Dig deeper into the data, however, and a stunning figure emerges from the last ten years or so. Among lower-caste women in Mumbai who have had access to an English medium education, the rate of inter-caste marriage shoots up to 35 per cent! Why this sudden spurt in the last decade? After all, English education has been around for a long time; of course more lower-caste students have access to it now, but why has the percentage of inter-caste marriages increased? One possible answer: globalisation has created job opportunities and an environment which requires familiarity with English as an entry barrier, but also breaks down social taboos once people make it inside.

Is this a significant trend? Will more students studying English and working at call centres lead to us gradually becoming a caste-neutral society? Actually, there isn’t enough data to draw that conclusion. This spurt in inter-caste marriages of lower-caste women with an English education has only shown up very recently, that too it has only been studied in one enclave of Mumbai; so no such data exists yet for the rest of India. But it’s an intriguing thought, isn’t it? That access to English and an open economy might do more to end the scourge of caste than the crores spent on statutes and social programmes.

What about secularism, how does our version differ from those in other countries? One fundamental difference is that Indian secularism is about treating all religions equally, whereas the American version, for instance, is about distancing governance from every religion.

... contd.