Introduction: Caste, power and region in colonial South Asia

Abstract

general accounts of caste that were organised around largely ahistorical anthropological or sociological schemes. For historians, the publication of these two ambitious and useful books will likely serve as a long-standing landmark. There is a remarkable convergence in the periodisation and coverage of the two accounts. Both Bayly and Dirks begin with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and see considerable diversity in patterns of social organisation across the subcontinent. They agree that early colonial accounts of caste were uncertain and confused, and did not dominate early British perceptions of ‘lndia’. Both authors date the more intense British objectification of Indian identities in general, and caste in particular, to the 1860s, and give similar accounts of the colonial policies and discourses that reified caste over the following half century. When they arrive at the twentieth century, both writers examine the attitudes of anti-colonial nationalists and other politicians before turning to the political history of caste in the postcolonial Indian state. On the whole the two books tell very much the same story. Despite this similarity, both Bayly and Dirks are quite determined to portray their interpretations as radically different from each other. Bayly, for instance,