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  1. Home
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  3. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
  • Cited by 324
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1999
Online ISBN:
9781139053389
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521264341
Subjects:
Area Studies, South Asian History, Asian Studies, History, Anthropology: General Interest, Anthropology
Series:
The New Cambridge History of India
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Asian History
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Book description

The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Susan Bayly's cogent and sophisticated analysis explores the emergence of the ideas, experiences and practices which gave rise to the so-called 'caste society' from the pre-colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Using an historical and anthropological approach, she frames her analysis within the context of India's dynamic economic and social order, interpreting caste not as an essence of Indian culture and civilization, but rather as a contingent and variable response to the changes that occurred in the subcontinent's political landscape through the colonial conquest. The idea of caste in relation to Western and Indian 'orientalist' thought is also explored.

Reviews

‘The book is extraordinary in the diversity of themes that it handles and the chronological span it covers. ... What emerges is an extraordinarily nuanced understanding of caste that satisfies the historian and provokes the social anthropologist.’

Dr Seema Alavi Source: The Book Review

‘Susan Bayley deserves praise for attempting to explain how caste in India has come to mean what it does today. Her analysis covers almost the entire Indian subcontinent, something which today is a rarity, given the current trend of ever more narrowly focused studies.’

Source: The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Historical origins of a ‘caste society’
    pp 25-63
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses the spread of the lordly or Kshatriya-centred manifestations of caste values. It discusses three important elements of change in the new states and dominions of the post-Mughal period: first, the emerging courtly synthesis between Kshatriya-like kings and Brahmans, later the diffusion of these values and practices into the world of the upper non-elite 'peasantry', and finally the continuing power and importance of martial 'predators' and so-called tribal peoples. The chapter explores the significance of these trends, and particularly the importance of individual agency in the forging of more castelike forms of social order through an account of the rise of the great Maratha-dominated polity of Shivaji Bhonsle. It certainly focuses on the many ways in which the experience of caste has taken root, often being forcibly challenged, and yet still spreading and diversifying in ways which had far-reaching effects across the subcontinent.
  • 2 - The ‘Brahman Raj’: kings and service people c. 1700–1830
    pp 64-96
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores which brought ideals of Brahmanical rank to the fore in Indian life, without ever fully supplanting the ideals of the lordly man of prowess. It also explores why the Brahman's and merchant's ideal of a 'pure' dharmic way of life became so influential in the world of the so called caste 'Hindu'. In middle of the eighteenth century there were three main areas of advancement in which Brahmans and Brahman-centred values came increasingly to predominate: in the field of finance, statecraft and war, and ritual arena. In the peshwa daftar records, that is, the Maratha rulers' registers of state transactions and revenue obligations, the Peshwas documented acts of adjudication through which they as Brahman guardians of the realm proclaimed themselves arbiters of other people's jati and varna status. India's dynasts built their power through a drive for cash revenue. The techniques used to spread and tax commercial cash-crop production prefigured the strategies of Britain's colonial revenue machine.
  • 3 - Western ‘orientalists’ and the colonial perception of caste
    pp 97-143
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the understandings of caste propounded by Western orientalists from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, the massive bureaucratic machinery of the Raj had generated an enormous output of documentations in which jati and varna were used as basic units of identification. Two key themes have been identified in the vast array of regional ethnographic surveys, population censuses and other official and quasi-official writing. The first is an insistence on the supposedly ineradicable sense of community dividing Hindus from Muslims and other non-Hindus. The second is a view of Indians, apart from so-called tribals and followers of minority faiths, as slaves to rigid, Brahman-centred caste values. As of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'Aryan' caste Hindus were widely said by both Indian and British race theorists to be 'awaking' in evolutionary terms.
  • 4 - Caste and the modern nation: incubus or essence?
    pp 144-186
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the views aired in the subcontinent's emerging public arena, looking briefly at the early nineteenth century, but concentrating primarily on from the 1870s to the early 1930s. It examines why many Indian polemicists identified caste as a topic of vital concern for the modern nation, and seeks to identify the conceptual roots of the caste debates, as well as their intellectual and ideological consequences. The chapter also explores the ideas of the many Indians who made their mark in controversies about the spiritual and political meanings of caste. It discusses the conventional Hindu ideas about the low and unclean nature of 'untouchables'. Since the First World War, jati and varna were being so widely identified as expressions of Aryan/Hindu 'race genius', many theorists sought to distinguish between supposedly good and bad manifestations of 'caste spirit', and exalted the idealised solidarities of the twice-born as the embodiment of national faith and a cohesive national morality.
  • 5 - The everyday experience of caste in colonial India
    pp 187-232
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter deals with the changing face of caste from the 1820s to the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how and why the conceptions of caste became so widely adopted in the course of the nineteenth century. The chapter explores the central paradox of the castelike social order: while colonial India's caste differences became widely spoken of as fixed essences of birth and rank, Indians kept finding ways to reshape and exploit them to meet conditions of change and insecurity. Historians of India's so-called subalterns have portrayed initiatives as assertions of anti-authoritarian resistance, especially when they took the form of collective action by low-caste or tribal people against landlords, money-lenders, or agents of the colonial state. Two distinct models of caste society had come into operation in the centuries immediately preceding the British conquest, with a leading role being played by the rulers of the precolonial period.
  • 6 - Caste debate and the emergence of Gandhian nationalism
    pp 233-265
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores attempts by Gandhi and the other key political figures of the twentieth century to forge viable constitutional arrangements in a society where divisions of caste and ethno-religious community were seen both as national essences and, simultaneously, as impediments to modern nationhood. The founders of the Indian Republic were notably ambivalent about caste. The 1950 Constitution's celebrated commitment to casteless egalitarianism was prefigured in one of the major documents of the nationalist freedom struggle, the Indian National Congress's 1931 Karachi Resolution. Nehru's secular vision of social modernity shaped the Constitution of independent India. Yet the other two traditions have retained considerable power as well: the Gandhian goal of a modified and purified caste system, and, against this, the Ambedkarite view, which has found its expression in the assertiveness of the militant Dalit movements. These complexities and contradictions were all carried forward into the social welfare policies of the newly independent Indian republic.
  • 7 - State policy and ‘reservations’: the politicisation of caste-based social welfare schemes
    pp 266-305
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the moves made by jurists, politicians and government agencies in the decades after 1947. It discusses the provisions of the 1950 Constitution in regard to low-caste 'uplift'. The chapter attempts to interpret the battles over caste-based regional welfare schemes which have been an explosive feature of Indian politics in the years since Independence. The Indian state is certainly not all-powerful, and the moves it has made in regard to caste, reservations and the amelioration of social and economic 'backwardness' have been anything but consistent. Nevertheless, both the 1950 Constitution and the country's recent social justice schemes have confirmed much that the colonial planners and policy-makers had established in areas where they too regarded jati and varna as powerful realities of Indian life. It is hard to believe that the language of Indian politics will ever be purged of its references to 'scheduling', OBCs, Dalits, KHAMs, Backwards, Forwards, Manuvadi elites, and all the other caste-related categories and slogans.
  • 8 - Caste in the everyday life of independent India
    pp 306-341
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter concerns caste consciousness as it has been manifested in surprising though generally uncontentious forms, most notably where one can see conventions of jati and varna difference retaining their power in the modern workplace and in the thinking of educated city-dwellers. Since the 1950s, cross-cutting affinities of faith, class and ethno-linguistic identity have often had a more direct and lasting impact on both local and national life than the claims of anti-Brahmanism, or Harijan uplift, or caste reform movements. The chapter examines why caste has come to operate for so many Indians in the manner of an imagined community, that is, as a bond of idealised allegiance answering needs which both in India and elsewhere have been more widely associated with the claims of two other forms of supra-local attachment, the modern nation and the ethno-religious community. In the years after Independence, social scientists found further evidence of the spread of these modern-minded or substantialised forms of caste consciousness.
  • 9 - ‘Caste wars’ and the mandate of violence
    pp 342-364
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on one of the two manifestations of caste consciousness, the phenomenon of so called 'caste war'. It explores how caste can divide modern Indians to the point of systematic armed violence between those of high- and low-caste origin. It is true that those involved in 'caste wars' since the 1960s have generally mixed the language of jati and varna with references to faith, class and nationality, defining themselves and their opponents not just as embodiments of caste-based `community', but as landlords and tenants, capitalists and workers, oppressors and oppressed. Since the 1970s the ideals of the `secular' nation-state have been regularly inverted by groups claiming to be under threat from the real or imagined aggression of militant `Dalits'. In many of the widely reported conflicts, `caste war' violence has tended to feed back and forth between urban centres and the rural hinterlands from which towns like Banaras and Aurangabad draw many of their students and factory workers.

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