Caste and Class in India

India combines many characteristics that we have discussed with regard to Brazil, Laos, and Nigeria, and adds another dimension of inequality, namely caste. It would be misleading to argue that each caste has its particular gender relation but the inequalities of caste intersect with those of gender as well as with other dimensions of inequality. India is a diverse country with many religions and regions and the position of women has been affected by these factors.

At least since Vedic times, the structures of the Indian states have been patriarchal.

Women have faced discrimination in all areas of life and have struggled to achieve the same position and respect as men in political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. However, what is India today consisted of hundreds of political entities before, and to a certain degree even during, colonial rule. Due to the heterogeneous nature of India, there are multiple patriarchies even today (Maharana 2015). Each community, region, religion, and caste imposes its own set of expectations on men and women, and in most of these, it is women who are confined to the home and given the role of caretakers, and men are tasked with being the breadwinners.

This was reiterated by the interviewees when asked about their management of careers and households. In some cases, it was an unsaid expectation that child-rearing and the majority of domestic household tasks would be the primary responsibility of the women, and their careers, secondary. In other cases, it was made explicitly clear to the women, that the home is their central responsibility.

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During interviews, women belonging to affluent social classes also indicated that their jobs/careers are treated more like an avocation by their families and that even they are expected to be primarily engaged with overseeing the running of the household. Along with placing men in the public sphere and women in the private, India has in its history some especially cruel practices against women, such as widow burning, female foeticide, the practice of dowry, or child marriage. These practices have now been officially banned and witnessed legal amendments after a long struggle.

The caste system in India has been known to reaffirm ideas of patrilineal succession and subjection and control over the labor and sexuality of women (Jeyanayagam 2015). The basic ideas of purity and pollution are deeply ingrained in the concept of Hinduism and are often applied to women. The normalization of the ideas of purity in relation to gender is evident in India and as a consequence, the subjugation of women is apparent (Livne 2015). This legitimizes the inferior position of women. Thereby, women are subordinated to their husbands. The impossibility of getting divorced became an important feature of the Hindu marriage system whereas it was present in the Muslim marriage system (Sen 2000).

During British colonial rule, apparent attempts toward reforms of gender relations were made. However, beneficiaries of the reforms towards achieving women empowerment were almost exclusively upper-caste women. One example of this is the law that allowed upper-caste widows to remarry after the death of their husbands. Legally, the marital laws only took into account the Hindu customs and ignored the customs and traditions of lower castes and Dalits. Even the newfound access to education and employment after the introduction of the British education system only benefitted upper-caste women and further widened the divide between the rich and the poor. British education and customs introduced changes within a specific privileged group and further disempowered minorities and other lower castes.

India attained independence in the year 1947. The socialist-leaning government put some improvements into practice with the biggest one being that every citizen of India regardless of their gender deserved a dignified position and was to be afforded the same under the protection of the law. Special thought and consideration were given to the position of women in society and certain safeguards were put in place in the constitution (Singh 2015). The position of women is highlighted well by a report by the Committee on the Status of Women appointed by the Indian government in 1974. The findings in the report confirmed that the status of women, especially poor women, had become even worse in some ways since 1911. Gender disparities had widened compared to before in all fields including education, health, politics, and the economic sphere.

Presently, almost 68 percent of all Indians live in rural areas. It is an important statistic as the rural-urban divide entails dual realities of the status of the Indian woman, the highlight of which is the caste- and class-based division. The experiences and the kind of oppression faced by women in rural and urban areas are quite different. Talking in a general sense, as the urban woman faces challenges of balancing work and home, sexism at home and the workplace, rural women are still facing multiple kinds of caste- and gender-based oppressions. Access to basic facilities like sanitation, health and nutrition is lacking and with the absences of such basic necessities it becomes extremely difficult for rural women to raise their voices for their rights. Several programmes by the Indian governament like the Swachh Bharat Mission to address issues of sanitation and health are underway but their long term effects remain to be seen.

Even when rural women migrate to urban areas in order to gain economic independence, they still face caste- and class-based prejudice. Poor women in and from rural areas still go through the worst kind of oppressions. They work outside their homes as maids, cooks, nannies etc. to improve their financial situation, but their job does not end there. They are also responsible for taking care of their own households, and are required to do the domestic tasks like cooking, cleaning, taking care of children etc. While they shoulder most of the workload, they are usually last in line when it comes to the fulfilment of their basic needs, from food to safety to education.

This is especially true for women from lower castes. They are excluded from good education, white-collar jobs and much of the public sphere not only on the basis of their gender and their rural background but also on the basis of caste. From a Hindu perspective, they are impure in several dimensions: gender, work and caste. At the same time, women from the upper castes had been privileged by colonial policies and continue to be privileged even under the conditions of legal equality. The upper castes have come to dominate both the state and the private sectors. As social classes emerge in India, the distribution of the population to classes is not random but is rooted in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial hierarchies. In all of these, upper castes have been privileged. It comes as no surprise that there is a strong correlation of caste and class (Jodhka et al. 2017).

The structural picture of India is very similar to that of Laos. Pre-capitalist hierarchies are the foundation of the contemporary order of social classes while they partly persist. Like in Laos, there are pre-colonial, colonial, socialist and capitalist sociocultures – while the colonial period left much less of an imprint on Lao society. And like in Laos, there is a huge variation of local structures, often down to the village level. Finally, we see a tendency toward more egalitarian gender relations in the (privileged) urban middle classes. It is interesting to note that India also hosts localities of ethnic minorities with egalitarian and even somewhat matriarchal gender relations, especially along the Himalayan rim. These traditions partly persist, just like in Laos. However, the Hindu states and the caste system, which was rendered all-encompassing and systematic only by the British colonial power (Jodhka et al. 2017), created a much stronger and pervasive foundation of patriarchy than in Laos. In this regard, India resembles Nigeria more than Laos.