CASTE, CLASS AND SOCIAL MOBILITY. A CASE STUDY IN NORTH INDIA 1958-2015

This thesis analyses the nexus between caste, class and social mobility in rural India over the last half-century of profound transformations. The increase of demographic pressure on land has reduced agriculture to a subsidiary source of livelihood for the rural population. The transition from farming to informal and irregular forms of labour which require the working population to commute to small and medium towns, have become the predominant patterns of occupational transition in rural India. This thesis investigates the nature and magnitude of these changes and their implications for the reconfiguration of the social structures - caste hierarchy and class stratification - and aims at verifying whether the caste membership continues to prevail as a factor of social stratification. Using unique data at the individual level on the full population of Palanpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh, surveyed seven times from 1958 to 2015, we provide a longitudinal analysis of the trends, the patterns and the determinants of the social mobility of three generations of individuals. We combine the statistical and econometric analysis of the social mobility with a qualitative analysis of more than a hundred interviews carried out during six-months in-depth fieldwork. We find evidence of the opportunities for social mobility to increase but prevalently downward toward manual workers’ class. The advantage of the upper castes to access high salariat positions persists over time, however, with the modernization, the educational attainment plays an equalising role on the chances of upward mobility irrespective of the caste and the class of origin. Moreover, we find that the caste disadvantage for upward mobility from low to middle and top-class decreased over time for some of the castes at the bottom of the hierarchy. While much social stratification research has been and still is carried out in Western countries, this thesis is an original contribution to the emerging literature concerning social stratification and mobility in developing countries.