The caste system has been a major topic for discourse in India throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the mid-50s the author spent sixteen months on an ethnographic study of Khalapur, a village in western Uttar Pradesh. The issues then were educational and occupational access for low-caste and untouchable people and other practices of untouchability The villagers could not conceive of a society that was not caste-organised and equal treatment was a foreign urban Congress Party issue. Has the discourse about caste changed in the last generation? If so, how?
