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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5634 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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How am I to make sense of the fact that the castes in India have been highly endogamous for the past two thousand years and that the pre-industrial world was Malthusian? Shouldn't that have resulted in the gradual replacement of the lower castes with the upper castes, or did the upper castes not actually receive any material benefit as a result of their higher status?

Gregory Clark has argued that in England, the upper classes did replace the lower classes as a result of their material advantage. But they did not form distinct endogamous castes, so most of the descendants of the upper classes fell into the lower classes and there was some limited mixing between the classes. But India, my understanding is that the Brahmins didn't become Shudras, so why didn't the Shudras go extinct?

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Simply put, India never had the kind of climate & geography imposed population pressure that Northern Europe faced.

Then what limited population growth? Small differences in growth rates quickly result in massive population differences; a fertility rate of 2.2 instead of 2.0 results in 45-fold difference in population size in 40 generations. So I don't buy the argument that the abundance of the land made any difference.

Third, unlike Europe, the upper castes were not landlords. Mercenary soldiers & Brahmins did not have monopoly over the crop-output. This means that a drought/famine does not cause disproportionate population replacement among the lower castes vs the upper castes.

So, you're saying they weren't richer. What made them higher status then? Was there no material benefit to being in an upper caste?

It's possible there was significant replacement within Sudhras themselves, and we would be none-the-wiser.

This is the explanation I've been leaning towards, but are there no estimates for their historical population sizes? It does seem like there are a lot of Brahmins given that they are supposed to be priests. How many priests do you need?

So, you're saying they weren't richer. What made them higher status then? Was there no material benefit to being in an upper caste?

If we consider being a rich landowner the epitome of status in a poorly-industrialised society like India, than the link between upper caste and status becomes a bit fuzzy.

In Punjab Jatt Sikhs tend to dominate. In Tamil Nadu I hear a lot of castes who are considered traditionally as Shudras dominate but this does not make Tamil Nadu the land of caste egalitarianism that some imagine it as. They have the highest rates of caste endogamy in India and have plenty of news worthy cases of discrimination among themselves, just that you cannot plaster Brahmin in the headlines. Different regions have different dominating castes.

From my own experience there seem to be as many rich Brahmin land owners as broke subsistence farmers. My extended family leans towards the latter. To make an analogy to the US, we were trailer trash and we sure felt privileged.

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