FACULTY OF ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY - RESEARCH

PORTAL

Colonial consciousness and

the caste system in 20th-
century India. A study of
the intellectual and
institutional impact of
orientalist discourse
Koloniaal
ABSTRACT PEOPLE
bewustzijn en het
kastenstelsel in
het 20ste-eeuwse
“Why does the caste system continue to dominate
India. Een studie
Indian society, in spite of centuries of moral critique
van de
and decades of reservation politics?” This is one of the
intellectuele en
most frequently asked questions in contemporary
institutionele
public debate in India. To understand the question, we
impact van een
must briefly sketch its historical background.
oriëntalistisch
From the eighteenth century onwards, Protestant discours
missionaries and European Orientalists described
Indian society as a caste hierarchy consisting of four Start - End 
ranks or varnas (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishas, and 2016 - 2020
Shudras) and the ‘outcastes’ or ‘untouchables’. They (ongoing)
explicitly viewed caste as a religious institution –
founded in Hinduism and dominated by Brahmin priests Type 
– which condemned the lower castes to lives without PhD research
basic dignity and rights. Since colonial officials accepted
this as a true description of Indian society, they also
Research included it in the educational programmes of British
group(s)  India. Thus, generations of Indian intellectuals learned
RCVC - Research to reproduce this characterization of their own society.
Centre As a result, they started building ‘anti-Brahmin’
Vergelijkende movements for ‘the liberation from caste tyranny’ in
Cultuurwetenschap the era between the 1850s and the 1940s.
When India gained independence in 1947, some political
leaders argued there should be redress for the
historical injustices committed against the lower
castes. Hence, they pleaded for the establishment of a
system of quota or reservations in the Constitution: a
certain percentage of seats in all government
institutions (including students and faculty in
universities) should be reserved for individuals
belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled
Tribes (ST), a series of castes and ethnic groups listed in
a schedule of the Constitution. They succeeded: today
almost 50% of all seats are reserved for certain caste
groups; in some Indian states, the number is even
higher.
Throughout the twentieth century, caste politics went
together with the dominance of a particular discourse
in the social sciences and humanities: the systematic
rejection of Hinduism and the Brahmins as immoral
forces in Indian society. Its climax came with the
emergence of the Dalit Movement, which is
aggressively opposed to the so-called ‘upper castes’
and to ‘Hindu religion’ in general. Today, its
sympathizers play a prominent role in the social
sciences and humanities departments of universities
across India. They have established a climate of
political correctness, where certain dogmas are no
longer allowed to be questioned on scientific grounds.

The research questions

The notion of a fourfold caste hierarchy founded in
Hindu religion faces a number of conceptual and
empirical problems. Empirically, a huge variety of jatis
(groups determined by birth) co-exist in Indian society
and many are characterized by practices of endogamy
and commensality. By convention, one could perhaps
call such groups ‘castes’. However, empirically, the
structure of Indian society does not reflect a fixed caste
hierarchy. In fact, British colonial officials came to this
conclusion long ago when they launched a caste census
aimed at classifying these groups along the lines of the
castehierarchy. Generally, this exercise ended in failure.
For most groups, it turned out to be impossible to
attribute a stable location in the hierarchy. Even worse,
it was often impossible to find out to what ‘caste’
Indians belonged. When asked the question “What is
your caste?” – so colonial officials complained – some
Hindus would mention one of the four varnas, others
would say they belonged to some “endogamous sub-
caste,” yet others would mention some “caste-title” or
add “vague and indefinite” entries. In short, the Hindus
seemed to be ignorant of their own caste system (Blunt
1931; Dirks 2002: 202-212; Nesfield 1885).
Conceptually, the link between caste and Hinduism is
unclear. Usually, this link is established by quoting a
selection of passages from one text, the
Manavadharmashastra (mistranslated as ‘Manu’s Code
of Law’). Yet, for every Sanskrit text that supposedly
sanctions the caste system, one can find another that
does not. While the status of such texts in Indian society
is unclear, they certainly do not count as sacred
scriptures or legal codes that found social practice
(Bhattacharya-Panda 2008; Menski 2003: 73-4). The
claim that Brahmin priests invented the caste system
and imposed it onto Indian society is as problematic
(Dirks 2002; Inden 1990). Any attempt to transform a
society along the lines of such a model would require a
particular type of institution or centralized authority,
which inculcates the rules and monitors compliance.
But no historical evidence is available indicating such
attempts to create a centralized religious authority or
legal system. The variegated groups of Brahmins across
India do not constitute a Hindu priesthood, let alone a
central institution of religious authority. In short, there
is no credible theoretical ground for connecting caste
and religion (Guha 2013; Nadkarni 2006; Sen 2005).
How then could this idea of a religiously rooted caste
hierarchy emerge and spread? Research shows that it
crystallized in the framework of theological debates
between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries in India.
Whereas the former viewed caste as a civil institution,
the latter argued it was a religious institution, ‘the
cement that keeps together the false religion of the
Hindus’ (Forrester 1979). Drawing on the Protestant
theology of false religion and its anti-clericalism, they
described ‘the Hindu system’ as an evil clerical
hierarchy, which had tyrannized the majority of
believers belonging to the lower castes. In the course of
the nineteenth century, Orientalist scholars reproduced
this theological characterization of the Hindu caste
system as though it constituted an objective factual
description of Indian society (Balagangadhara 1994;
Gelders and Derde 2003).
The proposed project builds on these insights to
examine the intellectual and institutional impact of the
account of ‘the Hindu caste system’ in postcolonial
India. Indian intellectuals reproduced this colonial
account, even though it is based in Christian doctrine.
Under colonialism, the British education system
imposed this account. However, after Independence in
1947, Indian intellectuals avidly kept on presenting it as
a valid description of their society. In fact, politicians
actively drew upon this account to give shape to the
new institutions and policies of India. Since then, it has
increasingly come to dominate government institutions.
Most strikingly, it shaped Indian higher education, its
universities, and bodies like the University Grants
Commission (UGC), Indian Council for Social Scientific
Research (ICSSR) and Indian Council for Historical
Research (ICHR). The account of the caste system
determined the content of social sciences and
humanities programmes. Through the reservation
policies, it decided the student population and faculty
composition. The avowed goal was to root out injustice
and inequality in society, but commentators suggest it
is precisely there that the policies failed. Instead they
led to the emergence of ‘elite’ groups within the lower
castes, which pursue their own sectional interests in
the name of social justice.
This brings us to three central questions:
(1) What allowed the Orientalist account of the caste
system to dominate the intellectual world of
postcolonial India throughout the twentieth century, in
spite of the absence of empirical evidence and
conceptual coherence?
(2) Given the Christian-theological foundations of this
account, how could it play such a decisive role in the
‘secular’ social sciences and humanities institutions of
twentieth-century India?
(3) What induced Indian political leaders to build far-
reaching policies on the foundations of the critique of
‘the Hindu caste hierarchy’, considering its failure both
as a description of Indian society and as a guide for
social reform?