Caste class and occpation.
- Bombay Popular Book 1961
- 356p.
In 1921 when studying at Cambridge I chose caste as the subject of my research. Previously, while living in London for some time I had thought of combining the study of caste with that of class. The decision I took at Cambridge was the result of my preliminary study of the racial aspect of caste. It was by itself intricate enough to occupy me for the best part of two years which I could afford at Cambridge. At that time I could hardly dream of anyone approaching a similar avenue of study. But subsequent events showed that Prof. P. C. Mahalanobis was studying Bengal caste from a similar point of view. The results of my inquiry were accepted as one of the papers for the Ph.D. degree the Cambridge University in the first quarter of 1923. The paper "Ethnic Theory of Caste" after some delay was published in Man in India in 1924. Before I left Cambridge in April 1923 I had signed a contract with Messrs. Kegan Paul and Co. for a book Caste and Race in India to be included in their series entitled History of Civilization, edited by C. K. Ogden. I had already prepared a tentative plan of not only the racial aspect but also the other aspects of caste and its historical setting. When at Bombay I sat down to it in 1924 I added to it as a natural conclusion the plan of analysis of contemporary trends. The final type-script of the book was despatched to the London publishers early in 1931 and the book was published by them in London in the beginning of 1932. Between the time my type-script of Caste and Race in India left me and its publication in the book-form a number of papers and books appeared here in India in quick succes- sion, demonstrating the fact that the subject of caste was in the air. The Report on the Indian Census of 1931 was pub- lished after my book but the anthropometric survey under- taken in connection with the Census was rather slow to appear. The Census Report contained Dr. Hutton's contribu- tion to caste. The anthropometric survey when published, created a little confusion in the beginning. Later on its grave defects were pointed out by me. My book, as extracts of some of the reviews so insistently printed by the present publishers will show, was almost uni- versally well received. It went out of print some years back, when owing to other pre-occupations I could not direct imme- diate attention to its revision. When I was almost free to do so I found that Dr. Hutton had forestalled me with his book Caste in India. Naturally I waited for some time. an During the interval of nearly twenty years from the time when the manuscript of Caste and Race in India was ready and the actual revision of it, the subject of caste as extreme case of social stratification has assumed a significance which was realized by me but was not common heritage of sociologists. The European institution of class, too, has come in for a more detailed and analytical treatment. A number of investigations to measure its strength, to unravel its precise nature, were made, more in the U.S.A. than in the U.K. The Marxian doctrine of class-war, since the success of the Rus- sian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Regime, turned the attention of not only professional students but wise statesmen to the understanding of class structure. In the United States the Negro problem worried and worries a number of sociologists and statesmen. Its apparent affiliation to caste has naturally turned American attention to the study of caste. Racial differentiation brought to the forefront by the Nazis in Germany further oriented the subject. The result is seen in the much fuller treatment of class and caste in the recent edition of the best of English text-books of Socio- logy, Prof. R. M. MacIver's Society, which he has brought out in collaboration with Page. A little earlier Cox wrote a whole volume, which for the first time brought the three aspect of social differentiation, caste, class and race, together under one title.