32 SOCIAL SCIENTIST production, and those who work for payment of wages. Marx also identified a number of other classes, eg, landlords, petty-bourgeoisie etc. on the basis of the same criterion of property ownership. This type of class categorisation of people in the Western society was very useful for the analysis of their interdependence and interaction and also in the study of the operation of the economic forces. Marxist thinkers in India have been using this class categorisation for their analysis of Indian society. However, the Indian society had another basis of categorisation of people, namely, the caste. Though 'caste' is believed to have originated in the division of people on the basis of their occupation, it turned out to be hereditary and in course of time it created social groups based on kinship and ethnicity. The hereditary occupations created vested interests in the form of socio-economic monopolies. The worst forms of exploitation emerged under this grouping of the people in India. After independence, though attempts have been made to reduce the exploitation based on caste, the politicisation of 'caste' has strengthened the hold of the caste system in different forms. While many sociologists maintain that caste has a necessary function to perform, namely, in creating conditions for the harmonious functioning of the complex society, Marxists have tended to ignore the relevance of the caste system for an understanding of the operation of the Indian society. As a result few serious attempts have been made to understand the relationship between caste and class and their interaction in the Indian society. For a deeper understanding of the operation of the Indian social and economic systems, it is necessary to study both caste and class and their association. One view in this regard maintains that "classes exist in all castes". This simplistic point of view is based on the assumption that the rich as well as the poor, workers as well as capitalists exist in all castes in India. Another point of view is that class and caste are completely isomor" phic entities and there are certain castes which can be easily classified under one class or the other. According to this naive view we can easily identify certain castes with each particular class. Both these points of view have been based on impressionistic observations rather than on any reliable empirical evidence. Empirical Results In what follows an attempt is made to examine the association between economic status (class) and social status (caste) in Karnataka. In this study, however, the concept 'class' is used in a very specific sense, ie, to indicate the economic status of the people as suggested only by their annual per capita income. The social group considered for the purpose of this study is the Hindus (including Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes). Though there is a controversy over the inclusion of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and also Lingayats in