Caste and its implications for sociologies of inequality

Abstract

The concern to think about the place of caste as a conceptual category – within, and in relation to, broader sociological understandings of inequality – was the primary motivation of the British Sociological Association Presidential event on ‘Caste and its Implications for Sociologies of Inequality’ held at the London School of Economics in late autumn 2023. It sought not only to engage with caste sociologically but also to ask the question of what a consideration of caste could bring to sociological thinking more generally.

One of sociology’s central injunctions has been C Wright Mills’s (1959) call to connect private troubles to public issues. While this is as important now as it has ever been, we need to be continually mindful of whose private troubles become public issues. The differential valuing of lives and populations is a key aspect of caste hierarchies and the inequalities justified in their name. This points to the centrality of caste to practices of social stratification and yet, within British sociology, there is an almost complete absence of sociological engagement with the topic. This, despite the fact that the British were colonially entangled with India and its extensive caste system for over two centuries.

The one substantive collection of articles on caste, within a sociology journal in the United Kingdom, was published in 1993 and guest-edited by two social anthropologists, Mary Searle-Chatterjee and Ursula Sharma. It was published a year later as a Sociological Review monograph titled, Contextualising Caste: Post-Dumontian Approaches. The majority of contributors were social anthropologists plus one political scientist and its purpose, in the words of the co-editors, was to identify the importance of caste ‘relative to other aspects of social life which might also be considered axial to South Asian society’ (Searle-Chatterjee and Sharma, 1993: 1). Its focus, then, was to consider caste in relation to other aspects of modern society within India and also to recover the study of India for the general sociologist. But it wasn’t to consider caste as a category central to sociology.

The concern to think about the place of caste as a conceptual category – within, and in relation to, broader sociological understandings of inequality – was the primary motivation of the British Sociological Association Presidential event on ‘Caste and its Implications for Sociologies of Inequality’ held at the London School of Economics in late autumn 2023. The keynote speaker, Dr Suraj Yengde – one of India’s leading scholars and public intellectuals – spoke on the topic of racial castes, drawing attention to crucial debates on the topic within US sociology. The discussion picked up the question of its place within British sociology. This talk has been revised as the lead article for this special section titled, ‘Race and Caste in the Making of US Sociology’. This is followed by the commentaries delivered on the day from Professors Faisal Devji, Meena Dhanda and John Holmwood, as well as an additional invited response by Professors Bandana Purkayastha and Kalpana Kannabiran.

On the day, Yengde also acted as a respondent to early career scholars working with the idea of caste and discussing issues of activism, secularisation and economic agency. We heard papers from Simple Rajrah, a DPhil student in Politics at the University of Oxford, on ‘History of Dalit-Bahujan Women’s Activism 1924-1956: One Historic Conference, Dr Ambedkar, and a Text’; Dr Kumud Ranjan, Assistant Professor in Sociology at O. P. Jindal University, on ‘Reading Caste with the Secularisation Thesis’; and Urvi Khaitan, a DPhil student in Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford, on ‘Working Women: Gender, Caste, and Economic Agency’. All papers can be listened to at the link given here. ¹

In his article, Yengde sets out a key debate within US sociology around how best to understand the sociological categories of ‘race’ and ‘caste’. This dates back to the early years of the 20th century in the development of a ‘caste school of race relations’ and had a renewed expression in the 1960s in a disagreement between Oliver Cromwell Cox and Gerald Berreman. Yengde suggests that while they were both interested in caste for similar reasons – to understand the reproduction of inequality in the United States – their objectives differed. For Cox, according to Yengde, caste could be used as an ‘intersectional’ category to study the ways in which race, capital and class relations were entangled. For Berreman, on the contrary, caste in India was seen to be a direct equivalent to race in the United States and could be used to understand the reproduction of unequal race relations there.

The key issue for Yengde is not to provide a precise definition of caste, but to understand the ways in which it has been used within sociological debates on inequality within the United States. In particular, he examines the arguments for whether race should be understood in biological or sociological terms – the terms of the debate in early 20th century sociology in the United States – and compares this with the ways in which caste has been similarly conceptualised. He notes that none of the US academics engage in any meaningful way with one of the key scholars on caste in an Indian context – Dr B. R. Ambedkar. The main issue for Yengde, as set out towards the end of the article, is not so much to consider how caste has had an impact on US sociology (and society), but to think through the ways in which US engagements with the conceptualisation of caste have influenced understandings of it. This is particularly so in the context of the hegemonic position of US academia.

The commentaries on Yengde’s lead article engage with and extend many of the arguments made within his piece. The response by Faisal Devji examines the ways in which understandings of race and class have not simply been mediated by class, but have also been entangled with religion in significant ways. He addresses the relationship of class to democratic politics and brings in a discussion of how these issues are configured in relation to the dynamics of Hinduism and Islam. In the process, Devji argues that while the understandings of race and caste are connected, and that it is important to think through these connections in the way in which Yengde sets out, the connections become even more complicated once we add religion explicitly to the mix.

Meena Dhanda, in turn, addresses the philosophical terms that Yengde uses to address the question of how caste comes to be known and by whom it is known, or perhaps, can be known. She discusses Yengde’s arguments formulated in terms of ‘caste epistemology’ and the implications of the general failure of scholars to engage with anti-caste writings and politics. The work of intellectual clarification, as Dhanda argues, has to be related to the explicit project of collective action oriented to the dismantling of the casteist system. Here, she points to the importance of the fresh perspective brought by Yengde to the broader issues.

John Holmwood takes as his starting point, Yengde’s discussion of Cox and Berreman and the nature of the relationship between class, caste and race. Whereas Yengde is sceptical of the work of Cox, Holmwood suggests that the implication of Cox’s argument is that it is colonialism that makes caste akin to race and yet this was not explicitly addressed within the caste theory of race relations. The issue is not that race and caste have their origins in similar contexts, but rather that they have been made similar through the logics of the (colonial) modern. As such, the political movements against race and caste inequality share a common feature – the annihilation of the categories of race and caste through the self-organisation of the communities at their sharp end.

The final response by Bandana Purkayastha and Kalpana Kannabiran responds to Yengde’s article by drawing on resources from social anthropology and locating the dialogue with his work in the context of issues of caste and gender in India. Indeed, they suggest that an acknowledgement of the many intersections of caste with other markers of identity would enable a deeper accounting for the inequalities and hierarchies sustained through caste. Specifically, they point to the importance of caste as a comparative framework through which such work can be done.

In sum, this special section seeks not only to engage with caste sociologically – which has been done to greater or lesser extent in a variety of contexts as highlighted by many of the contributors here – but it also asks the question of what a consideration of caste could bring to sociological thinking more generally. While the question of the place of caste within British sociology remains outstanding, perhaps this symposium can lead to further reflections on this topic more broadly.