Review

Reviewed Work(s): Social History of an Indian Caste. The Kayasths of Hyderabad by Karen
Isaksen Leonard
Review by: D. A. Washbrook
Source: Social History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1980), pp. 309-312
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4284988
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 May i98o Reviews 309

mood of agrarian capitalism', so that anti-urban rhetoric may not always be as

reactionary as it at first glance seems.
The second volume of this work studies in detail the grain crisis after I768 and the
'retreat from liberalization'. In the end it proved impossible, even in the absence of proof
that liberalization was responsible for the lack of bread, to ask the people 'to abandon
a way of thinking and a system of values through which they made sense of their uncertain
lives', unless that demand was accompanied by revolutionary change in the social
relations of production. Turgot and his like could not have the best of both worlds.
Kaplan is right to argue that 'the political triumph of grain liberalism was precisely its
ability to link its fate to a powerful, traditional and resurgent economic (and political)
interest', but, I would add, that triumph was shortlived because of the inability and/or
unwillingness of its partisans to extend their radical analysis from the grain trade to state
and society as a whole. The heart of the matter is not, as Kaplan would have it, recurrent
short crops, although they certainly played a role in the crisis of I770/I and later, even
after the victory of deliberalization and the return to the status quo ante. The heart of
the matter is to be found in the emergence of capitalist agricultural relations that 'cut
across the conventional sociojuridical cleavage of the old regime', and gave rise to
contradictions of sentiment, ideology and interest that Terray's statistical compilations
and grain relief could not resolve. The years of conflict between liberalization and
deliberalization, or political economy and policing, were the time when the great options
about which the French Revolution would be fought first confronted one another. It is
more rewarding to think in these terms than in the more conventional ones of an 'age
of reform' or 'enlightened despotism', as Kaplan so properly points out. The story
should be told, and the issues analysed, not in terms of different institutions locked in
conflict (different Parlements took different views of the matter, and the state apparatus
shifted its position several times), nor in terms of nobles v. bourgeois, or sword v. robe,
or city v. country, but with an eye to the richness of emerging contraditions which could
no longer be contained within the restrictive institutional/legal/status categories of the
old regime. Kaplan sets us firmly on this path, and it is this quality that makes his work
important. Beyond any disagreement either of detail or more substantial analysis we may
have, I must say that this is a book with which every student of the period will have to
be familiar. A shorter and more easily accessible version would assure it the distribution
it clearly deserves.
Jeffry Kaplow
Universite de Paris- VIII

Karen Isaksen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste. The Kayasths of

Hyderabad (1978), xvii+353 (University of California Press, Berkeley, ?10.25).
Dr Leonard's study examines the social history of the Kayasths of Hyderabad, in
south-east India, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present day. The
Hyderabad Kayasths were, by origin, a loosely knit group of North Indian 'service'
families, concerned with military affairs and administration, who moved southwards with
the Mughal armies at the end of the seventeenth century. They became especially
important in the state of the Nizam of Hyderabad, which broke away from the Mughal
Empire during the eighteenth century. Dr Leonard takes up this service immigrant
community and analyses its subsequent history through the many changes imposed by
Hyderabad's connection first to a colonial and, second, to a republican Indian society.
N' ASH 5

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 3 Io Social History VOL 5: NO 2

The range of themes which Dr Leonard's arguments illuminate is broad and very
impressive. She discusses, inter alia, family structure and development, the dynamics
of migration, the social impact of bureaucratic and economic change and the formation
of sub-caste, caste and ethnic community identities. What she has to say on each of these
themes is seldom less than enlightening or provocative, and much of it derives from
sources little used for historical purposes before. Her careful reconstruction of Kayasth
genealogies and her concern for a precise kinship terminology, for example, produce by
far the clearest picture of pre-colonial family relations which we possess. Equally, her
study of the institutional and social relationships of a 'mughlai' bureaucracy breaks new
ground, while her analysis of the relation between Hyderabad-resident and North
Indian-resident Kayasths (and between Kayasths and non- Kayasths and non-
Hindustanis) contributes greatly to our understanding of the tessilated patterns of ethnic
and cultural settlement which characterized many major Indian cities. There is something
here for all those interested in Indian society's recent history.
There is also a great deal for those concerned with the anthropology of Indian
civilization. Dr Leonard's approach to her subject matter is informed by anthropological
theory and she draws many of her questions from anthropological debates about caste,
kinship and social change. However, she puts the questions with an historians's eye for
the significance of movement, noting repeatedly the distortions imposed by static,
structural-functional interpretations of the Indian past. Her emphases fall on the
plasticity of beliefs and institutions, on the contingent character of family and kinship
structure, on the importance of the specific mechanisms through which historical change
was taking place. Before her pen, many standard assumptions about Indian 'traditional'
society dissolve into vacuity; the modernization paradigm (which still dominates
conceptualizations of social change) is exposed as worthless; and the current anthropo-
logical fashion for making gross generalizations about the ageless culture of Hinduism
appears properly ridiculous.
Dr Leonard's achievements in historical reconstruction and sociological critique are
outstanding. However, her work raises one problem which should cause concern to all
those interested in expanding the relationship between history and the social sciences
and in promoting a more theoretically informed history of society. Her conclusions carry
very negative implications for the development of a general sociological understanding
of India's history. While demonstrating the inadequacy of existing general concepts (of
the family, the community, the kinship system, etc.) and general theories of change
(especially modernization theory) to the particular history of the Kayasths, Dr Leonard
does not suggest or even seriously pursue concepts or theories which might be the more
adequate. Rather, she rests her conclusions on the specificities of the Kayasth case and
leaves open the broader questions of structure and change in Indian society. But leaving
the broader questions open while concentrating on the unique features of a case, is
tantamount to denying that they can be answered (however much one might plead the
need for more information). The social world is made to appear as a myriad of singular
instances, without coherent regularities, and the relationship which is implied between
history and the social sciences is that what social science proposes history disposes.
At one level, the reasons for this depressing prognosis may derive from the way that
Dr Leonard tends to confront extremely general theories with the evidence of an
extremely particular case. Most of her targets represent attempts to develop paradigm
of 'the Indian family' or 'social change in India'; while her ammunition is provided
by a tiny and highly idiosyncratic (elite occupational position, bi-lateral kinship system,

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 May I980 Reviews 311

foreign immigrant status, etc.) social grouping. It may be no more surprising, and
perhaps no more significant, that the Kayasths do not fit the general models of Indian
family and group structure (and provide no obvious guidelines to the development of
better models) than that, say, the Rothschilds do not fit general models of the European
family.
But this, then, raises the problem of why one should choose to look at general questions
concerning the structure and dynamics of the Indian social process through the peculiar
prism of the Kayasths, and it takes us to a deeper level of stress. It could be that the
methodological assumptions from which Dr Leonard starts, and the sociological theories
on which they are based, are such that the only response which they can elicit from an
historically sensitive analyst is a profoundly negative one. The decision to make a
particular example of the family and the ethnic caste grouping the primary focus of st
whose character can reveal something general about the society, and to discuss the
empirical findings in relation to pan-societal models, is defensible only on the basis of
a number of assumptions: that family and, to some degree, ethnic caste relations reflect
the 'basic' (although Dr Leonard prefers the obscure 'characteristic') units of Indian
social life; that they are constituted prior to and are determinant of other types of
relationship; that the general exists as the 'typical' of whose character all single instances
partake (and thus may illustrate); and that institutional features of pan-societal similarity
are more significant than those of dissimilarity. Such assumptions, very obviously, derive
from that conflation of Weberian and Durkheimian ideas which, since Parsons at least,
has come to provide us with orthodox, or as some would say 'bourgeois', sociological
theory. The anthropological works from which Dr Leonard draws her original inspiration
are very much in this theoretical tradition. Difficulties arise, however, the instant that
one begins to confront these assumptions with historical questions about movement,
change and cause (not to mention a critical awareness of one's own values and political
ideology). For, as has often been argued, they are rooted in an a-historical approach to
analysis and, notoriously, are unable to offer adequate, non-teleological, explanations of
change. Indeed, it could be said that what Dr Leonard's very historical analysis actually
presents us with is a splendid demonstration of the falseness of the assumptions from
which she started. Her evidence reveals, for example, that the Kayasths were not an ethnic
group nor, in most ways, structurally a social grouping at all. Group consciousness
developed among them only occasionally and never more than partially, and represented
but one of several different available identities. (But, then, why design the collectivity
to be studied on ethnic caste lines?) Equally, she shows that the family as an institution
was as much the product of voluntaristic as of biological ties and that its structure was
given to constant change, and sometimes dissolution, under the pressure of other,
adjacent social institutions. (But what, then, makes it the fundamental rather than one
of several parallel social units?) Moreover, her emphasis on the close interconnection
between politico-economic opportunities and the structure (even recognized existence)
of family ties denies the utility of the concept of an ideal-type Indian family and makes
questions of class-difference more significant than those of cross-class similarity. (But
why, then, take one's frame of reference for argument from analysts pursuing the
classificatory chimera of the Indian family and working with integrationist models?)
Having negated most of the premises which would justify her perspective on the subject,
it may not be surprising that Dr Leonard should appear somewhat stumped by the
question of just what the case of the Kayasths does tell us generally about India's social
history.

I -2

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 3 I2 Social History VOL 5: NO 2

But where do we go from here? Dr Leonard, in a sense, has rung the death-knell on
the type of family and caste case-study which she has pursued, and has issued a challenge
for us to find a more cogent base from which to erect the historical sociology of India.
Her overt response to this challenge is strangely weak - calling for more evidence before
we attempt generalization. Whatever the shortcomings of our present knowledge, data
alone do not enlighten and even if we possessed accounts of the history of every family
and caste group, we still could not claim to understand Indian society's history nor the
place of family and caste in it. What we need is a new approach, emancipated from
a-historical assumptions, to the problems of family and caste relations. Tucked away
inside Dr Leonard's detailed discussions, and unfortunately not raised to any level of
explicit theory, however, there are signposts to a way forward. Her practical analysis
emphasizes strongly the contingency of family and caste structure on the specificities of,
especially, the politico-economic system: particular instances of Kayasth family and
group relations are seen as responses to particular patterns of economic opportunity, legal
pressure and political imperative. It could be that a more fruitful way of inquiring into
the general history of family and caste relations would be to begin by examining the
politico-economic structure of the whole society, in which, at various levels and in various
forms, families and caste groups were located. Of course, this would alter fundamentally
the questions which were asked of family and caste history, and the conclusions which
were sought. Family and caste would be studied as determined, rather than determining
or conceptually autonomous phenomena; the focus of analysis would be on multi-group
societies rather than family and caste isolates; differences in structure (related to
differences in situation) would supply the central problematic; the explanation of change
would proceed by tracing its origins in the wider social dynamic rather than by describing
its effects on single social particles. But radical re-thinking seems to be necessary if the
concept of an historical sociology is to be any more than a pious aspiration. Having
destroyed the bases of one approach to the history of family and caste, it is to be hoped
that, in future work, Dr Leonard will take up more vigorously the task of building the
platform for another.
D. A. Washbrook
University of Warwick

W. R. Lee, Population Growth, Economic Development and Social Change in

Bavaria i750o-850 (977), xxxi+462 (Arno Press, New York n.p.).
This book represents something of a landmark in the development of German social
history. Historians of Germany have consistently boasted of the wealth of primary
evidence heaped in local and ecclesiastical archives and have stressed the potential of this
material for throwing much needed light into the many dark recesses in our knowledge
of German society. Until recently, however, few have had either the inclination or the
requisite expertise to tackle this rich seam, despite the frequent exhortations from all sides
about the need for more local studies. There has been a reluctance to recognize that some
of the key problems in German history can be tackled by the type of local and regional
studies which have so influentially shaped our perceptions of French society in the ancien
regime, or of the preconditions of industrialization in Britain. This study of rural society
in southern Bavaria therefore offers us one of the first opportunities to gauge both the
character of these local sources and the contribution they can make, if effectively used,
to our understanding of social and economic change in Germany in the century before

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