Author: haroonkhan

In contemporary politics when political parties talk of vote bank, or of caste dominance, they refer to the electoral constituency—consisting of several settlements—and not to any single village; and quite often they use it for a caste cluster, such as SC votes, Rajput votes, Muslim votes; none of these qualifies as a caste in the…

Village studies carried out by sociologists and social anthropologists in India brought convincing evidence to suggest that ritual hierarchy needs to be differentiated from the social hierarchy of dominance. In the social and political spheres, we are told that the power did not rest with the Brahmans who are regarded as ritually ‘superior’ to others.…

Caste in India is a much misunderstood term. It is employed for different kinds of groupings, not only by the common people, but also by social scientists, including sociologists. It has been, and is being, used to refer to: Sociologically, these are all wrong usages. For example, Brahman is not a Jati, it is a Varna, just as Kshatriya,…

Another ascriptive group, smaller than race and almost similar to ethnic group, and in many ways corresponding to the tribe, is Caste. In most sociology texts, Caste is contrasted with Class as a structural type and is defined in a tautological manner: ‘Class is an open Caste, Caste is a closed Class’. The point underlying…

While race is now recognized as a biological term and the physical indicators for it are well established, there seems to be no consensus regarding the concept of tribe. Pioneering anthropologists carried out their studies of primitive societies without bothering to precisely define the concept of Tribe. This is somewhat understandable if we went back…

The issue of the policies of apartheid of the Government of South Africa remained on the agenda of the United Nations for almost 50 years. After numerous efforts to urge the Government of that country to abandon its policies—declared a crime against humanity—the international campaign reached a watershed in 1989. That year, the United Nations…

Apartheid became the official policy of the Government of South Africa in 1948, following the election of the Herenigde Nasionale Party, later renamed the Natio al Party. Under this policy, racial discrimination was institutionalized. The lives of the Africans, who made up almost 75 per cent of the population, were controlled by the unjust segregation…

The history of the evolution of Man tells us that all humans belong to a single genus and a common species, called Homo Sapiens. This indicates the biological commonalities between all humans that distinguish them from other animals. At the same time, we note that each individual of this highly populous group (now more than 6.8 billion)…

Of the several ways in which societies get stratified, three ascriptive groups (namely Race, Tribe and Caste) and a category based on the criterion of achievement (Class) are used as the prominent strata. Reviewing the trends in sociological research in the 1980s, Neil J. Smelser noted that the ‘three words … —“race”, “ethnicity”, and “class”—enjoy…