Nicholas B. Dirks - Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.

CASTES OF MIND

COLONIALISM AND THE MAKING
OF MODERN INDIA

Nicholas B. Dirks

Copyright 2001 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dirks, Nicholas B., 1950

Castes of mind : colonialism and the making of
modern India / Nicholas B. Dirks.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-08894-2 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-691-08895-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. CasteIndia. 2. Social classesIndia. 3. India

HistoryBritish occupation, 17651947. I. Title.

DS422.C3 D58 2001

305.51220954dc21 2001021236

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Times Roman

Printed on acid-free paper.

www.pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
(Pbk.)

Contents

One
Introduction: The Modernity of Caste

Two
Homo Hierarchicus: The Origins of an Idea

Three
The Ethnographic State

Four
The Original Caste: Social Identity in the Old Regime

Five
The Textualization of Tradition: Biography of an Archive

Six
The Imperial Archive: Colonial Knowledge and Colonial Rule

Seven
The Conversion of Caste

Eight
The Policing of Tradition: Colonial Anthropology and the Invention of Custom

Nine
The Body of Caste: Anthropology and the Criminalization of Caste

Ten
The Enumeration of Caste: Anthropology as Colonial Rule

Eleven
Toward a Nationalist Sociology of India: Nationalism and Brahmanism

Twelve
The Reformation of Caste: Periyar, Ambedkar, and Gandhi

Thirteen
Caste Politics and the Politics of Caste

Fourteen
Conclusion: Caste and the Postcolonial Predicament

Coda
The Burden of the Past: On Colonialism and the Writing of History

Acknowledgments

ALTHOUGH this book has in some ways grown quite naturally out of its predecessor, The Hollow Crown, it was not the book I had at first intended to write. I had spent a year at the India Office Library and Record Room in 1986 engaging in research on a Scottish antiquarian and collector, Colin Mackenzie, a man whose life and work is discussed in the fifth chapter but who plays a far less significant role in the story to follow than was my original plan. I had intended then to write a book on the early colonial archive: the collection, formation, and then transformation of early canons of British colonial knowledge concerning India, for which the Mackenzie collection was to be the centerpiece. Mackenzie, whose massive collection of vernacular texts and miscellaneous records from peninsular Indiaassembled by an extraordinary group of assistants and translators during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuriesproduced many of the texts used in my earlier study of local kingship and society in early modern southern India, still warrants a book of his own. Instead, I became preoccupied with one of the major absences in the early colonial archive: namely, caste. My study of the early colonial archive made it clear how peculiar the colonial fascination with caste from the middle of the nineteenth century on really was. I had already argued that casteat least in the areas of southern India that I had studied intensivelywas profoundly embedded within political society, not at all as it has been portrayed in contemporary anthropological literature. But, now that I could document this claim in much more extensive ways given the provenance of the Mackenzie collection, I soon became preoccupied with two central questions concerning the modern career of caste. First, I sought to understand how caste had come to exercise such pride of place in the colonial imagination. Second, I wanted to document the effects of this transformation on modern Indian society. If knowledge was both an effect and an instrument of power, as Foucault has suggested, it seemed necessary to write an account of caste that was both about ideas and their materialization in, and through, history.

As the idea for this book began to take shapeamid a series of other research trips to India as well as back to Londonthe explosion of caste anxiety and violence around then Prime Minister V. P. Singhs decision to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission in the summer of 1990, dramatically increasing quotas for Backward Caste representation in government and education, raised a third question. Would my effort to write a critical account of the colonial history of caste become affiliated with critiques of Mandal? By extension, what was the relation between colonial critique and postcolonial politics in India? Although attention shifted from caste to the growing communalism of the 1990s, most dramatically around the Hindu nationalist assault on Baburs mosque in Ayodhya, I kept my focus trained on the politics and history of caste in contemporary India. And I discovered that the question of caste brought together a wide range of historical, anthropological, and political concerns, even as it connected the two most distant points of my own scholarly relationship to India. As an undergraduate, I had begun to study Indian history through the figure of E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker and his relation to Gandhi and Indian nationalism, on the one hand, and the extraordinary history of caste politics in southern India, on the other. At the point that I began to draft the manuscript that makes up this book, I found myself convening the seminar at Columbia University where B. R. Ambedkar had presented his first critique of caste. The critical visions of E.V.R. and Ambedkar made it possible for me to connect the first two questions of this book with the third.

I have been extremely fortunate during the fifteen years of this books gestation to have the support of a variety of institutions and individuals. The California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University have all supported the research and writing of parts of this book, as have the Social Science Research Council (1986), the Guggenheim Foundation (19891991), the American Institute for Indian Studies (1989; 1991), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (19891990). I am grateful to the staff of the following institutions where the research for this book was carried out: the India Office Library and Records, London; the library and archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; the National Archives of India, New Delhi; the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Tamil Nadu Archives, Madras; and the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, University of Madras.