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. The kings or nobles, for example, came from the Kshatriya Varna; and many invading groups who overwhelmed the local populace and became rulers allocated themselves the status of a Rajput. The Meena—regarded as an indigenous tribal group—got divided into Jagirdar (feudal) and Chowkidar (Meenas). The same has happened with certain sections of the Gujars, the Badgujars and Pratihars among them identified with the ruling group.
To highlight this important distinction, M. N. Srinivas proposed the concept of Dominant Caste.29 He regarded ‘numerical strength, economic and political power, ritual status, and western education and occupations’ as ‘the most important elements of dominance’ (1959: 15). Besides these, he mentions (i) ‘the capacity to muster a number of able bodied men for a fight’; (ii) ‘reputation for aggressiveness’; and (iii) ‘abusing, beating, gross under-payment and forceful gratification of the sexual desire with women of non-dominant castes’ as relevant factors. Such dominant castes, according to him, serve as ‘vote banks’.30
The concept of dominant caste, as advanced by Srinivas, is a mere listing of the attributes, and if all such elements are found in equal measure in any particular caste, certainly it would qualify as a dominant caste. But in actual field situations, such is not the case. Those who employed Srinivas’ concept in actual field conditions found that numerical preponderance need not always go with high ritual status of a caste. Moreover, the numerical strength of a caste varies from village to village, because in any given village, a caste is represented by a small number of families belonging to it—it is usually a family-writ large group. Thus, what happens in day-to-day village politics is very different from the politics of the region in which the village is located. In the democratic set-up, it is the numbers that count and not ritual status or economic power. People with high ritual status, or greater wealth do take leadership roles and even manage to get tickets to contest elections, but it is the numerical preponderance of a caste that defines its status as a vote bank. Field studies also suggest that larger groups lose their cohesiveness because of factionalism and different political preferences.
This concept was commented upon and criticized by Dube, Atal, and Oommen, among others, by presenting empirical evidence from village India that refused to be caged in it, and also pointing out theoretical ambiguities (Dube, 1968; Atal, 1968; Oommen, 1970). Oommen sums up the key criticisms of the concept by saying that Srinivas made the following assumptions, all of which are questionable: ‘(1) that a dominant caste is a united group; (2) that power is concentrated in one or another caste; (3) that power is mainly an ascriptive attribute; and (4) that village power structure tends to be stable overtime’. Quite in tune with the observations made by Dube and Atal, Oommen reiterates that ‘…castes with the requisite resources to be dominant are divided into hostile factions thereby reducing their potentiality to emerge as dominant castes; that the segmental character of caste system makes for power dispersion and it imparts a certain measure of autonomy to all castes; that persons with relevant personality traits acquire and exercise power even when they do not belong to dominant castes; and that the dominance view of power contains erroneous assumptions regarding the…human nature and that it does not account for the productive functions of power’ (Oommen, 1970: 82). There is the additional point that Srinivas talked of the dominant caste in the context of the village Rampura31 studied by him. But a village is not an isolated whole. Caste dominance needs to be seen in a regional or a sub-regional perspective. The old accounts of the caste system and of the atrocities committed by the so-called dominant castes relate to the region as a whole. Thus, a numerically preponderant caste in a village may not be populous in the region; similarly, a numerically preponderant caste in a region, or a sub-region, may have a minority in a given village. The DMK movement in the South was against the Brahmans of the province—and here the attack was on the caste cluster (that is, Varna category) as a whole and not on a particular Brahman caste.
Leave a Reply