Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India

"India was, in many ways, the most extreme project in the entire history of colonisation. The British government, through military domination, took control of a country with a population almost 10 times larger than its own. The need to understand, rationalise, and organise this massive country led to considerable efforts, including many censuses to classify the population into castes and social categories. This wasn’t just pure bureaucracy: it allowed the authorities to decide which groups to focus on to better dominate them, by raising taxes, maintaining social order, etc. By doing this, the British imposed a great deal of uniformity and rigidity onto the caste system, while the country was much too large for such generalisations to be accurate. People in India spoke dozens of languages, with tremendous socio-economic and cultural differences between regions, and the caste system was much more fluid than the authorities were willing to allow in a census where simple boxes had to be ticked. In my book, I compare this with a hypothetical situation in which an Indian ruler would have invaded all of Europe, and classified the entire population into small boxes, such as Catalan fruit pickers, Greek nobles, Scottish bakers, Finnish nannies, etc. Not only would these categories have seemed quite strange and irrelevant to us, but they probably would have had an impact on reality anyway. When you dictate that society is organised a certain way for almost a century, and give out rights and responsibilities according to these divisions, you end up creating identities that people truly associate with. “The caste system was much more fluid than the authorities were willing to allow in a census where simple boxes had to be ticked” That is the very situation that India has been facing since 1947. Systems of positive discrimination and quotas were created to help the most discriminated castes access higher education and public responsibilities. They haven’t solved everything, but to some extent they’ve bridged the gap between the most and the least privileged social groups. The first time I went to India in 1996, I stayed in Calcutta with the family of my fellow economist Abhijit Banerjee [recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer]. I remember reading a lot of books at the time, but having trouble really understanding Indian society. But recently, to prepare the chapter on India in my own book, by reading great works like Nicholas Dirks’s book, and also going back to these censuses themselves, I feel like I’m starting to understand the modern history of this country a lot better."