Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
An anthropologist by training, Dirks employs methodologies from a wide range of disciplines to present a critique of British colonialism and its protégé, the caste system. The author lets both the primary and secondary sources speak for themselves to tell the story of how caste under modern colonial conditions came to acquire the status that it had never enjoyed in India's pre-colonial history. The British colonial state made caste the central pillar of Indian civilization and used it to justify its rule by institutionally generating an enormous body of archival data, to prove the authenticity of caste. So caste as it is perceived today is actually a creation of colonial ethnography that got codified in the census reports of the late 19th century British imperial India. This immensely influenced all the social reform, revivalist, nationalist, communalist, and casteist movements in 19th and 20th century South Asia.
Repository Citation
Satya, Laxman D.. "Review of Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, by Nicholas B. Dirks." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–7. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss2/21
Included in
Asian Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, Sociology Commons