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Literary Review
Cultural technologies of colonial rule
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Identifying the complex relationships between knowledge (the colonised body as ethnographic text), colonial rule and history, Castes of Mind argues that colonialism re-invented caste in a way which was to have a lasting mark on society and its present post-colonial politics, says R. CHAMPAKALAKSHMI.
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CASTE in India has been the subject of many scholarly works as well as public and private debate in the last century and a half. It still eludes understanding, in its role in Indian society in various periods, although it is often "valorised" as the central organising principle in Indian society.
Nicholas Dirks is one of those historians whose work on the Poligars and colonialism has been significant and provided useful insights into the ways in which colonialism constructed "native" institutions and their history for building up its own technologies of imperial rule over the colonised and even shaping its future history to a large extent. The present book is about the historicity of caste and the ways in which caste came into being, and as such been "conditioned by history to condition (and make conditional) any possibility of a future beyond or without caste."
Tracing its career from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual sources of early colonial archive, from the commentaries of the 18th Century Jesuit missionaries to the enumerative obsessions of late 19th Century census, from the ethnological writing of colonial administrators and missionaries to those of the 20th Century western and Indian scholars, Dirks's work marks a historiographical advance in the ways in which colonial rule in India has been understood and characterised, adding new dimensions to the study of modern India.
Dirks recognises two major phases in colonial rule, the early phase in which Orientalist forms of knowledge about the colonised and Christian missionary views dominated, and the later, more important phase, when (after the Mutiny of 1857) direct rule was established and major transformations in the nature of colonial state took place, and concomitantly, new forms of knowledge emerged, and Indian tradition and social institutions, particularly caste, were studied. More importantly, to serve the needs of the colonial state, caste was reconstituted, historicised and understood as fundamental to Indian civilisation, culture and tradition, in effect, caste as India.
The four parts into which the book is divided have titles which reveal the main thrust of the author's thesis (1. The Invention of Caste; 2. Colonisation of the Archive; 3. The Ethnographic State; 4. Recasting India: Caste, Community and Politics). Dirks argues that colonialism invented caste in a way which was to have a lasting and indelible mark on Indian society and its present post-colonial politics. It is not Dirks's argument that caste was invented ex nihilo by the colonisers. His aim is to identify the complex relationship(s) between knowledge (in this case ethnographic categories), power (colonial governmentality) and history (as a sign of the modern). An overview of the author's main arguments may elucidate these connections.
Caste endures and is so significant today because it has been the precipitate of a powerful history, in which colonial role (and rule) has been very significant. Caste became a single term capable of expressing, organising and above all "systematising" India's diverse forms of social identity, community and organisations. It became a core feature of colonial power/knowledge. Caste under colonial rule was refigured as a distinctly religious system and as mediating the private domain. Caste was understood as the quintessential form of civil society, to have always resisted political intrusions and as opposed to the basic premises of individualism.
Colonial views on caste, according to Dirks, were consciously articulated. They ignored or did not recognise that in pre-colonial India, the units of social identity had been multiple, heterogeneous and determined by context (e.g. the temple and the state = king) in a complex, conjunctured, constantly changing political world. It is a striking act of history and studied disregard for ethnographic specificity, as well as a systematic denial of the political mechanisms that selected different kinds of social units as significant, and as most valorised, at different times, that made caste central to social organisation.
The present work builds on those of earlier critics of colonial modernity such as Ranajit Guha and Partha Chartterjee and is influenced by works of Bernard Cohn and Edward Said, on the power of colonial history, the hegemonic character of colonial rule and the history of the colonised. Colonial conquest was not only the result of the power of superior arms and military organisation, but sustained and strengthened as much by the cultural technologies of rule. This was achieved by the creation of an archive, built up through Orientalist approach to archaeology, ritual texts, agrarian structure, land organisation, classification and assessment, anthropological surveys and the enumeration of caste in the census, through which the British set in motion equally powerful transformations. Colonialism played a critical role in the identification and production of Indian tradition, devalued under conditions of colonial modernity. The Orientalist view that in India there was a lack of history and caste was the sign of the lack of historical consciousness dominated all colonial efforts to study the country and its people.
The textual basis of colonial views on caste was the Dharma Sastra (of Manu), taken as the classical statement. Thus the idea that varna — the four hierarchical orders with the Brahmans at the top — could conceivably organise the social identities and relations of all Indians (in the subcontinent) was developed, Dirks argues, under the peculiar circumstances of British rule. While one may agree with Dirks that this is largely true as has often been expressed in most scholarly writings, yet it is necessary to go further back into the pre-colonial past, to see whether, and if so, how, political factors influenced medieval kingdoms like Vijayanagara to revive and reinforce the idea of varna to organise social identities and relations, which is indisputably established by the Vijayanagara inscriptions in south India. Recent studies on Vijayanagara polity have shown that attempts were made to homogenise multiple and complex identity markers and socio-religious organisation through a very conscious use of the Vedic and Sastric texts as foundational to Indian tradition. In pre-colonial south India there appears to have been an oscillation between caste and community identities. Later, caste was appropriated and reconstructed in a different context, i.e., for colonial power, in a new and disembodied form, modern India's apparition of its traditional being.
The canonic importance given to Manu's text encapsulated British attempts to codify not just law but also social relations in a single orthodox "Hindu" — and therefore necessarily "Brahmanic" — register, based on varnasrama dharma, that centrepiece of "Hinduism". For the Orientalists and even for later Sociologists from Louis Dumont to McKim Marriott (and Ronald Inden?), it has taken on a general anthropological significance, with enormous consequences for the refashioning of basic assumptions about both religion and society, i.e., caste by definition as Brahmanic, and opened the Hindu world to charges of Brahman domination and privileges. Thus in Orientalist views the limits of the textual version of the position of Brahmans in society was not grasped.
In early colonial historiography (19th Century) the most influential views on caste were those of the Missionary, who denounced caste as the most serious impediment to the spread of the Gospel, the Indologist, who produced text-oriented views on Indian society and the Orientalist who created stereotypes such as Oriental Despotism and Village Republics. British interest in the institution of caste intensified in very new ways depending upon the documentation projects of the early colonial state around matters of land revenue — to understand local forms of landholding, to reorganise the agrarian order, to resurrect local landlords or the Ryotwari against landlords and the village community, all of which played a critical role in the primary transformations of British rule from the late 18th to the early 19th Centuries.
In the second half of the 19th Century, in the wake of the 1857 rebellion (itself attributed to caste and religious differences) and the establishment of direct British rule (an ethnographic state), colonial ethnology took the place of colonial history. Ethnography became the primary colonial modality of representation linking politics and epistemology. Knowledge became privileged more than any other form of imperial understanding. Attempts to find some method that could produce useful and uniform knowledge for all of India, beyond district gazetteers and manuals, led to compilation of material on caste, in a new kind of empirical quest. A relentless anthropologising resulted in a colonial anthropology and sociology, which had the greatest impact and force in relation to the subsequent colonial and post-colonial history of India.
The extraordinary burden of knowledge and responsibility was arrogated by the coloniser, in order to regulate knowledge by fixing tradition, modifying or reifying custom, differentiating between authenticity and inauthenticity and legislating about "Sanskritisation." Moral discourse and reformist ideology concealed the forms (and effects) of the hegemonic power that the colonial state itself exercised, as seen in the policing of tradition and controlling of custom e.g., rituals like Hookswinging, involving physical torture, as in the earlier debates about sati and human sacrifice among tribes. Caste was defined as the genetic boundary of the Indian body, i.e., the colonised body as ethnographic text. A relationship between martiality and criminality was established and those martial tribes who were disloyal to British rule were denominated as criminal castes (Kallar, Maravar and Bhils), while others were recruited to the military and police, these two being the most crucial agencies of the colonial state.
In the process of defining rituals as either sanctioned by Brahmanical religion or as folk/ popular, Hinduism itself was redefined and a rigid separation between the high classical and the low popular religion made, producing the model of the Great and Little traditions.
The relation of knowledge and power, and the ways in which cultural hegemony was produced are best illustrated in the Aryan-Dravidian racial theory and more significantly by Robert Caldwell, who developed a complex sociology of religion in southern India and contributed to the establishment of a distinctive Tamil culture by challenging the cultural hegemony of the Brahmans. This is the first "valorisation" of a Dravidian race as against the Aryan by William Jones. Interestingly, it was appropriated by the Dravidian nationalists like E.V.R. (Periyar), the rationalist, and others, showing the conversions of meanings of caste in translation and appropriation.
The effects of colonial anthropology were most direct in the census, which was related in fundamental ways to imperial projects of army recruitment, policing, labour migration or even controlling of prostitution. However, problems of fixing the criteria for enumeration led to a vacillation between the varna categories and occupational basis or functional categories, mainly economic. Social precedence varied considerably by region and dominant groups were specific to regions (e.g. Vokkaligas in Karnataka and Vellalas in Tamil Nadu). With the exception of the Brahmans and the untouchables (outcastes) the middle level was extremely heterogeneous and often unidentifiable within the four-fold varna.
Yet, with the racial theories and the authropometric preoccupations of H.H. Risley (like measuring the nose etc.), who dominated colonial sociology for 30 years in late 19th Century, varna and textual authority continued to be used, until 1891, when overlapping of caste, sect (religion — as castes existed among Muslims and Christians too) and locality defeated the purposes of returns leading to the abandoning of varna. There were myriad claims to caste status and position by many groups through origin stories and history of castes. Risley's list of social precedence hence became a political document. Ethnography unleashed a political revolution and rise of caste organisations (e.g. Vanniyar in Tamil region). Despite the apotheosis of ethnography, the colonial state failed to contain caste and custom.
Caste often spins its own career, Dirks argues, for, it continues to haunt the body politic of post-colonial India. Caste has worked to compromise the easy affiliation of national unity and civilisational history. In early 20th Century nationalist politics, what was of greater concern was that a pre-occupation with caste reform would retard nationalist mobilisation and not that caste might be antipathic to nationalism. Caste has simultaneously preserved the patriarchy of pre-modern society and worked to sanction the continued oppression and exclusion of women in national re-imaginings of the past. It was Gandhi who struck a middle ground between revivalist traditionalism and reformist modernism and emphasised that social reform was to be harnessed with nationalism both as an ideal and a practice.
Census gave rise to a competitive politics, making caste as the basis for political mobilisation, as in Maharashtra and the Tamil region. Curiously, the demands both for social status and for better opportunities, economic and political, made by the backward/depressed classes/castes, were contested by upper-caste non-Brahman groups, who sought to keep them in their ritual position of inferiority and subservience. Caste thus became the focus of debates about the character of post-colonial politics.
Both the colonial state and the post-colonial state have allowed caste to leak mischievously into the political world — into populist rhetoric and election manifestoes. The Mandal crisis and the debate of the 1990s on reservation policy were certainly behind the development of a new political rhetoric by the BJP, which stressed that Hinduism was a much better focus for social identity than caste. A general backlash against caste and a certain ambivalence to it are also direct consequences of the politicisation of caste.
Opposition to the politicisation of caste came from serious academics and sociologists. G. S. Ghurye's "path breaking analyses of caste" and his criticism of its politicisation influenced the critical anthropology of Bernard Cohn, while opposition to reservation as harmful and as leading to the hardening of caste differences came from influential Indian sociologists like M.N. Srinivas and Andre Beteille. The former's theory of Sanskritisation and ethnographic speculations were invariably situated in historical contexts. Yet, Sanskritisation, which is not necessarily about emulating Brahman per se, but worked under other agencies (like the Vokkaligas) as the principal modality of social mobility, became the pervasive idiom of legitimation of Brahmanic values in relation to colonial rule as well as national resistance.
Caste became the focus of progressive movements (Dalit and anti-Brahman). The current crisis around Hindu nationalism was anticipated, says Dirks, by the lives of social reformers and activists like Jyotiba Phule, Periyar (E.V.R.) and Ambedkar and their anti-caste and anti-Brahman movements. Their understanding of a relationship between Brahmanism and Hinduism, their questioning of the ideological uses made of the idea of a tolerant majoritarian "Hindu" religion and its incorporative strategies (vis-à-vis the untouchables) aimed at protection of difference rather than protection of weakness. In other words, the Hindus being denominated as a majority community and a homogenous group made up of the adherents of a uniform system, created problems for the minorities and untouchables (outcastes).
Hinduism and the relationship of religion to society have undergone a massive redefinition from the 18th to the 20th Centuries. In the colonial context, it was defined by an upper caste elite in relationship to colonial and national contexts and imperatives. The birth of a new post-colonial Hindu nationalism is a result of the several versions of Hinduism which emerged in reaction to colonial and Oriental characterisation of Hinduism. The most pernicious legacy, Dirks says, is the construction of the idea of a national community persisting long after colonial rule. The peculiar contradictions that are still very much a part of the colonial inheritance for the nation, still work against most progressive post-colonial politics of India today. The colonial past continues to be written into the new world order, in post-colonial developments around liberalisation, globalisation and the later 20th Century triumph of capitalism.
What Dirks says in his book is not entirely new or unknown to other scholarly works on the colonial state and modern India. Yet, what is new in his work is the way in which he has related the making of the colonial state to the making of its archive, criticising the unquestioning acceptance of the archive as a primary source and not as a historical document in itself. Dirks also points out the remarkable continuity between colonial historical writings and the Cambridge school of Indian historians and Oxford's five volume encyclopaedia on the British empire, wherein the emphasis has been on British rule through Indian collaboration, i.e., Indian agency, or colonialism itself as an Indian project, all of which is problematic in Dirk's analysis.
The methodological significance of Dirk's work lies in the author's interrogation of the colonial archive and the specific histories behind the production of the kinds of primary sources that have represented colonial knowledge, even as they have been used to determine and justify colonial policy. The colonial archive, which comprises of Indological and Orientalist views on India, and more importantly bureaucratic writings, court and police records, was no neutral repository. Col. Colin Mackenzie's huge collection, the only project which attempted to rescue south India's pre-colonial history, was ignored, as caste was secondary to it. The origin stories of local lineages contained in this collection were used for caste origins and Mackenzie's voice became muffled and finally lost, even as the colonised voices were written over again and again in the colonial archive.
Critical studies of colonialism are a problem among academia, precisely because of the connections made between colonial history and post-colonial concerns, whether they focus on the status of post-colonial writing or on the epistemological and archival problems of reading colonial sources. Dirks sets out to prove this by taking up the history of caste and show that the complex effects of a colonising power have had such a profound impact on India precisely because of the kinds of mechanisms that produced a new form of caste in modern India. His focus is, therefore, on the salience of the imperial archive and the extraordinary impact of colonial rule to the point that both the sources for the understanding of tradition (caste) and the terms of reference for tradition are implicated in colonial history.
It would be difficult not to agree with Dirks that caste is often reborn in more perilous forms i.e. as a monster. Any transformation of society has to understand the political character of caste. Tradition or civilisation can in no way be recuperated whole by going back to a specific time in the past. The only way is to keep religion and politics as discrete fields of belief unlike in pre-modern kingdoms in which they were not separated. As Dirks says, "Writing has never been a neutral activity. What matters are from where we write, to whom we write, and more generally how writing is positioned geo-politically, socio-historically and institutionally."
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