ABSTRACT
This chapter presents findings of an extensive survey conducted during 2000–01 with the help of a team of researchers. The ideas of purity and pollution are almost universally recognized as the core defining features of the caste system. The ideas of purity and pollution thus provided legitimacy to the power of caste, which often translated into 'naturalization' of symbolic and 'physical' violence, a normative system of social inequality. The idea of the 'line of pollution' has been an important category in the academic literature on caste. The early colonial administrators who had developed their understanding of Indian society and its caste system from scriptural sources, found it hard to make sense of untouchability when they were confronted by its practice, particularly when it came to enumerating caste. Caste prejudice was quite weak in the local labour market. The chapter focuses on the nature of changes and continuities in everyday social and economic life of rural Punjab.
