Revisitation and resurgence of the race-caste debate: returning to the classical texts

In the early-mid 20th century, sociologists were interested in sketching out possible similarities between caste and race. Since then, this approach has both been defended and – more commonly – rejected. In this paper, I contend that critics of the race-caste approach have fundamentally misunderstood the central arguments of that said approach, often committing methodological errors in their criticisms. I contrast this approach to advocates of the race-caste comparison. My argument is that this loosely knit group of scholars generated a sociological programme to think about racial domination as: a) historically specific, which b) in particular moments can appear to be caste-like, whereby c) there are degrees of realisation of how rigid or loose the caste system can be (i.e. there is a caste continuum). Classical authors of the race-caste approach argued that the concept of ‘caste’ could help to generate comparative insights into hierarchical relations across time and space, and could provide insights into the mismatch(es) between attitudes, practices, and social structure in the era of burgeoning capitalist social relations. The central thesis of this paper, therefore, is that the race-caste scholars of the classical era developed a sociological programme oriented not towards demonstrating an equivalence between race and caste, but rather oriented towards the relational empirical question of when, how, and why, in certain specific moments, racial domination becomes caste-like.