Safer among their own Caste? Everyday Discrimination and Mental Health among Community-dwelling Older Adults in Rural India

Journal : Social Indicators Research

Structural and cultural hierarchies shape chronic stress by reinforcing negative stereotypes and discriminatory practices in everyday social interactions. A growing body of evidence links such discrimination to depression, anxiety and psychological distress. Yet, whether these effects play out the same way regardless of where you live remains an open question, one that is particularly important in societies with deep-rooted social hierarchies like India.

Living among people from the same social group can offer protection, through shared cultural norms, reduced exposure to dominant group bias and a sense of belonging. But such enclaves also carry structural disadvantages, limited access to resources, public goods, and economic opportunities. Whether living among one’s own community buffers discrimination, or compounds disadvantage, has remained contested. This study investigates exactly this question in the context of caste in rural India.

Caste remains one of the most enduring forms of institutionalized hierarchy in the world, reinforced through hereditary occupational divisions, endogamy and spatial segregation. In rural India, caste-based residential clustering is the norm rather than the exception. Marginalized castes, particularly Scheduled Castes (SCs), have been historically excluded from public infrastructure, civic facilities and decision-making processes. These spatial arrangements systematically shape life opportunities, health disparities and psychosocial stress across generations.

These dynamics are especially consequential in later life. Older adults carry the cumulative burden of lifelong exposure to social stressors. Depression and related mental health conditions are chronically underdiagnosed among older adults from marginalized communities. Yet, research on how spatial and social contexts interact to shape late-life mental health, particularly through the lens of caste, remains remarkably thin.

Drawing on nationally representative data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI, 2017-2019) covering over 40,000 rural older adults, this study shows that marginalized caste individuals, particularly those belonging to Scheduled Castes, report significantly higher everyday discrimination and depressive symptoms than upper-caste counterparts. Crucially, living in villages where one’s own caste forms the local majority, substantially reduces discrimination exposure. Everyday discrimination further mediates the caste-depression relationship, identifying social stigma as a key psychosocial pathway linking caste-based social structure to mental health outcomes in later life.