The Political Role of India's Caste Associations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IT IS ONE OF THE PARADOXES of Indian politics that India's ancien regime, surely one of the oldest and most deeply rooted in the world, produced no reaction. In three-fifths of India the nationalist middle classes which emerged out of the British colonial experience aimed not only at independence but also at the transformation of Indian society. The Rebellion of i857 is the only historical event in which the old order attempted to preserve itself, but its causes and objectives were so ambiguous that its meaning remains open to serious dispute even today. At Independence, the vestigial political expression of the ancien re'gime, the princely states, which covered two-fifths of India's territory, swiftly collapsed. This event was as much the result of the atrophied condition of the institutions and wills of the ruling order as of the skill with which the Indian Government (through Sardar Patel) managed the negotiations. Only a few minor local parties today stand for a full return to the rule of Brahmans and Kshatryas according to the precepts of dharma or traditional duty, and they are ineffectual.1 There is one perspective in which the absence of a reaction in the European sense is not surprising: within Hinduism, conflict (at the level of theology, philosophy and law) has generally been dealt with less by confrontation of adversaries, struggle and decision, than by compartmentalization, absorption or synthesis. And absorption appears likely to be the fate of the ancien regime's most central and durable institution-caste. Within the new context of political democracy, caste remains a central element of Indian society even while adapting itself to the values and methods of democratic politics. Indeed, it has become one of the chief means by which the Indian mass electorate has been attached to the processes of democratic politics. The appeal of India's relatively weakly articulated voluntary associations is confined to the urban-educated who are more or less attuned to the modern political culture. Caste, however, provides channels of communication and bases of leadership and organization which enable those still submerged in the traditional society and culture to transcend the technical political illiteracy which would otherwise handicap their ability to participate in democratic
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".