When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In
academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central
symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other
places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that
caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India
nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather
than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern
phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between
India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste
was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did
become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming
India's diverse forms of social identity and organization.
Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of
southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives;
from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the
enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from
the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of
twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography
from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste
politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the
emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist
consensus.
"Castes of Mind" is an ambitious book, written by an
accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian
history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis
for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful
case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present,
it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory
and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
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