Mobility in the Caste System

Burton Stein has pointed out that the various subdivisions which now exist among the Tamil peasant caste of Vellalas arose out of their former mobility. The Backward Classes Movement was widespread in the Indian subcontinent as a whole and was particularly strong in peninsular India, where it had a distinctive ideology and pervaded every area of social life. The twentieth century has indeed witnessed a great increase in the quantum of mobility in the caste system, and Sanskritization played an important role in this mobility by enabling low castes to pass for high. Edmund Leach recently stated that "wherever caste groups are seen to be acting as corporations in competition against like groups of different caste, then they are acting in defiance of caste principles". If Leach&s;s "principles" are not applicable to the caste system in traditional or pre-British India, they are even less applicable to the situation today.