Caste and colonialism: Sanskritising and anti-

Brahmanical treand
Lesson: Caste and colonialism: Sanskritising and anti-Brahmanical
treand
Lesson Developer: Dr. Charu Gupta, Associate Professor
College/ Department: Department of History, University of Delhi

An overview of caste
Caste has been considered by anthropologists and social historians as the most important
mode of social stratification and oppression in India. It is expressed in the two parallel
concepts of varna and jati, which have a great degree of overlap in their meanings. The four
fold division of society into varnas had been visible since 1000 BC, when the ‘Aryan’ society
was divided into Brahmans or priests; Kshatriyas or warriors; Vaishyas or farmers, traders
and producers of wealth; and Sudras, who served these three higher groups. The system
was highly hierarchical. Untouchability as a fully developed institution appeared sometime
between the third and sixth centuries CE, when the untouchables came to constitute a fifth
category, known by various names like Panchamas, Ati-Sudras or Chandalas
(Bandyopadhyay 2004: 342). However, while the varna-model represents a ‘textbook view
of caste’, the jati-model represents a ‘field-view’ or the actual reality of caste (Banerjee-
Dube 2008: xvii). Jatis as occupation groups, which number more than three thousand in
modern India, were emerging side by side with the varnas, and were often again further
subdivided on the basis of professional specialization and occupational groups. Which jati a
person would belong to was determined by birth, and exclusiveness was maintained by
stringent rules of commensality restrictions. At the same time, there were some
opportunities for limited social mobility. Further, a singular idea of dharma was at times
contested, most significant being the bhakti movement.

Debates around caste

Louis Dumont, a structural anthropologist, in his landmark work in 1970 titled Homo
Hierarchicus, put caste at the centre of Hindu social life. He believed in the inherent and
deeply religious quality of the caste system. He imagined it as a religious system that had
enveloped the secular world and imposed a ranking system of purity and pollution. In this
schema, the Brahman priest was more powerful than the Kshatriya king. M. N. Srinivas in
his work Caste in Modern India and other Essays, published in 1962, too in a different way
accepted the ritual pre-eminence of the Brahman in the caste system. He put forward the
theory of ‘Sanskritization’, i.e. the tendency among lower castes to accept and absorb the
‘customs, ritual, belief, ideology and style of life’ of upper castes, which is often followed by
claims to higher position in caste hierarchy. These positions however, have not remained
uncontested.

Anthropologist and social historian Nicholas B. Dirks has refuted the position of Dumont in
this two works The Hollow Crown (1987) and Castes of Mind (2001). He says that the crown
was never that hollow as made out by colonial ethnographers like Dumont. He argues that
ritual rank was never unconnected with the power structure, and there was a close positive
correlation between power, wealth and rank. Thus often the Kshatriya king was more
powerful than the Brahman. Historian Sekhar Bandyapodhyay further effectively argues that
caste identity is not a given. Caste categories do not represent an ‘undifferentiated mass of
people’ who act in a uniform way. Moreover, he states, what defined the collective identity
of lower castes was often not Sanskritization but an ‘ideology of protest’.

Colonial impact: continuities & discontinuities

There is much debate on what happened to caste with the coming of colonialism. The
central point of the debate is whether colonialism marked a dramatic shift and fracture in
terms of caste categories and identities or whether there were continuities from pre-colonial
pasts. While Nicholas Dirks represents the first viewpoint, Susan Bayly tends to emphasize
the latter. Both positions are partly valid, depending on different contexts. It appears that
caste was a meeting ground between Indian reality and colonial knowledge and strategy.

Western Orientalist scholars often propounded fixed understandings of caste, as they relied
mainly on the Sanskrit textual tradition. Their knowledge about Indian society was largely
mediated through Brahmanical texts, leading to an understanding from a top-down
perspective (Dirks 2001). They strengthened the notion of a ‘spiritual’ India, where the
social life of its members was strictly determined by religious norms. Thus more often than
not, they regarded Indian society as based on a rigid grid of hierarchy with fixed caste
categories. Communities thus came to be seen as marked by primordial caste and religious
identities. This has led some scholars like Nicholas Dirks and Ronald Inden to argue that
caste was an ‘invention’ of British rule, especially in a discursive sense. Dirks states that a
religious understanding of caste identity was imposed by the British colonizing authority, by
which caste was refigured as a distinctly religious system. He further states that the colonial
rule ‘disengaged’ the caste system from its pre-colonial political contexts, but gave it a new
lease of life by redefining and revitalizing it within its new structures of knowledge,
institutions and policies.

Susan Bayly, and others like Richard Eaton and Sumit Guha, while acknowledging changes
brought in with colonialism, stress that the indigenous intellectuals were active participants
in the production of colonial knowledge about caste. The literate Brahmans and the
Brahmanized scribal and commercial populations were particularly sought after as learned
informants and as providers of the shastric texts, which the colonial officers were coming to
treat as authoritative sources on caste. Moreover, Bayly stresses that the voices of colonial
authorities were not homogenous or singular. She makes a distinction between two schools
of thought among them. Herbert Hope Risley, one of the most important officials to collect
data on castes, showed a more racial understanding of caste. He saw a racial difference
between northern and southern Indians and between high and low castes. However, William
Crooke, Blunt and Nesfield had a more material and occupational interpretation of caste.

It would be irresponsible and simplistic to blame the colonial government for creating caste

categories or misrepresenting Indian society in terms of caste alone, as the institution had a
much larger history. But there were distinct yet overlapping ways in which configurations of
caste changed and gained legitimacy during colonial times. Thus there appear to be both
continuities and changes in caste structures during colonial rule. The salience of caste
politics bears important colonial legacies. Caste acquired new connotations at this time and
became an important term capable of expressing, organizing, and above all ‘systematizing’
India’s diverse forms of social identity. A critical tool for doing so became the census.
Colonial knowledge, census and caste
Paradoxically, the colonial agenda of rationalistic administration necessitated collection of
census data on the Indian population, which led to the classification of populations in terms
of their caste and religion, and furthered the process of consolidation of caste identities. The
census was taken to be the basis of enumeration. Susan Bayly calls it the ‘single master
exercise of tabulation’ of colonial society (Bayly 1999: 244). Moreover, colonial laws and
judicial administration pronounced on the status of the collective caste category, investing
such units with a legal identity before the law. Particular configurations of caste thus took
shape and gained new significance and legitimacy under imperial initiatives.

Value addition: Did you know?

The role of the census

Bernard Cohn shows how the inhabitants of India and their cultures were
objectified through the census. Colonial classification along caste lines was not
merely ‘academic speculation’. It had important economic and political
repercussions. For example, those categorized as ‘low’ castes were often
excluded from the army. Caste became a major factor in recruitment policies in
other sectors as well. There were other implications of the census. It gave
shape to communities of ‘martial races’, criminal castes and tribes, and
depressed and scheduled castes.

Source: Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. An Anthropologist among the Historian

and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 224-54.

Numerical enumeration, apart from serving ‘justificatory’ and ‘disciplinary’ purposes,

undermined the huge diversity of castes, and allowed the colonial state greater control over
the subject population. Arjuna Appadurai argues that even if census operations ‘built upon’
indigenous initiatives, renewing existing identities rather than creating them, the motive
and criteria behind these operations demonstrated that quantification was never totally
‘innocent’. Colonial ethnography, by applying a seemingly scientific precision to caste across
India helped to transform what had been fuzzy, rather localized identities into far more
strictly defined and tightly enumerated notions of community. Census transformed a huge
array of variable data into uniform and clear registers of Indian people. In this way, British
helped in firmly establishing caste as a Hindu institution.

Emerging caste associations: Sanskritization?

As we have shown, colonialism did lead to consolidation of caste identities especially from
the 19th century. Indigenous people saw census and other British efforts as attempts at
freezing a constantly changing hierarchy. The 1901 census is especially significant here, as
then a decision was made to attempt to rank the castes in the census records according to
‘social precedence’. This led to the emergence and proliferation of a large number of caste
associations and ‘caste sabhas’, and an explosion of writings on caste.
There was the emergence of caste-cluster consciousness and various caste groups began
vying for prestigious caste positions. Modern administrative tools of census and judiciary
were utilized in their moves towards claiming a higher socio-ritual status. There was a
deluge of caste petitions made to the government for moving up the ladder of caste
hierarchies, and ranking in the census. Though the practice of caste classification in the
census was discontinued, caste-based endeavours persisted. Caste inventories made people
realize their numerical strength in the population and improved means of communication
allowed greater horizontal solidarity among the caste members. The growth of the modern
printing press, urban centres and government employment further helped caste associations
flourish. Many of them started their own journals, and used newspapers and the press
effectively to publicize their appeals. A large number of caste genealogies, pamphlets and
booklets around specific castes were also penned at this time. Susan Bayly argues that most
leaders of these caste associations came from scribal, trade and middle status cultivating
backgrounds. There was a growing realization of the significance of the new sources of
status i.e., education, jobs and political representation, leading to more organized demands
for more special privileges. New vistas of thinking were evolved around caste, kinship,
identity and hierarchy. Caste became a legitimate site for defining social identities within a
more institutionalized and apparently secularized public space.

While many castes struggled to fit into a higher varna, and this may fit into the theory of
‘Sanskritization’, still others used this opportunity to organize across regions and unionize.
The creation of caste sabhas and focus on practical habits and customs over ‘arbitrary’
varna title also brought caste movements opportunities for socio-political advancement.

Non-Brahman movements
It was not just in the form of caste associations that caste consciousness and movements
asserted themselves. Western and southern India, where Brahman dominance was far in
excess of numerical proportion, were the first to see the growth of anti-Brahmanical trends,
by way of emergence of non-Brahman movements in late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Some other regions too witnessed such movements. As a side note, it is significant that
some princely states in South India like Mysore and Kolhapur introduced caste-based
reservation in public employment for people of non-Brahman birth, in order to make up for
their past losses. In this section, we will study some of the non-Brahman movements.

Maharashtra: Jotirao Phule and the inversion of

Brahman myths
The non-Brahman movement started in Maharashtra under the outstanding leadership of
Jotirao Phule (1827-1890), popular known as Jotiba Phule. He was a member of the Mali
(gardener) caste. He formed the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truthseekers Society) in 1873. The
Marathi non-Brahman public sphere was distinguished by a critique of caste hegemony. The
Kunbis or Marathas constituted a large per cent of the population in this region. Being a rich
peasant class, they controlled agricultural production. However, due to traditional ideologies
and caste institutions, they were subservient to the Brahmans. The Brahmans, on the other
hand, exercised considerable influence due to their ritualistic power and monopoly of
knowledge.
Phule blamed the ritual power and domination of the Brahman for the predicament of Sudra
and Ati-Sudra castes. Rosalind O’ Hanlon argues that Phule attempted to bring together
non-Brahman peasant castes (Kunbis) and the untouchables by turning the myth of Aryan
invasion and the Orientalist theory of Aryanization upside down. There was a creative
deployment of missionary accounts of Indian history by many lower caste leaders in their
constructions of anti-Brahman lower caste identity. Phule portrayed the Brahmans as
descendents of Aryan invaders. He presented the lower castes as the original inhabitants of
India, as veritable fighters who refused to easily submit to the conquerors. This defiance
also meant their terrible subjection once the Brahmans consolidated their power. He stated,
‘Brahmans hide Vedas from Sudras because they contain clues to understand how Aryas
suppressed and enslaved them’. Such distinct understandings of the past proved vital in the
emergence of a distinctive ‘Maratha’ identity and its demands for the rectification of
inequalities.

Figure 6.6.1: Jotirao Phule

Source: http://www.payer.de/dharmashastra/dharma04a02.gif

In the latter part of the 19th century, Phule’s writings against Brahmanism utilized forms of
speech and rhetorical styles associated with the rustic language of peasants, but infused
them with demands for human rights and social equality that bore the influence of
nonconformist Christianity to produce a unique discourse of caste radicalism. He was
an iconoclast through his satirical writings. He was a great promoter of education. He
wrote, ‘No riches without vigour, no vigour without morality, no morality without
knowledge, no knowledge without education’. He was also a champion of women’s liberation
and challenged the authoritarian family structure. During marriages he asked the
bridegroom to promise the right to education to his bride. A journal titled Deen Bandhu in
Marathi was edited and published by Phule. His book Gulamgiri (slavery), published in 1873,
revealed his conception of the historical roots of Sudra slavery under Brahmanical
domination. Phule had an ambiguous stand towards the British. He praised their rule for
breaking the slavery of Sudras, by imparting them education, and hoped for further
transformation of Indian society for the better under their rule. In fact various non-Brahman
movements had an ambivalent relationship with colonialism, which did not always align with
the views of dominant Hindu communities.

However, fissures and tensions developed in the movement later on account of its emphasis
on mobilizing the Kunbi peasantry. This shift led to the privileging of the Maratha identity
and Kshatriyahood, which alienated the Sudras and Ati-Sudras. The non-Brahman
movement in Maharashtra developed two parallel tendencies at the turn of the century. One
was conservative, led by richer non-Brahmans, who reposed their faith in the British
government for their salvation. The second however was a more radical trend, represented
by the Satyashodhak Samaj. They posited Brahman and merchant interests as antagonistic
to the bahujan samaj, i.e. the majority community and masses. However, by the 1930s the
movement gradually merged with Congress nationalism (Omvedt 1976: 245-47).

Tamilnadu: Dravidian identity

Crystallization in the South of a non-Brahman identity centered on a Dravidian identity, with
the caste of Vellalas taking the lead. The Vellala elite of Tamilnadu began the Dravidian
movement in the late 19th century against the Brahman monopoly of administrative jobs
and governmental posts. The Brahmans valorised Sanskrit as the language of a classical
past, and showed great contempt for Tamil, the language of the ordinary people. This
motivated the Vellala elite to uphold their Dravidian identity. People like P. Sundaram Pillai
and Maraimalai Adigal emerged as its leaders.

Value addition: Did you know?

Maraimalai Aidgal and Dravidian ideology

Maraimalai Aidgal privileged the Vellalas over Brahmans and generated a

usurpation myth, in which the Brahmans had stolen India from the indigenous
Tamils. The movement even cast Brahmans as uncivilized usurpers who
infiltrated and destroyed a golden age of India, one in which society had been
divided along occupational, not caste lines. Yet of course this movement had
elements of paternalism and denied agency to both the non-Brahman and non-
Vellala, but its key feature was the differentiation between Tamil/Dravidian and
Sanskrit/Aryan racial backgrounds.

Source: Pandian, M.S.S. 1994. Notes on the Transformation of

‘Dravidian’ Ideology: Tamilnadu, c. 1900-1940. Social Scientist, 22
(5/6): 84-104.

This movement also took two different paths in the 1920s. First, under an elitist Justice
Party, it strove for privileges offered by government sponsored reforms. Second, a more
militant trend of ‘Self Respect’ in Dravidian identity emerged under the leadership of E. V.
Ramaswamy Naicker, popularly known as Periyar (literally meaning ‘great man’ in Tamil).
 Figure 6.6.2: Periyar
Source: www.tn.gov.in/tamiltngov/memorial/periyar.jpg

Under the leadership of Periyar, the Self Respect Movement in the 1920s and 1930s became
a mass movement, attacking the ruling elite. Periyar converted to atheism even before his
ascent into the public sphere in 1919. He had a deep belief in reason, and he functioned
within the Enlightenment paradigm. Born into a non-Brahman family, he encountered
several instances of discrimination and Brahman exclusivity, causing him to embark on a
lifelong vendetta against Brahmans and Hinduism. He argued that Hinduism did not merely
give its adherents a caste identity but also invested them with a range of other inferiorized
identities. He was imprisoned multiple times due to a refusal to back down from his anti-
Brahman or anti-Hindu statements. Dirks describes Periyar as someone who was always
positioned on the margin, often out of necessity, on societal issues. He was a great
champion of the cause of women and supported love marriages. He truly extended his
concept of equality and human dignity to women. He advocated birth control as essential for
a woman’s freedom, and saw divorce as a woman’s prerogative, reflecting his social
radicalism. Disillusioned with Congress, he left it in 1925. The same year he started
publishing a series of pamphlets as Kudi Arasu (Government of the People). They were
printed in Tamil and won over many lower-caste adherents, while also drawing criticism
from many others. He stated in Kudi Arasu that he was perfectly willing to ‘destroy’ rather
than merely ‘amend’.

In spite of the radicalism of this movement, its social basis was largely confined to the
upper non-Brahman castes, the rural landowning classes and urban based business groups.
At the same time, unlike the movement in Maharashtra, this movement turned more and
more vocal and anti-Congress, culminating in a pronounced Tamil regional separatism.

Gangetic India: rhetoric of bhakti and militancy

In north India, namely Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, there too emerged some non-Brahman
movements, though not as powerful as in western and southern India. Many of the
movements in this region upheld a rhetoric of bhakti. Religiosity in fact became an
important political tool in caste identity politics of the region. Upper castes used scriptural
evidence to prove their superiority. Lower castes adopted the path of bhakti or devotion to
both challenge as well as gain an advantageous position in caste hierarchy. Bhakti
emphasized the importance of devotion rather than rituals, thereby theoretically
undermining the importance of customary hierarchy.
Ramanandi Sampraday in theory was formed by Ramananda. However in the early 20th
century, it was effectively used by the Kurmi, Yadav and Kushvaha peasant castes of north
India, in their claims for superior status. William Pinch shows that the sect provided in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries an institutional context within which members of various
stigmatized communities could acquire a modicum of social and religious dignity. While
using the language of bhakti and devotion, lower castes were at the same time able to
carve out a martial identity, laying claims to a Kshatriya status. They established emotional
and later genealogical links with the divine figures of Ram and Krishna. Such linkages
served the double purpose of staking out a claim to a Kshatriya, and hence a militant,
identity, as well as trying to de-stigmatise manual labour.

Value addition: Interesting details

Being Vaishnava, becoming Kshatriya

Various intermediate castes and jatis in the region, who were assigned a Sudra
status, also began a new reformism, often spearheaded by articulate, educated
members of their communities. These new jati reformers sought personal and
community dignity on their own by the unqualified assertion of status. Much of
the reform advocated urged abstinence from meat and intoxicants, and
encouraged Sanskrit education and wearing of the sacred thread among its
members, so as to inculcate a ‘pure’ lifestyle. It is possible to see in these
Kshatriya reform movements a significant degree of ‘Sanskritisation’. At the
same time however there were more significant underlying meanings of
ideological change implicit in such social reform. Underlying these was a
complex and highly ramified Vaishnava discourse.

Source: Pinch, William R. 1996. Peasants and Monks in British India.

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 81-83.

Besides these non-Brahman caste expressions and movements in rural areas of north India,
there also emerged caste movements among the urban Sudra poor in the 1920s and 1930s.
In these, primacy of militancy over devotion was particularly evident.

Value addition: Interesting details

Urban Sudra poor

Nandini Gooptu, in her study of the UP poor, argues that in the years between
the two world wars, when north Indian society and its economy underwent
crucial transformations, a section of the urban Sudra poor came to play a
central role in militant displays of Hinduism. They began participating in Holi,
Ramlila and akharaculture, and asserted themselves in political-public arenas. In
some ways thus, they were co-opted within a Hindutva discourse. Why did they
do so, when Hinduism had marginalized them for so long? Behind it, there were
contradictory pulls and diverse economic, political and social reasons. These
lower castes were functioning in an orthodox Hindu commercial environment.
They wished to fortify their own position in scarce urban occupations and search
 for better job opportunities. Given the context of extreme competitiveness of
the urban labour market at this period, the vastly expanded group of the Sudra
poor entered into direct competition with other contenders for jobs such as the
untouchable and the Muslim poor. From the perspective of the Sudras it was
essential to stake out a claim for higher status within the Hindu caste hierarchy
than to reject the caste system altogether given their dependence on the
market. They thus began emphasizing their martial traditions and showed
themselves as protectors of the bazaars. They showed a sense of pride and
glorified physical labour and strength as it was seen as increasing their
importance as manual labourers. They used education and print culture too as a
way of countering marginalization in the economic sphere. These were efforts at
self assertion, to claim respectability.

There were problems with this however. Their assertions revealed multi-vocal
and varied levels of social constructions of meaning. Their aspirations for an
egalitarian social order went hand in hand with an awareness of being deprived
and powerless. Moreover class and caste prejudices remained very much
entrenched among the upper castes. Hindu cohesiveness was superficial. These
lower castes thus, while participating in the same public arenas, did it for
different reasons, with diverse perspectives. This reflected conflict and
contradiction within the putative Hindu community.

Source: Gooptu, Nandini. 2001. The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early

Twentieth-Century India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contradictory trends
Various Sanskritizing and non-Brahman movements that emerged in colonial India in the
19th and 20th centuries revealed contradictory pulls and pressures. They cannot be easily
classified under the simple rubric of ‘Sanskritization’ or ‘Anti-Brahmanism’ and ‘Anti-
Hinduism’. There were complexities within each movement, and all of them had distinct
trajectories. Many of the lower caste assertions were definitely against Vedic ritualism and
against Brahmanical caste rigidity. Some of them were also attempts to move up the ladder
of caste hierarchies by framing themselves in a language of reformism. Others articulated a
militant assertion within the Hindu fold, but for very diverse reasons. At the same time, they
were united in their defiance of Hindu hierarchies. Some of them however took a complete
break from Hinduism and began converting to other religions. These trends were more
sharply articulated in Dalit politics and movements, for example by the Namasudras of
Bengal, the ad-Dharma Mandal of Punjab and the Adi-Hindu movement of Uttar Pradesh.
These however will be the subject of another chapter.