1. “Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment of Warren Hastings,” 15 February 1788 in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 302–3.
2. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946; reprint Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 245–46.
3. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, translated by Mark Sainsbury et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 5. Italics in original.
4. Ibid., pp. 18–19.
5. Ibid., p. 20.
6. I use governmentality here in Foucault’s sense. “To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and goods.” In “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 91. When I refer to “colonial governmentality,” I mean the specific forms of governmentality deployed by the colonial state, in which the relationship between sovereignty and bureaucracy is necessarily different from metropolitan forms. For debates over the definition of this term, see David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Fall 1995), pp. 191–200; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Paul Rabinow, French Modern (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
7. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). Pandey’s work was the first to argue systematically that colonial history played a foundational role in the communalization of religious identity in India.
8. Nehru, Discovery of India, p. 247.
9. See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton and Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 1963); idem., Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); idem., Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
10. For my appreciation of the importance of these thinkers, see my foreward to Bernard Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. ix–xvii; and also N. B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), especially my introductory essay, pp. 1–25. As I note in the Coda of this book, Guha does not in fact accept the hegemonic character of colonial rule, though he writes about its cultural effects. And although Cohn assumes the cultural effects of colonial forms of knowledge, he writes far less about them than about the modalities of colonial rule itself. This book takes up Said’s challenge to document the colonial role in the actual constitution of the Orient, something Said himself has not done.
11. For an extraordinary study of the cultural and political effects of colonial rule in Africa, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). For other comparable views of colonial history, see the essays in Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture; Gyan Prakash, ed., After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
12. Cohn, Colonialism, p. 162.
13. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).
14. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 20.
15. For an evocative and nuanced account of this problematic in the context of the history of scientific thought in modern India, see Prakash, Another Reason.
16. G. S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932).
17. N. B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; 2nd ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 4–5.
18. Seeley completely disavowed the idea of a colonial conquest, writing that “Nothing like that what is strictly called a conquest took place.” John Seeley, The Expansion of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 165. See the Coda below for an extensive discussion of Seeley’s argument, as well as its more recent manifestations.
19. Shakespeare, Richard II.
20. See, for example, M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).
21. Chatterjee has defined political society as a space between the state and the people that was produced by governmentality in a register different from the normative sphere of civil society. Although political society emerged out of a form of colonial rule predicated on the cultural difference and political insufficiency of an Indian public—the invidious terms setting the parameters for civil society—it is a space of mediation that for Chatterjee carries the promise of political transformation in a postcolonial setting. See Partha Chatterjee, “Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the Non Christian World,” in Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
22. Thus it is that this book uses the history of caste to stand in for the history of colonialism more generally, in part to follow through one particular story, in part to demonstrate analogues for other similar stories that could be told about the construction of Hinduism, ethnic identity, or the rise of the nation itself.
23. For a provocative study of the relationship between Dalit politics and the gendered character of caste in western India, see Anupama Rao, “Undoing Untouchability? Violence, Democracy and Discourses of State in Maharashtra, 1932–1991,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1999. For some important contributions to our understanding of the relationship of caste and gender, see the work of Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly” Englishman and the “Effeminate Bengali,” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Janaki Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996); Uma Chakravarty, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Tanika Sarkar, “A Book of Her Own: Autobiography of a Nineteenth-Century Woman,” History Workshop Journal no. 36 (1993), pp. 35–65.
1. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, translated by Mark Sainsbury et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 347.
2. The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the Countries Bordering on the Indian Ocean and Their Inhabitants, Written by Duarte Barbosa, and Completed about the Year 1518 A.D. Translated and annotated by M. L. Dames (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1918), pp. 212–13.
3. Ibid., p. 217.
4. Bernard S. Cohn, “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 140.
5. Quoted ibid. See Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India by Jean B. Tavernier, edited by Valentine Ball, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1889).
6. Abu’l Fazl’Allami, A’in-i-Akbari (Calcutta, 1786), vol. 3, pp. 82–84.
7. Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, Translated from the Persian. 3 vols. (London, 1768–1771).
8. Abbé J. A. Dubois; translated, annotated, and revised by Henry K. Beauchamp, as Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies (1897; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906).
9. Sylvia Murr, “Nicolas Desvaulx (1745–1823) veritable auteur de oeuvrs, institutions et ceremonies des peuples de l’Inde, de l’abbé Dubois,” in Purusartha 3 (1977): 245–67; Murr, “Les conditions d’emergence du discours sur l’Inde au Siècle des Lumières,” in Purusartha 7 (1983): 233–84; also see Murr, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire, vol. 2, L’Indologie du Père Coeurdoux: Strategies, apologetique et scientificité. Publications de L’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient 146 (Paris: Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1987).
10. Mark Wilks, Historical Sketches of the South of India, in an Attempt to Trace the History of Mysore, 2 vols. (1810, reprinted with notes by Murray Hammick, Mysore: Government Press, 1930).
11. Mark Wilks, Preface to first edition. Jean Antoine Dubois, Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India; and of Their Institutions, Religious and Civil, by the Abbé J. A. Dubois, translated from the French manuscript (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817). This was the first English edition, translated from the original French manuscript; the first French edition, from a later manuscript, revised and much altered by the author, was published in 1825 under the title, “Moeurs, institutions et cérémonies des peuples de l’Inde.” The first English edition of this later enlarged manuscript was first published in 1890.
12. Beauchamp, Introduction to Dubois, Hindu Manners (1906), p. xv.
13. Ibid.
14. Extract of Public Letter from Fort St. George, dated 25 January 1816, Board’s Collections (BC), No. 541, Indian Office Library (IOL).
15. Ibid. It is likely that A. D. Campbell’s request for revisions would have been deeply worrisome to Dubois, knowing that he had plagiarized the text and that scholars such as Campbell would have had access to Coeurdoux’s text. F. W. Ellis, also attached to the college, had just published what T. Trautmann has called a “blockbuster exposé” of the “Ezour Vedam,” a “fifth” Veda that turned out to have been forged by a Jesuit. See Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
16. BC No. 541.
17. Prefatory Note to new edition by Beauchamp, in Dubois, Hindu Manners (1906), p. vii.
18. Abbé J. A. Dubois, “Letters on the State of Christianity in India” (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1823).
19. Letter from Abbé Dubois on the state of the missions, Erskine Manuscripts, Eur. MSS D. 30, IOL.
20. Rev. James Hough, A Reply to the Letters of the Abbé Dubois on the State of Christianity in India (London: L. B. Selley and Son, 1824).
21. Dubois, “Letters on the State of Christianity in India.”
22. Dubois, Hindu Manners (1906), pp. 28–30.
23. Duncan B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Curzon, 1980), pp. 14–16.
24. Dubois, Hindu Manners (1906), p. 33.
25. Ibid., p. 37.
26. Ibid., p. 97.
27. R. Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), p. 34.
28. Antony Copley, Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact, and Conversion in Late Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 5.
29. Forrester, Caste and Christianity, p. 26.
30. Ibid., p. 34.
31. Ibid., p. 37.
32. Ibid., p. 39.
33. Ibid., p. 42.
34. Report from the Select Committee in the House of Commons, Evidence, III Revenue, Appendices, minute dated November 7, 1830.
35. Quoted in Wilks, Historical Sketches, vol. 1, p. 139.
36. Walter Firminger, Affairs of the East India Company: Being the Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, July 28, 1812 (Calcutta: R. Cambray, 1917–18), vol. 3.
37. Mountstuart Elphinstone, Report on the Territories Conquered from the Paishwa (Calcutta, Government Press: 1821), p. 17.
38. Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of the Permanent Settlement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
39. For the apotheosis of the place of the village in nineteenth-century colonial policy, see the study by Richard Saumerez Smith, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early British Panjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
40. H. H. Wilson, Catalogue of Oriental MSS. Col Mackenzie (Calcutta: n.p., 1828).
41. The Mysore Survey Documents, SIR.
42. Mackenzie’s drawings are in the Map Library of the India Office Library and catalogued in Mildred Archer, British Drawings in the India Office Library, 2 vols. (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1969), see pp. 534–38.
43. James Mill, The History of British India, 8 vols. (London: James Maddon, 1820).
44. See Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 45.
45. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 127.
46. James Mill, “Voyage aux Indies Orientales,” Edinburgh Review 15 (January 1810): 369. Majeed argues that Mill was concerned that the riches of India had been vastly exaggerated due in part, at least, to an Orientalist imaginary, and that British policy was both more expansionist, and extractive, than it should have been under the circumstances.
47. Mill, History of British India, p. 24.
48. Ibid., p. 456, 458. For an incisive analysis of the peculiar limits of Mill’s liberalism, in relation to a more general critique of liberalism and utilitarianism in the context of British imperial blindness, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
49. Mill, History of British India, pp. 471–72.
50. Hastings had laid down in 1772 that “inheritance, marriage, caste and other religious usages or institutions” were to be administered in different ways for Hindus and Muslims, according to the sastras and Islamic jurisprudence, respectively. “But by far the greater part of litigation was never brought before Muslim officials, but was settled by recourse to traditional methods of resolving disputes, which differed according to the caste, the status in society, and the locality of the parties.” J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), pp. 229, 233.
51. Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals. Written chiefly in 1792. Excerpted in Martin Moir and Lynn Zastoupil, eds., The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (London: Curzon Press, 1999), pp. 82–83.
52. Mill, History of British India, p. 472.
53. In Sanskrit, the text is properly titled either Manavadharmasastra or Manusmriti, and informally known as Manu, though it is also frequently referred to as the Manu Dharma Sastra. Sir William Jones’s translation was published under the title of Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu According to the Gloss of Culluca, Comprising the Indian System of Duties, Religious and Civil (Calcutta: 1794). The canonic English translation of the text for the twentieth century was George Bühler, The Laws of Manu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886). For the most extensive English commentary on the text, see the classic work by P. V. Kane, History of Dharmasastra, 5 vols. (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1930–1962). For a more recent assessment of the text and its history, as well as a new translation, see Wendy Doniger and Bardwell Smith, eds. and trans., The Laws of Manu (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1991).
54. Doniger and Smith, The Laws of Manu, p. xviii.
55. Ibid., p. lxi.
56. Mill, History of British India, p. 48.
57. Ibid., pp. 50–51.
58. Ibid., p. 66.
59. See the argument in Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
60. Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842), p. xvii.
61. Ibid., p. 108.
62. Ibid., p. 99.
63. Ibid., p. 368.
64. Significantly, when Elphinstone turned to an inquiry into early Indian history outside the purview of the Orientalist canon, in particular in his chapter on the early history of the Deccan, he relied upon the manuscript material collection by none other than Colin Mackenzie. Mackenzie’s collection did provide an abundance of local historical material, but as we have seen, little in the way of help for opening chapters on the general character of Indian social organization. But the kind of material collected by Mackenzie was in fact of great interest to Elphinstone, who as a practicing administrator was far more concerned than Mill with the establishment of precedent for the reforms he was undertaking in the Maratha country.
65. James Mill, The History of British India, fifth edition with notes and continuation by Horace Hayman Wilson (London: James Madden, 1858), preface, pp. xii–xiii.
66. Max Müller, “Caste, 1858,” in Müller, Chips from a German Workshop (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), pp. 297–356.
67. The general explanation for the outbreak of hostilities in Meerut had been the use of the new Enfield rifle and the rumor that the cartridges were to be loaded with animal fat and that a new method of loading required the use of the mouth. There was imperial convenience and self-delusion, to be sure, in the British belief that the rebellion was caused solely by atavistic superstition and terrified/terrifying alterity—there were many other issues ranging from disciplinary procedures within the army to the annexation of Awadh and the fact that what developed was a general revolt designed to reinstall the power and authority of the Mughal emperor—but there was also genuine concern about the relationship between missionary proselytization and official policy. And there were many missionaries who felt that the “mutiny”—with the horrible images of British women and children attacked by Indians promulgated in myriad genres across India and Britain—afforded an opportunity to win their argument and establish a guiding ideological relationship to the colonial state. See Chapter 7 below.
68. Müller, “Caste, 1858,” p. 300
69. Ibid., p. 301.
70. Ibid., p. 300.
71. Quoted in Forrester, Caste and Christianity, p. 64.
72. See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
1. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York: Dell, 1959), p. 113.
2. Much colonial historiography makes a lot of the supposed ignorance of the British about India, without ever confronting the extent to which the professed ignorance was itself a conceit of a certain kind of epistemological regime. As I will demonstrate in later chapters, the uncritical reading of colonial sources invariably excuses the British in relation to explicit alibis of their rule.
3. See for example, Bernard S. Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 224–54; Anand Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); David Washbrook, “Law, State, and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 15, 3 (1981): 649–721; A. H. Bingley and A. Nicholls, Brahmans: Caste Handbook for the Indian Army (Simla: Government Press, 1897); P.H.M. Van Den Dungen, The Punjab Tradition: Influence and Authority in Nineteenth-Century India (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972).
4. Madras: Government Press, 1868.
5. Home Proceedings, Public Department, February 12, 1870.
6. Public Proceedings, Nos. 32 & 33, March 7, 1870.
7. Public Proceedings, Nos. 144 & 145, September 30, 1871.
8. C. D. Maclean, ed., Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, 3 vols. (Madras: Government Press, 1892), p. 29. Italics added.
9. M. A. Sherring, Hindu Tribes and Castes, 3 vols. (1872; reprint New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1974), Preface, p. iii.
10. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 218–19.
11. An Anglican minister, the Rev. Sherring noted that he had no admiration or respect for caste. He noted that his intense conviction was “that, next to the universal prevalence of the Christian faith, the greatest boon to India would be the absolute and complete renunciation of caste. The author has portrayed the institution as a phase of humanity, and because he considers that every aspect of human society, even the most distorted and ugly, should be fairly represented and fully understood”; ibid., Preface, p. iv.
12. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 220, 225, 226, 231.
13. Ibid., p. 231, 235, 245.
14. Ibid., pp. 274–96.
15. Ibid., p. 280, 296, 292.
16. H. H. Risley, The People of India (1908; 2nd ed. London: W. Thacker, 1915).
17. H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (Calcutta: Secretariat Press, 1891).
18. W. Crooke, Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, 4 vols. (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1896).
19. Risley, The People of India, p. 278
20. Public Department, Madras, Government Order No. 647, June 26, 1901, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras.
21. Risley, The People of India, p. 282.
22. Ibid., p. 291.
23. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (1899; reprint London: Dover, 1956), p. 113.
24. Ibid., p. 142
25. See J. H. Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function, and Origins (London: Oxford University Press, 1946).
26. McKim Marriott, ed., Village India: Studies in the Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
27. See Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992).
28. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, translated by Mark Sainsbury et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
29. The key text for this breakthrough was in fact the Manu Dharmasastra. In my first graduate seminar, we spent the first four weeks reading Bühler’s translation of Manu as if it were the source of all true knowledge about the essential structure of caste relations.
30. These were also heady days in American anthropology, when the idea of culture flowered and seemed to make possible an interpretive methodology for cracking and understanding cultural codes with many of the conceits, if not always the full-blown theoretical commitments, of the structuralism of the time.
31. McKim Marriott and Ronald B. Inden, “Caste Systems,” in Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, 1974). Some time between 1969, when Marriott critiqued Dumont in an important review of Homo Hierarchicus from the perspective of empirical social science, and 1971, when he coauthored the first draft of the Encyclopedia Britannica article with Ronald Inden, Marriott underwent a sea change in his intellectual style and perspective.
32. Ronald Inden has subsequently written an important book about colonial ideology that seeks in part to disavow his role in the “ethnosociology” of India. See Inden, Imagining India (London: Blackwell, 1990).
33. Ronald B. Inden and McKim Marriott, “Interpreting Indian Society: A Monistic Alternative to Dumont’s Dualism,” Journal of Asian Studies 36.1 (November 1976): 191.
34. Ibid., p. 193.
35. “For a Sociology of India,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1 (1957): 7, 9. Italics in original.
36. See, for example, symposia edited by T. N. Madan in Contributions to Indian Sociology 5 (December 1971), and by J. F. Richards and R. W. Nicholas in Journal of Asian Studies 35.4 (August 1976).
37. Edmund Leach, “Hierarchical Man: Louis Dumont and His Critics,” South Asian Review 4.3 (1971): 233–37.
38. Stanley Tambiah, review of Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System, in American Anthropologist 74.4 (August 1972): 832–35.
39. Ravinder Khare, “Encompassing and Encompassed: A Deductive Theory of Caste System,” Journal of Asian Studies 30.4 (August 1971): 859–68.
40. McKim Marriott, review of Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, in American Anthropologist 71.6 (September 1969): 1166–75.
41. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, p. xxxiii.
42. Ibid., p. 74.
43. Ibid., p. 234
44. Dumont, “For a Sociology of India,” p. 9.
45. Ibid., p. 21.
46. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, p. 235.
47. Jan Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 193.
48. It has also seemed extraordinary to me that so many commentators find it possible to address contemporary social, cultural, and political questions in India by primary resort to ancient history, whether textually derived or not. In the case of Europe, for example, no serious commentator would suggest that the present can be explained not only by referring to the ancient past but also by rendering the period between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries either irrelevant, or at best of only limited importance. For another egregious example of this, see the book by the eminent Sanskritist W. Norman Brown, The United States and India and Pakistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). In one of the first books concerning independent India by an American scholar—and that too the founder of the first area studies program in South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania—Brown not only wrote, “The greatest achievement of characteristic Indian civilization are in religion and philosophy” (p. 24) but suggested that this religion and philosophy had been the primary cause of the partition of India and Pakistan (p. 130). He also used his review of ancient Indian civilization as the frame for his own analysis of the depressing condition of agricultural production, the oppressive poverty both in the countryside and the cities, and the many problems confronting the establishment of democratic politics across the subcontinent.
49. Heesterman, Inner Conflict of Tradition, p. 8.
50. For the most recent statement of an ethnosociological approach to the study of India, see McKim Marriott, ed., India through Hindu Categories (New Delhi: Sage, 1990), although there are some dissenting views within. For the best reviews of recent scholarly debates on caste, see Gloria Raheja’s important “India: Caste, Kingship, and Dominance Reconsidered,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 17 (1988): 497–522, and Chris Fuller’s Introduction to his edited volume, Caste Today (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). As is clear from both works, the most significant revisions of Dumont and Marriott have come from scholars who have insisted on the importance of broad historical as well as contemporary political analyses of caste. It is worth noting that recent efforts to treat caste from a comprehensive anthropological perspective—works such as Declan Quiqley’s The Interpretation of Caste (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993)—have continued to take Dumont’s contribution as foundational to contemporary understandings, even when they are critical. Even Susan Bayly’s useful historical review of caste society from the eighteenth century to the present, published after the completion of the present manuscript, argues that “The Social Scientists who will probably have the most enduring impact on the field are therefore those who have taken Dumont’s formulations seriously rather than dismissing them altogether”; S. Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 4, no. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
1. See Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 3–49.
2. Norman Paul Ziegler, “Action, Power and Service in Rajasthani Culture: A Social History of the Rajputs of Middle Period Rajasthan,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Chicago, August 1973.
3. See Surajit Sinha, “State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India,” Man in India, 42.1 (1962): 35–80.
4. I draw here from my earlier monograph, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; 2nd ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
5. André Wink has demonstrated that a similar importance was placed on inams as symbols of rule and structures of landholding in the Maratha kingdom throughout much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See his Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
6. Hiroshi Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan: Peasants, Social Systems and States, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).
7. Uma Chakravarty, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 14, 17.
8. To use M. N. Srinivas’s term. See Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); also Chandra Mudaliar, The State and Religious Endowments in Madras (Madras: University of Madras Press, 1976).
9. The text is called the Maravar Cati Vilakkam, and is included in the Mackenzie manuscript collection. The original is in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras, D. 2743 R. 370 (restored). Quotes here are from my own translation of the text.
10. This is an example of one of the texts collected by Colin Mackenzie that was clearly scripted by one of Mackenzie’s assistants on the basis of oral accounts provided by selected “informants.”
11. Abbé J. A. Dubois, translated, annotated, and revised by Henry K. Beauchamp, as Hindu Manner, Customs and Ceremonies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), p. 25.
12. Ibid., p. 26.
13. Brenda Beck, Peasant Society in Konku: A Study of Right and Left Subcastes in South India (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1982).
14. The components were not, however, as open as suggested by Arjun Appadurai, who argued that the right-left distinction was a root metaphor for factional classification in southern India. Although he showed that there was a great deal of variability in the way lists of right- and left-hand castes were organized across space, time, and account, he could not explain some regularities—he could not fully explain the extent to which some of the divisions did suggest fundamental cleavages in the social and political structure of the time. Arjun Appadurai, “Right and Left Hand Castes in South India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 14.1 (1976): 47–73.
15. Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).
16. Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 51.
17. See T. Muzushima, Nattar and the Socio-Economic Change in South India in the 18th–19th Centuries, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, monograph 19 (Tokyo, 1986).
1. Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India: The Hindu and Mahometan Periods (London: J. Murray, 1841).
2. T. V. Mahalingam, ed., Mackenzie Manuscripts (Tamil and Malayalam) (Madras: University of Madras Press, 1972), p. xviii.
3. Excerpted in William Taylor, Catalogue Raisonné of Oriental Manuscripts in the Library of the (Late) College of Fort Saint George (Madras: H. Smith, 1857), pp. ii, iii.
4. “Biographical Sketch of the Literary Career of the Late Colin Mackenzie, Surveyor-General of India; comprising some particulars of his collection of manuscripts, plans, coins, drawings, sculptures, etc., illustrative of the antiquities, history, geography, laws, institutions, and manners of the ancient Hindus; contained in a letter addressed by him to the Right Hon. Sir Alexander Johnston, V.P.R.A.S., etc. etc.,” Madras Journal of Science and Literature 2 (1835): 264.
5. Ibid., p. 265.
6. W. C. Mackenzie, Colonel Colin Mackenzie: First Surveyor-General of India (Edinburgh and London: W. & R. Chambers, 1952), p. 53.
7. Colonel R. H. Phillimore, The Historical Records of the Survey of India (Dehra Dun: Survey of India, 1945), vol. 1, p. 351.
8. Vol. 68, Survey of India Records (SIR), National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi.
9. Mackenzie, Colonel Colin Mackenzie, p. 269.
10. Letter from Mackenzie to Colonel Montresor, dated July 28, 1800, SIR, vol. 4.
11. Letter dated Madras July 12, 1803, SIR, vol. 42.
12. Mayaconda, for example, was chosen by the raja because when he was hunting with his dogs in its deep woods, a hare miraculously fought off the dogs and chased them back to their master. The raja then discovered that in the days of the Vijayanagara rulers a local chief had died, and his wife Mayaca had thrown “herself into the fire of her Husband’s pyre according to their law.” Because of the virtue accruing to this act, and the transformation of the chief and his wife into “veerooloo” (“persons remarkable for virtue”), the site had become charged with extraordinary properties and powers.
13. Mackenzie, “Memoirs of the Northern Pargannahs of Mysore, Surveyed in 1801 and 1802, under the Provincial Divisions of the Partition of 1799,” Foreign Miscellaneous, NAI, vol. 92, p. 180.
14. Ibid., p. 247.
15. Second Report on the Mysore Survey, letter from Mackenzie to Close, July 12, 1803, SIR, vol. 42.
16. “Memorandum of the Means of Procuring Historical Materials Regarding the South of India,” doc. 65, Box 3, Mackenzie uncatalogued miscellaneous papers, IOL.
17. Ibid.
18. Letter to P. Connor, on Survey in Coorg, January 11, 1816, SIR, vol. 42.
19. Mackenzie, Colonel Colin Mackenzie, pp. 274–75.
20. Mackenzie learned that his general scheme would have to be scaled down at the end of 1801, just after he had finished his initial survey of the northern and eastern frontier of Mysore. As a result, he could not continue to survey the natural history of the country, had to fire a number of his principal assistants, and had his stipend and general establishment cut in half. Despite these problems, and virtually constant problems of ill health, Mackenzie conducted an extraordinarily detailed survey. In addition to preparing general maps of each district and descriptions of salient geographical features, the survey included a census of villages, forts, houses, classes of inhabitants (that is, a breakdown of the population into its constituent castes, tribes, and occupational groups), waterworks, and so on; historical “memoirs” of each district “illustrative of the revolutions and remarkable events of the country and of the origin and succession of the several Rajahs, Polligars, and Native Rulers for the last three centuries”; and “cursory remarks and accounts of the soil, productions, manufactures, minerals, inhabitants, etc.” John Malcolm wrote that the survey contained “a mass of information respecting the geography, history, commerce, revenue, police and population of Mysore which must prove of the greatest advantage to every officer connected with the conduct of administration” (Letter dated November 13, 1803, SIR, vol. 68).”
Mackenzie’s survey, commissioned so soon after the fall of Srirangapattinam, was necessarily limited in nature. At the outset Mackenzie informed Colonel Barry Close, the resident of Mysore, that his survey would not “descend to the minutea of measurements of the quantity of the cultivated and uncultivated lands, with details more properly belonging to an Agricultural Survey,” concentrating rather on “full information of its [Mysore’s] extent, form, and capacity in a Political and Military Light” (Letter to Close dated November 9, 1799, SIR, vol. 41).” Elsewhere Mackenzie noted that “enquiries into the Revenue were altogether avoided, as tending to create an uneasiness, and possible counteraction that would have possibly retarded the progress of the other branches, without deriving sufficient advantages” (Letter to Close dated January 10, 1803, SIR, vol. 44). Some years later, when giving advice to the British surveyor of Coorg, Mackenzie advised him against making “many minute enquiries,” as such would “at first alarm their minds with friendless suspicions” (Letter to P. Connor dated January 11, 1816, SIR, vol. 44; italics added).” In any case, the East India Company had restored the rule of the Wodiyar rajas of Mysore, overthrown forty years previously by the Mysore sultans, and had no direct reason to assemble revenue information. Although Mackenzie sought to collect information about the origins of land tenures, he specifically avoided the facts of production. Nevertheless, at one point the dewan of Mysore expressed his concern that “all further enquiries respecting the number of Ryots and inhabitants of either sex in Mysore may be put a stop to.” (Phillimore, Historical Records, 2, p. 367).
21. Letter to Col. Close, dated May 29, 1801, SIR, vol. 41.
22. January 11, 1816; SIR, vol. 156.
23. History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, 2 vols. (1876; 2nd ed. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899), vol. 2, p. 253.
24. See the catalogues of the Prints and Drawings Room, India Office Library, London. Reference numbers are given here by reference to Mildred Archer, British Drawings in the India Office Library, 2 vols. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1969).
25. Ibid., p. 535, fol. 71.
26. Ibid., p. 537, fol. 64.
27. Ibid., p. 537, fols. 25–28.
28. Ibid., p. 536, fol. 41.
29. “No daring Chief of all the numrous band / Against his Priest shall lift an impious hand / Not even the chief by whom our Hosts are led / The King of Kings shall touch that sacred hand.” The poem makes clear the importance of the purohit or priest in relation to the king rather than as a straightforward sign of Indian spirituality. Ibid., p. 536, fol. 36.
30. Ibid., p. 537, fols. 80, 67, 66.
31. Ibid., pp. 535–37, fols. 12, 15, 44, 48, 79, 35.
32. Ibid., p. 536, fol. 46.
33. Ibid., p. 536, fol. 44.
34. Ibid., p. 536, fols. 32, 33.
35. Ibid., pp. 535–37, fols. 61, 18, 8, 21.
36. Ibid., p. 497, no. 868.
37. Ibid., p. 496, nos. 857, 858.
38. Ibid., p. 537, fol. 65.
39. Ibid., p. 537, fol. 82.
40. H. H. Wilson, Mackenzie Collection (Madras: n.p., 1828), p. 11.
41. Public Letter, October 21, 1807, BC no. 6426, IOL.
42. Extract of Public Consultation, letter from Rennell dated March 4, 1809, in BC no. 6426, IOL.
43. Mackenzie, Colonel Colin Mackenzie, 366.
44. Letter to Board of Control dated March 14, 1807, in BC no. 6426, IOL.
45. Extract of a letter from Major Wilks to John Malcolm, dated February 27, 1807, in BC no. 6426, IOL.
46. Ibid.
47. Mackenzie, Colonel Colin Mackenzie, p. 122; C.O. Blagden, Catalogue of Manuscripts in European Languages Belonging to the Library in the India Office (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), p. 358.
48. “Biographical Sketch of the Literary Career of the Late Colin Mackenzie,” p. 276.
49. Ibid., pp. 276–77.
50. Taylor, Catalogue Raisonné, pp. ix, x n.6.
51. “Biographical Sketch,” pp. 265–66.
52. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 13.145–150 (1844): 421–63, 578–608.
53. Letter from A. Falconer to C. Mackenzie, June 25, 1813, in Report on the Mysore Survey, SIR, vol. 41, July 1803.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Letter from Mackenzie to Government of India dated July 29, 1808, in SIR, vol. 41.
57. “Letters and Reports from Native Agents Employed to Collect Books, Traditions, etc., in the Various Parts of the Peninsula,” Mackenzie Collection, Unbound Translations (housed in the IOL), Class XII, vol. 1, no. 3. The volumes and books are idiosyncratically numbered, sometimes in contradictory ways. For the only index to this collection see the appendix to H. H. Wilson, Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts of Col. Mackenzie (Calcutta: n.p., 1828).
58. “Letters and Reports,” Class XII, no. 40; no. 13.
59. As all of Mackenzie’s assistants corresponded with their employer in English, I use the spellings of names and places as written in the original English texts of the Mackenzie Collection.
60. “Letters and Reports,” Class XII, no. 40.
61. C. V. Ram, “Letters and Reports,” no. 18.
62. Narrain Row, “Letters and Reports,” nos. 26, 27.
63 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (c. 1968; New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 60.
64. For a provocative meditation on, and illustration of, the silence of the archive, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
65. Phillimore, Historical Records, p. 483 n9.
66. “Report of the Committee of Papers on Cavelly Venkata Lachmia’s Proposed Renewal of Colonel Mackenzie’s Investigations,” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, including 3rd August 1836, 7th September 1836, printed in the Madras Journal of Science and Literature, October 1836, pp. 437–42.
67. Archer, British Drawings, no. 586, plate 25, p. 477.
1. “Factory” is the term used for the warehouses and staging points for the collection of goods and commodities traded by the East India Company (not for their production).
2. Munro’s interest in the “Poligars” of southern India was to find ways to unseat them, and make their lands available to British survey and settlement. See W. K. Firminger, ed., The Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812, 3 vols. (Calcutta: R. Cambray, 1918).
3. Mackenzie’s collection was virtually allowed to disappear. After Wilson’s halfhearted catalogue was completed, most of the Mackenzie manuscripts were consigned to a most uncertain fate, shipped back and forth between London and Madras, ultimately housed in Orientalist libraries rather than government archives.
4. In 1795 there was a dramatic fall in prices, making it difficult for zamindars to collect rents from peasants at the old rates. Many zamindars “had no choice but to sell out or see their right auctioned off to other bidders. It was at this time that a number of zamindaris passed by foreclosure of mortgage, sale or auction to bankers and merchants.” Irfan Habib, “Colonialization of the Indian Economy 1750–1900,” In Essays in Indian History (New Delhi: Tulika, 1995), pp. 296–335.
5. Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier, An Open Elite?: England, 1540–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
6. The 1793 regulations entailed no survey, records of rights, or methods of assessment; by 1820, the documentation project of the colonial regime had expanded to the point where even zamindari settlements required the recording of rights, annual assessments of cultivated land, and periodic reassessments.
7. As, for example, in southern India, first in the Baramahal district that had been absorbed from Tipu Sultan in 1792, then in Kanara after Tipu’s final defeat in 1799, and finally in the Ceded Districts that had been handed over by the nizam of Hyderabad in 1800 to “defray” the cost of military support from the Company.
8. This previous paragraph summarizes for the most part the historical argument of Burton Stein, in his Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
9. Munro’s supervisors were particularly surprised by the fact that Munro, who had so criticized the reliance of earlier regimes on inam grants—and praised Tipu Sultan for his extensive efforts to resume inams—ended up using them to reward dominant groups in village politics. What Robert Frykenberg has termed the “silent settlement” was really the recognition on the part of Munro that inam forms were fundamental to the establishment of state power—whether old regime or colonial—in the southern Indian countryside. See Frykenberg, “The Silent Settlement in South India, 1793–1853: An Analysis of the Role of Inams in the Rise of the Indian Imperial System,” in Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia, edited by Robert Frykenberg (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1977).
10. I accept Burton Stein’s argument here that the village form would have been historically more attuned to the old regime revenue system. But see my own work on the character of mirasidar politics in Pudukkottai, in The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; 2nd ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
11. Firminger, ed., Fifth Report. Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; 2nd ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
12. There was some overlap between Mackenzie’s survey of Mysore and the investigations of Francis Buchanan, an Edinburgh-educated surgeon who in February 1800 was commissioned to investigate the “state of agriculture, arts and commerce in the fertile and valuable dominions acquired in the recent and former war, from the late sultaun of Mysore, for the purpose of obtaining such insight in to the real state of the Country, as may be productive of future improvement and advantage.” Letter dated February 24, 1800, from Governor General, extract of Bengal Public Consultation, 14 March 1800, Home Miscellaneous, IOL, vol. 256.
13. Ibid.
14. Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, vol. 2 (Madras: Higginbotham, 1870), p. 317.
15. “The Brahmans of Tulava are allowed a plurality of wives, which must be of the same nation with themselves, but of a different Gotram or family, and which must be married before the signs of puberty appear. The widows cannot marry, but may become Moylar. . . . It is looked upon as disreputable for a Brahman to keep a woman of this kind, and he would lose caste by having connection with a dancing girl, or with a Moylar, that did not belong to a temple; but all such women as are consecrated to the gods cohabit with some Brahman or other” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 268).
16. Lists of this kind seem to proliferate from the early nineteenth century on. As David Ludden has observed, before this local census lists or revenue accounts did not use caste at all, in the form of either jati or varna. See his “Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge,” in Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 250–78.
17. Buchanan, Journey from Madras, vol. 2, January 15, 1801, p. 204.
18. Mackenzie’s Report on the Survey of 1805, Survey General Records, SIR, vol. 42, NAI.
19. “Lectures on Hindu Law” by F. W. Ellis, Erskine Manuscripts, Eur. MSS D. 31, IOL.
20. He used the sthala-purana of Tondaimandalam, inscriptions as well as modern deeds of sale, and other sources in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Sanskrit. See Three Treatises on Mirasi Right by the late Francis W. Ellis, Lieutenant Colonel Blackburne, and Sir Thomas Munro, edited by Charles Philip Brown (Madras: Christian Knowledge Society’s Press, 1852).
21. “Caste is ignored or underplayed throughout, for in the prevalent ideology of the period a ‘community’ is an egalitarian group.” L. Dumont, “The ‘Village Community’ from Munro to Maine,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 9 (December 1966): 67–89.
22. I am grateful to David Ludden for making this census available to me and sharing his sense of its historical formation and context.
23. There seems to be one major difference between this grid and Marriott’s proposals. Whereas Marriott writes about those who are willing to eat in certain houses and not in others, Mackenzie notes those who are “allowed” and those who are “exempted.” In the absence of more to go on, it is difficult to know whether the difference here is just the use of particular words or whether the emphasis is more on food giving than on the Brahmanic principle of not taking food from any deemed inferior. See McKim Marriott, “Caste Ranking and Food Transactions, a Matrix Analysis,” Structure and Change in Indian Society, edited by Milton Singer and Bernard S. Cohn (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), pp. 133–71.
24. C. V. Ramswamy, Pundit, and Son, A Digest of the Different Castes of the Southern Division of Southern India, with descriptions of their habits, customs, etc. (n.p.: printed at the Telegraph and Courier Press, by JeeJeebhoy Byramjee, Printer, 1847).
1. V. D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence: National Rising of 1857 (London: n.p., 1910).
2. See the excellent account of the Great Rebellion in Thomas R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt: India, 1857–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).
3. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, History of the Bijnor Rebellion, translated with notes and introduction by Hafeez Mallik and Morris Dembo (East Lansing: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1972), pp. 122, 124, 126.
4. See David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
5. Letter of 1869 to Sir John Kaye from Sir Syed Ahmed, dated December 14, 1869, quoted in Khan, History, pp. 161–62.
6. Notes by Frere and Outram of March 28, 1860 in Canning Papers Miscellaneous, No. 558, quoted in Metcalf, Aftermath of Revolt, p. 91.
7. See John W. Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India 1857–1858, 3 vols. 7th ed. (London: W. H. Allen, 1876); G. B. Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, 3 vols. (London: W. H. Allen, 1896).
8. C. H. Philips et al., eds. The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1857–1947. Select Documents (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 10–11.
9. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 48.
10. Ibid.
11. Max Müller, “Caste, 1858,” in Müller, Chips from a German Workshop (London: Longmans, Green, 1867).
12. Duncan B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London, Curzon, 1980), p. 57.
13. Ibid., p. 33.
14. Minute of the Madras Missionary Conference on the Subject of Caste (n.p.: printed for the Conference at the American Mission Press, 1850), pp. 1, 4.
15. Calcutta, 1858.
16. Forrester, Caste and Christianity, pp. 55–56.
17. Müller, “Caste, 1858,” pp. 318–19.
18. Ibid., p. 355.
19. See Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
20. Obituary of Robert Caldwell, Times (London), October 19, 1891.
21. Quoted in Reminiscences of Bishop Caldwell, edited by his son-in-law, Rev. J. L. Wyatt, Missionary, S.P.G., Trichinopoly (Madras: Addison, 1894), p. 190.
22. Ibid., p. 191
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Robert Caldwell, “The Languages of India in their Relation to Missionary Work,” a speech delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, April 28, 1875 (London: R. Clay, Sons & Taylor, 1875), p. 9.
26. Robert Caldwell, The Tinnevelly Shanars: A Sketch of their religion, and their moral condition and characteristics, as a caste; with special reference to the facilities and hindrances to the progress of Christianity amongst them (Madras: Christian Knowledge Society’s Press, 1849).
27. Ibid., pp. 17, 13.
28. Ibid., p. 59.
29. Ibid., p. 42.
30. Ibid., pp. 42–43.
31. Ibid., p. 12.
32. Ibid., p. 25.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., pp. 29, 22, 37.
35. Ibid., p. 71.
36. Ibid., p. 69.
37. Robert Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856; London: Trabner, 1875), pp. 49, 51.
38. Ibid., pp. 109, 114, 117.
39. Ibid., p. 577.
40. J. M. Lechler, letter to Church Board, Salem, dated January 13, 1857; box 10, archives of the Council for World Missions, South India; housed in the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
41. W. B. Addis, letter to Church Board, Coimbatore, dated March 31, 1854, ibid.
42. W. B. Addis, letter to Church Board, Coimbatore, dated January 6, 1852, ibid.
43. Quoted in Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 176.
44. See Joan Leopold, “The Aryan Theory of Race,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 7. 2 (June 1970): 281.
45. See Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
46. Ibid.
47. See Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 50–132.
1. October 23, 1891. The Madras Mail was the largest English daily in Madras at the time.
2. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), pp. 88–126.
3. Individual vows, such as those that involved the piercing of the body in fulfillment of various pledges, were never subjected to administrative concern; however, when vows led to activities such as firewalking in public, collective, ritual events, some of the same concerns as we find in regard to hookswinging were also raised. For a superb anthropological account of different rites in Sri Lanka, see Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
4. For an important account of the development of colonial contradictions around public space in northern India, see Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas in the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
5. See Arjun Appadurai, “Right and Left Hand Castes in South India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 14.1 (1974): 47–73.
6. For an account of missionary responses to hookswinging, see the recent book by Geoffrey Oddie, Popular Religion, Elites and Reform: Hook-swinging and Its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800–1894 (Delhi: Manohar, 1995).
7. Judicial Department, Madras, Government Order (G.O.) No. 83, January 14, 1892, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras.
8. See Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, Reports on the Swinging Festival and the Ceremony of Walking through Fire (Madras: Fort St. George Gazette Press, 1854) IOL V/23/139.
9. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 1,257, July 7, 1892.
10. Letter from J. H. Wynne, Acting District Magistrate, to J. F. Price, Chief Secretary to Government, Judicial Department. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 856, May 5, 1892. Kallan is the singular form of Kallar. Kallars were a major landed group that tended to reside in mixed or dry agricultural zones, and had been associated in intimate ways with precolonial chiefs and their military systems. They were associated with criminality because of both their military prowess, amply displayed in early wars with or involving the British, and their forms of land control and local authority, which were based in protection systems.
11. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 856, May 5, 1892.
12. See Oddie, Popular Religion, pp. 47–68; also Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1906), pp. 487–501; 510–19.
13. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 856, May 5, 1892.
14. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 1, 321, July 22, 1892.
15. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 2,662/3, December 21, 1893.
16. Public Consultations, Nos. 35–37, December 21, 1858, Vol. 4, pp. 385–88.
17. Letter dated September 27, 1858, ibid.
18. Quoted in Oddie, Popular Religion, pp. 175–84; see p. 176.
19. Extract from the Minutes of Consultation, Public Department, Madras, February 18, 1854, no. 173, quoted in Reports on the Swinging Festival, p. 327.
20. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 2,662/3, December 21, 1893.
21. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. 1,418, August 27, 1890.
22. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. 990, May 25, 1892.
23. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. 2,662/3, December 21, 1893.
24. This is a view that is echoed in large part by Geoffrey Oddie in Popular Religion. After dismissing those critics of colonialism who merely focus on colonial sources rather than the truths available in them, he emerges with an analysis that could have been developed without any of the sources.
25. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. 2,662/3, December 21, 1893.
26. Ibid.
27. Quotations in this paragraph are ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. For a helpful account of the rise of bourgeois morality in nineteenth-century Britain, see Peter Stallybrass and Allen White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986).
31. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 2,662/3, December 21, 1893.
32. Ibid.
33. Quoted ibid.
34. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 1,284, May 27, 1894.
35. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 2,627, November 2, 1894.
36. See my argument in “From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule,” in Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 175–208.
37. For an example of this view, see Oddie, Popular Religion.
38. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 2,314, September 24, 1894.
39. See M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).
40. The particular example comes from Pudukkottai; see Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). For other examples, see Franklin Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy: Policy and Administration for Hindu Temples in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
41. See the argument in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See my longer critique of this position in “Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories,” in T. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 17–51.
1. I came upon some of these reports in the first instance because they were carefully preserved and in some cases reproduced by Walter Elliot, a long-time civil servant in the Andhra region of Madras presidency who was an amateur ethnographer and prodigious collector. After his retirement from India, Elliot became one of the early promoters in England of anthropological interest in the customs and communities of India. Missionary writings constituted the primary source material for the many papers he gave in learned societies in Britain. In this, Elliot was by no means an exception; during the years leading up to and immediately following the Great Rebellion, missionary reports could scarcely be distinguished from more official (administrative) forms of ethnographic writing about caste and custom. See Robert Sewell, Sir Walter Elliott of Wolfelee: A Sketch of His Life, and a Few extracts from His Note Books (Edinburgh: printed for private circulation, 1896); only 100 copies were issued. See also Walter Elliott’s papers in the IOL, European Manuscripts, D. 318, D. 319, D. 320.
2. IOL, European Manuscripts, D. 318; see, for example, Church Missionary Intelligencer, Vol. 3, No. 8 (August 1852), under the heading, “The Aboriginal Races of India.”
3. One Mr. Cleveland, a British officer who labored in the Andhra highlands, was given the following epitaph in 1851: “Without bloodshed, or the terrors of authority, employing only the means of conciliation, confidence, and benevolence, attempted and accomplished the entire subjection of the lawless and savage inhabitants of the jungle territory of Rajamahal, who had long infested the neighboring lands by their predatory incursions, inspired them with a taste of the arts of civilized life, and attached them to the British government by a conquest over their minds; the most permanent, as the most rational, mode of dominion”; ibid.
4. See “The Aboriginal Races of India.”
5. Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1906), p. 511.
6. Edith Brandstadter, “Human Sacrifice and British-Kond Relations, 1759–1862,” in A. Yang, ed., Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 108–27.
7. IOL, European Manuscripts, D. 318.
8. Due to the monograph of W.H.R. Rivers, The Todas (London: Macmillan, 1906).
9. Paper by Walter Elliot, “On a Proposed Ethnological Congress at Calcutta,” read at a meeting of the British Association of Nottingham, August 28, 1866, IOL, European Manuscripts, D. 319.
10. See Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers, and Men (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).
11. David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 8.
12. Major G. F. MacMunn, The Armies of India (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1911), pp. 119, 135.
13. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University, 1996), pp. 109–11.
14. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great-nineteenth century liberal historian, wrote in his essay on Warren Hastings: “The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedendary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds.” See T. B. Macaulay, “Warren Hastings” (originally published in October 1841), reprinted in G. M. Young, ed., Macaulay, Poetry and Prose (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 386.
15. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, p. 12.
16. R. C. Christie, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Jats, Gujars and Ahirs (Delhi: Government of India, 1937), pp. 1–6; W. B. Cunningham, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Dogras (Calcutta: Government of India, 1932), p. 2.
17. Ridgway, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Pathans (Calcutta: Government of India, 1915), pp. 14–15.
18. Cunningham, Dogras, pp. 89–90.
19. J. M. Wikeley, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Punjabi Mussalmans (Calcutta: Government of India, 1915), pp. 67, 69; R. M. Betham, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Marathas and Dekhani Musalmans (Calcutta: Government of India, 1908), p. 74; J. Evatt, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Garhwalis (Calcutta: Government of India, 1924), p. 43; A. E. Barstow, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Sikhs (Calcutta: Government of India, 1928), p. 151.
20. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, pp. 26–27.
21. Ridgway, Pathans, pp. 48, 87–94, 167, 189.
22. C. J. Morris, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Gurkhas (Delhi: Mittal Government of India, 1938), p. 145.
23. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, p. 30.
24. Betham, Marathas and Dekhani Musalmans, p. 96.
25. George MacMunn, The Martial Races of India (1933; reprinted Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1979). In addition to the books mentioned below, he wrote books such as The Armies of India, The Indian Mutiny in Perspective, The Romance of the Indian Frontiers and The Religious and Hidden Cults of India.
26. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
27. George MacMunn, The Underworld of India (London: Jarrolds, 1932), pp. 19, 21.
28. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, pp. 16–19.
29. There were groups that were classified as criminal all over British India. Even MacMunn, in The Underworld of India, devotes a chapter to the “Criminal Castes and Tribes,” pp. 149–62.
30. Public Records, Madras, G.O. No. 6/6A, January 10, 1893, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras.
31. Frederick S. Mullaly, Notes on Criminal Classes of the Madras Presidency (Madras: Government Press, 1892). The preface says, “Much valuable information has been obtained from Dr. Sherring’s ‘Hindu Castes and Tribes,’ the Abbé Dubois’ ‘People of India,’ Mr. Nelson’s ‘Madura Country,’ and from the various District Manuals.”
32. See Yang, Crime and Criminality.
33. Mullaly, Notes on Criminal Classes, p. 82.
34. Ibid., p. 85.
35. Financial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 86, January 25, 1893.
36. Public Records, Madras, G.O. 647, June 26, 1901.
37. A. Aiyappan, “Hundred Years of the Madras Government Museum (1851–1951),” in Madras Museum Centennial Bulletin (Madras: Government Press, 1951), pp. 1–36.
38. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 57, No. 2,942 (April 9, 1909).
39. Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home Department (Public), May 23, 1901, No. 3219/32. The Proposal for and Ethnographical Survey of India was later published in the first issue of the anthropological journal Man 1.1 (1901).
40. Ibid. Also see Home Department, Public Records, August 1900, Nos. 6, 8, on proposals of the British Association regarding the use of ethnography in connection with the census of 1901. The government allocated substantial funds and announced its intention to name Risley as the Director of Ethnography for India in its Public Proceeds, May 23, 1901, No. 3219/32. The Madras government followed suit by appointing Thurston as the Superintendent of Ethnography for the Madras Presidency in Public Records, Madras, G.O., No. 647, Public, June 26, 1901.
41. E. Thurston, “Syllabus of a Course of Demonstrations on Practical Anthropology Given at the Museum, October 1898,” in Madras Government Museum Building, 2.3 (Madras: Government Press, 1899), pp. 170–80.
42. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), for an insightful analysis of the relation between statistics and prejudice in this kind of research.
43. Edgar Thurston, “The Madras Government Museum as an Aid to General and Technical Education,” Nos. 454, 455, Educational Department, August 1, 1896, India Office Records, London (Appendix E).
44. Thurston, “Anthropology in Madras,” ibid. Appendix F.
45. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 1838, September 9, 1893.
46. Ibid.
47. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 2,454, October 9, 1894.
48. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 1,472, October 9, 1897.
49. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 1,014, July 1, 1898.
50. Francis Galton, the prime mover of eugenics in Victorian England as well as the inventor of regression analysis, was the first to give prominent scientific credence to the use of fingerprinting for marking and identifying individuals. In fact, however, Sir William Herschel, chief administrator of the Hooghly district of Bengal in 1860, was one of the first to use fingerprinting, and—unaware of some experiments taking place in Europe earlier in the century—he discovered the idea in Bengal itself, where finger-prints were routinely used to “sign” documents and deeds well before the British arrived. Galton noted that the use of fingerprinting made particular sense in Colonial India, where officials had special difficulty identifying natives, who were both illiterate and, to the British, indistinguishable. As Carlo Ginzburg, who gives this account in his fascinating essay on the history of detection, writes, “This prodigious extension of the concept of individuality was in fact occurring by means of the State, its bureaucracy and police. Thanks to the fingerprint, even the least inhabitant of the poorest village of Asia or Europe was now identifiable and controllable.” See Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989), p. 123.
51. Edgar Thurston, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1907).
52. Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. No. 792, September 5, 1903.
53. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol. 3, p. 54.
54. Ibid., p. 69.
55. Ibid., p. 64.
56. See Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (New York: Knopf, 1985).
57. Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, 2 vols. (Madras: Government Press, 1906).
58. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol. 1, p. xi.
59. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes, pp. 487–501.
60. Ibid., pp. 407–432.
61. Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency, Submitted to the Right Honorable the Governor in Council of Fort Saint George, on the 16th April 1855 (Madras: Fort St. George Gazette Press, 1855), p. 4.
62. Ibid., p. 15.
63. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
64. See David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule in Madras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).
65. Public Records, Madras, G.O. No. 787, November 2, 1906.
66. J. M. Kaye, The People of India (London: India Museum and W. H. Allen, 1872). The preface to volume 1 lists various sources for the letterpress accounts, including J. R. Melville, Meadows Taylor, J. M. Kaye, and J. Forbes Watson.
67. For a more extensive treatment of Kaye’s project, and of the visual component of late colonial ethnographic representation, see Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
68. Ever since Bernard Cohn argued persuasively that the colonial sociology of India left important legacies for postcolonial social science, and Talal Asad brought together a classic group of essays that demonstrated the close links between colonial rule and anthropology, it has been widely accepted that such work sheds important light on the conceptual and political history of significant areas of anthropological practice. Until recently, however, the historical scrutiny of anthropology has been seen as largely incidental to the kind of anthropology done today, and historical investigations within anthropology have stopped far short of engaging in thorough, and wide-ranging, historical inquiry into the relations between foundational categories and historical processes. See Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, and Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973).
1. Even before the rebellion, the government had been desirous of better, and more systematic, information. For example, in Madras—where the rebellion in any case caused fewer direct concerns—it was believed as early as 1855 that “defective organization” had so far “failed to yield any systematic and comprehensive results . . . for rendering . . . a faithful register of the state of the country as at present existing.” However, it was only with the rebellion that this need became recognized at an all-India level. Madras Public Proceedings, No. 144–145, September 30, 1871, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras.
2. Nelson’s in 1868; Carmichael’s in 1869. J. H. Nelson, The Madura Country (Madras: At the Government Press, 1868); David F. Carmichael, ed., A Manual of the District of Vizagapatam in the Presidency of Madras (Madras: Asylum Press, 1869).
3. Madras Public Proceedings, G.O. nos. 32–33, March 7, 1870.
4. Madras Public Proceedings, G.O. nos. 144–145, September 30, 1871. Richard Temple, chief commissioner of the Central Provinces, prepared a gazetteer for the Central Provinces in 1865, which was held in considerably higher repute than the works of Nelson and Carmichael. But Temple’s ambitions for a separate department of statistics was thought to be too expensive a proposition.
5. W. W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Preface (London: Trubner, 1875–1877), Vol. 1, p. viii. In early 1865, W. W. Hunter had already begun his own researches in the Birbhum collectorate, and in September of 1865, the Bengal government decided to experiment with the idea of using Hunter to do this on a district-by-district basis. The outcome of this inquiry, funded by the Government of India, was Hunter’s Annals of Rural Bengal (1868).
6. Hunter, Statistical Account, p. x.
7. Madras Public Proceedings, G.O. No. 197, March 25, 1892.
8. Despite the official disapproval of Nelson’s manual, it is noteworthy that he provided footnotes (as we have seen in previous chapters) for many of the ethnological endeavors of the next several decades. Nelson was an interesting character whose legal writings also secured major significance in the development of Anglo-Hindu law; in southern India he is chiefly remembered for his anti-Brahman sentiments. In fact, there was a long tradition through the nineteenth century of anti-Brahman feeling among official civilians as well as missionaries. In The Madura Country Nelson made it clear that he valued the literary and cultural achievements of non-Brahmans over those of Brahmans, and believed that the term “Sudra” had been forced on non-Brahmans as a term of denigration. He also endorsed the Abbé Dubois’s account of the customs and rituals of Brahmans—hardly the most sympathetic account, even if from the perspective of one who supported the general principle of hierarchy. Although official ethnography tended increasingly to take a Brahmanic view of caste, Indian society in general, and Hinduism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nelson’s comments reveal an undercurrent of critique that gave additional weight to Caldwell’s excoriation of Brahmans and Brahmanic influence in the south. See J.D.M. Derrett, “J. H. Nelson: A Forgotten Administrator-Historian of India,” in C.H. Philips, ed., Historians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 354–72.
9. See Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 314–39.
10. See Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics and the Raj: Bengal 1872–1937 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1990), p. 31.
11. The imperial gazetteer was a logical extension of Hunter’s first proposed statistical survey. It was designed to provide ready-to-hand information for district collectors and magistrates, who were frequently transferred from post to post. Some old India hands had little faith in Hunter’s enterprise, however. John Beames asked, “How many Collectors in Bengal do you think will care a sixpence for your Gazetteer? How many of them will be bored by the whole thing and hand it over to Babu Ghose or Bose to expiate upon? How many will have time for it or the taste and learning which fit them to be your collaborators?” In his memoirs he was much more vicious: “About this time we received a visit from that vivacious but not very accurate writer, Dr. W. W. Hunter. . . . He was then a small, lean, hatchet-faced man with a newspaperman-correspondent’s gift of facile flashy writing, and a passion for collecting facts and figures of which he made fearful and wonderful use afterwards. The light-headed subalterns of the regiment at Cuttack had amused themselves by inventing for his benefit wonderful yarns, all which he duly entered in his notebook and reproduced in his book on Orissa.” Quoted in R. Emmett, “The Gazetteers of India: Their Origins and Development during the Nineteenth Century,” M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1976.
12. See Bernard S. Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 233–38; Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics, and the Raj, pp. 28–29
13. W. R. Cornish, Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency, 1871, vol. 1 (London: Government Gazette Press, 1874).
14. Henry Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India of 1871–72 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1875).
15. Ibid., p. 41.
16. H. Beverley, Report of the Census of Bengal, 1872 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1872), p. 58.
17. Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India of 1871–72, p. 41.
18. Beverley, Report on the Census of Bengal, 1872, p. 59.
19. Cornish, Report of the Census of the Madras Presidency, 1871, p. 91.
20. Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India of 1871–72, p. 20.
21. Plowden noted elsewhere that “On the subject of caste, the results obtained . . . are by no means commensurate with the labour involved, and, unless some better arrangements are made, it would, probably be advisable to omit the column altogether. . . . In the eight reports about 200 pages are devoted to a description of the various castes, with some 1,370 pages of tables and though there is in them much interesting matter, it is very doubtful whether the information thus gained has at all repaid the trouble taken in the compilation.” Proceedings of the Government of India, Home Department (Public), nos. 76–78, March 1878, NAI, p. 9.
22. See Bernard S. Cohn, “Is There a New Indian History? Society and Social Change under the Raj,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians, pp. 172–99.
23. The total of Hindus by race is 12,530,637, broken down into 654,707 Brahmans, 142,433 Ksatriyas, 932,404 Vaisyas, and 10,801,393 Sudras.
24. J. Lumsdaine, Report of the Census of the Bombay Presidency, 1872 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1872).
25. See Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), chapter on “Caste, Gender, and the State in Eighteenth Century Maharashtra,” pp. 3–42.
26. Beverley, Report on the Census of Bengal, 1872, p. 154.
27. Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India, 1871–72, p. 36.
28. Cornish, Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency, 1871, Vol. 1, p. 116.
29. Cornish exempted two authors from his general characterization: W. W. Hunter and J. H. Nelson. He applauded Hunter for demonstrating that the Brahmans of the present day are not all of uniform origin, and Nelson for explaining that the caste system of Manu never had any vitality in southern India, ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 117.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 118.
33. Ibid., p. 123.
34. Ibid., p. 125.
35. “The later Aryan colonists evidently saw that if they were to preserve their individuality and supremacy, they must draw a hard and fast line between themselves, the earlier and partly degenerated Aryans, and the brown and black races of the country, and hence probably we get a natural explanation of the origin of caste. It was at first essentially a distinction of race” (ibid., p. 126).
36. Ibid., pp. 125, 127.
37. Ibid., p. 129.
38. Nevertheless, it was unclear whether he had any real sense of the superiority of the original Brahman, so thorough was his racial condemnation of the population he was charged to enumerate.
39. W. C. Plowden, Report on the Census of British India, 1881 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1882), vol. 1, p. 277.
40. Lewis McIver, Report on Census in the Presidency of Madras, 1881 (Madras: Government Press, 1883), p. 102.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 108.
43. Ibid., p. 104.
44. Ibid., p. 108.
45. Rashmi Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of Some Literature on the NorthWest Provinces and Oudh,” in Indian Economic and Social History Review 24.2 (1987): 152; see Plowden, Report on the Census of India, 1881, vol. 1, p. 307.
46. Cohn, “The Census,” p. 245; J. A. Bourdillon to Sec. Govt. Financial Department, Bengal, G.O. No. 255I C, June 17, 1881; Proceedings of the Lt. Governor of Bengal, Financial Department, Statistics Branch, Head Census, July 1881; Circular no. 5, May 1881, IOL.
47. J. A. Baines, General Report on the Census of India, 1891 (London: Printed for the Indian Government, 1893), p. 183.
48. Ibid., pp. 123, 127.
49. Ibid., p. 185.
50. Ibid., p. 121.
51. In the 1891 census Baines wrote as follows: In Bengal, “it is said that there is the only opportunity to be found in the present day of judging of Brahmanism where its development has been absolutely unchecked; and something very like the code of Manu is in force in its unmitigated bigotry. It is only within comparatively recent times that the racial distribution of the population has been investigated on the line of modern science. Previous to that time philology had held the field unchecked by observations from other standpoints. A beginning has been made in Bengal by Mr. Risley, who has published anthropometrical data from about 6,000 persons. Most of them are from Bengal, but some were made in the North-West Provinces and the Panjab. Such an extensive field of survey, comprising over 146 millions of inhabitants, cannot, of course, be appreciated from the results of measuring one person in 24,000, but the results show the value of the method, and it is to be hoped that more material of the same sort may be made available.”
52. Risley was obviously the most successful critic of occupation, but he was by no means alone. For example, H. A. Stuart wrote in his report on the 1891 census in Madras that “the connection between caste and function is, in my opinion, entirely a non-Dravidian idea,” thus making clear his sense of the irrelevance of occupational criteria for Madras.
53. Sir Denzil Ibbetson, Punjab Castes (reprint of the chapter on “The Races, Castes, and Tribes of the People” in the Census of the Punjab, 1881 (Lahore, Mubarak Ali, 1974); first published 1883.
54. John C. Nesfield, Brief View of the Caste System of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, together with an examination of the names and figures shown in the census report, 1882, being an attempt to classify on a functional basis all the main castes of the United Provinces, and to explain their gradations of rank and the process of their formation (Allahbad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press), 1885.
55. Baines, General Report on the Census of India, 1891, p. 189.
56. H. H. Risley, only son of Rev. John Holford Risley, rector of Akeley, was born on January 4, 1851. He went to Winchester and Oxford, where he was selected for an appointment in the Indian Civil Service before his graduation in 1872. He stayed in India until 1910, when he was appointed permanent secretary in the India Office, a post he only held for a short time, as he died in September 1911.
57. H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (Calcutta: Secretariat Press, 1891), preface, p. xix.
58. Proceedings of the Government of India, Home Department (Public), no. 3219/32, May 23, 1901, NAI.
59. Baines, General Report on the Census of India, 1891, p. 189.
60. Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, p. i.
61. Ibid., p. xx.
62. Ibid., p. xxii.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., p. vii.
65. Ibid.
66. One of the curious results of Risley’s peculiar fascination with marriage customs and their racial register was his careful defense of Indian customs in matters such as child marriage. “Many hard things have been said of infant marriage, and the modern tendency is to assume that a population which countenances such a practice must be in a fair way towards great moral degradation, if not to ultimate extinction. Much of this criticism seems to me to be greatly exaggerated, and to be founded on considerable ignorance of the present conditions and future possibilities of Oriental life.” Of course Risley was also convinced that the handful of “classes who have adopted more or less completely European ideas on the subject of marriage” would be the ruin of India’s classical traditions. And he was hardly averse to the idea that there be some controlling authority other than the Western ideal of romantic love over the marriage decision, perhaps a coded eugenicist wish of his own to find parallels for the control of unsuitable racial mixing in Europe.
67. All of this material is found in the IOL file European Manuscript E 101, Ethnographical Papers, mostly concerning H. H. Risley.
68. Circular No. 1, July 1886, Reg. No. 4034J–300–16–7–86, European Manuscript E 101, IOL.
69. Report dated September 1, 1886. Microfilm reel, ibid.
70. This letter is included in Risley’s papers but appears to have predated most other inquiries. It is dated July 12, 1881.
71. Ibid., p. 260 in file.
72. Letter from Michael Foster to the Secretary of State for India, December 1899, in Extract No. 3219–32 from the Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home Department (Public)—Simla, May 23, 1901, NAI.
73. Resolution of the Government of India, Home Department (Public) no. 3919, May 23, 1901, Simla, NAI.
74. It is noteworthy to contrast the support of the colonial administration for the collection and analysis of ethnological knowledge with the extremely limited interest of the state, a century before, in the collecting activities of men such as Mackenzie.
75. H. H. Risley, Census of India, 1901, Vol. 1., Part 1., Report, chapter 11, pp. 489–557.
76. Ibid., p. 493.
77. Ibid., p. 538.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., p. 543.
80. Ibid., p. 544.
81. Risley did not believe that caste was confined to India. “It occurs in a pronounced form in the southern States of the American Commonwealth, where Negroes intermarry with Negroes, and the various mixed races Mulattos, Quadroons and Octoroons each have a sharply restricted jus connubii of their own and are absolutely cut off from legal unions with the white races”; ibid., p. 555.
82. Ibid., p. 556.
83. Ibid., p. 539.
84. W. Francis, Report on the Census, Madras, 1901, Part 1 (Madras: Government Press, 1902), p. 171.
85. J. C. Maloney, Report on the Census, Madras, 1901, Part 1 (Madras: Government Press, 1913), p. 159.
86. L.S.S. O’Malley, Report on the Census of India, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and Sikkim, Part 1 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat, 1913).
87. Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Politics, and the Raj, p. 100.
88. J. H. Hutton, Census of India, 1931, Vol. 1, Part 1, Report, p. 433. Like other census commissioners before him, Hutton went on to use his census background in his subsequent professional career. He used an appendix and one chapter from his census report in his book, Caste in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946).
89. H. H. Risley, The People of India (London: Thacker, 1908 [based on Report on the Census of India, 1901, authored by H. H. Risley and E. A. Gait [Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1902]), p. 287.
90. Ibid., p. 293.
91. Ibid., p. 294.
92. Ibid., p. 301.
93. Ibid., p. 281.
94. See, for example, Sumit Sarkar’s thorough discussion of this in his The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973).
95. See Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India (New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 271–72.
96. See Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
1. Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 365.
2. The Hindu, April 9, 1921.
3. M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works (Delhi: Government of India, 1958–1994), vol. 19, pp. 83–84.
4. Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse (New Delhi: Sage, 1989), p. 226.
5. See for example ibid., p. 229.
6. Gandhi, Collected Works, vol. 63, p. 153, vol. 62, p. 121.
7. See Sarkar, Writing Social History, p. 390.
8. Nehru wrote that “If merit is the only criterion and opportunity is thrown open to everybody, then caste loses all its present-day distinguishing features and, in fact, ends. Caste has in the past not only led to the suppression of certain groups but to a separation of theoretical and scholastic learning from craftsmanship and a divorce of philosophy from actual life and its problems. It was an aristocratic approach based on traditionalism. This outlook has to change completely, for it is wholly opposed to modern conditions and the democratic ideal.” The Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989): p. 520. But since Nehru also sanctioned his valorization of Indian civilization through an idealized retelling of Sanskritic and Hindu genealogies, he could only appeal to a political vision in which the democratization of the masses would eviscerate the old regime. His accounts of, and relationship with, Gandhi reveal the full measure of Nehru’s ambivalence and contradiction. See ibid., pp. 358–64; also see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 131–66.
9. See, for example, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
10. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest, and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (Surrey: Curzon, 1997).
11. Sarkar, Writing Social History, p. 376.
12. Ibid., p. 390.
13. Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), p. 64.
14. P. J. Mead and G. Laird MacGregor, Report on the Census, vol. 7, Bombay, 1911 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1912), p. 195.
15. Chakravarti, Rewriting History, p. 65.
16. Rosalind O’Hanlon has demonstrated the diverse intellectual influences on Phule in her Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 142.
17. Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India: 1873 to 1930 (Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976), p. 2.
18. O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, pp. 220–302.
19. H. A. Stuart, Report on the Census, Madras, 1891 (Madras: Government Press, 1894), p. 212.
20. Ibid., p. 213.
21. W. Francis, Report on the Census, Madras, 1901, Part 1 (Madras: Government Press, 1902), p. 171.
22. Home Department (Public), Madras, G.O. no. 857, May 27, 1935, TNA.
23. G. T. Boag, Report on the Census, Madras, 1921, vol. 13 part 1 (Madras: Government Press, 1922), p. 153n.
24. These records were grouped under a special category of communal records: H.F.M. Extracts from G.O.s relating to the Communal Movement, Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras. The following citations are from this collection.
25. G.O. No. 590 (confidential), July 17, 1933; G.O. No. 622 (confidential), March 29, 1936;
26. G.O. No. 817, March 25, 1922.
27. G.O. No. 516, May 1, 1929.
28. G.O. No. 291, March 23, 1931.
29. G.O. No. 1,356, October 20, 1932.
30. G.O. No 329, February 25, 1935
31. G.O. No. 166, January 26, 1939.
32. Ibid.
33. G.O. No. 878, August 28, 1931.
34. Non-Brahman Manifesto, “printed as an appendix to Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
35. Quoted in Shriram Maheswari, The Census Administration under the Raj and After (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1996), p. 113.
36. S. V. Ketkar, History of Caste in India: Evidence of the Laws of Manu on the Social Condition in India during the Third Century A.D., Interpreted and Examined, with an Appendix on Radical Defects of Ethnology (1909; reprint Jaipur: Rawat Publishers, 1979), p. liv.
37. He also made it clear that caste in India was not only unique but also impervious to changes introduced by “foreigners” within India: “Principles antagonistic to the system were forced into society by the swords of the Mohammedans, by the bayonets of the Portuguese, and by the organized missions of Europeans and Americans of the nineteenth centuries, but they all failed to make any impression,” ibid., p. 5.
38. Ibid., pp. 53–54.
39. Ibid., pp. 22–23.
40. Ibid., pp. 21–22.
41. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
42. Including M. N. Srinivas, A. R. Desai, Irawati Karve, Y. B. Damle, and M.S.A. Rao. He supervised fifty-five Ph.D. dissertations and twenty-five M.A.s.
43. G. S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (1932; 5th ed. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1969), p. 1.
44. Ibid., p. 27.
45. Ibid., p. 157.
46. Ibid., p. 160.
47. It is, of course, ironic that Ketkar’s book anticipates the rise of American ethnosociology more than it does subsequent colonial forms of knowledge.
48. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, pp. 287–90.
49. Ibid., p. 283; he went even further to suggest that “Perhaps, in the name of justice and efficiency, the time has come when the interests of the Brahmins have to be protected against the majority party” (ibid., p. 291), though ultimately he dismissed this idea as well because of his argument that special representation was unnecessary and harmful.
50. Ibid., p. 290.
51. Ibid., p. 285.
52. Ibid., pp. 283, 291.
53. For example, in his major work he never raises the question of whether Muslims have caste—a standard question, if not a major preoccupation, for most other ethnographers.
54. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, p. 303.
55. A. R. Momin, ed., The Legacy of G. S. Ghurye: A Centennial Festschrift (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1996), p. vii.
56. Srinivas had a difficult relationship with Ghurye, earning the latter’s displeasure in particular when he went off to Oxford to study with Radcliffe-Brown. Srinivas complained about Ghurye’s despotic proclivities as a supervisor, wryly noting that “while meeting him was a good thing for me, leaving him was better.” See M. N. Srinivas, “Professor G. S. Ghurye and I: A Troubled Relationship,” in Momin, ed., The Legacy of G. S. Ghurye, p. 12.
57. M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 6.
58. Ibid., p. 23.
59. Ibid., p. 7.
60. Ibid., p. 23.
61. Ibid., p. 102.
62. See Chapter 13 below for a discussion of Srinivas’s role in debates over reservation policy.
63. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, p. 147.
64. Ibid., p. 152.
65. E. R. Leach, review of Dumont, British Journal of Sociology 14.4 (December, 1963): 377–78.
66. See M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of Southern India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).
67. See Partha Chatterjee’s argument about the predicament of anticolonial nationalism in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
68. Ketkar, History of Caste, p. 4.
69. When Dumont and Pocock bid farewell to their journal Contributions in Indian Sociology in 1966 (the year of the publication of Homo Hierarchicus), they bequeathed it to T. N. Madan, a prominent sociologist who soon made the New Series of Contributions the most influential anthropological journal published in India. Although the journal has published some of the most important contributions to anthropological research concerning India, it has also maintained an uneasy connection between Indological assertions about the primacy of Indian values, terms, and meanings and sociological commitments to develop a national social science. Madan has been one of the most influential scholars to raise questions about the cultural appropriateness of secularism in modern India, and to suggest in turn that India must acknowledge the special place that religion has had in its history and its culture. But I ask here what kind of “religion” this has been, and what implications the use of this idea of religion has for the emergence of a new nationalist sociology of India. See T. N. Madan, “Secularism in Its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46.4 (November 1987): 747–60.
1. See Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” in A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 228–62.
2. See Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A Couth Indian Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
3. Dilip Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 81.
4. Ibid., p. 82.
5. Kudi Arasu (Madras), May 2, 1925.
6. See Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Change in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separation, 1916–1929 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
7. V. Geeta and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Madras: Samya Press, 1998), pp. 298–99.
8. The Hindu (Madras), April 9, 1921.
9. M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works (Delhi: Government of India, 1958–1964), Vol. 34, pp. 510–11.
10. Kudi Arasu, August 7, 1927
11. Kudi Arasu, August 28, 1927.
12. Quoted in Geeta and Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium, p. 299.
13. “The Self-Respecters contended that the Vellalas’ eyes were partially opened to their cultural grandeur by the English missionary Dr. Robert Caldwell, but still they remained under the spell of Smartaism, which could only be dispelled by the magic wand of the Self-Respect Movement.” Revolt, 18 August 1929, quoted in E. Sa. Visswanathan, The Political Career of E. V. Ramasami Naicker (Madras: Ravi and Vasanth, 1998), p. 357.
14. See Geeta and Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium, pp. 210–16.
15. Ibid., p. 319.
16. Ibid., p. 320.
17. E.V.R. praised Jinnah’s two-nation theory “as the sanest way of settling the baffling Hindu Muslim problem,” and contended that this doctrine was the logical outcome of two years of Aryan-dominated Congress rule in the country: “Two years of Congress regime, which was so Aryan ridden, could not but create a sense of despair in the minds of all non-Aryans. . . . It is but a natural desire on the part of the Muslims to live as a separate nation.” Significantly, however, there is no indication that he made any serious effort to make bridges with the Tamil Muslim community, which was hardly affected by the plan for Pakistan.
18. Geeta and Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium, p. 327.
19. Quoted ibid., p. 522.
20. B. R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,” in V. Moon, ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1. (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1989), pp. 18, 15.
21. Ibid., p. 15.
22. B. R. Ambedkar, “The Annihilation of Caste,” in Moon, ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, vol. 1. pp. 68, 77.
23. “A Vindication of Caste by Mahatma Gandhi,” Reprint of Gandhi’s articles from Harijan, reprinted in Moon, ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, vol. 1, pp. 81–85.
24. Harijan, July 18, 1836. Reprinted with Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste.”
25. Ambedkar’s reply to Gandhi, reprinted in Moon, ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Vol. 1, pp. 89, 93, 94.
26. B. R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables (Bombay: Thacker, 1945), pp. 108, 112.
27. B. R. Ambedkar, The Untouchables (Bombay: Shravasti, 1948), pp. x, xi, xii.
28. Bhagwan Das, ed., Thus Spoke Ambedkar—Selected Speeches, 2nd ed. (Jullundur, Punjab: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1969), pp. 126–38.
29. In The Untouchables, he wrote about Buddhism for the first time as the only Indian religion that was genuinely committed to egalitarianism. Gauri Viswanathan has noted that Ambedkar chose conversion to Buddhism as a commitment to national regeneration; Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Although I share much of her analysis, her interest in the comparative question of religious conversion leads her to a different emphasis in her interpretation of Ambedkar’s conversion. She argues that rather than being primarily reactive, Ambedkar’s chief aim was the refashioning of a moral community. My argument here is that Ambedkar’s conversion was made necessary by, even as it was the ultimate rejection of, the stranglehold of caste. In other words, the conversion was less about religion than it was about the extent to which religion had been implicated in the history of casteism and Brahmanism in India.
1. J. H. Hutton, Caste in India: Its Nature, Function, and Origins (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 194.
2. Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 134. He goes on to note that “The resulting list, then, designates all of those groups who in the view of Parliament require the special protections provided by the Constitution: it defines who may stand for reserved seats and enjoy benefits and reservations for the Scheduled Castes. But it does not necessarily include every person or group that might be considered ‘untouchables’ by any conceivable definition. It omits some groups which historically suffered disabilities (e.g. Ezhuvas) or which would be untouchables in terms of the 1931 census tests. And it excludes non-Hindus (other than Sikhs) who would clearly seem to be untouchables within the judicial test of ‘origin in a group considered beyond the pale of the caste system’ ” (p. 134). Galanter also surveys the change over time in the list, finding it remarkably constant, and consistently bound to an idea the caste should play the primary role in designating the scheduled castes.
3. “Community” in recent Indian usage has come increasingly to stand for a section of the population differentiated by religion or caste or both, such as Muslim/Hindu; Brahman/non-Brahman; caste Hindu/untouchable. “Communalism,” or “communalist,” refers to persons or ideologies that stress community for political purposes or in the context of social/religious antagonism.
4. For full quotations and citations, see Galanter, Competing Equalities, pp. 73–74.
5. G. S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, 5th ed. (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1969), p. 292.
6. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 150.
7. See Galanter, Competing Equalities, pp. 320–21.
8. See Rudolph and Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition, p. 149 n. 49.
9. See Report of the Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, 1982–83 (New Delhi: Controller of Publication, 1984).
10. M. J. Akbar, Riot after Riot (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 45.
11. Galanter, Competing Equalities, p. 166.
12. N. K. Bose, Culture and Society in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), p. 188.
13. Galanter, Competing Equalities, p. 166.
14. Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 218–74, 368–72.
15. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, p. 290.
16. This reckoning constituted a population of 116 million, about 32 percent of the total population of India. This figure did not include women as a separate group, although the commission recommended that all women in India made up what was in effect a backward class; Galanter, Competing Equalities, p. 169.
17. Ibid., p. 172.
18. Quoted in Frontline (Madras), September 1–14, 1990.
19. Galanter, Competing Equalities, p. 173.
20. Quoted in ibid., p. 175.
21. Quoed in ibid., p. 178.
22. Marc Galanter, whose splendid book provides much of the information used in the preliminary pages of this chapter, makes the point that as a result of the dropping of the report, the major story of preferential discrimination in favor of backward groups has been played out in the courts, both at the center and in the states. The bulk of his massive study concerns this legal history.
23. Galanter, Competing Equalities, pp. 186–87.
24. India Today, September 15, 1990, pp. 34, 35.
25. Frontline, September 15–28, 1990, p. 27.
26. Economic and Political Weekly, October 6, 1990, p. 2,231.
27. Ibid., p. 2,234.
28. Rajni Kothari, Caste in Indian Politics (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1970); Kothari, “Caste and Politics: The Great Secular Upsurge,” Times of India, op-ed. piece, September 28, 1990.
29. This had also been argued by the political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph in The Modernity of Tradition.
30. M. N. Srinivas, A. M. Shah, and B. S. Bavaskar, “Kothari’s Illusion of Secular Upsurge,” Times of India, letter to editor, October 17, 1990.
31. Times of India, November 13, 1990. Mehta further argued that it was the external threat of Islam that produced modern hereditary forms of caste.
32. See interview of Veena Das in India Today, May 31, 1991; Dharma Kumar, “From Paternalism to Populism: The History of Affirmative Action in India,” paper delivered to the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, October 1991.
33. By this I refer to the fact that arguments made against the British, and in the context of British colonial rule, are frequently used uncritically in the postcolonial period, when despite the continued salience of national unity as a concern, issues of social justice and redistribution must be addressed in new and less defensive ways.
34. Ashok Guha, “Reservations in Myth and Reality,” Economic and Political Weekly, December 15, 1990.
35. Although not all arguments against Mandal can be automatically designated as unprogressive, the primary political instincts behind colonial critiques and Mandal critiques are fundamentally different, if not completely opposed.
36. Guha, “Reservations in Myth and Reality,” p. 2,718.
37. Dharma Kumar, “The Affirmative Action Debate in India,” Asian Survey 32.3 (March 1992): 290–302
38. See André Béteille, Caste, Class, and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Béteille, Castes: Old and New, Essays in Social Structure and Social Stratification (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969); Béteille, Society and Politics in India: Essays in a Comparative Perspective (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
39. André Béteille, “Caste and Reservations: Lessons of South Indian Experience,” The Hindu, October 20, 1990.
40. This is a point made even more strongly by Dharma Kumar, “The Affirmative Action Debate.”
41. Béteille, “Caste and Reservations.”
42. Op ed. article, The Hindu, October 27, 1990.
43. Ibid.
44. India Today, Special Forum, “Caste vs. Class,” May 31, 1991.
45. Interview with Ashis Nandy, Frontline, October 13–26, 1990.
46. Interview with Upendra Baxi, Frontline, October 13–26, 1990.
47. P. Radhakrishnan, “OBCs and Central Commissions,” Seminar 375 (November 1990), pp. 22–26.
48. Aditya Nigam, “Mandal Commission and the Left,” Economic and Political Weekly, December 1–8, 1990.
49. Shiv Visvanathan, “Mandal’s Mandala,” Seminar, 375 (November 1990), pp. 31–36.
50. The concept of compartmentalization was initially that of Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (New York: Praeger, 1972).
51. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, pp. 300–1.
52. Report of the Seminar on Casteism and Removal of Untouchability, 1955, p. 136. For Srinivas’s general views, see his Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (London: Asia Publishing House, 1962), and Social Change in Modern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).
53. Edmund Leach, ed., Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon, and Northwest Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 6–7.
54. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 222.
55. See Nicholas Dirks, “Recasting Tamil India,” in C. J. Fuller, ed., Caste in India Today (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 263–95.
56. Partha Chatterjee, “Two Poets and Death: On Civil and Political Society in the Non-Christian World,” in Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 35–48.
1. Kancha Ilaiah, Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture, and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya Press, 1996), p. 7.
2. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929; Boston: Beacon, 1957), p. 504.
3. Young India, September 29, 1927
4. Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism,” in Veena Das, Mirrors of Violence (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 90.
5. T. N. Madan, “Secularism in Its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46.4 (November 1987), p. 757.
6. “Caste and the Census: Implications for Society and the Social Sciences,” Economic and Political Weekly, August 8, 1998, p. 2,157.
1. For a commanding summary of the outlines of the economic entailments of imperial rule in India, see Irfan Habib, Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception (New Delhi: Tulika, 1995), in particular the essay, “Colonialization of the Indian Economy, 1757–1900,” pp. 296–335.
2. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883; reprint Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 9, 12.
3. Ibid., p. 165.
4. Ibid., p. 185.
5. Ibid., p. 179; 184.
6. The “Cambridge school” was founded by Jack Gallagher, coauthor with Ronald Robinson of Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961), and early on joined by Anil Seal. In its early years, the late 1960s and 1970s, the school included such figures as Gordon Johnson, Francis Robinson, Christopher Baker, B. R. Tomlinson, and David Washbrook. Christopher Bayly, who was trained at Oxford by Gallagher, among others, only joined Cambridge in 1970.
7. Anil Seal, “Imperialism and Nationalism,” in John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal, eds. Locality, Province and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 12. The theme of collaboration had first been sounded in systematic fashion in Gallagher and Robinson’s Africa and the Victorians.
8. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North India in the Age of British Expansion, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
9. C. A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 319.
10. The words are Robinson’s: Ronald Robinson, “Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism,” in R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), p. 120, quoted in Bayly, Rulers, p. 2.
11. Despite Bayly’s interest in the economic character of empire, he has nowhere refuted the kinds of evidence adduced by Irfan Habib, among others, to demonstrate the massive colonization, and impoverishment, of the Indian economy from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Perhaps Bayly simply assumes that the Cambridge Economic History of India (edited by Dharma Kumar, with the assistance of Meghnad Desai, Cambridge, 1982) had put to rest to the arguments of Dutt and his successors concerning the drain of empire and the deindustrialization of India. It seems unarguable today, however, that Britain’s own economic and political prosperity was integrally connected to its imperial role in India. Wealth was extracted first with the lever of new-world bullion, then through the extortionate use of land revenue to fund the management of Indian politics and the monopolization of the Indian economy; later in the nineteenth century, relying on the opium trade with China, the British used India to bankroll both its imperial and metropolitan dominance. As Habib makes clear in his essay, “Colonialization of the Indian Economy, 1757–1900,” the evidence to document the extraordinary economic exploitation wrought by imperial rule is still overwhelming. For a critique of the Cambridge Economic History of India, see Habib, “Studying a Colonial Economy—Without Perceiving Colonialism,” in his Essays in Indian History, pp. 336–66.
12. C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 46–47. Emphasis added.
13. Bayly, Indian Society, pp. 48, 53, 51, 203–4.
14. David Washbrook, “Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History, c. 1720–1860,” Modern Asian Studies 22.1 (1988): 74, 76.
15. Washbrook’s Marxism seems only to concern class formation in Britain, and as a consequence has the effect of exculpating British “national” responsibility for the consequences of “world” capitalism.
16. Washbrook, “Progress and Problems,” p. 84.
17. These are the very magnate classes who later entered nationalist politics, according to Washbrook. See his “Country Politics: Madras 1880–1930,” in Jack Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal, eds., Locality Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 155–211.
18. Washbrook, “Progress and Problems,” p. 85.
19. Ibid., p. 86. The main example is taken from Frykenberg, Guntur District 1788–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965). When Washbrook notes that “the cultural blindness, internal contradictions, and more meaningful ‘corruptions’ of the regime made successful ‘concealment’ of wealth not only possible but more the rule than the exception,” he is restating Frykenberg’s argument. Frykenberg called his theory of colonial Indian politics the theory of the white ant, local Indian agents being likened to white ants who, invisible to the colonial overlords, managed to consume the colonial pie from the inside out.
20. Washbrook, “Progress and Problems,” p. 87.
21. C. A. Bayly, “The Second British Empire,” in R. W. Winks, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5, Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 70.
22. Robert Frykenberg has put the objection even more stridently. As he wrote in his chapter in the new Oxford History of the British Empire, “At least for the moment, some historians have been listening to the siren song of anti-historical literary criticism. Theory, in the names of current fashions, has become a cloak for dogma, for denial of empirical evidence, and for scorning real events in historical understandings. By whatever name such fashions parade, whether as ‘colonial discourse analysis’, ‘deconstruction’, or whatever else such nihilist impulses might be called, fulminations of this sort cannot be accepted as genuine historical understanding.” One is tempted to ask who is fulminating, but the attribution of such labels as nihilist dogma to work such as that represented in my first book would seem libelous (even if it had appeared without the authority of the editors of the new Oxford History) were the charges not so absurd. Robert E. Frykenberg, “India to 1858,” in Winks, ed., Historiography, pp. 194–213.
23. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 370.
24. Part of the reason for this is a profound unease with “the ‘knowledge is power’ theme of Francis Bacon and Michel Foucault” (ibid., p. 324),” partly because of an interest in strategic and military information rather than knowledge in the larger sense. Of course, specific information of this last kind is both at the service of larger forms of knowledge, and frequently driven by it, even as it is so literally implicated in the larger project of colonial conquest and rule. I might add that Bayly seems almost deliberately to misunderstand the thrust of new work, even as he avoids any direct comment about the work of Bernard Cohn, noting only, in a footnote, that “his seminal article attributed too great a capacity on the part of the British to ‘construct’ Indian society independently of the agency of its social formations and knowledge communities” (ibid., p. 287n).
25. Ibid., pp. 370, 371.
26. Ibid., pp. 47, 53, 143, 49, 313.
27. Ibid., pp. 48, 46, 167.
28. See, for example, James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” reprinted in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 255–76.
29. I have made this argument before, as for example in “From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule,” in Dirks, ed. Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 175–208.
30. Eugene Irschick’s recent book, Dialogue and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), has been held up as the model of a new kind of colonial history by Bayly (see Empire, p. 370, and “The Second British Empire,” p. 71) and Frykenberg, “India to 1858,” p. 212.
31. See David Washbrook, “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 15.3 (1981): 649–721.
32. Bayly, Empire, p. 142. Emphasis added.
33. All of the authors discussed above refer to Said and his “disciples.” The disciples are invariably guilty of far more than the master himself.
34. William Pinch, “Same Difference in India and Europe,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 38.3 (October 1999): 389–407.
35. Pinch makes the extraordinary claim that “what underpins postmodernist-deconstructionist scholarship on colonial India generally” is the “assertion of fundamental difference between European and Indian cognition.” He fails entirely to take into account that most of the colonial scholarship he considers, not to mention the work of both Said and Foucault, has precisely focused its critique on those traditions of thought and institutional practice that have asserted fundamental (that is, essential) difference.
36. Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (January 1992): 141–67.
37. This, in fact, is the common charge, made by O’Hanlon and Washbrook, Aijaz Ahmed, Arif Dirlik, Neil Lazarus and H. D. Harootunian, among others. See my “Post-colonialism and Its Discontents: History, Anthropology, and Postcolonial Critique,” forthcoming in Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates, eds., Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Social Science and Social Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
38. See my “The Home and the World: The Invention of Modernity in Colonial India,” in R. Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 44–63. Also see Gyan Prakash’s cogent critique of Chatterjee in Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
39. Indeed, the focus on Sanskrit texts and ideas works precisely to pose the kind of problems that Ambedkar and Periyar fought against in their own political and intellectual struggles.
40. I have used the term “hegemony” in the colonial context to specify forms of securing consent, whether in public rhetorical arenas or private law cases, that make it clear that “domination” as an analytic term is hardly sufficient to explain the nature of colonial law. Although I used “hegemony” in much of my earlier writing on colonial history, I would accept that there are differences between metropolitan and colonial hegemony. Significantly, I would argue that “hegemony” is useful precisely to counter the trope of “collaboration.” Nevertheless, colonial effects were neither minor nor controlled solely by the colonized. I cannot accept, for example, Guha’s argument that “The advent of Europe’s reason in South Asia as part of a colonial cargo also had a transformative impact, no doubt. But thanks to the indigenous society’s refusal to dignify an alien rulership with hegemony, the transformation shaped up essentially as a process of Indianizing the idioms of modernity imported by the Raj.” My emphasis in this book, of course, has been on the colonialization of the idioms of tradition under the regime of colonial modernity. See Ranajit Guha, “Introduction,” in his A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. xx. Also see Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
41. It is in this context that I would situate the contrast between colonial and metropolitan governmentality. Whereas in my view colonial governmentality shares more with metropolitan governmentality than suggested by Partha Chatterjee, the similarities are always mediated by the complexity of relations of accountability, in short, by the limits of colonial despotism. Colonial hegemony worked precisely to lessen the sense of this contrast (through the promise that British rule would confer equivalent rights to Indians once education succeeded in creating the conditions for civil society), even as that hegemony increasingly came up against the limits of its own fundamental contradictions (from the British response to the rebellion to debates over the Ilbert Bill). The nationalist movement itself struggled for years with the problem of hegemony, ultimately overturning the conditions for limited hegemony, even as it appropriated many of the terms of colonial hegemony in the formation and implementation of nationalist goals. Here see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
42. See, for example, Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton University Press, 2001).
43. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).