As its title suggests, this book studies “how caste became ethnicity” (p. 19) in India from the nineteenth century onward. It focuses on two kinds of mobilization: the “ranked” and the “unranked” ones. Whereas the former reflects what specialists of India since M. N. Srinivas call “Sanskritization” (the imitation of the brahmin in order to rise in the caste system), the latter calls to mind what another anthropologist, Louis Dumont, has described as the “substantialisation of caste”—a state in which caste acquires an identity irrespective of the way it relates to other in the traditional caste system.

Alexander Lee emphasizes the role of elite groups in both processes. He hypothesizes that education plays a key role in these mobilizations and, more precisely, that “the higher levels of literacy that some […] castes gain over time give them a sufficiently large elite to initiate the mobilization process” (p. 93). Logically enough, he distinguishes two types of elites: first, those of the landowning groups and those of the “groups with limited contact with the state bureaucracy” who will continue to “emphasize hierarchical themes” (p. 111)—and who will therefore fight for being recognized as of some higher rank; and second, those who are part of sections of the society experiencing a process of modernization. The author differentiates both categories on the basis of his statistical analysis of the petitions generated by the way the Census of India—which the British introduced in the late nineteenth century—which tabulated caste groups in a hierarchical order. Lee’s work on this rich material (the only primary sources he uses) allows him to distinguish the petitions “making ranked and those making unranked claims” (p. 112).

This distinction is somewhat misleading (as Lee himself acknowledges) because, in fact, he does “not mean that the unranked petitions reject the hierarchical worldview entirely” (p. 113). To make this point clear, some historicization would have helped. In fact, most caste groups that ended up by acquiring an “unranked” identity to begin with explored the Sanskritization route. These sequences make a lot of sense because to emulate the upper caste has always reflected a form of revolt against the social order. Lee alludes to this state of things, in passing, by reference to the Shanan who were turned into Nadar in South India over several decades (p. 121).

More importantly, Lee does not attribute the transition from “ranked” to “unranked” mobilizations to education but, in fact, to the transformation of Indian politics during the twentieth century. Another sequence emerges in this regard: the groups that shifted from one repertoire to the other did it to compete against others in the newly democratized electoral arena (pp. 117–19). Here, it might have been useful to explain how the 1919 and 1935 reforms had enlarged the franchise to some extent, giving a new importance to demographics: as numbers mattered more, some caste groups found it useful to transform themselves into interest groups in order to be more united (and, in some cases, larger).

To support this thesis empirically, two caveats should have been explored in greater detail in the book. First, Lee claims that the groups that shifted from a “ranked” to an “unranked” form of mobilization came mostly from the lower castes—now, many of these people did not have the right to vote because of the franchise; and second, among those who did, many did not know how to read. This is the reason why the British had the ballot boxes painted in different colors. It was so that the illiterate voters could choose the one associated with their favorite candidate.

The correlation itself between education and the shift from “ranked” to “unranked” mobilization needs to be scrutinized for other reasons. It overlaps with the summa divisio mentioned above, between, on the one hand, “landowning groups and groups with limited contact with the state bureaucracy” and, on the other, “large groups in areas with democratic elections” (p. 111). This line of cleavage is supposed to coincide with the one opposing the “areas like the princely states where the traditional political order was strong and the colonial state weak” and British India. First, this opposition is problematic because several princely states were very progressive in terms of their opposition to caste hierarchies. The states of Kolhapur, Baroda, Mysore, Travancore, and others are cases in point. Some of them introduced caste-based positive discrimination programs before British India. Alexander Lee acknowledges this in passing only on page 117. Second, to equate education with literacy suggests that education matters only as a means to getting a job. But the kind of education that was dispensed in different schools during the Raj matters a lot. One of the first low-caste intellectuals who promoted a form of ethnicization of caste, Jyotirao Phule (who is not mentioned), learned antihierarchical values such as liberty and equality in the missionaries’ school he attended in Poona district—where he discovered not only Jesus Christ but also Thomas Paine.

Lee acknowledges that “it is possible that Christianity influenced caste mobilization by making lower caste groups hostile to the existing hierarchy” (p. 102). This possibility needed to be investigated by resorting to nonquantitative tools because it would have brought into the picture a key domain known as “history of ideas.” This subdiscipline at the intersection of political science, philosophy, and history assumes that ideas matter—and this is very much the case with the ethnicization of caste question. The whole process relies on the ideological “inventions of traditions” (as Eric Hobsbawm called it), including a claim to autochthony. Dravidianism, which Lee mentions briefly in the last chapter (p. 151), epitomizes this identity-building process as early as the 1910s, as evident from the prefix “Adi-” (“Ancestral”) that caste associations added to their name. This is mentioned in table 5.1. (p. 114) but not analyzed. In addition to Phule and the Dravidian ideologues, B. R. Ambedkar played a major role in propagating an ethnicized version of caste by requesting the Untouchables to change their name to “Dalits” and convert to Buddhism to acquire a separate identity out of the caste system—and to return, allegedly, to their ancestral roots. This major episode of ethnicization of caste does not appear in the book.

The last section of the last chapter deals with another key factor of the shift from “ranked” to “unranked” mobilizations: positive discrimination. Lee implicitly admits that this policy played a role during the Raj: “The discussion so far has ignored one important difference between caste politics today and during the colonial era: the presence of policies of caste-based affirmative action in political recruitment, government hiring, and educational admissions” (p. 157). Why has this variable not previously been factored in to explain the transformation of the caste system from “ranked” to “unranked” mobilizations?

Possibly because its impact was not easy to measure. But should political scientists focus only on the variables that are easy to measure—such as the literacy rate—at the expense of policies such as this one or the role of ideas? The question applies not only to this book but to a quantitative methodology that shows its limitations more and more systematically. From Hierarchy to Ethnicity shows that the ethnicization of caste, like many other issues, can best be captured by mixed methods. But it tells an interesting part of the story—the one that can be measured, as evident from its study of the petitions sent to the Census of India officers. This analysis is very convincing.