ABSTRACT
In 1955, M.N. Srinivas presented a paper on ‘Castes: Can They Exist in the India of Tomorrow?’ at a national seminar on ‘Casteism and Removal of Untouchabilty’ in Delhi, attended, among others, by such distinguished persons as S. Radhakrishnan, Jagjivan Ram, Govind Ballabh Pant, V.K.R.V. Rao, Kaka Kalelkar and Irawati Karve. The paper was published in the seminar report as well as in the Economic Weekly (1955). After a lifetime of scholarship on caste, in 1999, the last year of his life, he gave a lecture under different titles in Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata, on the passing away of caste as a system. It was published posthumously in 2003 in Economic and Political Weekly under the title, ‘An Obituary on Caste as a System.’ Srinivas expanded this title into a sentence, ‘While caste as a system is dead, individual castes are fl ourishing’ (ibid.: 459). He made this statement almost at the end of the 20th century, after publication of his book, Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar (1996). It is time now to think of the 21st century.
