Caste in Cities: How Urban India Still Lives by Caste Rules

Cities are supposed to dissolve old hierarchies. Anonymity, mixed neighbourhoods and market-driven housing choices are meant to replace the rigid social order of the village. Yet caste has not disappeared from Indian cities; it has simply changed its address. Localities are still known by caste and community names, rental markets still sort applicants by surname, and migrants still cluster with others from their own caste and region. Urban India’s social geography, in many ways, still runs on caste rules.

How caste shaped the traditional Indian city 🔗

Long before independence, Indian cities followed a fairly consistent spatial logic. Upper castes occupied the centre, close to temples, markets and administrative buildings, while lower castes and Dalit communities were pushed to the peripheries and outskirts. A long-term study of residence patterns in Pune, drawing on economist D R Gadgil’s socio-economic surveys of the city, found that upper castes remained residentially centralised while lower castes stayed dispersed towards the edges, and that this pattern barely shifted even as the city grew and modernised over more than a century. Upper castes remained residentially centralised

A pattern that shows up in other cities too 🔗

Urban anthropologists have long pointed out that this kind of community-based clustering isn’t unique to India. Cities elsewhere, including Mexico City, show similar patterns, where ethnic and community neighbourhoods persist for generations despite waves of migration and urban redevelopment. Research on residential segregation describes how such enclaves form and endure worldwide, sustained by housing markets, social networks, and often by discriminatory practices that outlast the original reasons for their formation. Such enclaves form and endure worldwide The Indian case stands out mainly in how closely this clustering tracks caste specifically, rather than income or religion alone.

Modern metros haven’t broken the pattern 🔗

It would be comforting to think that large, dense, economically diverse metros dilute caste-based clustering. Data from 147 Indian cities suggests otherwise: caste-based residential segregation does not shrink as a city grows larger, and segregation levels in ten-million-plus metros closely track those in towns a fraction of their size. Segregation levels in ten-million-plus metros closely track those in towns Whether the city is a small district town or a metropolis like Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru, caste neighbourhoods tend to sit farther from good schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure.

Migration and the making of caste enclaves 🔗

Rural-to-urban migration is often described as an escape route from caste hierarchy. In practice, it frequently reproduces it. People moving to cities tend to settle near others from their own village, region or caste, both because these networks help with jobs and housing, and because an unfamiliar city feels more manageable navigated with familiar faces. Over time, such clusters harden into recognisable caste neighbourhoods within the city, essentially replicating rural social organisation in an urban setting.

One of the clearest illustrations of this comes from anthropologist Owen Lynch’s fieldwork among the Jatavs, a Dalit community, in Agra. Lynch lived among the Jatavs for well over a year in the early 1960s, documenting how they formed a tightly bound, caste-based community within the city, with extensive internal interaction and, over time, distinct political and religious institutions of their own. Lynch lived among the Jatavs for well over a year His research, later published as The Politics of Untouchability, made the case that migration to the city did not dissolve caste identity. It gave that identity a new organisational form suited to urban life, closer to what sociologists would call an ethnic group than a purely rural kinship unit.

Caste as an ethnic category in the city 🔗

Anthropologist Gerald Berreman offered an influential framework for understanding this shift. Studying how residents of a North Indian city classified themselves and others in daily life, Berreman argued that caste functions in cities much like an ethnic category: an identity marker that people actively use to build relationships, pursue economic opportunities and navigate administrative systems. Caste functions in cities much like an ethnic category In this reading, caste in the city isn’t simply inherited baggage carried over from the village. It becomes a resource that residents can consciously deploy depending on the situation, whether that’s finding a job, forming a political alliance or securing a favour from a government office.

Later scholars extended this idea. Harold Gould and M N Srinivas both suggested that caste groups in urban settings take on multiple, overlapping roles at once, functioning simultaneously as kinship networks, welfare associations, political constituencies and informal economic support systems. A caste identity that looked fixed and singular in the village becomes flexible and multi-purpose in the city, activated differently depending on what a given situation calls for.

Caste associations and guilds: mutual aid or exclusion? 🔗

Caste doesn’t just organise where people live; it also organises how people help each other. Gadgil’s surveys of caste associations in Pune found that, far from weakening under urban pressures, caste-based guilds and associations actually grew stronger as the city urbanised. Caste-based guilds and associations actually grew stronger Many of these associations ran caste-specific schools and hostels, offered scholarships, and helped members find jobs and housing, functioning as informal welfare systems that filled gaps the state was not covering.

This gives caste associations a genuinely contradictory character. On one hand, they operate as real support networks, letting disadvantaged communities pool scarce resources for education and community upliftment. On the other, the very support they offer is typically restricted to members of the same caste, which keeps caste boundaries firmly intact inside the city even as it helps individuals get ahead within them. Caste associations, in other words, function less as relics of tradition and more as a deliberate, ongoing organisational strategy for city life.

Discrimination in the rental housing market 🔗

Caste segregation in cities isn’t purely a matter of habit or preference; recent research shows it is actively enforced through discrimination in one of the most basic urban transactions there is: renting a home. A well-known study of the rental housing market across the National Capital Region tracked how landlords responded to home-seekers with identical qualifications whose names signalled different castes and religions. Tracked how landlords responded to home-seekers with identical qualifications Upper-caste Hindu applicants secured accommodation with relative ease, while Dalit applicants were far more likely to be turned away outright.

The reasons landlords gave for refusal followed a fairly consistent script: concerns about uncleanliness, objections to non-vegetarian food habits, and vague references to ritual pollution. Some landlords asked prospective tenants for their surname before agreeing to even show a house, using it as a quick proxy to establish caste. Dalit tenants who did manage to secure housing by keeping their caste identity quiet were frequently asked to vacate once neighbours or landlords found out.

When literature confirms the data: Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi 🔗

Academic audits aren’t the only place this pattern shows up. Dalit writer Sharankumar Limbale’s autobiography, Akkarmashi, describes his own struggle to find housing in Latur after landing a job as a telephone operator, a position that should have signalled upward mobility. He discovered that entire localities in the city were identified by caste name, and that he could only rent a room by concealing his caste identity, living with the constant risk of being found out. Entire localities in the city were identified by caste name When he eventually chose not to hide it any longer, he ended up in a densely packed informal settlement with limited water, sanitation and other civic amenities. His account illustrates something the housing audits confirm with numbers: a better job doesn’t automatically get you a better address once your caste becomes known.

The everyday cost of urban caste discrimination 🔗

The consequences of this segregation extend well beyond housing itself. Lower-caste residents pushed into overcrowded, poorly serviced localities often end up paying rents comparable to those in better-off areas, without the civic amenities that come with those areas. Because these localities are frequently located far from commercial and employment hubs, residents also absorb higher commuting costs and longer travel times simply to reach work each day, despite having the budget to afford housing closer in.

Jeffrey Witsoe’s ethnographic work on caste and postcolonial politics in Bihar, based substantially on fieldwork in and around Patna, adds another layer to this picture. His research traces how caste identities shaped under colonial rule became closely linked to state institutions, patronage networks and government offices, meaning that lower-caste residents continue to encounter caste-based friction well beyond the housing market, in dealings with local bureaucracy, police and other arms of the state. Caste identities shaped under colonial rule became closely linked to state institutions Caste, in other words, does not just decide where you live in the city; it continues to shape how the city treats you once you’re there.

This is part of why urban migration as an escape from caste discrimination is only a partial truth. Many families move to cities specifically to get away from the intense, face-to-face caste hierarchies of village life, where everyone already knows everyone else’s caste. Cities do offer a degree of anonymity, at least at first. But as rental audits, caste enclaves and caste associations all show, that anonymity tends to be temporary. Sooner or later, through a surname, a locality, or a caste association membership, caste identity resurfaces, and with it, many of the same exclusions migrants hoped to leave behind in the village.

What do you think? 🔗

If caste-based housing discrimination is this well documented, why do you think it continues largely unchallenged in most Indian cities? And does growing up in a caste-mixed urban neighbourhood actually weaken how strongly people identify with their caste, or does it just change how openly that identity gets expressed?

References

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.2307/2060091
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X21000097
3. https://www.epw.in/journal/2013/23/letters/remembering-owen-lynch.html
4. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00220
5. https://hlrn.org.in/documents/Housing_Discrimination_Study_by_ICSSR.pdf
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956247818812330
7. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo16552144.html