This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

In Caste, Class and Power, André Béteille recounts the gradual transformation of a social system that, till the end of the nineteenth century, was structured primarily on distinctions of caste—between the Brahmins, the middle-level non-Brahmins and the Adi-Dravidas. Based on extensive field study carried out in a South Indian village, the book presents the different ways of studying the themes of caste and class.