SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN ANCIENT INDIA 21 power in the Harappan cities being of a republican, oligarchic variety.28 There is disagreement about the actual position of urban craftsmen as well. While Puskas29 and R.S. Sharma30 have no doubt regarding urban craftsmen being a part of the ruling class, Childe associates them with the modest urban dwellings of the lower strata,31 even though they were to a large extent producing 'for the market*.32 In a recent article Massimo Vidale expresses the opinion that craft production was under the political control of the urban elites of the Harappa Culture.33 Antonova, Bongard-Levin and Kotovsky find the presence of both impoverished and prosperous artisans within the precincts of the cities.34 The class character of the Mature Harappa Culture is, however, generally recognized.35 Stretching the evidence to make out the existence of caste and untouchability as well in the Harappa Culture, on the other hand, does not seem to have adequate basis. Iravati Karve, a sociologist, first referred to the probability of 'something very like castes' at Harappa and a street exclusively occupied by a 'caste-like group' which had specialized in pounding rice there.36 She also loosely spoke of untouchability as a characteristic of the caste structure from top to bottom.37 Following her, S.C. Malik, another sociologist, imagined the 'roots' of caste and the 'perpetuation of caste status by birth' in Harappan society.38 'Caste class patterns', in his opinion, developed in the socio-economic organization at Harappa and the incoming Aryans adopted them in the process of being Indianized.39 That Malik is not at all serious about the use of the term 'class' here may be gauged from his reference to 'the emergence of complex socio-economic classes' comprising 'the rich and the poor' in the Harappa Culture along with the clarification that 'this is not in the sense of class consciousness or an interclass struggle*.40 And Malik's reference to caste in the Harappan context evoked from A. Ghosh, a much more perceptive, mature and balanced scholar, the apt comment that such hurling of institutions from the known to the unknown to suggest their origin and bringing them down from the unknown to the known to prove their persistence does not carry conviction.41 Suvira Jaiswal, too, questioned the propriety of Malik's tagging caste with the existence of class differences reflected in the settlement pattern of the Harappan cities, which survived even after the cities themselves had disappeared.42 The concentration of various crafts in specific quarters or streets being a normal feature of the Oriental towns up to the present day has been underscored by several scholars.43 Significantly in his edited work, Determinants of Social Status in India ,44 which is presumed to reflect 'a multi-faceted trans-disciplinary approach to the structure of society from ancient history to contemporary times in the Indian subcontinent',45 neither Malik in his Introductory paper 'Determinants of Social Status in India: Problems and Issues',46 nor any other contributor makes a single reference to caste in the Harappan context.