8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 1/25
This article was downloaded by:[Syracuse University]On: 21 November 2007Access Details: [subscription number 768487883]Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
South Asia: Journal of South AsianStudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713445348
Classifying caste: census surveys in India in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuriesPadmanabh Samarendra a
a S.A. Jaipuria College.
Online Publication Date: 01 August 2003To cite this Article: Samarendra, Padmanabh (2003) 'Classifying caste: censussurveys in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ', South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, 26:2, 141 - 164To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/085640032000089762URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/085640032000089762
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf
This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will becomplete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with orarising out of the use of this material.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 2/25
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
n.s., Vol.XXVI, no.2, August 2003
Classifying Caste: Census Surveys in India inthe Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries*
Padmanabh Samarendra
S.A. Jaipuria College
The decennial census surveys conducted by the state in India in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries produced a vast corpus of knowledge on caste. Butthe motives of the colonial state in launching this vast enumeration project had
more to do with governance than science.1 Caste and religion were understood by
British officials to hold ‘the sociological keys to understanding the Indian people’.2
More specifically, in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857, the state ‘wanted to know
the customs of the land, so that it could face more prudently the vexed question of
social reform’,3 and desired to enhance its ‘knowledge about the internal divisions
of Indian society, in order to identify its allies who could be played effectively
against the enemies’.4 Hence the prominence accorded to caste in the census
reports. Recognising the potential of caste as a ‘divisive force’,5 the British imperial
state politicised this ‘socio-cultural dichotomy’6 with a view to consolidating its
subcontinental hegemony.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has written extensively and intelligently on this issue, but
he has in my view given insufficient attention to the diversities and discontinuities
* I am grateful to the late Dr Arvind N. Das, Dr Dilip K. Menon and Prof. Neeladri Bhattacharya for their commentson an earlier version of this paper that appeared as a chapter in my doctoral thesis. That chapter could not have takenthe present form of an article without Dr Lakshmi Subramanian’s initiative. Sangeeta DasGupta has shared and shapedthe ideas presented herein from the very beginning. I also thank Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and the two anonymousreferees whose comments helped me enrich the arguments.1 ‘The roots of the census in India’, writes Kenneth W. Jones, ‘are to be found in the first half of the nineteenth centuryas an expanding foreign government sought to gather information on the individuals and territory under its control’.K.W. Jones, ‘Religious Identity and the Indian Census’, in N.G. Barrier (ed.), The Census in British India: NewPerspectives (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1981), p.77. The opinion is also shared by Sekhar Bandyopadhyaywho, while outlining the objectives of Risley’s ethnographic experiments, writes: ‘Information is an essential toolof social control. And it is all the more necessary for an alien ruler’. S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Raj, Risley and theTribes and Castes Of Bengal’, in India Past and Present , Vol.II, no.1 (1985), p.41. Rashmi Pant, similarly, underlinesthe utility of a knowledge of caste for the ‘British administrative strategy…of managing masses’. R. Pant, ‘TheCognitive Status Of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review Of Some Literature on the North West Provinces andOudh’, in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.XXIV no.2 (Apr.–June 1987), p.150.2 B. Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’ in his An Anthropologist Among the
Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), p.242.3 S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Caste in the Perception Of the Raj: A Note Of the Evolution Of the Colonial Sociology Of Bengal’, in Bengal Past and Present , Vol.CIV, nos.198–9 (Jan.–Dec. 1985), p.57.4 Ibid .5
Ibid ., p.62.6
Ibid ., p.63.
ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/03/020141-24 2003 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/085640032000089762
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 3/25
142 SOUTH ASIA
in the colonial discourse on caste. The premeditated ‘political’ intent ascribed to the
colonial state by Bandyopadhyay has imposed an ahistorical continuity and unifor-
mity on such discourses. Instances such as the recommendation by the Census
Committee of 1877 to exclude caste from the purview of the census surveys,7 or
the decision to drop the practice of hierarchising castes according to their presumed
social status after the census of 1901—the feature of the process that generated themost lively public debate—or the disinclination of Edward Gait, the census
commissioner in 1911, to speculate about the origins of the caste system in the
pages of his report,8 do not support the contention that the state constantly
endeavoured to politicise the ‘divisive’ potential of caste. Finally, since his
attention is fixed on the supposed agenda of the state, Bandyopadhyay has little
interest in analysing the modes of comprehending caste as these appeared over the
years in ‘colonial sociology’.
Susan Bayly has illustrated the varied conceptions of caste in the literature
produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but not before she purges
these of the homogenising influence of colonial politics. Caste was not ‘invented’,
asserts Bayly, in the ‘so-called colonial discourse’.9 Rather, caste constituted ‘a
meeting ground between Indian reality and colonial knowledge and strategy’.10
This interaction produced an ‘astonishing diversity in the literature on Indian
“castes”, “tribes”, “races” and “nations”, and very little of it conforms to
the familiar stereotypes about narrow, self-contained, so-called “hegemonic”
knowledge and data-collection’.11 Implied in the presence of this diversity was
the absence of a defining colonial will. To demonstrate that the discourses on
caste were uncontaminated by power relations obtaining in India, Bayly furtherlinks these to the intellectual traditions evolving in the West. Caste, she argues, was
only of ‘subsidiary’ interest for the ethnographers who found race to be ‘a much
more pervasive concept in the analysis of Indian society’.12 Indeed the ethnog-
raphers in Bayley’s view were as much scholars as officials—‘men who sought to
make their mark in a wider learned world which had come to be dominated by
ethnological debate’.13 ‘Much of this scholarship’, she concludes, ‘was not
“colonial” at all in the usual senses being conceived as a contribution to broad
debates in social theory and “scientific” ethnology, rather than being focused solely
on questions of how to “know” and subjugate Indians as the ethnographic
“other” ’.14
Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ offers a more comprehensive insight into
7 Cited in J.A. Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, Vol.I (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1883),p.133.8 E.A. Gait, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.I: India, Part I: Report (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India,1913), p.387.9 S. Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography Of India’, in P. Robb (ed.), The Concept Of Race in South
Asia (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), p.166.10
Ibid .11
Ibid ., p. 214; and see also ibid ., pp.167, 183, 190, 205.12 Ibid ., pp.168, 214.13
Ibid ., p.167.14
Ibid ., p.214.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 4/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 143
the modes of imagining caste as delineated in the census reports and their
implications for Indian governmentality. Orientalism symbolised ‘a style of thought
based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction…between “the Orient”
and (most of the time) “the Occident” ’.15 ‘The relationship between Occident and
‘Orient’, explains Said, was ‘a relationship of power, of domination, of varying
degrees of a complex hegemony’.16 Orientalism was a discourse ‘by whichEuropean culture was able to manage—even produce—the Orient’.17
Within the nexus of knowledge and authority as identified by Said, several issues,
however, remain unexplored. What is specific in the Western representation of the
‘Orient’ in a colonial context? How did the obligation to administer, as in the case
of the ethnographers, mediate ‘a scholarly or classical’ representation of the
‘Orient’?18 Said insists that the presence of empire or ‘political imperialism’ in the
nineteenth century governed an ‘entire field of imagination’.19 However, by
reducing the varied Orientalist imaginations to a single discourse of imperial
endorsement, Said has denied culture its varied representations, autonomy and even
politics. Said’s cognition of the relationship between culture and politics, between
Orientalism and political empire, is thus marked by ambivalence. Culture is
endowed with politics, but it is overwhelmed by the politics of empire. The
conclusion is ironical: the more we saturate Orientalist writings with imperial
politics, the less we know about the strategies through which these commanded
authority. The project of Said is to establish the political significance of the
cultural, but this cannot be done by insisting on a continuous relationship between
culture and politics, or between Orientalist scholarship and empire. Only by
fracturing this continuity, by locating a discontinuous relationship between the two,by freeing culture of institutional politics, can we recover and formulate the politics
of culture.
In fact, the colonial situation critically modified the ‘ontological and epistemolog-
ical distinction between the Orient and the Occident’ as conceived by Said. The
colonisers exported to India the institutions and ideologies they were acquainted
with in the metropolis. It is not surprising, then, that Kenneth Jones found that: ‘In
form both the British and Indian censuses appear nearly identical’.20 But the
similarities were not just formal ones. The decennial census surveys are deeply
imbued with ideas of materialist evolution and racial hierarchy. The institution of
caste seemed, to the British census officials, to have attributes that made it
amenable to these Western explanatory models.
15 Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions Of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p.2.16
Ibid ., p.5.17
Ibid .18 ‘Scholarly or Classical’ are the terms used by Said to characterise German Orientalism during the first two thirdsof the nineteenth century. Germany in this phase possessed no colonies; there was ‘nothing in Germany to correspondto the Anglo-French presence in India’. Ibid ., p.19.19
Ibid ., pp.13–14.20
Jones, ‘Religious Identity and the Indian Census’, p.78.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 5/25
144 SOUTH ASIA
Of course they were wrong. Western concepts lost their integrity in the colonial
milieu. But that, too, was grist to the official mill, for it underlined the unchanging
‘Oriental’ character of the institution. Further, the uneven impact of intellectual
traditions on enumerators produced divergences in the cognition of caste
even within a set of census reports for the same year. The ‘Final Report’
on a census survey always contained a greater explication and applicationof academic theories. The enumerators in the localities, on the other hand,
tended to draw much more upon local traditions and customs. Finally, the
ethnographers’ interpretations always had to conform broadly to the parameters set
by the state.
The decennial census surveys in India thus produced discourses on caste marked
equally by continuity and rupture. In these varied discourses the colonial state
contended to discover the colonised, and re-present them in ways that reinforced its
moral and material claims to rule. While other conceptions of caste existing beyondthe arena of the state were not effaced, the officials in the process of selecting,
comparing and classifying fundamentally altered the customary ways of identifying
and defining caste. Caste was exteriorised: its features were objectified and made
visible; it was wrenched from the domain of received tradition and subjected to
public discussion. And from the pages of the governmental records, the colonial
conception of caste percolated down into society. Not only did people begin to use
new terms to describe their own identity: even the way they thought about it—to
paraphrase Cohn—showed signs of change.21
The Beginning of EnumerationThe decennial survey of population started in India from 1871 to 1872.22 In the
beginning, it was primarily thought of as a statistical exercise—the subject
population was to be enumerated to facilitate a more efficient mode of admini-
stration.23 Nevertheless, one of the requisites of the project was to count and
classify the myriad array of Indian castes by clubbing together analogous castes and
arranging these hierarchically according to their respective ranks. However, the
outcome was ‘not satisfactory’, concluded Henry Waterfield of the Statistics and
21 Cohn, ‘The Census’, p.228.22 The early attempts at enumeration and classification of population preceding the census operations have beendetailed by Bernard Cohn and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. See Cohn, ‘The Census’, pp.233–8; and Bandyopadhyay,‘Caste in the Perception Of the Raj’, pp.58–61.23 It was the ‘administrative inconvenience’ caused by the ‘want of more precise information regarding the numbersof the people’, Beverley wrote, that led the Secretary of State to issue ‘instructions that arrangements should be madefor a general census of the population in the year 1871’. ‘Without information on this head’, he added, ‘the basis iswanting on which to found accurate opinions on such important subjects as the growth and rate of increase of thepopulation, the sufficiency of food supplies, the incidence of local and imperial taxation’. H. Beverley, Report onthe Census Of Bengal, 1872 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1872), p.1. Underlining the importance of numeralsin colonial imaginaire, Appadurai writes that ‘the exercise of bureaucratic power…involved the colonial imaginationand…in this imagination number played a crucial role’. The ‘referential purpose’ that the numbers concerningcommunities served, Appadurai elaborates, was ‘far less important than their discursive importance in supporting orsubverting various classificatory moves and the policy argument based on them’. A. Appadurai, ‘Number in theColonial Imagination’ in C. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp.315, 321.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 6/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 145
Commerce Department, ‘owing partly to the intrinsic difficulties of the subject, and
partly to the absence of a uniform plan of classification, each writer adopting that
which seemed to him best suited for the purpose’.24 Thus, forty-eight ‘principal’
castes of the Central Provinces were placed in eleven ‘groups’, while in Madras
‘various castes of the Hindoos’ were arranged in seventeen ‘sets’.25 In Bengal,
sixty-nine castes were grouped into ‘superior Hindu castes’, ‘intermediate castes’,‘trading castes’, ‘pastoral castes’, castes engaged in the preparation of cooked food,
‘agricultural castes’, ‘service castes’, ‘artisan castes’, ‘weaver castes’, ‘labouring
castes’, castes engaged in selling fish and vegetables, boating and fishing castes,
and dancer, musician, beggar and ‘vagabond’ castes.26
Seen primarily as a statistical inquiry, the census of 1871–72 made no attempt to
offer an explanation of caste structure. At the same time, the varying methods of
classifying caste pursued in the reports anticipated future developments. For
instance, the varna arrangement of castes found favour in the summary of the
census reports from the different provinces: ‘In all modes of classification, the firstrank is held by the Brahmin or priestly caste…. Next in rank come the Kshatriyas,
Rajpoots, or warrior caste…. The third of the primitive castes was the
Vaisya…while the great majority of the Hindu population was indiscriminately
thrown together into the fourth, namely the Soodra or servile class’.27 The varna
schema was also present in the census report of Bengal, but its restricted
application here marked the beginning of attempts by colonial officials to explain
the structure of caste without depending on Brahmanical tradition. The two
criteria adopted in the Bengal report were ‘racial’ origin and occupation.28 The
racial identity of a caste was gleaned from textual traditions. The origin of the
Brahmans and Kshatriyas could be traced to the pure-blooded Hindu race or the
‘Aryan’ race. Placed below them were functional castes, said to be of mixed racial
origin. But the functional hierarchy implicit in the varna model proved of little
assistance in deciding the status of these castes. The ‘vagabond caste’, for example,
was placed on the lowest rung, not because the varna schema prescribed that
position for it, but because it bore no resemblance to the traditional function of any
caste.
Until 1881, census enumerations in India were undertaken ‘at different times and
by independent agencies’, and with little attempt to secure uniformity in the
arrangement of their findings.29 To ensure future uniformity, a Census Committee
24 H. Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census Of British India Of 1871–72 (London: George Edward Eyre and WilliamSpottiswoode, 1875), p.20.25 Ibid ., p.21.26 Ibid .27 Ibid ., p.22.28 ‘Race’, in this report, was not used as a biological category. The term overlapped with that of ‘nationality’ andalso referred to religious groups. Beverley, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1872, ‘Resolution’, p.3. Bayly has pointedout that the term race was ‘widely used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its meaning waslinguistic and cultural, rather than “ethnological” in the later Victorian sense, when notion of progressive evolutionhad emerged as a generalized theory of human racial “type” ’. Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” ’, p.172. The term in itspresent connotation was applied even beyond the early nineteenth century, as is evident from the census report of 1872.29 W.C. Plowden, Report on the Census Of British India Taken on the 17th Of February 1881(London: Eyre andSpottiswoode, 1883), Vol.1, p.1.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 7/25
146 SOUTH ASIA
was constituted in 1877 to frame a common programme for the forthcoming census
operations. The Committee recommended that the ‘Hindus should be shown as
Brahmins, Kshatryas, and Others’.30 A pan-Indian representation of caste structure
was thus proposed by aggregating castes, smothering their specificities—hierarchi-
cal and interactional, occupational, etc.—and universalising certain characteristics
on the basis of which castes from disparate localities could be rendered compar-able.
The diversity in the composition of caste society in the provinces and the differing
principles identified by the ethnographers as underlying such social arrangements
denied the uniformity in caste classification envisaged by the Census Committee.
In Bengal, Bourdillon had wanted to follow the classification adopted by Beverley
in 1872, ‘but the paramount necessity of maintaining uniformity in the system of
caste classification throughout India compelled the Census Commissioner [for India
in 1881] to negative [sic] the request’.31
Yet ‘the practical difficulty of carrying outon any uniform principle…[the] grading of castes’ in the manner suggested by the
census commissioner ‘was found to be so great’ that even this had to be
‘abandoned’.32 Plowden, the census commissioner, had decided that the various
castes ‘should be arranged in five categories: Brahmans, Rajputs, Castes of Good
social Position, Inferior Castes and Non-Hindus or Aboriginal Castes’.33 But in
Bengal, ‘all the castes’ were divided into five great ‘classes’, namely, Brahmins,
Rajputs, ‘Other Hindu castes’, ‘Aboriginal castes’ and ‘Hindus not recognising
caste’; following these was the indeterminate ‘caste not stated’.34
The necessity of finding an organising principle of caste structure was forced upon
the ethnographers when the Census Committee rejected the four-varna model as
‘primeval and obsolete’.35 Subsequent investigations demonstrated that the ethnog-
raphers could neither form a unanimous opinion on the subject nor exclude
completely the influence of the Brahmanical model from their explanations. As in
the preceding census report for Bengal, Bourdillon, in 1881, employed the two
criteria of descent and occupation to classify caste. The inhabitants of Bengal, he
believed, comprised the Hindus, the aborigines and ‘a large population which
throngs the debateable land between the Hindus and the pure aborigines’.36 The
‘pure’ Hindus in Bengal were the Brahmins and the Rajputs, the castes that hadretained the purity of their Aryan descent.37 While Bourdillon refers to ‘ethnolog-
ical’38 distinctions to separate the Hindus from the aborigines, the category did not
yet assume a biological connotation. That had to await H.H. Risley.39 In the 1881
30 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, pp.139–40.31
Ibid ., p.140.32
Ibid .33 Cohn, ‘The Census’, p.245.34 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.133.35
Ibid ., p.139.36
Ibid ., p.140.37 Ibid .38
Ibid .39
See below.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 8/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 147
report, ‘descent’ was discerned from ‘language’, ‘customs’ and ‘faith’.40 The
members of the ‘Other Hindu castes’ and the ‘Aboriginal castes’ were those
aboriginals who had been conquered by the Aryans and ‘relegated to…lowest
grades and employed in…most menial offices’.41 These classes had lost their racial
purity in the wake of their absorption within Hinduism; hence, their social status
was to be decided by the services rendered by them. A similar method of classification of caste was followed in Bombay Presidency where Baines cited ‘the
eponymic occupation of all classes below those of Brahman and Rajput as
indicative of [their] social position’.42 Descent from the Aryan race, on the other
hand, secured the Brahmins and the Rajputs the first two positions in a list of
thirteen classes.43
The role of race as one of the defining elements of caste society was, however,
rejected in the census report of 1881 for Punjab. Deuzil Ibbetson, who prepared the
report, contended that the ‘whole basis of diversity of caste’ was ‘diversity of occupation’. ‘The old division into Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, Sudra, and
Mlechchha or outcaste who is below the Sudra’, he explained, ‘is but a division
into the Priest, the warrior, the husbandman, the artisan and the menial’.44 By
‘giving the whole sanction of religion to the principle of the hereditary nature of
occupation’45 the Brahmins had cleverly safeguarded the elevated status of these
castes.
The commencement of the next census operations in 1891 was preceded by critical
changes in the approach of the colonial state to the enumeration of caste. The
census operation had started out as a counting exercise. However, variations in
the scheme of classification or between the surveys of 1872 and 1881 made
it difficult to compare absolute numbers. In compiling tables for Bengal, Bourdillon
admitted that ‘considerable differences exist between the caste totals of 1872
and 1881, which it is now impossible to reconcile’.46 Investigating the circum-
stances responsible for this discrepancy, the census officer pointed out that
‘there must have been radical differences in the system upon which the castes,
and especially the subdivision of castes, were classified in 1872 and 1881’.47
These errors could be avoided, he suggested, ‘by the preparation of a report onthe castes of Bengal which shall show their origin and classification, as well as
the ramifications of the same caste in different parts of the country, and will give
40 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.140.41
Ibid ., p.141.42 Plowden, Report on the Census Of British India Taken on the 17th Of February 1881,Vol.III, ‘Appendix H: Mr.Baines on Caste and Other Social Division in the Bombay Presidency’, p.xcix.43 The following thirteen ‘classes’ were mentioned by Baines: ‘Brahmin, Rajputs, Writers, Traders, Artizans,Agriculturists, Shepherds, Fishers and Sailors, Personal Servants, Minor Professions, Devotees, Depressed Castes,Labourer and Miscellaneous’. Ibid ., pp.xc–xcii.44 D.C.J. Ibbetson, Report on the Census Of the Panjab Taken on the 17th Of February 1881, Vol. 1. (Calcutta: BengalSecretariat Press, 1883), p.173.45 Ibid .46 Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.142.47
Ibid ., p.141.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 9/25
148 SOUTH ASIA
an exhaustive list of the subdivisions of each caste and of their numerous
synonyms’.48
The Census Committee of 1877 had also stressed the necessity of a detailed
investigation into the structure of caste, even while questioning the merit of
including the subject within the purview of the census reports. (A census report, itopined, was a statistical document ‘relating properly to the enumeration of the
people’.49) Similar advice was tendered in 1882 by the census commissioner,
following which the government of Bengal appointed H.H. Risley, in 1885, to
conduct an ethnographic survey of the tribes and castes of the province.50 This
conscious decision to initiate a ‘scientific enquiry’ to collect ‘more precise
information’ regarding caste reflected a desire on the part of the colonial state to
know how the caste system worked. Summarising the advantages expected to flow
from Risley’s ethnographic survey, C.E. Buckland, officiating secretary to the
government of Bengal, wrote:
The more Government officers know about the religious and social
customs of the people of their districts, the better able they will be to
deal with either the possible social problems of the future, or with the
practical questions arising in their ordinary work, such as the relations
of different castes to the land, their privileges in respect of rent, their
relations to trade, their status in civil society, their internal organi-
zation, their rules as to marriage and divorce, and as to the giving and
receiving of famine-relief.51
At the heart of this new endeavour lay not only some practical administrative
benefits but, as is evident from the following statement of Buckland, the very
hegemonic aspirations of the colonial state: ‘Much influence for good over the
people can be obtained by both Executive and Judicial officers by acquiring,
and having a reputation for possessing, an intimate knowledge of the circumstances
and surroundings of their actual life’.52 Colonial officials who had never had
the advantage of reading Edward Said understood, nevertheless, that there was
a correlation between knowledge and control. Accordingly, they strove to
discover caste in all its intricacies and to encompass it within an explanatoryparadigm.
Search for a Theory of CasteThe census of 1891, though distinct from its predecessors in many respects, was not
without its linkages to the past. One was the appointment of J.A. Baines as the
chief census commissioner. As census commissioner for Bombay in 1881, Baines
48 Ibid .
49 Ibid ., p.133.
50 Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.55, May 1892, ‘Enquiryinto Castes and Occupations Of the People Of Bengal’, Bihar State Archives, Patna [hereafter BSA].51
Ibid .52
Ibid . (emphasis added).
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 10/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 149
had been a stalwart protagonist of the view that descent and occupation were the
defining criteria of caste status.53 But Baines directed that the caste groups be
organised within the 1891 ‘imperial tables’ on a principle ‘based mainly upon
function’.54 What was ‘aimed at’ in this method, the census commissioner wrote,
‘was as much uniformity as the nature of statistics will show, so that the return of
each province might be dealt with on the same basis’.55
Function, agreed O’Donnell, census commissioner for Bengal, was ‘the only
possible basis of classification [of caste]’.56 O’Donnell’s views were informed by
the formulations of Nesfield presented in his Brief View Of the Caste System Of the
North-Western Provinces and Oudh. The two inter-related aspects of Nesfield’s
hypothesis were as follows: first, the intermixture of races since the time of the
Aryan invasion had led to a complete ‘unity of the Indian race’, 57 and hence, no
perceptible physiological differences existed among the Hindus; second, the div-
ision of caste was a functional division. O’Donnell cited historical parallels withWestern societies to corroborate Nesfield’s hypothesis. ‘The three upper classes’,
he wrote, ‘were in fact parallel to the patres et populus Romanus of ancient Latium,
one in race and blood, but partially differentiated by rank, founded on occu-
pation’.58
The population of Bengal was segregated by O’Donnell into two main groups: the
‘Vaishyas or Aryan Settlers’; and the ‘Subject Tribes’. The former was further
divided into three sub-groups: the ‘Patrician Clans’ comprising Brahmans and
Rajputs; the ‘Vaishya proper’ or ‘Plebeian middle class’ which included castes like
the Baidya, Baniya, Kayastha, etc.; and the ‘Shudras’ or the ‘Lower classes’, thelast being further split into the ‘Nabasakh or pure functional groups’ and the
‘Unclean castes’.59 The classification of caste in the report exhibits traces of the
varna division, particularly in respect of the Brahmans and Rajputs, but also in
respect of the Vaishyas ‘proper’ who were assigned ‘trade’ as their traditional
occupation.60
53 J.A. Baines, Census Of India, 1891, General Report (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1893), p.185. See alsopp.182–3.54 Ibid ., p.188. The caste population was divided into the following groups in the ‘imperial tables’: ‘A. Agriculture,B. Professional, C. Commercial, D. Artizans and Village Menials, E. Vagrants, F. Races and Indefinite Titles’. Ibid .55
Ibid ., p.189. The arrangement proposed by Baines wasaccepted with minor modifications to classify caste in MadrasPresidency. The following were the classes mentioned in the census report of 1891 for Madras, within which the castepopulation was distributed: ‘A. Agriculture, B. Professional, C. Commercial, D. Artisan and Village Menials, E.Vagrant, Minor Artisans and Performers, etc., F. Races and Nationalities, G. Indefinite and Unknown’. H.A. Stuart,Census Of India, 1891 (Madras: The Superintendent, Government Press, 1893), Vol.XIII, pp.209–10.56
Ibid ., p.250.57 Cited in C.J. O’Donnell, Census Of India, 1891 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893), Vol.III, p.251.58
Ibid ., p.253.59
Ibid ., pp.265–6.60 It was only a shadow of the varna model that was retained in the census report. The character of the classes inthe fourfold division had been irrevocably altered in the course of enumeration. The class of Brahmans, for instance,incorporated many deemed sub-castes that actually occupied a low rank on the social ladder. The Gayawals and theDhamins of Gaya district in the province of Bihar (earlier Bengal), for example, were not admitted in the network of social interaction with the ‘twice-born’ castes, and yet, these were incorporated as the sub-castes of Brahmans inthe district census report. ‘District Census Report, 1891, Gaya District’, BSA, p.11.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 11/25
150 SOUTH ASIA
The census reports of 1891 seemingly obliterated the gap between the ‘Orient’ and
the ‘Occident’. Caste had been equated with the structure of social classes in
ancient Rome. Concealed in this equivalence, however, was an assertion of
Occidental superiority. The present of the ‘Orient’ could match only the past
of Europe. History had progressed in Europe; in India it had not travelled
much beyond Roman times. Europe was thus the future of India, European historythat inexorable trajectory of universal history which ‘Oriental’ societies had to
tread.
The ‘Oriental’ image of India was made explicit as soon as the theory of materialist
evolutionism was confronted with the problem of explaining how the ‘functional
guilds’ of ancient times were transformed into endogamous castes. Explaining
the reasons for caste endogamy, O’Donnell wrote: ‘Like their Italian congeners
the patricians of Hinduism soon discovered that a rigorous law of exclusive
marriage was the most effective means of protecting themselves from plebeian
intrusion. The Brahman, however, went further than the Roman lords, whose
exclusiveness was founded on wealth and noble birth rather than on sacred
office’.61 Yet why was the Brahmanical stratagem accepted by other functional
groups? At this point the theory of materialist evolutionism receded into the
background and the distinctiveness of the ‘Oriental’ character came into play: ‘The
acceptance of endogamy by the other castes was, no doubt, chiefly due to their
adoption of a practice, which their pastors and betters found good for themselves.
In nothing is mankind, and especially the half-civilized Asiatic, so imitative as in
regard to social custom’.62
The image of caste as constituted by the doctrine of materialist evolutionism
appears, fragmented, in a set of District Census Reports prepared during the 1891
census surveys. These reports indicate that enumerators at the local level used a
wide range of indices, many of them actually at variance with those recommended
at the provincial level. Generally, it was the varna model, not the functional
classification of caste as proposed by O’Donnell, that was preferred by officers at
the local level to categorise castes. ‘To arrange the different castes and sub-castes
in order of social precedence’, wrote the census officer for the Gaya district, ‘no
better classification could be adopted than by using the one universally recognized
and sanctioned by religious writings, viz: Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, Su-dras’.63 Not every enumerator agreed with this approach; but most did to some
extent. As the census officer for Monghyr (Munger) district argued: ‘the
classification of castes in order of social precedence can be effected with precision
only in cases of the “twice-born”. When we come to make the same attempt [for
the other castes], we find that opinions differ widely’.64
The large number of non-twice-born Sudra castes constituted something of a
61 O’Donnell, Census Of India, 1891, Vol.III, p.25362 Ibid .63 ‘District Census Report, 1891, Gaya District’, BSA, p.11.64
‘District Census Report, 1891, Monghyr District’, BSA, p.12.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 12/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 151
problem for the enumerators because the varna system lumped these castes
together. How should they decide the respective rank of the castes enclosed within
the Sudra category? The district enumerators tried to resolve this problem by
alluding to a whole range of social interactions involving these castes. The
description of the Gwala caste, placed on a fairly high rung within the Sudra
classification, tells us about what kind of social conduct indicated status in theireyes. The ‘caste occupation’ of the Gwalas, wrote the census officer of Bhagalpur
district, was ‘rearing cows’, but ‘a large part of them engage in agriculture and are
generally occupancy raiyats [tenants]. Many of them are considered zamindars
[landlords]…Brahmans take water from their hand’.65 The report added that
like ‘many of the middle castes of Bihar, the Goars [a name used for the
Gwalas] allow widow-remarriage according to the sagai or chuman form’.66
There were three ‘local groupings’ of this caste living in the district of Bhagalpur:
the Majrauthi; the Kishnauti; and the Dahiara. The last was held to be the
lowest in standing because the ‘first and second will on no account mix water with
milk and hence do not prepare Dahi [curd] or Chhana (cheese). These are onlymade by the last section’.67 The relative position of the Gwala caste was thus fixed
by assessing whether customs discouraged by the high castes, such as widow-re-
marriage, were prevalent or not among them; and by establishing whether Brah-
mans accepted water from them. Other ranking criteria employed by the
enumerators in respect of the Sudra castes included whether the caste in question
was of ‘criminal’, ‘litigious’ or ‘peaceful’ disposition; the attitude of high castes
towards it; and the period of impurity observed by its members following the death
of a kin.
The functional theory of the origin of caste was abandoned during the censussurveys of 1901. Risley, census commissioner in 1901, argued that the preceding
census had provided only ‘a patchwork classification in which occupation predom-
inates, varied here and there by considerations of caste, history, tradition, ethnical
[sic] affinity, and geographical position’.68 Because of this inconsistency, he
concluded, the classification ‘accords neither with native tradition and practice, nor
with any theory of caste that has ever been propounded by students of the
subject’.69 This critique of the census reports of 1891 reveals the two goals Risley
had set for himself: to propound a theory of caste; and to represent ‘native’
tradition and practices accurately in this proposition.
Risley’s first attempts at a theory of caste were formulated in the course of his
‘Enquiry into Castes and Occupations Of the People of Bengal’ in 1885. Encour-
aged by the response to that enquiry, Risley submitted a fresh proposal, in
December 1890, ‘for continuing similar researches in the Lower Provinces, and for
extending them to other parts of India’.70 The project was still at the discussion
65 ‘District Census Report, 1891, Bhagalpur District’, BSA, p.6.66
Ibid .67
Ibid .68 H.H. Risley, Census Of India, 1901 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1903), Vol.I, p.538.69 Ibid .70 Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.55, May 1892, ‘Enquiryinto Castes and Occupations Of the People of Bengal’, BSA.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 13/25
152 SOUTH ASIA
stage, however, when in 1901 the government of India, ‘at the instance of British
Association for the Advancement of Science’, sanctioned ‘a scheme for a general
ethnographic survey’ in India.71 The proposal submitted by Risley admittedly fitted
their requirements. Risley’s new role as census commissioner was also perfectly
adapted to the task of compiling a scientific survey of the subject populations of the
subcontinent.
Risley went to work with the thoroughness of a scientist, too. He examined the
hypotheses of Ibbetson, Nesfield, Senart and others before deciding that ‘race’ was
the real basis of the caste system, and that anthropometry was the appropriate tool
for discovering it. In the process, Risley dismissed the traditional varna
classification as little more than a ‘grotesque scheme of social evolution’.72 The
subsequent deliberations in the general census report of 1901 demonstrate how the
image of the ‘Orient’ was constructed and authorised through the interplay of
scientific learning and the prerogatives of colonial authorship.
A caste, wrote Risley, was known by a common name, it had a common occupation
and claimed a common totemic origin. But most importantly, a caste was ‘almost
invariably endogamous’—marital linkages proved the membership of an individual
in a caste.73 The ‘growth of caste sentiment’ through the formation of endogamous
groups, Risley postulated, was rooted in ‘a basis of fact and a superstructure
of fiction’. The basis of fact obtained widely if not universally; ‘the superstructure
of fiction’ was ‘peculiar to India’.74 The ‘fact’ referred to the concern of
the invading Aryans to maintain their racial purity, as was ‘common’ for dominant
races in other parts of the world. The Aryans, however, were forced to takewomen from indigenous sections since Aryan women could not accompany their
men in the conquering expeditions. A total amalgamation with inferior races could
be avoided solely because the Aryans ‘only took women and did not give them’.
These less-than-pure Aryans became ‘the founders of Rajput and pseudo-Rajput
houses all over India’. Racial distinction was thus held to be ‘the ultimate basis of
caste’.75
Nevertheless, Risley allowed that some blurring of the boundaries had taken place
over the centuries. The ‘fact’ of racial distinction, he noted, had been ‘fictionalised’
by the ‘Orientals’. This had resulted in a proliferation of castes. In the census
commissioner’s own words:
Once started in India the principle [of distinction of race] was strength-
ened, perpetuated, and extended to all ranks of society by the fiction
71 Cited in Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.386.72 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.547.73
Ibid ., p.517.74
Ibid ., p.555. Risley’s discourse, points out Inden, ‘presupposes a dichotomy of the material and ideal, the empiricaland the metaphysical, base and superstructure’. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990),p.64. For insightful analyses of Risley’s writings, see ibid ., pp.58–66; and N.B. Dirks, ‘Castes Of Mind’, in
Representations, no.37 (Winter 1992), pp.68–72.75 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.556.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 14/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 153
that people who speak a different language, dwell in different districts,
worship different gods…must be so unmistakably aliens by blood that
intermarriage with them is a thing not to be thought of.76
Yet why did the people choose to confine themselves to endogamous groups on the
pretence of fictional difference? Why, to use the census commissioner’s term, didthey ‘fictionalise’ their lives in this way? What science could not explain,
‘Orientalism’ did. The growth of caste sentiment, Risley confidently asserted:
must have been greatly promoted and stimulated by certain character-
istic peculiarities of the Indian intellect—its lax hold of facts, its
indifference to action, its absorption in dreams, its exaggerated rever-
ence for tradition, its passion for endless division and sub-division, its
acute sense of minute technical distinction, its pedantic tendency to
press a principle to its furthest logical conclusion, and its remarkablecapacity for imitating and adapting social ideas and usages of whatever
origin. It is through this imitative faculty the myth of the four castes,
evolved in the first instance by some speculative Brahman, and repro-
duced in the popular versions of the epics…has attained its wide
currency as the model to which Hindu society ought to conform. That
it bears no relation to the actual facts of life is in the view of its
adherents an irrelevant detail. It descends from remote antiquity, it has
the sanction of the Brahmans, it is an article of faith, and every one
seeks to bring his own caste within one or other of the traditional
classes. Finally as M. Senart has pointed out, the whole caste systemwith its scale of social merit and demerit and its endless gradations of
status is in remarkable accord with the philosophic doctrine of trans-
migration and Karma. Every Hindu believes that his spiritual status at
any given time is determined by the sum total of his past lives—he is
born to an immutable karma, what is more natural than that he should
be born into an equally immutable caste?77
Risley’s conception of caste did not exactly reiterate the image of a fixed and
immutable ‘Orient’. On the contrary, the author highlighted the processes of creation of new castes through changes of custom, migration, adoption of new
functions, etc. Yet it was precisely the processes of change in the caste system and
not its fixity that convinced the census commissioner of the inherent and immutable
irrationality of the ‘Orient’—of its ‘otherness’. Risley ascribed the people’s
‘passion for endless division and sub-division’ to the ‘characteristic peculiarities of
the Indian intellect’ that would be ‘obvious at a glance’. These ‘obvious’ character-
istics of the Indian intellect were ‘its phenomenal memory, its feeble grasp of
questions of fact, its subtle manipulation of impalpable theories, its scanty develop-
ment of the critical faculty’. The strength of the Indian intellect, Risley concluded,
76 Ibid .
77 Ibid .
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 15/25
154 SOUTH ASIA
‘lies in other lines of mental activity, in a region of transcendental speculation
which does not lead to the making of history’.78
Risley was a man of science, and science called for the demonstration of the ‘fact’
of ‘caste sentiment’. Accordingly, he proposed that the racial types in the indige-
nous population should be discovered through measurements of head, nose and
bodily stature, in accordance with a scheme developed some years earlier by Sir
William Flower of the British Museum and Professor Topinard of Paris. 79 Risley
advanced the following reasons for adopting anthropometry as a tool for uncover-
ing the ‘fact’ underlying the organisation of caste. In India, ‘historical evidence can
hardly be said to exist’;80 further, the distinct cultural characteristics of social
groups had been lost due to ‘the wholesale borrowing of customs and ceremonies
which goes on…in India’. When norms obscured the truth, one could recover it
only through natural or physical indices. Moreover, anthropometry was particularly
suited to the Indian situation because of the existence of the caste system. Risleywrote:
Nowhere else in the world do we find the population of a large
continent broken up into an infinite number of mutually exclusive
aggregates…this absolute prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth
now as its [caste structure’s] essential and most prominent character-
istic.… In a society thus organized, a society putting an extravagant
value on pride of blood and the idea of ceremonial purity, difference
of physical type, however produced in the first instance, may be
expected to manifest a high degree of persistence, while methods which
seek to trace and express such differences find a peculiarly favourable
field for this operation.81
In Risley’s thought, India was Orientalised, disengaged from the (European) world
and converted into a ‘field’. Elaborating upon the suitability of India as a ‘field’ for
anthropometrical experiments, Risley wrote:
In this respect India presents a remarkable contrast to most other parts
of the world, where anthropometry has to confess itself hindered, if notbaffled, by the constant intermixture of types obscuring and confusing
the data ascertained by measurements.… In fact all the recognized
nations of Europe are the result of a process of unrestricted crossing
which has fused a number of distinct types into a more or less definable
national type. In India the process of fusion has long ago been arrested
and the degree of progress which it had made up to the point at which
it ceased to operate is expressed in the physical characteristics of the
78 Ibid ., p.546.
79 Ibid ., p.494.80
Ibid ., p.489.81
Ibid ., p.496.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 16/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 155
groups which have been left behind. There is consequently no national
type and nation in the ordinary sense of the word.82
This was, in effect, a ‘science’ for colonies.
With the help of anthropometry Risley identified three main ‘races’ in India: theAryan; the Dravidian; and the Mongoloid. Leading European scholars—Flower,
Beddoe, and Haddon in England, Topinard in France, and Virchow, Schmidt and
Lollmann in Germany—apparently approved Risley’s findings.83 Risley had admitt-
ed that there was nothing in the racial profile to merit a gradation of races: ‘people
with long heads cannot be said to be cleverer or more advanced in culture than
people with short heads’.84 But the census commissioner’s endeavours were to be
of little value if he demonstrated only the racial typology of different castes. The
colonial state that sponsored these researches needed to classify castes by rank. The
issue of hierarchy thus assumed seminal importance for Risley. In pursuit of this
he ventured well beyond the neutral domain of science, and became a learnedpropagandist for empire.85
Risley had expressed surprise at ‘the curiously close correspondence between the
gradations of racial type indicated by the nasal index and certain social data
ascertained by independent inquiry’. Elaborating upon the phenomenon, he sug-
gested that, if one took
a series of castes in Bengal, Bihar, the United Provinces of Agra and
Oudh, or Madras, and arrange[d] them in order of the average nasal
index, so that the caste with the finest nose shall be at the top, and thatwith the contrast at the bottom of the list, it will be found that this order
substantially corresponds with the accepted order of social pre-
cedence.86
Risley’s scientific inquiry had now ‘curiously’ assumed cultural connotations. He
concluded it by laying down a ‘law’: ‘for those parts of India where there is an
appreciable strain of Dravidian blood it is scarcely a paradox to lay down as a law
of the caste organizations that the social status of the members of a particular group
varies in inverse ratio to the mean relative width of their noses’. 87 The method of
82 Ibid .83 Ibid ., p.494. Not everyone involved in the census accepted Risley’s racial hypothesis. For example, the officer incharge of census operations in Madras Presidency observed that it was ‘exceedingly doubtful whether cranialmeasurements (though they will doubtless separate the jungle-man from the trader classes, and the latter from themore Aryan Brahmans and immigrants from North India), will ever succeed in differentiating the very manySemi-Dravidian castes of which the bulk of the population consists’. In fact he went further, and asserted the‘impossibility of defining scientifically what should be considered to be a caste’. W. Francis, Census Of India, 1901(Madras: The Superintendent, Government Press, 1902), Vol.XV, p.126. Enthoven faced a similar problem inBombay Presidency in racially separating the Marathas from Kunbis. R.E. Enthoven, Census Of India, 1901 (Bombay:The Government Central Press, 1902), Vol.IX, p.185.84 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.497.85 Risley, significantly, had arranged the castes alphabetically, not hierarchically, in the four volumes of The Tribes
and Castes Of Bengal published in 1891.86 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.498.87
Ibid .
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 17/25
156 SOUTH ASIA
affixing status to race, as should be clear from the passages quoted above, was
ironical in its simplicity: the high caste was the same as the ‘high race’. Risley had
so far investigated race to explain caste; he now reversed his approach: the status
of caste determined the status of race. The following example illustrates the
super-imposition of caste status on racial division. The head measurement in Bihar,
the census commissioner wrote, corresponded ‘substantially with the scale of socialprecedence independently ascertained. At the top of the list are the Bhuinhars
[Bhumihars] who rank high among the territorial aristocracy of Hindustan and
Bihar; then come the Brahmans, followed at a slight but yet appreciable interval by
the clerkly Kayasths’.88 In fact, in the caste hierarchy of Bihar, the Bhumihars came
after the Brahmans.
Head and nose measurements did not, though, remove the ongoing uncertainties
concerning the hierarchisation of caste. The ‘same’ caste enjoyed differing social
status in different regions, while castes apparently originating from the same racial
stock did not always share a common rank either. There was thus an asymmetry
between the rigidity of the nasal index/identity of the races and the social diversity
of the castes. The former could not decide the latter. Further, the number of castes
enlisted in the report had increased considerably, making the exercise of hierarch-
isation even more intractable. Evidently the task could not satisfactorily be left to
the discipline of science: perhaps intervention by the state was required to solve the
problem? In the event, a new sub-section made its appearance in the chapter on
caste in the census report of 1901: a genealogy of the state’s prerogative in the
matter of caste was traced, beginning with the right of kings in the ‘Hindu period’.
E.A. Gait, the census commissioner for Bengal, wrote:
Under the Hindu regime the social precedence of different castes was
settled by the monarch himself.… There are numerous stories regarding
the interference of Ballala Sena in caste matters, how he degraded the
Subarnabaniks and jugis and…how he settled the grades of several
high castes including that of the Brahmans themselves.89
The implication of this allusion is obvious: if kings decided caste related issues in
the ‘Hindu’ period, why could the colonial state not do so? The colonial state,
however, made a very reluctant king; it had professed not to intervene in the socialand religious affairs of the people. Hence an indirect method of hierarchising caste
was adopted by the census commissioner that decisively ushered this institution
into the arena of public debate.
Risley decided to accept in the census reports the ‘classification [of caste] by social
88 Ibid ., p.504.
89 E.A. Gait, Census Of India, 1901, Vol.1 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1903), p.365. Gait in his report as thecensus commissioner in 1911 had underlined the role ‘traditional’ temporal authorities played in caste matters at thetime. As he later wrote: ‘In Muhammadan times this jurisdiction [of a king in caste maters] was largely exercisedby the local Chiefs and zamindars, such as the Maharaja of Krishnanagar. At the present day therulers in Native states,and various zamindars of ancient descent in British territory, often exercise a great deal of control in caste matters’.Gait, p.393.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 18/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 157
precedence as recognized by the native public opinion at the present day’.90 Public
opinion concerning the status of a caste manifested itself in
the facts that particular castes are supposed to be the modern represen-
tatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Hindu system;
that Brahmans will take water from certain castes…that the status of certain castes has been raised by their taking to infant marriage…that
the status of others has been modified by their pursuing some occu-
pation in a special or peculiar way.91
Risley admitted that it was not possible to draw a general scheme of hierarchy of
castes applicable to the whole of India. Nevertheless, he directed the provincial
census officers to prepare a list with the help of the ‘highest native authorities’ that
‘would command general acceptance’92 in the respective regions.
The representatives of the ‘native public opinion’ were identified by Edward Gait
in his report on the census of Bengal. The ‘test laid down by the Census
Commissioner for fixing the scale of social precedence is not the rank assigned by
the pedantry of pandits, but “Hindu public opinion at the present day” ’, Gait wrote.
He was soon faced, however, with the problem of ascertaining precisely what
constituted Hindu public opinion. The Hindus, he complained, ‘are strangely
indifferent to the circumstances of castes that do not clash with their own. Those
of good position know very well from whom they can take water and those whose
touch defiles, but they neither know nor care much regarding their relative
position’.93
Accordingly Gait concluded that decisions about caste precedencewould have to rest with ‘enlightened opinion, and not with public opinion
generally’.94
It was clear from the very beginning that the ‘enlightened opinion’ was going to
unite, rarely if ever, on the question of social precedence. Gait, however, contended
that there were ‘certain well recognized tests of social position, by the consider-
ation of which a fairly accurate scale of social precedence can be drawn up’.95
The ‘first great test is whether good Brahmans will serve as priest, and if not,
whether the caste is served by any Brahmans at all’.96 The discovery of the critical
role of the Brahmans in defining the status of a caste was arrived at by means of a selective reading of indigenous traditions. For instance, the section on ‘Social
Precedence Of Castes’ in the Bengal provincial census report shows how Gait read
the Hindu past:
At first each class of the community had a variety of occupations open
90 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.538.91
Ibid ., pp.538–9.92
Ibid .93 Gait, Census Of India, 1901, Vol.VI, p.366.94 Ibid ., p.354.95
Ibid ., p.367.96
Ibid ., p.368–9.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 19/25
158 SOUTH ASIA
to it, but by degrees the process of differentiation spread further and
particular occupations were gradually restricted to particular
groups.… As the Brahmans and Kshatriyas…gradually grew into
different groups a long struggle for mastery arose which is reflected in
the legends that cluster round the name of Parasurama, the great
protagonist of the Brahmans. The result, as we know, was that thepriest triumphed over the warrior, and from that time to the present day
the supremacy of the Brahmans had become one of the cardinal
doctrines of Hinduism, and is the main test by which we decide
whether members of the non-Aryan tribes are to be classed as Hindus
or Animist.97
The notion of Brahmans as arbitrators, and of the authority of Brahmanical
traditions, was reproduced not only in the provincial census report, but in most
others as well. A comparison between the various provincial reports convincedRisley of ‘the predominance throughout India of the influence of the traditional
system of four original castes’. In every scheme, he continued, ‘the Brahman heads
the list. Then come the castes whom popular opinion accepts as the modern
representative of the Kshatriyas, and these are followed by the mercantile groups
supposed to be akin to the Vaisyas’.98
The irony of Risley’s scientific schema was now complete: the ghost of the varna
classification, repeatedly banished since the time of the Census Committee of 1877
and again by Risley in 1901, had reappeared through a privileging of the
Brahmanical traditions. While reviewing ‘the Indian theory of caste’—before he
had devised his own—Risley had concluded that the principles of Manu had ‘no
foundation in fact’. He acknowledged, though, that Manu’s arrangement was
‘accepted as an article of faith by all orthodox Hindus’. As such it had become, he
concluded, a sort of ‘fact in itself’—one which played a large part ‘in the shaping
of Indian society’.99 Once anthropometry had failed to deliver a design of caste
hierarchy and Risley had turned to public opinion for guidance, the reinstatement
of the varna model was perhaps inevitable. However, Risley was prepared to
accommodate only a ghost of the varna classificatory framework in his census
report. The colonial state could not relinquish its authority to classify caste at a juncture when its knowledge of the subject was both comprehensive and ‘sci-
entific’. The Brahmanical traditions were thus subverted, redefined and selectively
appropriated; and ‘native opinion’ was moulded to meet official requirements. For
instance, the category of Brahman was widened in the census report to include all
castes whose names contained the word ‘Brahman’ as a suffix irrespective of
whether their touch was polluting to the ‘twice-born’ castes. Referring to such
discrepancies, Risley wrote:
97 Ibid ., p.365.98 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.539.99
Ibid ., p.546.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 20/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 159
As everyone knows, there are Brahmans and Brahmans [in Bengal], of
status varying from Rarhi, who claim to have been imported by
Adisura from Kanauj, to the Barna Brahmans who serve the lower
castes, from whose hands pure Brahmans will not take water. No
attempt has been made to deal with these multifarious distinctions in
the Table. It would be a thankless task to attempt to determine theprecise degree [of such differences].100
The ‘multifarious distinctions’ within the caste structure could not remain immune
to the needs of administration. In drawing up their tables, the enumerators of 1901
redefined caste to suit their purposes, objectifying its features and exteriorising the
institution.
Hindu CasteAfter Risley’s opus, official interest in the structure of caste was replaced by an
effort to link caste and religion. As Edward Gait, the new census commissioner,
wrote: ‘the question [of the origin of caste] has passed beyond the stage at which
any direct contribution to it could usefully be made in…a census report, where
attention should be directed primarily to the presentation of facts rather than the
elaboration of theories’.101 A link between caste and Hindu identity had indeed
been established in the course of the census surveys of the late nineteenth century;
but it was left to the census reports of 1911 to fully induct ‘Hindu’ symbols and
practices into the official discourse about caste.
It is paradoxical that even when caste had been consistently addressed with the
prefix ‘Hindu’ in the census reports from the very beginning, the significance of
this prefix was not amply clear to the enumerators. In fact no comprehensive
inquiry into the social organisation or ‘caste structure’ of ‘Hinduism’ had taken
place before the census operations of 1901. Why this lacuna? First, Hinduism, like
other religions, was seen as an undifferentiated faith that could be identified with
reference to specific gods and rituals alone. Second, the main concern of the early
enumerators was to separate ‘the aboriginals’ from the Hindus, hence, they were
content to demarcate the Hindu community from without. Third, there was no
simple definition of Hinduism available to the census officials that could help theminvestigate the social constituents of the faith.
The discussion over ‘who are and who are not Hindoos’102 had featured as early as
in 1872 in the Report on the Census Of Bengal. Responding to the dilemma, the
early enumerators invariably slid into asking: what is Hinduism? ‘The problem can
only be satisfactorily solved by a clear definition of what we mean by Hinduism’,103
declared Beverley in his report of 1872. As an ‘ism’, the term Hindu was explicated
100 Ibid ., p.540.
101 Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.387.102 Beverley, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1872, p.129.103
Ibid .
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 21/25
160 SOUTH ASIA
with reference to gods, rituals, beliefs, etc. In the definition given by Alfred Lyall,
cited by Bourdillon in the Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, Hinduism stood
for ‘a tangled jungle of disorderly superstitions, ghost and demons, demi-gods and
deified saints; household gods, tribal gods, local gods, universal god’.104 These
imprecise religious motifs had to be given a solid social content before any firm
link could be established between Hinduism and the caste structure. The process of construction of the social dimension of Hinduism in the subsequent census reports
can be best illustrated in the way Lyall was selectively quoted by the census
enumerators.
Although Risley regarded Lyall as ‘the first living authority’ on the subject of
Hinduism he turned to him not for evidence of ‘religious chaos’, but for
confirmation that Hinduism was ‘the religion of all the people who accepted the
Brahmanic Scriptures’.105 The cognition of the Brahmans as the supreme expositors
of scripture seemed to meet Risley’s own conclusions about the position of thiscaste in society. From this point Risley had little difficulty jumping logically to the
conclusion that ‘the ordinary Hindu’ was someone who accepted the ‘Brahmanical
supremacy’ and ‘the caste system’.106 This social aspect of ‘Hinduism’ was further
elaborated by Gait in the general report of 1911. Lyall, said Gait, used the term
Hindu to denote ‘not exclusively a religious denomination, but…also a country and,
to a certain extent, a race’.107 By now the ‘tangled jungle’ had disappeared. In its
place stood a Hinduism endowed with three denotations—religion, race and
country. To these Gait later added, following Risley, the criterion of social
organisation: ‘a man who does not belong to a recognized Hindu caste, cannot be
a Hindu’.108 The problem with this new definition was that it appeared to fly in the
face of empirical reality since the ‘general tendency of the Hindu gentlemen’
consulted by the census officers ‘was to regard Hinduism as a matter of belief
rather than of social or even religious practice’.109
Yet in the first decade of the twentieth century, any doubt about the authenticity of
official knowledge regarding the religious identity of the people was hardly
permissible. The provision of ‘separate electorates’ in the Morley–Minto reforms of
1909 rested firmly on assumptions about Hindu and Muslim religious identity,
which were linked to entitlements to political power. It follows that the state had
to define and delimit these ‘religious communities’. Accordingly Gait issued a
circular to his enumerators that contained a set of questions about what
104 Cited in Bourdillon, Report on the Census Of Bengal, 1881, p.71.105 Risley, Census Of India, 1901, p.357.106
Ibid ., p.360.107 Gait, Census Of India, 1911, pp.115–6.108
Ibid ., p.116. Commenting on the transformation that had come in the mode of conceiving ‘Hinduism’, Jones wrote:‘the census reports provided a new conceptualisation of religion as a community, an aggregate of individuals unitedby a formal definition and given characteristics based on qualified data. Religion became communities mapped,counted, and above all compared with other religious communities’. Jones, ‘Religious Identity’, p.84.109
L.S.S. O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1913), p.229.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 22/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 161
might disqualify a caste from entering the Hindu fold. The indices of deviation
from a ‘standard’ Hindu norm, and the ‘disabilities’ that might consequently be
present in the social interactions of the castes, were outlined in the questionnaire
as follows:
1. [Members of my caste] deny the supremacy of the Brahmans; 2. donot receive the mantra [sacred formulae] from a Brahman or other
recognized Hindu guru [teacher]; 3. deny the authority of the Vedas; 4.
do not worship the great Hindu gods; 5. are not served by good
Brahmans as family priests; 6. have no Brahman priests at all; 7. are
denied access to the interiors of ordinary temples; 8. cause pollution a.
by touch b. within a certain distance; 9. bury their dead; 10. eat beef
and do not reverence the cow.110
The response to the questionnaire was varied. Gait noted in his report that in theCentral Provinces and Berar ‘a quarter of the persons classed as Hindus deny the
supremacy of the Brahmans and the authority of the Vedas…a third are denied
access to temples…and two-fifths eat beef’.111 The custom of beef eating did not
always cause degradation in status, and even when it did the extent was not
uniform. Thus, Gait continued: ‘Of the thirteen castes whose touch causes pol-
lution, nine do not eat beef, while of the eight who eat beef, four are not regarded
as polluting, and two are allowed access to temples’.112 Such ambiguities, of course,
did not prevent the census officials from deciding what constituted the defining
features of the Hindu persona. ‘In spite of their divergences’, concluded O’Malley,
‘Hindus have a common religion of which there are two salient features, viz: 1.religious objection to the slaughter of cows, and 2. veneration, or at least
acknowledgement of the supremacy of Brahmans’.113
Herewith, the cow was officially proclaimed as the cardinal symbol of Hinduism.
The other indices mentioned in the questionnaire also assumed significance through
the process of official deliberation. Castes claiming noble Hindu status, it was
noted, invariably endeavoured to demonstrate it by having Brahmans present at
their religious ceremonies, or by observing ‘Vedic’ injunctions.
Appeals and Petitions‘The census existed not merely as a passive recorder of data’, writes Kenneth
Jones, ‘but as a catalyst for change as it both described and altered its environ-
ment’.114 In the course of classifying caste and mapping it on a national or
provincial level, the census surveys redefined the hierarchy and made it visible.
Further, the frequent changes in the criteria of classification adopted during the
110 Gait, Census Of India, 1911, p.117.111
Ibid .112 Ibid .113 O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.234.114
Jones, ‘Religious Identity’, pp.73–4.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 23/25
162 SOUTH ASIA
subsequent surveys and the cataloguing of the pointers of status exposed the
susceptibility of the caste hierarchy to modifications. The literate representatives of
different castes, as well as the burgeoning caste associations, were quick to take
advantage of the situation. Citing caste characteristics that were acknowledged as
evidence of status in the census reports, they filed petitions with the government
‘requesting that they might be known by new names, be placed higher in the orderof the precedence, be recognized as Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, etc’.115 The petitions
illustrate what O’Malley called ‘a stereotyped plan’. The first step in this ‘plan’ was
to obtain favourable vyavasthas, or rulings, from complaisant pandits. ‘These refer’,
O’Malley explained, ‘to the present occupations and manner of life of the caste,
and quote verses from ancient works to show that they are like those of the varna
from which the caste claims to be an offshoot’.116
Yet far from being merely emulative, the caste representatives were often ex-
tremely innovative. They had to negotiate the differing worlds: they interacted with
the state; but they also had to speak in a language with which the society in general
and their caste members in particular were familiar. Hence, while repeating the
indices of high status recognised in the census reports, the petitions also went
beyond them. Further, the elites did not always remain dependent on the Brahmans
for receiving vyavasthas; the ‘authoritative’ texts cited in the petitions to endorse
the claims of a caste included books of older as well as of recent origin. The
contestation of, and modification in, the criteria of status as proposed in the census
reports can be evidenced in an application submitted by the Babhan (also known
by the name Bhumihar Brahman) caste.
Numerically prominent both in Bihar and the eastern part of the United Provinces,
the Babhans formed an important agrarian caste with many landlords in their rank.
Though listed as a dwija (twice-born) caste, they were placed below the Brahmans
in the census report of Bihar for 1901. Refuting this non-Brahman designation,
Prabhu Narayan Singh, maharaja of Benares, recognised leader of the caste,
informed the lieutenant-governor of Bengal in August 1911 that: ‘The Bhumihar
115 O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440. Applications claiming a higher status were submitted by castes
from different parts of the country. The rank of Kshatriya varna was sought by the Nadars of Tamilnad and by theRajbanshis of Bengal. See Robert L. Hardgrave, The Nadars Of Tamilnad: The Political Culture Of a Communityin Change (Bombay: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p.133; and Sibasankar Mukherjee, ‘The Social Role Of a CasteAssociation’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.XXXI, no.1 (Jan.–Mar. 1994), p.91. The Mahtonsin Punjab, writes Cohn, ‘wanted to be recorded in the census of 1911 as Rajputs’. Cohn, ‘The Census’, p.248. In manyinstances, the census authorities were persuaded to record new caste names signifying higher status in place of theprevailing ones. The Chandalas of Bengal, suggests Imtiaz Ahmad, wanted to be addressed as Namasudras, whilethe Chasi Khaibarta from the same province preferred Mahisya as their new name. The ‘number of castes advancingnew status claims’ in the regions of United Provinces, Bengal and Sikkim, Bihar and Orissa and Central Provincesand Berar, Ahmad informs us, went up from 21 to 148 between 1901 and 1931. Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘Caste MobilityMovements in North India’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol.VIII, no.2 (June 1971), pp.170–1.For further illustration of the impact of the census operations on caste mobility, see G.S. Ghurye, Caste and Racein India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1979), pp.278–9; M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India (Bombay:Orient Longman, 1972), pp.94–100; and David Washbrook, ‘The Development Of Caste Organization in South India1880 to 1925’, in C.J. Baker and D.A. Washbrook (eds), South India: Political Institutions and Political Change,1880–1940 (Delhi: The Macmillan Company of India Limited, 1975), p.154.116
O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440.
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 24/25
CLASSIFYING CASTE 163
Brahmans were Brahmans pure and simple who do not follow the craft of
priesthood and live on land’.117 Of course, this assertion was directly counter to the
orthodoxy that ‘Brahmans’ were all members of the priesthood, but the maharaja
had no hesitation in dismissing the conjunction as ‘erroneous’. This notion, he
wrote, ‘has been so much engrafted upon the minds of Europeans that they class
many such communities as Brahmans who have no good claim to that title exceptthat they receive alms. According to Hindu religious books, on the contrary, a
Brahman as far as possible should refrain from accepting indiscriminate religious
gifts and alms’.118 Ram Gopal Singh Chowdhary, the secretary of the Pradhan
Bhumihar Brahman Sabha, Patna, followed up in 1912 by citing a range of texts
which endorsed the ‘Brahmin proper’ status of his caste in a letter to the chief
secretary of Bihar and Orissa. All, significantly, were compendia of European
knowledge about India:
Memoirs on the History of Folklore and the Distribution of the Races
of the North Western Provinces of India, Vol. I by Henry M. Eliot,
Hindu Tribes and Castes as represented in Benares by M.A. Sherring,
The Golden Book of India by Roper Lethbridge, The Fifth Report from
the Select Committee on the affairs of the East India Company, Vol. I,
and People of India by H.H. Risley.119
Indigenous opinion, these instances reveal, could not be co-opted within the
colonial discourses on caste. Nevertheless, in the course of negotiation with the
latter, the mode of imagining the caste identity and hierarchy as shared by the
people was altered.120
ConclusionThe classification of caste in order of social precedence was abandoned after the
census of 1901. The state found it ‘impossible to comply with the requests’121 for
change of caste status that had poured in following the decision by Risley to invite
public opinion on the subject. The people, complained O’Malley, had failed to
understand the purpose of the census surveys. The erroneous belief prevailing in
Bengal was that ‘the object of census is not to show the number of persons
belonging to each caste, but to fix the relative status of different castes’.122
Notwithstanding O’Malley’s comments, however, the purpose of the census did not
stay the same from decade to decade. The agenda has gradually broadened and in
117 Government of Bengal, General Department, Miscellaneous Branch, A Proceedings, no.42 and KW, Oct. 1911,BSA.118 Ibid .119 Government of Bihar and Orissa, Revenue Department, Census Branch, File no.VC-7 of 1912, BSA.120 It is difficult to specify, Appadurai suggests, ‘the degree to which the effort to organize the colonial project aroundthe idea of essentialized and enumerated communities made inroads into the practical consciousness of colonialsubjects in India’. Though the projects of enumeration of communities, he continues, ‘were by no means whollysuccessful…the fact is that the colonial gaze, and its associated techniques, have left an indelible mark on Indianpolitical consciousness’. Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, pp.334–5.121 O’Malley, Census Of India, 1911, Vol.V, p.440.122
Ibid .
8/6/2019 Classifying Caste Padmanabh
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/classifying-caste-padmanabh 25/25
164 SOUTH ASIA
the process the official modes of conceptualising and representing caste in the
reports had, by 1911, undergone a transformation.
Finding out the number of the subject population for administrative convenience
was the object with which the census operations had begun in India. But even that
limited objective involved an element of interpretation. Knowing the numericalstrength of a caste required, in the first place, defining the identity of that caste. On
the other hand the early census reports, given their restricted focus, devoted little
space (barring few exceptions, like the census report of Punjab for 1881 prepared
by Ibbetson) to an analysis of the institution of caste per se. The absence of any
foundational knowledge in turn led to divergence in the classification of caste
within and across the census surveys. The problem was further compounded during
the census of 1881 when the varna division—which alone carried the imprimatur
of a pan-Indian system—was formally rejected as a classifying principle. The
consequent lack of consistent and continuing caste and classificatory names in the
census reports rendered the task of calculating, comparing or verifying numbersuncertain.
Consistency in the classification of caste depended on the certitude of official
knowledge. The same knowledge enabled the state to claim and exercise hegemony
over the colonised. Hence, in the decades following the census of 1881, Indian
society was subjected to meticulous academic analysis by the census enumerators.
Nevertheless, science was forced to take a back seat to policy. The Western
intellectual tools of materialist evolutionary theory and Social Darwinism were not
allowed to retain their intellectual integrity in the colonies, because they did not
altogether suit, in their pristine form, the agenda of the state. The colonialknowledge produced by the state still, however, needed to explain the features of
caste comprehensibly and demonstrate a correspondence between general explana-
tions and the notions of identity and status held by the people. The enumerators
failed on both counts. Subsequently, Manu as well as the varna division were
selectively incorporated within the ‘materialistic’ and ‘scientific’ expositions of
caste, while at the same time, ‘Oriental peculiarities’ deemed inherent in the
institution of caste were invoked to explain those features that eluded the explana-
tory reach of these paradigms.
The petitions submitted before the enumerators to proclaim the high varna statusof the concerned castes illustrated the propensity of the caste representatives to
modify and redefine the criteria of status as presented in the census reports. Once
the listing of castes according to their respective rank was given up after the census
surveys of 1901, the caste associations adopted new strategies to achieve their
goals. The census authorities were requested by petitioning associations to enlist
their members under names that often used words like Kshatriya or Brahman as
suffixes.123 The colonised in this way responded to, and manipulated, the colonial
project of enumeration to secure recognition and authority within society.
123 Thus the associations of the Koeris and Kurmis in Bihar petitioned the provincial census authorities to redesignatethese castes as Kushawaha Kshatriya and Kurmi Kshatriya, respectively. See Government of Bihar and Orissa,Revenue Department, Census Branch, File no.VC-89/31 of 1931, and VC-4/32 of 1932.
Top Related