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Summary

This chapter examines the understandings of caste propounded by Western orientalists from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, the massive bureaucratic machinery of the Raj had generated an enormous output of documentations in which jati and varna were used as basic units of identification. Two key themes have been identified in the vast array of regional ethnographic surveys, population censuses and other official and quasi-official writing. The first is an insistence on the supposedly ineradicable sense of community dividing Hindus from Muslims and other non-Hindus. The second is a view of Indians, apart from so-called tribals and followers of minority faiths, as slaves to rigid, Brahman-centred caste values. As of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'Aryan' caste Hindus were widely said by both Indian and British race theorists to be 'awaking' in evolutionary terms.

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3 - Western ‘orientalists’ and the colonial perception of caste

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3 - Western ‘orientalists’ and the colonial perception of caste

Summary