Caste in Historical Context

Abstract

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.