civil society in colonial india

8/2/2019 Civil Society in Colonial India

1/37

TRANSFORMATIONScomparative study of social transformations

CSSTWORKING PAPERSTheUniversity of Michigan

Ann Arbor


2/37

THE INVENTION OF CASTE:C IV IL SOCIETY I N COLONIAL INDIA

N i c h o l a s B. D i r k sCRSO W ork in g CSST W ork in gPaper #368 Paper #11October 1988


3/37

THE INVENTION OF CASTECIVIL SOCIETY IN COLONIAL INDIA

Nicholas B. DirksThe University of Michigan

The "inventionn of the nation state in eighteenth-centuryEurope went hand-in-hand with the construction of a new form ofcivil society. Civil society was to free "individuals" in newand progressive societies from "traditional" modes of socialorganization and from the myriad constraints of pre-modern and/orfeudal polities. Civil society has been constituted by andinstitutionalized in a range of bodies--the church, education,civic organizations--which represent the interests of a privatedomain, interests construed now to be autonomous from the state(even as they are simultaneously protected by the state). In theretrospective histories of modern nation states, it was assumedthat although the outward reach of the pre-modern state waslimited by political, military, and technological constraints,the inward (or downward) reach of the state had been virtuallyunlimited. The modern state, more powerful than ever before,legitimated itself in part through its claim to free the socialfrom the political intrusion of the past.

In eighteenth century Europe, allegiances came increasinglyto be conceptualized in terms of verticalities associated withbounded territoriality and shared pasts; local hierarchies werereplaced by what Benedict Anderson has termed "imagined


4/37

2communities" (~nderson 983). The sociopolitical realignmentsleading to the emergence of the nation state as the predominantEuropean social formation were based upon the invention of socialtechnologies, printing and the standardization of languages,nationalizing education, self-regulating and autonomous legalsystems, official histories of the state and the people, and theproduction and celebration of national shrines, symbols, andpilgrimage centers. The legitimizing of the nation stateproceeds not only in the public enactment of its self-definedtraditions, but by constant reiteration of its power through whathave become accepted as natural (rational and normal) statefunctions, of certifying, counting, reporting, registering,classifying, and identifying. These documentation andcertification projects of the state have become naturalized asthe fundamental activities and legitimate provenance of themodern state. But these projects did not begin at home.Colonialism did not just provide the wealth for the Europeannation state, it was an extension of Western state formationitself.

I have argued elsewhere that colonialism in India producednew forms of civil society which have been represented astraditional forms; chief among these is caste itself (1987). Theacademic study of India has, perhaps unwittingly, furthered acolonial project. And in the case of India, anthropologists andhistorians, for good and ill, are in it together. Castecontinues to be the central social fact for South Asia and socialhistory remains implicated in many of the same theoretical and .


5/37

3methodological problematics as anthropology. The regnantimportance of scholars such as Dumont (1980) and Heesterman(1985) suggests that the ghost of colonial sociology still hauntsus; anthropologists still write about the need for a sociology ofIndia and historians still borrow what they need to know aboutIndian society from Weber and Dumont before proceeding to dosocial history. Anthropologists of India have themselvesremained so firmly wedded to a Dumontian position (even indissent) that India has become marginalized as the land of caste.The definition of culture as shared values or distinctivefeatures has led to a series of peculiar debates, in which each

- - new contestant seems to argue not about the way in which multiplecultural forms are embedded in larger historical, political, orsocio-economic contexts, but rather about which cultural key ortrope most successfully dissolves the difficulties of previousformulations.

Dumont's general views, and the fact that Dumont hasoccupied a hegemonic position in the field of Indiananthropology, reveal important aspects of the implication ofcomparative sociology in colonial structures and legacies.Weber, Marx, ~ a i n e , nd now Dumont have all held that in India,in marked contrast to China, the state was epiphenomenal.Instead, caste, not the state, was what held society -- with itsconstituent village republics and communities -- together. In amore general sense, caste is seen as the foundation and core ofIndian civilization; it is responsible for the transmission andreproduction of society in India. And caste, like India itself,


6/37

4has been seen as based on religious rather than politicalprinciples.

In a previous study I concentrated on the relationshipbetween Indian state and Indian society in the old regime, andthe transformation of this relationship under British ,colonialism, when the Indian crown became increasingly hollow(1987). But until the emergence of British colonial rule insouthern India the crown was not so hollow as it has generallybeen made out to be in Indian history, anthropology, andcomparative sociology in general. Kings were not inferior toBrahmans; the political domain was not encompassed by a religiousdomain. State forms, while not fully assimilable to westerncategories of the state, were powerful components in Indiancivilization. Indian society, indeed caste itself, was shaped bypolitical struggles and processes. In using the term "political"I am of course conscious of imposing an exogenous analytic termonto a situation where ritual and political forms were oftenfundamentally the same. However, I stressed the political bothto redress the previous emphasis on "religion" and to underscorethe social fact that caste structure, ritual form, and politicalprocess were all dependent on relations of power. Theserelations were constituted in and through history; and theserelations were culturally constructed. But most recently thiscultural construction took place in the context of Britishcolonial rule, in which caste was constructed as the religiousbasis of Indian society, a cultural form that became viewed as aspecifically Indian form of civil society.


7/37

5Colonialism purposefully preserved many of the forms of the

old regime, nowhere more conspicuously than in the indirectlyruled Princely States, of which the little kingdom I studied wasthe only one in the Tamil country of southern India. But theseforms were frozen, and only the appearances of the old regime--without its vitally connected political and social processes--were saved. Colonialism both changed things more and less thanhas commonly been thought. While introducing new forms of civilsociety and separating these forms off from the colonial state,colonialism also arrested some of the immediate disruptions ofchange by preserving many elements of the old regime. But byfreezing the wolf in sheep's clothing, it changed thingsfundamentally. Paradoxically, colonialism seems to have createdmuch of what is now accepted as Indian "tradition," including anautonomous caste structure with the Brahman clearly andunambiguously at the head, village based systems of exchange,isolated ceremonial residues of the old regime state, andfetishistic competition for ritual goods that no longer played avital role in the political system.

The concerns of comparative sociology are not only theproducts of a nineteenth century Orientalism but also of thecolonial intervention that actively removed the politics fromcolonial societies. It was not merely convenient for the Britishto detach caste from politics; it was necessary for them to do soin order to rule an immensely complex society by a variety ofindirect means. But caste--now disembodied from its formerpolitical contexts--lived on. In this dissociated form it was


8/37

6appropriated, and reconstructed, by the British. Paradoxically,they were able to change caste only because caste in factcontinued to be permeable to political influence.

The study of the history of Orientalism not only revealsclearly the participation of early knowledge about India in theproject of conquest and control, it also helps to document someof the most critical aspects of the colonial enterprise in India,an enterprise that was part of the more general documentation andcertification project of the nation/colonial state discussedabove. This project can be vividly seen in the career of a Scotby the name of Colin Mackenzie (see Mackenzie n.d.1 who became,through diligent and prodigious effort, the first SurveyorGeneral of India. Early on noted for his plans and drawingsassociated with the third and fourth Anglo-Mysore wars, his firstcontribution was to use his topological knowledge of the Deccanto help devise the final assault on Seringapatanam, stronghold ofthe tiger of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, arguably the most seriousmilitary threat to the British in the late eighteenth century.Through his long career in southern India as cartographer andsurveyor (Phillimore 1945; Markham 18781, Mackenzie was obsessedwith an interest in collecting narratives and facts to supplementthe maps he and his associates made of Hyderabad, Mysore, andother regions of the southern peninsula. On his own initiativeand with his own resources he hired and trained a group ofBrahman assistants who helped him collect local histories ofkingly dynasties, chiefly families, castes, villages, temples,monasteries, as well as other local traditions and religious and


9/37

7philosophical texts in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Telegu,Kanarese, Malayalam, and Hindi. He also took rubbings of stoneand copper plate inscriptions, collected coins, images, andantiquities, and made extensive plans and drawings wherever hewent. When Mackenzie died in 1821 he had amassed a collection of3000 stone and copper plate inscriptions, 1568 literarymanuscripts, 2070 local tracts, and large portfolios andcollections of drawings, plans, images, and antiquities (seeTaylor 1858, Wilson 1828 & Mahalingam 1972 & 1976).

This collection contains by far the largest set of sourcesfor the study of the early modern historical anthropology of

-s. outhern India. Nonetheless, when I began to use it a decade ago.l L- , for its family histories of some of the kingly families I was

studying, the collection itself continued to be seen as it was. "T characterized by its first bibliographer, the eminent sanskritist

H. H. Wilson, as so miscellaneous and embellished by mythologicaldistortion as to be at best a literary source. Wilson, who wenton to become the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, was bestknown for his Sanskrit-English dictionary, and seems to havethought that annotating the Mackenzie collection, which he beganshortly after Mackenzie's death in 1821, would further hisprofessional ambition and claims. But even though Wilson made aname for himself in part by expanding the range and types oftexts in the Orientalist canon, concentrating on puranas as wellas vedas, he soon realized that the Mackenzie material was tooderivative, too contaminated by latter day accretions, for hisserious consideration. Indeed, after Wilson's 1828 catalogue,


10/37

the collection fell into the developing fault lines ofOrientalist discourse and concern; on the one hand, the materialwas too late and peculiar for the classicists, on the other hand,the chronicles and other texts were insufficiently "historicalnfor those early scholars trying to trace out the chronologicalcontours of India's pre-colonial past. Even Mark Wilks (1817),who used Mackenzie's collections of material extensively in hishistory of Mysore (the same text with the original statementabout independent village republics so beloved by ~ arx), asdoubtful of the historical value of anything but theinscriptions. "The department of history in this country is sodeformed by fable and anachronism that it may be considered as anabsolute bland in Indian literature." Wilks then went on tosuggest what most Indian historians since then have thought, thatIndian "historical" texts and chronicles are so sullied by mythand fancy that they would be useful only to trace developments inIndian literature in late medieval and early modern times. Wilksturned, however, to the inscriptional record for south India, towhich Mackenzie had contributed greatly by making rubbings ofthousands of stone and copper plate inscriptions: as Wilks said,"There is but one mode which appears to afford the most distanthope of supplying the important defect. The grants generally ofa religious nature inscribed on stone and copper plates which areto be found in every part of the south of India are documents ofa singularly curious texture; they almost always fix thechronology and frequently unfold the genealogy and militaryhistory of the donor, and his ancestors, with all that is


11/37

9remarkable in their civil institutions or religious reforms,"(1807, in IOL, Board's Collection No. 6426). If history ispredicated on chronology, then of course inscriptions arepreferable to other texts: inscriptions can be used to datekings, reigns, wars, and other events; whereas texts--loosecomposites of oral and literary tradition which even if we canknow the moment of collection we cannot definitively date or eventrust--constitute their own internal set of time referents,events, and structures, and do not easily succumb to historicalappropriation and use.

The history of the Mackenzie Collection, both the actualcollection and assemblage, and then its uses and disuses,reflects and refracts the peculiar relation of colonial knowledgeto the fractured changes in the sociology of knowledge in Indiaduring the first century and more of British colonial rule. In asense, the history of the collection is the history of theconstruction of an archive, which though first largely anembarrassment to be saluted and yet ignored, and latertextualized (and disguised) in the late nineteenth centuryGazetteers and administrative handbooks and early twentiethcentury ethnographic surveys of different regions in India, wasonce a differentiated slice of the texts and traditions currentin late eighteenth century south India. Nonetheless, theconcerns of Wilson and Wilks about the historicity andauthenticity of the Mackenzie manuscripts are not withoutjustification. The Mackenzie archives does indiscriminately mixpublished books, hastily finished palm leaf manuscripts, and


12/37

10locally produced new traditions, sometimes written by oneparticular caste headman with an agenda of his own, sometimeswritten up by Mackenzie's Brahman assistants, and sometimes oldtexts re-written to produce clarity and chronological consistencyaccording to British (or what were perceived as British) notionsof history. And while Wilson's and Wilks' suspicion of the noninscriptional material in the collection led to the temporaryneglect of the other texts, these texts did surface later on,first in the notebooks of such earlyantiquarians, philologists,and ethnologists as Walter Elliot (Sewell 1896) and C.P. Brown(Bangorey 19781, then in the footnotes and texts of the DistrictGazetteers, and finally in the seven volumes produced by EdgarThurston (19071, curator of the Madras,Museum and an avidmeasurer of skull sizes and types, on the castes and tribes ofsouthern India. By 1907, when these volumes were published,Mackenzie's manuscripts appeared, if not ancient, certainly asearly texts that suggested the possible recovery of a pre-colonial sociology of knowledge.

From the letters and diaries of the native agents ofMackenzie, those early research assistants--or "nativeinformantsn--of colonial ethnography and historiography, we learnof course that the process of collection was anything butneutral, that the sociology of knowledge might have been earlycolonial, but was hardly pre-colonial. First, it is clear thatthese agents, themselves Brahmans, assumed that the onlyknowledge worth having would necessarily be mediated throughBrahmans, even if the object of collection was the history of a


13/37

11low Sudra caste or a robber Kallar king. Whenever an agent wentto a new town, he looked for books by first looking for learnedBrahmans. If no text existed for a subject the colonial masterwas particularly keen about, the local Brahman would find therelevant expert/informant and transcribe an oral account. Infact, many of the rough translations made by ~ackenzie'sassistants of some of these accounts inscribe such information inthe margin--e.g., as told by a headman of such and such caste--but this information has never been passed along with the use oftexts. In other instances, pre-existing texts were rectified.Perhaps the most extraordinary example I found of this is seen inthe preface of a text titled by Mackenzie, "Mootiah'sChronological and Historical Accounts of the Modern Kings ofMadura." It begins like this: "I turned my thoughts towards theChronological and ~isto ric al ccounts of the Gentoo Kings ofMadura written upon Palmyra leaves in a vulgar style of the Tamillanguage which I found to be satisfactory but the same being in aconfused order and full of tautologies and repetitions which, ifI proceed to translate literally into the English, it would proveabsurd in the sight of the learned, I have therefore, in my

. following version of the said account, omitted the tautologicaland repeated expressions and set aside prolixity but followinglaconism, digested the Chronicles into eleven chapters and apreamble prefixed thereto, (IOL, Mackenzie General, vol. 2 1 . "For the textual scholar, of course, this yields indigestion, butthe point is that most uses of the texts Mackenzie collectedinvolved several layers of transformation, only the last stages


14/37

12of which were the translation and ultimate rectification of thetexts in the bound volumes that have for most subsequent scholarsprovided the only known version of the texts. (The vernaculareditions were sent at Wilson's instance back to Madras where theylay moldering in the College .library until the University ofMadras under T. V. Mahalingam decided to catelogue the texts inthe 1950s.)

These Brahman research assistants were thus agents and ina complex social reality; to shift the usual anthropologicalreading of their status as informants, we can now see them asdouble agents. On the one hand they constructed and representeda Brahmanic sociology of knowledge, one that has already beenwell-documented in the construction of leg'al codes for Indiansunder colonial institutions, but which also set in motion a widerange of apparatuses which led to the flip side of nationalism inlate nineteenth and early twentieth century India--thecommunalist and sometimes separatist anti-Brahman movements ofTamil Nad, Karnataka, and Maharashtra. On the other hand theywere agents of and for the British. There was often considerableand justifiable concern about the implications of handing texts,traditions, knowledge, artifacts, etc. over to these agents.When one Nitala Naina went to collect the family history of theroyal family I have written about in my book, it took him severalmonths of wrong leads and frantic misunderstandings to procurethe text, which nonetheless seems to have -contained nothing butpanegyrics to and of the British (1ndia Office Library, MackenzieUnbound, Class XII, vol. 1, no. 3 ) . But some other family


15/37

13histories had new improved conclusions asserting the loyalty ofthe little king to the East India Company; and some texts endedwith petitions to release from prison some descendant of theroyal family who had been interned as a result of the poligarwars and rebellions of the late eighteenth century. And sometexts, like the folk ballad about the hero of these wars andrebellions, were kept underground until the late nineteenthcentury because of concern about their treasonous nature (seeDirks 1987, chapter 3).

Even when the political stakes of knowledge were not soclear, knowledge never passed hands without complex negotiationand the mobilization of much symbolic capital. Often Mackenzie'sassistants had to promise that they would arrange a job liketheir own, or at the very least an interview with the CompanyMaster, i.e. ~ackenzie imself. And texts were vaguely promisedand then not delivered, or when delivered turned out to be just alocal copy of a standard text, in story after story that readmuch like my own notes and diaries from my fieldwork. Thus textswere transacted and produced in contexts which anticipate by twohundred years Foucault's suggestions about the relations of powerand knowledge. But rather than simply seeing these mediations asimpediments in our own search for truth, we should also see theactive participation of countless local scribes and agents in acontinuous sociology of production. To borrow from Bakhtin,there are a lot of voices in ~ackenzie's exts.

My point here is not simply that the texts of this kind arenot pristine, never authentic versions of some pre-colonial (or


16/37

14pre-modern) moment, but also that no text is ever neutral, andnever intelligible apart from the context of its production,transmission, and use (see Chartier 1985, McGann 1987). In part,of course, I begin with the kind of concern raised by Said in histremendously important Orientalism (19791, for we can clearly seein the history of colonial collections the appropriation of adynamic and active process of oral and textual production, thecolonial politics of representation. Although Mackenzie himselfwas saved from the lower circles of an Orientalist's hell in partby his obsessive empiricism--he never stopped his collectingendeavors long enough to prepare, much to the distress of hisbiographers and the inheritors of his collection, either anannotated catalogue or a distilled historical sociology of hisown--the history of the collection graphically tells Said'sstory. When Mackenzie's chief assistant, Cavelly VenkataLutchmia, applied to the Madras division of the Asiatic Societyto carry on Mackenzie's work of collection and cataloguing afterthe Master's death, the Society rejected the application on thegrounds that no oriental would be able to do the managerial andcritical work necessary to oversee such a project. According tothe head of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,; James Prinsep, "Suchan extensive scheme would need the control of a master head,accustomed to generalization, and capable of estimating the valueand drift of inscription and literary evidence. Thequalifications of Cavelly Venkata for such an office, judging ofthem by his "abstract," or indeed of anv native, could hardly bepronounced equal to such a task, however useful they may prove as


17/37

15auxiliaries in such a train of research." (italics mine, MadrasJournal of Literature and Science, October 1836, p. 44).Instead, they hired the Rev. William Taylor, a missionary inMadras and self-professed Orientalist, who can only be judged,even in nineteenth century colonial terms, as at best a poorscholar, and more accurately as an eccentric antiquarian (seeTaylor 1835).

Thus textual politics do not take place only in texts, asmuch post-structuralist writing today seems to imply (see McGann1987). Rather, the history of the collection demonstrates thehegemonic appropriation of native voices and meanings by colonialforms and logics of knowledge. Even Mackenzie's impressivereticence to gloss and catalogue his own collection became thepretext for the marginalization of the native scholars Mackenziehad himself seen as so instrumental in his own project.

Nonetheless Mackenzie played an important if contradictoryrole in the rescuing of south India's precolonial historiography.Throughout his career, he consistently advocated the importanceof recovering and documenting the precolonial history of southernIndia, and in this context stressed the significance of localtexts. Unlike Wilks and Wilson he did not disparage or dismissout of hand Indian historical accounts or sensibilities. Andunlike the stewards of the Madras Society of Literature andScience and the Royal Asiatic Society he'did not condemn thecapabilities of his Brahman assistants, waxing eloquent in hispraise of C.V. Boria, his first assistant and the older brother


18/37

16of Lutchmia, whose untimely death in 1803 almost endedMackenzie's efforts.

Mackenzie's aim was to collect as many different kinds ofevidence and documentation as possible. In his instructions tohis assistants, as also in his memos to other Company servantswho were posted throughout southern India, he communicated aprofound and specific appreciation for the various sources ofknowledge that might be consulted and collected. He wrote thathe was "desirous of obtaining copies or originals of native MS inany language, relating to the ancient government of the Pandeyanand Cholen kings or other dynasties that have ruled in thesecountries (Box 3, Mackenzie uncatelogued miscellaneous papers,no. 65, IOL)." In his memo he further noted, for example, that"At Madura and other ancient religious establishments, somenotices it is supposed are still preserved in the hands of theBramins, which may throw light on the ancient government.Accounts are also said," he went on, "to be preserved of thereligious contentions that took place between the Bramins, Jain,and other sects." In subspquent paragraphs of his memos hebecame more specific: "Regular historical narrations and tractsare seldom found amoung the natives, and such notices as exist,are generally preserved in the form of religious legends andpopular poems and stories." But rather than consigning suchsources and genres to the colonial dustbin of legend, he told hiscolleagues and assistants to collect them. He also said thatthere were exceptions, as for example in the cases of"Vumshavelly, or genealogies of the several dynasties and


19/37

17considerable families; Dunda Cavelly, or chronological registersand records. ..; Cheritra or histories and Cudha -- frequentlyapplied to tales and popular stories, but sometimes containingcorrect information of remarkable characters and eventsapproaching to the nature of our memoirs (the Mahratta Bakeersare of the same description he wrote); Rakas; and Calliganums,literally prophecies, but sometimes really conveying under thatassumed disguise Historical information with more apparentfreedom than could be addressed to Oriental sovereigns; It needscarcely be observed that the recovery of any of these ancientrecords would be very desirable. As we see, it is not that~ac ke nz ie as less clear than ilks or Wilson about whatconstitutes proper historical knowledge, but that he had a muchmore eclectic and grounded sense of how to accumulate it.Furthermore, rather than immediately despairing over theahistoricism of the Oriental mind, he assumed that quasi- or non-historical genres, such as prophecies, were less historical thanthey otherwise might have been in order to disguise theirpolitical and dangerous nature.

Nonetheless, Mackenzie neither developed nor deployed acritique of colonial discourse. When writing about localhistories of kings and important families in another context, henoted that these histories were "mixed with much fabulous orpuerile mattern and that they were important only because"Hindoos... appear to have no regular histories (Box 3, Mackenziemiscellaneous uncatelogued material, no. 73, IOL)." His realinterest was in political and revenue history, precisely the


20/37

18domains of historical inquiry most suited for colonialcuriousity. In addition to a number of papers he wrote on thesignificance of Jainism in the history of southern India, hismost important paper, submitted at a meeting of the Royal AsiaticSociety'in April of 1815. was entitled: "View of the principalPolitical Events that occurred in the Carnatic, from thedissolution of the Ancient Hindoo Government in 1564 till theMogul Government was established in 1687, on the Conquest of theCapitals of Beejapoor and Golconda; compiled from variousauthentic Memoirs and Original MSS., collected chiefly within thelast ten years, and referred to in the Notes at the bottom ofeach page (Journal of the Roval Asiatic Society of Benaal, vol.xiii, 1844, pp.421-463) ." And yet, even given theconventionality of his interests, what stands out in this long19th Century title is the emphasis on sources, and specifically

their authenticity and originality.In spite of the fact that Mackenzie engaged in many of his

antiquarian activities on the side, without direct Companysponsorship and support, he himself saw his life work as a singleproject. As Surveyor General, he made maps, drawings, and routedescriptions; these materials have been housed in the SurveyorGeneral's office, and indeed for a long time I thought I wasunable to locate a great deal of material about Mackenzie'sproject because I never thought to look in these records.Instead, I merely consulted the records that were a part ofMackenzie's private project, the collection of texts, traditions,inscriptions, coins, etc., which were housed in London and


21/37

19Madras. In reproducing the administrative and archival taxonomywhich separated off his public from his private activities,however, I for a long time did not realize that the cartographicproject was as Mackenzie himself thought, a vital part of theantiquarian one. For if time and chronology were fundamental toMackenzie's sense of the value of his historical labors, so toospace and topography organized his sense of the importance of,say, his early ethnographic collections. And indeed, it was onlywhen I started looking through Mackenzie's maps that I found hiscareful delineation of caste groupings and populations for thedifferent regions he mapped in Mysore and in the Ceded Districts.The whole project of mapping the interior portions of thesubcontinent that were progressively conquered from the Nawabs ofHyderabad and Arcot and from the Sultans of Mysore was a projectin filling out a space that in late seventeenth century maps wasboth unknown, and, with the compression of unknown spaces as mereinterstices for the well-known coastal areas, almost twice asnarrow as the satellite picture suggests. These spaces weresocial as well as cartographic, so it was in this context thatcastes were listed, ordered, and counted.

In Mackenzie's initial project of collecting representativetexts, histories of places and polities predominated. The southIndian landscape was dotted with temples which, due to the tallgopuram towers built over the gateways into structures that oftenserved as centers for marketing and defense in addition toworship, served as convenient reference points fortrigonometrical surveying and general route maps. Every temple


22/37

20had a history which inscribed the significance of its deity andthe ground of the deities' worship with a special past of miracleand power. The south Indian landscape had also been controlledby myriad little kingdoms, ranging immensely in size, each with afamily history for the chief or king. Thus the set of localtracts collected by Mackenzie contain literally hundreds ofaccounts of one lineage headman after another who, through acombination of strategies and successes, managed to become a1.ittle ing.

From the work of David Shulman (1980) on temple histories,Iand from my previous work on little kings, I was aware of the

prevalence of this kind of text. However, when I first turned tothe Mackenzie collection as a repository for early ethnographicknowledge about southern India, I was surprised to find very fewcaste histories. As mentioned above, there were some statisticallists in the map collections, compilations of populationbreakdowns on caste that had the same indexical function for themap as the delineations of field types and irrigation sources.These lists were highly particularistic and idiosyncratic; thoughBrahmans were usually at the head the lists were neither highlyformalized nor, as David Ludden can tell us in great detail, easyto compare across districts or regions. There were some generaltexts about castes, as also some curious lists of caste groupswhich resembled Borges' Chinese encyclopedia more than laterethnographic surveys. But there were only a few specific castehistories. Those that did exist., such as the Kallar and Maravarcaste histories I had earlier read and copied from the Tamil,


23/37

21were clearly of the sort I referred to earlier--hastily puttogether from the chance concerns and remarks of a set ofsubcaste headmen. But in all of ~ackenzie's bsessivecollection, caste as a rubric for textualization was surprisinglyuncommon.

And ~ackenzie eemed far less interested in caste than Iwould have expected. Not that he didn't mention it. In one ofhis memos to fellow East India Company Servants, he listed theneed to collect texts concerning and information about caste:"The peculiar customs of certain descriptions of the nativestheir division into casts and where any different from theestablished customs (BOX 3, Mackenzie Miscellaneous uncateloguedmaterial, no. 73, IOL)." And he noted that "The population ofthe districts by castes, families, and villages" should becarefully counted and presented by local Public Officials. Butapart from the utility of caste for organizing early censuscounts, it played a small role in Mackenzie's Collection, and atfirst I felt disappointed that my interest in finding early (andlittle mediated) texts on caste turned up so little.

But in mid and late nineteenth century collections, forexample the extensive manuscript collections of Walter Elliottwhich drew heavily on the Mackenzie collection, I found thatcaste histories had begun to predominate. Part of the reason forthis had to do with the demise of the little kings; those who hadsurvived at all had done so as zamindars or landlords with littleparticular claim to histories of their own. Temple historiescontinued to be important, but were considered to be relevant by


24/37

22the colonial state only in so far as they could be used to decidedisputes over temple control, management, and honors, disputeswhich were arbitrated by the Hindu ~elig iou s.a nd haritableEndowments Board. But for a variety of reasons caste historieswere considered to be particularly important, and caste becameincreasingly the only relevant social site for the textualizationof Indian identity.

One of the first indications of the importance of caste camein an official memo of 1816 recommending support for andpublication of a revision of Abbe Dubois' Hindu Manners. Customs,a n d 19721, the first edition of which was said tocontain a large number of errors and omissions. The Board ofControl wrote: "There is nothing.perhaps of more importance tothe Hindoo community than that their distinctions of caste shouldbe well understood by the civil officers of the government in theinterior of the country, yet there is no subject at present onwhich it so difficult to procure correct information, (1814, IOL,Board's Collections no. 5411." In later years, of course, thecollection of information about caste structure and customs wasjustified less in terms of the needs of Hindu community.

But some of the first ethnographic surveys, at least in thesouth of India, betrayed signs of their uncertain pedigree andrecent genre. Perhaps the clearest example of this comes in abook compiled by Lutchmia's younger brother, C.V. Ramaswamy,privately published in 1847. This book was entitled "A Digest ofthe different castes of the southern division of southern India,with descriptions of their habits, customs, etc." The work was


25/37

dedicated to "British public of India," and was clearly intendedfor a European audience ("that they may receive thatgratification and instruction which it is my anxious desire toimpart"). The treatise began with an account of the four varnaswith their dharmic duties, and then in catelogue fashion listedthe castes of the south of India with brief descriptions for eachone. The list begins like this: "Butler, Dubash, Cook, Cooks'mate, Ayea, ampl lighter, waterwoman, grasscutter..." and thenincludes such standard castes as the dog boy, the hammaul, andthe agriculturalist. As idiosyncratic as this work clearly is

i it reflects the lack of clarity and convention regarding caste asa site for textualization.

But as 't he nineteenth century progressed, the collection ofmaterial about castes and tribes and their customs, and thespecification of what kinds of customs, kinship behaviors, ritualforms, etc. were appropriate and necessary for ethnographicdesc.ription, became increasingly formalized and canonic. Indeed,collection of this kind of information soon became thecenterpiece of an official colonial sociology of knowledge. Asit was stated in the announcement of the ethnographic survey ofIndia, published in the first issue of W in 1901:

It is unnecessary to dwell at length upon the obviousadvantages to many branches of the administration inthis country of an accurate and well-arranged record ofthe customs and the domestic and social relations ofthe various castes and tribes. The entire framework ofnative life in India is made up of groups of this kind,and the status and conduct of individuals are largelydetermined by the rules of the group to which theybelong. For the purposes of legislation, of judicialprocedure, of famine relief, of sanitation and dealingswith epidemic disease, and of almost every form ofexecutive action, an ethnographic survey of India, and


26/37

a record of the customs of the people is as necessaryan incident of good administration as a cadastralsurvey of the land and a record of the rights of itstenants. The census provides the necessary statistics;it remains to bring out and interpret the facts whichlie behind the statistics.Such interpretation often rested in a peculiar set of notionsabout origins, which themselves had less to do with history thanwith a set of functional correlates assumed to be demonstrated bythe particular origins of any given group and its derivativeoccupational and social status. These preoccupations werereflected in the kinds of information (texts, traditions,statistics) the colonial state collected, stored, and published,and help explain why only certain parts of Mackenzie's vaststorehouse of material was seen to have relevance.

The rise of caste as the single most important trope forcolonial Indian society, and the complicity of Indiananthropology the project of colonial state formationdocumented in a great many texts, perhaps nowhere more fully,though complexly, than in H. H. Risley's classic work,P Risley, who was the Census Commissioner ofIndia for 'the 1901 Census (the regulations of which greatlyinfluenced the 1911 Census as well), had earlier produced themulti-volume work published in1891. The P e o ~ l e f India resulted directly from Risley's workas Census Commissioner, and is an expanded version of theCommissioner's report on the 1901 Census (written with theassistance of E. A . Gait) that, among other things, summarizedhis views on the origin and classification of the Indian races


27/37

25based on his historical speculations and his anthropometricresearch.

Risley has been much criticized by contemporary as well assubsequent writers for overemphasizing the racial basis of casteand stressing anthropometry. W. Crooke argued against Risleywith particular vehemence, suggesting that occupational criteriaprovided much more comprehensive and accurate indices forunderstanding caste as a system than race. And theanthropometric researches of Thurston in the south and otherselsewhere steadily eroded the confidence of the anthropologicalestablishment that racial types in India were anywhere near aspure or clear as Risley had assumed (Thurston 1907). ButRisley's general views of caste as a social system and force inIndia were little challenged. Risley seemed to speak for many inboth colonial and academic establishments when he wrote thatcaste "forms the cement that holds together the myriad units ofIndian society .. Were its cohesive power withdrawn or itsessential ties relaxed, it is difficult to form any idea of theprobable consequences. such a change would be more than arevolution; it would resemble the withdrawal of some elementalforce like gravitation or molecular attraction. Order wouldvanish and chaos would supervene (2781."

Risley's characterization of caste redeploys the standardcolonial conception of Indian society, in which caste is thesource of all order and the fundamental basis of the social. Butin The P e o ~ l e f India Risley departs from normal colonialanthropological practice and addresses the question of


28/37

26nationalism. In one of the two new chapters written for the 1909publication of the book, Risley assesses the role caste mightplay in the future of India's political development. And hequotes with approval the words of Sir Henry Cotton, who surmisedthat "The problem of the future is not to destroy caste, but tomodify it, to preserve its distinctive conceptions, and togradually place them upon a social instead of a supernaturalbasis ( 2 8 2 1 . " Here Cotton, and Risley, advocate precisely what Ihave suggested colonialism in ~ n d i a et out to do: theconstitution of caste as a necessary complement to social orderand governmental authority, as a new kind of civil society forthe colonial state.

In Risley's view, caste has an ambivalent status. It isboth a religious institution, and a social or civil one. It isanarchic, yet encourages the development of monarchy. It isparticularistic, though the necessary and inevitable basis forany unity in the Indian context. On the one hand Risley noted,basing.his conclusions largely on the lectures of Sir JohnSeeley, that "The facts are beyond dispute, and they point to theinevitable conclusion that national sentiment in India can deriveno encouragement from the study of Indian history (2911." On theother hand, Risley also wrote that "the-caste ystem itself, withits singularly perfect communal organization, is a machineryadmirably fitted for the diffusion of new ideas; that castes mayin course of time group themselves into classes representing thedifferent strata of society; and that India may thus attain, bythe agency of these indigenous corporations, the results which


29/37

2 7have been arrived at elsewhere through the fusion of individualtypes (2931." These contradictions are interestingly resolved in(and by) the colonial situation. And here we confront thecolonial mind in its most liberal guise. For Risley writes that"The factors of nationality in India are two--the common use ofthe English language for certain purposes and the commonemployment of Indians in English administration (3001."

Risley thus holds out a kind of limited but realistic hopefor national development in India, measured by his sense thatcaste ideas and institutions will stand in the way, thoughoptimistic that a steady (and English) pragmatism on the part ofIndian leaders can sow the seeds of a new mentality. ButRisley's liberalism is complicit in the general project ofBritish colonialism, as it supports the notion that caste issimultaneously a barrier to national development and aninevitable reality for Indian society in the foreseeable future.Risley suggests that caste, as he has interpreted it, can be madeinto a virtue out of its necessity. It can accomodate and shapea gradually developing class society, perhaps even softening itspotential conflicts and antagonisms, and it can provide a model(in its idealized varna version) for the articulation of an all-embracing ideology which might work at a general level toconfound and even counteract the fissiparous tendencies of casteas a specific social institution. Caste in this sense is the keyto the great transition from feudalism to capitalism/democracy.Except that in the colonial situation that transition can never


30/37

28be fully made. The teleology of self-rule is here, as always,couched in a future which has absolutely no temporal reality.

Nonetheless, the assumption that the colonial state couldmanipulate and invent Indian tradition at will, creating a newform of caste and reconstituting the social, and that a study ofits own writings and discourse is sufficient to argue such acase, is clearly inadequate and largely wrong. Long after Ibegan to study the complex dynamics of colonial intervention inIndia, the study of what is now called colonial discourse hasbecome rather fashionable (Gates 1986). This is in large partbecause of the impact of Said's work and the ease with whichcolonialism falls subject to a post-structuralist critique. Butin spite of Said's insistence on a reading of Foucault whichsituates discursive formations in historical processes ofinstitutional domination and hegemony, much recent criticaltheory has merely gestured towards history -- no soonercompleting the gesture than appropriating history to support a-and even anti-historical readings of texts. The ease with whichcritical readings of colonial texts and "third world" referentsare made in certain literary circles today may indicate theironic birth of a new Orientalism.

However, any study of colonial discourse which fails toexamine the contradictory nature of colonial intervention and theinstitutional bases of colonial impact must be rejected even ifwe might accept Foucault's emphasis on the fields of powercreated by discursive practices. The power of colonial discoursewas not that it created whole new fields of meaning


31/37

29instantaneously, but that it shifted old meanings slowly,sometimes imperceptibly, through the colonial control of a rangeof new institutions, including those for which the study of castewas judged necessary in the earlier note from the ethnographicsurvey. Although an emphasis on ideas and discourses revealsthat institutional hegemony is not based solely, or evenprincipally, on brute force, discourse does not do it alone.Institutions activate ideological changes most often, and mosteffectively, when they do so subtly, masking seduction asmutuality and change as continuity. Transformations occurredbecause of the ways colonial discourse inscribed its peculiar,often masterful, combination of old and new meanings ininstitutional theatres with major consequences for the colonialsubjects. As I have argued elsewhere (19871, this process ofteninvolved the paradoxical preservation of old regime forms,creating a shadow theatre in which continuities and changesseemed always to mimic each other.

In the case of caste, we have only begun to examine thecomplex and contradictory character of colonial change throughthe lense of colonial collections. I do not have the space hereto identify how these were related to other institutionalprocesses in colonial India. Suffice it for the moment to saythat they included the politicization of invented forms of castein the census, in the communally based franchises of earlyelectoral reform, in the development and implementation of legalcodes which made formal civil and criminal distinctions on thebasis of caste, in the introduction and elaboration of revenue


32/37

30systems and policies predicated on a colonial sociology of India,as well as in the textualization and professional appropriationand reinterpretation of Indian traditions and social forms.Caste achieved its critical colonial position because the Britishstate was successful in separating caste as a social form fromits dependence on pre-colonial political processes. The historyof Mackenzie's collection cannot be separated from the history ofthe British colonial state project in India. But if colonialdiscourse and the documentation apparatus that provided theevidence and the ground for the colonial caste of mind was nottotally and autonomously constitutive, neither was itepiphenomenal. Caste, I have tried to suggest, became a.specifically Indian colonial form of civil society, the mostcritical site for the textualization of social identity, but alsofor the specification of public and private domains, the rightsand responsibilities of the colonial state, the legitimatingconceits of social freedom and societal control (by which I mean,for example, the political definition of the social dimensions ofproperty, occupation, labor, and criminality), and thedevelopment of the documentation and certification project of thecolonial state. To amend Anderson's general terms of argument,it seems clear in the Indian case that the forms of casteism and .communalism that continue to work against the imagined communityof the nascent nation state have been imagined as well. However,they have been imagined precisely through and within the samehistorical mechanisms that brought about the very state to whichthese centrifugal forces appear now to be the supreme threat.


33/37

Anderson, h en edict. 1983. ~m agined ommunities: ~eflection nthe Oriain and Spread of Nationalism. London: VersoPublications.Bangory, ed. 1978. Literarv Autobioaraphv of C.P. Brown.Tirupati: Sri Venkateswara University.Chartier, Roger. 1985. "Text, Symbols, and Frenchness," Journalof Modern History. (~ecember).Chatterji, Partha, 1986. ~a ti on al is t houaht and the ColonialWorld. London: Zed Books.Cohn, Bernard S. 1986. "The Command of the Language and theLanguage of Command," ed. R. Guha, Subaltern Studies IV. NewDelhi: Oxford University Press.Dirks, Nicholas B. 1987. The Hollow Crown. cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Dubois, Abbe J.A. 1972. Hindu Manners. Customs and Ceremonies.. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press..Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System andrt s Im~lications. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Gates. H.L.! ed. 1986. Pace. Writina. and Difference. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press.Heesterman, J.C. 1985. The Inner Conflict of ~radition: Essaysin Indian Ritual. ins hi^. and Societv.

.-Mackenzie, W.C. n.d. Colonel Colin Mackenzie: First SurvevorGeneral of India. Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers Ltd.Mahalingam, T.V. 1972 & 1976. Mackenzie Manuscripts. 2 vols.Madras: The University of Madras Press.Markham, C. 1878.~ondon.Marx, Karl. 1972. "The British Rule in India." On Colonialism:Articles from the New York Tribune and other Writinas, New York:~nternational ublishers.McGann, Jerome J. 1987. Social Values and Poetic Acts.Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Phillimore, R.H. 1945. Historical Records of the Survev of~ n d i a . 4 vols. Dehra Dun: Government of India.Ramaswamy, C.V. A Diaest of the Different Castes of the SouthernDivisions of Southern India. with Desc ri~tio ns f Men's Habits.Customs. etc. 1847.


34/37

Risley, H.H. 1909. The People of India.Said, Edward. 1979. orientalism. New York: vintage.Sewell, Robert. 1896. Sir @alter Elliot of Wolfelee.Edinburgh.Shulman, David. D. 1980. - Mvths. Princeton:Princeton University Press.

ical Manuscri~tsinaylor, Rev. William. 1835. Oriental Historthe Tamil Lanauaae. Madras.. 1858. A Cataloaue Raisonee of OrientalManuscri~ts n the Librarv of the (late) Colleae. Madras.Thurston, Edgar. 1907. Castes and Tribes of Southern 1ndia. 7vols. Madras.

. .Weber, Max. 1958. The Reliaions of India. Translated andedited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: The FreePress.istorical Sketches of the South of India.ilks; Mark. 1817. H3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, and Orme.

Wilson, H.H. 1828. Cataloaue of Oriental Mss. of Col.Mackenzie. Calcutta.


35/37

PROGRAM ON THECOMPAR ATIVE STUDY OF SO C IA L TRANSFORMATIONSUNIV ERS ITY OF MICHIGANWORKING PAPER SERIES

The P ro gra m on t h e C o mp a ra t iv e St u dy o f S o c i a l T r a n s f o r m a t i o n s i s an i n t e r -d i s c i p l i n a r y r es ea rc h p ro gra m a t t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f M ic hi ga n. I t s f a c u l t ya s s o c i a t e s a r e d ra wn p r i m a r i l y f ro m t h e d e p ar tm e n ts o f A n th r op o lo g y, H i s t o r y ,and S o c i o l o g y , b u t a l s o i n c l u d e members o f s e v e r a l o t h e r p r og ra ms i n t h eh u m a n it i es and s o c i a l s c ie n ce s . I t s m i s s i o n i s t o s t i m u l a t e new i n t e r -d i s c i p l i n a r y t h i n k i n g and r es e ar ch a bo ut a l l k i n ds o f s o c i a l t r an s f or m a t i o n si n a w i d e r an g e o f p r e s e n t a nd p a s t s o c i e t i e s . CSST W o rk in g Pa pe rs r e p o r tc u r r e n t r e s e ar c h b y f a c u l t y and g r a du a t e s t u d e n t a s s o c i a t e s o f t h e p ro gra m;many w i l l be p u b l is h e d e ls ew h er e a f t e r r e v i s i o n . W o r ki n g P ap er s a r e a va i l a b l ef o r a f e e o f $ 1.0 0 f o r p a p e r s u n d er 40 pa ge s an d f o r $2.00 f o r l o n g e r p a p e rs .The p r o gr a m w i l l p h ot oc o py o u t - o f - p r i n t W o r ki n g P ap ers a t c o s t ( 8.0 5 p e rp a g e ) . To r e q u e s t co p i e s o f W o r ki n g Pa p er s, w r i t e t o Co mp a ra t ive S tu d y o fS o c i a l T r a n s f o r ma t i o n s , 4 010 LSA B u i l d i n g , U n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h ig a n , Ann A rb o r ,M I 48109-1382 .o r c a l l ( 31 3) 936-1595 .1 " Pr og ra m i n C o m pa r at iv e St u dy o f S o c i a l T r a n sf o r m a ti o n s ," b y W i l l i a m H.Sewe l l , J r . , Te r renc e J . McDonald, Sh er r y B. O r tn e r , and J e f fe ry M.Pa ig e, May 1987, 15 pag es. A ls o CRSO Wo rki ng Paper #344 .2 "L a b o r H i s t o r y , U neven De ve lo p me n t, a nd t h e Auto nomy o f P o l i t i c s : TheD o ckw or ke rs o f N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y Ma r se i 1 e ," b y W i 11 am H. Sewel 1, Jr .,J u l y 1987, 45 pages . A ls o CRSO Wo rk in g Paper #346.3 "C o f f e e , C op pe r, a nd C l a ss C o n f l i c t i n C e n t r a l A mer ica a nd C h i l e : AC r i t i q u e o f Z e i t l i n ' s C i v i l Wars i n C h i l e and Z e i t l i n and R a t c l i f f ' s

L a n d lo r d s and C a p i t a l i s t s , " b y J e f f e r y M. Paige, September 1987, 10page s. A ls o CRSO Wo rkin g Paper #347.4 " I n S ea rc h o f t h e B o u r ge o i s R e v o l u t i o n : The P a r t i c u l a r i t i e s o f GermanH is to ry ," by Geoffrey El ey , September 1987, 61 pages. Al so CRSO Workin gPaper #350.5 "Th e B u rd en s o f U r ba n H i s t o r y : The T h eo r y o f t h e S t a t e i n R ec en tAmer ican So ci a l H is to ry , " by Te r re nc e McDonald, May 1988, 50 pages.Also CRSO Working Paper #355.6 "H i s t o r y , S o c i o l o g y , an d T h e o r i e s o f O r g a n i za t i o n , " b y Mayer N. Za ld ,May 1988, 42 page s. A ls o CRSO W or ki ng Paper #357.7 "H av e S o c i a l H i s t o r i a n s L o s t t h e C i v i l War? Some P r e l i m i n a r yDemographic Sp ec ula t io ns ," by M ar is A. Vi no vs ki s, May 1988, 55 pages.Also CRSO Working Paper #358.8 "R ev 01 u t i o n and t h e A g r a r i a n B o u r g e o i s i e i n N i ca r ag u a ," b y J e f f e r y M.Paige, 42 pages. Also CRSO Working Paper #363.9 " N a t i o n a l i s m and C l as s as F a c t o r s i n t h e R e v o l u t i o n o f 1917," b y Ro na ld

G. Suny, Oc tob er 1988, 42 page s. A l s o CRSO Wo rki ng Paper #365.


36/37

" Th e O r i g i n a l C a s te : P owe r, H i s t o r y , a n d H i e r a r c h y i n S o u th A s ia , " b yNi ch ol as B. D i r k s , Oct obe r 1988, 30 pages. Al so CRSO Work in g Paper#367."The I n v e n t i o n o f C as te : C i v i l S o ci e t y i n C o l o n i a l I n d i a ," b y N i c ho l a sB. D ir k s , O cto be r 1988, 24 pages. A ls o CRSO Wo rkin g Paper #368." S o c io l o g y as a D i s c i p l i n e : Quas i -Sc ien ce and Quas i -Human i t i es ," byMayer Za ld , Oc tob er 1988, 43 pages. A ls o CRSO Wo rkin g Paper #369." C o n s t r a i n t s o n P r o f e s s i o n a l Power i n S o v i et - Ty p e S o c i e t y : I n s i g h t sf r o m t h e S o l i d a r i t y P e r i o d i n P ol an d, " b y M i c h a e l D. Ke nne dy a nd K o nr adSad kow ski, November 1988 , 37 page s. A l s o CRSO Wo rki ng Paper #371."E vo lu t io na ry Changes i n Ch inese Cu l t u re , " by M ar t i n K. Whyte , November1988, 20 page s. A l s o CRSO Wo rki ng Pape r #372 ." W o rl d M a r ke t , C l a ss C o n f l i c t , a nd R u r a l C o e r ci o n i n P o s t - C o lo n i a lBuenos Ai re s, " by K a r l Monsma, November 1988, 22 page s. A l s o CRSOWorking Paper #373." R i t u a l a nd R e s i s t a n c e : S u b v e r s i o n a s a S o c i a l F a c t, " b y N i c h o l a s B.D i r k s , December 1988, 39 page s. A ls o CRSO Wo rking Paper #375."So c ia l T ran s fo rm at ion s o f Gender i n Andean Sou th Amer ica : A Work ingA n n o t at e d B i b 1 o g r a p h y ," by Ja ni se Hu r t ig , December 1988, 24 pages.Also CRSO Working Paper #376." L a b o u r H i s t o r y - - S o c i a l History--Alltagsgeschichte: E x p e r i e n c e ,C u l t u r e , and t h e P o l i t i c s o f t h e E ve ryd ay. A New D i r e c t i o n f o r GermanSo c i a l H is to ry ? " by Geoff E ley , January 1989, 85 pages . A ls o CRSOWorking Paper #378."No tes on th e Soc io log y o f Med ica l D isco urse : The Language o f CaseP r e s e n t a t i o n , " by Renee R. Anspach, Ja nu ar y 1989, 32 page s. A ls o CRSOWorking Paper #379."Wor ld War Two and the De rad ica l z a t i o n o f American Labor : A ' D e v i a n tCase' Study," by Howard K im el do rf , Fe bru ary 1989, 45 pages. A ls o CRSOWorking Paper #383."Tak ing S tock : The F i r s t Year o f CSST," by Geof f E ley , Februa ry 1989, 7pag es. A ls o CRSO Wo rki ng Paper #384."Immigration Research: A Concep tua l Map," by S i l v i a Pedraza-Ba i ley ,Fe br ua ry 1989, 15 pages . A ls o CRSO Wo rkin g Paper #385.


37/37

civil society in colonial india

Documents