Statistics, Anthropology and Caste: India in British and French Writings in 19th and 20th Centuries

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

Padmanabh Samarendra will present in this session the main lines of his ongoing research on the modern construction of caste in India, focusing in particular on the role of knowledge produced under British colonial administration and its influence on contemporary academic representations.

Presentation of the project

"Caste is a form of community; in its quintessential form, it is deemed to be native to India. Indian society, it is believed, is largely divided into castes. Caste, scholars argue, represents a traditional social form; it has continued to exist in India, despite periodic changes, since Vedic times (c. 1500 BCE). In the proposed presentation I argue that caste, as conceived in academic writings, represents a new idea. The form and features of this so-called traditional institution were produced in modern times, in the course of and because of the census operations conducted in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under British colonial rule. The statistical features of the census, in conjunction with anthropological knowledge, produced the notion of caste being a pan-Indian empirical institution with certain uniform features: birth-ascribed identity, hereditary occupation, fixed and unchanging hierarchy, endogamy, etc. In the course of the presentation, I will also try to offer preliminary comments on the function of colonial knowledge, keeping in mind Edward Said’s formulations. Did the colonial census reports compiled by British officers represent a hegemonic body of knowledge about Indian society? How do the writings of French scholars from the same period and later, who had no colonial axe to grind, relate to those by British authors on the issue of caste? These are some of the questions that I will try to take up in the course of my presentation."

Speaker

Padmanabh Samarendra is Professor at the Dr. K.R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. His research interests include the concept of caste and caste movements in modern India, colonial anthropology, colonialism, nationalism, etc. He is in the process of completing a monograph on caste. He has received fellowships from the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Ford Foundation and the Nehru Trust for Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a member of the Centre for Social Science Studies in Calcutta.