Nicholas B Dirks has revealed in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India much of the unknown facts behind the history of the formation of today’s caste system in India. He stated that the Indian caste system is usually seen as an institution deeply rooted in Indian culture and religion. He has argued that the British colonial thinkers are largely responsible for the way the system has been shaped in about 150 years. He has noted that prior to British arrival the Indian society was highly fragmented into communal groupings that served as centres for social identity. In a bid to understand these groupings, the Portuguese were the first ones to suggest using the word ‘caste’. The British essentially expanded on that theme to create groups to conveniently divide and rule. The 1921Census was conducted meticulously, and as a result a clear hierarchy of caste categories was established.
M L Middleton, Superintendent of the Government of India, in the Census 1911 Report confessed: “We pigeon holed everyone by caste and if we could not find a true caste for them, labeled them with the name of hereditary occupation. We deplore the caste system and its effect on social and economic problems, but we are largely responsible for the system we deplore”.
Dirks said the Indians themselves have been ambivalent about caste categories in the past. But after this categorisation by the British, caste become a key element in India’s competitive politics, power and economy. The Western experts drew Dirks’ flak for establishing linkages between caste and Indian tradition.
The British essentially tried to map the caste system based on their own political and economic class divisions in England and other places. The Indian society, after hundreds of years of alien Islamic rule, was out of sync with its own institutions. No wonder, they took to the British system. This heralded a new social order, where the colonial superpower of the day imposed segregation and exploitation to its own advantage.
What was supposed to be a system based on dharma (righteousness, social justice and duty) became an automaton for exploitation.
The British essentially tried to map the caste system based on their own political and economic class divisions in England and other places. The Indian society, after hundreds of years of alien Islamic rule, was out of sync with its own institutions. No wonder, they took to the British system.
Many other Western scholars are in agreement with Dirks. Some have shown the British colonists infused the caste consciousness of the sepoys (native soldiers) of the Bengal army, encouraging Brahmins to regard themselves as elite and making them to be particular in food preparation and eating habits. This is just one example of how a job with the British had raised the caste-consciousness among the natives and the casteist notions, which in India had traditionally been relatively fluid and secondary. At this juncture, the concept that to be a Hindu, one must belong to a caste took deep roots in the Indian social hierarchy.
Kevin Hobson in his article, ‘Ethnographic Mapping and the Construction of the British Census in India’ writes: ‘..The conceptual framework within which Indian society was being understood was becoming British rather than Indian. This allowed the British to expropriate the basic concepts of Indian society and Anglicize it in such a way that only they would have the ability to interpret it within the new construct. A major factor in allowing this expropriation was the census system.
‘This understanding (of Indian society based on census data) was deeply affected by British concepts of their own past, and by British notions of race and the importance of race in relation to the human condition. Further, the intellectual framework, such as that provided by anthropology and phrenology, that was used to help create the ideas surrounding the concept of race, was foreign to the intellectual traditions of India.
‘ These same notions led to a classification of intelligence and abilities based on physical attributes, and this in turn led to employment opportunities being limited to certain caste groupings that displayed the appropriate attributes. Indians attempted to incorporate themselves into this evolving system by organizing caste sabhas with the purpose of attaining improved status within the system. This ran contrary to traditional views of the purpose of the caste system (read: Jati) and imposed an economic basis. With this, the relevance and importance of the spiritual, non material rational for caste was degraded and caste took on a far more material meaning. In this way, caste began to intrude more pervasively into daily life and status became even more coveted and rigid. In a sense, caste became politicized as decisions regarding rank increasingly fell into the political rather than the spiritual sphere of influence. With this politicization, caste moved closer to class in connotation. The actions of the Indian people that contributed to this process were not so much acquiescence to the British construction as they were pragmatic reactions to the necessities of material life. In expropriating the knowledge base of Indian society, the British had forced Indian society and the caste system to execute adjustments in order to prosper within the rubric of the British regime.’
This is a good explanation of how Indology, influenced by racial and colonial worldview created a class of scholars who eventually looked at the Indian society in twin terms — caste and religion — and called it Hinduism. However both the idea of ‘caste’ and ‘religion’ are alien to Indian sensibilities. Indian society was and is still studied using the methods, terms and epistemologies introduced by these colonial Indologists. Majority of them held the idea like Macaulay (Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian Education): ”…a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. It is a well-known fact that Nalanda’s famous libraries had over 900,000 manuscripts that were burnt down by the invaders hundreds of years before the Europeans came to India.
