Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Castes are not just of mind

Before Nicholas Dirks was a controversial chancellor of UC Berkeley, he was a well regarded historian of South Asia. He wrote Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. I read it, along with other books on the topic in the middle 2000s.

Here is Amazon summary from Library Journal:

Is India’s caste system the remnant of ancient India’s social practices or the result of the historical relationship between India and British colonial rule? Dirks (history and anthropology, Columbia Univ.) elects to support the latter view. Adhering to the school of Orientalist thought promulgated by Edward Said and Bernard Cohn, Dirks argues that British colonial control of India for 200 years pivoted on its manipulation of the caste system. He hypothesizes that caste was used to organize India’s diverse social groups for the benefit of British control. His thesis embraces substantial and powerfully argued evidence. It suffers, however, from its restricted focus to mainly southern India and its near polemic and obsessive assertions. Authors with differing views on India’s ethnology suffer near-peremptory dismissal. Nevertheless, this groundbreaking work of interpretation demands a careful scholarly reading and response.

The condensation is too reductive. Dirks does not assert that caste structures (and jati) date to the British period, but the thrust of the book clearly leaves the impression that this particular identity’s formative shape on the modern landscape derives from the colonial experience. The British did not invent caste, but the modern relevance seems to date to the British period.

This is in keeping with a mode of thought flourishing today under the rubric of postcolonialism, with roots back to Edward Said’s Orientalism. As a scholar of literature Said’s historical analysis suffered from the lack of deep knowledge. A cursory reading of Orientalism picks up all sorts of errors of fact. But compared to his heirs Said was actually a paragon of analytical rigor. I say this after reading some contemporary postcolonial works, and going back and re-reading Orientalism.

To not put too fine a point on it postcolonialism is more about a rhetorical posture which aims to destroy what it perceives as Western hegemonic culture. In the process it transforms the modern West into the causal root of almost all social and cultural phenomenon, especially those that are not egalitarian. Anyone with a casual grasp of world history can see this, which basically means very few can, since so few actually care about details of fact.

Castes of Mind is an interesting book, and a denser piece of scholarship than Orientalism. Its perspective is clear, and though it is not without qualification, many people read it to mean that caste was socially constructed by the British.

This seems false. It has become quite evident that even the classical varna categories seem to correlate with genome-wide patterns of relatedness. And the Indian jatis have been endogamous for on the order of two thousand years. From The New York Times, In South Asian Social Castes, a Living Lab for Genetic Disease:

The Vysya may have other medical predispositions that have yet to be characterized — as may hundreds of other subpopulations across South Asia, according to a study published in Nature Genetics on Monday. The researchers suspect that many such medical conditions are related to how these groups have stayed genetically separate while living side by side for thousands of years.

This is not really a new finding. It was clear in 2009’s Reconstructing Indian Population History. It’s more clear now in The promise of disease gene discovery in South Asia.

Unfortunately though science is not well known in any depth among the general public. The ascendency of social constructionism is such that a garbled and debased view that “caste was invented by the British” will continue to be the “smart” and fashionable view among many intellectual elites.

8 thoughts on “Castes are not just of mind

  1. “Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism” by Ibn Warraq
    https://www.amazon.com/Defending-West-Critique-Edward-Orientalism-ebook/dp/B003D7LXR6/ref=sr_1_5

    This is the first systematic critique of Edward Said’s influential work, Orientalism, a book that for almost three decades has received wide acclaim, voluminous commentary, and translation into more than fifteen languages. Said’s main thesis was that the Western image of the East was heavily biased by colonialist attitudes, racism, and more than two centuries of political exploitation. Although Said’s critique was controversial, the impact of his ideas has been a pervasive rethinking of Western perceptions of Eastern cultures, plus a tendency to view all scholarship in Oriental Studies as tainted by considerations of power and prejudice.

    In this thorough reconsideration of Said’s famous work, Ibn Warraq argues that Said’s case against the West is seriously flawed. Warraq accuses Said of not only willfully misinterpreting the work of many scholars, but also of systematically misrepresenting Western civilization as a whole. With example after example, he shows that ever since the Greeks Western civilization has always had a strand in its very makeup that has accepted non-Westerners with open arms and has ever been open to foreign ideas.

    The author also criticizes Said for inadequate methodology, incoherent arguments, and a faulty historical understanding. He points out, not only Said’s tendentious interpretations, but historical howlers that would make a sophomore blush.

    Warraq further looks at the destructive influence of Said’s study on the history of Western painting, especially of the 19th century, and shows how, once again, the epigones of Said have succeeded in relegating thousands of first-class paintings to the lofts and storage rooms of major museums.

    Like you, Razib, Warraq is a secular humanist.

    “Why I Am Not a Muslim” by Ibn Warraq
    https://www.amazon.com/Why-I-Am-Not-Muslim-ebook/dp/B00C4B2JRA/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500399544

  2. Strangely, this is the first time I have heard of this concept (Caste being a social construct started by British colonialists). Being an Indian brought up in North India and casually aware of Indian history, I have known that the Indian caste system was put forth, most emphatically at least if not originally, in the book Manusmriti which has been followed for dozens of centuries before British arrived in India. In any event, it is good to be aware of this idea and its traction in some intellectual circles.

  3. It has become a universal explain-all for anything undesirable. Thus the Tsutsi/Hutu divide in Rwanda/Burundi is, we have been assured, all the fault of the colonizers, who ingeniously arranged for the Tsutsi to be an inch taller than the Hutu. Presumably through their all-powerful ideological mystification of tallness. Or something. Even an otherwise decent book like Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (Jason Stearns) has some cringe-worthy paragraphs along those lines.

  4. Fst really underscores that the role of caste and tribe groups is really important in genetic distance in South Asia. Big table in the supplement here: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19166

    Distances: Pathan-BrahminUP: 0.003, BrahminUP-Gond: 0.007, Pathan-Gond: 0.012

    Populations vary in ANI:ASI from around 80:20 (Pathan), 66:33 (BrahminUP), 20:80 (Gond).

    OTOH, using a different table I have we can take two populations who model as having similar ANI:ASI proportions to Pathan and Gond respectively, but are *extremely* heavily drifted, Kalash and Paniyas.

    Distances: Kalash-BrahminUP: 0.026, BrahminUP-Paniyas: 0.034, Kalash-Paniyas: 0.070.

    There is almost roughly a 7-fold increase in differentiation in comparisons using what appear to be the extremely bottlenecked groups, and the cosmopolitan equivalents with the same position on the ANI-ASI cline.

    Caste / tribe groups seem to me to be responsible for the very largest differentiation in Fst in South Asia. Differences in Fst in groups between cosmopolitan populations which are highly differentiated ANI-ASI cline look far more moderate – something like 2x differences between most North and most South cosmopolitan populations in Europe (e.g. Sweden-Greece Fst 0.006). (Not 10x or even 7x!).

    (Gond are the “largest tribe in India” – http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v25/n4/full/ejhg2016198a.html?foxtrotcallback=true)

  5. Rupinder, it would be new to you, because this is not a phenomenon of Indians interested in their own history, but of Westerners explaining away any imperfection in any society that is not Western. You’re not invited to the self-flagellation party. Notice that the author’s name is “Nicholas Dirks”. Just recently a white liberal of my acquaintance agreed that there was homophobia in modern India, but that it only began there when… yes, you guessed it.

    It is not enough to acknowledge that all peoples are human, with histories that are mixtures of achievement and shame; instead all peoples must be unblemished, until cast out of paradise by the British serpent.

  6. The “smart” and fashionable views among our intellectual “elites” seem to be usually incorrect. Just how elite are they, really?

Comments are closed.