Explores The Attitude Of Certain Lower Casts To Nationalist Movement In Bengal. It Shows That Their Aspirations Were Not Accommodated Within The Mainstream Of Nationalist Politics And This Led Ito Emphasize On Caste Which In Turn Delayed Their Integration Into The Nation. Has 4 Chapters Followed By Conclusion, Appendix And A Bibliography.

A history of the British administration in South Asia during the reign of Queen Victoria profiles the India Civil Service and the society they attempted to build in the region, explaining how officers and their families were expected to fulfill a wide range of roles.

Explores The Attitude Of Certain Lower Casts To Nationalist Movement In Bengal. It Shows That Their Aspirations Were Not Accommodated Within The Mainstream Of Nationalist Politics And This Led Ito Emphasize On Caste Which In Turn Delayed Their Integration Into The Nation. Has 4 Chapters Followed By Conclusion, Appendix And A Bibliography.

The phenomenon of caste has probably aroused more controversy than any other aspect of Indian life and thought. Susan Bayly's cogent and sophisticated analysis explores the emergence of the ideas, experiences and practices which gave rise to the so-called 'caste society' from the pre-colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. Using an historical and anthropological approach, she frames her analysis within the context of India's dynamic economic and social order, interpreting caste not as an essence of Indian culture and civilization, but rather as a contingent and variable response to the changes that occurred in the subcontinent's political landscape through the colonial conquest. The idea of caste in relation to Western and Indian 'orientalist' thought is also explored.

A wide-ranging and truly interdisciplinary guide to understanding the relationship between India's colonial past and globalized present.

From Hierarchy to Ethnicity discusses the origins of politicized caste identities in twentieth-century India, and how they evolved over time.

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.