Abstract
‘When thinking about India it is hard not to think of caste’, said Nicholas Dirks as the opening statement of his book Castes of Mind (Dirks 2001). Even though the book seemed to indicate some reservations about such a situation, neither the book, nor anything that has followed, has altered the situation. The study of India across disciplines has been significantly shaped and driven by the study of caste. Caste is still considered the ‘master key to unlocking the Indian world’ (Guha 2013, 21). References to caste in literature about India go back at least to the sixteenth century. Thus, it certainly has a well-established lineage of scholarly interest and research.
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- 1.
For a discussion about how gotra further complicates these matters, especially in relation to seeing castes as endogamous groups see, Jalki and Pathan (2015).
- 2.
For discussions of endogamy as a property of the ‘caste system’ see, Martin Fárek in this volume and Jalki and Pathan (2015).
- 3.
While it is not clear exactly what elements Dirks claims existed and what new elements were introduced, he does say, ‘caste – at least in the areas of southern India that I had studied intensively – was profoundly embedded within political society, not at all as it has been portrayed in contemporary anthropological literature’ (Dirks 2001, ix).
- 4.
‘Caste associations sprung up to contest their alleged position in the official hierarchy, holding meetings, writing petitions and organising protests. By 1931 some caste groups were distributing handbills to their fellow caste members to tell them how to answer questions about their religious and sectarian affiliations, as also their race, language and caste status. After 1931, the British could no longer ignore the political fallout of the census, and abandoned the use of caste for census counting altogether’ (Dirks 2001, 48).
- 5.
Reference here is to Balagangadhara’s unpublished writings.
- 6.
This is from a post made on the yahoo forum formed to discuss Balagangadhara’s book The Heathen in his Blindness in 2003. Many of the points raised in this Introduction were first raised in discussions that took place on this forum over the past 13 years. For this particular post see https://beta.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/TheHeathenInHisBlindness/conversations/messages/2859.
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Fárek, M., Jalki, D., Pathan, S., Shah, P. (2017). Introduction: Caste Studies and the Apocryphal Elephant. In: Fárek, M., Jalki, D., Pathan, S., Shah, P. (eds) Western Foundations of the Caste System. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38761-1_1
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