BOOK REVIEW

Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 2014 vol xlIX no 24
29
The History of Caste
Tirthankar Roy
T
hree building-blocks structure
this book. First, the author cites
the anthropologist Morton Klass
to remind us that there is no exact
equivalent of the word caste in Indian
languages (p 19). The word signied
the way the Portuguese, the Dutch and
the British settlers viewed society in
India from the 16th century onwards.
These views were stylised, being attempts
to capture the essence of Indian society
on the basis of little systematic know-
ledge of it, and worse, a religious con-
ception of it. Because the word carries
such preconceptions, a serious discussion
of the history of corporate organisations
in Indian society needs to go beyond
caste, or at least, specify what it is about
caste that is of interest to the historian,
of which certain features were abstracted
to form the European concept.
Second, the author follows McKim
Marriott in dening caste as an ethnic
group, that is, a group that sets boundaries
around itself by means of endogamy
and hereditary membership, and that
sees itself as a body of distinct people
within the larger society. This exible
notion can apply to corporate groups
among non-Hindus as well as Hindus,
and holds equally well across the arti-
cial caste-tribe divide, as Marriott
himself claimed.
And third, the author follows Fredrik
Barth, and partly Max Weber and
Michael Mann, to claim that such corpo-
rate groups can remain locally powerful
only because they serve political roles
that are supra-local. A history of caste
cannot be distinct from a history of the
state, understood not as an entity
Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia,
Past and Present by Sumit Guha (Leiden: Brill
(Brills Indological Library)) 2013; pp xx+ 236, $127.
removed from society, but as a societally
important institution (p 15).
These building-blocks support what
must be regarded as the most important
attempt so far to write a long-range his-
tory of caste. The aim of the book is to
develop an analytical narrative that spans
centuries, even millennia, and at the same
time, to challenge both European orien-
talist construction of India where India
is changeless, and the opposite positions
claiming that caste was radically changed
by British colonial rule. There is more
continuity in this story. The connecting
thread through time is politics, rather
the constantly renegotiated relationship
between local communities and the
state. Colonial rule was indeed a break,
so was the 18th century transition, in the
ways the relationship was reordered.
A new book on such a profoundly
challenging and yet overworked subject
needed to join a number of qualities.
Beyond Caste combines theoretical rigour,
a close knowledge of the archives, the
ambition to bridge the gulf of time and
link the premodern, the early-modern,
the colonial and the present in a longue
dure account, and an elegant writing
style enhanced by a ne sense of humour.
These characteristics, present in many
of Sumit Guhas publications, make him
one of the most interesting and stimulat-
ing social historians today. This work
justies that reputation.
Excluding the Introduction and an
afterword, the book consists of six
chapters, dealing with the evolution of
the meaning of the word (Chapter 1), how
social organisation and political power
became entwined in precolonial era and
how the interdependence changed from
the 18th century (Chapter 2), the political
economy of the village and the house-
hold (Chapters 3 and 4), how systematic
knowledge of society reshaped society
(Chapter 5), and the transformation of
caste in colonial and postcolonial times
(Chapter 6).
Theory
The signicant contributions on this
subject have been written not by histori-
ans but by political scientists, who have
studied the instrumental use of corpo-
rate identity and organisation or what
caste does in practice, and by sociologists
and anthropologists, who have studied
what caste is or is thought to be. Beyond
Caste belongs in neither of these two dis-
ciplines. It is a social history. But it had to
decide whether to write a history of what
caste was, or a history of what caste did.
It takes the latter road, asking how the
structures of caste enter[ed] into the po-
litical process (p 18). It justies the
choice by an insightful discourse on the
large theoretical literature, which is set
out in the introduction and Chapter 1.
It is shown that the question what
caste is or what is the essence of caste
has led emphasis to fall on a number of
attributes, some of which are historically
contingent, and some can be found in
other societies. One of the answers
(especially Louis Dumont in the 20th
century) has focused on the Hindu ritual
context, the opposition between purity
and pollution, and the highly specic idea
that purity is lost by touch or the exchange
of bodily substances. The idea of a hierar-
chical social order follows from the purity
ideal. Others have dealt with the notion of
kingship and how the hierarchical social
BOOK REVIEW
june 14, 2014 vol xlIX no 24 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
30
order was conceived in statecraft. An
inuential contribution in this line, by
Nicholas Dirks, suggests that the link
between kingship and caste was severed
during the British colonial era, making
caste appear as the essence of Indian so-
ciety and engendering the caste system.
All of these concepts become more or
less unstable in the presence of hierarchy
among the non-Hindus, Indo-Islamic-
states, and evidence that there was no
one notion of statecraft even among
Hindu kings. Purity is no more of much
value today, and yet caste persists. These
readings also overstress the hierarchical
ordering aspect of caste, at some neglect
of another important aspect of it as a
political community.
This distinction between the external
political aspects of an ethnic group,
which involves separating outsiders from
insiders, and the internal social aspect, or
maintaining order within (pp 84, 90), is
crucial for the book. Guha does not deny
that there are real cultural diversities in the
Indian situation, as elsewhere. Coexist-
ence of various identities and diverse
values...inevitably also generates contests
over public space and social norms (p 14).
These contests are political, that is, they
are resolved via access to power, whether
by forming powerful communities in the
past or by taking a share of the state in
the more recent times. It is this idea that
connects the present of caste with its past.
Practice
The historical interpretation can be
summed up in a few broad generalisa-
tions, though bland summaries would
not convey either the nuances of the
argument or the richness of the illustra-
tions that accompany them.
Until the 19th century, a great deal of
military power was diffused among the
communities that formed in and governed
the village. Some of these communities
were tribal or kingless, as were some of
the janapadas of the epics, others pos-
sessed forms of kingly authority within
them. In the arid areas, which produced
a smaller surplus, we are more likely to
encounter relatively egalitarian commu-
nities. Because of the geographical inu-
ence, there was no one linear pathway
that led tribes to become castes, a theory
favoured by colonial ethnographers.
Groups resembling the kingless janapadas
could form as late as the 18th century,
such as the Khalsa Sikhs.
Conquest and conict renewed and
re-energised local authority (p 59),
whereas the presence of a stable and
powerful imperial state that managed to
insert revenue ofcers and intermediaries
in this world could undermine their power.
The origin of militarily strong village-based
corporate groups, who enjoyed entitle-
ments from the state, including juridical
autonomy, is the foundation of caste.
The 18th and the 19th centuries perma-
nently changed this long-term dynamic.
The conversion of entitlements into mar-
ketable rights in the 18th century, the
relentless pressure of kings upon the
locality in periods of warfare, the insertion
of military chieftains and, nally, the dis-
armament of the village elite after the mu-
tiny led to effective dis solution of the lo-
cality as a political unit (p 80). The 18th
century conicts and the dependence of
the state on certain hereditary services
turned the supply of these village-based
services into customary obligations. In
Chapter 3 on the village and elsewhere
Guha suggests that a later belief in strong
village unity, insularity, and established
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BOOK REVIEW
Economic & Political Weekly EPW june 14, 2014 vol xlIX no 24
31
village customs in western India were a
product of the 18th century turmoil.
The British colonial regime achieved
a degree of unprecedented control over
the countryside, with the result that
the vesti ges of older sociopolitical organi-
sation began to wither away (p 189).
But its knowledge of the constitution of
local society was limited as in times be-
fore. Governance in this era empowered
intermediaries of a different sort, liter-
ate ofcers recruited from the scribal
groups. The diver gent trajectory of post-
colonial dalit movements in northern
and southern India had owed partly to
these selection processes.
Conclusions
We read here about mainly two ways
that the history of caste-like bodies can
be written: hierarchy and collective
action. There is a third way, property
rights. Bounded communities could
form through the task of setting out who
should have access to productive assets,
and who should not. In a world where
asset markets are non-existent and yet
productive assets are scarce, corporate
bodies would play a role in protecting
access, whether by negotiating with the
state or enforcing rights themselves.
These groups in the past deployed the
universal language of caste, turning eco-
nomic opportunity into moral right, and
frequently behaved like an ethnic group.
The word guild is sometimes used to
refer to this dimension, but guild, like
caste, is an European word prone to mis-
placed application. The common use of
guild is in the eld of technological and
commercial knowledge; which context
is not identical to, but shares some simi-
larities with, the control that caste-like
groups often exercised in India upon
land, water, the commons, livestock,
craft skills, and even labour service.
Theoretical studies on caste tend to
make short work of this dimension.
Following that convention, the book
avoids the economic history of corporate
bodies. Perhaps wisely, for what it does
offer is a more coherent product in the
end. It is, furthermore, a persuasive and
a totally new way of thinking about
a difcult subject, a truly signicant
achievement.
Tirthankar Roy (t.roy@lse.ac.uk) teaches at
the London School of Economics and Political
Science, the UK.
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