Author: Nicholas B Dirks
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 385
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240726
Description
Caste is a central symbol for India, suggesting an area which is socially and culturally different from other places, as well as expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is in fact neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects some core culture. Rather than being an expression of Indian tradition, caste, he argues, is a relatively modern phenomenon-the product of the encounter between India and British colonial rule.
Dirks traces the career of caste through history and also examines the rise of caste politics in contemporary India, in particular caste-based movements and their implications for Indian nationhood.
REVIEWS
The methodological significance of Dirks’s work lies in the author’s interrogation of the colonial archive, he reveals the extraordinary impact of colonial rule for the understanding of tradition (caste).
-R Champakalakshmi in The Hindu
Castes of Mind will, reopen the debate on the place of caste in modern India, its commodified form and its indelible link with the colonial archive. Its achievement is that it establishes the precise connections between colonial and republican India.
-Deepak Mehra in The Book Review
Neither reductive nor schematic, the notion of caste that emerges here is genuinely original.
-Edward W Said
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
PART I
THE INVENTION OF CASTE
1. Introduction: The Modernity of Caste.
2. Homo Hierarchicus: The Origins of an Idea.
3. The Ethnographic State.
PART II
COLONIZATION OF THE ARCHIVE
4. The Original Caste: Social Identity in the Old Regime.
5. The Textualization of Tradition: Biography of an Archive.
6. The Imperial Archive: Colonial Knowledge and Colonial Rule.
PART III
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC STATE
7. The Conversion of Caste.
8. The Policing of Tradition: Colonial Anthropology and the Invention of Custom.
9. The Body of Caste: Anthropology and the Criminalization of Caste.
10. The Enumeration of Caste: Anthropology as Colonial Rule.
PART IV
RECASTING INDIA: CASTE, COMMUNITY, AND POLITICS
11. Toward a Nationalist Sociology of India: Nationalism and Brahmanism.
12. The Reformation of Caste: Periyar, Ambedkar, and Gandhi.
13. Caste Politics and the Politics of Caste.
14. Conclusion: Caste and the Postcolonial Predicament.
CODA
The Burden of the Past: On Colonialism and the Writing of History.
NOTES
INDEX