Breaking down the question
The command word is examine, which asks for a weighing rather than a verdict. The candidate must look at the influence of industrialisation on caste from more than one side — the ways industry has eroded caste and the ways caste has survived, adapted, and even exploited industry. A one-directional answer, whether triumphantly declaring caste dead or stubbornly declaring it untouched, misreads the command.
The two key terms need holding steady. Industrialisation means the shift to factory production, wage labour, urban concentration, and the impersonal market — forces that, in classical theory, should dissolve ascriptive bonds. Caste is the system of hereditary, ranked, endogamous groups bound to notions of purity and traditionally to occupation. The question is whether the first has undone the second.
The strongest reading recognises a paradox: industrialisation has weakened some features of caste while leaving others intact, and has even given caste new forms and functions. The task is to specify which dimensions changed and which persisted, rather than to pronounce on caste as a whole.
How to approach it
Begin with the theoretical expectation. Weber and modernisation theory predicted that industrial society, resting on achievement and contract, would corrode a system resting on ascription and ritual. State this expectation so the evidence can be measured against it. The structural features that industrialisation tests are set out in the note on the features of the caste system.
Then examine the eroding influences: the delinking of caste from traditional occupation, new avenues of occupational mobility, the anonymity of the city and factory, the secularisation of the ritual idiom, and the weakening of purity-pollution in public spaces like workplaces and transport. Balance this against the persisting and adapting influences: endogamy scarcely dented, caste networks used to recruit factory labour, caste reborn as association and vote bank, and Beteille's observation that caste has become more an instrument of competition than of ritual rank.
Conclude with the synthesis — a secularisation and horizontal consolidation of caste rather than its disappearance. Keep the answer tight; at fifteen marks, selection matters more than coverage.
Model answer
Classical sociology expected industry to be the solvent of caste. Max Weber, and the modernisation theorists after him, held that industrial society rewards achievement, contract, and impersonal exchange, and must therefore erode a social order built on ascription, hereditary occupation, and ritual purity. The Indian experience is a partial confirmation and a large qualification of that expectation, and it is this mixed record that a considered examination must capture.
The eroding influences. Industrialisation has struck hardest at the link between caste and occupation. The factory recruits for skill and availability, not birth; the traditional correspondence between jati and hereditary calling loosens once a Brahmin can operate a lathe and a Dalit can supervise a shop floor. New industrial and service occupations, unknown to the old order, offer routes of mobility unmoored from ritual rank. The city and the workplace impose a physical proximity — in the tram, the canteen, the assembly line — that makes the observance of purity and pollution impractical, and the anonymity of urban life loosens the surveillance that village caste depended upon. The idiom of caste is thereby secularised: it survives less as a matter of ritual purity and more as a matter of group identity and interest.
The persisting and adapting influences. Yet the erosion is uneven and partial. Endogamy — the structural core of caste — has proved remarkably resistant; marriage remains overwhelmingly within caste even among the industrial and urban educated. Caste has, moreover, colonised the industrial economy rather than surrendered to it: recruitment to factory work has often run along caste and kinship networks, so that particular mills or trades became associated with particular communities. M. N. Srinivas noted that improved communications and industrial prosperity could actually strengthen caste consciousness, enabling dispersed members to organise as never before. Caste has re-emerged as caste association and vote bank, a horizontal solidarity mobilised for economic and political advantage. Andre Beteille captured the transformation precisely: caste has increasingly become an instrument of competition rather than an expression of ritual hierarchy.
Assessment. The net influence of industrialisation, then, is neither the destruction of caste nor its preservation intact, but its secularisation and functional reinvention. The ritual dimension — purity, pollution, hereditary occupation, hierarchy — has weakened under industrial and urban conditions. The structural and political dimensions — endogamy, group solidarity, competitive mobilisation — have survived and in some respects intensified. Caste has shed its sacred skin and reappeared as a secular interest group, at home in the very modernity that was supposed to abolish it. Industrialisation has thus changed the form and function of caste far more than it has diminished its hold.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners penalise the single-directional answer above all. A script that announces industrialisation has destroyed caste, or that caste is wholly unchanged, has misread examine. The mark scheme rewards the candidate who separates the dimensions of caste and shows industrialisation acting differently on each — dissolving the occupational and ritual, sparing the matrimonial and political.
The decisive move is the paradox: that industrialisation secularises caste rather than abolishing it, and can even strengthen caste organisation. Srinivas on communications reinforcing caste, and Beteille on caste as competition rather than hierarchy, are the citations that lift a script from competent to authoritative. Endogamy as the surviving structural core is the empirical anchor examiners look for.
At fifteen marks, discrimination matters. The strongest answers are selective and analytical, closing on the synthesis of secularisation and reinvention rather than attempting an exhaustive catalogue.