Caste, Class, and Urbanization: The Shaping of Religious Community in Contemporary India Samuel Stroope Accepted: 9 January 2011 / Published online: 21 January 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract Building on the implications of qualitative work from India and urbanism theories, I aim to understand whether religious bonding social capital in contemporary India increases with greater urbanization and whether such increases are moderated by caste or social class position. Results from multinomial logistic regression on 1,417 Hindu respondents in a nationally representative sample of India (World Values Survey-India 2001) indicate that religious bonding is fostered by urbanism and that this association is stronger for upper castes. But there is little evidence that social class similarly moderates the association between urbanism and religious bonding. In light of these findings, reli- gious bonding might be better understood as rooted in the interaction of caste dynamics and changes in the urban environment, rather than as a result of greater affluence. The data are also consistent with work underscoring the importance of disentangling social class and caste among Hindus in contemporary India. Keywords India Á Caste Á Stratification Á Religion Á Urbanization Á Community 1 Introduction Social scientists since Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and To ¨nnies have been concerned with the urban environment’s role in shaping human community relations. Although early work in this area maintained that urban life largely erodes the strength of community interaction (Wirth 1938), recent scholars, rather than seeing a deterministic progression from rural gemeinschaft to urban gesellschaft, maintain that gemeinschaft is a kind of experience or ‘‘mode of relating’’ that can exist in a wide array of settings, both rural and urban (Calhoun 1998: 381). In a similar vein, Fischer (1975, 1995) argues that urbanism, in creating critical mass and group boundaries, may help foster subcultural community. Smith et al. (1998: 90) extend this idea, illustrating that urban environments can intensify people’s desire for social interaction within ‘‘morally orienting’’ religious groups. These developments in the S. Stroope (&) Department of Sociology, Baylor University, One Bear Place #97326, Waco, TX 76798-7326, USA e-mail: Sam_Stroope@Baylor.edu 123 Soc Indic Res (2012) 105:499–518 DOI 10.1007/s11205-011-9784-y