Indian Anthropology I: Social Stratification and Caste, Scheduled Castes and Dalit, OBC, Nomadic and Denotified Groups, Revivalist and Nativist Movements, and the Malabar and Telangana Peasant Movements

Social stratification is the ranking of categories of people in a society into layers that differ in access to wealth, power and prestige, and that persist across generations. Anthropology and sociology distinguish four historical forms: slavery, estates (as in feudal Europe), caste, and class. Class positions are in principle open and achieved; caste positions are ascribed by birth and closed by endogamy. In India two ideas are often confused. Varna is the fourfold scheme of the Sanskrit texts — Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, with those outside it — a model of society as the texts imagined it; jati is the local, endogamous, named group into which a person is born and by which marriage, occupation, commensality and ritual status are organised in practice, of which there are thousands. Early colonial ethnography treated caste as fixed and often as racial: H.H. Risley, who directed the 1901 Census, argued in The People of India (1908) that caste rank corresponded to the proportion of "Aryan" blood, measured by the nasal index — a theory now rejected, which the census's attempt to rank castes also helped to harden. G.S. Ghurye's Caste and Race in India (1932) gave the classic list of six features of caste: segmental division of society; hierarchy; restrictions on feeding and social intercourse; civil and religious disabilities and privileges of different sections; lack of unrestricted choice of occupation; and restrictions on marriage, that is, endogamy. J.H. Hutton's Caste in India (1946) surveyed the theories of origin. B.R. Ambedkar's paper "Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development" (1916) argued that endogamy superimposed on exogamy is the essence of caste, maintained by practices that control women's marriage. Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus (1966) explained the whole system by the religious opposition of the pure and the impure: the Brahman is the purest and the "untouchable" the most impure, and in Indian ideology status encompasses power, so that the king, though powerful, ranks below the priest. M.N. Srinivas, working from Rampura (1950s), introduced the dominant caste — a caste that preponderates numerically, holds much of the land, wields economic and political power and has a reasonably high ritual status — and Sanskritisation, taken up in the third chapter. McKim Marriott distinguished attributional theories of rank, based on the attributes of castes, from interactional ones, based on the transactions of food and services between them. Gerald Berreman compared caste with racial stratification in the United States, while others insisted on the specificity of Indian hierarchy. Later ethnography stressed that caste is lived through kinship, locality, occupation and politics, that it has changed with land reform, education, migration and electoral democracy, and that it exists among Muslims, Christians and Sikhs as well as Hindus. Population genetics has added that most Indian groups descend from mixtures of two ancestral populations, formed before the rise of strict endogamy, which then kept groups genetically distinct for many centuries (Reich and colleagues, 2009; Moorjani and colleagues, 2013) — findings about history, not support for any ranking.

"Scheduled Castes" is a legal and administrative category. The term was introduced by the Government of India Act, 1935, which attached a schedule listing the castes previously called the "Depressed Classes"; the Constitution continued it. Under Article 341 the President, after consultation with the Governor, notifies the castes, races or tribes to be Scheduled Castes in each State and Union Territory, and only Parliament can change the list. The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 requires that a member profess Hinduism; Sikhs were included in 1956 and Buddhists in 1990, and the question of Dalit Christians and Muslims remains before the courts. At the 2011 Census the Scheduled Castes numbered about 20.1 crore, 16.6 per cent of the population. Article 17 abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form; the Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955, renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, give it force. Articles 15(4), 16(4) and 46 allow special provision and promotion of educational and economic interests; Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats in the Lok Sabha and the Legislative Assemblies; and Article 338 provides the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. In 2024 a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court (State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh) held that States may sub-classify the Scheduled Castes for reservation. The word Dalit — "broken", "ground down" — is a self-chosen name that asserts dignity and a shared history of oppression rather than accepting a label given by others. It was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was made a political identity by the Dalit Panthers, founded in Bombay in 1972 by young writers, and by the Dalit literature that followed; official documents use "Scheduled Caste". Gandhi's term Harijan ("people of God") was rejected by many as condescending. The movement's intellectual history runs from Jotirao Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) and Gulamgiri (1873), through the Adi movements of the 1920s — Ad-Dharm in Punjab under Mangu Ram, Adi-Dravida and Adi-Andhra in the south — to B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956): the Mahad satyagraha for access to a public water tank (1927), the demand for separate electorates and the Poona Pact with Gandhi (1932), which gave reserved seats within joint electorates, Annihilation of Caste (1936), the chairmanship of the Constitution's Drafting Committee, and the conversion to Buddhism with several hundred thousand followers at Nagpur on 14 October 1956. Ethnographers have studied Dalit communities not as the bottom of a Brahmanical order but as groups with their own traditions, religious forms, histories of labour and struggle, and assertion through education, conversion, electoral politics and literature, and have documented the continuing forms of exclusion — in housing, access to water, temples and land, violence and occupational stigma, including manual scavenging, which the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 forbids.

The Constitution speaks of "socially and educationally backward classes of citizens" (Articles 15(4) and 16(4), which uses "backward class of citizens") and, in Article 340, empowers the President to appoint a commission to investigate their condition. The first Backward Classes Commission, chaired by Kaka Kalelkar, reported in 1955, identifying some 2,399 backward groups, but its recommendations were not accepted. The second, chaired by B.P. Mandal and appointed in 1979, reported in 1980: using social, educational and economic indicators it identified 3,743 castes and communities as backward, estimated them at about 52 per cent of the population, and recommended 27 per cent reservation in central government posts, the figure that kept total reservation within the 50 per cent limit set by the Supreme Court. Its implementation in 1990 provoked protests; in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992) the Supreme Court upheld the 27 per cent quota, required the exclusion of the "creamy layer" — the advanced sections among the backward classes — and confirmed the 50 per cent ceiling save in exceptional circumstances. The 102nd Amendment (2018) gave the National Commission for Backward Classes constitutional status under Article 338B, and the 105th Amendment (2021) restored the States' power to identify their own backward classes. A commission under Justice G. Rohini (2017) examined sub-categorisation of the central OBC list. Separately, the 103rd Amendment (2019) allowed up to 10 per cent reservation for economically weaker sections not covered by existing quotas, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2022. Anthropologically, "OBC" is an administrative umbrella over very different groups — peasant and landowning castes, artisan and service castes, pastoralists — whose rise through land reform and electoral politics has been one of the central changes of post-independence India. Nomadic groups are those whose livelihoods require regular movement. Anthropologists distinguish pastoral nomads, who move with herds (the Gaddi and Gujjar-Bakarwal of the western Himalaya, the Raika or Rebari of Rajasthan and Gujarat); peripatetic or service nomads, who move among settled communities offering goods, crafts, entertainment or services (the Banjara carriers, the Gadia Lohar blacksmiths, the Nat and Kalbelia performers, the Bahurupi mimics); and hunting-gathering groups. Many were declared "criminal by birth" under the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, which confined them to settlements and required them to report to the police. The Act was repealed in 1949 and the communities were "denotified" in 1952 — hence Denotified Tribes or Vimukta Jatis, who mark 31 August as their day — but the Habitual Offenders Acts that replaced it and continuing police suspicion kept the stigma alive, as the case of Budhan Sabar, who died in police custody in West Bengal in 1998, made public. Commissions chaired by Balkrishna Renke (report 2008) and Bhiku Ramji Idate (constituted 2015) documented the landlessness, lack of documents and exclusion of nomadic, semi-nomadic and denotified communities, many of which fall outside the SC, ST and OBC lists or are listed differently from State to State.

Anthropology's general theory of such movements comes from two American papers. Ralph Linton's "Nativistic Movements" (1943) defined a nativistic movement as "any conscious, organized attempt on the part of a society's members to revive or perpetuate selected aspects of its culture", typically under the pressure of contact with a dominant society. He classified movements along two axes — revivalistic (reviving elements of the past) or perpetuative (preserving elements still present), and magical (expecting supernatural intervention, often led by a prophet) or rational (seeking to restore self-respect or group solidarity by practical means) — giving four types. The Ghost Dance of the Plains peoples (1870 and 1890, the latter led by the Paiute prophet Wovoka), which promised the return of the dead and the buffalo and the disappearance of the whites, is the classic revivalistic-magical case. Anthony F.C. Wallace's "Revitalization Movements" (1956) generalised further: a revitalization movement is "a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture". It passes through a steady state, a period of increased individual stress, a period of cultural distortion, and a period of revitalization — reformulation of the "mazeway" by a prophet, often through a vision, then communication, organisation, adaptation, cultural transformation and routinisation — leading to a new steady state; his model case was the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake (1799). Melanesian cargo cults, studied by Peter Worsley (The Trumpet Shall Sound, 1957), and millenarian movements everywhere belong here. In India anthropologists have studied several kinds. Among tribal communities, reform and revival movements sought to purify custom, give up liquor and meat, reject spirit specialists and restore a moral order, sometimes combined with resistance to landlords and the state: the Tana Bhagat movement among the Oraon of Chotanagpur (from 1914), led by Jatra Oraon, is the best known, alongside the Sapha Hor among the Santal and the Birsa movement taken up in the next chapter; L.P. Vidyarthi and K.S. Singh documented these. Among castes, movements asserted dignity, challenged Brahmanical hierarchy or claimed higher status: Jotirao Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) in Maharashtra, Sree Narayana Guru's Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP, 1903) among the Ezhava of Kerala, E.V. Ramasamy "Periyar"'s Self-Respect Movement (1925) in Tamil Nadu, and the Adi movements. M.S.A. Rao, in Social Movements and Social Transformation (1979), analysed the SNDP and the Yadava movements as backward-class movements that combined Sanskritisation, reform and protest. At the level of religion as a whole, nineteenth-century movements such as the Arya Samaj (Dayananda Saraswati, 1875) were revivalist in the strict sense, calling for a return to the Vedas.

Anthropology came to peasants through Robert Redfield, who described peasant society as a "part-society with a part-culture", tied to towns, markets and a great tradition, and Eric Wolf, whose Peasants (1966) and Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969) analysed peasants as rural cultivators whose surplus is transferred to a dominant group of rulers. Hamza Alavi's "Peasants and Revolution" (1965) argued that middle peasants, independent enough to act, are the most likely to rebel. In India, A.R. Desai's edited Peasant Struggles in India (1979) and D.N. Dhanagare's Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950 (1983) compared the major movements, among them the two the syllabus names. The Malabar or Mappila rebellion of 1921 took place in the south of Malabar district, then in Madras Presidency. It had a long background: the Mappila Muslims, largely tenants and labourers, lived under a land system in which mostly Hindu upper-caste jenmi landlords, backed by British courts, could raise rents and evict tenants at will, and a series of Mappila outbreaks had occurred from the 1830s. In August 1921, in the atmosphere of the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, an attempt by police to arrest Khilafat leaders at Tirurangadi set off a rising led by figures such as Variyankunnath Kunjahammed Haji and Ali Musliyar; for some months British authority collapsed in parts of Ernad and Valluvanad. The rebellion was suppressed by military force and martial law; in November 1921 some sixty or more prisoners suffocated in a closed railway goods wagon on the way to Bellary jail (the "wagon tragedy"). Historians debate how far it was an agrarian revolt against landlords, an anti-colonial rising, or a communal outbreak, since violence was also directed against Hindu landlords and others; Dhanagare and K.N. Panikkar (Against Lord and State, 1989) emphasise its agrarian and anti-colonial roots. The Telangana armed struggle (1946–51) arose in the Telugu-speaking districts of the princely state of Hyderabad under the Nizam, where deshmukhs, jagirdars and other landlords controlled vast estates, exacted vetti (unpaid forced labour) and illegal levies, and dominated village life. The Andhra Mahasabha, increasingly led by the Communist Party, organised peasants against these exactions; the killing of Doddi Komaraiah in July 1946 at Kadavendi in Warangal district is usually taken as the start of the armed phase. Village sanghams took control of some thousands of villages, abolished vetti, redistributed land and cancelled debts; guerrilla squads fought the Nizam's forces and the Razakar militia. After the Indian Army's "police action" (Operation Polo) integrated Hyderabad into India in September 1948, the movement continued for a time against the new government and was formally withdrawn in October 1951. Its leaders included P. Sundarayya, whose Telangana People's Struggle and Its Lessons (1972) is a participant's account, Chandra Rajeswara Rao and Ravi Narayan Reddy. Its legacies included tenancy and jagir-abolition legislation in Hyderabad and, indirectly, the linguistic reorganisation of states; its tribal dimension — Koya and Gond participation in the forest areas — is part of the region's anthropology. The syllabus spells it "Telengana"; the usual spelling is Telangana.