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The caste system, its salient characteristics, and its subtle and more obvious transformations, coupled with its persistence and pervasiveness, have been central to studies of Indian society. This review provides a specific view of caste and its transformations with an emphasis on the socioeconomic or labor market dimension. Such a perspective is particularly crucial as one of the distinctive features of caste is the inheritance of occupations. A major argument of modernization has been the increasing movement away from occupational inheritance. This review traces the limited support for the \"Orientalist\" view of caste as essentially unchanging and focuses on the fluid nature of caste and its transformation in the economic domain.

Well-functioning groups enforce social norms that restrain opportunism. We study how the assignment to the top or bottom of the caste system affects the altruistic punishment of norm violations. Individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy exhibit a much lower willingness to punish norm violations that hurt members of their own caste. We can rule out self-selection into castes and control for wealth, education and political experience. We thus plausibly identify the impact of caste status on altruistic punishment. The lower willingness to punish may impair the low castes' ability to enforce contracts, to ensure property rights and sustain cooperation.

Can descriptive representation for a stigmatized group change the beliefs and intentions of members of dominant groups? To address this question, I focus on quotas (reservations) that allow members of the scheduled castes to access key executive positions in India's village institutions. To measure the psychological effect of reservations, I combine a natural experiment with an innovative MP3-player-based self-administered survey that measures various beliefs and behavioral intentions. Results provide credible causal evidence that reservations affect the psychology of members of dominant castes. Even though villagers living in reserved villages continue to think poorly of members of the scheduled castes (stereotypes do not improve), reservation affects two other types of beliefs: perceived social norms of interactions and perceived legal norms of interactions. These changes in beliefs in turn appear to have far-reaching consequences for intercaste relations, as villagers’ discriminatory intentions also decrease under reservation.

What are the mechanisms by which societal discrimination affects individual achievement, and why do the effects of past discrimination endure once legal barriers are removed? This paper reports the findings of two experiments in village India that suggest that the mechanisms of discrimination operate, in part, within the individuals who are members of the groups who have been discriminated against. it demonstrates that publicly revealing an individual's membership in such a group alters his behavior in ways that make the effects of past discrimination persist over time.

Using the 2004-2005 India Human Development Survey data, we estimate and decompose the earnings of household businesses owned by historically marginalized social groups known as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs across the earnings distribution. We find clear differences in characteristics between the two types of businesses with the former faring significantly worse. The mean decomposition reveals that as much as 55 % of the caste earnings gap could be attributed to the unexplained component. Quantile regressions suggest that gaps are higher at lower deciles, providing some evidence of a sticky floor. Finally, quantile decompositions reveal that the unexplained component is greater at the lower and middle deciles than higher, suggesting that SCST-owned businesses at the lower and middle end of the conditional earnings distribution face greater discrimination.

We report the results of an experiment that was designed to test for discrimination in grading in India. We recruited teachers to grade exams. We randomly assigned child \"characteristics\" (age, gender, and caste) to the cover sheets of the exams to ensure that there is no relationship between these observed characteristics and the exam quality. We find that teachers give exams that are assigned to be lower caste scores that are about 0.03 to 0.08 standard deviations lower than those that are assigned to be high caste. The teachers' behavior appears consistent with statistical discrimination.

Contemporary South Asian sociality is marked by signifiers of race, caste, ethnicity, and colorism. Examining the particular social inequalities and marginalization experienced by Africana people in these societies uncovers the dialectical interrelationship between caste, race, and colorism. This yields an understanding of how race and its more trenchant inflection, racism, function in South Asia. Interpreting implications for Africana politics in South Asian societies requires a theorization of these categories. Racialized casteism is an analytic that reveals the relationship between race, caste, and colorism in South Asia and highlights how Africana presence indisputably raises the significance of race thereby intensifying the outcomes faced by Siddis and Kaffirs.

This paper seeks to unravel the institutional context of the educational experience of scheduled caste engineering students in Kerala, a federal state in India. Though much has been debated about equity of access in the domain of reservation policies in higher education while studying the caste question and educational equity, process and outcome dimensions continue to be understudied. By presenting ethnographic accounts of the educational experience of fourteen scheduled caste engineering students, we explain how different institutional cultures result in different experiences for students of similar educational and familial backgrounds. Our analysis suggests that the notion of institutional habitus better captures the impact of institutions on marginalised students. The paper concludes with a call for further research to explore the institutional habitus of different higher education institutions. The authors hope that such research would help in formulation of new policies and practices to facilitate institutional transformation and contribute to improved quality and equity of higher education in India.

Recent economic changes in India have coincided with a dramatic change in the concept of a ‘middle class’ in the south Indian city of Madurai. Whereas previous sets of class identities were overwhelmingly dichotomous (for example, the rich and the poor, or the ‘big people’ and ‘those who have nothing’), the middle class has now become a highly elaborated component of local class structures and identities. It is also a contested category; moreover, its indigenous boundaries differ from those most often used by scholars, marketers, or policy-makers. Drawing from research over the past decade, this paper examines local definitions of ‘middleness’ and the moralized meanings ascribed to it. Whilst being ‘in the middle’ is a source of pride and pleasure, connoting both achievement and enhanced self-control, it is simultaneously a source of great tension, bringing anxiety over the critical and damaging scrutiny of onlookers. For each positive aspect of a middle-class identity that emphasizes security and stability, there is a negative ramification or consequence that highlights the precariousness and potential instability of middle-class life. In exploring each of these aspects, I pay attention to the explicitly performative features of class identities. I conclude by considering the epistemological and experiential insights we gain into the construction of emergent class categories by focusing on self-ascribed identities and their performance.

With the racial progress the nation has made over the past half century, including the growth of the black middle class and the election of a black president, many are now prepared to proclaim the United States a postracial society, where egalitarian values most often prevail; race is no longer a significant barrier to power, privilege, and prestige; and racial prejudice is mostly a thing of the past. When observed ethnographically, the lived experience of race relations suggests a different view and conceptual framework. As the legacy of racial caste, the color line persists in social interaction and is evident in racially determined perspectives and local working conceptions that order race relations and contribute to persistent racial inequality. Indeed, the claim of a postracial society is an ideological discourse that denies continuing patterns of race relations.