Q.What is caste? How does it differ from class as a way of organising society into strata?

Caste and class are both systems of social stratification, but they organise inequality according to very different logics. In a caste system, an individual's social position is determined almost entirely by birth: the status attributes a person is born with fix their position far more completely and rigidly than birth-based attributes do in a class society. In traditional India, castes were arranged in a hierarchy of purity and pollution, with Brahmin priestly castes placed at the top as the most pure and the historically labelled 'outcastes' (Panchamas) placed at the bottom; the simplified four-fold varna scheme (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra) sits above a much more complex reality of innumerable occupation-based jatis. Because caste position is ascribed at birth, movement out of one's caste through personal achievement was, in the traditional system, not possible in the way movement between classes is at least formally possible.

Class, by contrast, is organised around a person's economic and market position rather than their birth alone. Marx defined class through a group's relationship to the means of production — whether they own productive property like land and factories, or own only their own capacity to labour. Weber added the idea of 'life-chances' — the rewards a person's market position affords them — while insisting that inequality can also stem from prestige or political power, not economic position alone. Crucially, a class system is formally open: nothing in principle stops a person from a disadvantaged class background from rising to the top through education, income or professional achievement, and this achievement-orientation is exactly what marks modern societies off from caste-based ones. …