INEQUALITY: CASTE AND CLASS

INTRODUCTION

The normative and democratic pillars of institutions and doctrines enshrined in the Constitution of India set the agenda of post-colonial state in India in terms of abolition or at least reduction of social-inequalities. The objective of ‘welfare’ state was to make a modern caste-less society by reducing centuries old disabilities inflicted upon the ‘depressed’ and attempt to improve their lot by providing them ‘reservations’ and ‘quotas’ in education as well as job market especially in state-bureaucracy and over-sized public sector enterprises. The Constitution of India requires the state to treat all citizens equally, without regard to birth, gender or religious belief. However, society does not function merely on the basis of formal principles. Enforcement of legal doctrines and attempt to remove social discrimination is a process entangled in the complexities of social formation. The pernicious aspects of jati, varna and class, therefore, still permeate our families, localities and political institutions. In this unit, our focus will be on various aspects of social inequality and their impact on democratic polity and political economy of development in the post-colonial state of India.

NOTION OF SOCIAL-INEQUALITY

Human societies vary in the extent to which social groups as well as individuals have unequal access to advantages. Rousseau had made a distinction between natural and social inequality. The former emerge from the unequal division of physical and mental abilities among the members of a society. The latter arise from the social entitlement of people to wealth or economic resources, political power and status regardless of potential abilities possessed by individuals. Not only economic resources of societies vary according to the level of development and structural features of society, but also different groups tend to have differential access to these resources. Power enjoyed by the social groups also differ and offers another related social advantage. Similarly, conventions, rules, customs and laws confer greater prestige and status on certain groups and occupations in most human societies. Hierarchy, stratification, class-divisions are notions used by anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists to describe and denote social-inequality. Anthropologists generally distinguish three types of societies in terms of social-inequality. These are classified as egalitarian, rank and class societies.

Egalitarian societies contain fair amount of equality and no social group enjoys greater access to economic resources, power or prestige. Rank societies do not have unequal access to wealth or power, but they do contain social groups that enjoy greater honour and status. A pre-literate tribal society in which social ranking is based on rules of descent and alliances belong to this category. The complex class societies have unequal access and entitlement to economic resources, power and status.

In many pre-industrial agrarian societies, access to social opportunities and status was determined by birth. The ascribed role or status of individual was assigned by virtue of factors outside his or her own control such as birth, sex, age, kinship relations, and caste. This assigned role was rationalised as divinely ordained and natural. The estates or orders of medieval Europe were unequally ranked and this hierarchy of ranks was legally recognised and approved by religious-normative order of the society. Indian caste system was another type of validation of social hierarchy. The individual’s professional or occupational role came to depend on individual effort and ability in the modern industrial and democratic society. This new role was emphasised in the political discourse of modernity and was seen as consonant with the democratic ideal. It involved an exercise of effort and choice as well as a fair deal of competition to occupy a given position. The society moved from the principle of hierarchy to stratification. According to the sociologists, hierarchy prevailed in societies based on castes or estates and social-inequalities were legitimated as naturally given. Stratification, on the other hand, is a feature of modern industrial societies in which inequalities do exist but are not considered as a part of natural or divine order. In this process of social change, inequality did not vanish or reduce, but changed its nature. Now class boundaries became more porous and permeable, individual mobility is possible and society’s normative order is based on formal equality. However, there is still a large area of industrial society where roles are allocated by virtue of being male or female, black or white and so on.

G.D. Berreman suggests that out of ‘differentiation’ of persons, which is a natural and universal phenomenon, inequality or social evaluation of differences arises. He terms the behavioural expression of inequality as ‘dominance’ and combination of inequality and dominance is socialinequality. Dominance and status in egalitarian societies is often negotiable and contextual whereas in ranked or inegalitarian societies, inequality is institutionalised. It is embedded in a hierarchy of statuses and is not linked to individual differences of ability. Marxists generally tend to view gradations of power and status as correlated to the distinctions of class defined by economic position and accessibility of economic entitlements. In the Weberian paradigm, however, status and power are not entirely governed by economic divisions or control over economic entitlements. Although the term stratification reminds us of a geological image which signifies a sort of vertical layering or arrangement of social strata, social organisation is much more fluid and complex. A multiple set of factors affect a particular social formation and it is never a simple vertical or hierarchical arrangement of layers like the earth’s crust. Political thinkers like Pareto, Mosca and Michels assigned primacy to power as the real source of inequality in society. According to them, power is the ability to make others do what they do not want to do and the elite groups exercise this power as they occupy the top positions within the institutions of a given society. Similarly, French scholar Bourdieu employs terms symbolic capital and distinction to identify social groups who enjoy more prestige and honour in society simply because they are endowed with more symbolic capital reflected in their pattern of behaviour and taste. The notion of social-capital also has similar connotations. It demonstrates how certain social groups have greater capacity to form social-relations and competence to associate with others. They indicate that differences in terms of esteem, prestige and status rather than neat economic or political hierarchy may play the dominant role in some systems of stratifications.