4 - Caste and the modern nation: incubus or essence?

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The orientalist writings described in Chapter 3 might be dismissed by some as pseudo-scientific ‘imaginings’ without relevance to the reality of the colonial experience. But we have already seen that the scholar-officials and their informants were not mere fantasists. However disagreeable to a modern reader, their pronouncements about caste and the other key colonial categories of race, blood and nationality became closely bound up with the operations of the state, together with other important arenas of Indian life. Furthermore, these writings helped to shape the ideologies of faith and nationhood that came to the fore in the final half-century of colonial rule.

Yet this was far from being a one-sided process. On the contrary, the Indians who joined and led these important cultural and political movements were impelled by complex intellectual initiatives of their own. This was apparent both in their appropriation and reformulation of contemporary racial theories and in their treatment of caste as a phenomenon to be critiqued or defended by India's aspiring nation-builders and religious purifiers. This indigenous side of the colonial experience must now be addressed. The debates which engaged Indian moralists and social reformers mirrored and in some cases anticipated the speculations of British scholar-officials. These Indian thinkers were decidedly not mere recipients of Western ideas. This chapter therefore explores the views aired in the subcontinent's emerging public arena, looking briefly at the early nineteenth century, but concentrating primarily on the period from the 1870s to the early 1930s. It will ask why so many Indian polemicists identified caste as a topic of vital concern for the modern nation, and will seek to identify the conceptual roots of these debates, as well as their intellectual and ideological consequences.