Introduction

The previous two chapters treated family, caste, tribe and the market as forces that build community and hold society together. This chapter turns the same institutions around to look at their other face — how they generate and perpetuate inequality and exclusion.

For most people in India, this isn't an abstract topic. Beggars on the street, children working as domestic help or in small roadside eateries, a child carrying a wealthier classmate's bag to school rather than her own, reports of caste-based discrimination or of violence against women and minorities — these register as ordinary, everyday sights rather than shocking exceptions. Precisely because they are so ordinary, inequality and exclusion start to feel natural, even deserved: the assumption creeps in that the poor and excluded must simply lack ability or effort.

That assumption does not survive scrutiny. Some of the hardest physical labour anywhere — breaking stone, digging, hauling loads, pulling a handcart — is done almost exclusively by the poorest people, and it rarely lifts them out of poverty. A construction labourer becoming a contractor is rare enough to be treated as remarkable; when cinema tells that story, it usually has to invent an illegal shortcut to make it believable.

The point of that exercise is to unsettle a comfortable assumption — that individual effort and ability alone decide who ends up where. They matter, certainly, but only if everything else about two people's starting points were equal, which they almost never are. It is exactly these non-individual differences — of caste, class, gender, and other social divisions — that sociology asks you to take seriously as an explanation for social inequality.