India's Caste System and Its Modern-Day Implications

I just wrapped up reading The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy--a novel rooted in generational trauma and India's caste system. The novel explores "Love Laws," or societal restrictions determining who can love who, and how they can love them. Ammu, the mother of Estha and Rahel, loves Velutha--a paravan, or "untouchable." His state as a paravan forbid their love and allowed those from higher castes to paint him as the guilty actor in an accident he didn't cause.

In my understanding of the novel, the climax is the scene in which Velutha is hunched on the ground of the History House and beaten black and blue by the police, who reveal no emotion or remorse in their obscene brutality. Roy uses metaphors of daily life, like "cracking an egg," to describe the mechanized nature of the bureaucracy at the time and how they're systemically taught to treat paravans inhumanely.

The novel takes place shortly after India gained independence from Britain and emphasizes the exacerbation of the Indian caste system under colonialism. The novel waved a huge red flag: even in the mid 1900s, the restrictive caste system built in ancient India still dictated society. Or dictates, I should say. My parents graduated from Indian universities about 30 years ago and shared with me that even then, caste was a significant criteria in university admissions. If that wasn't close enough to the future, let me provide a personal example from last summer: my 25-year-old cousin refuses to tell her parents about her relationship with an educated, sophisticated man because he's from a different caste.

How is the caste system so strong that it was able to last thousands of years? Despite the system being "officially abolished," how does it affect India today? I explore these questions and more in my research below.

As I started digging deeper into caste, I found that while the Indian Constitution outlawed caste-based discrimination in 1950, the caste system still operates in a manner somewhat like de facto segregation. Instead of explicit entrance restrictions, it's now in Shaadi.Com marriage bios, urban housing applications, and hiring decisions behind closed doors.

Reservation policies—India’s version of affirmative action—exist to give Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) access to education and government jobs. But these policies, while positively intended, also stirred up resentment among higher castes, who now frame caste as a “thing of the past” while quietly maintaining social boundaries through marriage arrangements and informal networks.

The truth is, caste isn’t just about religion or rituals—it’s about social capital. Who you know. Who vouches for you. Who invites you to the table. And as Roy illustrates in Velutha’s story, that capital is nearly impossible to earn if you were never meant to have it in the first place.

Even today, data shows us just how entrenched these dynamics still are:

• 75% of Indian marriages are still within the same caste (India Human Development Survey, 2011)
• Only 4% of rural Dalits own land, compared to nearly 50% of upper-caste Hindus (2019 NSSO data)
• In elite institutions like the IITs and IIMs, Dalit and Adivasi students often report bullying, alienation, and administrative neglect
• In 2023, a Dalit man was lynched for riding a horse in Gujarat—because it was considered a "Brahminical act"

So yes, caste was a pivotal character in Roy’s novel, but it’s also still a character in real life. In land ownership. In college dorms. In boardrooms. And in the personal decisions people make about who they love, who they hire, and who they trust.

References

Indian Government. “Government of India | Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation | MOSPI.” Mospi.gov.in, 2011, mospi.gov.in/.

Kumar, Avinash, and Nazia Iqbal Hashmi. “Caste and Educational Inequalities in India.” IASSI-Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 89–107. Accessed 5 Nov. 2025.

“Rahul Gandhi Meets Family of Dalit Man Lynched in Raebareli.” Www.ndtv.com, NDTV, 17 Oct. 2025, www.ndtv.com/india-news/rahul-gandhi-meets-family-of-dalit-man-lynched-in-raebareli-9471201. Accessed 5 Nov. 2025.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. 1997. Random House Trade Paperbacks, An Imprint Of Random House, A Division Of Penguin Random House Llc, 1997.

Staff, Scroll. “Bihar: Lalu Yadav Dismisses Speculation That His Son Tejashwi Yadav Will Take over as RJD Chief.” Scroll.in, 5 Feb. 2022, scroll.in/article/1016720/the-untouchable-indian-students-who-never-make-it-to-graduation. Accessed 5 Nov. 2025.