PERSPECTIVES

Caste as Social Capital

The Tiruppur Story
M Vijayabaskar, Kalaiyarasan A

There are suggestions that caste

networks can be used as a means
to reduce transaction costs and
promote economic development.
Based on critiques of the social
capital for development
literature and the experience of
the knitwear cluster in Tiruppur,
this article contends that
caste-based economic networks
reinforce socio-economic
hierarchies and generate new
forms of exclusion.

ike caste, its defenders too have a

number of avatars. The most recent
one is being promoted by proponents of the free market and Hindu
right-wing ideologues. They view caste
as a driver of development and as a form
of social capital. Taking his cue from
the book Trust: The Social Virtues and
the Creation of Prosperity where Francis
Fukuyama argues that culture constitutes
20% of the missing element in economics,
S Gurumurthy, ideologue and convenor
of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch,1 looks at
caste as the missing cultural element in
the Indian context. He claims that caste
is a safety net or a shock absorber that
counteracts the problems posed by an
expanding individualistic and acquisitive ethic. As he reasons,
Caste is a very strong bond. While individuals are related by families, castes link the
families. Castes transcended the local limits
and networked the people across. This has
prevented the disturbance that industrialism caused to neighbourhood societies in the
West, resulting in unbridled individualism
and acute atomisation.2

Gurcharan Das, writer and newspaper columnist, and R Vaidyanathan

of the Indian Institute of ManagementBangalore (IIM-B), make similar arguments. Das argues that the caste structure provides rules of self-restraint which
smoothen market functioning by providing the required trust between economic
agents. Caste also, according to him, provides knowledge and capital. He claims,

The authors thank Atul Sood and M S S Pandian

for their useful comments on an earlier draft.
M Vijayabaskar (baskarv@mids.ac.in) is with
the Madras Institute of Development Studies,
Chennai and Kalaiyarasan A (kalaijnu@gmail.
com) is a PhD student at the Centre for the
Study of Regional Development, JNU,
New Delhi.

34

Instead of morally judging caste, I seek to

understand its impact on competitiveness. I
have come to believe that being endowed
with commercial castes is a source of advantage in the global economy. Bania traders
know how to accumulate and manage capital.
They have financial resources and more
important, financial acumen (Das 2002: 150,
cited in Vaidyanathan 2012).

Vaidyanathan argues that given the

putative positive role of caste in economic
march 8, 2014

development, the cry to abolish caste is

to semitise and homogenise Indian
society and those who are critiquing
caste are rootless metropolitan elites.
He claims that those who use caste in
business tend to be productive and upwardly mobile whereas those who deploy it in politics continue to lag behind.
Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, writing in The Times of India, too proposes a
case for caste-based development through
the concept of social capital. He argues, it
is the social glue that enables cohesive
communities to pull together, help distressed members, mediate conflicts,
penalise deviant behaviour and reward
desirable behaviour, far more efficiently
and cheaply than government mechanisms.3 According to him, instead of
worrying about negative aspects of the
caste system, one needs to use it effectively through caste-based development schemes.
The industrial town of Tiruppur in
Tamil Nadu is often pointed out as an
example of how caste as social capital can
propel development. For example, the
World Development Report 2001 notes,
Tirupur was a world leader in the knitted
garment industry. The success of this industry is striking. This is particularly so as the
production of knitted garments is capitalintensive, and the state banking monopoly had
been ineffective at targeting capital funds to
efficient entrepreneurs, especially at the levels necessary to sustain Tiruppurs high
growth rates. The needed capital was raised
within the Gounder community, a caste relegated to land-based activities, relying on
community and family network (World
Bank 2001: 175).

Gurumurthy echoes a similar sentiment:

These are community-driven models...I think
it is only social capital which can do it. In my
view, the community is the social capital in
India. Take Tamil Nadu, for instance. The
Naidus, the Kongu Goundars, the Nadars,
and the Rajus took to commerce there.
These communities developed financially,
educationally and socially.4

The increasing recourse to the social

capital theory in developmental discourse
has however been critiqued extensively
by Harriss (2001) and Fine (2010) among
others. Based on their critique and empirical evidence from the knitwear industry in Tiruppur which has been held
vol xlIX no 10

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PERSPECTIVES

as a model for the caste as social capital

argument, we point out that the proposition validates exclusionary practices and
reinforces socio-economic hierarchies.
An Institution for Markets
The new avatar of caste as social capital
has to be understood in the light of
recent shifts in the discourse of development economics. From merely getting
prices right, there has been a growing
emphasis on getting institutions right
which has shifted attention to identifying institutions including social ones
like caste that can help markets work
better. In particular, this shift coincides
with the ascendance of what has
been referred to as the post-Washington
consensus. The call for getting social
relations right symbolises the failures
of the policy structure advocated by the
Washington consensus. This has opened
up space for the consideration of noneconomic factors in economic development. Social capital is one such noneconomic factor; and it has been used as
an explanatory factor in developmental
outcomes like income, education and
health in recent years.5
There is no singular definition of what
constitutes social capital. The World
Bank (WB) defines it as the norms and
networks that enable collective action
encompassing institutions, relationships,
and customs that shape the quality and
quantity of a societys social interactions.6
However, it is broadly defined as social
networks based on horizontal and voluntary local associations and as resources
that people have by virtue of their social
relationships. The evolution of the concept
of social capital has come from diverse
routes.7 The concept of social capital
initially developed by Pierre Bourdieu
(2008) is much broader in its scope than
what is currently being used in policy
discourses. His notion of social capital
rooted in social structures allows for
emergence of social stratification through
unequal distribution of this capital and a
reinforcement of other sources of stratification. His thesis on forms of capital
describes how cultural, social and economic capitals combine to enhance and
expand the domain of exercise of power
stemming from the economic.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

march 8, 2014

The current version of social capital

that permeates development economics
is closer to the one developed by James
Coleman, a Chicago-based functionalist
and a rational choice sociologist (Coleman
1988). According to his argument based
on methodological individualism, social
capital which is produced through interaction between persons in a given social
structure may become an asset in itself
like physical and human capital. This
understanding has found its way into
institutional and information-theoretic
economics that emphasises the importance
of social trust and networks in reducing
information asymmetries and transaction costs (Fine 2010). Social capitals are
divided into three operational categories.
The capital that binds the members of a
group together is referred to as bonding
capital. It is supposed to produce a sense
of identity and common purpose. The
sort of capital that connects people from
different social groups is defined as
bridging capital. Finally, linking capital
is expected to generate ties between the
relatively weak and the powerful.
Colemans concept of social capital
was applied by Robert Putnam (1994) in
his study of Italy, Making Democracy
Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy.
This work has become paradigmatic,
inspiring the application of the concept
across disciplines. Putnams primary
contention is that the better performance of northern Italy in comparison to
the south is due to an early active
engagement in community affairs, a
dense network of local associations, and
an egalitarian pattern of politics in the
region. Critics have however shown that
such difference is rooted in a particular
agrarian structure and state formation
in the northern region which perhaps
has facilitated such civic engagement
(Harriss 2001). In other words, the
emergence of certain patterns of civic
engagement too needs to be explained.
Importing the concept of social capital to
study differences in the US in a subsequent
work, Putnam (2000) locates the current
problem of differences in health, wealth
and happiness amongst Americans in
the lack of social capital.
Broadly, the current dominant paradigm of social capital gives primacy to
vol xlIX no 10

civil society in understanding economic

outcomes. It views civil society as a sort
of equalising space devoid of power,
privileges and conflict. That is, by voluntary association, everybody benefits from
mutual cooperation and collectivism.
However, what is missing in this story is
the aspect of vertical and often exclusive
nature of such associations, networks
and civic engagements. As we shall see,
caste continues to be the primary source
of such exclusive networks in India.
Tiruppur: Claims and Realities
Tiruppur is a successful export hub in the
country. It produces roughly 15% of the
countrys cotton yarn and generates 45%
of its knitwear exports (Damodaran 2008).
The dynamics of industrialisation in the
region have been characterised variedly
as a decentralised form of capital accumulation, amoebic capitalism or as transformations of non-corporate capital
(Chari 2004; Cawthorne 1995; Mahadevan
and Vijayabaskar 2012). Indeed the region has witnessed rapid expansion and
accumulation for over two decades,
mostly through a dense agglomeration
of networks of small and medium firms.
This widespread accumulation has been
attributed to the successful entrepreneurship among members of the Gounder
caste, an intermediate caste group with
landed interests in western Tamil Nadu.
They have mobilised capital more through
family networks than through formal
markets or state support, it is argued.
Labour too is mobilised through firmfamily and firm-farm-family networks.
The disproportionate share of entrepreneurs from this caste in the manufacturing sector is revealing. For instance, 56%
of the manufacturers registered with
the South India Hosiery Manufacturers
Association (SIHMA) are Gounders. The
same situation prevails in the Tiruppur
Exporters Association (TEA), a producer
association for knitwear exporters (Chari
2004). The role of state intervention in
industrialisation in Tiruppur has been
circumspect, with Gounders themselves
explaining their success in terms of their
toil or uzhaippu in Tamil (ibid). As
Chari points out, this representation as
self-made men connotes not merely
the prevailing social conventions among
35

PERSPECTIVES

Gounders but also ways of working and

exercising control over labour.
The significant point, however, is that
the caste itself is highly differentiated as
indicated by the multiple paths of entry
into the knitwear industry and their subsequent growth trajectories.8 The movement of the richer peasants or those with
bigger landholdings has been through
investment of agrarian surplus whereas
the entry of agricultural workers and many
of the small and middle peasants is driven
more by push factors rooted in the poor
agricultural conditions in the region.
Given the vagaries of dry land cultivation, agrarian incomes have historically
been supplemented by income from nonfarm activities in the form of dairying,
seasonal employment in ginning and
pressing in Tiruppur, etc. The growth of
the knitwear industry and the declining
prospects in agriculture led to a new
mode of transition into the urban industrial economy. Increasingly, capital for
investment in the knitwear industry was
acquired through sale or mortgaging of
agricultural land to raise capital for
investments. This process has intensified
over the last decade with the increasing
unviability of agriculture on the one
hand and rising land prices on the other.
Another route is based on kashtakootu, a distinct institution that draws
upon kinship networks (Swaminathan
and Jeyaranjan 1994). Workers with good
work experience in this industry enter
into a partnership with a relative who
would invest the necessary capital. Thus,
while the management of production
would be taken care of by the workerowner, the other partner would be involved in negotiating buyers, accessing
new markets, etc. In a few instances,
persons with assured access to one or
many buyers would team up with a
worker to set up a production unit. Yet
another route of capital mobilisation,
though not an openly acknowledged
phenomenon, is through dowry. As a part
of the dowry, the son-in-law, in addition
to being given money for investment,
would also come to establish links with
other relatives who would then begin to
place orders with his unit.
In addition to such kinship facilitated
entry into entrepreneurship, there are a
36

couple of other routes for Gounder workers to enter the industry. These are
routes opened up as a part of the bigger
firms strategy of capital accumulation,
helping themselves against market uncertainties and avoiding legal obligations
to labour. Bigger firms in order to escape
fulfilling legal obligations to labour and
to avoid problems of maintaining a large
labour force, encourage long-standing
workers, most often belonging to the
same caste as that of the owners, to move
out and set up units of their own. They
were invariably supplied with secondhand machinery and orders to work on
in the initial phases. Such provision of
gratis capital was particularly prevalent
during the 1970s and early 1980s. Given
the low investment and technological
requirements, especially in the earlier
phase, workers often teamed up together
to start a unit of their own. Mostly, it
was done with the help of second-hand
machinery with operations being carried
out in household premises.
Since then, there has been an influx
of white-collared employees from the
formal sector, both public and private,
teaming up with locals with a good
knowledge of the industry to start exportoriented units. Else, they would work for
a period of six months to one year in
their friends or kins firms before setting
up units of their own. With their social
capital more attuned to the process of
accessing global markets and loans from
formal lending institutions, many of them
have succeeded. Caste thus morphs into
capital among the Gounders in Tiruppur,
facilitating capital mobilisation for entry
into the sector. However, the unevenness of the process is missed out in the
explanation based on caste as social
capital. All routes of entry are not however available to all Gounders. While
access to land and certain kinship networks constitute the axes of such intracaste variations, need for additional
attributes to transact with global buyers
further excludes sections of Gounder entrepreneurs. Entering into direct exports
requires an ability to interact and negotiate with global buyers, an attribute
that is unevenly distributed among the
entrepreneurs. Lack of formal education
among workers and small peasant-turned
march 8, 2014

entrepreneurs is a key factor confining

most of them to the position of job
workers and subcontractors undertaking
work outsourced by the direct exporters.
Importantly, as we show next the idea of
horizontal intra-caste solidarity mooted
by the caste as social capital argument
collapses in the way caste is deployed by
the Gounder exporter-entrepreneurs to
negotiate market uncertainties.
Power in Intra-Caste Networks
Kinship-based networks do not preclude
unequal exercise of power between different actors. Direct exporters enjoy a
high degree of manoeuvrability vis--vis
the subcontractors. Payment delays, reduction in payment due to minor faults
are all frequent complaints of the subcontractors and job workers against the
direct exporters. Subcontracting of production helps the bigger firms to pass on
the shocks to smaller firms at the lower
end of the hierarchy. The impact of pricecutting is felt more by subcontractors
and job workers.
A telling example is how debiting
has been used by direct contractors to
exploit their own kinsmen who are subcontractors. A single order obtained by
the direct exporter is split into smaller
orders and contracted out to different
subcontractors. Let us assume that one
lot of the entire order has not met the
quality requirements of the importer and
the corresponding amount is deducted
from the amount due to the direct exporter. Subcontractors felt that instead
of passing on the loss to the specific
subcontractor, the direct exporter would
deduct from payments due to all of them.
In the absence of any direct contact with
the importers, the subcontractors have
no avenue to know the extent and nature
of rejection. Power and information
asymmetry due to intra-caste differences
in endowments between the Gounder
exporters and Gounder subcontractors
enables the exporters to mobilise caste to
accumulate at the latters expense.
In fact, as a response to such exploitation of the subcontractors, an association of subcontractor manufacturers
called the Tiruppur Export Knitwear
Manufacturers Association (TEKMA) was
formed in the late 1990s to collectively
vol xlIX no 10

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PERSPECTIVES

negotiate with direct exporters on these

issues and to curtail unhealthy competition among subcontractors that had led
to intense price wars. However, this
association was not quite effective as
subcontractors were worried about loss
of orders from the parent firms. To an
individual firm, establishment of a stable
patron-client relationship with a direct
exporter is strategically more advantageous than collaborating with fellow
subcontractors to bargain with the direct
exporters. The nature of intra-caste relations that we have mapped here is clearly
different from the one based on horizontal
solidarity and cooperation within caste.
Big Gounder capital draws upon internal
caste differentiation to accumulate under
uncertain conditions of global production.
Importantly, kinship networks also
exclude segments of capital that fall outside these networks.
Failed Dalit Entrepreneurship
The exclusivity of such social networks
is best exemplified by the experience
of the state government initiated Tamil
Nadu Adi Dravidar Housing and Development Corporation (TAHDCO) knitwear
industrial estate at Mudalipalayam on the
outskirts of Tiruppur. Meant to improve
the socio-economic status of dalits in the
state, the TAHDCO promoted, for the first
time in the country, an industrial estate
exclusively for dalit entrepreneurs on
100 acres along with the Tamil Nadu Industrial Investment Corporation (TIIC),
with the state government providing a
15% capital investment subsidy and a 5%
share in capital contribution. Given the
lower technological and capital requirements of the garment sector and the substantial growth in demand for knitted
clothing from the Tiruppur region in the
global market, it was anticipated that
the first generation dalit entrepreneurs
would be able to plug themselves into
circuits of global production once the
initial start-up costs are subsidised.
However, even in the initial phase,
there were no takers for close to 50% of
the 100 sheds. Among the remaining
50-odd firms that were started all firms
except five or six suffered losses and
soon stopped functioning. Apart from
some changes in government policy
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

march 8, 2014

them,9

that disadvantaged
a major issue
reported by the entrepreneurs was lack
of access to markets despite having access to high quality imported machinery
for knitting and embroidery. Orders
have to be invariably sourced through social networks, which are mostly controlled by the Gounders. Despite the fact
that many of them had tertiary education and were ex-employees of the public
sector, they could not enter these networks. Entrepreneurs are able to enter
into such networks either through kinship ties or through having worked with
other entrepreneurs over a period. In
the absence of either kinship or other social ties, dalit entrepreneurs found it extremely difficult to run the machines at
optimal capacity. Caste-based networks
thus once again enable some sections to
gain even as they exclude by generating
strong entry barriers. In other words,
while the social capital argument looks
at caste in discrete terms, we have pointed out that caste indeed is relational
one caste creating entry barriers to
other castes.10
Following this failure, in 2007, the
government helped the sick enterprises
to come together to float a new company,
the Tiruppur Apparel Park India, that
would take care of marketing issues.
While there was a revival in the fortunes
of some of the units through this effort,11
marketing efforts could not be sustained.
Outside the TAHDCO estate, a few dalit
workers have tried to become entrepreneurs by taking up job work for
exporters and tier-one contractors. They
purchased second-hand stitching machines
by pooling in some money and undertook only stitching operations for a few
firms during peak season. Being a labour
intensive operation, they started on the
presumption that their capital requirements would be minimal. However, what
they had not bargained for was the need
for working capital to meet the weekly
wage bill of the workers and the possibility of delayed payments by the outsourcing firms. Their ability to rely on
credit was severely undermined by their
lack of collateral. Gounder entrepreneurs by virtue of their access to land
could address this demand much more
easily than the dalits. While some of
vol xlIX no 10

the dalit entrepreneurs have gone back

to work as tailors in the export factories,
a few of them continue to survive as
labour contractors, bringing in teams of
workers to different factories as and
when demand arises. Caste, by setting
the initial conditions of distribution of
endowments like land and education,
reinforces and enhances hierarchies
within a purportedly democratic socioindustrial formation.12
Exclusive and Differentiated
Social Capital
Though identities based on caste, ethnicity
or religion do contribute to reduction in
transaction costs, such identity-based
networks also exclude those who do not
have initial resources or belong to these
networks. Such identities may ensure
efficiency in the market, but an industrialisation process that reinforces such
social divisions may only exaggerate existing inequalities. When an industrial agglomeration like Tiruppur bases its
competitiveness on such networks, it reinforces other identity-based inequalities.
Developmental strategies based on use
of existing caste relations as social capital
clearly reinforce multiple inequalities.
Application of social capital analysis
to caste has, in general, taken two
forms. One assumes caste itself as social
capital; and others claim how different
caste groups achieve by means of certain
social networks and voluntary clubs.
Neither recognises the fact that caste is a
hierarchical system, but assumes castes
to be discrete and horizontal. If castes
are seen as relational to each other, then
inclusion of some groups would mean
the exclusion of others. The process
of either inclusion or exclusion thus
becomes systemic and structural. Even
within the social capital framework,
caste clearly lacks both linking and
bridging capital. Second, across different castes, one needs to ask how much
of social capital is pre-given and how
much is accumulated over time. This is
important since the initial endowment
of social capital might decide future
accumulation of the same. Further,
accumulated social networks of all caste
groups need not deliver equal or similar
outcomes.13
37

PERSPECTIVES

Notes
1 The Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) is the
economic wing ofthe Hindu Right.
2 S Gurumurthy (2009), Is Caste an Economic
Development Vehicle?, The Hindu, 19 January,
accessed at http://www.hindu.com/ 2009/01/
19/stories/2009011955440900.htm, on 31 August 2013.
3 Swaminathan A Aiyar (2000), Harness the
Caste System, The Times of India, 4 June,
http://swaminomics.org/harness-the-castesystem/, accessed at 31 August 2013.
4 Indias Strength Is Its Industrial Clusters, interview with S Gurumurthi, convenor of Swadeshi
Jagaran Manch, 8 April 2003, on rediff.com,
http://www.rediff.com/money/2003/apr/08
inter.htm
5 For a discussion on this, see Ben Fine (2007).
6 http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/
EXTTSOCIALCAPITAL/0,,contentMDK:201851
64~menuPK:418217~pagePK:148956~piPK:21
6618~theSitePK:401015,00.html, accessed at
15 April 2013.
7 This discussion is primarily drawn from Harriss
(2001) and Fine (2010).
8 The elaboration of entrepreneurship formation
in the knitwear industry and the subsequent
discussion on differentiated nature of capital
and power within entrepreneurial networks
is drawn from Vijayabaskar (2001); Raman
Mahadevan and Vijayabaskar (2012).
9 http://www.hindu.com/2005/02/19/stories/
2005021908130500.htm, accessed at 15 April
2013.
10 This is brilliantly captured by B R Ambedkar in
his essay The Annihilation of Caste wherein
he characterises caste as a system of graded
inequalities.
11 http://www.hindu.com/2007/07/23/stories/
2007072359791000.htm, accessed at 15 April
2013.
12 In this regard, Rammanohar Lohias understanding of caste as a form of insurance is hugely

NEW

insightful. As Arun Patnaik (2009) notes, To

cite Lohia: Caste is presumably the worlds
largest insurance for which one does not pay a
formal or regular premium. Solidarity is always
there, when everything else fails. But Lohia
does not fail to notice that caste-based security
for which we may not have to pay any premium
for insurance protection is also excluding men
of other castes who are reduced to be in periphery of such social security system.
13 This argument is applicable in the context of
other inferiorised identities as well. According
to Rodney Hero (2007), social capital is a white
mans story and he finds that racial diversity is
a far more powerful explanatory factor for differential outcomes than social capital.

References
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Cawthorne, P (1995): Of Networks and Markets:
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of Tiruppurs Cotton Knitwear Industry, World
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Chari, Sharad (2004): Fraternal Capital: PeasantWorkers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in
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Damodaran, Harish (2008): Indias New Capitalists:
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(2010): Theories of Social Capital: Researchers

Behaving Badly (London : Pluto Press).
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Hero, Rodney (2007): Racial Diversity and Social
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(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press).
Mahadevan, Raman and M Vijayabaskar (2012):
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Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, paper presented at the
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Patnaik, Arun Kumar (2009): Lohias Immanent
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Putnam, Robert (1994): Making Democracy Work:
Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton NJ:
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Swaminathan, Padmini and Jeyaranjan J (1994):
The Knitwear Cluster in Tiruppur: An Indian
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the Lens (IBTL), 19 October, http://prof-vaidyanathan.com/2012/10/18/india-growth-theuntold-story-caste-as-social-capital/, accessed at
15 April 2013.
Vijayabaskar (2001): Industrial Formation under
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Washington DC.

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