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From Empiricist Conflation to Distortion: Caste in South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts
Affiliation:
University of Adelaide
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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 1985 , pp. 343 - 352
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 Modern Asian Studies 17, 3 (1983) 519–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Appadurai, and Breckenridge, , ‘The South Indian Temple: Authority, Honour, and Redistribution’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 10 (1976), 187–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appadurai, Arjun, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: a South Indian Caste (Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moffatt, Michael, An Untouchable Community in South India (Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Conlon, Frank C., A Caste in a Changing World. The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700–1935 (Berkeley, University of California Press), 1977.Google Scholar

3 ‘Structural Marginality and the Urban Social Order’, Urban Anthropology (1978), 287–320.Google Scholar

4 One of the strengths of the studies by Washbrook and Baker is their attention to the colonial state and the manner in which the extension of state agencies influenced local politics and caste relations.

5 Cf. ‘If we are to construct the social history of India on the basis of dozens of local studies, whose informing theory is questionable and whose design makes difficult the development of more adequate theories, we may never build it very high’, David Washbrook in reviewing Karen Leonard's book on The Kayasths of Hyderabad in Pacific Affairs 52 (Winter 1979–1980), 735–6.Google Scholar

6 The chapter on caste in British India was not part of the original plan and was inserted because the referees for the Cambridge University Press desired my study to be related to the literature on caste mobility in India. In responding to this ‘suggestion’, I warned them that such a venture could open a Pandora's box. Bayly's article is a proof of this prediction. In retrospect, I believe that my study would not suffer greatly from the elision of the first part of chapter seven, though the survey of the factors sustaining the solidarity of the Karava in the latter half of the chapter is a distinct gain.

7 The term ‘caste formation’ is used in my study as an equivalent for the word jati and as a generic device to encompass all levels of a segmentary structure of caste—thereby leaving open the question whether it possessed a sense of community which justified its description as a ‘caste’ (see p. 180n).

8 Conlon is also circumspect in some of his conclusions. I think his study gains in value from this imprecision and cautiousness. As Lawrence Stone remarks, the study of history forces scholars back ‘upon the principle of indeterminacy’, in part because the variables are numerous and in part, one might add, because of deficiencies in the source material (see his ‘The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History’, Past and Present 85 (1979), 13).Google Scholar

9 A general land tax was not found in Sri Lanka from pre-colonial times. Thus, in the British period, there was only a tax on paddy; and the taxation rate was one-tenth, not one-half as in much of India. When I glanced at some of the paddy-tax registers of the mid-nineteenth century, it was my impression that the revenue-farmers (renters) were mostly Goyigama.

10 Review of Conlon's book in The Indian Economic and Social History Review XVI (1979). 99–101.Google Scholar

11 ‘Introduction’ in Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1969).Google Scholar

12 ‘Hindu society, speaking in this case through the Nayaks of Ikkeri and Bednur, required that each caste should organize itself and the Brahmans should have a recognizable spiritual descent’ (Ashin Das Gupta in review of Conlon, The Indian Economic and Social History Review XVI (1979), 99).Google Scholar

13 As Karen Leonard notes, complaining that Gonion leaves it to the readers to chart out these connections over time (review in the Journal of Asian Studies XXXVII (1978), 564Google Scholar).

14 My summary of the background to this event was unashamedly derived from Kitsiri Malalgoda's excellent account in Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1760–1900 (Berkeley California: University of California Press, 1976).Google Scholar However, it was supplemented by two significant pieces of evidence (see Caste Conflict, p. 138)Google Scholar which confirmed Malalgoda's argument.

15 In reviewing an earlier work (drafted in 1969–70) in which I had dwelt briefly on the rise of the Karava, D. A. Kotelawele rightly criticized me for not taking account of the rise of the Salagama (‘Nineteenth Century Elites and their Antecedents’, Ceylon Historical Journal XXV (1978) 204–12).Google Scholar I did not come across this essay until I visited Sri Lanka early in 1979, by which time I had come across the relevant data and incorporated this development into my analysis.

16 See Caste Conflict, pp. 207, 211–12, 178, 170, 137–8, 90–1.Google Scholar

17 In questioning my reference to ‘caste warfare’ on the ground that the conflict ‘was a far cry from the communal violence of north India or the honours disputes and lefthand: right hand caste conflicts of south India’ (p. 525), Bayly displays mind-boggling pedantry.

18 If I wished to depict the essence of the caste system, I would probably concentrate upon the social organization of the Kingdom of Kotte or that of the Kingdom of Kandy, or both. Apart from the choice of arena, however, the more problematic issue is the theoretical approach which one considers appropriate to the search for ‘the essence’ of a structured social order. Bayly seems unaware of the minefields surrounding such a venture.

19 The Preindustrial City. Past and Present (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960).Google Scholar Despite being cited often, Sjoberg's study is shot through with most of the shortcomings of the modernization theory. His ‘pre-industrial city’ is a residuary category, with its lowest common denominator being its technologically-determined contrast from the industrial city. No wonder that Moses Finley dismisses this work in a footnote (‘The Ancient City: From Fastel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977) 309n).Google Scholar Also see Wheatley, Paul, ‘What the Greatness of a City is Said to Be’, Pacific Viewpoint 4, (1963), 163–88, espec. 163–4, 171–2, 187–8.Google Scholar

20 Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchies (London: Paladin, 1972)Google Scholar; Marriott, McKim and Inden, Ronald B., ‘Caste Systems’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn, 3:982–91Google Scholar and ‘Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems’ in David, Kenneth (ed.), The New Wind (World Anthropology Series, The Hague: Mouton, 1977), pp. 227–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Whereas Dumont's theoretical analysis places the Muslims and the Sinhalese Buddhists in South Asia outside his schema (ibid., ch. 10), Marriott and Inden explicitly claim that their cognitive and ethnosociological theory encompasses ‘the caste systems of Buddhists in Sri Lanka [and] those of Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh’, ibid., p. 227).

21 ‘Introduction. What should we mean by Caste’ in Leach, E. R. (ed.) Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-West Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 1–10.Google Scholar

22 That is why Leach's work is surveyed by Pauline Kolenda, together with those by the Wisers, Beidelman, T. O., and Gould, Harold, in her ‘Toward a Model of the Hindu Jajmani System’, Human Organization 1963, 22:11–30.Google Scholar Note too, my passing reference to ‘the locality-centred functionalist studies of caste networks perpetuated by … F. G. Bailey and Edmund Leach’ (p. 195).

23 Dumont, , ‘Village Studies’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 1957, 1:23–41.Google Scholar

24 This is a stronger statement than Dumont's; he maintains that ‘untouchability will not truly disappear until the purity of the Brahman is itself radically devalued’ (Homo Hierarchius, p. 92).Google Scholar

25 The previous reference to Sjoberg's study was not introduced without reason. His approach is explicitly structural-functionalist (see The Preindustrial City pp. 12–13, 139, 341–2).Google Scholar Also see fn. 19 above.