Figures published by the education charity the Sutton Trust this week showed that only 16% of Britain’s senior doctors and one in 10 of its leading barristers were educated at state comprehensive schools. Among judges in the high court and court of appeal, the proportion was even smaller: 5% had attended a comprehensive, compared with the 21% who had gone to selective schools and the 74% who had gone private. In the military, only 12% of the army’s two-star generals and the equivalent ranks in the Royal Navy and the RAF had attended a comprehensive; among prominent journalists only 19%; among award-winning actors only 23%. In a country where 88% of the school-age population go to comprehensives (and only 7% to fee-paying schools), this represents a hugely disproportionate presence of the privately educated inside Britain’s elites, but then this is also a nation with a future which, to paraphrase the Duke of Wellington, will be won or lost on the playing fields of Eton.

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Where else in the world offers a similar picture of entrenched privilege? A comparison with the ancient Indian city of Allahabad is instructive. Allahabad sits on the north Indian plain in the state of Uttar Pradesh at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers; more than 2.5 million people live inside its metropolitan area; its most famous children include India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It was there in 2012 that the development economist Jean Dreze and his associates studied the continuing hold of the upper castes on India’s public institutions – research that became part of the book (An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions) that Dreze and his fellow economist, the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, published the following year.

By enumerating the membership of local organisations by caste, one of its tables presents a vivid picture of social dominance. Take the 16 office bearers of the Allahabad Press Club, for example. All of them are upper caste, while three quarters belong to the two highest-ranked castes in the city, the Brahmins and Kayasthas. The proportions are almost exactly the same for the 17 leaders of teachers’ unions, and nearly as high for the 28 executive committee members of the bar association. About 90% of the city’s senior doctors are upper caste, between 68 and 80% of its high court judges, and 74 to 85% of its journalists. Overall, in a study that ranges across educational establishments, NGOs and municipal engineers, as well the medicine, the media and the law, Dreze finds that the upper castes hold an average of 75% of the best jobs, while their proportion of the general population is 20%. Substitute the phrase “privately educated” for “upper caste” and in these Indian ratios you can find a smudged reflection of the British elites.

To equate these two things would, of course, be ridiculous. Caste is an ancient system of social division and oppression that has no parallel in the modern world: a stratification that gave us the words “untouchable” and “pariah” can’t be compared to the fortunes of comprehensive school-leavers in the unloved towns of northern England, any more than Brahmin pundits can to old Etonians. The similarity lies in their habit of stubbornly continuing. The injustice of both Indian caste and British social inequality began to concern the public in the 19th century and political causes in the 20th, but the composition of, say, the media in Allahabad and the high court in England would suggest that little has changed.

“It is often argued that caste discrimination has subsided a great deal,” wrote Dreze in 2013, recalling a time when Dalits (untouchables) weren’t allowed to wear sandals, visit temples or sit on a chair in the presence of higher castes. But even though caste had lost “some its earlier barbarity and brutality”, he went on, in Indian society it continued to be an important instrument of power.

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Attempts to destroy or at least modify this power by affirmative action have had unexpected and sometimes perverse consequences, as witnessed this week in Delhi when the city was besieged for several days by the Jats, the farming (or ex-farming) community that lives in the rapidly urbanising countryside at its periphery. Trains, lorries and buses were stopped and burned; 16 people died in the riots; the demonstrators breached an irrigation canal, cutting off water supplies to 10 million Delhi citizens. The Jats are (or were) among the most affluent people of rural north India, powerfully represented in political parties and state governments and traditionally described as upper caste. But now they want to overturn a recent decision by India’s supreme court and be included among the category known as Other Backward Classes, which since 1991 has held a 27% quota of government jobs and higher education places. To be upwardly mobile, in other words, the Jats must first take a step down.

But then everything about the business of caste is complicated. Castes and sub-castes vary from region to region, and within their four broad divisions, run in total to thousands. It was the British who chose to group some of them in a different way – by their poverty rather than their occupation – by referring to them as the Depressed Classes and reserving seats for them in the provincial legislatures that predated independence. A schedule was drawn up of the eligible castes, and out of this came the term, Scheduled Castes (and Scheduled Tribes), which was recognised by India’s constitution when it was drafted as a social-reform-minded document by BR Ambedkar, the country’s first law minister, himself an untouchable. The scheduled castes and tribes were the first to be set a quota of government jobs and public university places – 15% for the castes and 7.5% for the tribes – which set off prolonged protests and lobbying by castes outside the quota that saw themselves as equally disadvantaged. When these, the Other Backward Classes, were eventually awarded their own quotas, almost one government job and student place in every two was in theory reserved for the underprivileged.

You can apply for a caste certificate online by filling in a form. Dropdown menus show the relevant castes in your area and include the equivalent social groups among Muslims; caste may be a Hindu idea, but poverty has never been a Hindu monopoly. If the scrutineers of your form decide you belong to the “creamy layer” – that is, you are caste-poor but cash-rich – you will be rejected.

Supporters of quotas, known in India as reservations, would like the principle extended to the private sector. Opponents say that it simply strengthens caste loyalties and antagonisms, and postpones the day when caste will become a colourful irrelevance, like the clan or the kilt. But that day seems far away. Like Eton and St Paul’s – indeed like the poor – the Brahmins and the Kayashtas will always be with us.