EDITORIALS & ARTICLES
What do you understand by discrete castes and muddled hierarchies? Substantiate your answer with suitable illustrations. (UPSC CSE Mains 2018 - Sociology, Paper 2)
- Discrete castes are characterized by clearly defined social groups with distinct roles and limited social mobility, while muddled hierarchies indicate a more fluid and ambiguous social order where individuals occupy multiple positions within the hierarchy.
- Dipankar Gupta writes that the caste system should be understood in terms of the principle of differences among different caste groups, rather than a hierarchical principle. He believes instead that there are many competing hierarchies within the caste system. Gupta also argues that notions of purity and pollution are relatively recent additions in the history of the caste system. They emerged mainly to separate the untouchables from the rest and became operative at various planes of the caste system much later. According to him, castes exist first as discrete categories and hierarchies come later. Individual castes, Gupta believes, are discrete entities with well-developed views and ideologies. Castes that are lower down the scale do not accept the degrading status accorded to them by what he calls the "sacerdotal" view of caste.
- The concept of difference has been developed by Dipankar Gupta to present a picture of the caste system which is totally different from the one that we find in many books including Dumont''s Homo Hierarchicus.
- Gupta claims that empirically as well as logically it is wrong to say that a single all-inclusive hierarchy based on the principle of the opposition of purity and pollution can be a defining feature of the caste system.
- To quote him, "Any notion of hierarchy is arbitrary and valid from the perspective of certain individual castes. To state that pure hierarchy is one that is universally believed in, or one which legitimizes the position of those, who participate in the caste system is misleading.
- The separation between castes is not only on matters which connote the opposition between purity and pollution. Distinctions and diacritical notches which are not even remotely suggestive of purity and pollution are observed as strictly. Obverse, distinctions relating to purity and pollution do not systematically affect caste status. The cultivating Amot caste solemizing their Goraiya festival with the sacrifice of a pig and yet Brahmans take water from them Gupta points out.
- Therefore. Gupta opines that ''difference'' and ''ritualization of multiple social practices'' constitute the essence of the caste system. To quote him, "we will define the caste system as a form of differentiation wherein the constituent units of the system justify endogamy on the basis of putative biological differences which are semaphored by the ritualization of multiple social practices".
- In order to make the meaning of the phrase ''ritualization of multiple social practices'' clear, Gupta writes, "By rituals we mean all those social practices that are followed because they are supposed to be inherently good irrespective of Weber''s ''means-ends'' rationality.
- Gupta argues that different origin tales or Jati puranas of different castes justify different hierarchies and the Brahmin is not always at the top. The existence of various models of Sanskritization for upward mobility, also indicates strongly the presence of multiple caste hierarchies. Each of these origin tales or caste legends "Captures independently the essence of ''difference'' between castes and arc therefore logically of equal status". The constitutive elements of ''difference'' "are not arranged vertically or hierarchically, hut horizontally or even separately". Therefore, in the system of ''difference'' one encounters discrete categories in place of a continuous scale. Nune of the castes considers that it is made up of unique substance, or that the substance in it is less pure Each caste maintains its own traditions, customs and ideologies and, therefore, differentiates from others.
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