Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779678.005
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779678.004
Alexander Lee
Much of the activity of ethnic activists, in particular their social and educational activities, occurred in a private, vernacular language world that was difficult for outsiders to observe even at the time. Variation in the level of importance attached to social ranking is similarly difficult to measure in practice, since much of the expression of ranking norms is cultural and takes place outside formal state structures. The role of the census in colonial India provides an interesting exception to this pattern: quite unintentionally, the colonial state created a means by which caste activists could register their activities and aspirations, and a language in which those aspirations could be expressed. The census assumed the role of a forum for caste claims when superintendent H. H. Risley decided to organize the census returns by hierarchical caste status. While Risley's goal was to generate data supporting his own theory of the racial origins of caste, the classification change had dramatic consequences: many lower and middle caste elites anxious to maximize their hierarchical status organized to petition the census authorities for a new caste name, typically one that linked them to a ‘higher’ caste or to one of the three higher varnas of the Sanskritic caste hierarchy. Other caste elites also petitioned for new names, to distance themselves from the ranking system entirely, by disassociating themselves from names that suggested subordination. The census, of course, was not a neutral participant in this process. Simply by asking Indians about their caste, the census authorities potentially made caste more salient to individuals than it had been previously. Moreover, the census's simple categories (and in some periods interest in a single hierarchical dimension) tended to delegitimize and override previous, perhaps more ambiguous, identities (Dirks 2002). However, as we shall see, there was considerable variation in the way in which caste activists used these new concepts and categories. Caste in the census While statistical enumerations of India had long collected information about caste (Guha 2003), the connection between caste and the census changed in the early twentieth century through the work of H. H. Risley, who became superintendent of the Census of India for the 1901 census.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779678.006
Alexander Lee
At the time the colonial census officials finally began to accede to the demands of the caste petitioners, British rule in India was clearly nearing its close – indeed, much of the electoral jockeying of the caste associations was bent on filling the political space that the decline of the Raj opened up. India's independence changed the formal attitude of state institutions towards the caste system from curiosity to strident hostility, and the political system from a curious colonial hybrid to a democracy with universal suffrage. Over time, the policies of the post-independence state would also change the distribution of wealth and education among social groups. The development of caste identities during these decades presents a paradoxical picture. On the one hand, it was clear that certain public expressions of caste identity that had been important in the colonial period were in precipitous decline. Elite opinion in India, at least in public, has turned against the caste hierarchy as a legitimator for social and political inequality, and even as a legitimate social affinity or object of intellectual analysis. The census no longer tabulates jati populations, both eliminating it as a focus for public contestation and dramatically limiting our ability to make reliable quantitative generalizations about this period compared to the one before. The practice of untouchability, once nearly universal, has undergone a precipitous decline, especially in urban areas. Lower caste candidates routinely win elected office, and upper caste voters routinely court lower caste support, which they know they cannot take for granted. The formal advertisement of claims to high caste status is also much less common than it once was; if anything, it is now more common for castes to claim to be ‘backward’. On the other hand, despite the hopes of some reformers of the independence generation, it is clear that caste has not withered away – in fact, in some respects, caste identities appear more salient now than they were in the colonial period. During the 1990s, explicitly caste-based political parties became electorally successful in some northern states, and the controversy over caste-based quotas in reservation and public employment made caste a more noticeable element of political contention it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Caste associations remain prominent, still dabbling in electoral politics and conducting campaigns for the social betterment of the caste.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779678.003
Alexander Lee
Chapter 2 predicted that caste mobilization should be rare in societies where education is rare, and rise as education rises. Similarly, ranked rhetoric should be nearly universal in societies with patrimonial political systems, but fall as these systems become more participatory. This chapter will apply these ideas to the modern history of India, in two phases. First, it will show how hierarchical ideas were important in pre-colonial India, though often less rigid in form than they became later. This emphasis on ranking reflected the patrimonial structure of the political system. Second, it will show how identity articulation, while confined to a few relatively wealthy groups, was advanced in India relative to other parts of the world, reflecting the wealth enjoyed by some segments of the pre-colonial elite. Later sections describe how this process continued in the colonial era. It discussed the increase in education during the colonial period, and shows, as Hypothesis 1 would predict, that this increase in education was associated with an increase in caste activism. It will also discuss the role of the colonial state in promoting caste consciousness, though the discussion of the intervention often thought the most important, the colonial census, will be taken up in Chapter 4. The background to pre-colonial identity politics Chapter 2 argued that the level of social hierarchy within a group or political system can be explained by two factors: education (which enables political involvement) and exposure to patrimonial political structures (which turns such involvement in a hierarchical direction). In this section, we will discuss the available evidence on the levels of these two independent variables in pre-colonial India. While pre-colonial South Asia was in general quite poor, it offered substantial levels of economic returns to members of certain privileged groups. This relatively sophisticated economy contrasted with a political system that was quite unstable, and where politics centred around shifting and informal alliances among landholding and military elites. As we shall see, this combination of concentrated wealth amid political instability corresponded to a system in which the mass of the population remained quiescent while the elite energetically pursued hierarchical status.
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