Review of Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India

In the Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Nicholas Dirks documents the centuries of scholarship on caste, colonial intervention in the institution of caste, and its broad impact on Indian modernity. In the book, Dirks presents the colonial understanding of caste as an Indian form of “civil society” through writings from the early attempts of Abbé Dubois to the late 19th-century scholarship of Louis Dumont. Dirks, then, provides a brief analysis of the colonial obsession with the caste system through its attempts at categorisation in the form of ethnographic censuses. Finally, Dirks analyses the politicisation of caste through the reservation policies and the subsequent OBC politics.

The book is divided into four parts: “The Invention of Caste,” “Colonisation of the Archive,” “The Ethnographic State,” and “Recasting India: Caste, Community, and Politics.”The book can be categorised into two broad trajectories: the early ethnographic formulation of caste before 1857 and the post-1857 colonial understanding of India in terms of caste through categorisation. Dirks accounts for the colonial construction of knowledge and the institutionalisation of India on caste terms. He writes that colonialism was ‘made possible’ and ‘sustained and strengthened by both the ‘brutal modes of conquest’ and through ‘cultural technologies of the rule’.

By technologies of the rule, Dirks refers to the colonial forms of knowledge as espoused by Bernard Cohn in his “investigative modalities.” Dirks opines that colonialism itself was a cultural project of control. He writes, ‘Colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it’ (p. 9).

The colonial effort to understand India prior to 1857 is reflected in the writings of Alexander Dow, Robert Orme, Charles Grant, Mark Wilks, and James Mill. One of the earliest British efforts to record Indian history emerged in the form of a treatise by Alexander Dow, an officer in the East India Company’s army, titled History of Hindostan, in 1768. Nicholas Dirks observes that ‘Dow [however] relied on the tutelage of a Brahmin pandit in Banaras and adopted a textualist and Brahmanic view of Indian society’ (p. 22).

Dirks observes that early colonial efforts to write the history of India focused on caste, rather than the state that held the society together through villages and communities as its major constituents. Its impact, Dirks notes, was evident in the writings of Louis Dumont as late as the 1960s. In his 1966 book, Dumont held that the region’s domain encompasses India’s ‘political and economic domains of social life’. Brahmana, to the Hindus, was a religious principle and the highest form of purity.

However, Dirks countered Dumont’s views on caste as highly problematic, as the kings were not inferior to Brahmanas. And that political struggles shaped Indian society.

Identities, Dirks writes, were not restricted to caste itself. He shows us that regional, village, and residential communities, kinship groups, chiefs, factional parties, and so on, formed the basic character of pre-colonial Indian society.

The early colonial efforts at understanding India, as Dirks accounts, span from the writings of the historian Abbe Dubois to the ethnographic enthusiast Colin Mackenzie, in his efforts at mapping and surveying the southern states of India. There is little mention of “caste” in their accounts, unlike those produced by the missionaries. But with the 1857 revolt, the British began their quest to understand India with enthusiasm.

However, the colonial efforts at understanding India drastically restructured society, in which the subjects became mere tools for governance. The colonial administrators recorded censuses, wrote reports and conducted surveys based on caste, race, ethnicity, religion and colour. Such processes of categorisation, Dirks notes, not only reified the community but also created an entirely new form of community.

In the Castes of Mind, Dirks writes, the British began to use caste [in Varna terms] as a tool to enumerate the population soon after securing their hold over India. The colonial ethnographic interest started in the 1870s, with caste as a primary object of social classification and understanding.

The 1871 census generated all-India procedures, standards, and categories for its enumeration. One of the general trends in the colonial caste census was its intolerance for multiple, blurred, at times changing identities. The colonial census assigned a specific category to the people. Several census officers, time and again, have written, as Dirks shows us, that the question of caste was inaccurate and conflicting, and such a process would lead to a flawed understanding of the communities.

Mr Prinsep, an officer who conducted the census of Benaras in 1843, accounts for not less than 107 distinct castes in one city alone (p. 202). In 1891, the Varna was formally abandoned as the basis for the census. Herbert Hope Risley, a census commissioner of 1901, made it pertinent that he would return to the use of Varna for enumeration and classification. To the British, caste became a civilizational factor contributing to India’s backwardness. As a result, Dirks shows us that caste became a defining feature of India’s civil society.

Caste was reformulated into the rigid Varna categories while discounting multiple identities, at times, politicising such identities. The Castes of Mind shows us that, with caste becoming a major category for understanding India, the process of politicisation of caste began as early as the 1930s, with caste associations sprouting all across India, trying to mobilise people along their caste lines.

In this well-structured essay, Dirks demonstrates that caste has permeated every aspect of Indian social life. Caste, to the British, represented India as a whole. It was only the caste that represented India. The British also thought that the caste system would represent India. Furthermore, the British alone could determine to classify and reinstitute caste in a manner that would perfectly represent itself as a civil society.

In the work’s final section, Dirks argues that caste has taken a new shape in its influence on politics. He accounts for the reform movements of Periyar, Gandhi, and Ambedkar, which helped uplift Dalits. In another chapter, Dirks discusses the politics of caste and caste politics, presenting multiple facets of the caste debate in Indian sociology, with Rajni Kothari at one end and Srinivas and Ghurye at the other.

The caste system that took a new form of civil society did not disappear after independence, with upper castes resorting to violence to avail preferential treatment and its subsequent culmination in the OBC violence and its aftermath.

In Castes of Mind, Dirks argues that castes pose a significant threat to Indian modernity, even though they have contributed to its development. Over the years, the caste system has reshaped itself as an essential aspect of Indian society. Today, caste remains as resilient as it could have ever been. Castes of Mind shows us that caste, as we know it today, is a colonial construct and was perpetuated through colonial forms of knowledge.

References:

Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001

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