Alexander Lee's From Hierarchy to Ethnicity offers an understanding of the mobilization of historically subordinated ethnic groups that highlights distinctive features of Indian lower-caste politics while helping us compare it with other phenomena. It draws from classical sociological understandings of authority, constructivist explanations of ethnic mobilization, institutionalist and rational choice analyses of state-formation legacies, and historical-anthropological accounts of the colonial formation of tradition; however, it departs from them to better understand ranked mobilization. Social scientists and humanists can fruitfully engage its contributions, but they may find ranked social relations more durable and dispute how far education and state authority shape subaltern mobilization.
Lee highlights how two features of caste were formed during the late precolonial and colonial eras: their large number and close association with socioeconomic status. He differs from instrumentalist and most constructivist analyses in emphasizing whether groups are ranked. Ranking has been crucial not only to caste relations but also to race relations in former settler colonies. The colonial period witnessed both ranked and unranked caste mobilization. Ranked mobilization aimed for upward mobility and intracaste differentiation; unranked patterns promoted caste solidarity and proclaimed intergroup equality. The persistence of patrimonial systems in rural areas and indirectly ruled regions enabled ranked mobilization, while the growth of education, state presence, and electoral competition encouraged unranked mobilization. Education is said to influence not only the levels but also the dimensions of ethnic mobilization. The most educated castes preferred supracaste ideologies—procolonial loyalism, nationalism (Indian and Hindu), and communism—while the larger upwardly mobile castes with middling educational levels adopted caste-specific mobilization. The further growth of education and state presence, and democratization after independence, made unranked mobilization predominant and higher among middle castes than at the caste spectrum's extremes.
This account disputes claims that colonial knowledge reshaped society uniformly by depicting varied social responses. It underlines that caste classification was based on hierarchical Hindu textual norms only in one census, that caste associations kept demanding dignified caste titles despite limited success, and that unranked caste mobilizers rejected official caste-based status differentiation. Castes adopted different strategies—Bihari Kayasths who monopolized literacy avoided caste politics, Uttar Pradesh Kayasths and Hindustani Jats promoted it to compete with other castes, and Uttar Pradesh Chamars shifted from ranked to unranked mobilization as their occupations changed.
The attention to ranked rhetoric distinguishes this account from constructivist analyses that focus on group boundaries and foresee all ethnic mobilizers building solidary communities to maximize political influence. Ranked mobilization is said to have been highest in rural and indirectly ruled areas and where colonial officials gathered taxes through landlords (zamindari) rather than from peasants (raiyatwari), and lowest where army and police employment was higher. The first two are indices of patrimonial authority and the fourth of autonomy from it, but tax collection systems had varied effects. Colonial officials and some development economists associated zamindari with greater inequality. But land control was equally concentrated and caste relations comparably hierarchical in intensively cultivated raiyatwari regions.
Lee believes that public support for caste hierarchy declined dramatically after independence as a result of democratization, the abolition of colonial patrimonial institutions, and measures to benefit the lower and middle castes. But these changes had uneven effects. Landed elites avoided or evaded land reforms, and upper castes, politicians, bureaucrats, and the police frequently violated formal lower-caste rights. The study underlines that parties that were rooted among particular castes (e.g., Republican Party of India, Samajwadi Party, Lok Janshakti Party, Bahujan Samaj Party) or used caste idioms extensively (e.g., Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, socialists, Janata Dal) accommodated the middle and lower castes the most while privileging larger and upwardly mobile castes. But parties foregrounding nation (Congress Party, Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]) and class (communists) also engaged caste demands in some regions. The communists accommodated Kerala's highly mobilized lower-middle and lower castes, while marginalizing comparable and equally mobilized castes in Bengal. Even Congress and the BJP engaged lower castes tactically and granted them tiered preferences from the 1990s, while retaining certain hierarchical mobilization patterns.
The argument that state presence and education enable subaltern mobilization does not correspond with where disadvantaged groups mobilized. In certain rural areas where state power was weak and education low, Dalits and Adivasis were more numerous and this enabled their mobilization. This was the case in parts of Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh. Most of these initiatives were suppressed until the 1970s and resulted in ongoing violent conflict often involving Maoists since the 1990s. Parties channeled these efforts and helped lower status-groups secure extensive benefits in Kerala.
The analytical advantages of addressing ranking are not fully realized because of inaccurate understandings of relative caste status. The higher-status Vokkaligas, Lingayats, Kammas, and Reddis are deemed comparable to Jats, and the lower-caste label applied equally to Dalit castes such as Chamars/Jatavs, Mahars, Madigas, Pulayas, and Parayas, and the higher-ranked Yadavs, Kurmis, Nadars, and Izhavas, as Kanchan Chandra's and Christophe Jaffrelot's earlier studies did. The Dalit castes experienced greater exclusion and found beneficial alliances less accessible.
While underlining that caste is comparable with other ascriptive inequalities, the book barely develops such comparisons. It overestimates the decline of racial ranking in the United States and Brazil. The Republican Party used ranked motifs covertly even after the Second Reconstruction, and more openly after Barack Obama's election, to justify racialized incarceration, felon disfranchisement, and welfare state retrenchment. Pigment-based stratification persisted in Brazil despite democratic consolidation.
The study nevertheless imaginatively analyzes the mobilization of India's ranked identities and provides raw material useable to craft “a new theory of . . . ranked (ethnic) mobilization” (p. 8).
