I asked a friend (an Indian friend) about Dirks’ book, and she said it applied primarily to south India, not the north, and that it started with the medieval period, not the Iron Age or second urbanisation. So it is entirely possible that we’re really arguing about very different things, and it does seem plausible to me that caste – very much a north Indian phenomenon, at least in its origins – only truly permeated south India under European rule. But that’s very different to the claim that the majority of Indians lived outside of caste.

it seems to me that an absolute majority of India’s population has always been under the bootheel of varna

This is exactly what Dirks argues against. I won’t rehash his argument and evidence here. I suggest you read it for yourself. However, he sees this system as previously only governing the lives of a small (mostly upper caste) portion of the population and argues it was generalized to the rest of the population under British rule. The current system, he argues, was not a British invention, but something created together with their upper caste allies, who based it on the system that had governed their lives before Colonialism. This was not true in the same way for the rest of the population. Dirks is quite explicit about this point. I don’t know if he’s changed his position at all since he wrote the book.

Interesting. It was also a strategy pursued by states in ancient India as well, if the Arthasastra gives any indication. Forcible settlement of forest dwellers and nomads on agricultural land is mentioned in the text as the best option for dealing with them (from the point of view of the state). The consensus is that the text was composed in either early Mauryan times or before, and lots of other equally early texts mention large numbers of tribal peoples inhabiting not only the forested areas in central and southern India but also around the Ganga-Yamuna Doab. So the practice of settling or fighting tribal people seems to have been well-established by the time the British came along. That doesn’t legitimise it, at all, but it does put it in context.

Kerim,

That there are ancient texts pointing to things like untouchability or criminality should therefore not be seen as giving either greater “authenticity” when discussing their modern forms.

Criminality and untouchability are two completely different things. Untouchability is to do with varna – the original form of caste, found not only in India but elsewhere and concerned primarily with purity and ritual rather than ethnicity or origin. The evidence for this comes from a wide range of texts, including all of the Dharmasutras, the Vedas, Upanisads, and more – orally composed, sure, but much older than colonialism. Supposed ‘criminality’ is to do with jati – castes-as-tribes, with judgements like ‘criminality’ amounting to little more than stereotyping rather than an imposed and enforced ritual status. These are very different things. Jati probably was solidified by the British and turned into something different to what it was, using the divisions they created for their own ends.

Neither form is more legitimate than the other, but one was clearly not introduced by the British. Varna seems to have been in India since the late Bronze Age according to all available evidence, and the fact that the terms – and something like the form – of varna can be found outside of India (Bali, for instance) indicates that varna was present among the people who introduced Indic concepts to southeast Asia (long before the British arrived).

The issue is complicated by the fact that Indians produced almost no histories until recently – the first history to be written in the entire sub-continent was Kalhana‘s twelfth century CE history of the kings of Kashmir – and not many other texts survive. Those that do were composed orally, and even then only by a small subset of the population – mostly Brahmans – with a different outlook to the rest of the population. So Dirks’ claim is probably impossible to verify. It’s hard to find archaeological or numismatic evidence of caste. But it seems to me that an absolute majority of India’s population has always been under the bootheel of varna, if only because the evidence suggests that it predominated in the most agriculturally-productive and militarily-strongest regions.

You’re certainly right to point to current conditions for the answer to why Indians behave in caste-bound ways. But just as it would be wrong to ignore the Bible in understanding US homophobia, it would be just as wrong to ignore pre-colonial caste-based social structure in understanding modern caste.

I’ve no idea about the Chharas, but the idea that nomadic or forest-dwelling people would have been part of the brahmanical civilisation of India in any meaningful sense before being forcibly settled by the British appears distinctly unlikely, doesn’t it? I’ll definitely be checking out the film, in any case!

As I say (in the line you left out of the quote): “Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. I would argue that, like fingerprinting, the colonial experience shaped what was happening in Europe as well.”

A quick leap to direct connection between Lombroso and the Criminal Tribes Act may be a wee bit sloppy.

Good thing I didn’t do that then 🙂

Kerim, you may be on to something here, but the argument as stated is implausible. Why? Because if the Criminal Tribes Act was passed in 1871, and Lombroso’s discovery was also in 1871, the likelihood that the latter influenced the former is low. Without a clear chain of evidence connecting one event to the other, it seems unlikely that a scholarly discovery by an Italian would have been disseminated quickly enough to affect British policy within the same year.