5 - The everyday experience of caste in colonial India

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter deals with the changing face of caste from the 1820s to the end of the nineteenth century. During this period, the colonial state acquired powers of coercion and surveillance which profoundly affected the lives of its Indian subjects. At the same time, the growth of population, the quest for revenues, and the combined priorities of commerce and military security placed massive pressure on India's physical environment. Forests were felled and their ‘tribal’ inhabitants disarmed and subordinated. Much remaining grassland was put to the plough, pitting graziers and warrior-pastoralists against the tiller, the settlement officer and the colonial policeman. Old agricultural and artisanal zones stagnated; others struggled to hold their own against the challenge of volatile new cash-crop economies. By mid-century, new roads, ports and railways nourished the increasing commercialisation of agriculture and commodity production, creating a demand for wage labour and specialised skills, and endowing both the growing cities and the countryside with the trappings of ‘modernity’.

Like the telegraph, the press, and the stone-built jails, courthouses and residential cantonments in which the presence of colonial power was most apparent, these material transformations could be seen and experienced by almost all Indians. Increasingly, such people as the Bhil, the Kallar and even the Maratha could no longer retreat to terrain in which they were comparatively secure and lordly. Few buffers now remained between these former arms-bearing groups and the people with whom they were now competing for rights and resources. In these new circumstances, caste became the measure of the new pecking orders that called the Bhil or the Bhuinya a low squatter or dependent labourer, and defined the landowning or moneyed ‘caste Hindu’ as high, pure and superior.