DOMBIVLI SHIKSHAN PRASARAK MANDAL'S

K. V. PENDHARKAR COLLEGE OF ARTS, SCIENCE AND COMMERCE

(AUTONOMOUS).
Dombivli (East) 421203, Dist. Thane.

DEPARTMENT OF ACCOUNTING & FINANCE

SECOND INTERNAL EXAMINATION

SEMESTER I (2022-2023)

Assignment for the subject of

FOUNDATION COURSE I

By
Tejas Dalvi
Roll No.: 228088
FYBAF [ b ] Division

To the Subject Teacher

Mrs. Sweta Patel, Ms. Anila Alakkal and Ms. Jyoti Dwivedi
 INDEX

Sr.no paticulars Page

no.
01 summary 3
02 Chapter 1-Introduction 4-5
03 Chapter 2-Method of data collection 5-6
04 Chapter 2- Analysis of data 7-8

05 Chapter 4-Conclusion and suggestion 9

06 Annexure 10-11
07 Photo gallary -
 SUMMARY

In this project I studied about the in caste system. I studied about only
caste sysytem. Firstly I given the introduction to caste system like
what is caste system.
Also i given the analysis on caste system and some conclusion and
my suggestion on class system.
In this project I taken the interview of backward caste man, mr.
Tukaram narve . I ask him some question on caste system and what he
faces through it.
 CHAPTER1- INTRODUCTION

The caste system in India is the paradigmatic ethnographic example of classification of castes. It has
its origins in ancient India, and was transformed by various ruling elites in medieval, early-modern,
and modern India, especially the Mughal Empire and the British Raj.[1][2][3][4] It is today the basis
of affirmative action programmes in India as enforced through its constitution.[5] The caste system
consists of two different concepts, varna and jati, which may be regarded as different levels of
analysis of this system.

The caste system as it exists today is thought to be the result of developments during the collapse of
the Mughal era and the rise of the British colonial government in India.[1][6] The collapse of the
Mughal era saw the rise of powerful men who associated themselves with kings, priests and ascetics,
affirming the regal and martial form of the caste ideal, and it also reshaped many apparently casteless
social groups into differentiated caste communities.[7] The British Raj furthered this development,
making rigid caste organisation a central mechanism of administration.[6] Between 1860 and 1920, the
British formulated the caste system into their system of governance, granting administrative jobs and
senior appointments only to Christians and people belonging to certain castes.[8] Social unrest during
the 1920s led to a change in this policy.[9] From then on, the colonial administration began a policy
of positive discrimination by reserving a certain percentage of government jobs for the lower castes.
In 1948, negative discrimination on the basis of caste was banned by law and further enshrined in
the Indian constitution; however, the system continues to be practiced in parts of India.[10] There are
3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes in India, each related to a specific occupation.[11]

Caste-based differences have also been practised in other regions and religions in the Indian
subcontinent, like Nepalese Buddhism,[12] Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism.[13] It has been
challenged by many reformist Hindu movements,[14] Sikhism, Christianity,[13] by present-day Indian
Buddhism.[15] With Indian influences, the caste system is also practiced in Bali and parts of Southeast
Asia such as Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.[16][17][18]

India after achieving independence in 1947 enacted many affirmative action policies for the
upliftment of historically marginalized groups as enforced through its constitution. These policies
included reserving a quota of places for these groups in higher education and government
employment.
What is caste system?

The caste system has existed in some form in India for at least 3,000 years. It is a social hierarchy
passed down through families, and it can dictate the professions a person can work in as well as
aspects of their social lives, including whom they can marry. While the caste system originally was
for Hindus, nearly all Indians today identify with a caste, regardless of their religion.

The survey finds that three-in-ten Indians (30%) identify themselves as members of General
Category castes, a broad grouping at the top of India’s caste system that includes numerous
hierarchies and sub-hierarchies. The highest caste within the General Category is Brahmin,
historically the priests and other religious leaders who also served as educators. Just 4% of Indians
today identify as Brahmin.

Most Indians say they are outside this General Category group, describing themselves as members of
Scheduled Castes (often known as Dalits, or historically by the pejorative term “untouchables”),
Scheduled Tribes or Other Backward Classes (including a small percentage who say they are part of
Most Backward Classes).

Hindus mirror the general public in their caste composition. Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority
of Buddhists say they are Dalits, while about three-quarters of Jains identify as members of General
Category castes. Muslims and Sikhs – like Jains – are more likely than Hindus to belong to General
Category castes. And about a quarter of Christians belong to Scheduled Tribes, a far larger share
than among any other religious community.

Caste segregation remains prevalent in India. For example, a substantial share of Brahmins say they
would not be willing to accept a person who belongs to a Scheduled Caste as a neighbor. But most
Indians do not feel there is a lot of caste discrimination in the country, and two-thirds of those who
identify with Scheduled Castes or Tribes say there is not widespread discrimination against their
respective groups. This feeling may reflect personal experience: 82% of Indians say they have not
personally faced discrimination based on their caste in the year prior to taking the survey.

Still, Indians conduct their social lives largely within caste hierarchies. A majority of Indians say that
their close friends are mostly members of their own caste, including roughly one-quarter (24%) who
say all their close friends are from their caste. And most people say it is very important to stop both
men and women in their community from marrying into other castes, although this view varies
widely by region. For example, roughly eight-in-ten Indians in the Central region (82%) say it is very
important to stop inter-caste marriages for men, compared with just 35% in the South who feel
strongly about stopping such marriages.

India’s religious groups vary in their caste composition

Most Indians (68%) identify themselves as members of lower castes, including 34% who are
members of either Scheduled Castes (SCs) or Scheduled Tribes (STs) and 35% who are members of
Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or Most Backward Classes. Three-in-ten Indians identify themselves
as belonging to General Category castes, including 4% who say they are Brahmin, traditionally the
priestly caste.12

Hindu caste distribution roughly mirrors that of the population overall, but other religions differ
considerably. For example, a majority of Jains (76%) are members of General Category castes, while
nearly nine-in-ten Buddhists (89%) are Dalits. Muslims disproportionately identify with non-Brahmin
General Castes (46%) or Other/Most Backward Classes (43%).

Caste classification is in part based on economic hierarchy, which continues today to some extent.
Highly educated Indians are more likely than those with less education to be in the General
Category, while those with no education are most likely to identify as OBC.

But financial hardship isn’t strongly correlated with caste identification. Respondents who say they
were unable to afford food, housing or medical care at some point in the last year are only slightly
more likely than others to say they are Scheduled Caste/Tribe (37% vs. 31%), and slightly less likely
to say they are from General Category castes (27% vs. 33%).

The Central region of India stands out from other regions for having significantly more Indians who
are members of Other Backward Classes or Most Backward Classes (51%) and the fewest from the
General Category (17%). Within the Central region, a majority of the population in the state of Uttar
Pradesh (57%) identifies as belonging to Other or Most Backward Classes.
CHAPTER 2- METHOD OF DATA COLLECTION
In this project I collect the information regarding to caste system , with the help
of google and I try to give the correct and maximum information . I search for
the information by visiting different different websites , and I got many
information , from that information I choose the important and valueable
information and I use that information in this project.

For the rest of the project I take the interview of backward caste man , and ask
him minimum few based on the caste system and he gives me the answer and
written them accordingly the project was completed by the using of google as
well as by taking a interview of a person.
CHAPTER 3- ANAYLSIS OF DATA
Caste is a form of social stratification characterized by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a
lifestyle, which often includes an occupation, status in a hierarchy, customary social interaction, and
exclusion (Scott & Marshall, 2009). The caste social system in modern India is a paradigmatic
ethnographic example of such a social stratification. Norms and conventions that name, group and
sometimes rank people can be traced far back into distant Indian past, “varnas,”1 and later
“jatis,”2 originated in the later Vedic society (circa 1500–500 BCE). Over the centuries, social
discrimination has contributed toward the hardening of caste identities. Social unrest in India during
colonialism prompted the British to start positive discrimination by reserving a certain percentage of
government jobs for the lower castes. After India achieved independence, the policy of caste-based
reservation of jobs was formalized with lists of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The
government officially recognized historically discriminated communities of India such as the
Untouchables and certain economically backward castes as Other Backward Class. These policies of
affirmative action aimed at reducing the inequality but paradoxically have also created an incentive
to keep this stratification alive. Over the time lower castes remained locked in unskilled, low-paying
occupations.

Many important questions remain to be answered by the social scientist: Why do caste
discrimination remain active in society, despite the Constitution and all the legal and political
efforts? Why, despite recent economic growth, is caste conflict also rising (Deshpande, 2011; Thorat
& Neuman, 2012)? How does caste divisive power articulate with nationalism? How will strict caste
endogamy evolve in a modern liberal and open society? How are media contributing to propagate
such ideas?

Including quantitative social scientists in our multidisciplinary team, with the ability to analyze big
quantities of data, our effort was directed to provide a better understanding of the expression of
caste discrimination and conflict in the public sphere, more specifically in the news media, using a
quantitative approach. To this purpose, our main task was to extract patterns of word usage and
expression from newspaper texts and then to interpret the coexistence of those patterns. Our goal
in this analysis will be to clarify objectively the nature of the written discourse that is presented to
the general public, taking into account the lack of vocality of the lowest and underprivileged castes
in India. We will try to assert with a relevant degree of certitude the relations between caste and
signs of autonomy and agency of SC/ST communities as they are described in the news.
In the next section, we will present an overview of how the literature considers the “caste” question
in India, focusing on how castes are represented in the media. Our quantitative study contributes for
a better understanding of this specific matter. We start by discussing some of the relevant problems
when studying newspaper texts and performing statistics over word usage. We will consider the
advantages and the perils of supporting an analysis on this method. Then, the quantitative methods
used in the context of our research are described, including an original mix of state-of-the-art
algorithms that comprise procedures based on Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) distributed variables,
and two-layer neural network Word2Vec. The results point to the relevant information that was
obtained applying these methods. Finally, we will discuss the results obtained from this quantitative
analysis and present the conclusions drawn against the already know readings of the “caste”
problem.

Caste in India
Some surveys of nationally representative samples show that there has been convergence between
the upper castes and the lower castes on education and occupations over the past decades in India
(Hnatkovska & Lahiri, 2011). Caste plays an important role in economic mobility (Deshpande, 2011).
On the one hand, by business and employment facilitation, caste networks can be very economically
advantageous for lower disadvantaged castes (Damodaran, 2008). On the other hand, these same
networks of acquaintances can restrict the economic mobility: they can, for example, enforce rural-
urban wage gaps by keeping rural individuals receiving city migrant’s remittances (Munshi &
Rosenzweig, 2016) or restricting labor market access to high caste occupations. Deshpande
(2011) notices that overall, the evidence indicates that contours of caste disadvantage are changing
in terms of some dimensions of relative distance between OBCs and uppers castes. However, there
is no indication of reversal of the broad historical caste hierarchies. Although they have gained
substantially after the 90s economic reform, SC/ST individuals are still at the bottom of the income
and social ladders (Thorat & Neuman, 2012).
 CHAPTER 4- CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
With our computational analysis we saw that the prevalent discourse in the “caste” related articles is
almost entirely focused on prejudice, violence, and conflict situations. Although this perspective is
mostly commendable, once the underprivileged castes do in fact suffer prejudice and violence, this
monotonic discourse does not in fact reflect and report the multitude of aspects necessarily present
in the life of the lower caste population. Every community has its tradition, habits, private life, and
the most dear or problematic life events that contribute to its happiness and reinforce its identity.
Life and events that deserve to be reported and known about within the public sphere. A lack of
agency, autonomy, and vocality of the lower caste population, which also is evident in the
newsrooms, is severely affected and augmented with this type of discourse, in which
underprivileged people is inevitably seen merely as a source of trouble and problems.

With this work, which largely complement the seminal work of R. Jeffrey (2001), we hope to
reinforce his claim and to contribute to a better understanding of the Indian public sphere in which
concerns caste discrimination, underlining the importance of news media in the improving of
democracy but also the important role Natural Language Processing and computational methods
can play in social science research and communications studies.

Solution to the Problem of Casteism:

Till now, we have discussed about the ill-effects of casteism. Then what could be done in order to
eliminate or minimize the problems of casteisms?

Some of the solutions for the problems arising out of casteism are as follows:
i. Providing value-based education to children from childhood can solve the problem of casteism to
some extent.

ii. Various social agencies like family, school, and Mass media must be given the responsibility to
develop a proper, broad outlook among children, which will negate the feelings of casteism, for
example, creating awareness about the ill-effects of perpetuating the traditional caste system.

iii. Literary programmes must be taken up in rural areas as the caste feelings, which further
perpetuate casteism, are more in rural areas. These feelings of casteism can be minimized by the
provision of social education among rural population.

iv. By encouraging inter-caste marriages, the feelings arising out of casteism can be minimized as
these marriages bring two families of different castes closer to each other.
V. Provision of cultural and economic equality among different sections of the society reduces the
chances of jealousy and competition. Thus, economic and cultural equality is important in
eliminating casteism.
 ANNEXURE

Q.1.This may be a naive question, but how are members of a caste identifiable? As in, how do
children learn to recognize people from different castes? If it is due to surname, what's to stop people
from just changing their name and lying about their caste?

A: In general it is difficult for any outside person to identify the caste of a person, as it is based on
particular features or skin colour. As insiders we recognise the caste of the other person through
surname, family and village connections, food habits, rituals and ceremonies and general enquiry into
one's family and background. It is not offensive for people to even directly ask about one's caste
affiliation in India.

Q.2.A question that has always nagged me is how an advanced spiritual system such as Hinduism can
support the huge inequality of the caste system and the disrespect it showers on life. Based on my
very brief research, it seems that not everyone agreed with the original Varnas, or categories of
occupations, which excluded the untouchables. The system of varna or caste system has been
regularly challenged from the time of Buddha with opposition noted in the Upanishads and by
religious figures since that time. Why has it remained? Because it is a multi-layered issue mired by
historical circumstances? – Brenda Piquette

A: What you mention is true; on one hand Hindu religion has enunciated some very complex
philosophies in the realm of spirituality. These do not however reflect in the realm of human
relationships and rights. In the every-day life the system of caste hierarchy and exclusion dominates
every aspect of personal and social life. In some ways, one can compare it to how Christian religion –
despite its very progressive teaching – considered it right to relegate women as the handmaids of men.

Anti-caste movements are also of old, from religious and reform movements to continued protests and
religious conversions. While some changes have also come about, owing to the Constitution
overturning the caste structure legally with affirmative action built into it, much has not changed in
social life. Even while caste-based disabilities have been legally abolished, accessing justice is still a
struggle as the social and mental attitudes are still dictated by caste.
 Q.3.How can it be a colonialist construct when it is seemingly mentioned in the Hindu ‘Rig Vedas’?

A. Apparently the caste system came from the ‘varnas’ which was a social classification of society.
With the reign of the Aryans and others, it kept on grounding deeper and deeper till date.

Q.4.What’s the extent of denial towards caste discrimination in modern India?

A.I think it varies. Most upper caste Indians aren’t aware of the confirmation bias. They tend to ignore
the problem as long as it doesn’t concern them. Today most upper caste people refuse to accept the
existence of discrimination based on caste because all their lives they’ve been treated in a certain way,
and never experienced what the other (scheduled caste/ex-untouchable) castes did. The lack of
representation of the oppressed castes in the media, academia, politics and entertainment etc is the
reason why the upper castes believe that casteism is not a problem anymore. They argue about caste
reservations being groundless, because according to them ‘the caste system doesn’t exist anymore and
it was all in the past so why these measures now?’

Young upper caste people would mostly whine about how caste reservation has only snatched
opportunities away from them and passed those opportunities onto the undeserved. The upper castes
cringe upon headlines where the word ‘dalit’ is suffixed claiming ‘why is the victim’s caste important
if we’re living in an era where (apparently) we practice equality’. Many also argue that dalits are
benefiting from this political card. They will even ask ‘how has this caste system affected you
personally??’ just to shut you up.