Liberalisation will not remove Caste Prejudice: Nicholas B. Dirks

Nicholas B. Dirks, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and History and Vice President Arts and Sciences of Columbia University, New York, was in Mumbai this month to enhance the profile of a university that counts Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as one of its distinguished alumni. Professor Dirks, whose work on caste in India under British rule is well respected, spoke toThe Hinduabout caste, politics and the scandals of empire. Excerpts

Your work on caste in India, particularly in your book "Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India," is relevant to the situation in present day India. What drew your attention to this issue?

My earliest book, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom is a historical study of the princely state of Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu. I was interested in trying to understand how the institution of "kingship" operated in the Tamil country, what the relationship was between caste and the political system. In Pudukottai, the royal family came from the Kallar community. What this meant was that while under British rule, Kallars were mostly designated as `criminal,' in fact in Pudukottai they were not just not criminal but they were the royal community and had access and all sorts of recognition. They were also involved with very important political exchanges with everyone from some of the remnants of the Vijayanagara kingdom, the Nayakas of Madurai and Trichy, the Nawab of Arcot, and, ultimately, the British. And the reason that Pudukottai became a princely state was largely because it provided a great deal of logistical support and military support to the British in the late 18th century. So the records were terrific and it allowed to me to look at how the caste system operated before modern times and the way the political and social systems interacted.

My concern had been that many of the accounts of India, both under the British and afterwards, suggested that caste was a social system completely defined by ritual and religion. My argument was that there was actually a very strong set of political traditions that could be called upon.

I was also using some local historical accounts from the 18th century, collected by a Scotsman named Colin McKenzie. Many of these accounts are still available in the library of the University of Madras. The British would say there are no local histories, no tradition of historical writing. I actually worked on extensive historical accounts partly because I worked with Tamil pandits and painstakingly learned how to read Palmyra manuscripts.

After writing The Hollow Crown, I decided that actually the caste system had changed a great deal as a result of British colonial rule. And so Castes of Mind is a study that tries to track what happened between 1800 and 1947 but it leads up to many of the controversies around caste for reservation and comes up to 1991. My principal interest was in looking at the census, colonial gazetteers, colonial manuals, and basically the colonial sociology of caste and how that was used by different figures in the 20th century, the British, on the one side, and then Ambedkar, Periyar, Gandhi, and others.

The caste issue has once again come to the forefront with events like the Khairlanji massacre. What worries many people is that despite decades of efforts to alter mindsets, the prejudices remain entrenched and have become even more ferocious.

Partly what I wanted to suggest in my writing was that, if anything, caste prejudice got worse under colonial rule rather than better. And the reason I make that argument is that if you look at historical record, certain kinds of caste disputes became even more virulent in the 19th century under British rule. The extent to which these kinds of prejudices survive varies from place to place but it is obvious to anybody looking at contemporary politics of India that no amount of liberalisation is going to change the situation. Even affirmative action does not seem to be changing anything.

I also think that right now when you have such massive growth in the economy, that's what people are focussing on. We all know that the agriculture sector is not growing; we all know that the urban population still depends on cheap labour and that the social relations of caste are embedded in even the global success of the economy in India.

Your new book has a contemporary resonance even though it centres on the British Empire. You argue that scandal was constitutive of empire. That might well be said of the new "empires" in the world. Look at Enron...

Yes, and also Halliburton. My new book, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain is on the late 18th century, the British conquest of India and the trial of Warren Hastings. It tells also of the death of the Nawab of Arcot. Many of the British servants of the East India Company managed to control South India by credit, basically by continuing to give loans to the Nawab at usurious rates of interest that he could never repay. But this provided them access to his court, access to his lands, right to collect revenue on his behalf, and also the legal right to use him to conduct warfare. There were political wars that the Nawab conducted basically to collect money for his creditors, most of whom were these British civil servants who would come to India, make a fortune in four or five years, and then go back to London and buy big estates and often buy themselves seats in Parliament.

When I was working on the book, I did not realise that a cousin of Edmund Burke, a man by the name of William Burke, was an agent in the 1760s for the Raja of Thanjavur. It turns out that William Burke made a good deal of money representing the Raja against the Nawab of Arcot because the two of them were locked in a kind of battle in the 1760s-1770s. William Burke invested his money as well as Edmund's in East India Company shares in the 1760s. Then in 1769 there was a huge crash of stock value in the London because of the crisis in India. That year there was a huge famine in Bengal, like the 1943 famine, when a third of the population perished. When the market crashed, William and Edmund lost all their money. And poor Edmund, who went on the to criticise the Company, had a good reason to complain. I didn't know all these stories until I did this research. The relationship between the stock market, and investment, war, imperialism, then as now, was fairly similar.

Are you in India to conduct some fresh research?

The reason we're in India now is not for my research. We've come here two years in a row. In 2004, I became Vice President Arts and Sciences at Columbia. We already have a very fine programme in South Asian studies. But we want to expand ties between India and Columbia that go back to when Ambedkar got his PhD. We want to make Columbia more visible and we are asking our alumni here to help. We are specially looking for fellowships to support students who could come from difficult financial backgrounds.

Source: Kalpana Sharma, The Hindu (Jan. 15, 2007)