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Class, caste, and social stratification in india: Weberian legacy
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Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy Hira Singh The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber Edited by Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster
Subject: Sociology, Social Theory, Economic Sociology Online Publication Date: May 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190679545.013.21
Abstract and Keywords
Max Weber’s distinction between class and status, identifying caste as the latter, is the single most important influence on the mainstream sociology of caste. There is ambiguity in Weber’s conceptualization in the sense that the contrast between class and status is marked by precarity in the long run when stabilization of economic power serves as a condition for the predominance of status usurpations. This ambiguity remains unresolved in Weber’s conceptual formulation. Mainstream sociology of caste owing allegiance to Weber reifies the contrast between caste as status and class. In Weber, caste is part of global-historical enquiry. In mainstream sociology, caste is uniquely Indian. It is argued that a critical scrutiny separating the rational and historically verifiable from the irrational empirically-historically unverifiable elements in Weber’s conceptual and theoretical formulations will enrich the Weberian legacy. Similarly, historical, cross- cultural comparative study will liberate caste from the myth of Indian exceptionalism.
Keywords: class, status, caste, religion, political economy
It has been claimed that Max Weber was the first to undertake a strictly empirical comparison of social structure and normative order in world-historical depth. He disagreed with the systems and “isms” of the time, such as social Darwinism and Marxism that remained essentially speculative notwithstanding their claim to a science of society. Similarly, he was opposed to the evolutionary and monocausal theories—idealist or materialist. While he did recognize the significance of economic factors and their role in group conflicts, he rejected the thesis of class contradictions and class struggle in society and history. Finally, “Unlike Engels, he saw no grounds for assuming an ‘ultimately determining element in history.’” To the contrary, he approached sociological theory and historical generalization on the concrete level.1
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This statement about Weber’s general approach is useful in examining the particular strands of his theory. My particular interest in this chapter is to underline the salience of Weber’s conceptual and theoretical contributions to the study of the caste in India as a system of social stratification.
Caste is unarguably a most studied and at the same time a most contentious subject in sociological enquiry of India, by Indians and non-Indians alike. Max Weber’s distinction between class and status is the single most important influence on the mainstream sociology of caste. Caste appears in this work as a particular case to illustrate his general theory of the distribution of power. Caste is not determined by economic and political power. Rather, it is a source of economic and political power. Another work by Weber that deals directly with caste is his study of Hinduism and Buddhism, which formed Volume II of the “Economic Ethics of the World Religions” (and was translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale as The Religion of India. The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism).2 This was part of his larger study, that is, the development of capitalism in the West. We may be reminded that the larger question Weber was interested in was why it was in the West and only in the West that “modern capitalist conditions” emerged. Why did they not emerge in India or China? We may note that this question is central to Weber’s wider theoretical goal, rooted in his rejection of the role of class contradictions and class struggle in history. Some sixty years before Weber, Marx had emphasized the role of class struggle under feudalism leading to the expropriation of the direct producers from land, the means of their subsistence, as a decisive factor in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, replacing serfdom with wage labor, the distinguishing feature of the capitalist mode of production. He had also emphasized the role of violence in the process: the rosy dawn of capitalism was anything but idyllic, he noted. Weber rejects that and offers an alternative explanation of the genesis of capitalism in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as peaceful pursuit of acquisition determined by the economic ethic of Calvinism and the Puritan sects. How did caste as embodiment of the work ethic of Hinduism determine “the pursuit of life conduct” of Indians, and how did that impact on the development of capitalism in India, was Weber’s question.
Caste in India was not peripheral but central to Weber’s theoretical scheme. Two important, arguably the most important, components of Weber’s theoretical contributions include the distribution of power and the emergence of capitalism in the West; and caste figures prominently in both. I propose to critically examine Weber’s contribution to the study of caste, particularly the distinction between class and status, identifying caste as the latter, and the relationship between caste and religion (Hinduism).
Class and Status
Max Weber’s seminal essay “Class, Status, and Party” is hailed as “perhaps the most influential single essay in the sociological literature … the embryo of … a multidimensional approach to social analysis … primary alternative and antidote to Marx’s strong emphasis on material factors in social economic formations.” His main
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy concern in this essay, we are told, was “to avoid confusing different forms of power that served as the bases for different types of social formation.”3 Weber’s main concern in the aforementioned essay is the distribution of power in society. He identifies class (economic), status (cultural), and party (political) as three different phenomena of the distribution of power. He argues that economically conditioned power is not identical with “power” as such. Nor is it the primary source of power in all cases. In some cases, economic power may be the consequence of other sources of power. It is further argued that power is not merely a source of enrichment but frequently also a source of social honor. The source of social honor is cultural as opposed to economic and may frequently be a source of the latter.4
There are two component parts of class recognized by Weber: one, property and lack of property as the basic categories of all class situations and, two, class situation is ultimately the market situation. Those who cannot have a chance of using goods or services for themselves on the market (e.g., slaves or serfs) are not classes but status groups. Caste is characterized as status group, based on cultural power, in contrast to class, based on economic power.
Following on the distinction between economic power and cultural power, Weber distinguishes economic order from social order. One, concerned with the distribution of goods and services, is the realm of class. The other, concerned with the distribution of social honor, is the realm of status. Caste belongs to the realm of status as opposed to class.
Property as such is not always recognized as a status qualification, but in the long run it is, and with extraordinary regularity. However, status honor need not necessarily be linked with a “class situation.” It is so since both the propertied and the propertyless can belong to the same status group. This equality of social esteem (without equality of property) may, however, in the long run become quite precarious.5 If property becomes a status qualification in the long run, does that mean that status, albeit social honor, without property is a phenomenon only in the short run? The same holds for status equality between the propertied and the non-propertied: what happens in the long run when equality between the propertied and the non-propertied, the very essence of status in contrast to class, becomes precarious? There is no satisfactory answer to these and other—more serious—questions arising from Weber’s distinction between class and status.
Status as Style of Life
It is argued that the status group is not to be confused with the “occupational status group.” Status group is distinguished by style of life, not the occupation per se. Thus, for example, military service as a knight is status, but military service as a mercenary is not. The difference between the two lies in their different styles of life.6 What is missing here is that a knight lived off his estate where he had monopoly of economic–political power
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy and social esteem, a privilege which was not available to a mercenary. That was the basis of his lifestyle as distinct from that of the mercenary’s.
Weber provides two other examples of status group distinguished by their respective styles of life—blacks during slavery in the United States and the nobility in medieval Europe. Very much like the example of the knight and the soldier, the lifestyle of blacks during slavery in America and that of the nobility in medieval Europe was determined by their respective access to avenues of economic and political power. In focusing on style of life as exclusively cultural independent of economic and political power is problematic. Style of life and social esteem, the quintessence of status as cultural power, are intrinsically connected to economic and political power, underlining the connectedness of economic–political power and social honor.
Status Usurpation
Weber argues that status groups set themselves apart by adopting certain characteristics or badges indicative of social honor. Usurpation may begin in conflict, but it must be converted into legal privilege, which, we are told, happens only after it has become a “lived-in” reality by virtue of a stable distribution of economic power.7 It is not clarified whether usurpation of status occurs only after the economic power has already been usurped or prior to that. If stabilization of economic (and political) power normally leads to usurpation of badges of status, does that not make the distinction between class and status rather problematic in the sense that cultural power in that case is a result of economic power? If stabilization of economic power is a condition for the transition from usurpation by convention to usurpation by law (as argued by Weber), what does that say about status without property, the basis of distinction between status and class, to begin with?
Status, the Opposite of Stratification by Market
Status stratification is opposed to stratification by market. Every rational economic pursuit, especially entrepreneurial activity, is looked upon as a disqualification of status. If mere economic acquisition and naked economic power bearing the stigma of extra- status origin could bestow upon anyone the same honor as enjoyed by those who have earned it by virtue of style of life, the status order is threatened to its very core. Precisely because of the rigorous reaction against the claim of property per se, the “parvenu” is never accepted, without reservations, by the privileged status group. However, the succeeding generation of the “parvenu” faces little resistance to acceptance by the status group. Having been educated in the conventions of their status group, they are easily assimilated provided that they have never compromised status honor by engaging in manual labor for subsistence.8 What this means is that admission to the status group is dependent on stabilization of a family’s position in the existing economic–political order. Education in the conventions of the status group as a condition of admission is well taken
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy if it is noted that stabilization of the economic eminence and corresponding political and cultural position was a necessary condition for training in the convention of status. Slaves and serfs could not be educated in the convention of the master and the lord. The low- caste landless laborer could not be educated in the convention of the Brahman whose status qualification was to abstain from physical labor.
The hindrance of the free development of the market, the argument goes on, occurs first for those goods which are monopolized and withheld from free exchange by status groups, for example, the inherited estate in Hellenic cities and in Rome and the estates of knights or the clientele of the merchant guilds in medieval Europe. To that we may add the landed estates in India until the end of colonial rule. The principle at work is that the market is restricted, and the power of naked property per se, which gives its stamp to “class formation,” is pushed into the background. Where stratification by status permeates (antiquity and the Middle Ages), one can never speak of a genuinely free- market competition, as we understand it today.9 If status is a feature of non-market, albeit pre-capitalist, societies, it is well taken. If, however, it is argued that status is independent of property and political power per se, that is problematic. Status in pre- market society (antiquity, feudalism) was based on ancient and feudal forms of property as opposed to bourgeois forms of property characteristic of market (capitalist) society. The basic principle of the intrinsic connection between property and social honor at work is, however, the same in pre-market and market societies: the group having monopoly of economic and political power enjoys the highest social honor. It applies to antiquity, medieval society, and capitalism in the West, as well as to the caste system in India.
Relations of Production and Consumption
The distinction between class and status comes out sharply in Weber’s concluding remarks: “classes are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods; whereas status groups are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘styles of life.’”10 The problem is that consumption, marker of style of life of the status group, is not isolated from relations of production and acquisition of goods. Production, acquisition, and consumption are determined by the social relations of production, which bind the producers and consumers in unequal economic–political relations justified by dominant ideology with religious and secular components. It is as true of class society as of status societies.
To his credit, Weber admits that separation of status from economic power is not a general condition. He writes that they are separate at one point, connected at another, and separate at yet another. The differences between classes and status groups frequently overlap. It is precisely those status communities most strictly segregated in terms of status honor (e.g., the Indian castes) that there is a high degree of indifference to pecuniary income. However, the Brahmans seek such income in many different ways, he admits.11 It may be added that the Brahman, barring an ascetic or renouncer (a rank which was in fact not closed to other castes including the lowest castes), indifferent to
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy pecuniary income, is a mythical creature. Going back to Vedic times, Brahmans claimed their share of gold, garments, cows, and maidens acquired by warrior chiefs in return for praying for the latter, a relationship that continued after pastoralism gave way to settled agriculture with warrior chiefs turning into territorial landlords and princes. Brahmans were the first recipients of land grants once land became the private property of the prince and landlords, not only for praying but also for expanding agricultural production on newly colonized lands.12 In addition, Brahmans monopolized education, a perennial source of pecuniary income, in addition to social honor. In accounting for the eminence of the Brahman in Indian society and history, his spiritual eminence is analytically disconnected from his privileged access to material resources. Social honor of the Brahman in the caste system was not in contrast to economic power. One may argue, following Weber, that the economic power enjoyed by the Brahman was a result of the social honor he enjoyed. That does not, however, negate the fact that social honor and economic power in the caste system were intrinsically connected and mutually reinforcing rather than being contradictory.
The other examples of status group cited by Weber—estate holders in antiquity and medieval times—were distinguished by their style of life premised on consumption. The question is why it is that those who produced (slaves and serfs in the West and lower castes in India) did not consume, while those who did not participate in production (masters in antiquity and modernity, lords in medieval times, and upper castes in India) consumed. The answer lies in the social relations of production. Stylization of life by status group with positive honor: there is no dispute with that, if we remember that status groups with positive honor become bearers of convention and stylization of life only after they have already become bearers of exclusive rights to economic, political, and cultural power. That makes the contrast between class and status problematic.
Status and Performance of Physical Labor
Among privileged status groups there is status disqualification that operates against the performance of common physical labor. Any activity, including artistic and literary, is considered degrading if it is exploited for income or connected with hard physical exertion.13 When did physical labor become associated with negative social honor in human history? Only when the means of production became the private property of a particular class was the class without property rights compelled to engage in manual labor, freeing the other class to devote itself to mental labor and the symbolic boundaries between the two types of labor with their roots in the material conditions of existence drawn and sanctioned by convention, law, and religion. Manual labor became the condition of status disqualification and mental labor, of status qualification. As Richard Lee writes, “For most of the long history of human society, however, there were no leisure class, few machines and no distinction between the mental and manual laborer. Everyone worked and everyone used both hands and mind.”14
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A digression: status disqualification is now setting in America against the old tradition of esteem for labor, writes Weber.15 The tradition of esteem for labor in America noted by Weber is interesting. How well does that sit with the real history of the degradation of labor in America, a degradation that included slaves, indentured servants, indentured whites, and immigrants including Irish, Russians, and Jews at the turn of the twentieth century?16 What masters in antiquity, landlords in medieval Europe, dominant castes in India, and bourgeoisie in America have in common is their disdain of (manual) labor in the process of production—a disdain that is extended to the laborer, as rightly noted by Sharma17 in the specific context of the caste system in India.
Finally, as to the general economic conditions making for the predominance of stratification by status, Weber only says the following: “When the bases of the acquisition and distribution of goods are relatively stable, stratification by status is favored.”18 We may be reminded that the separation of cultural power from economic power is the very starting point of the distinction between status and class. It follows that separating cultural power from economic power and disconnecting consumption from relations of production and acquisition, the core of status–class distinction, is untenable.
Status and Miscegenation
Tambiah writes that the classical theory enshrines timeless truths about certain basic features of the Indian caste system. One such timeless truth he mentions is the differential privilege and dominance coded in the traditional theory in terms of sexual access to women of different varna status. Hypergamy (anuloma) and concubinage, prevalent in different parts of India at different times, were among the institutionalized forms of this privilege, he writes. Going back to ancient days, Manu prescribed that a Brahman may take three more wives, in addition to one from his own varna and three from the other three varnas; Kshatriya two more, Vaisya one more, and the Sudra only one (from his own).19
Milner argues that while many status groups are concerned about the regulation of sexual relations in general, they are especially concerned with the regulation of marriage.20 They may, however, be excused for sowing “wild oats.” In the specific context of caste, it refers to upper-caste men having sexual relations with lower-caste women, with no obligation to marry. As Rajshekhar puts it, “while our men are untouchables, our women can be enjoyed by the high caste men.”21 In characterizing this as “sowing wild oats,” Milner is dismissive of it as individual deviance. It was not individual deviance but a systemic issue. It happened in medieval Europe, the antebellum South, and the caste system on a daily basis. Status groups with positive honor—upper castes in India, masters in the antebellum South, and the aristocracy in medieval Europe, given their control over the means of subsistence of the lower caste, race, and class—“usurped the privilege” (to borrow Weber’s words) of access to the female bodies of the latter, while zealously guarding the sexuality of their own women, particularly against access by men of the latter. As a systemic issue, it was an embodiment of asymmetrical power relations
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy between the higher and the lower in the caste system. It was the same between the master and the slave in slavery and the lord and the serf in feudalism. Sexual access by men of privileged groups to women of unprivileged groups in different social economic formations across cultural boundaries is a phenomenon of power as defined by Weber, that is, to impose one’s will against the resistance of the other.
Social Honor in Caste: Consequence or Cause of Economic–Political Power
In distinguishing status from class, Weber argued that, indeed, social honor, or prestige, may even be the basis of political or economic power and very frequently has been. This argument is commonly used in mainstream sociology, that it is not economic power (or a lack of it) that makes a particular caste higher or lower in status. To the contrary, it is their status (with a positive or negative association with honor) which determines their access to economic (and political) power or a lack of it. It is thus argued that Marx on occasion overstated the effect of people’s relationship to the means of production. In doing that, we are told, he did not give adequate attention to the reverse causal relationship, that is, the way social–cultural factors determine the available resources.22 In order to determine whether social honor in the caste system results from, or results in, economic power, one has to study caste hierarchy not only as it exists at a particular point of time but also over time including times of social change. Take, for instance, the case of the Rajputs and Jats in Rajasthan until the 1940s and afterward. Until end of the 1940s, the Jats as peasants were dependent tenure holders in subordination to the Rajput landlords and consequently lower in caste hierarchy. Following the abolition of the age- old land tenure system following the abolition of landlordism in the 1950s, the Jats became independent proprietors of lands according to their occupation, which also enhanced their political power and social honor. It is the same with Ahirs and Kunabis in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Historically, the most obvious case of economic power resulting in social honor is that of the Kshatriyization or Rajputization of the various groups of amorphous origin who after establishing dominion over a territory staked claim to the Kshatriya (Rajput) status and found pliable Brahmans or bards to legitimize their claim in return for material gain. As Romila Thapar notes, the rise of families of relatively obscure origin to high social status, usually through the channel of landownership and administrative office, is amply shown by historical records. Those who became economically and politically powerful had genealogies fabricated for themselves, bestowing on the family Kshatriya status, linked with royal lineages.23
As argued by R. S. Sharma,24 the members of the higher castes could claim a number of exploitative privileges only when manual work was separated from non-manual (religious, intellectual, and administrative) work. The main condition for that to occur was to separate the laboring groups from the land, the most important means of production of the time, which allowed the higher castes to perpetuate their power and position by
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy socially–culturally distancing themselves from the former—artisans and agricultural laborers. Rituals of purity and pollution were devised to mask the division of property and political power, turning a social–historical process into a divine creation. Thus, only after particular castes were dispossessed of the means of their subsistence were they associated with negative social honor and a lower rank in caste hierarchy, which became self-perpetuating with the passage of time. Conversely, caste or castes gaining access to productive resources and political power moved up, becoming more powerful not only economically and politically but also culturally in terms of social honor. Mainstream sociology of caste confined, by and large, to studying caste as it exists at a particular period rather than over a course of different periods turns the relationship between economic power and social honor in the caste system upside down, making the latter cause the former.
Distinction of Caste as Status: Religious Usurpation
As a status group, caste has a specific feature that makes it rather distinct from other types of status group. As noted, status distinctions in caste are guaranteed not only by conventions and laws but also by rituals. This occurs in such a way that every physical contact between members of higher and lower castes results in ritualistic impurity—a stigma that must be expiated by a religious act.25 Usurpation by religion, in addition to convention and law, in the caste system noted by Weber is beyond doubt an important, arguably the most important, of Weber’s observations about caste. It may be mentioned that apart from usurpation, the relationship between religion and caste in general is unarguably the most controversial and debated issue in the sociology of caste.26 Mainstream sociology of caste, following Weber, turned his valuable insight about the role of religion in usurpation into religion as the very essence of caste and the caste system, stamping the latter with cultural uniqueness—Indian exceptionalism, with Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus being the most famous example of this. In what follows, I discuss some of the issues arising from the centrality of religion in isolation from economic– political power in conceptualizing caste as status.
Subordination of Political Power to Religious Power in Caste: Indian Exceptionalism
The distinction between status (priest/Brahman) and power (prince/Kshatriya) is at the core of Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus, unarguably one of most important and talked about books on caste. It may be noted here that Dumont borrows the idea of status from Weber and gives it his own interpretation to make it purely religious—a distortion of Weber’s conceptualization of status and of the reality of caste, past and present. Dumont writes that some eight centuries perhaps before Christ, Hindu tradition established an absolute distinction between power and hierarchical status. Indian culture, he argues, is
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy characterized by the probably unique phenomenon of a thoroughgoing distinction between hierarchy and power. As a result, hierarchy appears there in its pure form.27 Milner echoes Dumont in saying that, strange as it may seem, the culture of premodern India has been relatively successful over a long period of time at insulating status from economic–political power.28 Status and moral worth have been less directly dependent upon economic and political power than in most other complex societies. Hence, Milner asks, is status more important in India than in most societies? This is a case of Indian exceptionalism.
Priest Ahead of Prince: Brahmanocentric View of Caste
It has been argued that Brahman (spiritual power) in the caste system does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Kshatriya (economic–political power). The relationship between the spiritual principle and the principle of imperium is fully seen in the institution of the purohit (priest) with whom the king must have a “permanent personal relationship.” Purohit literally means “the one placed in front.” The king depends on him for all the actions of his life, for these would not succeed without him. Purohit is to the king as thought is to will.29 If one goes by historical and ethnographic evidence, there is scant support for the precedence of priest over prince. The prince was not dependent on the priest for “all actions.” In economic, political, juridical, and military matters—the main spheres of kingly duty (rajdharma)—there was little involvement of the priest. Priests’ activities were confined to rituals in temples. Kingdoms were not founded on rituals or for rituals but on the monopoly of land, the main form of property and principal source of subsistence; the main function of kings was the administration of land and people within their territory. In administering the land and people, the prince was dependent on peers— the fraternity of landlords—who were members of his class and caste. In the administration of land and people, the priest was not to the fore. The priest and the prince were united and separated. The prince provided for the priest in return for the spiritual and ideological service the latter rendered. But the prince and the priest belonged to two separate spheres when it came to the main affairs—economic, political, juridical, military, and social–cultural—of the state. They belonged to the realm of the profane, separate from the realm of the sacred belonging to the temple. The prince was the eminent owner of all land in the state, on which depended the survival of all including that of the priest. To collapse the court into the temple and privilege the temple over the court and the priest over the prince is distortion of historical reality.
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Was the Priest–Prince Relationship in India Unique?
It is argued that, driven by religion, the alliance between priest and prince in India was unique, separating it from other historical cases. To the contrary, the alliance between prince and priest in the caste system was not basically different from the alliance between king and priest in feudal societies in Africa, Asia, and Europe. The driving force behind the alliance was not religious but secular. The prince and the priest together constituted the dominant class (and caste), an alliance against the rest of society. As Huberman writes about the Middle Ages in Europe, the church and nobility were the ruling classes, which seized the land and the power that went with it. The church provided spiritual aid and the nobility, military protection. In return for this they squeezed the laboring classes.30 As in the case of the church and the nobility in Europe, the function of the priest was to provide spiritual service in return for military protection and material rewards guaranteed by the prince. Together, they seized the land and the political power to squeeze the peasants and artisans in the caste system.
The Problem of Legitimation
Hermann Kulke writes that Weber focuses his analysis of the Hindu social system on the order of the castes, but his definition of the caste system had little influence on actual anthropological research on caste, Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus being a prime example.31 I disagree. Weber is the single most important influence on mainstream sociology and social anthropology of caste, with Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus being the most important. Weber’s distinction between status and class is at the very core of Homo Hierarchicus. Weber’s influence is even stronger on the relationship between caste and Hinduism in mainstream sociology of caste in general, Dumont in particular. It is the same with the Brahmanocentric view of caste and the centrality of commensality and connubium in defining the caste system. Affinity between Weber, Dumont, and mainstream sociology of caste is not incidental. Rather, it is based on their common objective to find an alternative to Marxism as an explanatory model of society and history, as Sara Farris argues.32
Weber’s concept of legitimation is considered “an intrinsic and seminal aspect of his study on the Hindu social system and processes of state formation and Hinduization.” It has been argued that the centrality of religion and the preeminence of Brahman in the caste system was due to the role of the priest in the legitimation of princely rule.33 Weber wrote,
Legitimation by a recognized religion has always been decisive for an alliance between politically socially dominant classes and priesthood. It provided the “barbarians” with recognized rank in the cultural world of Hinduism. By
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transforming them into castes it secured their superiority over the subject classes with an efficacy unsurpassed by any religion.34
Apart from the sacred texts of Hinduism, if one looks at historical and ethnographic evidence, it is clear that the legitimation of kingship was not exclusively or even primarily a religious phenomenon. It was rather predominantly political–economic outside the spiritual domain of the Brahman priest. The role of the priest (Brahman) and the religious nature of coronation of the king and legitimation of the kingship are exaggerated, suppressing the secular and contingent character of kingly power, most importantly, the role of peers—the fraternity of landlords. A king could not rule without the consent of his peers on whom he was dependent for the military support to conquer and defend the kingdom in the first instance and subsequently for their political support to administer it.
In the Rajput princely states of Rajasthan, the coronation ceremony was not complete until and unless the peerage (the fraternity of land grantees in return for military, political, and judicial services) took the oath of allegiance. The coronation of the ruler of Marawar (a premier princely state of Rajasthan) was not complete unless the landlord of Bagari (a prominent land grantee of the state) put the tilak (the red mark of sovereignty) with the blood of his thumb on the forehead of the would-be king. In the state of Mewar (another premier state of Rajasthan), the privilege of putting the tilak with his blood on the forehead of the king at coronation belonged to the Bhil chief, member of a tribal group outside the fold of Hinduism and the caste system. Kulke mentions similar cases of the special role played by tribal chiefs, outside the fold of Hinduism and caste, in the coronation in the princely states of Orissa.35 The participation of tribal chiefs in the coronation of Hindu kings, he points out, can be interpreted as a demonstration of the power of the dominant tribes as the real or original owners of the land and the mutual dependence between the king and the tribe.
In the princely states of Rajasthan the Jain monks of the monastic lineage, in addition to the Charans and the Bhats, had a prominent role in royal affairs including coronation and legitimation. The Brahmans, Jain monks, Charans, and Bhats competed in providing alternative narratives of major historical events relating to the kings and kingdoms. What is interesting is that the Jain monks, Charans, and Bhats did not identify with the Brahmans. Rather, they identified with and emulated, by and large, the lifestyle of the Rajputs, the dominant caste.36 Legitimation and coronation were not sacred, rooted in religion, but dictated by political, economic, and administrative contingencies: they were profane.
It may be pointed out that the most important change in the transition from tribe to caste was the dissolution of tribal property rights in land and its replacement by feudal land rights. Conversion to Hinduism and caste was the secondary step. Sociologists following Weber focused on the latter, ignoring the former altogether. Integration of tribes took place at the top (Kshatriya) and at the bottom (Shudra) of the caste hierarchy. The difference between the two did not lie in Hinduization but in their differential land rights, political power, and social esteem—one having monopoly of all powers, the other
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy dispossessed and powerless. The sociology of legitimation in caste is confined to the top, ignoring the bottom. It is the story of the upper caste. Its main failure is evading the question of land, the very basis of stratification by caste and class. Inability to deal with the land question is more serious in Weber’s theory of stratification by caste. To deal with that, we turn to the question of feudalism.
Caste and the Land Question: The Problem of Feudalism
Weber relates the peculiarity of the caste system, in which spiritual authority of the Brahman reigns supreme, to the absence of feudalism in India. How does he establish that relationship? The Hindu social order, he argues, more than anywhere else in the world (another instance of Indian exceptionalism!) is organized in terms of the principle of clan charisma. This form of charisma was not absent in the West. The hereditary divine right of kings and the legend of blue blood are examples of charisma in the West, he admits. However, in the West the charisma was routinized and institutionalized in the offices of the prince, the elector, and the cardinal. To the contrary, in India it was confined to the sib. Sib charisma prevented the development of feudalism in India, which in turn kept the “rural idiocy” of the priest intact.37
In order to show how sib charisma prevented the development of feudalism in India, Weber argues that feudal ties in Europe developed in response to the military need of the time: feudal relationships were made by a “free contract” among sib strangers. Increasingly, feudal lords developed the in-group feeling of a unitary status group and eventually into the “closed hereditary estates of chivalrous knights.” This relationship grew on the basis of sib estrangement among men who viewed themselves not as sib, phratry, or tribe but simply as “status peers.” Indian development, to the contrary, took quite a different turn. There the feudal status formation did not rest on land grants. Rather, it was derived from the sib, clan, phratry, and tribe, as correctly emphasized by Baden-Powell. The conquering classes in India were comprised of a circle of phratries and sibs of lords dispersing over the conquered territory under the rule of the tribe, writes Weber. Feudal prerogatives were enforced by the head of the phratry (raja) or a tribal king (maharajah) only, as a rule, to his agnates. It was not a freely contracted trusteeship. Fellow sib members claimed their land grant as a birthright.38
Romila Thapar points out that Weber ignored the evidence showing that land grants in India were feudal rather than prebendal. The Dharmasastras and Arthashastra, she points out, discuss the laws and regulations for the sale, bequest, and inheritance of land and other forms of property. Inscriptions on stone and copper plates after 500 CE, recording the grant of land to religious beneficiaries by the king or wealthy persons, are even more precise. So are the secular grants made by the king in return for service. These inscriptions were deciphered in the nineteenth century but read primarily for chronology
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy and dynastic purposes. Land grants in India broke the clan charisma going back to the first millennium CE, she writes.39
Early centuries (Christian era) in India were a period of transition, when land and other agrarian resources came to be privately controlled by a considerable class of beneficiaries, religious and secular, which resulted in a division of society into two basic classes: (1) landlords having titles to land grants and (2) peasants, the basic producers. The landlords restricted the free access of the peasants to lands. This led to the emergence of the two principal classes—(1) landlords with a monopoly of economic– political powers and (2) dependent peasantry having the right to possess lands in return for rent and tributes. This constituted feudalism.40
It may be added that a serious problem with Weber’s position on feudalism in India, or the West for that matter, is that he confines himself to considering the political relations between landlords, ignoring the relations between landlords and serfs, the two principal classes of feudalism and its very foundation. Instead, consistent with his approach, he isolates a particular cultural feature, fealty, from its structural roots and turns it into the defining feature of feudalism. Whether feudalism ever developed in India depends on an answer to the most important question: were the relations between lords and peasants in India feudal, as defined in a generic sense?
Whether relations between a prince and his sib and clan members were feudal came up in the famous controversy between James Tod and Alfred Lyall in the nineteenth century. Tod maintained that the relations between rulers and landlords in the princely states of Rajputana (now Rajasthan) were analogous to the relations between lords and vassals in medieval Europe.41 Lyall, to the contrary, argued that Tod failed to make a distinction between two forms of society, tribal and feudal, and mistakenly introduced into his writings on Rajputana such medieval terms as “feuds” and “subinfeudation.” Rather than comparing “the Rajput tribal system” to that of medieval Europe, it should appropriately be compared to the system of kindred tribes like the Pathans and Afghans or a widely spread tribe of professional thieves, the Meenas of Rajputana. Lands held by the subchiefs of Rajputana must not be confused with the service grants—the fiefs—of medieval Europe. They were instead part of the clan occupation. The clannish origin of their tenures makes them tribal, rather than feudal. The subchiefs, rather than being the dependent tenure holders of the ruler of the state, were indeed their co-parceners. As clan members, they were equal partners in landownership,42 which is the same as Weber’s argument.
Contrary to Lyall, historical evidence from the 1870s shows that landlords in the princely states of Rajputana held their grants as service tenures. The two most important conditions attached to these grants were rekh (tribute) and chakari (service), the latter being more important.43 There are innumerable instances where a land grantee was forgiven for defaulting the payment of rekh, but in no single instance was he forgiven the default of chakari since it included military service, among a whole host of other services symbolic of inequality between the prince and the landlords holding their grants at the
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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 May 2019 Class, Caste, and Social Stratification in India: Weberian Legacy sufferance of the former. The subordinate status of the subchiefs (land grantees) was clearly demarcated not only by the lower economic, political, and juridical rights they held of the king but also by the symbolic boundaries that set the chiefs and subchiefs apart, notwithstanding their common kinship and caste ties. The obligations of the land grantees (subchiefs) in Rajasthan involved the duties of kindred in addition to those of obedience ranging from attending the court and guarding the fort to giving themselves as hostages for their lord.44 It contradicts Weber’s claim that the position of subchiefs in India was dependent upon sib or clan, denoting equality rather than a feudal hierarchy.45
There were other features of land grants in India that made them feudal, most important being the primogeniture, which in feudalism was a device to prevent parcelization of the estate to enable it to meet the public obligations attached to the land grants.46 More importantly, it was indicative of the precedence of class interests over those of kinship.47 The justification of primogeniture in Hindu law rested on a distinction between private property and a chiefship. In the case of the former, all of the sons had an equal share in family estates, but this did not apply to chiefships. Chiefship was a public estate, and the owner had to discharge the responsibilities of kingly office. It was for this reason that a land grant in return for military service was not allowed to die: “[sub]chief, like his sovereign never dies.… The great fiefs of Rajasthan never become extinct.”48 The distinction between private and public is absent in social formations based on the sib.
The basic principle of landholding in the feudal system is defined as follows:
The feudal system in the last resort rested upon an organization, which, in return for a protection … placed the working classes at the mercy of the idle classes, and gave the land not to those who cultivated it, but to those who had been able to seize it.49
Seizure of land in India by those who did not labor was not negated by the caste system. To the contrary, it was the very basis of caste hierarchy, very much as it was the basis of class hierarchy in feudal regimes elsewhere.
Our disagreement with Weber is on the wider implications of his argument in this context; that is, Indian society organized by the caste system rooted in Hinduism did not move beyond the tribal stage, while society in the West moved from tribalism to slavery to serfdom (feudalism), finally culminating in capitalism. To the contrary, the introduction of plough agriculture in various regions marked the transition from a clan-based to a class- and caste-based society going back to the first millennium BCE. The Mauryan Empire controlling the Indian subcontinent, contemporary to the Hellenic regime, was not a tribal polity and economy. The evolution of the state proper (premised on the disintegration of the sib and clan as the basis of socioeconomic organization) took place in the Ganga Valley in the mid-first millennium BCE.50 The most important change in the transition from the clan to the state society was the dissolution of the communal property and its replacement by hierarchical rights in land, with the ruler of the state having the highest rights. Weber does recognize the difference between tribe and caste in terms of different modes of subsistence (based on different property rights), but in distinguishing
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Concluding Remarks
In conceptualizing class and status, Weber’s main objective was to provide an alternative to the Marxist notion of class and class struggle in history. By defining class as a market situation, Weber provides an alternative view of history and the role of class and class struggle in the making of it. If class is a market situation, it could not have existed in pre- market, albeit pre-capitalist, societies; and the origin of capitalism could no more be attributed to class contradictions and class struggle under feudalism.
Weber’s challenge in conceptualizing status as cultural power in contrast to class as economic power was to find empirical–historical examples of status groups. The examples of slave and master, serf and lord in Western history were open to interrogation in the sense that these divisions were also divisions between the propertied and the propertyless. The Brahman in the Indian caste system, assumed to have social honor without economic (and political) power, ideally meets the criterion of status. The Brahman in the caste system also meets the other criterion of status, that is, entitlement to economic power on account of social honor.
The Brahman serves yet another function in Weber’s other project, “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” which can be seen as a follow-up to his Protestant ethic thesis. If capitalism did not develop in India, the reason must be found in the absence of a rational economic ethic in Hinduism. In The Religion of India, caste is presented as predominantly religious and a creation of Hinduism. Inseparability of Hinduism and caste—no Hinduism without caste and no caste without Hinduism—emphasized in the Religion of India has to be seen in that light. Subsequent studies of caste in mainstream sociology rather than critically examining Weber’s conceptualization of caste as status and separating the rational elements in his thesis from the irrational elements according to modern scholarship, turned it into a formula. This is not what Weber aimed at, as outlined by Roth (quoted at the start of this chapter).
Hinduism has played and continues to play an important role in shaping caste consciousness, and Weber’s contribution in that regard remains valuable. It is equally important to emphasize that religion (read Hinduism) is not the basis of caste stratification. Indian exceptionalism due to the uniqueness of caste rooted in Hinduism is based on myth. True, caste is not class. But caste is not negation of class in Indian society and history. Historically, class developed in India before caste, and class relations are the very foundation of caste hierarchy. Neither the structure of caste at a particular time in a particular region nor the struggles and changes in the caste system over millennia can be understood in isolation from class relations.
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In Weber, caste is part of a universal-historical system of stratification. In mainstream sociology, apparently following Weber, caste is peripheralized to uniquely Indian cultural phenomena, a case of Indian exceptionalism. Bringing caste from the periphery to the center of the comparative historical study of social stratification will enrich the Weberian legacy. It will also liberate mainstream sociology of caste from narrow ethnocentrism.
Notes:
(1.) Guenther Roth, “Introduction” to Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (hereafter E&S), ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), xxvii, xxix.
(2.) Max Weber, The Religion of India. The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (hereafter RI), trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1958); Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Hinduismus und Buddhismus. 1916–1920, Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (hereafter MWG) I/20, ed. H. Schmidt-Glintzer, with K.-H. Golzio (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr [Siebeck], 1996).
(3.) Murray Milner, Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7.
(4.) Max Weber, “The Distribution of Power Within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party,” E&S, 926–940; “‘Klassen,’ ‘Stände’ und ‘Parteien,’” Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Nachlaß. Teilband 1: Gemeinschaften, MWG I/22-1, ed. W. J. Mommsen, with M. Meyer (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr [Siebeck], 2001), 252–272.
(5.) E&S, 932; MWG I/22-1, 259–260.
(6.) From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 39.
(7.) E&S, 933; MWG I/22-1, 262.
(8.) E&S, 935-936; MWG I/22-1, 266–267.
(9.) E&S, 936–937; MWG I/22-1, 267–268.
(10.) E&S, 937; MWG I/22-1, 268.
(11.) E&S, 937; MWG I/22-1, 268.
(12.) R. S. Sharma, Rethinking India’s Past (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2009), 176–177.
(13.) E&S, 936; MWG I/22-1, 266.
(14.) Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 250.
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(15.) E&S, 936; MWG I/22-1, 266.
(16.) Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
(17.) Sharma, Rethinking India’s Past, 7.
(18.) E&S, 938; MWG I/22-1, 269.
(19.) S. J. Tambiah, “From Varna to Caste Through Mixed Unions,” in The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 191–230.
(20.) Milner, Status and Sacredness, 39–40.
(21.) V. T. Rajshekar, Hinduism vs Movement of Untouchables in India (Bangalore, India: Dalit Sahitya Academy, 1983), 4.
(22.) Milner, Status and Sacredness, 7.
(23.) Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13; Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture, and Hegemony: Social Domination in Colonial Bengal (Delhi, India: Sage, 2004) 51; Weber, RI, 65; MWG I/20, 131; Hermann Kulke, “Max Weber’s Concept of Legitimation in Hinduism Revisited,” Max Weber Studies 18, no. 1 (2018): 55–57.
(24.) Sharma, Rethinking India’s Past, 7.
(25.) E&S, 933; MWG I/22-1, 262.
(26.) For more on this, see R. S. Khare, ed., Caste Hierarchy, and Individualism: Indian Critiques of Louis Dumont’s Contributions (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2006).
(27.) Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
(28.) Milner, Status and Sacredness, 16, 28.
(29.) Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 289–290.
(30.) Leo Huberman, Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1963), 15.
(31.) Kulke, “Max Weber’s Concept of Legitimation,” 41.
(32.) Sara R. Farris, “New and Old Spirits of Capitalism,” International Review of Social History 55 (2010): 297–306.
(33.) Kulke, “Max Weber’s Concept of Legitimation,” 40–46.
(34.) RI, 16; MWG I/20, 68–69 (translation altered).
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(35.) Kulke, “Max Weber’s Concept of Legitimation,” 57–64.
(36.) Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500–1900 (Seattle: Washington University Press, 2007), 77–79.
(37.) RI, 50–51; MWG I/20, 110–111.
(38.) RI, 53–54; MWG I/20, 114–115.
(39.) Thapar, Cultural Pasts, 12, 41.
(40.) Sharma, Rethinking India’s Past, 18–19.
(41.) James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1832; London: Routledge, 1920), 153.
(42.) Alfred Lyall, Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social: First Series (London: John Murray, 1882).
(43.) G. D. Sharma, Rajput Polity: A Study of Politics and Administration of the State of Marwar, 1638–1749 (Delhi, India: Manohar Publishers, 1977).
(44.) Tod, Annals and Antiquities, 146.
(45.) RI, 63; MWG I/20, 128.
(46.) F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism, trans. P. Grierson (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 45.
(47.) Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (London: Routledge, 1961), 204.
(48.) Tod, Annals and Antiquities, 153.
(49.) Huberman, Man’s Worldly Goods, 16.
(50.) Sharma, Rethinking India’s Past, 34–37; Thapar, Cultural Pasts, 377–379.
(51.) RI, 30–31; MWG I/20, 88–89.
Hira Singh Department of Sociology, York University
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