Caste influences Indians who have spent all their lives in urban centres more than those who have migrated there. Endogamy may be dominant, but change is in the air in urban, with middle-class Indian showing varying degrees of interest in marrying outside their caste.
These are some of the findings presented at a programme organised by students from the University of California, Berkeley, who studied several aspects of India’s socio-political milieu, including caste and religion.
Incidentally, how ingrained these two factors are in the Indian psyche has been hotly debated throughout the country following two instances this past week — a Muslim boy’s religious identity cost him a job, while a mother, ‘progressive’ enough to seek a “groom” for her gay son, stipulated the caste for prospective applicants.
Understanding the role of caste in marital ties and whether modern-day India is willing to break free of rigid conventions is the focus of UC Berkeley students Susan L. Ostermann and Amit Ahuja’s paper ‘Understanding Modern-Day India through Experiments’.
Using matrimonial websites, the duo selected nine grooms from Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. “All similar in terms of height, skin tone, family background, education, finances, etc. and all open to inter-caste marriage. In each State, one groom was upper caste, one was OBC and one was SC. We examined response rates to letters of interest sent by each groom to over 1,500 potential brides,” said Ms. Ostermann.
A trade-off?
She added that the respondents were not only from different castes but also from different income groups and between their caste and class identities, lay an exchange mechanism.
“Our findings revealed that Scheduled Caste women were more willing to marry outside their caste. Some upper caste brides too were willing to consider out-of-caste matches. While upper middle income SCs saw marrying a higher caste groom as an opportunity to trade class for caste, some from the higher castes were willing to marry better earning SC grooms to boost their financial status,” she said.
Poll impact
The realm of caste in the Indian context extends far beyond matrimonial alliances and plays its part in elections as well. Another paper ‘Urban Migration and Caste-Politics’, presented by Winter Rain Patterson, sought to establish the “profound political implications as Indians are thought to ‘vote their caste, not cast their vote.’”
This article has been corrected for a factual error. The programme was organised by students from the University of California, Berkeley and not The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy. The error is regretted.
