Caste in Contemporary Society

Detailed chapter description

Chapter 138 examines caste as a contemporary social institution rather than as an unchanged survival from the past. Caste can shape marriage choices, neighbourhood relations, land access, political organization, educational trajectories, occupational networks and claims on the state, but none of those outcomes follows automatically from a person’s jati or administrative category. Modern constitutional rights, migration, schooling, markets, affirmative action, urbanization and digital communication have changed the settings in which caste is reproduced and contested. The chapter therefore rejects two opposite simplifications: that caste has disappeared under modernity, and that every social or political behaviour can be explained by caste alone. The useful historical question is how caste operates through institutions, and how those institutions have changed across Mithila, Vajji, Anga and the India–Nepal borderland. The evidence is unusually rich but methodologically difficult. Bihar’s 2022–23 Caste-Based Survey produced a recent state-wide enumeration of caste and broad social categories together with a separate socio-economic report, while Census 2011 remains the last completed all-India census baseline for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes at district, sub-district, town and village levels. Nepal’s National Population and Housing Census 2021 records caste/ethnicity through a different classification system, including Madhesh/Tarai castes, Madhesh/Tarai Dalits, Tarai Janajatis, Hill castes and religious/linguistic groups. Those categories are not equivalents of Bihar’s Backward Class, Extremely Backward Class, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and general/unreserved categories. Cross-border comparison must therefore compare institutions and outcomes without pretending that the legal-statistical taxonomies are interchangeable.