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  7 Geiger and Heller 2011, 3, 9.

  8 Caplan 2011, 34.

  9 Cummins and Clark 2013.

  10 Jenkins (2013) supplies the genealogical information on the Darwin family.

  11 Jenkins 2013.

  12 It is also interesting that Darwin’s fourth-generation descendants included Adrian Maynard Keynes and William Huxley Darwin, showing the intermarriages between the lineages of John Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley, and the Darwins. This illustrates the intermarriage of the English intellectual elite in these years.

  13 Hanley 2004.

  14 Boserup, Kopczuk, and Kreiner 2013.

  15 Björklund, Roine, and Waldenström 2012.

  16 The one way that such an error could produce reversion to the mean is if there were an upper bound on family competence, so that errors at the extreme effectively had to lead toward the mean.

  17 Technically it is first-order Markov.

  PART TWO

  TESTING THE LAWS OF MOBILITY

  EIGHT

  India

  Caste, Endogamy, and Mobility

  INDIA IS AN INTERESTING SOCIETY in which to test two aspects of the theory of social mobility outlined in chapters 6 and 7: that social institutions can do little to change the rate of social mobility and that a key controller of mobility rates is the degree of marital endogamy among elite and underclass groups. This chapter calculates social mobility rates for colonial and modern India for Hindu groups of different original status and for Muslims. These social mobility rates are low—much lower than the rates calculated for India by conventional methods. By some measures, social mobility is nonexistent.

  As the simple theory of mobility predicts, religious and caste endogamy are associated with low rates of social mobility. Thus as long as religion and caste continue to play a strong role in marital sorting in India, social mobility rates will remain unusually low.

  One factor that might be predicted to increase social mobility in India is a form of affirmative action known as the reservation system, whereby up to half of public-sector jobs and places in educational institutions are reserved for disadvantaged social groups. This chapter also calculates the effect of the reservation system on social mobility rates since 1947. It concludes that its dramatic interventions have had modest effects on overall social mobility rates. This is because although it has modestly increased downward mobility among Hindu and Christian elites, its main effect has been to create a new elite composed of groups that were never significantly disadvantaged. In practice, the system has largely hurt the prospects of the truly disadvantaged.

  Background

  India entered the modern era at Independence in 1947 with the legacy of the Hindu caste system, which was echoed in the Muslim community also. Intermarriage and even social intercourse between different castes were limited. This system of exclusion was so powerful that different castes and subcastes, even within small geographic areas, can now have distinct genetic profiles.1

  The Hindu community was traditionally divided into four castes. In descending order of status, these were Brahmins, priests; Kshatriya, rulers, administrators, and soldiers; Vaishya, farmers, bankers, and traders; and Shudra, laborers and servants. Each caste had hierarchically ranked subcastes. Under British rule, the lowest social groups were referred to as the depressed classes. These groups included the untouchables, who were believed to confer defilement on higher-caste groups through mere contact, as well as indigenous tribal communities not incorporated into Hindu or Muslim society.

  After Independence, for purposes of social action, these various castes and other social groups were classified under Indian law as “forward castes,” “scheduled castes” (the former untouchables), “scheduled tribes,” and “other backward castes.” The classification was based on the British census of 1931. While that classification broadly correlated with social status, as figure 8.1 shows, many groups that were not particularly disadvantaged ended up classified as scheduled castes or other backward castes.2 Membership in the legally defined scheduled caste group now derives strictly from inheritance and is independent of social status. But for the other backward caste group, those of higher social status, described under Indian law as the “creamy layer,” are excluded from benefits. Thus those in this group need to obtain a certificate of “non-creamy-layer” status to get the benefits of membership.

  Figure 8.1 shows the share of twenty-three-year-olds who graduated from universities in India in 2000 by caste and religion under these classifications. Caste affiliations determined centuries ago still strongly predict current educational outcomes.

  FIGURE 8.1. University graduation rates by social group, India, 2000.

  One factor that might be expected to promote mobility, however, is the reservation system. Since Independence, the number of places reserved and the number of groups eligible for reserved places has increased. Up to half of available educational places and government jobs are now reserved.3 If the caste system trapped many potentially talented people at lower levels of society in the premodern era, then modern reservation policy could be expected to rapidly increase social mobility. Thus, while figure 8.1 implies continuing dramatic social inequalities, it is not clear whether we should expect high or low rates of social mobility today, given Indian social policy.

  Table 8.1 shows numbers of candidates in various admissions categories admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences for the Bachelor of Medicine degree in 2012, as well as their rank on the entrance exam. Of the seventy-two candidates admitted, only half were admitted solely on the basis of their admissions exam score. The lowest ranking for any student in the open category on this exam was 36, compared to 2,007 for the reserved category.

  TABLE 8.1. Admissions to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, by reservation-system category, 2012

  Category

  Number

  Numerical rank on admission test

  Unreserved

  36

  1–36

  Scheduled caste

  11

  288–1,164

  Scheduled tribe

  5

  177–2,007

  Orthopedic physically handicapped

  1

  1,201

  Other backward classes (non-creamy layer)

  19

  41–116

  All

  72

  1–2,007

  There are surprisingly few formal studies of social mobility in India.4 Thus the two recent international surveys of social mobility discussed in the introduction, one for earnings and the other for education, do not include India.5 However, a recent study estimated the Indian intergeneration income correlation to be 0.58, making social mobility rates in India among the world’s lowest.6

  The estimated persistence rate for income in India of 0.58, however, is not much higher than those for the United Kingdom (0.5) or the United States (0.47). The share of income variance in the next generation attributable to inheritance from parents in India is still only (0.58)2, or 0.34. This suggests that even in India, an individual’s position in the income ranks is not primarily derived from inheritance. Thus, by conventional estimates, modern India has become a society of rapid social mobility, where three to four generations might see the elimination of all traces of millennia-old patterns of inequality.

  Social Mobility in Bengal, 1860–2011

  This chapter examines social mobility in Bengal from 1860 to the present. At the partition of India in 1947, this region was divided into the Pakistani province of East Bengal (now the nation of Bangladesh) and the Indian state of West Bengal. With a population of ninety-one million today, West Bengal is one of the larger Indian states. Its income per capita is only about three-quarters that of India as a whole, so it is also one of the poorer areas of the country. It was chosen because of the availability of the electoral register for Kolkata (Calcutta), the largest city in West Bengal, which allows estimates of the relative population shares of each sur
name. But it has a mix of castes and religions that it is representative of India in general, so it can be expected to be representative of other conditions as well.

  For the upper classes in Bengal, family surnames date from the arrival of the British in the eighteenth century or earlier. Petitioners to the East India Company courts in Bengal in the late eighteenth century typically have surnames, and these names are still common in Bengal: Banarji, Basu, Chattarji, Datta, Ghosh, Haldar, Khan, Mandal, Mitra, Sen.7

  If there had been substantial social mobility in Bengal, even with a persistence rate as high as 0.6, then over the last two hundred years (seven generations), even the high-status surnames of the eighteenth century should have regressed to an average representation in the top and the bottom strata of society. However, common surnames vary enormously in their relative representation among elites in modern Bengal. Figure 8.2 shows the relative representation of six groups of surnames among physicians and judges in West Bengal. These surname groups are presented below. Since they differ significantly in their social status, we can use them, as in other cases, to estimate social mobility rates.

  Among Bengali Brahmins, the highest subcaste is the Kulin, who supposedly migrated to Bengal from north India in the tenth or eleventh century CE. Seven surnames are associated with this group: Bandopadhyaya/Banerjee, Bhattacharya/Bhattacharjee, Chakraborty/Chakravarty, Chattopadhyaya/Chatterjee, Gangopadhyaya/Ganguly, Goswami/Gosain, and Mukhopadhyaya/Mukherjee.8 These surnames form the Kulin Brahmin group shown in figure 8.2.

  FIGURE 8.2. Relative representation of surname groups among physicians and judges.

  The surnames of Kulin Brahmins are the most overrepresented of all surname types among modern Bengali elites. They are more than four times as frequent among physicians registered in recent decades as in the general population. These names are likely to be familiar to anyone who has met Indian physicians, professors, or engineers in the United States.

  Other surnames associated with the high-status Brahmin and Kayastha castes in Bengal are also overrepresented, though not to the same degree as Kulin Brahmin surnames. These include the surnames Basu/Bose, Datta/Dutta, Ghosh, Kundu, Mitra, and Sen or Sengupta, which were all high status in the nineteenth century. These surnames form the “other elite Hindu” group in figure 8.2. Basu, Ghosh, and Mitra, for example, are associated with the Kulin Kayastha (scribe) subcastes, which were regarded as next in status after Brahmins in premodern Bengal. As with Brahmins, Kulin denotes a superior subcaste.

  In contrast, the surnames of the Muslim population are dramatically underrepresented among both physicians and judges. Muslims formed a large proportion of the population in Bengal before Independence and continue to do so in the contemporary state of West Bengal. Because Muslim and Hindu first names are also distinctive, the fraction of Muslim physicians in Bengal in the years 1860–2011 is easily estimated.

  Also still very underrepresented are some Hindu surnames that are included here because they had little or no representation among physicians before Independence. The main one is Shaw/Show, held by 3.7 percent of men on the Kolkata voting rolls. Others are Rauth/Routh, Paswan, Dhanuk, Balmiki, and Mahata/Mahato. Together these surnames are held by 7 percent of the population of West Bengal. These constitute the “poor Hindu” surname group in figure 8.2.

  Two additional surname groups of intermediate social status are tracked. The first is surnames associated with scheduled castes (those eligible for reserved positions), identified from lists of those admitted to universities in West Bengal and successful candidates for police jobs in Kolkata. These names are Barman/Burman, Biswas, Haldar/Halder, Mandal/Mondal, and Naskar. They account for 3.8 percent of the population age 20–29 in Kolkata. Because they are overrepresented among physicians and attorneys in Bengal, they are labeled in figure 8.2 as “scheduled caste elites.”

  The second intermediate group is “mixed Hindu” surnames. These are mixed in the sense that they are found mainly in the general admission lists for universities and the police but also in significant numbers in the scheduled caste lists. These surnames are Das/Dasgupta, Majumdar, Ray/Roy, Saha, and Sarkar.

  Figure 8.3 summarizes the relative representation of these surnames among five generations of physicians. The information on physicians for the years 1910–2011 comes from the Indian Medical Registry, which includes physicians registered in Bengal from 1915 onward. For the period before 1910, surname frequencies among physicians were estimated from a list of registered physicians in the province of Bengal in 1903 and from lists of physicians registered in Bihar and Orissa, and in Burma, in 1930 who were trained in Bengal. This list includes people first registering in the years 1904–09.

  For the Muslim population, relative representation is shown relative to the entire population and is always very low. Muslims have always been a tiny share of doctors compared to their population share. The partition of Bengal in 1947 into largely Hindu West Bengal and mainly Muslim East Bengal significantly reduced the Muslim population share in West Bengal. The removal of a large fraction of the population that contained very few doctors had the effect of decreasing the relative representation of all the Hindu surname groups among physicians after 1947. Their share of physicians increased little as their population share increased. Since this politically created decline gives a spurious impression of social mobility, for these other groups relative representation is shown always with respect to the non-Muslim population only.

  FIGURE 8.3. A summary of social mobility by surname type, 1860–2011.

  Measured by this standard, there has been very little social mobility among Hindu surname groups in Bengal since 1860. The Brahmin group of surnames is almost as heavily overrepresented among the non-Muslim population in the period 1980–2011 as it was in 1860–89. Other elite Hindu surnames show a slow rate of decline in status. But the relative representation of mixed Hindu surnames, which are modestly elite, does not change. And the relative representation of poor Hindu surnames of the nineteenth century, those with the highest potential for regression to the mean, also changes little. The only group showing a marked change in status is the group of surnames associated with scheduled caste lists for positions in universities and the police. This group went from being modestly disadvantaged among non-Muslim groups in 1860 to being one of the most elite surname groups, as measured by their relative representation among physicians now.

  Table 8.2 summarizes the persistence rates associated with these surname groups. These rates show how quickly the status of these groups is moving toward the population mean. With a stable variance of status across generations, they are also the intergenerational correlation of status. In that case they will be between zero and one. However, these persistence parameters are often greater than one, meaning that some of these groups are diverging from the mean rather than trending toward it. The persistence rate for the scheduled caste surname group cannot even be calculated for the period 1950–2011, since it crosses the mean, moving from below-average status to above-average status.

  TABLE 8.2. Intergenerational persistence rates (b) for various groups and periods

  THE MUSLIM POPULATION

  Census reports exist giving the Muslim share of the population in Bengal and West Bengal for each decade from 1871 on. Thus there are good measures of the relative representation among physicians in Bengal from 1860 on. The striking feature is the very low representation of Muslims among physicians in all periods. Under British rule, Muslims experienced limited upward mobility. The implied persistence of status was high, with a calculated intergenerational correlation of 0.91.

  However, from the 1970s until very recently, the Muslim community in West Bengal saw a further decline in representation among physicians, with no implied regression to the mean. Indeed, starting with the generation entering practice since Independence in 1947, the implied persistence coefficient is 1.2, indicating that the Muslim community has been diverging further from the mean.

  Bengal’s system of reserv
ing educational places and employment opportunities for disadvantaged castes and tribes explicitly excludes Muslims and Christians: only Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists are eligible. West Bengal, unlike some other Indian states, has not yet introduced reserved educational places for “other backward classes,” which would include Muslims. Such a system will not take effect until 2014.9

  Thus Muslims have been disadvantaged in admission to medical practice in West Bengal, compared to the Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist populations, since Independence. They could compete on equal terms for the unreserved positions in medical schools, but the advantages offered by the reservation system to other disadvantaged groups effectively penalized Muslims. This situation helps explain the surprising negative social mobility implied for the Muslim community in recent generations. It emerges below, however, that even if the pernicious effects of the reservation system were removed, upward mobility rates for this group would be low.

  It is possible that because there are so few Muslim physicians, this profession does not provide a useful measure of social mobility rates in the Muslim community in general. However, Muslims are similarly underrepresented in other, somewhat less elite occupations. Figure 8.4, for example, shows the relative representation of Muslims among new sergeants and subinspectors in the Kolkata police force in 2009, compared to their relative representation among physicians for the period 2000–2011. These lower-level police posts are coveted positions for which only a high school diploma is required. Muslims are similarly underrepresented in higher ranks in the police force, such as inspector. The medical profession is representative of a more general pattern.