Book Reviews : NICHOLAS B. DIRKS, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002, pp. 372

Abstract

a history of the idea-which is to say, practically a history of Indian anthropology, and second, a more tentative account of a history of the growth of caste ’as we know it today’, from the kingdoms of medieval India up to the conflicts around reservations for ’Other Backward Classes’ in contemporary India. The book is divided into four parts, successively titled ’The &dquo;Invention&dquo; of Caste’, ’Colonization of the Archive’, ’The Ethnographic State’ and ’Recasting India: Caste, Community and Politics’, and a short historiographic tailpiece or ‘Coda’ . The arrangement is, broadly speaking, chronological. The early chapters discuss early Western writings-with an amusing foray into the 1786 translation of the Ain, whose compiler Dirks finds ’spent far more time delineating the kinbased local social categories that actually made up the local social order than it did commenting on caste .... And under direct Mughal rule, the most salient titles conferring status were those that signified a relationship to or an honour derived from the Mughal court, such as Mansabdar, Zamindar, or Bahadur’ (p. 20). This piece of schoolboy bahaduri is (the charitable would say) unsupported by the reference given and does not increase one’s confidence in the author’s other