Indian Society: Configurations and Dynamics| Caste, Class and Tribe

Section a: Caste, Class and Tribe

Overview

This unit explores the structural configurations and dynamic transformations of caste, class, and tribe in Indian society. Drawing on seminal readings, it examines the persistence of traditional hierarchies, the emergence of new social classes, and the politics of identity among tribal communities.

Caste in Contemporary India: Eleanor Zelliot on Persistence, Identity, and Political Awakening

The Scholar Behind the Lens

To understand Eleanor Zelliot’s analysis of caste, we must first understand the woman herself. She was an American historian who first came to India in 1952, and over four decades, she returned repeatedly, immersing herself in Maharashtra, living in Pune, traveling across the state, and doing something remarkably rare for a foreign scholar of her era: she learned Marathi, listened to oral histories, and interviewed the living memory of the Dalit movement . Between 1963 and 1965, when she conducted her doctoral fieldwork, Ambedkar’s colleagues, family members, and frontline activists were still alive. She spoke with Yashwant Ambedkar, Dadasaheb Gaikwad, Shantabai Kamble, Changdeo Khairmode, Vasant Moon — figures who had lived the struggle . This was not scholarship from a distance. It was scholarship built on human connection.

Zelliot initially planned to write a political biography of Ambedkar. But her fieldwork transformed her approach. She realized that Ambedkar could not be understood apart from the caste community that produced him — the Mahars. She chose, in her own words, to concentrate on the movement rather than the man . This decision was itself a political and intellectual act: it shifted the lens from heroic individualism to collective struggle, from the exceptional leader to the ordinary people who made his leadership possible.

The Persistence of Caste: Organism and Virus

When Zelliot looks at caste in contemporary India, she offers two metaphors that capture its strange, contradictory nature. She sees caste as both an organism and a virus .

As an organism, caste exists symbiotically within the larger body of Indian society. It adapts. It evolves. It finds new hosts and new environments. The caste association — those modern, urban, often politically active organizations that represent particular jatis — is the organism’s way of surviving in a democratic, capitalist world. Jatis that once defined themselves through traditional occupations now organize as lobbies, as vote banks, as mutual aid societies. They have not disappeared; they have shape-shifted.

As a virus, caste is destructive. It perpetuates inequality and discrimination across generations. It infects institutions that claim to be neutral — schools, hospitals, government offices, even courts. It constrains what Zelliot calls the “moral imagination,” turning democracy into what she fearlessly describes as “ritual hypocrisy” . A country can hold elections, can write a constitution that guarantees equality, can pass laws against untouchability — and still, at the level of everyday life, caste determines who gets the job, who sits where, who marries whom, who is beaten for daring to draw water from the wrong well.

This duality — caste as adaptive organism, caste as destructive virus — is the central tension in Zelliot’s analysis. Caste persists not because Indians are traditional or backward, but because caste is profoundly modern in its ability to reinvent itself.

Varna and Jati: The Living Reality

One of Zelliot’s most important clarifications is the distinction between varna and jati. Most textbooks, most introductory accounts, focus on the four-fold varna system: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras. It is neat, orderly, and largely a Brahminical ideal rather than a social reality .

Jati is where life actually happens. There are perhaps four thousand jatis in India . Each is typically located in a single language region. Each is defined by endogamy — the rule that you marry inside the group — along with shared food practices, common myths, customs, and often a traditional occupation. Your jati is not just your identity; it is your kinship network, your marriage market, your social security system, and sometimes your political constituency.

Zelliot points out something that challenges the neat varna model: in large parts of western, central, and southern India, there are no Kshatriyas or Vaishyas at all . Soldiers and merchants exist, of course, but within the logic of the varna system, they are often classified as Shudras. This is not a minor technicality. It reveals that the varna system is not a universal template that was simply applied across India. It is a Brahminical framework that was imposed, contested, ignored, and adapted in different regions.

The Shudras, Zelliot notes, are not merely servants. They are peasants, artisans, farmers, tailors, musicians, painters, goldsmiths. And today, because of their numbers and their control over land, Shudras often hold political power . This is a transformation that would have been unimaginable in the classical texts, but it is the reality of contemporary India.

Caste and Democratization: The Paradox of Reservation

One of Zelliot’s most provocative insights is about the relationship between caste and democracy. The conventional view, held by many Indian nationalists and Western modernists alike, was that democracy would simply erase caste. Give people the vote, educate them, industrialize the economy, and traditional identities will wither away.

It did not happen. Instead, democracy made caste more politically salient, not less.

Why? Because of what Zelliot calls the “reservation system” — the policy of affirmative action that guarantees former untouchables and other backward castes access to education and government jobs . This policy, enshrined in the Indian Constitution and implemented through a complex system of quotas, has changed the life conditions of millions. Dalit children have become doctors, engineers, civil servants. Families that were landless laborers for generations have seen their children enter the middle class.

But here is the paradox: reservation has also preserved caste as something that matters in the competition for economic benefits . When government jobs are allocated on the basis of caste, caste becomes a resource. It becomes something worth claiming, worth mobilizing around, worth fighting for. Caste assertiveness becomes a means to counter caste inequality. The very tool designed to dismantle hierarchy ends up reinforcing identity.

This is not a failure of policy. It is the unavoidable tension of any group-based redistribution. And Zelliot does flinch from it. She acknowledges that Dalit vote-bank politics can sometimes constrain democracy, that casteism limits the moral imagination, that the ritual of elections can coexist with the reality of discrimination .

Caste Movements and Dalit Assertion: The Mahar Story

Zelliot’s most original contribution is her detailed study of the Mahar movement in Maharashtra. The Mahars were one of the largest untouchable castes in the region, traditionally serving as village watchmen, messengers, and laborers. They lived outside the village boundary, faced daily humiliation, and were subject to the full weight of untouchability.

But something remarkable happened to the Mahars between the late nineteenth century and 1956. They underwent a sustained process of political awakening . They formed organizations, launched newspapers, submitted petitions to the colonial government, contested elections, and produced leaders of national stature. The most famous of these leaders was Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, but he was not the first. Zelliot restores earlier figures like Gopal Baba Walangkar to their rightful place in history — a retired Mahar army officer who, in the 1890s, used his pension and his literacy to critique caste injustice through petitions and writings .

Why the Mahars? Why not other untouchable communities? Zelliot traces this trajectory back to structural changes under colonial rule. The British army recruited Mahars. Urban employment drew them to cities like Mumbai and Pune. Missionary schools gave some of them education. And the gradual weakening of traditional village servant roles freed them from customary subservience . These were not abstract historical forces. They were lived experiences — a Mahar soldier returning from service with a pension and a sense of dignity, a Mahar child sitting in a school bench for the first time, a Mahar family moving to the city and discovering that anonymity could be a kind of freedom.

The Mahar movement culminated in 1956, when Ambedkar led a mass conversion to Buddhism. Nearly half a million Mahars, along with members of other untouchable castes, followed him out of Hinduism . It was a rejection not just of caste but of the entire religious framework that justified it. Zelliot was there, in a sense — not as a participant, but as a scholar who understood that this was not a footnote to Indian history but one of its central events.

The Unfinished Revolution

Zelliot does not offer easy conclusions. She does not claim that caste is disappearing, nor does she claim that nothing has changed. She gives us two metaphors — organism and virus — and asks us to hold both in our minds at once.

What she does offer is a way of seeing caste not as a relic of the past but as a living, breathing reality of the present. She shows us that caste is not just about discrimination and hierarchy — though it is certainly that. It is also about identity, dignity, mobilization, and political power. The same system that crushes people also produces their resistance. The same identity that is imposed from above is also reclaimed from below.

And she leaves us with a question that has no easy answer: Can democracy become more than ritual hypocrisy? Can the moral imagination break free of caste? The answer, for Zelliot, lies not in grand theories or constitutional guarantees alone, but in the everyday struggles of ordinary people — the Mahar soldier writing a petition, the Dalit woman voting in an election, the young Ambedkarite student demanding a place in the classroom.

That is where caste is challenged. That is where change happens. Slowly, unevenly, incompletely — but really.

Caste in Village Dynamics: Watching One Village Change Over Forty Years

The Anthropologist Who Kept Coming Back

Imagine you are a researcher who wants to understand how caste really works—not from books or laws, but from watching how people actually live. You could go to a village, stay there for a year or two, take careful notes, and then go home and write a book. That is what most anthropologists do.

But Adrian Mayer did something different. He went to a village in central India in 1954. He stayed for eighteen months. He watched everything: who ate with whom, who married whom, who accepted water from whose hands, who sat where at village meetings. Then he left.

But then he came back. In 1966. In 1982. And finally in 1992.

Nearly forty years after he first arrived, Mayer walked into that same village again. He wanted to see what had survived and what had crumbled. He wanted to watch caste change in real time—not as a theory, but as the lived experience of real people.

This is what makes his work so special. Most studies give you a snapshot. Mayer gives you a film.

The Village He Called Ramkheri

Mayer gave the village a fake name—Ramkheri—to protect the people who lived there. But the picture he paints is real.

In 1954, Ramkheri was a village of about 1,500 people. Mostly farmers. Mostly Hindu, with a small Muslim community. And like almost every Indian village, it was organized by caste.

At the top were the Brahmins. They were few in number, but they owned much of the land and performed religious rituals. Below them came the Kunbis—the farmer caste, the people who actually worked the fields with their own hands. Then came the service castes: the barber, the potter, the blacksmith, the washerman. Each had their traditional job. Each knew their place.

And at the very bottom, living outside the village boundary in a cluster of mud huts, were the Mahars. They were the untouchables. They did the work that everyone else considered polluting: removing dead animals, cleaning latrines, beating drums at funerals. They could not draw water from the village well. They could not enter the village temple. Their children could not sit with upper-caste children in school.

This was not a happy system. But it was a working system. Everyone knew the rules. Everyone knew what to expect. The barber knew which families to visit and when. The Mahar knew he would receive a share of the harvest for his work as village watchman. The Brahmin knew that his status was secure.

Mayer called this a “moral economy”—not because it was fair, but because it had its own logic. Every relationship was graded. Every transaction carried the weight of ritual status. And for centuries, this had been simply how life was.

First Return, 1966: Small Cracks Appear

When Mayer came back in 1966, India had changed. Independence had happened. The Constitution had banned untouchability. The first land reforms had redistributed some land. The government had built a primary school, a paved road, and a bus stop in Ramkheri.

Mayer walked through the village, notebook in hand, looking for what had shifted.

The well was the first thing he noticed. In 1954, the well had been strictly segregated. Upper castes drew water from one side. Lower castes from the other. Mahars had their own separate well entirely.

By 1966, the well was still segregated in practice. But something had changed. A young Mahar man—he worked as a government peon in the nearby town—had drawn water from the upper-caste side one morning. Nobody beat him. Nobody even shouted at him. People stared, then looked away. The rule was still there, but the enforcement had weakened.

The village council had also changed. In 1954, the panchayat was an informal group of old men from the landowning castes. By 1966, the government had introduced elected panchayats with reserved seats for Scheduled Castes. The Mahars now had a representative. He rarely spoke. When he did, the upper-caste members often talked over him. But he was there. He had a vote. And once, he used that vote to block a proposal that would have taken village money away from the Mahar hamlet.

Mayer was careful not to exaggerate. Caste still ruled everything. Inter-caste marriage was unthinkable. Inter-caste dining was still rare. The Mahars still lived in those mud huts that flooded every monsoon.

But something had loosened. The bus that left Ramkheri every morning carried young men to jobs in the town. And those young men came back with new ideas—about rights, about dignity, about the possibility of saying no.

Second Return, 1982: Politics Enters the Picture

By 1982, the small cracks had become visible fractures.

The Green Revolution had arrived. New seeds, chemical fertilizers, diesel pumps. The village was more prosperous. But not everyone prospered equally. The big landowners—mostly Brahmins and wealthy Kunbis—got much richer. The small farmers and landless laborers, most of them from lower castes, saw their wages barely change.

But the biggest change was political. Across India, the 1980s saw the rise of caste-based political parties. And this national trend reached Ramkheri.

The Kunbis formed a formal caste association. So did the Mahars. These were not village organizations. They connected Ramkheri to other villages, to the district town, to state-level politicians. A Kunbi farmer now understood himself not just as a resident of Ramkheri, but as part of a regional Kunbi community that could deliver votes.

This had strange consequences. In 1954, caste had been about hierarchy—who was above whom. By 1982, caste was becoming about power—who could deliver how many votes.

The Mahar representative on the panchayat was no longer silent. He had learned to negotiate, to threaten, to form alliances. Mayer recorded one incident that captures this shift perfectly. The Mahars threatened to vote as a bloc for the opposition candidate in the upcoming district elections unless the upper castes agreed to repair the road leading to the Mahar hamlet. The road was repaired within two weeks.

But Mayer also noticed something darker. As caste became a tool for political power, it also became a source of open conflict. In 1954, caste relations had been hierarchical but mostly peaceful—the lower castes knew their place and stayed there. By 1982, that place was being contested. There had been three major caste clashes in the region in the previous five years. In one of them, a Mahar youth was beaten for riding his bicycle past the upper-caste temple.

The old system of deference had broken down. But nothing had yet replaced it except suspicion and occasional violence.

Third Return, 1992: The Old System Dies

Mayer’s 1992 visit is the most painful to read. He arrived to find a village that had grown—new houses, new roads, a new high school. But the social fabric was fraying.

The most dramatic change was in work. In 1954, the village had operated on the jajmani system—a system of hereditary obligations between castes. The barber visited each family on a fixed schedule and received a share of grain at harvest. The washerman collected laundry and returned it clean. The Mahars performed their traditional tasks and received their fixed share.

By 1992, the jajmani system was dead. Not weakened. Dead.

The barber’s son had become a truck driver. The washerman’s daughter had married a man who worked in a textile factory in Indore. The Mahars who had not migrated to cities now worked as casual laborers, hired by the day, with no hereditary claim and no hereditary obligation.

The moral economy of caste—the system of rights and duties, however unequal—had been replaced by the cash economy. You paid someone to cut your hair. You paid someone to wash your clothes. You paid someone to remove the dead cow. There was no longer any pretense of mutual obligation.

What replaced it? Mayer observed a strange mixture of closeness and distance.

On the one hand, physical segregation had softened. Upper-caste and lower-caste children sat in the same classroom. They played cricket together on the village green. Sometimes—rarely, but it happened—they ate lunch together, away from adult eyes.

On the other hand, adult relationships across caste lines had become more formal, less personal, less embedded in shared village life. The village festival, once organized collectively by all castes, was now organized separately. The Brahmins had their celebration. The Kunbis had theirs. The Mahars had theirs.

Mayer uses a telling phrase: the village had become a “community of communities” rather than a single community divided by caste. In 1954, caste had been the principle of internal difference within a unified village. In 1992, caste had become the principle of fragmentation. The village no longer felt like a whole. It felt like several parallel societies that happened to share a postal address.

What Migration Does to Caste

Throughout his four visits, Mayer tracked one thing more carefully than anything else: migration. Who left the village? Where did they go? Did they come back? And what happened to their caste identity when they did?

The conventional story is that migration weakens caste. You leave the village, you move to the city, you become anonymous. Nobody knows your caste. You eat in common canteens. You sleep in dormitories where nobody asks about your jati. Caste becomes irrelevant.

Mayer’s evidence suggests something more complicated.

Yes, migration weakens the ritual aspects of caste. A Mahar man working in a Mumbai factory eats in a shared canteen. He shares tea with men of all castes. When he returns to Ramkheri for Diwali, he brings these habits with him. He is less willing to accept the old humiliations.

But migration also strengthens caste as an organization. The same Mahar man who ignores caste in his daily work life joins a Mahar welfare association in the city. He sends money to the Mahar temple fund in Ramkheri. He votes for Mahar candidates. When his daughter is ready to marry, he looks for a groom within the Mahar community—not because of ritual pollution anymore, but because of trust, because of kinship networks, because of the desire to keep property within the group.

Migration does not erase caste. It changes what caste does. Caste becomes less about hierarchy and more about solidarity. Less about what you cannot do and more about who will help you when you are in trouble. Less about the village and more about the network that stretches from Ramkheri to Indore to Mumbai and back again.

So What Survives? And What Changes?

After watching one village for forty years, what can Mayer tell us?

What survives: Marriage. In 1992, exactly as in 1954, nobody in Ramkheri had married outside their caste. Young people might flirt across caste lines. They might even fall in love across caste lines. But the actual marriage—the legal and ritual union—remained within the jati. This is not unique to Ramkheri. Across India, even in educated, urban, professional circles, caste endogamy remains astonishingly stubborn. It is the last wall that refuses to fall.

What changes: Almost everything else. The ritual hierarchy has eroded. The jajmani system is gone. Physical segregation has softened. The village well is open to all. The school is integrated. The bus carries everyone.

But Mayer is too honest to call this simple progress. The erosion of ritual hierarchy has not produced equality. It has produced a more naked, less disguised form of inequality.

In 1954, the Mahar accepted his poverty because it was written into the cosmic order. That was his dharma. That was the will of the gods. He might not like it, but it made sense within the world he knew.

By 1992, the Mahar knows that his poverty is the result of land dispossession, poor schooling, and labor market discrimination. He knows this because his son, who works in the town, told him. And knowing this has not made him free. It has made him angry.

A Village Is Not a Fossil

Mayer’s great contribution is to rescue the Indian village from two opposing myths.

The first myth is that the village is timeless—unchanging, traditional, untouched by history. Ramkheri in 1992 is not Ramkheri in 1954. The bus, the school, the reserved panchayat seat, the Green Revolution, the migrant worker sending money home from Mumbai—these are not outside intrusions. They are the village. The village is not a fossil. It is a living thing. It changes.

The second myth is that modernization automatically erases caste. Ramkheri proves otherwise. Caste adapts. It finds new forms, new functions, new justifications. It becomes less about ritual pollution and more about political mobilization. Less about birth determining occupation and more about birth determining marriage and social security. Less about the village council and more about the caste association that spans twenty villages.

When Mayer walked out of Ramkheri for the last time in 1992, he left behind a community that was neither traditional nor modern, neither harmonious nor collapsed. It was simply in transition—as all communities are, if you watch them long enough.

One Old Man’s Words

There is a moment in Mayer’s 1992 account that I cannot forget. He describes sitting with an old Mahar man, a laborer who had spent his entire life in Ramkheri. The man remembered 1954. He remembered having to stand at a distance when an upper-caste person approached. He remembered eating from broken pots so that his touch would not pollute the family cookware. He remembered his father being beaten for letting his shadow fall on a Brahmin’s food.

Mayer asked him whether things had changed.

The old man was quiet for a long time. Then he said something like this:

“My grandson sits in the same classroom as the Brahmin’s grandson. He does not know that he should be afraid. I am glad for him. But I am still afraid. And when the Brahmin looks at me, I see that he is still afraid too—afraid that I might forget my place. So we are both afraid. Only the reasons have changed.”

That is the village dynamic. Not a story of liberation. Not a story of stasis. A story of fear changing its shape. A story of hierarchy becoming something more subtle and therefore harder to name. A story of people caught between the world they inherited and the world they cannot quite reach.

Class Formation in Developing Societies: Understanding the Invisible Walls

Why Class Matters in South Asia

When we talk about inequality in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, we often talk about caste. And that is absolutely right—caste is a powerful force that shapes everything from marriage to politics to daily dignity. But there is another force at work, one that often gets less attention: social class.

Class is about money, yes. But it is about much more than that. Class is about what kind of work you do. It is about whether you own land or work on someone else’s. It is about whether your job comes with a pension and health insurance or whether you live day to day, never knowing if tomorrow will bring work. It is about whether you have the power to say no to an unfair boss, or whether saying no means your children go hungry.

The book Sociology of Developing Societies: South Asia, edited by Hamza Alavi and John Harriss, asks a simple but powerful question: How did the class structures of South Asia come to look the way they do today? And the answer takes us back to colonialism, to the land, and to the factories that changed everything.

This section breaks their argument into three parts. First, how colonialism shaped the class system in ways that still echo today. Second, what the countryside looks like—who owns the land, who works it, and what “peasant” even means in a modern economy. And third, how industrial workers have tried to organize and fight for better lives, and why that fight has been so difficult.

Part One: The Colonial Legacy—How Empire Built the Class System

Before Colonialism: A Different Kind of Inequality

To understand what colonialism did, we first need to understand what existed before.

Pre-colonial South Asia was not an equal society. There were kings and landlords, merchants and moneylenders, peasants and laborers. But the economy was largely local. Most goods were produced in villages for village consumption. Land was abundant, and the relationship between landlord and tenant was often negotiated, not simply dictated.

Then came the British.

The Colonial Transformation: Three Big Changes

The British did not just take over political power. They reshaped the entire economy to serve their own interests—specifically, to extract wealth and send it back to England. Alavi and Harriss argue that this colonial restructuring created the basic class divisions that South Asia still lives with today.

First, the British changed who owned the land.

Before the British, land ownership was complex. Different regions had different systems. Some had village councils that managed land collectively. Others had local kings who granted land to officials in exchange for service. The British wanted simplicity. They wanted a clear set of landowners they could tax.

So they created new landowners. In some regions, they declared that the old revenue collectors—the zamindars—were now the legal owners of all the land. In other regions, they identified individual farmers as owners. In still others, they made entire villages collectively responsible for taxes.

What mattered was this: the British created a class of propertied landowners who had never existed in quite that form before. And they created a class of landless laborers—people who had once had customary rights to cultivate land—who now had nothing but their hands to sell.

Second, the British integrated India into the global capitalist economy.

This sounds like a fancy phrase, but it means something simple. Before the British, Indian villages grew food for themselves. After the British, they were forced to grow cash crops—indigo, cotton, opium, tea—that could be exported to England. Indian peasants were no longer growing rice and wheat to feed their families. They were growing raw materials for British factories.

This had two effects. One, when a cash crop failed, people starved. The famines of the late nineteenth century killed millions. Two, it created a class of Indian merchants and moneylenders who profited from this trade—a new urban elite that collaborated with the British.

Third, the British de-industrialized India.

Before the British arrived, India was a manufacturing powerhouse. Bengal’s textiles were famous across the world. Indian ships sailed to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But the British deliberately destroyed Indian industry to create a market for British goods.

They placed heavy taxes on Indian textiles. They forced Indian weavers to sell only to British companies at low prices. They built railways not to connect Indian markets but to transport raw materials to ports for export. By the end of the nineteenth century, India had gone from being an exporter of manufactured goods to being an importer of British cloth.

Millions of artisans lost their livelihoods. They were forced back onto the land—but the land was already crowded. So they became landless laborers, sharecroppers, or migrants searching for work. A new class of the poor rural proletariat was born.

The Legacy: A Divided Class Structure

What did colonialism leave behind? Alavi and Harriss identify three key features of the postcolonial class system that are directly inherited from the colonial period.

First, a weak and dependent capitalist class. The Indian industrialists who emerged under British rule—the Tatas, the Birlas, the Singhs—were not independent entrepreneurs. They were collaborators who operated within limits set by British capital. Even after independence, this capitalist class remained tied to foreign capital and the global market.

Second, a large and fragmented peasantry. Unlike Europe, where feudalism gave way to a clear division between capitalist farmers and landless workers, South Asia’s countryside remained a messy patchwork. Rich peasants, poor peasants, tenants, sharecroppers, landless laborers—all with different interests and different relationships to the land.

Third, an urban working class that was never fully “proletarianized.” In the classic Marxist story, workers leave the countryside, move to the city, lose all connection to the land, and become a pure working class. In South Asia, that never fully happened. Most workers kept one foot in the village. They sent money home. They returned for harvest. They married within their caste networks. This “dual connection” made it harder to build a unified class consciousness.

Part Two: Agrarian Classes—Who Owns the Land?

The Myth of the Homogeneous Peasant

When we imagine a farmer, we often imagine a single person: someone who owns a small plot of land, works it with their family, and grows food for themselves and the market. That person exists. But they are only one piece of a much more complicated picture.

The South Asian countryside is not divided into simple “landlords” and “peasants.” It is a spectrum. And understanding that spectrum is essential to understanding rural politics, rural poverty, and rural resistance.

A Map of Rural Classes

Alavi and Harriss, drawing on a long tradition of agrarian studies, offer a way of classifying the rural population based on their relationship to land. Think of it as a ladder.

At the top: the landlord class. These are people who own large amounts of land but do not cultivate it themselves. They lease the land to tenants or hire laborers to work it. In many parts of South Asia, this class still exists, though its power has been reduced by land reforms. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, large landowners remain politically dominant. In India, their power varies by state.

Below them: rich peasants. These families own enough land to cultivate more than they need for subsistence. They may hire some labor, but they also work alongside their laborers. They have surplus to sell in the market. They often dominate village politics.

In the middle: middle peasants. These families own enough land to feed themselves, but not much more. They work their own land with family labor. They do not regularly hire others, nor do they regularly work for others. They are the classic “independent small farmer” of the imagination.

Below them: poor peasants. These families own some land, but not enough to feed themselves. They must supplement their income by working for others—either as tenants on larger farms or as wage laborers.

At the bottom: landless agricultural laborers. These families own no land at all. They survive entirely by selling their labor to those who do. They are the poorest of the rural poor. They are disproportionately Dalit and Adivasi.

The Puzzle of the Peasant

One of the most debated questions in the sociology of development is this: Is the peasant a dying class? Will small farmers eventually disappear, replaced by capitalist farms and landless workers, just as happened in England and the United States?

Alavi and Harriss suggest that the answer is more complicated. In some regions, yes—capitalist agriculture is expanding. Rich peasants are becoming small capitalists. Poor peasants are being pushed off the land. But in other regions, small farmers are stubbornly surviving. They find ways to adapt: migrating for part of the year, sending family members to the city, diversifying into livestock or petty trade.

The result is what some scholars call a “semi-feudal” agrarian structure—a strange mixture of old and new. Landlords still extract rent from tenants, but those tenants also work as wage laborers. Moneylenders still charge usurious interest, but the money comes from urban banks. The village is connected to the global economy, but the old hierarchies of caste and patronage still shape who gets what.

The View from the Ground: A Recent Study

Recent research by Fraser Sugden on the Nepal-Bihar border gives us a concrete picture of what this looks like today. He studied the Eastern Gangetic Plains, a region that remains deeply unequal. Large landlords still dominate. Small farmers and tenants struggle to survive. Many young men have left to work in the Gulf or in Indian cities, sending money home to keep their families afloat.

But Sugden also found something hopeful. The old ideological ties that bound tenants to landlords—the sense of obligation, the fear of displeasing a patron—are breaking down. Young people who have worked in Dubai or Mumbai do not bow the same way their parents did. They know that the world is bigger than their village. And that knowledge, Sugden argues, creates new possibilities for political mobilization.

Part Three: Industrialization and Working-Class Formation

The Promise of the Factory

In the decades after independence, leaders across South Asia dreamed of industrialization. Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka—all believed that factories would transform their countries. Factories would create jobs. They would break the power of the landlords. They would produce a modern working class that would drive the nation forward.

And for a while, it seemed to work. Giant steel plants rose in Bhilai and Rourkela. Textile mills expanded in Mumbai and Dhaka. Automobile factories opened outside Chennai and Karachi. Millions of workers left their villages and moved to company towns.

The “Labour Aristocracy”

But not all workers were created equal. A small fraction of industrial workers got something remarkable: permanent, salaried jobs with benefits. These jobs came with housing, health insurance, pensions, and something even more valuable—security. You could not be fired on a whim. Your children could go to the company school. Your family would not starve if the factory shut down for a month.

Scholars call this group the “labour aristocracy.” They were the elite of the working class. And they were the ones who joined unions, went on strike, and demanded better conditions. In the 1970s and 1980s, the labour aristocracy won real gains: higher wages, shorter hours, more holidays.

But here is the crucial point. The labour aristocracy was always a minority. Below them was a vast sea of precarious workers—people hired by the day, without contracts, without benefits, without any protection at all. They did the same work as the permanent workers, sometimes side by side on the same factory floor. But they were paid less. They could be fired instantly. They had no union. They had no voice.

Jonathan Parry’s Study of Bhilai

One of the most powerful accounts of this divide comes from anthropologist Jonathan Parry, who spent years studying the steel town of Bhilai in central India. Parry wanted to understand what class actually felt like for the people living it.

What he found was a sharp divide between those who had naukri—a permanent, salaried job—and those who survived on kam—casual, precarious labor. The two groups lived in different neighborhoods. Their children went to different schools. They married within their own circles. They even had different life cycle rituals.

The labour aristocrats, Parry found, had not become revolutionary heroes. They had become a conservative force. They had too much to lose. They fought to protect their own privileges, not to uplift the workers below them. And the precarious workers, exhausted by daily survival, had little energy left for organizing.

Parry’s conclusion is sobering. The postcolonial state promised to build a unified working class that would drive social transformation. Instead, it created a divided working class—one part relatively comfortable, the rest struggling to survive—and those divisions have blocked the kind of class-based politics that Marx once predicted.

What About the Rest of South Asia?

Parry’s study is about India. But what about other countries in the region? A recent review of his work by a scholar studying Nepal points out an important difference. India had a period of state-led socialist development in the 1950s and 1960s—the Nehruvian era—that created the conditions for a labour aristocracy. Nepal, by contrast, leapfrogged from feudalism directly into neoliberalism in the 1990s. It never had that socialist moment. As a result, Nepal’s working class is even more precarious, even more fragmented, even less organized.

The lesson is that class formation is not determined by economics alone. It is shaped by politics, by history, by the specific trajectory of each nation-state.

Putting It All Together: Class as a Living Reality

So what does all of this mean for understanding South Asia today?

First, class is not just about money. It is about your relationship to land, to capital, to the state. A rich peasant who owns ten acres and a factory worker with a permanent job may have similar incomes. But their political interests, their social networks, their sense of who they are—these are completely different.

Second, class is not separate from caste. In South Asia, class and caste are braided together. The landless laborers at the bottom of the rural ladder are almost always Dalit or Adivasi. The industrial labour aristocracy is disproportionately from dominant castes. You cannot understand one without the other.

Third, the old models don’t fit. Marx predicted that capitalism would simplify class divisions into two great camps: bourgeoisie and proletariat. That has not happened in South Asia. Instead, we have a complex mosaic: landlords and rich peasants, middle peasants and poor peasants, landless laborers, labour aristocrats and precarious workers, a small capitalist class and a huge informal sector. Each group has different interests. Each group votes differently. Each group dreams differently.

Fourth, change is possible but slow. The old feudal ties are weakening. Migration is opening new horizons. Workers are organizing in new ways, even if not always through formal unions. But the structures inherited from colonialism—unequal land distribution, a weak industrial base, a fragmented working class—are stubborn. They do not disappear overnight.

A Final Thought

There is a temptation, when reading about class structures, to see them as abstract categories—boxes to be checked, labels to be assigned. But the people Alavi and Harriss are writing about are not abstractions. They are the landless laborer who wakes up before dawn to walk to a rich farmer’s field, hoping there will be work today. They are the precarious factory worker who has been a “temporary” employee for twelve years, still waiting for the permanent status that never comes. They are the labour aristocrat who knows that his children will not get his job when he retires, because the company has stopped hiring permanent workers.

Class, like caste, is lived. It shapes what you eat, where you live, who your friends are, how your children see the future. Understanding it is not an academic exercise. It is a way of seeing the invisible walls that divide people—and a first step toward imagining how those walls might one day come down.

Middle Classes in Contemporary India: The People in Between

Who Are the Middle Class, Really?

Close your eyes and picture an Indian middle-class person. What do you see? Perhaps a young software engineer in Bengaluru, sipping a cappuccino at a café, laptop open, speaking fluent English on a video call with a client in Texas. Or maybe a government clerk in Lucknow, living in a modest flat, saving carefully to pay for his daughter’s coaching classes. Or a schoolteacher in a small town in Maharashtra, who has just bought her first car—a second-hand Maruti—and feels like she has finally arrived.

All of these people are middle class. But they are also very different from each other. And that is the first thing we need to understand about India’s middle classes: there is no single middle class. There are many middle classes, divided by language, by region, by occupation, by caste, by when and how they entered this strange and shifting category.

Leela Fernandes, a political scientist who has spent decades studying India’s urban middle classes, asks a simple but powerful question: Who are these people, and why do they matter so much?

The answer takes us into the world of shopping malls and gated communities, of coaching centers and call centers, of political protests and social media outrage. It shows us a class that is small in numbers—perhaps 5 to 10 percent of India’s population—but enormous in influence. The middle class does not just live in India. It shapes what India wants to become.

This section breaks Fernandes’s argument into three parts. First, how the middle class defines itself not just by what it earns but by what it consumes—and how that creates a particular kind of cultural identity. Second, how this class exercises political power, often in ways that are invisible but deeply consequential. And third, how globalization has transformed the middle class, creating new opportunities but also new anxieties.

Part One: Consumption and Cultural Identity—How the Middle Class Sees Itself

From Saving to Spending

To understand India’s middle class today, we need to go back to the 1980s. Before that, the Indian economy was tightly controlled by the state. Licenses were needed to start a business. Imports were heavily restricted. Cars, refrigerators, televisions—these were luxuries that only a tiny elite could afford. The middle class saved. They did not spend.

Then came 1991. India was running out of money. The government had to pledge its gold reserves to avoid defaulting on loans. In response, the government launched a series of economic reforms: opening the economy to foreign companies, reducing tariffs, encouraging private enterprise. This was the beginning of what we now call liberalization.

Suddenly, foreign goods began to appear. Cola. Fast food. Satellite television. Mobile phones. The middle class, which had been trained for generations to save and sacrifice, was now being told to spend and enjoy. And they did.

Fernandes argues that this shift from saving to spending was not just an economic change. It was a cultural revolution. The middle class began to define itself not by its relationship to the state—not by government jobs or ration cards or waiting lists—but by its relationship to the market. You were middle class if you could afford certain things: a refrigerator, a two-wheeler, a television, English-medium schooling for your children.

The Mall as Cathedral

One of Fernandes’s most striking observations is about the role of the shopping mall in middle-class life. In the 1990s and 2000s, malls sprang up across India—in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and even in smaller cities like Lucknow and Nagpur. These were not just places to buy things. They were spaces of aspiration.

Think about what a mall offers. Air conditioning, which is still a luxury in a hot country. Clean bathrooms, which cannot be taken for granted. Security guards who keep out beggars and hawkers. Branded stores where the products are arranged beautifully and nobody haggles over price. Food courts where families can sit together and eat pizza or noodles or ice cream.

For the middle class, the mall is a refuge. It is a place where they can feel like they belong to the global mainstream, not the chaotic, poor, noisy India that surrounds them. It is a place where they can perform their identity: buying the right brand of jeans, carrying the right phone, drinking the right coffee.

Fernandes is careful not to mock this. She understands that for people who grew up in cramped apartments, shared bathrooms, and crowded buses, the mall represents dignity. It represents choice. It represents a life where you are not constantly reminded of what you cannot afford.

But she also points out the dark side. The mall is an exclusionary space. The security guard at the door is there to keep out people who look poor—who are not wearing the right clothes, who might be carrying a plastic bag instead of a branded handbag. The middle class’s comfort is built on the visible exclusion of everyone else.

The English Language as Gatekeeper

Nothing divides India’s middle class more sharply than English. Those who speak fluent, accent-neutral English have access to the best jobs, the best colleges, the best social networks. Those who do not—even if they have similar incomes—are often seen as less sophisticated, less modern, less truly middle class.

Fernandes notes that English is not just a skill. It is a marker of cultural capital. It signals that you come from a certain kind of family, that you attended a certain kind of school, that you have been exposed to certain kinds of media. It separates the “old” middle class—often upper caste, often from metropolitan cities, often with family histories of English education—from the “new” middle class, which may be wealthier but less culturally secure.

This creates strange tensions. A first-generation college graduate from a small town may earn more than her English-speaking counterpart in a call center. But she will always feel slightly inferior, slightly less legitimate, because her English has an accent, because she hesitates over certain words, because she cannot tell the difference between a latte and a cappuccino.

Fernandes argues that these cultural distinctions matter politically. The English-speaking middle class tends to dominate media, academia, and policy debates. They set the terms of what counts as “modern” or “backward.” And in doing so, they often erase or marginalize the experiences of the vast majority of Indians—including the majority of the middle class itself.

Part Two: Political Influence—The Quiet Power of the Middle Class

The Myth of the Silent Majority

If you read Indian newspapers or watch Indian news channels, you might think that the middle class is the most important political force in the country. Commentators talk about “middle-class aspirations” and “middle-class anger.” Politicians compete to be seen as middle-class friendly.

But Fernandes asks a uncomfortable question: Is the middle class actually that powerful, or does it just think it is?

The numbers tell a complicated story. As a proportion of the population, the middle class is small. Estimates vary, but most scholars agree that only about 5 to 10 percent of Indians can be considered middle class by any reasonable definition—regular salaried employment, some disposable income, some savings, some access to quality education and healthcare. The vast majority of Indians are much poorer.

So why does the middle class seem so influential? Fernandes offers several explanations.

First, the middle class is concentrated in cities. And cities are where the media is based, where journalists live, where news is produced. When a middle-class person in South Delhi complains about water shortages or bad roads, that complaint is much more likely to be heard and amplified than a similar complaint from a poor farmer in Bundelkhand.

Second, the middle class votes. This sounds obvious, but it matters. Poor and marginalized communities often face barriers to voting—lack of ID, lack of transportation, fear of violence on polling day. The middle class does not face these barriers. Their turnout is higher. Politicians know this.

Third, the middle class has what scholars call “veto power.” They cannot always get what they want. But they can often block what they do not want. A new tax on salaried incomes? The middle class will protest. A plan to build affordable housing in a middle-class neighborhood? The middle class will file lawsuits. A policy that would raise electricity prices for higher-consumption households? The middle class will call talk radio shows and flood social media with outrage.

The Anti-Corruption Moment

Fernandes points to the 2011 anti-corruption protests as a perfect example of middle-class political power in action. Led by activist Anna Hazare, thousands of middle-class Indians gathered in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, demanding a strong anti-corruption law. The protests captured national attention. They dominated television news for weeks. Politicians scrambled to respond.

But Fernandes notes something interesting about these protests. The demand was for a new institution—the Lokpal, or anti-corruption ombudsman—that would investigate corruption complaints. The protesters argued that corruption was the single biggest problem facing India. They believed that if only the state could be made clean and efficient, India’s problems would be solved.

What was missing from this analysis? Fernandes points out that the protesters rarely talked about poverty, about unemployment, about the lack of schools and hospitals in rural areas. They rarely talked about caste discrimination or religious violence. Their vision of a better India was a vision of a cleaner, more efficient state—not a more equal or more just society.

This, Fernandes argues, is the characteristic political stance of the Indian middle class. They want the state to work for them. They want roads, water, electricity, security. But they do not necessarily want redistribution. They do not necessarily want to challenge the deep structures of inequality that keep some people poor and others comfortable. Their politics is a politics of entitlement, not a politics of solidarity.

The Rise of Hindu Nationalism

One of the most significant political developments of the past decade has been the growing alignment between the middle class and Hindu nationalist politics. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have successfully positioned themselves as the champions of middle-class aspirations.

Why? Fernandes points to several factors. First, the BJP’s promise of economic growth and development appeals to middle-class desires for better infrastructure, more jobs, and a cleaner environment. Second, the party’s emphasis on a strong, assertive India—one that stands up to Pakistan, to China, to the West—resonates with middle-class nationalism. And third, the BJP’s cultural politics, which centers on Hindu identity and often marginalizes Muslims and other minorities, appeals to middle-class anxieties about social change.

Fernandes is careful not to say that all middle-class people are Hindu nationalists. They are not. Many middle-class Indians are secular, progressive, and deeply uncomfortable with the direction of Indian politics. But she argues that the middle class as a whole has become more receptive to majoritarian politics over the past decade. And that shift has had profound consequences for Indian democracy.

Part Three: Globalization and Its Discontents

The Call Center Generation

No symbol of India’s globalized middle class is more powerful than the call center worker. Young, educated, English-speaking, working nights to serve customers in the United States or the United Kingdom. The call center worker represents everything that globalization promised: integration into the global economy, good salaries, modern lifestyles, freedom from traditional constraints.

But Fernandes, drawing on extensive ethnographic research, shows that the reality is more complicated. Call center work is stressful. The hours are brutal. Workers face constant surveillance—calls are recorded, bathroom breaks are timed, performance is measured to the second. The high salaries come with high pressure, and burnout is common.

More subtly, Fernandes explores the cultural dislocation that globalization produces. Call center workers are trained to sound American or British. They adopt Western names—”Hi, this is Jennifer speaking”—even if their real name is Jyoti. They learn about American football and British weather and Canadian Thanksgiving. They live in a strange in-between world, neither fully Indian nor fully Western, constantly code-switching between identities.

Some scholars have celebrated this as a form of liberation—breaking free from traditional hierarchies of caste and gender. But Fernandes is more skeptical. She argues that call center workers are not free. They are serving global capital on terms they did not set. Their “freedom” is the freedom to be exploited in new ways.

The Software Engineer and the Security Guard

Fernandes makes a crucial point that is easy to forget when we talk about the globalized middle class. The software engineer earning a six-figure salary in Bengaluru does not live in a vacuum. He lives in a city where millions of people work as domestic servants, security guards, delivery drivers, and construction workers—often for wages that are less than what he pays for a single dinner out.

These workers are not middle class. They are what scholars call the precariat—a class of people with no job security, no benefits, no path to advancement. They live in the same city, sometimes in the same neighborhood, but in a completely different world. Their children do not go to the same schools. They do not shop at the same stores. They do not breathe the same air—the middle class can afford air purifiers; the poor cannot.

Fernandes argues that the middle class’s prosperity is built on the backs of this precariat. The maid who cleans the apartment, the security guard who watches the gate, the delivery boy who brings the food, the driver who navigates the traffic—all of them are paid poverty wages so that the middle class can live comfortably.

And here is the uncomfortable truth. The middle class rarely thinks about this connection. They complain about the maid being late. They shout at the security guard for not recognizing their car. They tip the delivery boy a few rupees and feel generous. They do not see the structural violence that makes their lifestyle possible.

The Anxiety Beneath the Surface

For all its consumption and confidence, the Indian middle class is deeply anxious. Fernandes captures this anxiety beautifully.

There is the anxiety of falling behind. Your neighbor bought a bigger car. Your cousin’s son got into an Ivy League university. Your colleague’s daughter is getting married in a five-star hotel. The comparisons are endless, and they breed a constant sense of inadequacy.

There is the anxiety of falling down. You are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. One job loss away from destitution. One bad investment away from losing everything. The middle class has savings, but not enough. They live on a knife’s edge, and they know it.

And there is the anxiety of social change. The old certainties are gone. Women are working outside the home. Children are moving to different cities. Caste is no longer a reliable guide to social status. The middle class is excited by these changes but also terrified. What will happen to the family? What will happen to tradition? What will happen to them?

This anxiety, Fernandes argues, is the hidden driver of middle-class politics. The anger at corruption, the support for strong leaders, the attraction to Hindu nationalism—all of these are expressions of a class that feels insecure, that feels its position is threatened, that is looking for someone to blame.

Putting It All Together: The Middle Class as a Contradiction

So after all of this, how should we understand India’s middle classes?

First, the middle class is not a monolith. It is divided by language, region, caste, generation, and relationship to the global economy. A government clerk in Patna and a tech entrepreneur in Hyderabad may both be middle class, but they live in different worlds.

Second, the middle class defines itself through consumption. What you buy, where you shop, what you eat, how you speak—these are the markers of middle-class identity. And this has created a culture of aspiration that is both liberating and exclusionary.

Third, the middle class wields political power that is disproportionate to its size. Through voting, through media influence, through veto power, it shapes policy and public debate. But its politics is often a politics of entitlement, not solidarity—focused on making the state work for the middle class, not on reducing inequality.

Fourth, globalization has transformed the middle class but also created new anxieties. The call center worker and the software engineer have opportunities their parents never dreamed of. But they also face stress, burnout, and a constant fear of falling behind or falling down.

Fifth, the middle class’s prosperity is built on exploitation. The maid, the security guard, the delivery boy—these workers make middle-class life possible, and they are paid poverty wages for their labor. The middle class rarely acknowledges this connection.

A Final Thought

There is a famous story about Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. He once said that the Indian middle class was “the backbone of the nation.” He believed that this class—educated, modern, secular—would lead India into a bright future of democracy and development.

Nehru was right that the middle class would be influential. But he could not have predicted the shape that influence would take. The middle class of contemporary India is not the secular, socialist vanguard that Nehru imagined. It is more consumerist, more anxious, more fragmented, and more attracted to majoritarian politics.

Does that mean the middle class is a force for good or for ill? Fernandes does not give a simple answer. She shows us the complexity—the aspirations and the exclusions, the freedoms and the anxieties, the power and the blindness.

Perhaps the most honest answer is this: the Indian middle class is a contradiction. It is modern and traditional, global and local, confident and insecure, generous and selfish, all at once. And like any human community, it contains both the potential for great good and the seeds of great harm. Which of these potentials wins out depends on choices—individual and collective—that are still being made, every day, in homes and offices and malls and voting booths across the country.

Tribes, Identity, and Politics: The Struggle for Recognition and Rights

Who Are the Tribes of India?

Let us start with a simple question: When we say “tribes” or “Adivasis” in India, who are we talking about?

The official term used by the Indian government is Scheduled Tribes. There are over 700 distinct tribal communities across India, together making up about 8 to 9 percent of the country’s population. Some are well-known—the Gonds of Madhya Pradesh, the Santhals of Jharkhand, the Nagas of the Northeast. Others are much smaller, living in remote forests and hills, speaking languages that only a few thousand people understand.

But the term “tribe” itself is complicated. It was a label given by colonial administrators, then carried forward by post-independence policymakers. Virginius Xaxa, one of India’s most respected scholars of tribal studies, has spent his entire career asking a more fundamental question: Who are these people, and why have they been treated so differently from the rest of Indian society?

Xaxa belongs to the Oraon community—himself a tribal—and he brings to his scholarship not just academic rigor but lived understanding. He was born in what is now Jharkhand, a region that has seen decades of tribal struggle for recognition and rights. He studied at IIT Kanpur (of all places, an engineering institute) but found his calling in sociology. And over the past four decades, he has become the single most important voice on the political economy of tribal life in India .

His 2005 paper, “Politics of Language, Religion and Identity: Tribes in India,” published in the Economic and Political Weekly, is a masterclass in asking the right questions. It does not just describe tribal communities. It shows how they have been systematically marginalized—and how they have fought back .

This section is organized around three analytical dimensions: first, how tribes have asserted themselves and resisted oppression; second, how language and religion have become battlegrounds for tribal identity; and third, how state policies have simultaneously promised protection and delivered marginalization.

Part One: Tribal Assertion and Resistance — The Long History of Saying “No”

The Colonial Roots of Dispossession

To understand tribal resistance, we have to start with the damage that was done.

Before the British arrived, India’s tribal communities lived in relative autonomy. They practiced shifting cultivation in the forests, hunted, gathered, and traded with settled agricultural communities on their own terms. They had their own systems of governance—village councils, clan elders, customary laws. They were not isolated from the rest of society, but they were not ruled by it either.

The British changed everything. They wanted forests for timber. They wanted land for tea and coffee plantations. They wanted access to minerals—coal, iron ore, bauxite. And the people living on that land were obstacles to be removed.

The colonial state declared vast areas of forest as “reserved” or “protected,” meaning that tribal communities lost their traditional rights to hunt, gather, and cultivate. They were pushed into smaller and smaller pockets of land. When they resisted—and they did resist—they were crushed by force.

Xaxa notes that this colonial encounter was not just about land. It was about epistemic violence—the destruction of tribal knowledge systems, languages, and ways of life. The British classified tribes as “backward,” “criminal,” or “primitive.” These labels stuck. They were carried forward into independent India, where the state continued to view tribal communities as problems to be solved rather than peoples with rights .

The Great Rebellion and Beyond

Tribal resistance to colonial rule did not begin with Mahatma Gandhi or the Indian National Congress. It began with tribal leaders who rose up against the British long before the mainstream national movement took shape.

Xaxa points to a series of tribal uprisings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Santhal Rebellion of 1855-56, the Bastar Rebellion of 1876, the Munda Rebellion led by Birsa Munda in 1899-1900. These were not small skirmishes. The Santhal Rebellion involved tens of thousands of people and took the British months to suppress. Birsa Munda, who was only 25 when he was hanged, is still remembered as a folk hero across Jharkhand.

What were these rebellions about? They were about land, first and foremost. The British were taking tribal land and giving it to outside moneylenders and landlords. But they were also about dignity. The British and their local agents treated tribal people as subhuman. The rebellions were an assertion that tribal lives mattered, that tribal customs had value, that tribal people would not simply disappear .

Post-Independence Resistance: The Narmada Bachao Andolan

After independence, the forms of resistance changed, but the struggle continued. Xaxa identifies the 1980s as a turning point. This was when tribal resistance began to take organized, visible, and nationally recognized forms.

The most famous example is the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), led by Medha Patkar and others. The movement opposed the construction of large dams on the Narmada River, which would displace hundreds of thousands of people—most of them tribal—from their homes and lands. The movement used legal challenges, peaceful protests, hunger strikes, and mass mobilizations. It captured national and international attention.

Xaxa notes that the Narmada movement was significant not just because it won some concessions, but because it changed the terms of debate. Before the 1980s, “development” was seen as an unalloyed good. Dams meant electricity, irrigation, progress. The Narmada movement forced Indians to ask: Development for whom? And at whose expense? The movement showed that tribal communities were not passive victims. They could organize, they could speak, they could fight back .

The Koel Karo and Netarhat Resistance

Xaxa also points to lesser-known but equally important resistances, such as the movement against the Koel Karo dam and the Netarhat Field Firing Range in Jharkhand. These were military and industrial projects that would have displaced thousands of tribal families. Local communities organized, protested, and eventually succeeded in stopping both projects.

What made these movements successful? Xaxa argues that it was a combination of factors: growing political awareness, better education, access to legal resources, and—crucially—the emergence of a tribal middle class that could articulate demands in the language of the state. Tribal communities were no longer “mute spectators” of their own suffering. They were becoming political actors .

Part Two: Language and Religion — The Battlegrounds of Identity

The Politics of Language: More Than Words

When we think about language, we usually think about communication. But Xaxa asks us to think about language differently. Language, he argues, is also about power.

Most tribal communities speak languages that are not recognized in the Indian Constitution’s Eighth Schedule. Their children go to schools where the medium of instruction is Hindi, English, or a regional language like Bengali or Odia. From the first day of school, tribal children are told that their mother tongue is worthless. They must learn in a language they do not fully understand. They fall behind. They drop out. And then they are called “backward” for failing.

Xaxa documents how this linguistic marginalization has devastating consequences. Literacy rates among tribal communities are significantly lower than the national average. High school completion rates are even lower. And without education, the path out of poverty is blocked.

But language is not just about schooling. It is also about identity. When a tribal community’s language dies—and many are dying—something irreplaceable is lost. Songs that have been sung for generations. Stories that carry the memory of the community. Ways of seeing the world that are not captured in Hindi or English.

Xaxa argues that the Indian state has paid lip service to linguistic diversity while actually pursuing a policy of homogenization. The promise of “three-language formula” in schools has been implemented poorly. Tribal languages are treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than resources to be preserved .

The Politics of Religion: Conversion and Its Discontents

Religion is an even more explosive battleground.

Before the arrival of Christianity and Islam, tribal communities had their own religious traditions. These were not organized “religions” in the sense that Hinduism or Christianity are. They were systems of belief and practice centered on ancestors, nature spirits, local deities, and seasonal rituals. There were no temples, no holy books, no priests with institutional authority.

Then came Christian missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They built schools and hospitals in tribal areas. They translated the Bible into tribal languages. They converted significant numbers of tribal people, especially in the Northeast and in central India. For many tribal people, conversion was not just about faith. It was also about access to education, healthcare, and a sense of dignity that the Hindu-dominated social order denied them.

This has made tribal Christians a target. Hindu nationalist groups accuse missionaries of “forced conversion.” They claim that tribal people were tricked or coerced into abandoning their “original” religion. In states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Gujarat, laws have been passed restricting religious conversion. Tribal Christians have been attacked, their churches burned, their leaders threatened.

Xaxa is careful not to romanticize either side. He acknowledges that some missionaries were paternalistic and disrespectful of tribal traditions. But he also notes that the campaign against conversion is not really about protecting tribal culture. It is about Hindu majoritarianism. The goal is to absorb tribal communities into a Hindu fold, to erase their distinctiveness, to make them “one of us” on terms that upper-caste Hindus set .

The Question of Indigenous Identity

One of Xaxa’s most important contributions is his analysis of the claim that tribes are indigenous peoples—the original inhabitants of India, who were displaced and marginalized by later waves of migration.

The Indian government has consistently rejected this claim. At international forums, India argues that all Indians are indigenous, that there is no “original” population, that the category of indigeneity does not apply to India. Xaxa finds this position disingenuous. India has signed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). It is a signatory to ILO Convention No. 107 on indigenous and tribal peoples. Yet it refuses to officially recognize Indian tribes as indigenous.

Why does this matter? Because if tribes are recognized as indigenous, they gain access to a body of international law that protects their rights to land, resources, and cultural autonomy. Without that recognition, they are just another marginalized community, subject to the whims of state policy.

Xaxa is not dogmatic on this issue. He recognizes that the concept of indigeneity is contested. But he insists that the debate must be had openly, not shut down by state denial .

Part Three: State Policies and Tribal Marginalization — Promises Made, Promises Broken

The Constitutional Framework: A Promise Unfulfilled

The Indian Constitution, drafted under the leadership of B.R. Ambedkar, contained special provisions for Scheduled Tribes. These provisions were based on a recognition that tribal communities were historically disadvantaged and needed protection.

The key provisions included:

• Reservation of seats in legislatures and government jobs
• Scheduled Areas where special laws apply and where the Governor has significant powers to protect tribal interests
• The Fifth Schedule (for central India) and Sixth Schedule (for the Northeast), which provide for autonomous tribal councils with powers over land, forests, and local governance
• The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) of 1996, which was supposed to give tribal communities control over their own affairs

On paper, these provisions look impressive. They seem to offer tribal communities a significant degree of autonomy and protection.

But Xaxa’s verdict is harsh: the constitutional promise has not been kept. The provisions exist on paper but are systematically undermined in practice .

The Failure of Implementation

Why have the constitutional protections failed? Xaxa identifies several reasons.

First, the Governor’s role has been neglected. Under the Fifth Schedule, the Governor of each state with Scheduled Areas is supposed to act as the “custodian” of tribal interests. Laws that affect Scheduled Areas must be approved by the Governor. In practice, Governors have rarely exercised this power. They have simply signed whatever the state government sent them. Xaxa has been scathing on this point, calling the failure of Governors “one of the great betrayals of the constitutional promise” .

Second, the Tribal Advisory Councils have been ineffective. These councils, which are supposed to advise the Governor on tribal issues, meet irregularly. Their recommendations are ignored. They have no real power.

Third, the PESA Act has been gutted. PESA was supposed to give tribal communities control over land, forests, water, and local governance. But state governments have passed laws that override PESA. As Xaxa puts it, instead of extending the provisions of panchayats to Scheduled Areas, governments have extended panchayats to include Scheduled Areas—meaning that the same rules apply everywhere, and tribal communities lose the special protection they were promised .

Fourth, land alienation continues. Despite laws prohibiting the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals, it happens constantly. Moneylenders use fraudulent documents. Wealthy farmers use political connections. Corporations use the power of the state to acquire land for mining, dams, and industry. Xaxa cites data showing that tribal communities make up 40 percent of the people displaced by development projects between 1950 and 1991. After 1991, the rate of displacement has only accelerated .

The Budgetary Betrayal

Here is a number that should shock you. In the 1950s and 1960s, the central government’s budgetary allocation for tribal welfare never exceeded 1 percent of the total budget. Tribal communities were 8 percent of the population, but they received 1 percent of the resources.

Things improved somewhat after the introduction of the Tribal Sub-Plan in the 1970s, which required that tribal development spending be proportional to the tribal population. But even then, the money allocated was often not spent. Funds were diverted to other purposes. Programs were poorly designed. Implementation was corrupt.

Xaxa’s research shows that despite decades of “tribal development” programs, the social indicators for tribal communities remain abysmal. Infant mortality is higher. Malnutrition is more common. Educational attainment is lower. Access to healthcare is worse. Tribal communities are not catching up to the rest of the population. In many areas, they are falling further behind .

Affirmative Action or Unequal Exchange?

One of Xaxa’s most provocative arguments is that the state’s policies toward tribes should not be seen as “affirmative action” at all. He calls them “terms of exchange” or “adverse inclusion.”

Here is what he means. Affirmative action, in its proper sense, is about giving extra help to a disadvantaged group so that they can catch up. It is about redistribution. It is about justice.

But what the state has done with tribal communities is different. The state has taken their land, their forests, their minerals. It has displaced them from their homes. It has destroyed their livelihoods. And in exchange, it offers a few schools, a few clinics, a few reserved jobs. This is not affirmative action. It is compensation—inadequate compensation—for what was stolen.

Xaxa calls this “adverse inclusion” —the process by which tribal communities are brought into the mainstream on terms that benefit the mainstream, not the tribes. They are included, yes. But they are included as laborers, as displacees, as objects of policy, not as equal citizens with rights and dignity .

Putting It All Together: Tribes as a Test of Indian Democracy

So after all of this, how should we understand tribes, identity, and politics in contemporary India?

First, tribal identity is not a relic of the past. It is a living, breathing, politically potent force. Tribal communities have been asserting their rights for over a century. They have resisted colonial dispossession, post-independence displacement, and contemporary forms of marginalization. The idea that tribes will simply “merge” into mainstream society has been proven wrong.

Second, language and religion are central to tribal politics. These are not secondary issues. They are the battlegrounds where questions of dignity, recognition, and autonomy are fought out. When a tribal child is forced to learn in a language she does not understand, that is a political act. When a tribal Christian is attacked for her faith, that is a political act. When a tribal language dies, that is a political loss.

Third, the state has failed tribal communities. The constitutional promise has not been kept. The Governor has not protected tribal interests. PESA has been undermined. Land alienation continues. Budgetary allocations are inadequate. The state talks about development but delivers displacement. It talks about inclusion but delivers marginalization.

Fourth, the struggle continues. Despite everything, tribal communities are not giving up. They are organizing. They are using the courts. They are building alliances with environmentalists, human rights activists, and international indigenous networks. They are producing their own scholars—like Xaxa himself—who can speak truth to power.

A Final Thought

Xaxa ends his paper with a question that haunts me: What kind of democracy are we building, if it cannot protect the weakest among us?

The tribal communities of India have been on this land for thousands of years. They have their own languages, their own customs, their own ways of knowing. They are not a problem to be solved. They are not a backward population to be developed. They are peoples with rights.

The Indian Constitution recognized this, at least in principle. It promised special protection. It promised autonomy. It promised that the Governor would be a custodian, not a rubber stamp.

Those promises have not been kept. And that failure is not just a failure for tribal communities. It is a failure for Indian democracy itself. A democracy that cannot protect its most vulnerable citizens is not a democracy worth having.

Xaxa does not say this explicitly. He is too measured, too scholarly for that. But the implication is clear. The test of Indian democracy is not whether it can produce billionaires or missiles or space satellites. The test is whether a tribal child in the forests of Jharkhand can grow up with dignity, with her language intact, with her land secure, with her future in her own hands.

By that test, India is still failing.

Conclusion

This section highlights the interplay of caste, class, and tribe in shaping Indian society. It underscores both continuity and transformation, offering students a nuanced understanding of how traditional structures coexist with modern dynamics.