Engineering Caste for Colonial Rule in India (original) (raw)
British rule in India can be succinctly viewed as a colonial knowledge project in which the colonisers' knowledge and control originated from the use of 'investigative modalities'. 1 British knowledge of India allowed 'the British to classify, categorise, and bound the vast social world that was India so that it could be controlled'. 2 The very usage of these investigative modalities defined the British as culturally hegemonic in the subcontinent, 3 and influenced the development of social and cultural tradition. In British India the caste system came to be the primary modality by which the British organised anthropological knowledge and effected colonial rule. The British used caste in their institutions of government in a way the subcontinent had never before seen, and stratified caste groups into a rigid hierarchy. Indeed, the British implemented legal codes along caste lines, criminalised entire caste groups, and restricted land rights based on caste. 4 Enumerating caste as the basic category for ethnographic description became formalised and canonised. There was an obvious institutional push towards statistical data, and towards the end of the 19 th-century the relentless systematisation of official knowledge about India had led to the standardisation of the subject matter of colonial ethnology. While caste existed long before the British arrived in the subcontinent, a narrative has emerged amongst scholars suggesting that the pre-colonial caste system could hardly be more dissimilar to the caste system in the colonial era. The question therefore emerges: To what extent has India's caste system been 'invented' by the British? In answering it is necessary first to assess the historical basis of the caste system, and then compare the varying degrees of flexibility, and legal utility of the caste system during the colonial and pre-colonial periods.
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International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd edition (William S. Darity, ed), 2008