The Bhagat Family: Mobility, Caste and the Meaning of a Reserved Post
The Bhagat family lives in a town near Phagwara and belongs to a Scheduled Caste of traditional weavers. The grandfather worked a handloom; the powerloom mills that employed the father for eighteen years closed in stages, and he now earns about ₹14,000 a month as a wage worker on another man's loom. The daughter, 24, is the first in the family with an M.Sc. in mathematics; she secured a bank clerk's post against a reserved vacancy and earns about ₹42,000 a month. Her marriage was arranged outside the caste, to an accountant, over the strong objection of her grandmother. The son, 20, left school after Class 12 and works at a mall for ₹13,000 a month. At family weddings, the grandmother's brother still eats separately and refuses to sit at the same table as the daughter's in-laws. Neighbours describe the family as 'settled now', while the grandmother says 'a job does not change what we are'.
1. Is what has happened to the daughter social mobility? Classify it, and identify the conditions that made it possible.
Read the worked answer
Yes, but the classification must be precise. It is intergenerational mobility, because the comparison is between the grandfather's and father's occupational position and the daughter's; it is also vertical, because a bank clerk's post carries more income, security and authority than wage weaving on another man's loom. It is not intragenerational, since the daughter's own career has barely begun. The conditions are identifiable and not mysterious: education to M.Sc. level, a reserved vacancy that converted educational attainment into a post where family capital was not required, and a family that permitted a daughter to study. Note what did not cause it - the father's own job history is one of decline, so this is not a case of a rising household lifting the next generation; the mobility runs through the daughter alone and depends on state provision. Note also the asymmetry: the son's position is broadly the father's, so describing the family as 'settled' overstates the change. Mobility here is real but narrow, resting on one member and one mechanism, and it would be reversed for the next generation if that mechanism were withdrawn.
2. Using this family, distinguish caste and class as principles of stratification. Why does the grandmother's brother's behaviour not refute the mobility argument?
Read the worked answer
Caste and class are different principles, not different amounts of inequality. Caste is hereditary, endogamous and hierarchical in a ritual sense: membership is fixed at birth, marriage across it is the boundary that is policed, and the ranking extends to commensality - who may eat with whom. Class is achieved, not fixed at birth, is not endogamous in principle, and is graded by command over economic resources. The Bhagats show both operating at once. Their class position has clearly moved: the daughter's income is three times her father's, and her marriage crossed a caste boundary, which is the most consequential breach available. Yet the grandmother's brother refusing to share a table shows that caste ranking survives independently of income - his objection is not that the family is poor, since they now out-earn him in cash terms. This is precisely why it does not refute mobility: caste has lost its legal and much of its economic enforcement, but its rules of purity and commensality persist as social practice, unevenly, and typically among older kin. The correct formulation is that class mobility occurred while caste ranking remains socially alive, which is why both concepts are needed rather than one replacing the other.
3. A local politician claims that reservation alone has destroyed caste. Assess this claim using the evidence in the case.
Read the worked answer
The claim is half right and the wrong half matters. Reservation demonstrably did something: a reserved vacancy is the mechanism that turned an M.Sc. into a bank post for a family with no property or contacts, so it broke the link between caste and economic position for at least one member. But 'destroyed caste' overstates three things. First, persistence: the grandmother's brother still refuses commensality, and the arranged marriage had to be negotiated against family objection, so ritual ranking outlived the economic change. Second, the mechanism is narrow - one post in one family, while the son is at the father's level and the father's industry collapsed; if reservation had restructured caste generally, the household pattern would be different, not concentrated in one member. Third, a single successful case cannot carry a general claim; what it shows is that state provision can create mobility, not that it dissolves hierarchy. A fairer claim is that reservation has weakened the caste–class overlap in specific entry points while leaving caste as a social and marriage boundary. The politician's sentence also contains an unfalsifiable element: no observation of continuing caste practice would count against it.