Introduction
The historical study of caste during the British colonial era in India is a subject that has invited a very substantial degree of attention and scholarly debate. Long believed to have been one of the characteristic features of Indian society and polity, extant scholarship has concerned itself with the definition, theorisation, historicisation, and analysis of the presence and reproduction of this social form both in pan-Indian and regional contexts, and across the major turning points of South Asian history. What is the most convincing way to understand this phenomenon? How do we explain its persistence across a wide variety of spaces and periods of time? How, if at all, was caste transformed with the advent and development of colonial rule in India? These are but some of the broad questions that have framed the voluminous literature on this controversial and complex subject.
Perhaps one of the reasons as to why historical explanations of caste have generated as much heated debate as they have is the general sense of condemnation and embarrassment, if not shame, that has accompanied discussion of this particular mode of organising society and defining identities. For many commentators and observers alike, akin to race and racism, caste is a type of identification that ought to have died out but, clearly, has not. Not just the fact of its existence but its stubborn reiteration have caused no shortage of lament among those predisposed to modernist prejudices, which can be attributed to most historians of the modern era. Where one assigns blame or responsibility for the perpetuation of caste seems to have been an implicit question that has dogged many scholarly investigations into the phenomenon and its varied transformations.
This is especially true if one considers caste in relation to the colonial context of India. As with a range of other dimensions of social life in India during this period, historical enquiry has turned on the question of how to assess and evaluate the effect of colonial rule on caste as social and political form. To put the matter in its starkest terms, was caste, as it has come to be contemporaneously understood, a consequence of British colonialism and its strategies of divide and rule? Or were there continuities in the nature of caste practices that bled into the colonial from the precolonial? Was caste an invention of the British, as one among a variety of techniques of governance over a socially divided population? Or was caste indigenous to Indian society and polity, such that the British accommodated its practice in the forms of government that they instituted during the course of the nineteenth century? Such concerns, to a large degree, have animated arguably the most prominent debate over the history and nature of caste and casteism during roughly the last two decades of the previous century, which is the subject of this brief historiographical survey.
Rather than attempt an exhaustive review of the extensive scholarship on caste in colonial India, certainly not all of which has been framed by the questions raised above, this chapter maps out the terrain of dispute between two broadly conceived historiographical stances: caste as colonial construction, on the one hand, and caste as precolonial continuity, on the other. Although there are undoubtedly areas of overlap and attempted reconciliation between the two positions, the purpose here is to illustrate what has been at stake in articulating these differing approaches and understandings of caste through consideration of several of the representative contributions to this debate. As informed readers will immediately recognise, the aforementioned polarity largely follows a trend observable in scholarly conversations about colonialism itself: the very different interpretations of the phenomenon pursued by historians identified with the so-called Cambridge school, as against those articulated by historians affiliated with the Subaltern Studies Collective and scholars influenced by postcolonial theory and historiography. Instead of pronouncing judgement on the relative merits and shortcomings, the focus here will be to offer a diplomatic treatment of the insights offered by historians positioned on either side of this debate, with the intention of familiarising readers unacquainted with these conversations to the substance of their contentions.
The chapter subsequently turns to reviewing some of the key additions to the historical study of caste by surveying the recent emergence of Dalit studies. Although these works have been informed by the debate described above, they have also attempted to move beyond the terse dichotomies of the same. In so doing, they have charted new avenues for the historical understanding of caste in colonial India, including those that lay greater emphasis on the social and political activism of Dalit historical actors, as well as the varied constraints placed upon them.
The colonial construction of caste
The emergence of the discourse on colonial construction within the subfield of modern Indian history may be attributed to several influences. At the broadest level, there was the change among scholars in the humanities and social sciences over the course of the 1980s in their methodological approaches as well as their objects of analysis. Widely referred to as the cultural and/or linguistic turn, this intellectual transformation witnessed a shift in historians’ interests from questions of social and political history to the terrain of culture and representation. In part a consequence of the growing popularity of structuralist and poststructuralist theory, historians increasingly moved from investigations of social and political forces and dynamics to examining how the past was shaped by the ways in which historical actors made meaning in the world.1 Another key influence was the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which offered a study of the typically denigrating ways in which key Western authors depicted the Orient in their works.2 Although based primarily on how these writers represented the Middle East, the book became a major source of inspiration for scholars studying societies in southern and eastern regions of the world, and how a vast range of colonial administrators, scholars, and literary figures represented the ‘non-West’ in their work in an overwhelmingly deprecating manner that was untrue to the historical reality of these societies. Finally, the philosopher Michel Foucault’s insights into the intimate relationship between power and knowledge were extended to locations far beyond the sites of analysis on which he focused by a wide range of historians of colonialism.3 Whereas colonialism had primarily been understood as a peculiar means of political and economic domination of the West over the rest, Foucault’s analyses of how the making of knowledge, far from being an impartial and objective process, actually veiled the workings of power prompted a sea change in how historians came to understand colonial rule. Although there were certainly other sources of inspiration as well, these disparate strands of scholarly insight combined to produce a major transformation in the historical understanding of colonial contexts. The ways in which Western colonial powers had understood Eastern polities, societies, and cultures came to be seen less as self-evident descriptions rather than as the consequence of a profoundly complex artificial process: colonial construction.
Unarguably the most important interventions concerning South Asia in this respect issued from the anthropologist Bernard Cohn’s generative studies of British colonial rule.4 One of the key contributions of his works was to encourage a major shift in the understanding of colonialism, from its traditionally political-economic and social-historical emphases to an approach rooted in the cultural analysis of the phenomenon, or what would later come to be known as the cultural technologies of rule. A seminal essay by Cohn, ‘The census, social structure and objectification in South Asia’, exerted tremendous influence on subsequent students of the colonial encounter thanks to his powerful analysis of how a seemingly innocuous administrative mechanism such as the census came to have profound consequences for how Indians came to think of themselves – and, as importantly, for how the British colonial rulers came to think about Indians. He showed how the colonial censuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prompted a great transformation in how Indians thought about caste and religion in particular, two aspects of their social lives that British officials believed were the ‘sociological keys to understanding the Indian people’.5 Cohn’s illustration of the ultimately arbitrary, ad hoc, and muddled fashion in which British officials defined the social categories they set out to count in the service of administrative efficiency suggested the imprecision of their efforts. He nonetheless sought to demonstrate that the various attempts to systematise knowledge about the Indian population, and about caste, led, above all, to a flurry of responses from various caste groups, who became sensitised with the passage of time to the questions of precedence and status as they were identified in each subsequent census. The implementation of the census, in sum, contributed to the heightened awareness of caste and community affiliations.
The deeper insight that lay at the heart of Cohn’s essay was that colonial knowledge about Indian society, and the means whereby it was accumulated, collated, and presented, far from being a seamless process, was not only riddled with errors but stemmed from the kinds of prejudices and perceptions British officials had of those they ruled. Furthermore, and as importantly, such processes contributed to quite drastic changes in how Indians came to understand themselves not merely in the colonial past but well into the postcolonial era as well. In short, the formation of colonial knowledge – indeed, its construction – wrought far-reaching effects on the constitution and interpretation of Indian society.6
These arguments were carried forward and given greater empirical heft in a number of studies that followed. Rashmi Pant’s study of colonial ethnography in the Northwest Provinces and Oudh, for example, was devoted to the ‘elaboration of Cohn’s insights through a more systematically textual exposition’.7 Like Cohn, Pant sought to illustrate that the conceptualisation of caste as something that is the sum of ‘castes’ – as the collation of substantial social entities that exist ‘out there’ – owed much to the discourse of the British colonial administration on the structure of Indian society. Frank Conlon’s reflections on the census likewise confirmed the sense that the data contained in the British colonial censuses about caste were far from reliable indices of social reality. As he remarked, his ‘point of view is really that of a frustrated scholar who found that his own particular investigations on the history of a caste could not be much advanced through use of official census ...
