The Political Construction of Caste in South India Vijayendra Rao Development Research Group, The World Bank And Radu Ban London School of Economics and Development Research Group, The World Bank

The Trope Abbé Dubois 1806 James Mill 1820 HH Risley 1915 Max Weber Karl Marx “Homo Heirarchicus” – Louis Dumont (1966) tr. 1980

Trope in Economics Most papers that look at caste discrimination, e.g.: Akerlof (1976) Frietas (2006) Rao and Walton (2004) Hoff and Pandey (2004) Etc. etc. ……

Trope in Policy Deepak Lal – Hindu Equilibrium Mancur Olson – Rise and Decline of Nations Harrison and Huntington – Culture Matters

CRITICS Rudolph and Rudolph (1969) Veena Das (1981) Susan Bayly (1999) Nicholas Dirks (2002)

Natural Experiment Bayly, Dirks – Political/Administrative History Land Reform History (Dharma Kumar, 1962) Jati – Language/Kinship Geography

Natural Experiment Reorganization of Indian States – 1956 Old States: -Hyderabad – Mughal Governor (18 th Century), with much longer prior history (12 th century -Madras Presidency – 18 th century, but again much longer prior history

Natural Experiment New States Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala “Mistakes” along the Border Language Matching – Block Language Matching- Village

Natural Experiment Control for Administrative History Control for Language Kinship Structures

Data Collection (Nov. 2002) Village Level – Focus Group Discussion/PRA Test: Population is almost perfectly correlated (0.83) correlated with census population despite imperfections in overlap. Household Level – 20 households per village

CASTE OVERLAP Two measures: 1)Overall Overlap: Ratio of population of overlapping caste names in both villages to total population in both villages 2)Top 5 Overlap: Ratio of population in overlapping caste names in five most populous castes in both villages

Caste “Broadening” Social Movements – “Dalit”, “Harijan”, “Adi-Karnataka”, “Lingayat” Affirmative Action – “Schedule Caste”, “OBC” Modernization – “Malayalee”, “Tenant”, “Muslim”