The story of Pratapa Rudra, the last sovereign of the Kakatiya dynasty in the eastern Deccan, forms the larger story of the extension of this axis from Delhi to the Deccan plateau. Pratapa Rudra's new title and new clothes, given him as he solemnly bowed toward Delhi from atop his citadel's ramparts. Both were only two of many elements in this semantic transfer, as ever more quarters of the plateau would become ideologically integrated into the still larger world of Perso-Islamic civilization. The dynamic of a moving economic and social frontier is reflected in the different kinds of temples patronized in the Kakatiya period. Pratapa Rudra's capital, Warangal, is largely bypassed by the main communication arteries of modern India. The collapse of Pratapa Rudra's kingdom was only one in a series of upheavals that shook the Deccan at that time. It is true that for several decades after 1309, Pratapa Rudra was a tributary king in the Tughluq imperial system.

This chapter concerns caste consciousness as it has been manifested in surprising though generally uncontentious forms, most notably where one can see conventions of jati and varna difference retaining their power in the modern workplace and in the thinking of educated city-dwellers. Since the 1950s, cross-cutting affinities of faith, class and ethno-linguistic identity have often had a more direct and lasting impact on both local and national life than the claims of anti-Brahmanism, or Harijan uplift, or caste reform movements. The chapter examines why caste has come to operate for so many Indians in the manner of an imagined community, that is, as a bond of idealised allegiance answering needs which both in India and elsewhere have been more widely associated with the claims of two other forms of supra-local attachment, the modern nation and the ethno-religious community. In the years after Independence, social scientists found further evidence of the spread of these modern-minded or substantialised forms of caste consciousness.

The rural sector, comprising agriculture, and ancillary activities such as animal husbandry, forestry and fishing, was the foundation of the colonial economy. In most parts of the country, the peasant mode of production never fully resolved itself into a class structure based on labour and capital. Rich peasants rarely became rentiers; poor peasants did not often suffer full proletarianisation by losing access to land entirely. The creation of a land market in India in the first half of the nineteenth century was identified by nationalist historians as one of the most drastic effects of colonial rule that acted, especially in north India and Bengal, as a mechanism for transferring control of land out of traditional proprietors into the hands of merchants and moneylenders. For the rural poor the disruption of the rural labour market was probably the most severe direct consequence of the depression in agriculture.