This looks like an economist's model of rural North Indian caste dynamics rather than something that is grounded to the reality. This makes me think of those orientalist accounts of Indians that European anthropologists curiously wrote in 19th century. I agree the essay is strong as a synthesis of economics and sociology, but weaker as a balanced account of contemporary India. Your emphasizes on jati (sub-castes) rather than the four classical varnas is good, socially relevant and shows that you have a flair of anthropological/sociological research on this topic. Also brave of you to state the relevance of caste among Indian-Americans for I am sure a lot of them will take offense to this . Finally I also liked your use of empirical papers on related topics and knitting it with endogamy, dowry, village social networks, labor market frictions etc. to give a general picture of village life.
But there simply is too much broad generalizations that a lot of readers would not treat cautiously.
You have simply presented rural Uttar Pradesh as though it represents "village India". The things you have described are from some backwater pocket in UP, yet you have conflated that specific status quo and its outcomes with the rest of the 600k+ villages in India. To contrast for instance, Kerala has a very different history of land reform, literacy, and caste politics. In the same way, Tamil Nadu has a different caste structure and anti-caste political tradition. Northeast states of India differ substantially from all these altogether.
You also blurs "still exists" with "still typical" which is quite stretch in my opinion. You have wrote "Dalits live outside villages", "voting is essentially caste-based", "love marriages are extremely rare" etc. - there is some important truth behind them, but the degree varies dramatically by region urbanization, and generation.
Now some other details that are plainly wrong:
"It is customary to defecate now into the fields" - I don't even know what exactly is the customary part and you are blindly treating a rapidly declining practice as a permanent cultural fixture. NFHS-5 data proved that open defecation had already fallen to 22% in Uttar Pradesh with a consistent downward trajectory, and the latest NFHS-6 which is yet to be released is likely to show even lower trends.
"Private schools are more likely to be attended by boys within the family, and by richer castes" - Not sure how are you making this assumption when as per Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, private schools are legally mandated to reserve a minimum of 25% of their seats for children from vulnerable and marginalized backgrounds.
"Women rarely work formally, and this declines as families get wealthier" - Partially agree with second part but rural Labour Force participation rate of rural women is quite high to be honest and furthermore lower caste women do not have the luxury to sit at home.
"India is surprisingly non-urbanized for a country of its level of development...." This claim relies heavily on an administrative definition of urbanization likely from the 2011 Census data that is now a decade and a half old, back when India's economy was only 30% of its current size. This is fundamentally a definitional issue rather than an economic one. If we look at functional urbanization using satellite data from the European Commission’s Global Human Settlements Layer (GHSL), India was already 63% urban as early as 2015. For all practical needs, India is a rapidly becoming a predominantly urban nation, rendering old census categories obsolete.
"The social obligations which sustain coinsurance make it much harder to migrate" - Again I agree with the premise but empirically not true as the PLFS Migration in India 2020-2021 report notes that 29% of the population consists of migrants. With millions of individuals migrating over 2,000 kilometers from northern villages to southern states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, it is inaccurate to assume that villages tie people down like the kulaks in Imperial Russia.
"I am inclined to say, however, that the predominance of family firms in India is not due to caste or custom" I am not sure why you would accept this despite the long argument against caste; the intersection of caste and family-run businesses forms the bedrock of the country's economic landscape. Caste simply carries networks for knowledge transfer as well as capital accumulation which ensured some castes are more entrepreneurial than others. For reference: Kanta Murali. 2017. Caste, Class and Capital: The Social and Political Origins of Economic Policy in India or How does Caste Affect Entrepreneurship?Birth vs Worth, 2019 by Sampreet Singh Goraya
"These important details of life in a rural Indian village... the generalities are universal" - simply not true and is a an oversimplification. It is fundamentally flawed to generalize across a subcontinent of 1.4 billion people. In reality, the socioeconomic and cultural landscape of a village in Eastern Uttar Pradesh or Bihar diverges drastically from counterparts in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, or Maharashtra, making such broad generalizations highly problematic.
India has changed significantly over the past 20–30 years and especially in the last one decade alone. Some of the changes being that migration has increased, education has expanded, urbanization continues, inter-caste interaction and marriages is more common and many discriminatory practices have significantly weakened. Now your essay do acknowledges some improvements, but its overall tone can make the situation appear more static than it is.
This is one of the best overviews of rural India I've seen so far. Although I must reiterate that this is absolutely rural India. Towns, cities have different cultures, different states have different cultures, picking Uttar Pradesh instead of Tamil Nadu would create a big difference in the details. Not necessarily better culture, there are other problems in wealthier parts of India for example but this description was a good representation of the rural less wealthy and more conservative areas.
Some areas I want to add on:
More on education, it's wayyy worse than what's reported. It's almost impossible from someone from a "government school" as we call it to say get into a medical college. I've taught 14 year olds who didn't know the alphabet (in any language), have never talked to there homeroom teachers, and attend school only for the midday meal.
Another pointer on capital allocation in rural schools, apart from the fact that extreme corruption eats up 80% (approximate experential figures, not backed by data) of the allocated funds, the nation building focused much more on making higher education stronger than primary education. There's a common notion of "Government Schools" being extremely bad (except KVs, JNVs), and "Government Colleges" being good/or at least high signal.
Ego and hierarchy sits very deep in the culture which makes it difficult for say a 16 year old girl in the village to stand up against injustice or demand an opportunity to move cities for better education, even when finance isn't an issue. If they're older than you, if it's a man, if they have more experience than you, if they have more power - it is much harder to debate with logic.
also the government kneecaps private colleges/universities by making it near-impossible for them to get international grant money for research etc, and subjecting the politically troublesome ones to authoritarian levels of scrutiny and pressure.
I'd say I've lived in a village in Maharshtra for ~15 days every year. My mom and dad grew up in villages we visit every year. I must say Maharashtra's villages are a bit different, and being financially secure changes your experience in the village, but I have an idea.
Moreover, I run a nonprofit where I have volunteers from very rural parts of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, where they teach kids in their villages. Again, not my personal first hand experience, but I get to hear personal stories and troubles from them often.
This is a very good overview of how a rural North Indian Hindu society is organized. A few observations:
1) Concept of dowry, as you mention, was a form of inheritance because property inheritance was limited to sons. The individual kin groups self-police themselves to mitigate some of the excesses you mention such as bride burning and continued demands for more money from the the bride's parents. Families that indulge in such behavior will not find good matches for their other sons. Other than this, unless one is a powerful politician, cops will arrest and throw husband and mother in law in prison if the wife complaints. Punishment for these kinds of crimes are severely dealt with now. The way you described the situation was true in 1950s, but not anymore.
2) There is little chance you can make changes to the way villages are organized. India's best bet is to industrialize rapidly and encourage younger population to migrate to towns and cities.
3) Even in towns and cities the jati system continues because that is how each group cooperates and assert power collectively, especially in elections. If your coalition wins power in a state, say, all plum posts go to elites of each of the jatis in the coalition and patronage flows down the hierarchy.
4) Almost everything that is government run just doesn't work because of corruption. Main reason being little understanding of a social contract, and no concept of public service.
5) Biggest challenge is that the poorer and lower varna jati families tend to have more children so that they start working menial jobs and bring home income, which means they won't be going to school and getting an education. Human development for SC/STs, dalits and other lower castes is the biggest challenge for India.
Excellent and very resonant! But I do want to underscore that this is a good description of the political economy of rural North India only.
It doesn’t tell you much about life in Delhi or Mumbai or Kolkata. Most Indian-Americans didn’t come from a gaon [village] - they came from a city. I think the aside about caste in the US at the end is a bit off-base. Cities’ culture and political economy are very different.
In the same way that it’s wrong to draw conclusions about New Yorkers based on a case study of West Virginia, rural UP is a *very* particular place in India.
Really great work, thanks for quantifying something that many of us are aware of. I’ve written about the need for jati to dissolve for India to fully approach modernity. I feel that despite its persistence, it will collapse in the next two centuries as education, the internet, new norms, and “love marriages” gradually spread, even if this seems slow and non-pervasive right now. I don’t think any traditional society can truly survive the exposure to the modern market and entertainment world intact in the long run.
I believe that if the rate of exogamy is even something like 5 percent in each generation, strict caste boundaries will dissolve in a few hundred years.
On the other hand, if there's a distribution over transmissable adherence to jati (for cultural and/or genetic reasons), the move towards exogamy could slow over time. After a while, the only ones maintaining endogamy would be the ones with strong tendencies towards endogamy for cultural and/or genetic reasons, thus being a harder nut to crack.
A big question is whether people who abandon their jati tend to accrue advantages which cancel out the cost of no longer having a kin group to provide protection/insurance/etc.
In the short run, probably not. It would be a few generations later, and only if a more civic-spirited mindset does become pervasive among the newly casteless majority, or at least significant minority.
It's a tricky problem, since people who stick with their caste can also still benefit from the civic spirit (free-riding).
I keep thinking of how the Catholic Church supposedly banned cousin marriage for everyone in Europe. I'm wondering if India needs a similar approach of banning within-caste marriages *everywhere*, so people don't need to unilaterally disarm. Probably wouldn't be a popular approach with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India however.
I think part of it is that NW Euros already avoided close cousin marriage prior to Catholicism. South Italians still practiced cousin marriage until quite recently, though less frequently than in the Muslim world and India.
Thinking about how jatis must've evolved in the first place. My understanding is that pre-industrial states were typically weak and had a limited capability to administer justice. Most people were untrustworthy. In the Roman Empire, they had a patron/client system where a less wealthy "client" would ally with a wealthier "patron", supporting the patron in politics etc. in exchange for protection. After the fall of the Roman Empire, this evolved into the feudal lord/vassal system where the lord provides protection in exchange for military service and/or taxes from the vassal. Feudal systems tend to have a big emphasis on honor, since the lord has discretion in who they select as vassal, and the lord prefers to pick someone they can trust. Sounds like in India, they solved the same problem through more horizontal alliances rather than vertical alliances. You can imagine the first ever jati has an advantage over everyone else in society since the person who is part of the jati has a bunch of kin who "have their back" in case of conflicts. That motivates others to form jatis of their own in order to catch up.
The sheer amount of fieldwork, observation, and synthesis that went into this article is remarkable. Rather than reducing caste to slogans or ideology, it explains how village society actually functions via its incentives, institutions, contradictions, and historical persistence.
As someone from an urban, upper-caste, upper-middle-class background, I also appreciated the reminder that our lived experience is not representative of India as a whole. It is easy to forget that the India of metros, multinational companies, apartment complexes, and social media is still a minority experience.
For hundreds of millions of Indians, village networks, kinship, land, caste, and local social structures continue to shape daily life in ways that many of us rarely encounter firsthand.
One aspect that particularly struck me is how much coercion, or violence both implicit and explicit, is required to sustain this social order. For a city dweller, the consequences of stepping outside prescribed norms can seem almost alien: social ostracism, economic exclusion, intimidation, and, in some cases, outright violence. That ever-present possibility of punishment is part of what has historically kept rebellion and individual defection in check.
Whether one agrees with every conclusion or not, this article is valuable because it begins with careful observation rather than preconceived narratives. We need more writing like this.
You briefly mention Bangladesh being similar enough that a lot of the same things apply. One major thing of course is that Bangladesh is majority Muslim, and caste is much less of a thing among Muslims in Bangladesh (although it's still a thing, but it's sometimes seen as distasteful and being imitating the Hindus, especially the more religious the family is).
Kinship networks being important is still definitely a thing. It's about direct extended family connections rather than intervillage jati connections.
Other differences that jumped out among Muslims in Bangladesh that I would expect would apply to Muslims in India include that the husband pays the bride rather than the bride giving a dowry (although there's expenses in both directions and and dowry still happens indirectly, with gifts andfurnitue standing in, but bride price is meant to be explicitly what is done religiously). And marriages within the same village are common (looking it up it's also much more common in south India).
Brilliant analysis. However, a number of papers are quite old. I would like to see if the economic growth and the provision of public services in the 2004-2024 period has made any difference to the conclusions.
Great article, your volume of referenced papers is very extensive. That one study from the Ivory Coast cashew laborers is quite revealing of a pan-Third World phenomenon that is perhaps magnified in India specifically.
> Places that had higher rates of cousin marriage are more likely to migrate off the farm and into higher-paying jobs, and are also more likely to live in homes for the elderly as a consequence of weaker family ties.
It's correct. The point is that the places that had higher rates of cousin marriage in the past are more affected by the change in marriage due to the laws.
Hello bro, I has really liked this article, and well see this one I just read as a counter to what you said about reservation ( I personally support a kind of civil rights act rather than the present system) https://substack.com/@embattledseer/note/p-186507903
This looks like an economist's model of rural North Indian caste dynamics rather than something that is grounded to the reality. This makes me think of those orientalist accounts of Indians that European anthropologists curiously wrote in 19th century. I agree the essay is strong as a synthesis of economics and sociology, but weaker as a balanced account of contemporary India. Your emphasizes on jati (sub-castes) rather than the four classical varnas is good, socially relevant and shows that you have a flair of anthropological/sociological research on this topic. Also brave of you to state the relevance of caste among Indian-Americans for I am sure a lot of them will take offense to this . Finally I also liked your use of empirical papers on related topics and knitting it with endogamy, dowry, village social networks, labor market frictions etc. to give a general picture of village life.
But there simply is too much broad generalizations that a lot of readers would not treat cautiously.
You have simply presented rural Uttar Pradesh as though it represents "village India". The things you have described are from some backwater pocket in UP, yet you have conflated that specific status quo and its outcomes with the rest of the 600k+ villages in India. To contrast for instance, Kerala has a very different history of land reform, literacy, and caste politics. In the same way, Tamil Nadu has a different caste structure and anti-caste political tradition. Northeast states of India differ substantially from all these altogether.
You also blurs "still exists" with "still typical" which is quite stretch in my opinion. You have wrote "Dalits live outside villages", "voting is essentially caste-based", "love marriages are extremely rare" etc. - there is some important truth behind them, but the degree varies dramatically by region urbanization, and generation.
Now some other details that are plainly wrong:
"It is customary to defecate now into the fields" - I don't even know what exactly is the customary part and you are blindly treating a rapidly declining practice as a permanent cultural fixture. NFHS-5 data proved that open defecation had already fallen to 22% in Uttar Pradesh with a consistent downward trajectory, and the latest NFHS-6 which is yet to be released is likely to show even lower trends.
"Private schools are more likely to be attended by boys within the family, and by richer castes" - Not sure how are you making this assumption when as per Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, private schools are legally mandated to reserve a minimum of 25% of their seats for children from vulnerable and marginalized backgrounds.
"Women rarely work formally, and this declines as families get wealthier" - Partially agree with second part but rural Labour Force participation rate of rural women is quite high to be honest and furthermore lower caste women do not have the luxury to sit at home.
"India is surprisingly non-urbanized for a country of its level of development...." This claim relies heavily on an administrative definition of urbanization likely from the 2011 Census data that is now a decade and a half old, back when India's economy was only 30% of its current size. This is fundamentally a definitional issue rather than an economic one. If we look at functional urbanization using satellite data from the European Commission’s Global Human Settlements Layer (GHSL), India was already 63% urban as early as 2015. For all practical needs, India is a rapidly becoming a predominantly urban nation, rendering old census categories obsolete.
"The social obligations which sustain coinsurance make it much harder to migrate" - Again I agree with the premise but empirically not true as the PLFS Migration in India 2020-2021 report notes that 29% of the population consists of migrants. With millions of individuals migrating over 2,000 kilometers from northern villages to southern states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, it is inaccurate to assume that villages tie people down like the kulaks in Imperial Russia.
"I am inclined to say, however, that the predominance of family firms in India is not due to caste or custom" I am not sure why you would accept this despite the long argument against caste; the intersection of caste and family-run businesses forms the bedrock of the country's economic landscape. Caste simply carries networks for knowledge transfer as well as capital accumulation which ensured some castes are more entrepreneurial than others. For reference: Kanta Murali. 2017. Caste, Class and Capital: The Social and Political Origins of Economic Policy in India or How does Caste Affect Entrepreneurship?Birth vs Worth, 2019 by Sampreet Singh Goraya
"These important details of life in a rural Indian village... the generalities are universal" - simply not true and is a an oversimplification. It is fundamentally flawed to generalize across a subcontinent of 1.4 billion people. In reality, the socioeconomic and cultural landscape of a village in Eastern Uttar Pradesh or Bihar diverges drastically from counterparts in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, or Maharashtra, making such broad generalizations highly problematic.
India has changed significantly over the past 20–30 years and especially in the last one decade alone. Some of the changes being that migration has increased, education has expanded, urbanization continues, inter-caste interaction and marriages is more common and many discriminatory practices have significantly weakened. Now your essay do acknowledges some improvements, but its overall tone can make the situation appear more static than it is.
This is one of the best overviews of rural India I've seen so far. Although I must reiterate that this is absolutely rural India. Towns, cities have different cultures, different states have different cultures, picking Uttar Pradesh instead of Tamil Nadu would create a big difference in the details. Not necessarily better culture, there are other problems in wealthier parts of India for example but this description was a good representation of the rural less wealthy and more conservative areas.
Some areas I want to add on:
More on education, it's wayyy worse than what's reported. It's almost impossible from someone from a "government school" as we call it to say get into a medical college. I've taught 14 year olds who didn't know the alphabet (in any language), have never talked to there homeroom teachers, and attend school only for the midday meal.
Another pointer on capital allocation in rural schools, apart from the fact that extreme corruption eats up 80% (approximate experential figures, not backed by data) of the allocated funds, the nation building focused much more on making higher education stronger than primary education. There's a common notion of "Government Schools" being extremely bad (except KVs, JNVs), and "Government Colleges" being good/or at least high signal.
Ego and hierarchy sits very deep in the culture which makes it difficult for say a 16 year old girl in the village to stand up against injustice or demand an opportunity to move cities for better education, even when finance isn't an issue. If they're older than you, if it's a man, if they have more experience than you, if they have more power - it is much harder to debate with logic.
also the government kneecaps private colleges/universities by making it near-impossible for them to get international grant money for research etc, and subjecting the politically troublesome ones to authoritarian levels of scrutiny and pressure.
Genuine question, do you have significant experience in rural India? Have you lived there?
I'd say I've lived in a village in Maharshtra for ~15 days every year. My mom and dad grew up in villages we visit every year. I must say Maharashtra's villages are a bit different, and being financially secure changes your experience in the village, but I have an idea.
Moreover, I run a nonprofit where I have volunteers from very rural parts of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, where they teach kids in their villages. Again, not my personal first hand experience, but I get to hear personal stories and troubles from them often.
Thank you!
But it overdoes on land as the average land holding like < 2 Acres. That's not much of a gentry.
This is a very good overview of how a rural North Indian Hindu society is organized. A few observations:
1) Concept of dowry, as you mention, was a form of inheritance because property inheritance was limited to sons. The individual kin groups self-police themselves to mitigate some of the excesses you mention such as bride burning and continued demands for more money from the the bride's parents. Families that indulge in such behavior will not find good matches for their other sons. Other than this, unless one is a powerful politician, cops will arrest and throw husband and mother in law in prison if the wife complaints. Punishment for these kinds of crimes are severely dealt with now. The way you described the situation was true in 1950s, but not anymore.
2) There is little chance you can make changes to the way villages are organized. India's best bet is to industrialize rapidly and encourage younger population to migrate to towns and cities.
3) Even in towns and cities the jati system continues because that is how each group cooperates and assert power collectively, especially in elections. If your coalition wins power in a state, say, all plum posts go to elites of each of the jatis in the coalition and patronage flows down the hierarchy.
4) Almost everything that is government run just doesn't work because of corruption. Main reason being little understanding of a social contract, and no concept of public service.
5) Biggest challenge is that the poorer and lower varna jati families tend to have more children so that they start working menial jobs and bring home income, which means they won't be going to school and getting an education. Human development for SC/STs, dalits and other lower castes is the biggest challenge for India.
Excellent and very resonant! But I do want to underscore that this is a good description of the political economy of rural North India only.
It doesn’t tell you much about life in Delhi or Mumbai or Kolkata. Most Indian-Americans didn’t come from a gaon [village] - they came from a city. I think the aside about caste in the US at the end is a bit off-base. Cities’ culture and political economy are very different.
In the same way that it’s wrong to draw conclusions about New Yorkers based on a case study of West Virginia, rural UP is a *very* particular place in India.
Really great work, thanks for quantifying something that many of us are aware of. I’ve written about the need for jati to dissolve for India to fully approach modernity. I feel that despite its persistence, it will collapse in the next two centuries as education, the internet, new norms, and “love marriages” gradually spread, even if this seems slow and non-pervasive right now. I don’t think any traditional society can truly survive the exposure to the modern market and entertainment world intact in the long run.
I believe that if the rate of exogamy is even something like 5 percent in each generation, strict caste boundaries will dissolve in a few hundred years.
On the other hand, if there's a distribution over transmissable adherence to jati (for cultural and/or genetic reasons), the move towards exogamy could slow over time. After a while, the only ones maintaining endogamy would be the ones with strong tendencies towards endogamy for cultural and/or genetic reasons, thus being a harder nut to crack.
A big question is whether people who abandon their jati tend to accrue advantages which cancel out the cost of no longer having a kin group to provide protection/insurance/etc.
In the short run, probably not. It would be a few generations later, and only if a more civic-spirited mindset does become pervasive among the newly casteless majority, or at least significant minority.
It's a tricky problem, since people who stick with their caste can also still benefit from the civic spirit (free-riding).
I keep thinking of how the Catholic Church supposedly banned cousin marriage for everyone in Europe. I'm wondering if India needs a similar approach of banning within-caste marriages *everywhere*, so people don't need to unilaterally disarm. Probably wouldn't be a popular approach with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India however.
I think part of it is that NW Euros already avoided close cousin marriage prior to Catholicism. South Italians still practiced cousin marriage until quite recently, though less frequently than in the Muslim world and India.
Tour de force, thank you for writing this
Thinking about how jatis must've evolved in the first place. My understanding is that pre-industrial states were typically weak and had a limited capability to administer justice. Most people were untrustworthy. In the Roman Empire, they had a patron/client system where a less wealthy "client" would ally with a wealthier "patron", supporting the patron in politics etc. in exchange for protection. After the fall of the Roman Empire, this evolved into the feudal lord/vassal system where the lord provides protection in exchange for military service and/or taxes from the vassal. Feudal systems tend to have a big emphasis on honor, since the lord has discretion in who they select as vassal, and the lord prefers to pick someone they can trust. Sounds like in India, they solved the same problem through more horizontal alliances rather than vertical alliances. You can imagine the first ever jati has an advantage over everyone else in society since the person who is part of the jati has a bunch of kin who "have their back" in case of conflicts. That motivates others to form jatis of their own in order to catch up.
This is an outstanding piece of work.
The sheer amount of fieldwork, observation, and synthesis that went into this article is remarkable. Rather than reducing caste to slogans or ideology, it explains how village society actually functions via its incentives, institutions, contradictions, and historical persistence.
As someone from an urban, upper-caste, upper-middle-class background, I also appreciated the reminder that our lived experience is not representative of India as a whole. It is easy to forget that the India of metros, multinational companies, apartment complexes, and social media is still a minority experience.
For hundreds of millions of Indians, village networks, kinship, land, caste, and local social structures continue to shape daily life in ways that many of us rarely encounter firsthand.
One aspect that particularly struck me is how much coercion, or violence both implicit and explicit, is required to sustain this social order. For a city dweller, the consequences of stepping outside prescribed norms can seem almost alien: social ostracism, economic exclusion, intimidation, and, in some cases, outright violence. That ever-present possibility of punishment is part of what has historically kept rebellion and individual defection in check.
Whether one agrees with every conclusion or not, this article is valuable because it begins with careful observation rather than preconceived narratives. We need more writing like this.
You briefly mention Bangladesh being similar enough that a lot of the same things apply. One major thing of course is that Bangladesh is majority Muslim, and caste is much less of a thing among Muslims in Bangladesh (although it's still a thing, but it's sometimes seen as distasteful and being imitating the Hindus, especially the more religious the family is).
Kinship networks being important is still definitely a thing. It's about direct extended family connections rather than intervillage jati connections.
Other differences that jumped out among Muslims in Bangladesh that I would expect would apply to Muslims in India include that the husband pays the bride rather than the bride giving a dowry (although there's expenses in both directions and and dowry still happens indirectly, with gifts andfurnitue standing in, but bride price is meant to be explicitly what is done religiously). And marriages within the same village are common (looking it up it's also much more common in south India).
Brilliant analysis. However, a number of papers are quite old. I would like to see if the economic growth and the provision of public services in the 2004-2024 period has made any difference to the conclusions.
Great article, your volume of referenced papers is very extensive. That one study from the Ivory Coast cashew laborers is quite revealing of a pan-Third World phenomenon that is perhaps magnified in India specifically.
> Places that had higher rates of cousin marriage are more likely to migrate off the farm and into higher-paying jobs, and are also more likely to live in homes for the elderly as a consequence of weaker family ties.
Shouldn’t this be “lower rates”
It's correct. The point is that the places that had higher rates of cousin marriage in the past are more affected by the change in marriage due to the laws.
Ahh I see
Hello bro, I has really liked this article, and well see this one I just read as a counter to what you said about reservation ( I personally support a kind of civil rights act rather than the present system) https://substack.com/@embattledseer/note/p-186507903
Please give it a read if possible