In a Caste of Minds Nicholas Dirks reviews a consensus of literature compiled about British colonial knowledge of Indian society. It is an extension of his own analyses on the structure of the caste system, that exist in India today. Principally he focuses on the impact that British colonialism had on the interpretation of caste from an Enlightenment mentality to Victorian perspective.
Dirks takes a backward glance at the theories of caste, and discusses the compulsion British writers had not only to understand Indian history, but to justify British rule of India. As he unpacks this labyrinth of work he discovers the nineteenth century cartographer and surveyor, Mackenzie, who while recording Southern India's local traditions and religious and philosophical texts, had inadvertently uncovered that costume was the key to ethnographic difference, that accounted for Indian social order.
In examining the colonial sociology of India, Dirks raises the prospect that modern India to-day may have lost sight of their identity due to the British manipulating the culture of India from their colonial perspective of anthropology, and anthropometric observations. Thereby the caste system was transformed to a model of social organization, which could be recognized by European Society.
Dirks from his examination of the textual records of British colonial history draws the conclusion that there is a likelihood that colonization resulted in a recasting of India. Moreover he states that this textualisation of social India under British rule remains in the country's prevailing bureaucracy of the twenty first century.
In this lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts, Said speaks regarding the problems in the way the West presents and enforces their foreign policies and the continuing conflicts between different and clashing civilizations including Western, Islamic and Confucian. He examines how this is shown in the modern world as opposed to the traditional.
ReplyDeleteIn the opening section Said asks "the real question is whether in the end we want to work for civilizations that are separate, or whether we should be taking the more integrative, but perhaps more difficult path, which is to see them as making one vast whole, whose exact contours are impossible for any person to grasp, but whose certain existence we can intuit and feel and study."
He is looking at the current times and what is happening in the world is not the clash of civilisations but the clash of how these civilisation are defined and by whom. He states the the people who really know how a culture operates is a huge conflict for that group and it is never solved.
He goes on to state cultures are not the same. There is an official culture, a culture of priests, academics, and the state. They also provide a definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries and what Said calls belonging. Said said that it is this official defined culture that speaks in the name of the whole.
The lecture presents a distorted view of what is described as Islam is a western view and not how they are viewed form within. Said claims that the current state of the world is a modern type of Orientalism. It is a constructed description meant to arouse a sense of hostility and hatred for an area where these groups reside is an area of strategic importance. Whether that importance is for the wealth of minerals located there or because it threatens a Christian base this location has had a long history with the West.
Hi John I'm unsure of why you have posted your review of Said's lecture as a comment?
ReplyDeleteCheryl this is a fine summary. What is especially good is the way you locate Dirk's argument about the effect of British rule on the contemporary imaginings of caste and modernity. A greater distinction between the early nineteenth century writings of administrators such as Mackenzie and the late nineteenth century findings of Risley would have been good.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Cheryl’s interesting assessment on Dirks’ article `Caste of Mind’ she claims that our contemporary understanding of caste is relatively a modern phenomenon. It is a product of the encounter between India and Britain colonial rule.
ReplyDeleteOver the one and half centuries of British rule, the British exploited and defined the caste system in order to promote state control over revenue and law and order. This served to justify a social organization, which would stratify people by ritual status. The high castes were placed in positions of power therefore it served to divide and rule the population as to exercise control.
Caste was instrument of rule, which helped to sustain Britain’s power in India through land revenue. Caste thus, became an essential utility for power. I think of it like the board game of Risk so in order to gain power, one must have a general understanding of the territories the British focused upon and local forms of landholding. Additionally in the game one must strategically reorganize the units. The British reorganized the agrarian order and resurrected powerful local landlords to fortify their presence.
Dirk’s shows how the missionaries projected caste as an impediment to Christian conversion and to rational modern politics. The early twentieth century Indian census constructed caste and religion as pre-eminent of all social identities. Since it was an apolitical and an `irrational’ social order, caste became the colonizers justification for their rule. An administrative tool such as the census, which was presided over by H.H Risley, was more than just a population count, but a basis of anthropometric measurements of selected tribes and castes (Dirks, 1992, p.69). That is a racist justification by the British. Risley’s occupational criteria conveyed the idea of rigidly structured hierarchy, which created a categorization of caste that was never seen before in India, forcing individuals to identify themselves to a particular caste group. This made it easy for the British to politically administer a massive population and caste into a single term capable of subsuming India’s diverse social identities and political organization.
Dirks, N 1992, ‘Castes of Mind’, Representation, Library Journal, no. 31, winter 1992, viewed 30 September 2010, pp. 56 – 78, retrieved from Electronic Reserve.