Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

so that instead of seeking specific principles of the caste system, Dirks sought to be more attentive to specific contexts of power.

More recently, D. Gupta (2000) has provided a masterful survey of the complex meanings of caste identity in India,¹ arguing that instead of being viewed as a generalized hierarchy, each caste identity should be considered as “discrete,” with the ordering of castes being undertaken in specific ways within the worldview of each caste identity. According to D. Gupta, there are, thus, multiple perspectives on caste hierarchies within India depending on the caste position from which the hierarchy is viewed, rather than a uniformly acceptable hierarchy as proposed by Dumont. However, in a review of D. Gupta's theory of caste, H. Singh (2008) argued that notions of caste construction and mobility need to be more firmly grounded in the realm of the relations of production. In H. Singh's estimation,

The multiplication and mobility of caste hierarchies is thus explained by H. Singh in terms of their grounding in changing distributions of landownership. This attachment of caste mobility to the economic histories of particular caste groups inserts a geographic moment in the discussions of caste which will follow next.

Spatial Mobilities

Contextual variations in terms of caste can be discerned within the notion of “dominant caste” put forward by Srinivas (1955). Here, the idealized version of the caste hierarchy “did not necessarily, or even often, coincide with the local distribution of economic and political power” (Jeffrey 2002, 209). Thus, a caste could be locally powerful—not on the basis of its ritual standing or in terms of its links to the state, but because