Caste in Transition: Progress, Intellectual Pessimism, and the Limits of Binary Policy in Contemporary India
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Few subjects in India provoke as much moral intensity as caste. It is invoked as an explanation for violence, inequality, humiliation, privilege, exclusion, and even for the failures of modern institutions. Yet when we listen carefully to public discourse, two dominant attitudes repeatedly emerge. At one extreme stands the denialist claim: caste is a relic, a colonial exaggeration, or at most a marginal remnant that no longer structures contemporary life. At the other stands a more pessimistic intellectual position: caste has not fundamentally changed; it has merely altered its techniques. Where once there was open exclusion, there is now subtle discrimination. Where once there was physical segregation, there is now psychological violence. According to this view, caste today is essentially what it was centuries ago, only more refined. While these positions appear opposed, they are in fact bound together by a shared rigidity. Both treat caste as static: either fully intact or fully obsolete. In this sense, the denialist claim that caste has disappeared is not independent of the pessimistic claim that nothing has changed; it is often a reaction to it. When discourse presents caste as immovable and omnipresent, the counterreaction is to dismiss it altogether. Thus, both narratives become two sides of the same coin, each flattening the complexity of social transformation.
This essay begins with the second proposition, the claim that caste has not meaningfully changed because it has gained intellectual legitimacy in academic and policy spaces. The insistence on structural continuity, however, risks overlooking gradual but measurable shifts in education, interaction, and representation. Here, Steven Pinker’s idea of “progress-phobia” becomes relevant: the tendency of intellectual cultures to under-recognise incremental improvement because injustice has not vanished entirely. To acknowledge change is not to deny discrimination; it is to refuse the assumption that deeply embedded systems cannot evolve. The sections that follow, therefore, turn to empirical evidence, not to proclaim the end of caste, but to examine whether its social grip is loosening in measurable ways.
The evidence of a fundamental shift in the power of caste within Indian society is grounded in a vast array of empirical data, most notably in the unprecedented democratization of higher education and the universalization of basic living standards. Hardcore numbers from the All-India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) Report (November 2025) demonstrate a structural revolution. Between 2010-11 and 2022-23, overall higher education enrolment in India grew by 59.3%, rising from 2.75 crores to 4.38 crores. Within this expansion, the growth rates for marginalized groups have been exponential compared to the General Category. Enrolment for Scheduled Castes (SC) grew by 122.9%, Scheduled Tribes (ST) by 133.8%, and Other Backward Classes (OBC) by 124.8%. In stark contrast, the General Category (including EWS) saw a growth of only 9.5% during the same thirteen-year period. This disparity is even more pronounced in absolute terms: SC/ST/OBC enrolment increased by 1.48 crores, while the General Category grew by only 15 lakhs (Caste-Based Enrolment 13-14).
The collective impact of these numbers is a complete reconfiguration of the social composition of Indian classrooms. The combined share of SC/ST/OBCs in overall higher education enrolment surged from 43.1% in 2010-11 to 60.8% in 2022-23. By 2022-23, the number of SC/ST/OBC students (2.67 crores) exceeded General Category students (1.72 crores) by more than 95 lakhs, a 55% lead in total representation. This progress is not confined to the safety of government mandates. Empirical data show that SC/ST/OBC representation in private institutions stands at 60%, nearly identical to their 62.2% share in government institutions. Given that the total statutory reservation is generally capped at 50%, these numbers prove that a significant portion of these students, roughly 10.8% of the total national enrolment, are securing seats through open competition and merit-based success in both public and private sectors (12-13).
This contemporary explosion is the result of a long-term trend of converging educational opportunities. Longitudinal data from Desai and Kulkarni (1983–2000) highlight the early stages of this decline in caste-based inequality. For youths aged 24-29, the percentage of those who “never enrolled” in formal schooling dropped precipitously. Among Dalit males, the “never enrolled” rate fell from 53.30% in 1983 to 36.75% in 1999. For Adivasi males, the rate fell from 62.72% to 43.94%. While the Upper Caste rate also improved (26.88% to 17.08%), the gap began to narrow significantly at the primary and middle school levels during this era (Desai and Kulkarni 250). By the 21st century, this momentum moved into professional and advanced courses. The AISHE 2025 report indicates that the rise of SC/ST/OBC enrolment is broad-based across technical fields such as BTech, MTech, MBA, and MBBS, indicating that the high-status professional “merit” pool is no longer the exclusive domain of the General Category.
Further evidence of a society improving collectively is found in the regression of the General Category’s historical dominance. In the two years between 2020-21 and 2022-23 alone, General Category enrolment fell by nearly 11 lakh students, even as the number of institutions grew from 23,290 to 60,380. This fall in absolute terms is observed in 23 of the 36 states and union territories. The demographic transition is so advanced that in 16 states/UTs, SC/ST/OBC students outnumber General Category students by a ratio of more than 2:1, and in 8 states/UTs, the ratio exceeds 3:1 (Caste-Based Enrolment 8). In Tamil Nadu, the General Category share has dropped to 17.0%, while in states like Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, the combined SC/ST/OBC share has reached 77.6% and 72.6%, respectively (16). These ratios are no longer just a reflection of quotas; they represent a “paradigm shift” where education serves as a primary vehicle for caste-to-class mobility.
The transformation underway is not confined to enrolment statistics or institutional expansion; it is equally visible in the attitudinal landscape of society. On the one hand, the demographic profile of higher education has shifted in ways that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, with Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes registering growth rates in enrolment that far exceed those of the so-called General Category. This is not merely incremental inclusion but a structural rebalancing of who occupies India’s classrooms and professional spaces. On the other hand, large-scale attitudinal surveys complicate the assumption that caste consciousness remains uniformly rigid. A nationally representative survey by the Pew Research Center found that 82% of Indians report not having personally experienced caste discrimination in the past twelve months, and even among Scheduled Castes and Tribes, fewer than one in five (17%) say they faced such discrimination in that period. Similarly, only about one-fifth of respondents perceive “a lot” of widespread discrimination against lower castes, while “most people say there isn’t a lot of caste discrimination (Sahgal et al.). These figures do not deny the persistence of caste or the reality of exclusion, but they do suggest that everyday experience and public perception are shifting in measurable ways.
These findings matter precisely because caste is not a shallow social habit but a structure that has shaped marriage, occupation, ritual hierarchy, and everyday interaction for centuries. If something so deeply embedded begins to show measurable loosening, even in limited domains, that is sociologically significant. The expansion of marginalized enrolment by over 120% in little more than a decade, combined with survey data showing that 82% of Indians report no personal experience of caste discrimination in the past year and that even among Scheduled Castes and Tribes, only 17% report such experience, does not mean the struggle is over. It does not mean humiliation, exclusion, or structural advantage have disappeared. But it does mean that change is occurring at a scale large enough to be counted. Recognizing this is not triumphalism; it is intellectual honesty. Yet much of academic discourse remains reluctant to frame these shifts as progress. Here, the idea of “progress phobia,” articulated by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now, becomes relevant. Pinker provocatively observes that “Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress” (Pinker 39). His point is not that injustice has vanished, but that intellectual cultures often undervalue incremental improvement because critique carries more moral prestige than acknowledgement. When hard numbers show expanding access and moderating attitudes, yet the dominant narrative insists that nothing has changed, one must at least ask whether a certain discomfort with recognising progress is shaping the discourse.
If this reluctance to acknowledge measurable progress persists even in the face of expanding access and moderating attitudes, it invites a harder question about incentive structures within academic and activist ecosystems. Social problems, once institutionalised as permanent crises, can generate what is often described as an “industry complex”, networks of scholarship, advocacy, funding, and moral authority that derive legitimacy from the persistence of the problem itself. This does not mean that scholars consciously wish injustice to continue, but it does suggest that intellectual capital is frequently built upon diagnosing structural failure rather than documenting structural repair. In such an environment, improvement can appear destabilising, because it complicates established narratives and redistributes moral authority. Legislative reform, constitutional safeguards, expansion of educational access, and rising social mobility create measurable shifts, yet for some strands of intellectual discourse, these shifts remain invisible.
It is here that the metaphor often described as the “St. George in retirement” syndrome becomes illuminating. The metaphor, drawn from the reflections of Kenneth Minogue, captures a psychological tendency that can afflict even the noblest reform movements, having defeated great injustices, sometimes go on to fight smaller and smaller dragons because they cannot imagine a world without combat. In the Indian academic context, however, the pattern is more complex. The dragon has not been reduced to something trivial; rather, the landscape has been redrawn so that the dragon appears permanent. Instead of recognizing that constitutional safeguards, reservation policies, educational expansion, and social mobility have altered the structure of caste interaction, some discourses redefine the field in such a way that caste hierarchy remains total, fixed, and morally frozen. The terms of debate are reconstructed so that every interaction is interpreted through an unchanging oppressor–oppressed binary, regardless of empirical shifts. In this sense, the syndrome does not manifest as the pursuit of smaller dragons, but as the refusal to admit that the terrain itself has transformed.
This is where the contemporary policy, in particular the UGC Bill, becomes troubling. By recasting educational spaces through rigid moral binaries where “General Category” is implicitly treated as a structurally inherent oppressor and SC/ST/OBC identities as fixed recipients of discrimination, the field itself is being reframed in ways that may undo the gradual erosion of caste rigidity. Such framing is historically imprecise and sociologically reductionist. Caste hierarchies have never operated as a simple linear ladder of one-directional oppression; they have been regionally varied, occupationally layered, and internally stratified. Contemporary India, shaped by migration, urbanization, and mobility, is even more complex. To freeze identities into permanent moral categories risks re-essentializing what decades of interaction and inclusion have slowly complicated. Instead of dissolving caste consciousness, such categorization may harden it.
More dangerously, it activates predictable psychological responses. When a group identity is publicly condemned or collectively stigmatized, in-group consolidation intensifies. This is not theory alone; it is lived political experience. In India, slogans such as “Brahmanvad Murdabad” have often been met with equally assertive counter-slogans like “Brahmanvad Zindabad.” Each denunciation generates its mirror affirmation. Each attempt to dissolve identity through moral attack strengthens identity through defensive solidarity. If academic discourse and regulatory frameworks reproduce this binary antagonism, they risk reigniting precisely the hardened caste consciousness that decades of integration have slowly complicated. The danger, then, is not that injustice is named, but that in the name of justice, identities are re-essentialised and progress is destabilised by the very structures meant to advance it.
This essay began with two seemingly opposed claims: that caste is a relic of the past, and that caste remains fundamentally unchanged. What it has attempted to show is that these positions are not opposites but mirrors. When caste is described as immovable, omnipresent, and morally frozen, the predictable counterreaction is denial. When entire identities are morally categorised and attacked, in-group loyalty hardens. The psychology is not mysterious. If a community is told that it is inherently oppressive, the defensive response is often to retreat into solidarity and reject the accusation altogether. Thus, the insistence that caste has not changed and the assertion that caste no longer exists feed off each other. Each produces the other. Each simplifies what is, in reality, a society in transition.
The challenge before us, therefore, is not merely to dismantle caste hierarchies and the residues of caste power. That remains essential. The challenge is to do so without re-essentialising identities in ways that intensify the very solidarities we seek to soften. Reform must be precise, not reactionary. It must recognise that measurable improvements in educational access, representation, and everyday interaction are not betrayals of justice but evidence that structural interventions can work. To acknowledge progress is not to declare victory; it is to understand the terrain on which the next stage of reform must operate. Equally important, policy and scholarship must resist the temptation to frame Indian caste through borrowed racial binaries or reductive adaptations of Western critical theory. Indian society is internally stratified, regionally varied, and historically layered in ways that do not neatly map onto imported oppressor–oppressed templates. Effective reform demands intellectual humility toward this complexity. If we are serious about weakening caste as a social force, we must craft policies that dissolve boundaries rather than freeze them, that encourage interaction rather than antagonism, and that build on documented gains rather than deny them. Only then can the erosion of caste hierarchy proceed without inadvertently reigniting the very identities we hope to transcend.
Works Cited
All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE). AISHE Report 2022–23. Ministry of Education, Government of India, Nov. 2025.
Caste-Based Enrolment in Indian Higher Education: Insights from AISHE 2022–23. Centre for Development Policy and Management, 2025.
Desai, Sonalde, and Veena Kulkarni. “Changing Educational Inequalities in India in the Context of Affirmative Action.” Demography, vol. 45, no. 2, 2008, pp. 245–270.
Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking, 2018.
Sahgal, Neha, et al. “Attitudes about Caste.” Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, Pew Research Center, 29 June 2021, www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/attitudes-about-caste/.
