Elite & Social Change : A Study of Elite Formation in India

This book examines the difficulties -- created by the traditional social structure and colonial experience of change -- faced in generating modernization and structural change in India.

The study is based on a survey of the social backgrounds of 1,432 members of three educated-professional elite groups -- industrial managers, civil servants and university teachers -- drawn from all over India.

The findings confirm the familiar pattern of an extremely narrow upper stratum from which these functional groups recruit their members to the exclusion of the bulk of society. This important book reexamines the institution of caste and its socio-religious underpinnings showing that: caste works as a tight and elaborately defined bureaucratic order that encourages every group to preserve its uniqueness and graded privileges; and that, being fundamentally connected with factors relating to distribution of power (land, capital and labour), caste provides the main structure of dominance that divides society into two highly defined strata of great rigidity.