Is caste disappearing in urban India? Illustrate your answer with examples.

Position

Caste in urban India is not disappearing; it is changing register. Its ritual and public expressions — purity, pollution, commensality restrictions — have weakened sharply. Its structural expressions — marriage, residence, ownership and network-based access to opportunity — have proved remarkably durable. Srinivas's observation that caste survives by shedding its ritual skin and keeping its social skeleton describes urban India well.

Evidence that caste is weakening

• Occupational delinking. The traditional jajmani association of caste with hereditary occupation has broken down for most urban jobs; software, retail, logistics and finance recruit without a caste-defined entry route.
• Anonymity of the city. Dense public transport, markets, restaurants and workplaces make the enforcement of untouchability practically impossible; commensality restrictions that persist in villages collapse in an office canteen.
• Education and reservation-enabled mobility. A first-generation Dalit professional and administrative class exists, and it did not before.
• Legal and normative change. Article 17, the Protection of Civil Rights Act and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 make overt discrimination actionable; a younger urban cohort is less willing to defend caste publicly.
• Class cross-cutting. Consumption, English education and gated-community residence create identities that cut across jati lines.

Evidence that caste persists

• Endogamy. The strongest evidence. Inter-caste marriages remain around 5 per cent nationally, and matrimonial platforms are organised by caste filters by default — the market has digitised endogamy rather than dissolved it.
• Residential segregation. Studies of Indian cities find caste-based clustering comparable in degree to racial segregation in American cities; housing societies still refuse tenants on caste and dietary grounds.
• Network-mediated labour markets. Correspondence and audit studies have found lower callback rates for Dalit and Muslim-sounding names for equivalent CVs; informal referral hiring reproduces upper-caste networks in the private sector.
• Capital and enterprise. Business ownership and industrial capital remain concentrated in specific caste clusters; the emergence of DICCI is itself an acknowledgement of the barrier.
• Stigmatised work. Manual scavenging and sewer cleaning remain overwhelmingly caste-assigned, despite the 2013 prohibition Act — the clearest refutation of the disappearance thesis.
• Political and associational life. Caste associations, urban caste-based welfare trusts, hostel and student politics, and electoral mobilisation are all thoroughly urban phenomena. The caste census debate is being conducted largely in urban media.

Assessment

The pattern is uneven along three axes: caste weakens in the public sphere and holds in the private; it weakens in impersonal transactions and holds in relational ones; it weakens for the urban middle class and holds hardest at the top and bottom of the hierarchy. Urbanisation has therefore altered the mode of caste's operation without dismantling it.

Conclusion

Caste is not disappearing in urban India. It has retreated from the street and the well, and relocated to the marriage advertisement, the housing society, the referral network and the ballot. Studying it, as our guide on caste in India argues, means tracking these changed forms rather than looking for the older ones and concluding from their absence that the institution has gone.