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India and U.S. Cultures of Reform: Caste as Keyword

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India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s

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Abstract

This chapter takes up Americans’ appropriations of the term caste in order to analyze the ways in which India figured into nineteenth-century U.S. debates over slavery and racial injustice. Drawing on newspaper and magazine articles, missionary commentary, and a range of novels, it first establishes that Americans used caste as a term for rigid and antimeritocratic social values and then shows how such authors as Julia C. Collins, Mary Hayden Pike, and Albion Tourgée applied the term as a means of critiquing racial hierarchies and their deformation of courtship and marriage. While such authors used caste to unsettle white American readers’ sense of racial superiority, they also participated in a delegitimization of the Indian other, who comes to represent a timeless incapacity for reform.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

    Susan M. Ryan

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  1. Susan M. Ryan
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA

    Anupama Arora

  2. William Paterson University of New Jersey, Wayne, New Jersey, USA

    Rajender Kaur

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Ryan, S.M. (2017). India and U.S. Cultures of Reform: Caste as Keyword. In: Arora, A., Kaur, R. (eds) India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62334-4_7

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