Caste System
The layout of a village is based on caste. The working-class people mostly live on periphery of village and do not have access to public wells. Indian village dwellings are built very close to one another in a nucleated settlement, with small lanes for passage of people and sometimes carts. Village fields surround the settlement and are generally within easy walking distance. In the deserts of Rajasthan villages are far and apart and located where the probability of water was high.
A village is a multi-community settlement, the various castes creating a structure of dependence based on the nature of their work. Changes are being wrought in this structure, with ceilings on land holdings, and with the young seeking employment opportunities in towns distant from their villages.
Most villages are characterized by a multiplicity of economic, caste, kinship, occupational, and even religious groups linked vertically within each settlement. The caste system plays a key role in all types of activities. In one of the first of the modern anthropological studies of Indian Dhani life, anthropologist Oscar Lewis called this complexity rural cosmopolitanism. It has a web of life where all are linked and depend on each other for survival.
Usually there is one caste that dominates the village; some villages are dominated by Rajput (warriors), Gurjar (warrior), Jat (warrior now agriculturist), Muslim, Vishnoi (environmentalist), Kumhar (potter), Meghwal (weaver), or Brahmins. The number of castes resident in a single village can vary widely, from one to more than forty. Typically, a village is dominated by one or a very few castes that essentially control the village land and on whose patronage members of weaker groups must rely.
There are sub castes within castes. Subcastes like washer man, sweeper, cobbler, barber, laborers, weavers, are not untouchables. Only a few like sweepers and drum beaters are untouchables. Tea at a tea shop in villages is offered in separate cups to them and they wash it themselves.
Read more about this topic: Dhani And Villages
Famous quotes containing the words caste and/or system:
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“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
—Han Suyin (b. 1917)