Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Historical origins of a ‘caste society’
- 2 The ‘Brahman Raj’: kings and service people c. 1700–1830
- 3 Western ‘orientalists’ and the colonial perception of caste
- 4 Caste and the modern nation: incubus or essence?
- 5 The everyday experience of caste in colonial India
- 6 Caste debate and the emergence of Gandhian nationalism
- 7 State policy and ‘reservations’: the politicisation of caste-based social welfare schemes
- 8 Caste in the everyday life of independent India
- 9 ‘Caste wars’ and the mandate of violence
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Map 1 The break-up of the Mughal empire and the emergence of the successor states, c. 1766"
- References
4 - Caste and the modern nation: incubus or essence?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Historical origins of a ‘caste society’
- 2 The ‘Brahman Raj’: kings and service people c. 1700–1830
- 3 Western ‘orientalists’ and the colonial perception of caste
- 4 Caste and the modern nation: incubus or essence?
- 5 The everyday experience of caste in colonial India
- 6 Caste debate and the emergence of Gandhian nationalism
- 7 State policy and ‘reservations’: the politicisation of caste-based social welfare schemes
- 8 Caste in the everyday life of independent India
- 9 ‘Caste wars’ and the mandate of violence
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Map 1 The break-up of the Mughal empire and the emergence of the successor states, c. 1766"
- References
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.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999