EXPERIENCING CASTE: SOCIAL DISTANCE IS DISTINCT FROM ECONOMIC DISTANCE

Abstract

Caste has been a primary identity factor in the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years. It originated from a religious framework, coded by early law books, but as society shifted with different rulers, political systems, and policies, the influence of caste in maintaining the distances between groups has changed. As a society changes, the power structures between different groups within the society inevitably shift, impacting the experience, outcomes and behavior of dominant and oppressed groups in differing ways. To study the impact of societal change on caste groups, I argue that caste inequalities should be observed and operationalized in social terms separately from economic terms, though both social and economic lenses are important. Moreover, I also argue that it is important to examine the relationship between these two axes of stratification by locating them in local rather than national contexts.Social caste distance is related to ritual beliefs and associated practices that maintain a social distance between different caste groups in a locality. Economic caste distance is related to the material wealth inequalities that exist between caste groups living in the same locality. This study serves to highlight that social and economic caste distance should not be considered one and the same, though they may interact. Using the India Human Development Survey Wave 2 (2011-12), I structure my study at the local area level, generating district-level markers for both the social and economic distance between different caste groups to operationalize the caste context in which each family lives its life. I test how the social and economic distance may impact dalits (also called Scheduled Castes) and dominant castes differently by looking at three outcomes: Local conflict, women’s labor force participation, and children’s learning outcomes. I find that social distance predicts conflict slightly better than economic distance, but places with both social distance and economic distance are even more likely to have conflict. For women’s labor force participation, I find that there are significant differences between dalit women and dominant caste women’s behavior. All women are less likely to work in areas with high social distance, but dalit women are likely to work more in areas with high economic inequality between caste groups despite social distance present in the area. Dominant caste women are not as likely to work, compared to all other caste groups, and economic inequality between castes benefits dominant caste households and decreases a dominant caste women’s likelihood of working. I also find that the learning outcomes of children significantly differ among different caste groups. For both oppressed caste and dominant caste children, the variables that are significant when it comes to learning outcomes seem to be the socio-economic factors apart from the caste distance like household education, assets, and in the case of reading, the urban/rural status. There is no conclusive finding for all children taken together when it comes to the effect of economic or social distance between castes, BUT dalit children analyzed separately face a negative impact on both reading and math outcomes in areas where there is high economic distance between castes.