Which statements about caste in cities after Independence are correct?
(A) Educated Indians drawn to individualism and meritocracy began to abandon extreme caste practices.
(B) Modern industry created new jobs for which there were no caste rules.
(C) Mill recruitment stopped following caste and kinship lines.
(D) Urbanisation made caste-segregated social interaction hard to sustain.
(E) Middlemen recruited factory labour from outside their own caste and region.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → A, B and D only
(A) Educated Indians drawn to individualism and meritocracy began to abandon extreme caste practices. — Correct. Modern educated Indians were drawn to the liberal ideas of individualism and meritocracy. Because of this, they began to give up the more extreme caste practices.
(B) Modern industry created new jobs for which there were no caste rules. — Correct. The growth of private industry speeded up economic change. Modern industry created all kinds of new jobs that had no caste rules attached to them.
(C) Mill recruitment stopped following caste and kinship lines. — Incorrect. Caste proved resilient in the mills. Recruitment to industrial jobs in the textile mills of Bombay and the jute mills of Calcutta continued to follow caste and kinship lines.
(D) Urbanisation made caste-segregated social interaction hard to sustain. — Correct. Collective living in the cities made it hard for caste-segregated patterns of social interaction to survive. Urbanisation therefore weakened such separation.
(E) Middlemen recruited factory labour from outside their own caste and region. — Incorrect. The middlemen recruited labour from their own caste and region. As a result, some departments or shop floors came to be dominated by specific castes.
NCERT (2026-27): “Caste in the Present … “Urbanisation and the conditions of collective living in the cities made it difficult for the caste-segregated patterns of social interaction to survive. At a different level, modern educated Indians attracted to the liberal ideas of individualism and meritocracy, began to abandon the more extreme caste practices. On the other hand, it was remarkable how resilient caste proved to be. Recruitment to industrial jobs, whether in the textile mills of Mumbai (then Bombay), the jute mills of Kolkata (then Calcutta), or elsewhere, continued to be organised along caste and kinshipbased lines. The middle men who recruited labour for factories tended to recruit them from their own caste and region so that particular departments or shop floors were often dominated by specific castes. …” |