occupation), the act and the actor (see Good Reference Good1982). And a market idiom that was earlier an exception or, for Dalits, an aspirational counter to relationships of caste or kaṭṭupāṭu (order, discipline), by 2009, pervasively over-wrote caste-connected work. I was myself rebuked for using phrases signalling old-order practices that were entirely ordinary 25 years earlier. ‘We have become social’ (cōcalāyirucci) was a common expression, referencing a permissive freedom or market disentanglement from social roles and conventions popularized in films (Mosse Reference Mosse2012, 250).

This moral claim is repeated as Paraiyar (Dalit) drummers negotiate a transactional re-description of themselves as fee-charging professional performers and artists; and the services of barbers, dhobis, potters, and others are relocated from the person-centred exchanges at homes to the impersonal ones of the laundry, shop, stall, and salon in Alapuram's expanding commercial centre—‘an “outside” space where unknowing and unknown outsiders mingle and are served’ (Mosse Reference Mosse2012, 251). In parallel, land tenure dominated by ‘bound-mode’ share cropping covering 64 per cent of tenanted land in 1982–83 had reduced by a third in 1994–95, with a still continuing shift to more market-contractual fixed-rate and land-mortgage tenancy (Mosse Reference Mosse2003, 206).

This expansion of the market as a moral (and physical) space is not in itself recent. However, while over most of the 150-year village history I have studied, market-based claims have been folded back into public representations of collective caste order (or their resistance), by the turn of the millennium, regardless of actual work and dependencies, the common narrative was of a shift towards independence, contract, and individual choice. What has changed is the ideology or framing of economic life, not necessarily its practice (Miller Reference Miller2002). Today, the old order of caste is firmly placed in the uncouth/enslaved (aciṅkam/aṭimai) past by a narrative of the growth of civility (nākarīkam), alongside market freedoms. This was confirmed in a survey and interviews in 2009Footnote ¹⁸ that revealed a weakening of the discourse of caste honour and group status mobility or the perceived irrelevance of activist narratives of struggle against upper-caste domination. It could be said, following Bate (Reference Bate2009, 79–80), that the ‘public’ space had become socially unenclosed (or puṟam, ‘outer’), having been denuded of its ‘interior’ (akam) moral-social-caste character. Certainly, the language of caste distinction is rarely heard in public, partly owing to it being subject to criminal cases, although a persisting ‘inner’ caste state of caste mind is often suspected amidst the rank-repudiating public forms of respect.

Research in India across regions records a democratization of former markers of social recognition, whether food, dress, grooming, or styles of worship, and a ‘declining ability of others to impose social inequalities’, as Kapur et al. (Reference Kapur, Prasad, Pritchett and Shyam Babu2010, 48) conclude from a large-scale study of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh across two sub-districts. But we should be more cautious than these authors are in reading a grassroots narrative of modernization and changed public codes of behaviour as signs of market-driven social transformation. For one thing, as just noted, we should not mistake a change in ideological framing for a change in practice. For another, the invocations of the market are themselves claims that are deeply embedded in caste contentions (cf. Keane Reference Keane2008). When working a shift from obligated funeral servants to musicians hired at negotiated rates, Paraiyar drummers in Alapuram were not presenting themselves as economic agents with a now equalized caste-cultural identity, but using the ethics of contract and market exchange to make claims in a relational field of caste power and honour/dishonour.Footnote ¹⁹

Third, Dalits in Alapuram would tend to see a caste order not undermined by the market (or gone with ‘time's change’—kālam mārirucci—as upper castes often did), but defeated by their political struggle against untouchability in the 1960s and 1970s, armed as they were with education and new economic independence. Then again, achieved equality also produces inequality. The collective action of a Pallar caste Dalit elite may have made it utterly irrelevant who carries the temple statues, enters the teashops, bicycles in the main street, but class inequality widens and a categorical separation of the poorer Paraiyar caste remains, indicative of the persisting division and disparity among Dalits. Moreover, gender inequality persists or is increased since Dalit men not infrequently escaped dishonour by displacing ignominious tasks such as providing free labour and accepting handouts at life-crisis rituals needed to retain upper-caste patrons onto their womenfolk.

With the disappearance of overt practices of caste rank, attention is drawn to subtle attitudinal, communicative, performative, and experiential aspects of caste prejudice and humiliation. These are strategies or tactics produced through interactions (as practical logic rather than social rule) and shaped by the enduring socially deposited attitudes, dispositions, or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977b) of caste, captured in the Tamil concept of cātiputi, loosely ‘caste mind’, ‘mentality’, or ‘disposition’, explored in its variety of new codes and technologies—attire, objects, gestures, sounds and other semiotic forms (verbal and non-verbal) and behaviours (cāti palakkam, caste practice/habit), and interpretation of behaviour—by Murali Shanmugavelan (Reference Shanmugavelan2018).

Even if the changes in caste practices do not have the wider significance they are often given, it is nonetheless indisputable that the ranked caste order has faded from Alapuram village public life. But, paradoxically, at the same time, caste is more visible than ever. As you climb down from a bus at the roadside commercial centre of the village, you will be confronted by clusters of flags, banners, and posters signalling a proliferation of caste associations, fronts, movements, parties, and NGOs. Competition to occupy public space brings ever-larger wedding or puberty-ceremony banners and statues of caste heroes (ancient and modern) erected in village squares to signal group identity and connections.

But, despite appearances, caste is not reborn within the village in the communalized form that characterizes district or state-level politics—with its rallies, guru pujas, violent street clashes, and lethal police firing. A disjuncture between communal caste politics and the quotidian village is maintained by skilled political entrepreneurs who inter-translate between the two. Thus, Dalit party or movement leaders secure a base of support along caste lines through building reputations for the mediation of disputes—over land, water, or inheritance, mostly not having a caste basis—rather than through contentious caste politics, which dissipates in the village (see Mosse Reference Mosse2012, 259–60). Indeed, as Krishna (Reference Krishna, Jodhka and Manor2018a) finds from large-scale cross-state surveys, people turn to caste-crossing political entrepreneurs or fixers (naya netas)—a disproportionate number of whom are nowadays Dalits—to bridge the gap in accessing the state (for bank loans, insurance claims, or school places). Expressions of caste are not so much absent as deferred onto public politics. Thus, working in the opposite direction to the politicians, Dalit youth activists work to translate diverse issues into the language of caste contention so as to mobilize external support (from police or politicians), such as when, in cases of individual (not caste-based) disputes over irrigation water, appeals for intervention from the state were made in the arresting language of the threat of caste conflict (cāti piraccanai) (Mosse Reference Mosse2003, 213–14).

Simplifying a point, one could say, first, that, in the village as in the nation, caste recedes as an archaic system of group rank and honour, with market relations providing the idiom for transactions unbound to caste, and, second, that ‘caste politics’ now has an autonomy from everyday economic life in the village (that was not the case in the caste struggles of the 1960s and 1970s). But why did a majority (82 per cent) of Dalits questioned in our Alapuram village survey say that caste was a barrier or obstacle (tatai) to their family advancement, meaning economic welfare? How does caste shape opportunity?

Caste and opportunity in the village economy

It is at this point that I need to turn to caste and economy, beginning with the village economy. When Dalit businessman and intellectual Chandra Bhan Prasad says that ‘capitalism can destroy the caste system from the inside’ (Prasad Reference Prasad2008, 2), he invokes the impact of the post-1990 decline of Indian agriculture and the explosion of non-farm opportunities on caste as an agrarian order. In Alapuram, the abandonment of cultivable land to wood-fuel shrubs, farmers’ reliance on crop insurance pay-outs, public distribution rice, or employment-scheme wages as much as tilling the land, and the huge diversification of non-farm business within the village, and work outside, all signal what is a national trend.

This has been tracked in longitudinal village studies, none more thorough than the seven-decade Palanpur project in Uttar Pradesh. Its recent reports (Himanshu et al. Reference Himanshu, Murgai and Stern2013) show that an overall decline in poverty is, nonetheless, accompanied by an increase in inequality as the poorest depend upon uncertain casual work in railways, cloth mills, bakeries, bottling liquor, or brick kilns or migrating as construction workers. The impact of such change on caste relations is a complex issue. It is true that the Palanpur researchers find most inequality between households, thus within caste, implying that caste is unimportant to (or made so by) such change. But other studies show the transition out of farming to industry reinforcing caste-based debt and dependency. Ethnographic studies of the diversifying economy of villages show complex and intersecting caste, class, and gender effects. As examples, near the Tiruppur textile hub in Tamil Nadu, Carswell and de Neve (Reference Carswell and de Neve2014) find quite opposite effects—both eroding and entrenching caste inequality—even in close-by and apparently similar villages. In the village hinterland of Chennai, Anandhi (Reference Anandhi, Anandhi and Kapadia2017, 106–08) finds access to casual industrial work freeing Dalit youth from caste-coded (kaṭṭupāṭu) labour dependence. However, peri-urban precarity also deepens gender inequality. Young Adidravidar/Paraiyar (Dalit) men in irregular work in Chennai prefer periods of unemployment to degrading agricultural labour, but their irregular factory work is insufficient to meet household needs that are elevated by the consumption expectations, education fees, and dowry payments born of new status ambitions. Meanwhile, investment in a new Dalit modernity and masculinity involves ‘upper’-caste-class gender notions regarding status, honour (mānam), and respectability (mariyātai) that bear down on Dalit women who carry an extra burden of income earning (agricultural labouring, cattle rearing) and domestic work, while being subject to patriarchal controls. There appears, then, an inverse relationship between developing caste social status and women's status (Anandhi Reference Anandhi, Anandhi and Kapadia2017, 109), as well as new assertions over both the older generation and the inferiorized Arunthathiyar caste (in the village studied) who remain locked in dependency relations with dominant-caste landowners.

The factors accounting for the different impact of labour and other markets on caste and caste on rural markets are varied—histories of land control or reform, urban proximity, caste demography, and political mobilization among them—and do not permit generalization about the erasure of caste effects in the post-liberalization rural economy (for example, Himanshu et al. Reference Himanshu, Murgai and Stern2013; Lanjouw and Rao Reference Lanjouw and Rao2011). Observing caste effects in the economic life of today's villages is not easy. What struck me as my assistant and village resident, M. Sivan, revisited 60 Alapuram families of different castes to ask about the route to work and qualifications of their sons and daughters was that, despite being a receding determinant of standing in the village, caste was important in structuring opportunity in the world beyond. Caste was an alloyed effect, bound up and disguised in the mobilization of capital, dowry payments, or networks into institutions (of government, the Church, and so on). Caste was embedded in relations of kin, friendship with class-mates, priests, or agents mediating work abroad, and, of course, marriage, through which entry into higher education, urban employment, or business was navigated and which reproduced the historical privileges of caste such as inherited wealth (land) and productive networks.

A deepening urban–rural opportunity divide (see Krishna Reference Krishna, Antonelli and Rehbein2018b; Reference Krishna2017) amplified this significance of caste. In Alapuram (as elsewhere), upper-caste families (for example, Vellalars, Chettiyars) were the first to exploit connections for more lucrative futures in regional towns and cities, eventually selling up and relocating out of the village in the 1970s and 1980s, while Dalits sought economic mobility by investing in farming livelihoods. But the later reduction in low-skilled jobs (with factory closures or mechanization) and raised pre-qualifications for urban formal-sector employment (in terms of skills, cultural capital, and connections) (Krishna Reference Krishna, Antonelli and Rehbein2018b; Reference Krishna2017) gave caste renewed importance to those seeking exit from the limited opportunities of the village.

Caste was now mobilized not as public status, but as a network resource—not for the preservation or enhancement of the status of the group (as in earlier conflicts that canalized economic opportunity into the idiom of ritual rank, cf. Bailey Reference Bailey1957, 270), but in support of individual mobility (redirecting symbolic capital to economic opportunity). The banners and posters, the marriage halls, scholarships, and prizes for ‘topper’ students of regionally linked subscription-collecting caste associations were not organizing for village or regional political power so much as networking for access to the regional economy. (Of course, the two interlink.) To borrow Kirsten Hastrup's distinction, here, caste is less ‘substance’—that is ethnicized collective identity in struggles for political power—and more ‘set’—that is, looser, intentional, strategic network, pragmatically realized in the search for jobs, skills, marriages, and support in local dispute mediation (Hastrup Reference Hastrup2006, 156–57).

It is poverty in this resource of caste (capital and connections) that leaves a proportion of Dalits in economic insecurity. Indeed, while their fathers organized against caste exclusion from public places like teashops or temples, and to carry the festival statues of the saints, in a field of caste honour, Alapuram Dalit youth mobilized around the privileges, chits, and tickets for access to the economy, targeting the gatekeepers of opportunity such as schools, colleges, or the Church.

My final point from the village is that this shift from honour to opportunity—from action around group status to group action for individual mobility—decreases the visibility of caste effects. Caste reworked as private connections and capital is not easily perceived as such. Among the Alapuram Dalits surveyed in 2009, the expectation of equal treatment (for example, in schools and colleges) was firm and, in accounting for outcomes (jobs and so on), they emphasized personal talent, qualifications, skill, good luck, and God's blessing, alongside helpful priests and patrons, even though it is well understood that the route to the good bishop is by way of his caste-networked secretary (Mosse Reference Mosse, Jodhka and Manor2018b, 279). Despite their own insistence that these are days of civility and equality, the majority of Dalits surveyed nonetheless expected ill-treatment and disrespect as they sought work or other breaks and could not imagine escape into the casteless anonymity they desired or into ‘mere poverty’ (Roberts Reference Roberts2016, 55). In fact, poverty itself exposes people to caste humiliation and our survey showed that the poorest and women were most incentivized by ill-treatment to try to conceal their caste when labouring in distant places.

Caste difference and exclusion in the wider market economyFootnote ²⁰

What I am suggesting is that, in the nation and in the village, there appears to be a disjuncture between the public narrative of caste (as market-eroded tradition and identity politics) and the processes of caste, which are firmly part of the modern market economy. But there remains uncertainty about the nature of these processes, their harder-to-detect effects, and how they are to be discovered.

Ethnographers already knew that those who controlled the village land gained advantages in the regional and industrial economy, and that caste networks in cooperatives, sand-mining cartels, in companies, and the Church are critical to the functioning of business, bureaucracy, and education (Shah et al. Reference Shah, Lerche, Axelby, Benbabaali, Donegan, Raj and Thakur2018; Witsoe Reference Witsoe, Jodhka and Manor2018; Jodhka and Manor Reference Jodhka, Manor, Jodhka and Manor2018). And that those drawn or pushed out of agriculture are sorted into work graded by skill, security, danger, or toxicity in caste-related ways, the gender divide allocating the worst work to Dalit women, who carry the greatest burden of social degradation (for example, Carswell, de Neve, and Heyer (Reference Carswell, de Neve, Heyer, Jodhka and Manor2018) on the Tiruppur garment industry).

But identifying caste effects in the wider economy that are visible only in the aggregate and which are not easily (or at all) traceable to the agency of caste collectives, or action within a framework of caste, requires different instruments—in particular, the large-sample surveysFootnote ²¹ and statistical methods of economists, who have perhaps done more than anthropologists to identify the modern ‘Grammar of Caste’—to use economist Ashwini Deshpande's (Reference Deshpande2017) title—even though the caste-merging block categories of analysis of national datasets—SC, ST, OBC, and General—are sociologically crude and sometimes misleading.

At the scale of national data sets, it becomes clear that post-reform development and its economic diversification have not, as regards employment, broken the association of ‘upper’ castes with higher-status professions and Dalits with manual and casual labour. For the post-reform period, the data reveal glass walls against Dalit occupational mobility out of caste-typed roles or low-end service trades into more profitable ones, or self-employment (Das Reference Das2013). A widening caste disparity in earnings at the top of the income distribution, and in access to the most prestigious jobs, indicates a ‘glass ceiling’ effect (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2017, xv). The intersections of caste and gender mean that Dalit women, with comparatively higher (although declining) participation rates in the labour force, are particularly restricted in job mobility (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2017; Das Reference Das2013). In parallel, the rapid expansion of private business with a two-thirds increase in enterprises since 1990, and half the workforce self-employed by 2005 (Harriss-White, Vidyarthee, and Dixit Reference Harriss-White, Vidyarthee, Dixit and Harriss-White2014, 40, 51), has not brought freedom from caste effects. The Dalit share of enterprise ownership is disproportionately small and initially decreased post reforms before rising by 2005 (Iyer, Khanna, and Varshney Reference Iyer, Khanna and Varshney2013, 56). Data reveal the business economy as a caste-structured field and Dalits (often as first-generation entrants) are firmly at the bottom, running rural petty shops, as dealers or agents (Harriss-White and Vidyarthee Reference Harriss-White, Vidyarthee, Harriss-White and Heyer2010). To the ‘glass-ceiling’ effect in salaried employment is added the ‘sticky-floor’ effect of a widening caste gap in earnings at the lower end of income from self-employment (Deshpande Reference Deshpande2017, xxiv).

The social processes underlying these patterns are still under-studied, but let me highlight three kinds of caste effect: first, the differential valuation (ranking) of occupations and derivatively markets; second, the effect of categorical distinctions, caste identity, and caste networks; and, third, the combining of these as discrimination. These processes are not distinct, but are interdependent and build on each other.

Caste as a social structure of the economy

I began this article by asking what we learn about caste observed from the point of view of the modern economy rather than religious ideology or political competition. For one thing, once caste is untethered from ‘traditional’ cultural ideas or agrarian order, it is easier to observe caste in history, as Habib (Reference Habib2002) does, in terms of its capacity to adapt to different social formations and labour processes, being itself formed through processes of urbanization, new markets, the multiplication of productive skills, technologies, specialists, types of manufacturing, and commerce, found in the economic transformations of the fourteenth century, as much as the nineteenth or twenty-first centuries. Also in the historical rear-view are the caste effects of enabling access to productive resources, markets, education, as well as controlling labour, lowering wage costs, restricting mobility, and containing resistance.

Considering caste in terms of general social processes such as identity discrimination, categorical exclusion, and opportunity hoarding provides a perspective on caste effects today that allows comparison with race, ethnicity, and other identity-based (and gender-intersecting) inequalities.Footnote ²⁵ Of course, this is entirely compatible with appreciating the significance of emergent and enduring cultural values that, for example, underpin the ranking of occupations, spaces, markets, and people and that ideas of purity and pollution remain alive in judgements and interactions in the marketplace, as Buswala Bhawani's (Reference Buswala2016) recent work on ‘the bazaar and the butchers in Rajasthan’ makes clear. Invoking the metaphor of the network (if not formal network analysis; see Mosse Reference Mosse2018a, 432) avoids caste as an over-determined, totalizing cultural or political concept, or presuming an independently definable caste logic. After all, caste is seen to break down and reform in new ways, and caste networks are ‘cut’ for different purposes (Strathern Reference Strathern1996).Footnote ²⁶ Caste-influenced interactions take genuinely new and unanticipated forms and often interact with, or orchestrate, other processes that include or exclude in their own right and where caste may be absent (or concealed) from actors’ frames of reference. And caste effects may also be lodged within interactional systems as an endogenous product of market relations (Basu Reference Basu2017). As network theorists John Mohr and Harrison White put it, ‘institutional resilience is directly correlated to the overall degree of structural linkages that bridge across domains of level, meaning, and agency’ (Mohr and White Reference Mohr and White2008, 485). And it is this flexibility of caste, not continuity of a particular cultural form or social institution, in which lies the resilience of caste (Mosse Reference Mosse2018a, 432).

What is required is indeed a multi-level view of caste as a social structure of the economy made evident at the macro level through large-sample surveys and at the micro level through reflexive observation of interactions that reveal caste-socialized subjectivities, the wider social structure being, as it were, incorporated as attitudes, thoughts, and historically embodied dispositions—that is habitus. In Bourdieu's terms, caste is both part of such subjectivities and the social field that produces them with its unequal distribution of material and symbolic capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977b; Reference Bourdieu2000; Swedberg Reference Swedberg2011). Also, from Bourdieu, we have a methodology that uses ethnographic insight to ground/frame statistical analysis of large data sets, initiating feedback loops between statistical practice and social experience allowing generalization—that is, discovery of a ‘grammar’ of caste and putting caste society on display (Swedberg Reference Swedberg2011; Deshpande Reference Deshpande2017; Mair, Greiffenhagen, and Sharrock Reference Mair, Greiffenhagen and Sharrock2016).

Bourdieu, finally, helps us think about the problem of the economy that is not a socially disembedded system of rational Homo economicus—certainly not one that can simply be re-embedded in social networks. The market economy is, Bourdieu suggests, itself a socially constituted ‘system of embodied beliefs’, values, dispositions, tastes, aptitudes, as well as categorical belonging and network connections (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2000; Reference Bourdieu2005)Footnote ²⁷ and it is one that, in India, is not separate from those of caste (with all its intersections with class and gender) in that the construction of ‘rational economic agents’ produces systematic discrimination against lower-caste economic agents who find themselves ‘devoid of the dispositions tacitly demanded by [the] economic order’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2000, 18) to which the upper-caste middle class are selectively adapted. It matters less whether discriminatory effects are intentional, statistical, or even endogenous, as caste arbitrarily becomes a ‘focal point’ of productivity and coordination in a rational market (Basu Reference Basu2017).

In other words, Dalits are discriminated not by caste as a set of relations separate from economy, but by the very economic and market processes through which they often seek liberation through market ‘framings’ (Callon Reference Callon1998) and through the processes of a social field that are concealed (misrecognized) by the pervasive ideologies of the market and its freedoms—indeed by the economic habitus that operates as a ‘kind of cultural and social screen between the actor and reality’ (Swedberg Reference Swedberg2011, 75).