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

of a correlation between large numbers and substantial economic and political power. To quote the actual definition,

Srinivas has been critiqued by Dumont (1980, 162), who suggested that Srinivas confused “dominance” with “status.” According to Dumont, status is not linked to number, so that Brahmans would have high status even if they are not in the majority. In the process, Dumont suggested a dichotomy in terms of “status” and “dominance,” with the former being a more global version of caste and the latter arising in local situations. Following D. Gupta (2000), however, one can argue that here, again, diversities in meanings of caste are sought to be disciplined within a strict hierarchical rendering that is not borne out in terms of place-specific discourses and practices of caste.²

The notion that power accruing to caste identity varies across contexts so that the caste hierarchy is not always maintained in its ideal form has been reinforced in other analyses. One analysis, for instance, can be seen in the work of Bailey (1964), who focused on the ways in which caste conflicts within villages in Orissa in eastern India are inflected by both the economic and ritual position of castes, as well as their links to caste organizations and state-level functionaries outside the village. In an analysis of the salience of caste within contemporary contexts, Jeffrey (2002) focused on the geography of caste in rural north India and showed how “[d]ominance is perpetuated through spatialized social networks that link the rural and urban” (Jeffrey 2002, 222). His conclusion was that “[c]aste as a religiously and culturally sanctioned system of resource transfer seems to be on the wane…But caste as an identity, form of social organization and basis for staking claims to valued resources remains significant” (221–222). Two things have to be noted here. First, caste no longer appears as an automatic claim on resources