3 - Political arenas and the political class

Summary

In view of the importance of political stratification and elite circulation for an adequate understanding of contemporary Indian politics and of many aspects of Indian social history as well it is remarkable that so little has been written on the subject. There is a useful body of material on dominant castes, but so far it has been focused mainly on village dominance. Little is known about regional dominance or about dominance in more inclusive, higher level political arenas (see Mayer 1958a). Few of those who have written on dominant castes have broken through the overlay of issues related to caste to deal with the phenomenon of dominance per se (see Gardner 1968). Much of what has been written explicitly about dominance and stratification is based on secondary sources (e.g. Bottomore 1967) or upon the most casual sort of fieldwork (e.g. Beteille 1967). Although a number of historical and political studies use the concept of the elite (see Broomfield 1966 and 1968, Stokes 1970, Mukherjee 1970, Dobbin 1970, Rosenthal 1970, and, on Maharashtra, Johnson 1970 and Sirsikar 1970), in most such work

theory has been of minor relevance; the word ‘elite’ then implies no more than ‘the men at the top’, whatever the particular context of discussion happens to be.

(Leach and Mukherjee 1970:x)

As a result, outside of the literature on village dominance there have been few detailed empirical studies of the social origins of Indian political leaders and of the relations between the mass of the electorate and the groups from which most such leaders seem to be recruited. A major aim of Part 2 of this essay is to fill that gap.