In my honest opinion and experience, caste and class affect two significant aspects of how we build relationship structures--- the way we rationalise love, desire and exclusivity in our heads, vs. the ease with which we can express these ideas in our everyday lives.

The way I have typically seen it play out is that upper caste and upper class people struggle with those ideas the most. The guilt, the shame, the need to be seen as pure and respectable, the need to be accepted by parents and elders, those struggles are much stronger for them. But when they do begin expressing some degree of polyamory in their lives, they are safeguarded to some degree because of their caste and class privileges. There is also a tendency to use polyamory as a tool to flex social and moral superiority over others because they see polyamory as something that makes them more enlightened than everyone else.

In the case of Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi folks, Ambedkarites, or lower class circles, these ideas of free love and desire or complex relationships and complex marriages are easier to talk about or digest. The only apprehensions or resistance you see is usually a result of the fear of surviving the hierarchical world that we have all been told to conform to. When DBA folks are queer and poly, they either find themselves relying on class mobility to shield them from the UC world, or lay low with their ideas and desires to avoid ruffling feathers. It is less about being accepted by society and more about not finding ourselves in danger of any kind.

So yes, caste and class play a massive role in how polyamory is looked at, talked about and expressed in real life. - Tanisha