A dominant caste is a caste that, within a given village or region, holds decisive control over land, numbers, wealth and local political decision-making, and so is able to impose its will on other castes regardless of its exact position in the ritual hierarchy. The concept was developed by M. N. Srinivas, first in his study of a Mysore village (1955) and then in the essay The Dominant Caste in Rampura (1959), where the Okkaligas — peasant proprietors of middling ritual rank — ran the village while Brahmins, ritually superior, did not.

The concept's importance is analytical. It breaks the assumption, common in textual accounts of caste, that ritual status and secular power coincide. By showing that a Shudra-ranked cultivating caste could rule a village containing Brahmins, Srinivas opened the way for a sociology of caste as a system of power and not only of purity — the field view correcting the book view.

The criteria of dominance

Srinivas set out a cluster of attributes; dominance is a matter of holding several of them together rather than any single one.

  • Numerical strength — a large enough share of the village population to matter in any collective decision or conflict.
  • Economic power, above all in land. Ownership of the bulk of arable land is the core, because it makes other castes dependent through tenancy, wage labour and credit.
  • Political power — control of the caste panchayat and, later, of the statutory panchayat, and links upwards to the party and the bureaucracy.
  • A ritual position that is not too low. A caste need not be twice-born, but extreme pollution — as with formerly untouchable castes — blocks dominance even where numbers exist.

In Social Change in Modern India and later writing he added the modern resources that increasingly decide dominance: western education, government jobs, urban contacts and command of English, which convert local landed power into regional and state-level influence.

How dominance is exercised

Dominance is visible in everyday village life more than in formal office. The dominant caste settles disputes, controls the village temple and its festivals, decides who may draw water where, sets the agricultural wage, and disciplines subordinates through boycott, eviction and violence. Srinivas also coined the term vote bank in his 1955 essay, to describe the block of dependent voters a patron could deliver — an idea later developed by Rajni Kothari into an account of caste as the organising material of competitive democracy. The dominant caste is likewise the cultural reference group in many villages: the model for sanskritisation is often its customs, not the Brahmin's.

Béteille and the decoupling of dimensions

André Béteille's Caste, Class and Power (1965), a study of Sripuram in Thanjavur, refined the idea decisively. He treated caste, class and power as three analytically distinct dimensions of stratification, historically cumulative in the Brahmin-dominated village but progressively dissociated in the twentieth century. Adult franchise, party competition, education and non-agricultural employment allowed a person to be high in one dimension and low in another. Dominance, in other words, was becoming less a property of a caste as a whole and more a resource that segments and individuals could accumulate separately.

Transformation after 1950

Four processes reshaped rural dominance. Land reform abolished intermediary tenures and dispossessed many absentee Brahmin and zamindari landlords, while ceiling laws were evaded — the net effect was to consolidate the position of middle cultivating castes who actually tilled and now owned. The green revolution turned these groups into commercial farmers with surplus, credit and tractors, most visibly the Jats, Patidars, Kammas and Reddys. Panchayati raj, especially after the 73rd Amendment, formalised local power and, through reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women, began to prise it open. And electoral mobilisation carried these castes to state power, the process Christophe Jaffrelot calls India's silent revolution. Francine Frankel and M. S. A. Rao's Dominance and State Power in Modern India (1989) traces exactly this shift from village dominance to regional political dominance.

Criticisms

The concept has been faulted for being a list of attributes rather than a theory, with no account of how the criteria are weighted when they conflict. It is village-bound: much dominance now operates through markets, contracts, party tickets and state offices located far outside the village, as Oliver Mendelsohn's work on the transformation of rural authority argues. Marxist critics hold that “dominant caste” obscures class — what matters is control of the means of production, not caste labels. Others note that dominance is often shared or contested between two castes rather than monopolised, that a dominant caste is internally divided by class and faction, and that Dalit assertion, reservation and out-migration have weakened the dependence on which dominance rested without abolishing it.

For the UPSC answer

State the criteria crisply — numbers, land and economic power, political clout, a not-too-low ritual rank, plus modern education and office — and anchor them in Rampura, 1959. The examiner is really testing whether you can show that ritual and secular hierarchies came apart, so pair Srinivas with Béteille's cumulative to dissociated argument in Sripuram. Then trace the concept forward through land reform, the green revolution and panchayati raj to Jaffrelot's rise of the middle castes in state politics. Close with the sharpest critique — that dominance today is regional and class-mediated rather than a village attribute.

References & further reading

  1. Srinivas, M. N. (1959). ‘The Dominant Caste in Rampura’. American Anthropologist, 61(1).
  2. Srinivas, M. N. (1955). ‘The Social System of a Mysore Village’, in M. Marriott (ed.), Village India. University of Chicago Press.
  3. Srinivas, M. N. (1976). The Remembered Village. University of California Press.
  4. Béteille, A. (1965). Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. University of California Press.
  5. Frankel, F. R. and Rao, M. S. A. (eds.) (1989). Dominance and State Power in Modern India. Oxford University Press.
  6. Jaffrelot, C. (2003). India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. Permanent Black.