INDIAN SOCIETY IN TRANSITION 5 the dominant ideology of the exploiting classes, nor even an ideology which retains its hegemony despite constant challenges, but somehow a construct that peryades the consciousness of everybody governed by the caste system. In the name of discovering the differentia specified of the Indian society, this idealistic view abolishes the individual, ideological conflicts, and above all, conflicts between classes.4 It is typical of disregard of real historical change displayed by the adherents of this school that they not only ignore the innumerable challenges to the caste system in India as so many irrelevant bubbles on the stream of time. Even more comically they are not even aware that just when they were gleefully celebrating the discovery of homo hierarchicus in India as against homo equalis in Europe and America that theorists of administrative and organizational behaviour were finding it necessary to conceptualize the nature of hierarchy in modem capitalist firms.5 It is important to emphasize that to challenge the validity of the caste system conceived as simply a state of mind somehow collectively, harmoniously embedded in so-called 'traditional societies' is not to deny the empirical importance of segmentation and incomplete ordering of Indian society in caste groups. The caste system has long invaded autochthonous peoples of the hills and forests and, according to many historians, has provided a method of incorporation of these peoples into the larger network of rule and exploitation spreading across the Indian plains. Even people owing allegiance to non-Hindu religions such as the Buddhists, Christians and Muslims have been affected by the system : they have internalized some of the characteristics of the system and even when they have not done that, they have had to come to terms with it since it prevailed among the majority religious group. It is possible to admit all this and yet argue that a single homogeneous ideology, namely, that of the vamasrama dharma is not sufficient to explain the processes of social change in pro-British and colonial India. For, we know that, to start with, the vast majority of the people were illiterate and did not have easy access otherwise to the texts expounding the ideology. While the ideology could be propagated successfully among illiterate people, it,in fact, was interpfeted anew by a new sect, and what came to be known in modem times as Hinduism was the conglomerate of all these accretions through the various bhasyas of the old texts and new texts propagated by new sets of religious leaders. There were also recurrent movements of protest against not only the dominance of particular castes but against the system itself (many of the protesting groups, of course, were incorporated as new sects). Furthermore, mobility of castes has been characteristic of most of the history we know. People also chose to change their religion rather thanobey the dhar-masastra edicts (so that these dissenting groups could not be incorporated into the system). Since the adherents of this re-mystifying ideology of the caste system are so fond of emphasizing the comparative method, it should be pointed out that the homo equalis of their domain of fantasy, the capitalist countries of the North Atlantic seaboard, is all the time disappearing into the maws of ever-renewed hierarchical structures of authority and control