Indological Discourses

UNIT 2 COLONIAL DISCOURSE*

Structure
2.0 Objectives
2.1 Introduction
2.2 The Colonial Perspective
2.3 The Missionary Perspective
2.4 The Administrative Perspective
2.4.1 Census and Survey
2.4.2 Villages and Cities
2.5 Influence of Discourse on Sociology of India
2.6 Let Us Sum Up
2.7 References
2.8 Specimen Answers to Check Your Progress

2.0 OBJECTIVES
After studying this Unit, you will be able to:
discuss the study of Indian society and culture through systematic
organisation of knowledge under the colonial rule;
differentiate between the Missionary and the Administrative views under
the Colonial Perspective on Indian society; and
explain the specific influences of the colonial discourse in shaping the
sociology of India.

2.1 INTRODUCTION
In the previous unit, on Indological discourse, you learnt about how the
Indological perspectives provided concepts, theories and framework, which
emerged from the study of Indian civilisation by different scholars. They primarily
adopted a historical and comparative approach. Their understanding of Indian
society and its structure is largely based on their study of classical texts and
literature, such as the Vedas, Upanishads and the Puranas. One View of Indian
society derived from the study of texts with the help of Brahman scholars and
presented Indian society as fixed, stagnant and timeless and with no socio-cultural
variations. Indian society was seen as a set of rules which every Hindu followed.

In this unit you will learn about the colonial discourse, i.e. the perspectives
given by scholars on society in India during the colonial period when the
Britishers ruled over India.

2.2 THE COLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

N B Halhead presented first compilation of Hindu Dharamshastra (1776) William
Jones, Colebrook were other scholars who did notable work on India. H H Risley

* Contributed by Saswati Bhattacharya, Delhi University 17

Understanding India; Major under whom first census of India (1872) took place to JH Hutton last census
Discourses
commissioner helped later scholars with the data like, Morgan, McLennon,
Lubbock, Tylor, Starcke and Frazer.

Early 19th century saw considerable literature by missionaries on Indian society

like Claudius Buchanan, William Carey, William Ward, Sir John Shore who
were critical of Hinduism and saw hope in the spread of Christianity.

The aim of the British colonial interest in studying the traditional Indian society
proved useful in laying the foundation for further studies of Indian society. The
emphasis of the studies was on how to govern India better.
After the arrival of the British, knowledge of Indian society began to grow
very rapidly from 1760 onwards.
Indian economy and polity changed tremendously.
Indian society went through many changes including beginning of the
modern era with introduction of industries. Posts and telegraph, railways
and modern education, growth of cities, new occupations, etc., were some
of the major developments leading to rapid changes in Indian society.

With the British colonialism, particular observations can be made about the
process of cultural changes and nature of social change in the Indian social
systems. Bernard S. Cohn (1990) argues that society of India offered a much
different situation as compared to American Indian or African colonies since
eighteenth century, in India:
there was a full-fledged agricultural economy,
political institution based on Kingship,
a legal system based on partially written law,
taxation,
record keeping, and
a set of cultural religious systems both of Hindus and Muslims.

He argues therefore that the British study of Indian languages was important to
the colonial project of control and command.

Cohn (1970) also asserts that an arena of colonial power that seemed most inclined
to native local influences, mostly in the field of law, in fact became responsible
for the changes of noticeably British notions about how to regulate a ‘different’
kind of colonial society. It was not only important to have a system of knowledge
of Indian society but also give rise to forms of constructing an India that could
be better packaged and ruled by the colonial powers. The central problems that
surfaced and had to be understood was how to develop a political-military system
that would leave the day-to-day functioning of the government in Indian hands
and yet arrive at a successful formula to have continuous supervision over the
Indian subjects.

18
 Box 2.0 Colonial Discourse

Some Indologists also tried to search for common grounds between the rulers
and the ruled and looked for similarity.

For example-
“The Indologists through their studies (also) made the point that the
governance of the old and Mughal India was based on documented laws.
The political system was not arbitrary. Scholars of Asiatic Society like
William Jones, backed by Max Mueller and other renowned scholars who
with their inter-disciplinary research, (proved) that both the Europeans and
Indians shared a common origin somewhere, as Aryans under the thick and
fur of the slopes of Caucasus mountains, and then migrated to their present
day habitations” (The Colonial Political Perspective, Biplab Dasgupta, pp.
31 Social Scientist, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (Mar. - Apr., 2003), pp. 27-56).

Check Your Progress I

1) How was Indian society different from other British colonies?
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2) Why was the need felt by the British to study Indian society?
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2.3 THE MISSIONARY PERSPECTIVE

This view developed through the writings of early Evangelical Priests (Protestants
who believed in spreading the teachings of Christianity through conversion by
persuasion) in the late eighteenth century. Charles Grant, one of the earliest
Evangelical writer, who served as a commercial official in Bengal in 1774-1790,
wrote a pamphlet in 1792 ‘Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic
subjects of Great Britain particularly with respect to Great morals, and on the
means of Improving it’. His views on Indian society can be summed up in the
following quotation:

Upon the whole, then, we cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindostan,
a race of men lamentably degenerate and base, retaining but a feeble sense of
moral obligation, yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right,
governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects 19
Understanding India; Major produced on society by great and general corruption of manners and sunk in
Discourses
misery by their vices…(Great Britain, House of Commons, 1833, vol 14, pg.41
(quoted in Cohn 1990:144).

What is evident from the above statement is the view they held of Indian society
as being essentially undignified as compared to the British society and the only
way to improve is by allowing the British to do so and by following their ways.
The main cause behind such ‘degeneration’ of course was rooted in the religious
system that is the base of Indian culture and the only way that Indians can the
saved recover from their situation would be through the missionary campaigns
that would convert the Indian population to Christianity.

Unlike the Indologists, the attempt was to condemn Indian society and its ways
by citing specific translations from the Sanskrit texts. Additionally, some of the
practices like sati, purdah, sale of children to slavery, cow worship, idol worship
and the caste system were taken to be everyday examples of the problems and
ills, suffered by Indian society. The extremely which negative evaluation of the
Indian society and caste system was deeply connected with their need to establish
Christianity across the subcontinent as a viable alternative especially to those
who were at the bottom-most level of the hierarchy and felt exploited in the
caste system.

Early missionaries saw caste system as an obstacle to conversion to Christianity.

The writings of Abbe Dubois, a French missionary and author of an influential
account in 1816 titled as Description of the Characters, manners, and customs
of the people of India, and of their institutions, religious, and civil noted the
stranglehold of caste system on Indians. ‘Dubois thought that the Brahmins
cleverly constructed the caste system by tuning civil institution into a sacred
and immutable feature of society for the perpetuation of Brahmanical supremacy
(Forrester, 1980: 26, quoted in Book 1 MSO-004, IGNOU, 2005, Pg. 61).

It needs to be mentioned here that caste system was criticised because the
missionaries felt that it thwarted their attempts to convert the Hindus into
Christians. Even after conversion, many Hindus continued to be guided by caste
rules.

Interestingly though in their search for the proof of a generally corrupting Hindu
society, these missionaries made major contributions to the empirical study of
the Indian society. Moreover, the need for translation of Bible into vernaculars
led to socio-linguistic study of Indian languages. This in turn gave rise to more
systematic and written accounts of the lived realities of the different caste and
occupational groups. The missionaries also helped in the spread of modern
education in different parts of India. They went to work in the remotest areas,
like amongst tribals in the forests and worked with zeal and fervor for the weak
and the poor.

In their analysis however, while the missionaries agreed with the Indologists
and later the Orientalists (scholars of Eastern world) about the central principles
of Indian society both did not attempt to fit the facts of political organisation,
land tenure, actual legal systems and commercial structure of the society into it.
Orientalists and missionaries accepted and agreed that:
Religious ideas and practices underlay all social structure;
20
 Primacy of the Brahman as the maintainer of the sacred tradition through Colonial Discourse
his control of the knowledge of the sacred text; and
Brahmanical theory of the four Varnas was accepted and saw the origin of
the castes in the inter mixture through marriage of the members of the four
Varnas (Cohn, 1987).
The difference lay mainly in their evaluation of Indian culture. While the
Orientalists and Indologists had immense admiration of an ancient Indian
civilisation and were deeply aggrieved by the fall of Indian society from that
ideal, the missionaries were of the view that there was no glorious past and it
has always been filled with absurdities.

According to Cohn, the approach adopted by missionaries can also be attributed

to their social backgrounds. Unlike the Indologists and Orientalists who tended
to be from upper class backgrounds and better educated, the missionaries,
particularly the Baptists came from lower rungs of the British society with a
zeal for reforming both their own and definitely the Indian society. They were
determined to change the social order in favour of Christianity unlike Indologists
and Orientalists who held a certain respect for Indian traditional system.

Box 2.1

William Carey’s Dialogues Intended to Facilitate the Acquiring of the Bengali

Language, published in 1801 from Sreerampore Press is perhaps the first
sociolinguistic study of an Indian language.

Robert Caldwell’s study titled Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or

South Indian Family of Languages is the first systematic account of Dravidian
languages and had a considerable indirect effect on the politics of South
India.

Check Your Progress II

1) What was the Missionary perspective? Explain with examples.
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2) Compare the Missionary perspective with that of Orientalists and the

Indologists.
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21
Understanding India; Major
Discourses 2.4 THE ADMINISTRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
The interpretation of Indian society by the administrators, trained in British
universities and indoctrinated by utilitarian rationalism was more pragmatic and
more matter-of-fact. Their purpose was to understand it Indian Society in order
to exploit its resources.

The administrators sought to develop categories that would help them in ordering
their ideas and actions relating to the life of the natives of India avoiding the
enormous complexities characterizing it. For example, B. H. Baden- Powells’
three volumes of The Land System of British India (1892) were not just a
compilation of data but had a series of arguments about the nature of Indian
village and its resources in relation to the state and its demand over these
resources. Baden-Powell recognised there were in general two claims on the
produce of the soil, the state’s and the landholder’s. He postulated that the
government derived its revenue “by taking a share of the actual grain heap on
the threshing floor of each holding”. In order to ensure the collection of this
share a wide range of intermediaries between the state and the grain heap
developed. They assert in their turn varying degrees of control or ownership/
possession right over land and its produce. In addition, rights over the land were
established by the conquest.

British scholarly administrators posted in different parts of India, for example,

Risley, Dalton and O’Malley in East India, Crooks in Northern India, wrote
encyclopedic inventories about the tribes and castes of India, which even today
provide the basic information about the life and culture of the people of the
respective regions. The purpose of these studies was to familiarise the government
officials and private persons with classified descriptions about castes and tribes
in India with a view to ensuring effective colonial administration.

The contribution of great British Indologist Sir William Jones was immense as
he began the study of Sanskrit and Indology and is also quite well known for
establishing the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1787. The Laws of Manu was
translated by Jones in 1794.

The period of 1757 to 1785 was a time in which the officials of the East India
Company in Bengal had to develop an administrative system capable of
maintaining law and order and producing in a regular manner income to support
the administrative, military and commercial activities of the company and also
provide a profit. The assessment and regular collection of land revenue required
considerable knowledge of the structure of Indian society. Accordingly, inquiries
into the nature of land tenure in Bengal were made by collecting documents and
records of previous rulers. In addition, some British, official and non-official,
out of interest and curiosity began to study and write on Indian society from
first-hand observation in somewhat objective fashion. For example, William
Tenant, a military chaplain in his two volume work, Indian Recreations:
Consisting Chiefly of Strictures on the Domestic and Rural Economy of the
Mahommedans and Hindoos (1804) based his information on personal
observations, ‘conversations and writings of several intelligent natives’ and ‘oral
conversation with…military servants’.

22
 Box 2.2: Imperial Gazetter Colonial Discourse

In short, using the classic anthropological techniques available at the time,

i.e. observations and interviews with key native/local informants. This
particular document and others like H.T. Colebrook’s Remarks on the
Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal provide detailed and careful
description of rural society.

2.4.1 Census and Surveys

But these early works proved insufficient as East India Company’s territory
rapidly increased and the British became aware of the baffling variety of peoples,
histories, political forms, systems of land tenure and religious practices. They
realised that the relatively haphazard reporting of sociological information must
be more systematised and supported by field surveys the goal of which was
acquisition of better and more accurate information. One of the earliest and
famous of these was contribution of Dr. Francis Buchanan. He carried out an
extensive survey in 1807 that was never completely published, but in many
ways was the forerunner of a continuing effort undertaken by the British to
collect, collate and publish official and scholarly information about all aspects
of Indian society. It is in these attempts that we find the emergence of a
sociological entity of India. For instance, the ‘official’ view of caste treated it as
an empirical category, a ‘thing’ concrete and measurable and above all had
definable characteristics such as:
endogamy (marriage within ones own caste and/ or subcaste),
commensality (eating together) rules,
fixed occupation,
common ritual practices.
The census exercise created the ‘fixed’ category of caste from ‘social lived reality’
for the purpose of British administration. The first census of 1872 under Lord
Mayo was mainly an exercise where open ended questions were asked, and the
categories of religion, caste and race were used.

The data collected was classified into different categories to separate one caste
from the other. The most famous classification is H.H. Risley’s in which he
reduced the 2000 odd castes with the help of census data, had found seven types:
1) tribal,
2) functional,
3) sectarian;
4) castes formed by crossing;
5) national castes;
6) castes formed by migration; and
7) castes formed by changing customs.
The questions that grew out of such an elaborate census were in regard of the
origin and functionality of caste in a sociological sense, unlike the question of
historical origin posed by the Orientalists and some Indologists.
23
Understanding India; Major Henceforth, the official researchers of caste although recognised that origin of
Discourses
caste is rooted in the Brahmanical theory they assumed to arrive at a more
functional, somewhat ‘field view’ of caste. Nesfield regarded caste as having its
roots in the division of labour and the occupation was the central determining
factor in the system. Risley argued for a racial origin of caste. Ibbetson saw the
major force to the formation of caste in ‘tribal origins’. J.H. Hutton compiled a
list of fourteen ‘more obvious factors which have been indicated as probably
contributing to the emergence and development of the caste system’. The ‘official’
view was not merely an outgrowth of the ways in which information was collected
but also reflects anthropological interests and theories of the period 1870-1910.
The general theoretical books written about the caste system implicitly reflect
the works of Morgan, McLennan, Lubbock, Tylor, Starcke and Frazer. The
attempt was to compare, classify and arrive at some general anthropological
solution about the facts, of customs, myths, proverbs and practices collected
from the field based studies.

Although the first ever official attempt for a field based ethnographic research
survey was undertaken in 1901 under Risley and the need was justified on the
grounds that “the primitive beliefs and uses in India would be completely
destroyed or transformed” and “for purposes of legislation, of judicial procedure,
of famine relief, of sanitation and dealings with epidemic disease and almost
every form of executive action” (Cohn 1990:157). This agenda also finally seals
the interest of the Raj to truly and completely control India. This survey later
developed as a part of the Census of 1901 with an elaborate classification of
castes and sub-castes.

2.4.2 Villages and Cities

Other than caste, the administrative idea of India was based on the category of
‘village’. The perspective developed and forwarded was that India was primarily
composed of villages. Charles Metcalfe, described Indians as living in “village
communities” which “are little Republics, having nearly everything they want
within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations” (Cohn 1971
reprint 2000: 86). The villages therefore came to be seen as self-sufficient units
both economically and politically. Three intellectual-cultural strands can be found
in the making of this myth and its perpetuation. The first is the romantic, idealistic
and evolutionary myth of the British past – ‘countryside as gentry surrounded
by happy peasants’; Marxist notions about evolution of society from a communal
property holding phase to the rise of private property and therefore India being
backward as having the communal phase of property ownership; the nationalists
stand reinforcing the idea of an idyllic past so as to pose a successful critique of
British imperialism.

The ‘caste’ and the ‘village’ view combined together helped the British rulers
frame revenue laws, create the class of zamindars and also force commercial
agricultural practices.

Box 2.3: Mackenzie’s Collection

“Colin Mackenzie, the first Surveyor General of India….was obsessed with

an interest in collecting narratives and facts to supplement the maps he and
his associates made of Hyderabad, Mysore and other regions of the southern
peninsula. On his own initiative and with his own resources he hired and
24
 Colonial Discourse
trained a group of Brahman assistants who helped him collect local histories
of kingly dynasties, chiefly families, castes, villages, temples, monasteries
as well as other local traditions and religious philosophical texts in Sanskrit,
Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese, Malyalam and Hindi (pp. 126).

From the letters and diaries of the native agents of Mackenzie, those early
research assistants, or ‘native information’ of colonial ethnography and
historiography we learn of course that the process of collecting was anything
but neutral , that the sociology of knowledge might have been early colonial
but hardly pre-colonial. First, it is clear that these agents, themselves Brahmans
assumed that the only knowledge worth having would necessarily be mediated
through Brahmans…Whenever an agent went to a new town, he looked for
books by first looking for learned Brahmans (pp. 128-129).

These Brahman research assistants were thus agents of and in a complex

social reality.… On the one hand, they constructed and represented a
Brahmanic sociology of knowledge, one that has already been well
documented in the construction of legal codes for Indians under colonial
institutions, but which also set in motion a wide range of apparatuses which
led to the flip side of nationalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century
India – the communalist and sometimes separatist anti-Brahman movements
of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra. On the other hand, they were
agents of and for, the British. There was often considerable and justifiable
concern about the implications of handing texts, traditions, knowledge, anti-
facts etc. over to these agents” (pp. 129-130, Dirks, 1997).

Despite several research studies by Henery Maine and Baden-Powell on Indian

villages that discussed village level conflict, regional variations of villages in
terms of both structure and culture within India etc., the categorical and
conceptual thinking about villages remained fixed at the stage where it was just
a ‘type’ in the evolutionary progress of human society. This directed attention
away from internal politics at village, questions of social relations, patterns of
wealth distribution. That is in reality even as students of social anthropology
they were not interested in the actual conditions of life in Indian villages but
with general theoretical questions derived from the social theory of the day.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century we also find several emerging
problems of famine, riots, land alienation etc., in the rural economy which deeply
troubled the colonial masters, shaking their somewhat simplistic understanding
of village India. As a result, we find more extensive and important statistical
data as well as suggestions for administrative and legislative changes for
correcting the ground level faults. Hence we find studies like that of Harold
Mann based on data about “numerous economic and agricultural questions by
the close study of a single village.”

The colonialists also attempted to arrive at an understanding of the urban structure

in India. Both Walter Hamilton and Robert Montogomery Martin gave lists of
cities with population estimated in 1820 and 1855 respectively but none were
reflective of the reality. These early observers greatly overestimated the
populations of the larger cities, mostly because the European eye saw streets to
be crowded and congested. The narrow streets with buildings right up to the
edge of the street; markets and pilgrim places crowded with people and it therefore
25
Understanding India; Major is impossible to arrive at any conclusive statistics. Cohn (1970) however is of
Discourses
the opinion that more than statistics what is important is to understand the nature
and consequences of urban living in India in the early or the late nineteenth
century. One must remember that the nature of Indian cities were very different
than that of cities in highly industrialised economy and society. Indian cities
performed four major functions:

a) economic – as a centre for marketing, trade, commerce and craft production;

b) military, frequently as military centres with forts or walled areas for defense
purposes;
c) political as centres of political life; and
d) religious – i.e. as sacred centres with ritual specialists, scholars and devotees.
It is also equally important to remember that while all four functions were mostly
found together, cities differed in their dominating function. Also most northern
and many southern cities were established out of political considerations, as
strategic centres of control. At the same time, early nineteenth century cities had
different lifestyles, cosmopolitan, local and regional, Benaras or Kashi
exemplifying to be the most traditional religious and culturally vibrant city had
people of and yet the most cosmopolitan of cities.
Check Your Progress III
1) What was the administrative view? Explain with examples.
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2) How did census and survey help British in understanding Indian society?
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3) How did Britishers view Indian Village and cities?

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26
 Colonial Discourse
2.5 INFLUENCE OF COLONIAL DISCOURSE ON
SOCIOLOGY OF INDIA
The interest of the British rulers gave rise to the research on India. Surveys to
collect a huge body of details regarding different aspects of Indian society and
social Institutions, such as caste, family, marriage, cubtemony laws etc. These
information were used by different scholars to study. Indian society, culture,
polity and economy. Both the census data and the Imperial Gazettes helped
social anthropologists and sociologists to study Indian society. Many of the village
studies were conducted able to their influence. Anthropological studies of India
both in terms of interest, particular subject matter, methodology and theories of
and about the caste as a category for administration, village, cities in India find
their origin due to this impact. The role of missionaries and administration in
the further enhancement of the British colonial interest in studying Indian society
proved useful in laying the foundation for further studies of Indian society.

2.6 LET US SUM UP

In this unit, we have discussed how colonial rule impacted study of Indian society.
Colonial narratives would be divided into missionary view which developed
from the writings of early missionary view which developed from the writings
of early missionaries in the 18th century and administrative view, the purpose of
which was to ensure effective colonial control. The detailed surveys, census
information and other studies by the British helped in shaping system of
knowledge about Indian society and led to further research in many fields.

2.7 REFERENCES
Cohn, Bernard 2000 (1971). India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization.
OUP
Cohn, Bernard 1990 (1987). An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other
Essays. OUP
Vidyarthi L P (1976) Rise of Anthropology in India, Concept Publishing Company,
Delhi
Sociology In India (2005) Book 1 MSO-004 Indira Gandhi National Open
University, School of Social Sciences, New Delhi
Dirks, N B (2001), Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern
India, Permanent Black, New Delhi.
Inden, Ronald (1990) Imagining India, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Cambridge, Mass.
Dasgupta, Biplab (2003) The Colonial Political Perspective, pp. 31 Social
Scientist, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (Mar. - Apr., 2003), pp. 27-56

2.8 SPECIMEN ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR

PROGRESS
Check Your Progress I
1) Society of India offered a much different situation as compared to American
Indian or African colonies since by eighteenth century, in India: 27
Understanding India; Major a) there was a full-fledged agricultural economy,
Discourses
b) political institution based on Kingship,
c) a legal system based on partially written law,
d) taxation,
e) record keeping, and
f) Set of cultural religious systems both of Hindus and Muslims.
2) To regulate a ‘different’ kind of colonial society, it was not only important
to have a system of knowledge of Indian society but also give rise to forms
of constructing an India that could be better packaged and ruled by the
colonial powers. The central problems that surfaced and had to be understood
was how to develop a political-military system that would leave the day-
to-day functioning of the government in Indian hands and yet arrive at a
successful formula to have continuous supervisions over the Indian subjects.
The emphasis of the studies on India’ was on how to govern India better.
British study of Indian languages was important to the colonial project of
control and command.
Check Your Progress II
1) The Missionary perspective to Indian society was according to them as
being essentially undignified as compared to the British society. The main
cause behind such ‘degeneration’ of course was rooted in the religious system
that is the base of Indian culture and the only way that Indians can recover
from their situation would be through the missionary campaigns that would
convert the Indian population to Christianity. (The need for translation of
Bible into vernaculars) led to socio-linguistic study of Indian languages.
The missionaries also helped in the spread of modern education in different
parts of India, went to work in the remotest areas, like amongst tribals in
the forests and worked with zeal and fervor for the weak and the poor to
offer Christianity as a viable alternative especially to those who were at the
bottom-most level of the hierarchy and felt exploited in the caste system.

2) In their analysis however, while the missionaries agreed with the Indologists
(scholars of Indian society) and later the Orientalists (scholars of Eastern
world) about the central principles of Indian society both did not attempt to
fit the facts of political organization, land tenure, actual legal systems and
commercial structure of the society into it.

The difference lay mainly in their evaluation of Indian culture. While the
Orientalists and Indological had immense admiration of an ancient Indian
civilisation and were deeply aggrieved by the fall of Indian society from
that ideal, the missionaries were of the view that there was no glorious past
and it has always been filled with absurdities. Unlike Indologists and
Orientalists who tended to be from upper class backgrounds and better
educated, the missionaries, particularly the Baptists came from lower rungs
of the British society with a zeal for reforming both their own and definitely
the Indian society. They were determined to change the social order in favour
of Christianity unlike Indologists and Orientalists who held a certain respect
for Indian traditional system.

28
Check Your Progress III Colonial Discourse

1) The administrative view was to familiarize the government officials and

private persons with classified descriptions about castes and tribes in India
with a view to ensuring effective colonial administration. The interpretation
of Indian society by the administrators, trained in British universities and
indoctrinated by utilitarian rationalism was more pragmatic and more matter-
of-fact, as their purpose was to understand it in order to exploit its resources.
British scholarly administrators posted in different parts of India, for
example, Risley, Dalton and O’Malley in East India, Crooks in Northern
India, wrote encyclopedic inventories about the tribes and castes of India,
which even today provide the basic information about the life and culture
of the people of the respective regions. Sir William Jones began the study
of Sanskrit and Indology and is also quite well known for establishing the
Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1787. The Laws of Manu was translated by
Jones in 1794.

2) Charles Metcalfe, described Indians as living in “village communities”

which “are little Republics, having nearly everything they want within
themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations”. The British
supported the romantic, idealistic and evolutionary myth of the British past
– ‘countryside as gentry surrounded by happy peasants’. The ‘caste’ and
the ‘village’ view combined together helped the British rulers frame revenue
laws, create the class of zamindars and also force commercial agricultural
practices. Despite several research studies by Maine and Baden-Powell on
India villages that discussed village level conflict, regional variations of
villages in terms of both structure and culture within India etc., the
categorical and conceptual thinking about villages remained fixed at the
stage where it was just a ‘type’ in the evolutionary progress of human society.

29