Insights from the Field: In-Depth Studies of Caste in Indian Villages

When sociologists and anthropologists set out to study caste in India, they faced a fundamental question: does the caste system look the same on the ground as it does in sacred texts and theoretical frameworks? The answer, as decades of careful fieldwork revealed, is a definitive no. Field-based village studies conducted across India from the 1950s onward exposed caste not as a static, scripture-bound hierarchy, but as a living, shifting system shaped by land, politics, ritual status, and local power. The scholars who walked into Indian villages – notebooks in hand, living among farmers and priests – gave sociology some of its richest and most enduring insights into how caste actually operates in everyday life.

Why field-based studies matter
F.G. Bailey in Bisipara, Odisha: caste, coercion, and economic change
McKim Marriott in Kishan Garhi, Uttar Pradesh: little communities in a great civilization
M.N. Srinivas in Rampura, Karnataka: dominant caste and the field view
André Béteille in Sripuram, Tamil Nadu: caste, class, and power intertwined
What these studies collectively reveal
Caste as a fluid, contested system

Why field-based studies matter

Before the mid-20th century, much of the understanding of Indian society came from what sociologists call the “book view” – interpretations derived from classical Sanskrit texts, colonial records, and Indological scholarship. This approach presented caste as a tidy, top-down system rooted in the four varnas: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras. But Indian villages told a far more complicated story. Village-based fieldwork that emerged strongly in the post-independence era moved away from this theoretical stance, immersing researchers in the actual texture of rural life – caste negotiations, patron-client ties, land disputes, and ritual exclusions – all unfolding in real time. This shift from the book view to the “field view” became a cornerstone of Indian sociology.

F.G. Bailey in Bisipara, Odisha: caste, coercion, and economic change

Frederick George Bailey, a British social anthropologist trained at Manchester University under Max Gluckman, conducted intensive fieldwork in Bisipara, a village in the highlands of Odisha, between 1952 and 1955. His research, published in works including Caste and the Economic Frontier (1957) and Tribe, Caste, and Nation (1960), examined how caste hierarchies in a traditional agricultural setting were being disrupted by wider economic and political forces – what he called the “extension of the economic and political frontier.”

Bailey’s analysis of caste in Bisipara rested on three core features. Segregation was visible in residential patterns – untouchable castes were physically separated, living in distinct wards or streets. Interdependence structured the village economy through a ritual and occupational division of labour, where each caste group performed specific roles essential to the whole. And hierarchy governed access to political power and economic resources, expressed in a deeply hierarchical idiom. His key insight, however, was that these categories were not fixed: as Bailey argued in his 1963 paper “Closed Social Stratification in India,” castes that were ritually or politically low in the village could become economically prosperous through trade and commerce outside the village – a process that directly challenged the summation of roles traditional caste ideology demanded.

Bailey also stressed the coercive dimension of caste relations – the way dominant castes wielded economic and social control over lower-caste groups – rather than focusing solely on ritual purity or symbolic hierarchy. This was a pointed departure from purely ideological readings of caste. His later revisit to Bisipara, informed by the Temple Entry Act (which allowed formerly untouchable communities to enter Hindu temples), showed how post-colonial politics and democratic processes were reshaping what had appeared to be an immovable caste order.

McKim Marriott in Kishan Garhi, Uttar Pradesh: little communities in a great civilization

American anthropologist McKim Marriott approached Indian villages from a different angle. After spending time in India during World War II, he undertook over eighteen months of dissertation fieldwork from December 1950 to April 1952 in Kishan Garhi, a village in the Aligarh district of Uttar Pradesh, where more than 20 distinct castes lived in close proximity. His findings formed the centrepiece of the landmark edited volume Village India: Studies in the Little Community (1955), published through the University of Chicago.

Marriott’s study challenged the idea that an Indian village was a self-sufficient, isolated unit. Kishan Garhi was internally divided along lines of economic interest, caste endogamy, political factions, and kinship – and had extensive commercial and cultural links with the wider world. Far from being a sealed community, it was a node within a larger socio-political and civilizational system. One of Marriott’s most significant contributions was his concept of universalization and parochialization – the two-way interaction between the “great traditions” of elite Sanskrit culture and the “little traditions” of local, village-based religious and social life. Lower-caste communities absorbed and reinterpreted high-caste rituals and festivals (universalization), while village-level customs sometimes fed upward into pan-Indian traditions (parochialization).

What Marriott found on the ground was striking: people from different castes were friends and regularly interacted, even when academic literature insisted they never spoke to each other. This gap between text and lived reality was precisely what field-based research was designed to expose. His approach, centring Indian ways of thinking and knowing rather than importing Western analytical frameworks, was considered methodologically radical for its time in Western anthropology.

M.N. Srinivas in Rampura, Karnataka: dominant caste and the field view

No figure is more central to Indian village sociology than M.N. Srinivas. His extended study of Rampura, a village near Mysore in Karnataka, conducted in 1948 and later compiled into The Remembered Village (1976), became one of the discipline’s most celebrated works – made all the more remarkable because Srinivas reconstructed it entirely from memory after a fire destroyed all his field notes at Stanford. The book offers a granular portrait of caste relations, religious practices, gender dynamics, and village politics in mid-20th century south India.

Srinivas’s most influential conceptual contribution from the Rampura study was the notion of the dominant caste. In Rampura, the Okkaligas – a peasant caste – were numerically preponderant, owned most of the land, and held effective political authority, even though Brahmins ranked higher on the ritual scale. As Srinivas observed, a caste could be called dominant when it combined numerical strength, land ownership, and political power – and that dominance in these secular terms could outweigh ritual standing. This finding reframed how scholars understood caste hierarchy: it was not simply about ritual purity, but about the convergence of economic and political muscle with social status.

Srinivas also developed the concept of Sanskritization from this and related fieldwork – the process by which lower castes adopted the customs, dietary habits, and ritual practices of upper castes to claim higher social status over time. Both concepts remain central to the sociology of caste in India today.

André Béteille in Sripuram, Tamil Nadu: caste, class, and power intertwined

Where Srinivas focused on ritual mobility and dominant caste, his student André Béteille took a more analytically layered approach. His fieldwork in Sripuram, a village in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, conducted in 1961-62, resulted in Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (1965) – a work that remains a benchmark of Indian empirical sociology.

Béteille’s central argument was that caste, class, and power were three distinct but interlocking dimensions of social stratification, and that they did not always move in the same direction. In Sripuram, he found Brahmins divided into distinct sub-groups – Srivaishnavas and Smarthas – each with separate residential areas, distinct ritual practices, and strict endogamy within sub-castes. Between Brahmins and Adi-Dravidians, the lowest stratum, a sharp cultural and symbolic gulf existed. But land reforms, modern education, and democratic politics were reshaping these alignments – lower-caste groups were gaining economic footholds even as their ritual status remained low. This uncoupling of ritual hierarchy from economic and political power was Béteille’s major empirical finding.

Influenced by Max Weber’s tripartite model of stratification (class, status, and party/power), Béteille insisted that social inequality in India could not be reduced to caste ideology alone. His work opened a path toward understanding how class and political power were increasingly independent variables in the village social order.

What these studies collectively reveal

Taken together, the field-based studies of Bailey, Marriott, Srinivas, Béteille, and others like S.C. Dube (who studied Shamirpet village near Hyderabad) dismantled several assumptions about Indian rural life. First, caste is not a uniform, text-bound system: it varies significantly from village to village, shaped by local history, dominant group interests, and the pressures of the market and the state. Second, economic and political relationships routinely overflow caste boundaries, meaning that castes low in ritual standing can rise economically and politically – and vice versa. Third, the village itself is not an isolated whole: it is embedded in wider regional, cultural, and political networks that constantly shape and reshape internal hierarchies.

These studies also exposed the limits of fieldwork itself. Researchers who lived in upper-caste localities – as Béteille did in Sripuram’s agraharam – had far more access to Brahmin perspectives than to those of Adi-Dravidians or lower castes who viewed a visiting Brahmin with suspicion. The social position of the researcher, in other words, is never neutral in a caste-conscious society. This methodological insight has continued to inform debates about who can study whom, and from which standpoint, in Indian sociology.

Caste as a fluid, contested system

Perhaps the most enduring lesson from field-based village studies is that caste is not a fixed ladder. It is a fluid, negotiated system that different actors – landowners, priests, politicians, artisans, formerly untouchable communities – constantly contest, manipulate, and reinterpret in their daily lives. The lines between ritual purity and political power, between hereditary status and achieved economic position, are blurred in practice. As the post-independence decades brought land reforms, democratic elections, affirmative action policies, and greater market integration, field studies documented how these forces were reshaping village hierarchies in ways no scriptural text could have predicted.

The field-view approach pioneered by these scholars did not just produce data – it produced a fundamentally different way of thinking about India. It insisted that to understand society, you must live in it, observe it, and listen to the people who navigate it every day. That insistence remains as relevant now as it was when Bailey first walked into the hills of Odisha in the early 1950s.

What do you think? Field studies revealed that ritual status and actual power often diverge sharply in Indian villages – does this gap between formal hierarchy and lived reality still hold true in rural India today? And if researchers’ own caste backgrounds shaped what they could see in the field, how should contemporary sociologists address that bias when studying communities very different from their own?

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References

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Table of Contents

Why field-based studies matter 🔗

F.G. Bailey in Bisipara, Odisha: caste, coercion, and economic change 🔗

McKim Marriott in Kishan Garhi, Uttar Pradesh: little communities in a great civilization 🔗

M.N. Srinivas in Rampura, Karnataka: dominant caste and the field view 🔗

André Béteille in Sripuram, Tamil Nadu: caste, class, and power intertwined 🔗

What these studies collectively reveal 🔗

Caste as a fluid, contested system 🔗