Secularisation of caste names a change in the content of caste rather than in its existence. M. N. Srinivas used the term to describe a process in which the ritual idiom of caste — the ranking of jatis by relative purity and pollution, restrictions on interdining and touch, the ritual duties attached to hereditary occupation — progressively loses force, while caste itself persists as a principle of identity, association and interest. Caste, on this account, becomes less a religious order and more a secular group: something closer to an ethnic community or an interest bloc that can act in the arenas of modern politics and employment.
The concept must be read alongside, and against, the general sociological idea of secularisation. It does not claim that Indians became less religious, nor that caste dissolved. It claims a separation: the hierarchy sanctioned by scripture and ritual is delegitimised in public life, while the network of birth-ascribed solidarity that the hierarchy once organised is carried over, intact and often better organised, into secular institutions.
What weakens and what endures
The distinction is best drawn as a division between the public and the intimate. In public and impersonal settings much of the ritual apparatus has receded. Untouchability in its classical forms — exclusion from wells, streets, temples and schools — is constitutionally prohibited and criminalised, and in urban transport, offices, cinemas, markets and railway canteens the anonymity of the crowd makes the enforcement of commensal rules impracticable. Occupational specialisation by caste has loosened as new occupations appeared that no scripture had assigned. Ritual distance is difficult to maintain in a bus queue.
What endures is the domain that ritual rules mattered least for and social closure matters most for. Endogamy has proved remarkably resistant: marriage remains overwhelmingly within the jati, arranged through caste networks and now advertised through caste-segmented matrimonial platforms. Caste retains its grip on residence, with segregated settlements persisting in villages and reproduced in urban housing through informal exclusion. And it operates as social capital: caste ties supply information about jobs, credit, tenancy, admissions and business partners. Rural untouchability, in practice, also persists in commensal and marital matters even where legally extinguished — the retreat of the ritual idiom has been most complete where observation is public and least where it is domestic.
The secular vehicles
Three institutions carry caste into modern public life. Caste associations — sabhas and mahasabhas formed from the late nineteenth century — took the form of voluntary bodies with offices, journals, funds, hostels and schools, and pressed claims for educational places, employment and recognition. Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph described this as the modernity of tradition: a traditional grouping adopting an entirely modern organisational form to pursue interests, and in the process turning a local jati into a wider, more self-conscious caste category.
Reservation categories create a second vehicle. Constitutional provision for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and, after the Mandal Commission's implementation, Other Backward Classes gives caste a formal administrative existence, attaches material entitlements to certificates of caste status, and generates its own politics of inclusion, sub-categorisation and claims to backward status. Here caste's official meaning is not ritual rank but historical disadvantage — a secular criterion.
Electoral politics supplies the third. Rajni Kothari's collection argued that the right question was not whether caste would survive politics but what politics would do to caste: parties mobilise caste numbers, distribute tickets by caste arithmetic, and build coalitions of jatis, while caste groups learn bargaining, alliance and the language of rights. The vote bank, a term Srinivas himself coined from village observation, describes a body of votes a patron could deliver. The effect is double-edged: caste is politicised and thereby entrenched, but it is also drawn into a competitive arena that erodes hierarchy, since in an election a numerous low-ranked jati counts for more than a small high-ranked one.
Distinguishing near neighbours
Three confusions are worth avoiding. Secularisation of caste is not the disappearance of caste: it is a change of register, and the persistence of endogamy and network is part of the claim, not a refutation of it. Nor is it Sanskritisation, which is movement within the ritual hierarchy by a group adopting the customs of a higher one, and which therefore affirms the ritual scale that secularisation abandons. Srinivas treated the two as parallel but distinct processes and noted that a mobile group often does both — Sanskritising its rituals while organising an association and voting as a bloc. Finally it is not the same as Westernisation, which concerns cultural style and technology rather than the basis of caste solidarity.
Decline or transformation?
The interpretive dispute is whether secularisation registers caste's decline or merely its adaptation. André Béteille's Tanjore study showed the classical convergence of ritual status, landholding and power beginning to come apart, with economic class and political position emerging as partly independent dimensions of stratification — a genuine loosening of the caste order. Srinivas held both that the ritual content was thinning and that caste as a corporate group was becoming more powerful, precisely because association and electoral politics gave it instruments it never had. Later writers, Satish Deshpande among them, argue that middle-class formation has made caste invisible rather than absent: upper-caste advantage is recoded as merit, and the professional and managerial strata reproduce caste composition through networks, schooling and marriage while denying that caste plays any part. On this reading the secular caste is more durable than the ritual one, because it can no longer be named.
The urban Indian professional office is the illustration. Nobody enquires about a colleague's jati before sharing lunch, and the canteen is genuinely caste-indifferent; yet the composition of the office reflects who had access to English-medium schooling and coaching, recruitment moves through referral networks that are caste-clustered, matrimonial choices remain endogamous, and residential sorting concentrates the same groups. Ritual has gone; closure has not.
For the UPSC answer
State the core claim as a change in content, not existence — ritual idiom weakens, secular solidarity persists — and cite Srinivas as its author. Organise the middle of the answer around what has declined (untouchability and commensality in public, occupational rigidity) against what has endured (endogamy, residence, networks), then give the three secular vehicles: caste associations, reservation categories and electoral mobilisation, with Kothari and the Rudolphs. Mark the boundary with Sanskritisation clearly, since examiners reward that distinction. Conclude with the decline-versus-transformation debate, using Béteille on the disjunction of caste, class and power and the invisibility of caste in middle-class merit talk.
References & further reading
- Srinivas, M. N. (1962). Caste in Modern India and Other Essays. Asia Publishing House.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1966). Social Change in Modern India. University of California Press.
- Béteille, A. (1965). Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. University of California Press.
- Kothari, R. (ed.) (1970). Caste in Indian Politics. Orient Longman.
- Rudolph, L. I. and Rudolph, S. H. (1967). The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. University of Chicago Press.
- Deshpande, S. (2003). Contemporary India: A Sociological View. Viking.