The Political Construction of Caste in South India

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• 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
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The Trope

• Abbé Dubois 1806
• James Mill 1820
• HH Risley 1915
• Max Weber
• Karl Marx
• Homo Heirarchicus Louis Dumont (1966) tr.
  1980

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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.

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Trope in Policy

• Deepak Lal Hindu Equilibrium
• Mancur Olson Rise and Decline of Nations
• Harrison and Huntington Culture Matters

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CRITICS

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

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Natural Experiment

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

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Natural Experiment

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

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Natural Experiment

• New States
• Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala
• Mistakes along the Border
• Language Matching Block
• Language Matching- Village

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Natural Experiment

• Control for Administrative History
• Control for Language Kinship Structures

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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

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

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Caste Broadening

• Social Movements Dalit, Harijan,
  Adi-Karnataka, Lingayat
• Affirmative Action Schedule Caste, OBC
• Modernization Malayalee, Tenant, Muslim

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