"Economic power is not the only kind of power": is caste the axis on which power turns in India?

To understand who holds power in most societies, the usual advice is to follow the money, or to look at who holds office. A familiar claim in anti-caste writing is that India is different. Here, it runs, you cannot read power from bank accounts. Caste is the axis around which everything turns: who holds power, who gets resources, who faces violence, and who is treated with dignity without having to earn it.

This explainer, the last of three, tests that claim against the argument B. R. Ambedkar made to India’s Socialists in 1936, and against two later critics.

What Ambedkar argued

Against “property is the only source of power”. Ambedkar summarised the Socialists’ case: they held that “man is an economic creature” and “that property is the only source of power”, so economic reform must come first (Annihilation of Caste, §3 [1]). He disagreed: “That economic power is the only kind of power, no student of human society can accept” (§3 [1]).

Status and religion are power too. “Why do millionaires in India obey penniless Sadhus and Fakirs?” he asked. In India “the priest holds a sway over the common man often greater than that of the magistrate”, and “everything, even such things as strikes and elections, so easily takes a religious turn” (§3 [2]). His example from Rome: the Plebeians won the right to elect their own consul, but every strong candidate was rejected by an oracle whose priests were all Patricians. Rather than give up their faith in the oracle, he wrote, the Plebeians gave up the gain they had fought for. “Does this not show that religion can be a source of power as great as money, if not greater?” (§3 [3]–[6]).

Three sources, and which one rules depends on the time. This is the core of the argument: “Religion, social status, and property are all sources of power and authority, which one man has, to control the liberty of another. One is predominant at one stage; the other is predominant at another stage” (§3 [7]). The Socialists’ mistake, he wrote, was to suppose that because property was predominant in Europe at that moment, the same must be true of India (§3 [7]).

So caste comes first. “If the source of power and dominion is, at any given time or in any given society, social and religious, then social reform and religious reform must be accepted as the necessary sort of reform” (§3 [7]). His conclusion: “Caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster” (§3 [13]).

The idea it is paired with: the economic interpretation of history

The view Ambedkar answered is what he called “the economic interpretation of history”: that economic relations are the base of a society, and that politics, religion and social rank follow from them. India’s communists took this from Marx. As Debayudh Chatterjee puts it in his study of the movement, they treated caste as part of “the realm of nonmaterial cultural religious ideology”, and hoped that the success of class struggle “would automatically dissolve caste relations” (Chatterjee, p. 55). Our brief on that study traces how the CPI(M) dealt with caste from 1926 to 2016.

Where the idea holds

Caste outranks money. Chatterjee offers a simple test: “if caste oppression happened because of production relations between the owner and the workers, then the Vaishyas, or the mercantile caste in custody of the capital, would have been at the topmost stratum of the caste ladder, rather than the Brahmins” (Chatterjee, p. 62). They are not. Status, not wealth, sits at the top.

It decides who faces humiliation. “Caste humiliation could be inflicted irrespective of class,” Chatterjee writes, and “A Dalit still remains a Dalit and faces social prejudice even if they are able to climb up the class ladder” (p. 62). Ambedkar’s own examples, from the Balais of Indore to the untouchables of Peshwa-era Poona, are about dignity and rank, not income (§2 [8]–[10]; part 1 of this series sets them out).

It divides workers. Ambedkar argued that caste is “not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers”, graded one above the other, so that the poor cannot unite against the system (§4 [1]–[2]; §21 [17]–[18]). Our explainer on that argument follows it into today’s labour market.

Where the idea breaks

Ambedkar named three axes, not one. He did not say caste is the only, or always the primary, source of power. He said religion, social status and property are all sources, and that which one rules “at any given time or in any given society” is a question of fact (§3 [7]). His claim was that in the India of his day, the social and religious source was predominant. That is a claim about a stage, which can change.

Caste is not the only axis Dalits live on. In 1995 the Dalit scholar Gopal Guru argued that Dalit women “talk differently” for two kinds of reasons: external ones, “non-dalit forces homogenising the issue of dalit women”, and internal ones, “the patriarchal domination within the dalits” (Guru, p. 2548). He wrote that in the post-Ambedkar period, “dalit leaders have always subordinated, and at times suppressed, an independent political expression of dalit women” (p. 2549). An account that makes caste the single axis can hide the power Dalit men hold over Dalit women. Ambedkar’s 1916 paper had already put the control of women at the heart of how caste is kept (part 2 of this series).

Money still matters. Ambedkar did not deny economic power; he denied that it was the only kind (§3 [1]). He asked whether the Socialists could have economic reform without social reform first (§3 [8]); he did not argue that economic reform was unneeded.

Why it matters

• Reading power. A list of the richest people or the highest officials says little, on this view, about who can walk where, marry whom or expect respect. To see that, you have to look at caste.
• Politics and alliances. Ambedkar’s argument is why he refused to wait for an economic revolution to end caste, and, as Chatterjee shows, the communist parties changed their own position on caste over decades.
• Not a single line. Guru’s point means the “axis” is better seen as one of several crossing lines, caste, gender and class, each shaping how the others are felt.

The fine print

• Our framing. “Axis of power” is our phrase for this series. Ambedkar’s own words are “sources of power and authority”, in the plural.
• An argument from 1936. Annihilation of Caste answers the Socialists of its day. It does not measure who holds power now, and this piece brings no new data.
• What we have not read. Western sociology is not a single view: Max Weber, for one, treated status and party as sources of power alongside class. We have not read Weber, or the wider literature on caste and class, for this piece.

Talking points

• Ambedkar said the main source of power changes “from one stage to another”. Is caste still the predominant one in India today, or has property overtaken it?
• If a Dalit family becomes wealthy, what changes for them, and what does not?
• Guru argued that Dalit women face power from within Dalit communities as well as from outside. Does calling caste “the axis of power” help or hinder that argument?

The works

• B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, 1936; third edition, 1944. Online edition by Frances W. Pritchett, Columbia University. Cited by section and paragraph.
• Debayudh Chatterjee, “Class versus Caste: The Conundrum of Dalit Politics and the Communist Movement in India (1926–2016)”, in Organizing Equality, ed. Alison Hearn and others (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), pp. 54–71.
• Gopal Guru, “Dalit Women Talk Differently”, Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 41/42 (14–21 October 1995), pp. 2548–2550. JSTOR