Caste in Contemporary Society

Research record

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.

Section index

1. 138.1 Caste is contemporary because institutions keep remaking it
2. 138.2 Jati, social category and legal status are different analytical objects
3. 138.3 Bihar’s 2022–23 Caste-Based Survey changed the evidentiary landscape
4. 138.4 The broad Bihar profile shows why “upper” and “backward” cannot be treated as small margins
5. 138.5 The socio-economic report shows inequality across broad categories, not a single caste ladder
6. 138.6 Within-category heterogeneity is a central fact, not statistical noise
7. 138.7 Land remains one of the strongest links between caste and material power
8. 138.8 Occupational change weakens hereditary closure without erasing network effects
9. 138.9 Education changes caste relations by changing the resources through which status is claimed
10. 138.10 Public employment makes caste simultaneously a social identity and a documentary category
11. 138.11 Bihar’s 2023 reservation increase demonstrates the constitutional limits of demographic arithmetic
12. 138.12 Local government makes representation visible at village and town scale
13. 138.13 Gender changes the meaning of caste because women often carry boundary-making work
14. 138.14 Marriage remains one of the most durable sites of caste reproduction, but its mechanisms are changing
15. 138.15 Urbanization changes the spatial form of caste more reliably than it eliminates caste
16. 138.16 Migration can loosen everyday hierarchy while making origin networks economically valuable
17. 138.17 Digital media has created caste publics that are larger, faster and more archival
18. 138.18 Caste associations have shifted from ritual status claims toward education, welfare and lobbying
19. 138.19 Dalit assertion has transformed the public vocabulary of dignity and rights
20. 138.20 Untouchability is constitutionally abolished, but legal abolition and social practice must be studied separately
21. 138.21 The SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act creates a specialized rights-and-remedy framework
22. 138.22 Caste and religion intersect, but neither can be reduced to the other
23. 138.23 Muslim social stratification should be analysed on its own historical terms
24. 138.24 Nepal’s caste/ethnicity census framework is not a translation of Bihar’s reservation categories
25. 138.25 Madhesh housing data shows material inequality without converting census groups into causes
26. 138.26 Nepal’s constitutional inclusion framework links caste inequality to citizenship and representation
27. 138.27 Cross-border kinship connects social worlds while national law assigns different categories
28. 138.28 Contemporary caste labels must not be projected backward as timeless medieval sub-castes
29. 138.29 Measurement requires an evidence architecture rather than a caste master-variable
30. 138.30 Conclusion: caste persists through unequal institutions, but the institutions are changing

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Caste in Contemporary Society.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-138/