Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs:

Endogamy Is Optional When You Own the Institutions

Gaurav’s excellent piece on “progressive Dravidianism” pushed me to re-examine a related elite anxiety: the melodrama around intermarriage.  I am happy to be corrected on any of the specifics below, especially where a claim could be tightened with better data.

The standard story goes like this. Elites marry out. Boundaries dissolve. The group dies. This story is intuitively appealing because it treats identity as if it were a biological substance. But elites are not reproduced primarily by blood. They are reproduced by property, institutions, credentials, and networks. In that world, intermarriage is rarely a solvent. It is more often a merger.

The English aristocracy understood this early, and acted accordingly. When the old landed families were cash-poor but title-rich, they did not preserve themselves by sealing the gates. They did the opposite. They married in money. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a whole genre of “dollar princesses,” wealthy American heiresses who married British aristocrats, trading capital for rank. By one commonly cited compilation, between 1870 and 1914, over a hundred British aristocrats, including multiple dukes, married American women; and in the broader European set, hundreds of such transatlantic matches were recorded.  This was not cultural dilution. It was institutional self-preservation by acquisition. The class survived because it treated marriage as capital strategy.

Parsis, the old elites of Bombay, sit inside a similar logic even as they face a genuinely severe demographic problem. India’s Parsi population is widely reported to have fallen from about 114,000 in 1941 to roughly 57,000 by the 2011 census.  That decline is real, and it is grim. But the habit of blaming it mainly on intermarriage misses the more basic driver: family formation itself. A group cannot reproduce if it marries late, marries less, and has few or no children even within endogamous marriages. In that situation, railing against exogamy is like blaming the weather when the engine is missing. Meanwhile, when Parsis do intermarry within the same urban professional class and property ecology, the household that results often remains socially Parsi-coded in Mumbai’s elite landscape: same neighbourhoods, same schools, same institutional circuits, often the same trusteeships and philanthropic boards. The boundary may soften; the elite position usually does not.

Upper-caste Hindus offer an even clearer case, because the scale is larger and the story is less sentimental. Caste endogamy is still strong in India overall, but in urban professional strata it is weakening. Yet upper-caste advantage does not weaken in parallel. The reason is straightforward. The elite is not defined only by who marries whom; it is defined by who inherits what, who gets credentialed where, who has the English fluency, who has the networks that turn education into employment, and who converts employment into assets. In that sense, an intercaste marriage between two elite families is not a breach. It is a consolidation of elite capital into a larger, more socially legible unit. The ritual story changes; the asset story continues.

No one in Bollywood marries within their ‘caste’ anymore, and yet no one disputes that Bollywood itself is a caste.

In the American context, the point becomes harder to avoid because the data is blunt. Among non-Orthodox American Jews who married recently, intermarriage is now the majority pattern; one major survey reports that among non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010, roughly six in ten have non-Jewish spouses.  If marriage boundaries were the decisive determinant of elite continuity, this would imply rapid elite collapse. But what has actually happened is closer to amalgamation with the older mainstream establishment. In practice, a great deal of intermarriage is not “down and out.” It is lateral and upward, into the professional-managerial class and, at the top, into the older American elites who used to be described as WASP. The household becomes less tribally bounded, but it does not become less elite. Titles are swapped for endowments; ethnoreligious boundary maintenance gives way to institutional positioning. The elite remains.

This is why I find “intermarriage panic” so often miscalibrated among property-owning groups. It treats identity as the primary scarce asset. For elites, identity is often a secondary asset, and sometimes a negotiable one. The scarce assets are housing in the right places, access to the right schools, entrée into the right professions, and the family structures that transmit these smoothly. Elites are “small” only demographically. They are not small institutionally. They are overrepresented where leverage is. That overrepresentation is not erased by a mixed marriage; in many cases it is stabilised by it.

“If elite intermarriage were truly eroding elite power, we would expect to see declining elite overrepresentation in property ownership, elite education, and institutional leadership; we do not.”

There is one more point that matters, and it links back to Gaurav’s frame on Dravidian progressivism (and whether it is grounded in truth). When a movement or community insists it is egalitarian while its leadership class quietly reproduces itself, you get a politics of symbolism and an economics of continuity.  The same thing happens in the marriage discourse. Elites talk as if intermarriage is existential because it sounds like moral seriousness. But their actual life choices often reveal a calmer truth: they will police boundaries when it is convenient, relax them when it is profitable, and, above all, continue accumulating power and property in either scenario. The boundary talk is theology. The marriage pattern is strategy.

Unlike property-owning elites, many Urdu-speaking Muslim identities in South Asia are linguistic and cultural rather than asset-anchored, which makes elite reproduction less stable even where group identity feels strong.

If any of this is wrong, I would rather correct it than defend it. The core claim, though, seems hard to escape: for elites, intermarriage is frequently exaggerated as a threat because the real engine of continuity is not endogamy. It is the machinery of inheritance, material and institutional, and elites remain unusually good at keeping that machinery running.

Despite rising intercaste marriage in urban India, upper castes remain massively overrepresented in the judiciary, elite universities, English-language media, and corporate leadership. This is a neutral statement; all elites remain disproportionately represented in elite sectors as a rule of thumb (Norman descendants in Britain come to mind).

Muhajirs (native Urdu-speakers) in Pakistan are already heavily intermarried and will be even more so within the next two generations, much like many Indus ethnolinguistic groups in India (Ranveer–Deepika being the pop-cultural shorthand). Yet no one seriously doubts that they will continue to exercise profound socio-cultural influence for the foreseeable future. They trade genetics for memetics; as refugee elites, Indus Hindus and Urdu-speaking Muhajirs alike, blend into their adopted lands and render a unnatural Partition into a settled historical fact.