Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
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Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. pp. 245, 22.75$, ISBN 0-691-08895-0.
<1> An anthropologist by training, Dirks employs methodologies from a wide range of disciplines to present a critique of British colonialism and its protégé, the caste system. The author lets both the primary and secondary sources speak for themselves to tell the story of how caste under modern colonial conditions came to acquire the status that it had never enjoyed in India's pre-colonial history. The British colonial state made caste the central pillar of Indian civilization and used it to justify its rule by institutionally generating an enormous body of archival data, to prove the authenticity of caste. So caste as it is perceived today is actually a creation of colonial ethnography that got codified in the census reports of the late 19 th century British imperial India. This immensely influenced all the social reform, revivalist, nationalist, communalist, and casteist movements in 19th and 20th century South Asia.
<2> The book fundamentally challenges the late 18th century British 'Orientalist' myths of the timeless, unchanging India whose central premise was the caste, and that there was a divorce between the caste system and political power whereby, despite the tyrannical and despotic rulers (oriental despots), the society survived unchanged through its essential characteristic embodied in the varna shrama dharma as propounded by Manu in his Dharma Shastra. Dirks attempts to show that this essentializing of Indian society and history by colonial state ethnography was fundamentally flawed. He shows how this essentialized notion of caste was actually a creation of the Orientalists that reified the enormous ethnographic material generated by the Christian missionaries and then by the institutions of the colonial state. So the author contends that caste, as we know it today did not exist in the pre-colonial history of India.
<3> The colonial ethnographic knowledge production that essentialized caste as the central pillar of Indian society was first manufactured by the Christian missionaries in their conversion agenda. Missionaries like Abbe Dubois, William Carey, Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and others concluded that caste was the fundamental obstacle to the Christian conversion agenda. The colonial missionaries had basically adopted the Orientalist notion of defining Indian civilization in terms of caste, in order to justify the British colonial conquest of civilizing the backward and barbaric Indians who were steeped in the superstitious inequality and oppression of caste, of course completely ignoring the fact that hierarchy also permeated the Christian church and its patriarchal establishment.
<4> The book shows that the British orientalists had long ago canonized Manu as the centerpiece of Hindu law. Basing their information on the microscopic brahmanical elite, the Orientalists touted the Rg Veda and Manu as the final testament to the origin of the caste system. The position of the Brahman was also made central to Hindu society. So there was now no need for the colonizers to deal with any other group. Also all the writings on caste and religion then became textually based. Orientalists like Max Muller even associated caste with race to argue that the pristine Hindu India of ancient times degenerated under the Muslim 'dark age' of medieval barbarism, thus exposing his own Christian prejudice against Islam.
<5> Dirks critically suggests that Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus was in fact an extension of the British orientalist construction of caste in the late 18 th century. Citing the examples of the pre-colonial south India kingdom of Pudukkottai in the 18 th century and the Vijayanagara Empire in the 15 th century, he states that religion and politics were so thoroughly mixed that the kings didn't necessarily depend on Brahmans to exercise political power. This stands in direct contradiction to the Orientalist myth that religion and politics were two separate spheres in Indian history. So the textual view of early India promoted by the Orientalists was based on false premises.
<6> The political power was dispersed according to the political hierarchy of the king in pre-colonial times, in which Brahmans were just one of several players in the game. But when the British colonial regime promoted caste in the name of tradition, the Brahmans acquired a position of power and status, which they did not have before. The Brahmanical collaboration with the regime of the colonial political power subverted many of the aspects of the pre-colonial society. For example, the Kallar lower caste kings of the Tondaiman dynasty of Pudukkottai had always honored their women with property and inheritance rights, including the right of widow remarriage and divorce. But when Pudukkottai became a British Princely State in the nineteenth century, the brahmans introduced their conservative patriarchy and misogynist laws that took away the rights which women had enjoyed during the pre-colonial times.
<7> So Dirks makes the case that caste was never central to the pre-colonial social and political culture of South Asia. The early colonial data collectors of the East India Company in the 18 th and 19 th century like Colin Mackenzie, who collected an enormous amount of historical material on Peninsular India in his long career spanning thirty-eight years (1783-1821), says almost nothing about caste. Consequently, the Mackenzie collection was silently dropped by the colonial state from further reference. Here Dirks is certainly not suggesting that Colin Mackenzie's outlook was somehow different from all other colonizers of his kind, but that his patronizing imperialist civilizing mission of preserving the native Indian traditions by creating an archive did not mesh with the broader imperial agenda of the colonial state to essentialize caste as the central characteristic of Indian society.
<8> Yet pre-colonial India could not be put into the straight jacket of the caste system because of its highly differentiated social landscape. One early colonial official, Francis Ellis, observed that definite mirasi property rights existed in the Tondaimandalam region of the Tamil country, where tenants were the true property holders of agricultural lands and not at the will of the king. Thus, Dirks makes clear that the British colonial assumption of a pre-British oriental despotic king holding an absolute control over all the land was fundamentally flawed.
<9> When exactly then did caste acquire the primary importance as the justification for the existence and continuation of the colonial state? According to Dirks, until the Great Rebellion of 1857, the colonial preoccupation was with revenues, laws, and the economy. But after 1857, the colonial government shifted its focus to systematically promote the idea of 'colonial difference' based on race and caste. The Christian missionaries who had amassed enormous data in these two areas were now "consigned to the wings of the imperial theater" (133). They became tools of the British imperial project of collecting and computing ethnographic data for the state. Robert Caldwell, the missionary who came to south India in 1838, developed the language theory of race by promoting Tamil as a distinctly Dravidian tongue vis-à-vis the Aryan Sanskrit group of languages. In other words, he created the racial divide between Aryan as a white and the Dravidians as a dark race. This eventually became the ideological basis for the anti-brahman movement in the Tamil country in the 1920s and 30s, which sought support from the colonial state against the mainstream anti-imperialist nationalist movement of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi. So the invocation of caste proved to be a divisive tool in the hand of British colonizers to be used against the rising Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century.
<10> But the great transition after the Great Rebellion of 1857 meant that the colonial state began to increasingly acquire an ethnographic character, while pretending to keep a non-intervention posture. The British maintained that they were upholding the customs and tradition of the Indian people. But in fact what they upheld was the tradition and custom as defined by their Brahman collaborators. Dirks argues that anything which happened beyond the limits of the limited definition of tradition, was changed in such a way as to appear in tune with custom and tradition after all. In this manner, the British used coercion to maintain a system, which suited their rule and strengthened their authority. In the name of protecting tradition, they re-engineered customs by producing colonial knowledge of power and control.
<11> How was the colonial control over knowledge and power? By creating the categories of 'martial' and 'non-martial' races for recruitment in the post-1857 colonial army and police. According to this new martial race theory, the Aryans were the martial race and the Dravidians were the non-martial race. Martial races were deemed loyal, disciplined, manly, warlike, with a natural respect for authority, good at following command because of their lack of intelligence. In other words, intelligence bred weakness and effeminacy. North India's Punjabis, Sikhs, Pathans, Rajputs, Dogras, and Nepali Gurkhas were promoted as martial races, while south Indians and Bengalis were condemned as non-martial and effeminate. Similarly, the tribes who resisted the British with arms were branded disloyal and criminal. But once the criminality of a caste or group has been established, then the crime automatically made them a first suspect irrespective of who committed it. Hence the overwhelming number of prisoners in colonial jails were from caste groups that were designated as 'criminal castes and tribes.' Torture, like caste was projected as the essential component of Indian society and was systematically administered in the colonial penal system.
<12> Anthropological knowledge and classification was used in the colonial project of conquest, control, and rule. So by the 1890s, the colonial state had become an ethnographic state, suggests Dirks, which meant that the colonized subject was first and foremost a 'body' to be known and controlled. In this context the Christian missionaries had created the notion of 'barbarism' by identifying certain groups whose practices the missionaries disapproved of. The colonial state anthropology appropriated this discourse of 'barbarism' from the missionaries and went on to violently suppress such groups in the name of law and order. The hill tribes were thus constantly subjected to this type of violence by the colonial military and police.
<13> The imperial project of anthropography guided enumeration and categorization of groups of people, and achieved its apotheosis in the colonial census that began in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Right from the beginning, the colonial census was wedded to the Orientalist categories of caste and race, and the British theory of race attained its zenith with the appointment of H. H. Risley as the Census Commissioner in 1899. His obsession with race led him to the conclusion that race was the key to understanding caste. His absolute faith in the European pseudo-science of anthropometry led him further to using calipers for measuring people's skull size, facial angles, nasal indices and to comparing human skeletons with those of orangutans, etc. Interestingly, this information was sent to anthropologists in Europe who under the influence of race theories inspired by Social Darwinism were collecting data to prove the superiority of the white race over the rest of the world. This according the author is an example of how the empire served as an important laboratory for the metropolis and how in particular, colonial ethnography made India into an imperial laboratory.
<14> Relying heavily on the Brahmans and upper caste interpreters, Risley came to the conclusion that the endorsement of his views on caste and race could be confirmed in Manu Dharma Sastra. He firmly believed that caste and race were so deeply embedded in Indian society they would successfully prevent the formation of a national identity or consciousness and thus perpetuate British rule in India. So he strongly recommended British benevolent despotism because India was, in his view, fundamentally apolitical and that caste as a divisive force was a solid obstacle to change. Critically studying Louis Dumont and McKim Marriott's views on caste, Dirks suggests that these two scholars have a lot in common with Risley.
<15> It was no surprise then that the 1901 census under Risley's auspices reified caste and race as the signature of Indian civilization. In fact, the colonial movement towards caste in the collection of enumeration data had begun in the 1860s and 70s and, by the 1890s, led to the formation of caste associations and to political mobilization among various groups demanding higher status in the census categorization system. By the first two decades of the twentieth century, the petitions and violent conflicts became so strong that the colonial state had to abandon caste as a criterion of enumeration in the 1931 census. But by then, casteism like communalism had become the legacy of the violent colonial fallout that went against the grain of anti-colonial nationalism, much to the chagrin of the nationalist movement, and a shot-in-the-arm of the divisive strategy of the colonial state.
<16> In a substantial chapter, the book dwells on the relationship between the anti-colonial nationalist movement of Gandhi and the non-Brahman anti-caste movement of Periyar and Ambedkar in Tamil country and Maharashtra. Gandhi's opposition to the non-Brahman movement on the grounds that it was anti-national and divisive was countered by the charge of Gandhi's endorsement of the status quo and the continuation of caste oppression. He was also charged with marginalizing the lower caste people from the upper caste-dominated nationalist struggle. If national liberation for Gandhi took precedence over everything else, then his nemesis was sure to haunt him for ignoring the painful cry for social liberation of the oppressed lower castes of India, who refused to be forcibly incorporated into Hinduism. And Gandhi's continuing insistence that caste has nothing to do with Hindu religion permanently alienated the lower caste from the nationalist movement in the same manner as he alienated the Muslims by stating that nationalism should override religious identity. In both instances, Gandhi's strategy failed to mobilize Muslims and lower castes. However, the book fails to make this point because of the author's sympathies with Gandhi and the anti-colonial nationalist struggle of the Indian people against the British Empire.
<17> In the last chapter titled " The Burden of the Past: On Colonialism and the Writing of History," the author systematically dissects the Cambridge school of Indian history writing represented by Chris Bayly, David Washbrook, Ronald Robinson, Jack Gallagher, Gordon Johnson and their American cronies like Robert Frykenberg, Eugene Irschick, David Kopf and others. Their grand ancestor J.R. Seeley, who assumed the chair of modern history at Cambridge University in 1869, had surmised in his own fit of absentmindedness that "We [the British] seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind" (qut. on p. 301). Bayly takes Seeley's approach further by stating that "the British only succeeded in their project of expansion, and the consolidation of colonial rule, through the desires, actions, and agency of Indians," and that "the colonial rule itself was an Indian project more than it was a European one" (qutd. on p. 307). Dirks then makes a strong point stating that "Bayly's disavowal of colonial power and prejudice is thus the predicate for his own historiographical conferral of agency onto the colonized subjects of Indian history" (311). Bayly's endorsement of the continuity thesis, that is that the British Empire grew from within the eighteenth-century state systems of India [1], fails to account for the British racism towards Indians, which could not have existed before the coming of the British. By ignoring this fact, Bayly, like his imperial ancestors, succumbs to British imperialism, colonialism and racism.
<18> Similarly, Washbrook continues the Cambridge school approach of Bayly by stating that there was no imposition of western capitalism on India, that Indian capitalism grew from within Indian economy, which he celebrates as the triumph of the Indian capitalist class. Hiding behind his Marxist-inspired rhetoric, Washbrook, in Dirks' view, "seeks to dissolve the idea of colonialism entirely in the world soup of capitalism, even though in India capitalism takes on a distinctly national flavor" (311). So, "here is where Cambridge school history masquerades as Marxist history, using networks of materialist analysis and so-called class analysis to disparage anticolonial nationalism and to deny the historical reality and lasting effects of colonialism" (313). Dirks reserves his strongest critique of Washbrook by stating that "Washbrook's delight in charging Indian capitalism with the full responsibility of British colonialism undermines not only his Marxism but also his historical credibility" (308). Furthermore, Frykenberg's, Irschick's, and Kopf's approach of looking at the early colonial rule in India as a dialogue between the British colonizers and Indians, totally ignores the fact that the relationship between the two was primarily that of power and dominance; colonizer and colonized; oppressor and oppressed.
<19> While the author states at the outset that this book is a critique of the orientalist design of presenting caste as the central pillar of Indian society, nevertheless, while reading the book one gets a sense that caste is after all central to understanding Indian society. Even though the author maintains his stance of presenting a critique of the colonial anthropological knowledge of portraying the centrality of caste, the book fails to go beyond its subject so that the reader is left with the question: If caste is not central to the understanding of Indian society, than what is? Or, if asking such a question is valid, given the complexity of Indian society? The book has very little on Muslims or other non-Hindu traditions, which may or may not have something to do with the caste system. The author also mentions a few times that women were marginalized in the caste system but does not say how exactly, or what, if anything, they did about it. To ask the author for a stronger gender dimension would not be out of place here.
<20> Even though the book is written for a specialized audience, the subject is very well developed and the argument is easy to follow. All the latest interpretations and controversies about caste in colonial and post-colonial India are analyzed in great detail. A section on the pre-colonial situation at the beginning of the book is a restatement of his earlier work on the subject [2]. While mildly disagreeing with the interpretations of 'hegemony' and 'the spiritual domain of Home,' as propounded by Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee [3], the author is on the whole sympathetic to the Subaltern school approach. The book's surgical exposure of British imperialism, colonialism, and racism along with the brutality and violence of the colonial state and its European collaborators is, paradoxically, the most pleasant aspect of the book.
Notes
[1] See C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. [^]
[2] See Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. [^]
[3] See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, and Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Press, 1986. [^]
Laxman D. Satya
Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania
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