In my last article under this column (‘An anti-Dharmic movement’, IE, September 27), in the backdrop of Udhayanidhi Stalin’s hate-filled statement calling for eradication of Sanatan Dharma, I had promised to chart the anti-Dharmic origins and journey of the Dravidian Movement. However, no discussion on the origins of the movement is complete without a short primer on the early ethnographic work undertaken by Christian missionaries in 18th century southern Bharat. Their work laid the foundation for the British colonial establishment’s understanding (especially in colonial Madras) of Bharat’s social organisation through the prism of “caste” and “tribe”.
This contributed significantly to the creation and shaping of a “Dravidian” identity on ethnic, religious and linguistic lines, which went hand-in-hand with the colonial formulation of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT). Given the nature of the topic, it’s important to inform the readers of the material (non-exhaustive) I will be drawing from to present facts and to substantiate my views.
For those interested in understanding the colonial origins of the “caste system” and the role played by missionaries, I would recommend the sample literature, which includes books, doctoral theses, and scholarly articles, at the end of this article. It is important to clarify that although I may not agree with all the opinions of some of the authors cited, I will still draw from their factual content to the extent it is credible.
As we shall see, contemporary notions of “caste” and “tribe” in popular discourse (including political), academia and the State apparatus in Bharat is significantly traceable to the application of the “caste” and “tribe” lens to Hindu social organisation by the colonial-missionary establishment.
What does this exactly mean? Does this mean there was no stratification in Bharatiya society prior to the advent of colonial rule? No. However, it does mean that there was an undeniable colonial hand in the creation of “caste” and “tribe” (as we understand them today) as dominant cataloguing categories of the Bharatiya society by the colonial administrative apparatus on the basis of philology and ethnography prepared by Christian missionaries as well as researchers appointed by the British for the said purpose. Such an approach to Bharat’s societal organisation suffered (and still suffers) from at least three layers of related problems.
First, the term caste came to be conflated with varna and jati when varna and jati themselves cannot be treated as all-purpose synonyms. Simply put, varna and jati are not substitutes for each other, and caste is a poor and incorrect colonial approximation for both. This problem arose primarily due to the application of a Christian-European lens and language to concepts and terms that are strictly untranslatable from Bharatiya languages such as Sanskrit to English. One such popular incorrect colonial approximation that readers may be familiar with is that of “Dharma” with “religion”.
The second layer, which is perhaps more symptomatic of European colonisation of the world, is the obsession with race and ethnicity that characterised the Christian European coloniser’s approach to caste. This race obsession was then projected on to the varna-jati complex. What this means is that the European coloniser applied his own ethnocentric worldview to the faith systems and social organisation of colonised societies instead of understanding them through the prism of the latter.
This becomes evident when the canvas of colonisation is expanded beyond Bharat and one looks at the global experience of European colonisation as a whole. The other way of putting this is that as long as Bharat’s colonial experience is sought to be understood in isolation, it will remain an incomplete, inaccurate and truncated picture.
The third problem, which is a corollary of the second, is the formulation of “tribe” as a category to explain those groups which could not be fit within the “mainstream caste system”. In fact, drawing from their experience with “aborigines” from colonised societies in other continents, the “tribal identity” was formulated by the coloniser to catalogue “indigenous communities” (“adivasis”/”moolnivasis”) with the presumption that they were the ethnically distinct original inhabitants who were conquered and marginalised by adherents of the mainstream caste system. This shows that race was a relevant factor in two ways — first, to distinguish between communities/groups within the caste system; and second, to distinguish castes from tribes.
Each of these problems continues to afflict the contemporary approach to the study of Europe’s colonisation of Bharat and, critically, our approach to Bharat’s history. Clearly, coloniality or colonial consciousness is not a thing of the past, but is a continuing state of mind and affairs.
With this as the context, in the next piece, I hope to address the following broad questions: One, what were the motivations of the colonial-missionary combine in seeking to understand and document the ethnography of Bharat? Two, how did they go about this exercise? How much of a role did European Christian theology and ethnocentrism play in framing the purpose and methodology of the exercise? And finally, what was the role played by the “native” in aid of the exercise? Did the “native” understand colonial intentions and evangelical motives? If yes, why did he continue to co-operate and collaborate with the colonial exercise to the detriment of Bharat?
The recommended resources:
1. Western Foundations of the Caste System (2017), edited by Martin Farek, Dunkin Jalki, Sufiya Pathan and Prakash Shah. This anthology draws significantly from the ideas and scholarship of S N Balagangadhara, Professor Emeritus at the Ghent University, Belgium
2. Rethinking the Caste System, edited by Prakash Shah, Vol. 13 No. 1 (2023) of Oñati Socio-legal Series
3. The Caste Connection: On the Sacred Foundations of Social Hierarchy (2015) by Jakob De Roover and Sarah Claerhout
4. Ethnography (Castes and Tribes) by Sir Athelstane Baines (1912)
5. Colonial Ethnography and Theories of Caste in Late-Nineteenth-Century India (2023) by Chris Fuller, published in Berose Encyclopedie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie, Paris
6. Ethnographic Inquiry in Colonial India: Herbert Risley, William Crooke, and the Study of Tribes and Castes by C J Fuller (2017), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23 (3). pp. 603-621
7. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001) by Nicholas B. Dirks, published by Princeton University Press
8. The Dravidian Idea in Missionary Accounts of South Indian Religion (2017) by Will Sweetman in Religion and Modernity in India, published by Oxford University Press
9. Tribe in India: The Fallacy of a Colonial Category (1990) by Susana B C Devalle in Studies on Asia and Africa from Latin America, edited by David N. Lorenzen
10. The Development of Aryan Invasion Theory in India: A Critique of Nineteenth-Century Social Constructionism (2019) by Subrata Chattopadhyay Banerjee. This work was preceded by a Ph.D. Thesis in 2017 by the same author on the same subject
11. Aryans and British India (1997) by Thomas R Trautmann, published by University of California Press
12. The Aryan Debate (2005) by Thomas R Trautmann, published by Oxford University of Press;
13. Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (2006) by Thomas R Trautmann, published by University of California Press
14. Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-1929 (1969) by Oxford University Press
The writer is a commercial and constitutional litigator who practises as a counsel before the Supreme Court of India, the High Court of Delhi, the NCLAT and the CCI
