6 - The practice of ethnography: Indian customs and castes

Summary

THE BIRTH OF A COLONIAL ETHNOGRAPHY

The Portuguese presence in Asia after 1499 entailed an important leap both in the amount of information regarding oriental societies which was available, and in the variety of generic forms it took. By virtue of the works written in the early decades of European activity in India, and notwithstanding the fact that the majority were only published years later or remained in manuscript form, South India, and in particular the Malabar coast, was to become one of the better mapped areas of the Renaissance world. This is why, despite its increasingly limited political importance, `Calicut’ still figured prominently in late Renaissance cosmographies such as Giovanni Botero's Relationi universali, alongside China, Persia, Turkey or the `Great Mogor’ of India. Perhaps more importantly, the early descriptions of South India set standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness which remained valid for much of the ethnography of the early modern period. Much more clearly than in the relatively hazy reports of Marco Polo, it is in the narratives of Varthema, Barbosa, Pires, Paes and Nunes that one finds the obvious precedents of such `modern’ ethnographical treatises as Abbeâ Dubois' classic Character, manners and customs of the people of India and of their institutions religious and civil of 1806.

Dubois' treatise, although originally written in French from Jesuit materials, accompanied the consolidation of the British empire in India, and its impact can best be understood as part of a colonial context.