The traditional social stratification in Maharashtra was governed by Varnashrama dharma,

t that is the division of society into an unequal hierarchical order comprising Brahmins,

Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Sudras. The social interaction between different castes governed
by this stratification was maintained by strict rules of pollution and purity. At the top, was
I the Brahmin caste with many rights and privileges which maintained their social control

over society by developing a religious ideology which gave legitimacy to many

superstitions and inhuman practices. At the lowest end were the Ati-Sudras or untouchable
outcastes deprived ofeducation and all other rights.
In Maharashtra the Hindus were 74.8 per cent of h e total population. According to the
Census of 1881, the Kunbis or Marathas were the main community about 55.25 per cent of
the total population. Kunbis were also economically powerful in rural society. Being a rich
peasant class they controlled agricultural production. However, the influence of the
traditional ideology and the institution of caste made them subservient to the Brahmins.
The Brahmins, on the other hand, exercised considerable influence over other castes due to
their ritualistic power and monopoly over learning and knowledge. During the British
period the Brahmins successfully adopted the new English education and dominated the
colonial administration. The new intelligentsia therefore, came mostly from the already
advanced Brahmin caste, occupying strategic positions as officials, professors, lower
bureaucrats, writers, editors or lawyers. This created fear among the non-Brahmin castes.
It was this traditional social order which came under heavy fire both from The Christian
missionaries and the nationalist intelligentsia that had imbibed western liberal ideas. We
can divide the reform movements into two distinct strands. The early radical reforms like
Jotirao Govindrao Phule tried for a revolutionary reorganisation of the traditional culture
and society on the basis of the principles of equality and rationality. The later moderate
reformers like Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901), however, gave the argument of a
return to the Dast traditions and culture with some modifications. It was the earlv radical

tradition of Phule which gave birth to the non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra.

In any case, the British administrators were, understandably overwhelmed by these figures
and felt obliged to find a way to compartmentalize chunks of population into manageable
groups. The most obvious way to do so was through the use of India's unique caste system.

The caste system had been a fascination of the British since their arrival in India. Coming
from a society that was divided by class, the British attempted to equate the caste system to
the class system. As late as 1937 Professor T. C. Hodson stated that: "Class and caste stand to
each other in the relation of family to species. The general classification is by classes, the
detailed one by castes. The former represents the external, the latter the internal view of the
social organization." The difficulty with definitions such as this is that class is based on
political and economic factors, caste is not. In fairness to Professor Hodson, by the time of
his writing, caste had taken on many of the characteristics that he ascribed to it and that his
predecessors had ascribed to it but during the 19th century caste was not what the British
believed it to be. It did not constitute a rigid description of the occupation and social level of
a given group and it did not bear any real resemblance to the class system. However, this will
be dealt with later in this essay. At present, the main concern is that the British saw caste as a
way to deal with a huge population by breaking it down into discrete chunks with specific
characteristics. Moreover, as will be seen later in this paper, it appears that the caste system
extant in the late 19th and early 20th century has been altered as a result of British actions so
that it increasingly took on the characteristics that were ascribed to by the British.

One of the main tools used in the British attempt to understand the Indian population was the
census. Attempts were made as early as the beginning of the 19th century to estimate
populations in various regions of the country but these, as earlier noted, were
methodologically flawed and led to grossly erroneous conclusions. It was not until 1872 that
a planned comprehensive census was attempted. This was done under the direction of Henry
Beverely, Inspector General of Registration in Bengal. The primary purpose given for the
taking of the census, that of governmental preparedness to deal with disaster situations, was
both laudable and logical. However, the census went well beyond counting heads or even
enquiring into sex ratios or general living conditions. Among the many questions were
enquiries regarding nationality, race, tribe, religion and caste. Certainly none of these things
were relevant to emergency measures responses by the government. Further, neither the
notion of curiosity nor planned subterfuge on the part of the administration suffices to explain
their inclusion in the census. On the question of race or nationality it could be argued that
these figures were needed to allow analyses of the various areas in an attempt to predict
internal unrest. However, there does not appear to have been any use made of the figures
from that perspective. With regard to the information on religion and caste, the same claim
could be made but once again there does not appear to have been any analyses done with the
thought of internal disturbance in mind. Obviously there had to be some purpose to the
gathering of this data since due to the size of both the population and the territory to be
covered, extraneous questions would not have been included due to time factors. Therefore,
there must have been a reason of some sort for their inclusion. That reason was, quite simply,
the British belief that caste was the key to understanding the people of India. Caste was seen
as the essence of Indian society, the system through which it was possible to classify all of
the various groups of indigenous people according to their ability, as reflected by caste, to be
of service to the British.

Caste was seen as an indicator of occupation, social standing, and intellectual ability. It was,
therefore necessary to include it in the census if the census was to serve the purpose of giving
the government the information it needed in order to make optimum use of the people under
its administration. Moreover, it becomes obvious that British conceptions of racial purity
were interwoven with these judgements of people based on caste when reactions to censuses
are examined. Beverly concluded that a group of Muslims were in fact converted low caste
Hindus. This raised howls of protest from representatives of the group as late as 1895 since it
was felt that this was a slander and a lie.H. H. Risely, Commissioner of the 1901 census, also
showed British beliefs in an 1886 publication which stated that race sentiment, far from
being:

Here is a prime example of the racial purity theories that had been developing throughout the
19th century. Here also is the plainest explanation for the inclusion of the questions on race,
caste and religion being included with the censuses. Thus far this essay has dwelt almost
entirely with British actions to the exclusion of any mention of Indian actions and reactions.
This should not be taken to mean that the Indians were passive or without input into the
process. Any change within a society requires the participation of all the groups if it is to
have any lasting effect. The Indian people had a very profound effect on the formulation of
the census and their analysis. However, Indian actions and reaction must be considered
within the context of Indian history and Indian culture in the same way that British actions
must be considered within British cultural context. For this reason, it has been necessary to
postpone consideration of Indian reactions and contributions to the British activities until the
next section of this essay which will then be followed by a more in depth examination of the
development of British attitudes. Finally, the results of the combination of both Indian and
British beliefs will be examined with a view to reaching a consensus on how they affected the
compilation of and conclusions reached through the censuses.
The word caste is not a word that is indigenous to India. It originates in the Portuguese word
casta which means race,breed, race or lineage. However, during the 19th century, the term
caste increasingly took on the connotations of the word race. Thus, from the very beginning
of western contact with the subcontinent European constructions have been imposed on
Indian systems and institutions. To fully appreciate the caste system one must step away from
the definitions imposed by Europeans and look at the system as a whole, including the
religious beliefs that are an integral part of it. To the British, viewing the caste system from
the outside and on a very superficial level, it appeared to be a static system of social ordering
that allowed the ruling class or Brahmins, to maintain their power over the other classes.
What the British failed to realize was that Hindus existed in a different cosmological frame
than did the British. The concern of the true Hindu was not his ranking economically within
society but rather his ability to regenerate on a higher plane of existence during each
successive life. Perhaps the plainest verbalization of this attitude was stated by a 20th century
Hindu of one of the lower castes who stated: "Everything lies in the hands of God. We hope
to go to the top, but our Karma (Action) binds us to this level." If not for the concept of
reincarnation, this would be a totally fatalistic attitude but if one takes into account the notion
that one's present life is simply one of many, then this fatalistic component is limited if not
eliminated. Therefore, for the Hindu, acceptance of present status and the taking of ritual
actions to improve status in the next life is not terribly different in theory to the attitudes of
the poor in western society. The aim of the poor in the west is to improve their lot in the
space of a single life time. The aim of the lower castes in India is to improve their position
over the space of many lifetimes. It should also be borne in mind that an entire caste could
rise through the use of conquest or through service to rulers.Thus, it may be seen that within
traditional Indian society the caste system was not static either within the material or
metaphysical plane of existence. With the introduction of European and particulary British
systems to India, the caste system began to modify. This was a natural reaction of Indians
attempting to adjust to the new regime and to make the most of whatever opportunities may
have been presented to them. Moreover, with the apparent dominance exhibited by British
science and medicine there were movements that attempted to adapt traditional social systems
to fit with the new technology. Men such as Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Dayananda, and
Ramkrishna started movements that, to one degree or another, attempted to explore new paths
that would allow them and their people to live more equitably within British India. Roy in
particular sits this description with his notion that the recognition of human rights was
consistent with Hindu thought and the Hinduism could welcome external influences so long
as they were not contrary to reason. While it is granted that the present paper is not the
appropriate venue to explore such movements, they must be noted so that an impression of
Indian submissiveness in the face of British intrusion may be avoided. There was a dynamic
interplay between the British and Indians that had a profound effect on both societies. More
appropriate to the task at hand, however, are the reactions of various groups within India to
the census itself.

This is virtually a call for a public enquiry into what most westerners would consider a
relatively minor matter of very limited concern.

A further example of Indian reaction to judgements made within the censuses becomes
apparent from the claims of castes that they should have higher ranking following the census
of 1901.One claim in particular, that of the Mahtons, is of particular interest for the present
paper. The Mahtons claimed that they should be granted the status of Rajputs because of both
history and the fact that they followed Rajput customs. Therefore, since they had not received
this status in the 1901 census, they requested the change to be affected in the 1911 census.
Their request was rejected, not on the basis of any existing impediment but on the basis of the
1881 census which stated that the Mahtons were an offshoot of the Mahtams who were
hunter/scavengers. Thus, it appears that the census system had become self reinforcing.
However, after further debate the Mahton were reclassified as Mahton Rajput on the basis
that they had separated themselves from the Mahtams and now acted in the manner of
Rajputs. Interestingly, it was at this point that the reasoning behind the claim became evident.
Some of the Mahton wanted join an army regiment and this would only be possible if they
had Rajput status. The Mahton, a rural agricultural group, were fully aware that the change of
status would allow their members to obtain direct benefits. In and of itself, this definitely
shows that the actions of the British in classifying and enumerating castes within the census
had heightened indigenous awareness of the caste system and had added an economic aspect
that the Indian people were willing and anxious to exploit.

With this in mind, it is interesting to note that in doing the censuses, Indians were used as
both census takers and as advisors regarding the caste system of hierarchy. Since it is very
likely that individual census takers filled out most of the data themselves, without consulting
each individual in the area, the possibilities for self serving activity was immeasurable.
Moreover, those Indians who were used as advisors certainly had more than ample
opportunity to act in a manner that suited their own or their group's agenda since precedent
was based on interpretations of the writings of the various Hindu holy texts. To even a
marginally cynical mind this would suggest immense possibilities for graft and corruption.
This, in turn, suggests the possibility that the British were manipulated, at least to some
degree, by their mainly Brahman informants.

Contrary to what the British appear to have believed, it seems doubtful that the Brahmans
were dominant within the material world in pre colonial Indian society. A cursory
examination of any of the ruling families quickly shows a dearth families of the Brahmin
caste. Rather, one finds that the majority, though by no means all, of rulers were Kshytria and
occasionally Vashnia. This suggests that although the Brahmin caste had power in spiritual
matters, their power and control within the material world was limited to the amount of
influence that they could gain with individual rulers. No doubt there were instances when this
was quite considerable but there is also little doubt that there were times when Brahman
influence was very weak and insignificant. With this in mind, it is not difficult to imagine a
situation where, Brahmans, seeing the ascendancy of British power, allied themselves to this
perceived new ruling class and attempted to gain influence through it. By establishing
themselves as authorities on the caste system they could then tell the British what they
believed the British wanted to hear and also what would most enhance their own position.
The British would then take this information, received through the filter of the Brahmans, and
interpret it based on their own experience and their own cultural concepts. Thus, information
was filtered at least twice before publication. Therefore, it seems certain that the information
that was finally published was filled with conceptions that would seem to be downright
deceitful to those about whom the information was written. The flood of petitions protesting
caste rankings following the 1901 census would appear to bear witness to this. To fully
understand how the British arrived at their understanding of Indian society it will now be
necessary to look at where British society was during the 19th century in both its concepts of
self and of other.

At the beginning of the 19th century, society in Britain was still attempting to come to terms
with the social structure that had developed within the British Isles. Symptomatic of this
phenomenon was the variation in terminology with reference to levels of societal existence
that was extant at this time. Phrases such as "gentlemen of wealth and property" and "the
lower ranks from labour to thinking" were used to describe levels within society. While this
is not meant to suggest that the British did not recognize that there were stratifications within
there society, it seems to indicate that there was an absence of the modern notion of class and
class structure. Instead, there appears to have been a linguistic shift occurring in which the
various levels of society were being described in a variety of ways. Even within the two short
phrases quoted above, there is description of three different attributes; social standing,
economics and intelligence. This may be seen as a reflection of the mobility that was being
experienced within Georgian society itself as non aristocratic, non landed groups moved up in
the social order through the increase in industrialization. The use of the word "rank" itself
indicates that the language had not entirely rid itself of feudal notions of high and low birth. It
is also interesting to note that the connection between social status and mental ability had
been made at this point in time. This tends to point toward the determinism that would later
be seen in the works of phrenologists such as Spurzheim in which the inheritance of a given
skull shape determined the entire character and ability of both individuals and nations. In
turn, this deterministic attitude meshed well with later statistical ideas that human behaviour
was caused and controlled by unvarying social laws and that free will was of little or no
consequence in the grand scheme of human progress.Therefore, it can be seen that as the
British became increasingly entrenched in India, three distinct but inter-related intellectual
movements converged to provide the basis for British extrapolations and interpretations of
Indian society. In this way, the British construction of Indian society was as much a reflection
of their own attempts to understand their own society as it was an attempt to reach an
understanding about another society. The main key in the evolution of all of this was the use
of statistics.

Statistics was initially used as a tool to understanding the present state of European society so
that power structures could make optimum use of resources during times of crisis and, in the
case of Britain, as an attempt to avoid the societal unrest that dominated Europe during the
first half of the 19th century. "Statistics, by their very name, are defined to be the
observations necessary to the social and moral sciences, to the sciences of the statist, to
whom the statesman and the legislator must resort for the principles on which to legislate and
govern." Thus, at the turn of the century, statistics were used to accommodate manpower
demands for the armies to fight the continental war against Napoleon and later during the
1830s, as a part of an attempt to control the population and avoid the turmoil that had
engulfed the European mainland. Initially, statisticians confined their activities to the
collection of raw data that was then used by others to form or confirm social theories.
However, there was a desire on the part of statists to go further and to ground there new
science on the same sort of constant that the universal law of gravity had provided for
astronomy. This inspired the French statistician Quetelet to formulate a model of probability
that he believed would give social scientists that same grounding.

Henry Thomas Buckle took this idea one step further. He believed that it was possible to gain
access to the rules that operate the human mind through the use of statistics. Moreover, it was
Buckle's belief that all human behaviour was caused by unvarying social laws and that moral
causes were inherent to the nation, not to individuals. Buckles concept of mankind was
shaped by the belief that there was no place for chance or supernatural intervention in
accounting for the history and progress of mankind. All of history was the result of the
universality of law. Within this viewpoint, Buckle saw corporate entities such as the church
or political in
Abstract
Empire has manifested in many forms, such as the impact of neo imperialism and neo
colonialism in the economic sector as well as the dynamics between developing and
developed societies, it has also had far reaching effects on the shaping of organizations in
other ways. Empire, imperialism and colonialism (Hardt & Negri ,2000) have had a historical
impact on the development of several societies and systems. This paper explores the impact
in
India in terms of the effects on organizational life.
While the colonization of the Indian nation by the British is a historical fact, the impact of
this
colonization on the Indian psyche is far deeper and carries over even into the present day.
(Nandy, 1983; Bhabha,1994; Spivak,1994 ). In this paper, I explore this impact in one
particular area of Indian social organization, the caste system, and how then this had an effect
on organizations.
The Caste System
Scholars studying caste have tended to agree that the presence of castes throughout the
country is a universal feature (Dumo nt, 1970). The main form of the system has been
described as “hierarchical polarity” and “institutionalized inequality” (Dumont, 1970). It has
been argued that even though there are regional variations, the caste system in fact represents
a uniform and universal ideology when applied to an understanding of Indian society. The
system or ideology of caste has a powerful influence in the conduct of economic life,
therefore economic life in India is very much a part of the social system. A discussion of the
concepts of Sanskritization (Srinivas, 1989) and Westernization (Srinivas, 1955, 1962, 1998)
throws light on how the British created an elite group of Indians in the civil services and
administration by aligning themselves with the uppermost caste in the hierarchy. This then
resulted in the capture of top positions by the upper caste, the Brahmins. However, even after
India’s independence in 1947, this dominance of the Brahmins continued in terms of
education, occupational and organizational privileges and performance.
Sanskritization and Westernization
The process of Sanskritization delineates a mode by which a lower caste moved up in the
hierarchy by adopting some of the practices of the upper castes. Simultaneously, the
Brahmins, whereby they imitated the British in their form of dress, education and other
aspects, thus considering themselves ‘superior’ to the rest of the people, adopted a process of
Westernization.
According to Srinivas (1955), the caste system is a dynamic system, and the fixed and rigid
view of caste is problematic. Especially in the middle ranges of the caste hierarchy,
movement upward was possible. A lower caste was able in a generation or so to rise upward
in the hierarchy by adopting the rituals and eating practices of the higher caste, such as
vegetarianism. The Brahmanic way of life, the customs, rites and beliefs of the Brahmins was
adopted. This process has been called Sanskritization. The other process that went hand in
hand with the process of Sanskritization was Westernization. The acceptance of Western
cultural ethos and ideas by upper caste Hindus and the process of imitation of British customs
and habits was the main feature of this process. The upper castes had an advantage in taking
to Western education because of a tradition of literacy. The kind of westernization that was
taking place in different parts of the country varied from one region to another. For instance,
in some cases westernization was confined to the acquisition of western science, knowledge
and literature, while others adopted westernized styles of dress, speech, sports and gadgets.
These congruent processes were two sides of the same coin. While the upper castes were
westernizing themselves, they were declaring themselves separate and distinct from the lower
castes, which were becoming increasingly sanskritized. The effect was thus to increase the
gulf between the upper and the lower castes. The upper castes were brought closer to the
British rulers, which gave them political and economic adva ntage. Thus, the social gap
between the lower and the upper castes remained, only the forms and manifestations of their
practices and rituals changed.
Caste and Reservations
The caste system has been interwoven with the Constitution of India, and the legal position.
The historical background of the Scheduled Castes can be traced back to the Government of
India Act, 1935. On the basis of social and economic disabilities and historical discrimination
suffered by certain groups because of their belonging to certain castes, they were placed in
the
list of Scheduled Castes (Parvathamma,1984).
When the reservation policy was started there was a rationale behind it. Reservations refers to
the practice of ensuring a certain percentage or quota of positions in jobs as well as in the
case
of admissions to educational institutions for persons belonging to the categories of Backward
Classes, as well as Scheduled Castes. The logic behind following this as a concerted program
of action on the part of the government of India was based on the principle of social justice
and to set right the discrimination faced by these groups historically.
The Constitution of India had provided for the idea of protective discrimination, or
affirmative action for the sections of society that were traditionally faced with discrimination
and with the burden of the past. As such, this resulted in the formation of the Backward
Classes Commissions. The first such Commission was headed by Kaka Kalelkar and the
report was tabled in 1955. The second Backward Classes Commission the Mandal
Commission was set up in 1979 and the report was finalized in 1980 The Commission was
also to identify the reference points of backwardness as social and economic backwardness.
However, the impact of this second Commission was rather severe. Everywhere in the
country there were anti- reservation stirs. In some cases, the policy advocated almost 50%
reservations in jobs and educational institutions for the backward section of society. This
resulted in the backlash against the recommendations of the Commission by the upper castes
who felt marginalized. It also brought into the limelight the debate about merit versus
reservations. That is, does reservations go against the concept of merit and due recognition
being given to the talented and deserving? (Chatterji, 1996).
Caste in contemporary India
The stronghold or dare we say stranglehold of caste continues not only in terms of its
visibility in all facets of life, but in the form of social marginalization. Despite Mahatma
Gandhi's efforts to raise the status of the Untouchables by calling them Harijans, (the Hindi
word which literally means people of god) the strength of caste as a way of social acceptance
and political identification continues. Legislation protecting the castes who were oppressed
for centuries has heightened the awareness of difference. "Caste is experienced not so much
as something which you ' do’, as something which is 'done to you' by other (high caste)
people" ( Searle -Chatterjee and Sharma,1994:11).
The intertwining of the caste system with the political and economic life of Indian society
continues. Thus, certain caste groups are the landholding sections of society and control
powerful voting blocks in many of the regions in India. Further, when there is a concentration
of a particular caste group in an area especially in industry and commerce, there is a bias
towards appointments and positions of managerial authority being made from the same group
(Barnabas and Mehta, 1965).
Conclusion
In essence, then, it is the main thesis, that while the caste system existed as a system of
occupational division of labor, and later social inequality for centuries, the role of empire in
India, served to deepen the impact of this schism in social life and this spilled over into
organizational life. The effects have been seen in the operation of the reservation and quota
system in Indian organizations (similar to affirmative action) and the backlash by the upper
castes as a result. The impact in terms of organizational life have been in the areas of
interpersonal communication between employees belonging to the underprivileged castes and
others, as well as in the area of perception of performance of such employees by peers and

others.

he reason that caste differences became so important from the late nineteenth century was
because Christian missionaries and Muslim communalism led to religious conversion and
violence amongst the lower castes of Hindu society, which effectively threatened the Hindu-
dominated nationalist movement against colonial rule.

The Hindu caste system was highly stratified and neglected, even promoted, vast economic
and social differences within Hindu society. In Brown’s view this was just as threatening to
the unity of the nationalist movement as communalism, and, according to Chara Gupta, it was
only by nationalist leaders resorting to religiously prejudiced propaganda in the early
twentieth century that lower castes were able to identify with the nationalist movement and
ignore the realities of the caste system.

The British colonial rule resulted in Christian missionaries achieving the conversion of Indian
people by spreading education. This was therefore particularly successful amongst the lower
castes, such as the ‘untouchables’, as Christianity offered them an opportunity to break away
from the socially and economic restrictions of the caste system. The tabligh movement also
targeted lower castes and encouraged their reconversion to Islam. Furthermore, the
heightening of communalist identities and Muslim separatism highlighted the extent to which
the nationalist movement was dominated by Hinduism; for instance, the cow was perceived
to be a nationalist symbol and government schools promoted the use of Hindi over urdu. As a
result, this meant that converting from Hinduism directly weakened the nationalist movement
by reducing the influence of Hinduism as well as demonstrating the inability of the nationalist
movement to unify the Indian population and address the problems of different sections of
society divided by class, caste and religious differences. Examples of protest against the caste
system by those in lower castes include anti-Brahmin violence in Punjab, and campaigns for
the inter-dining between different castes. As a result of the threat against Hinduism caused by
missionary movements for reconversion and violence amongst the lower castes against the
Hindu hierarchy caused Hindu movements to establish and strengthen their faith, thereby
encouraging religious and social tension within Indian society.

In conclusion, caste differences became increasingly important as they prevented the

nationalist movement from unifying Indians across social divides and resulted in the
conversion from, and protest against the Hindu hierarchy which in turn inspired movements
establishing and promoting Hinduism in order to combat these insecurities.

What is Caste?
 
The questions of what caste is, how it can be defined and what promoted the development of
a caste system in India have been of wide interest to historians. The extent of attention
focussed on caste is a reflection of its importance in defining Indian political, economic and
social life both historically and today. The caste system is an elaborate social and religious
hierarchy which has been created through a wide range of factors including ritual, religion,
culture, wealth, history, ethnicity, politics and is highly evasive and difficult to categorise. Its
influence on the lives of the Indian population also varies significantly depending on region,
time period and to which level of caste an individual may belong.
 
The ambivalence of the caste system is clearly reflected in the literature that has attempted to
explain it. The essentialist outlook of the Orientalists sees caste as an inherent and clear
characteristic of India defining the Indian experience caste and complex social hierarchies
against a background of perceived western rationality and stability. This view is rejected by
other historians, Inden for instance, emphasizes what he calls the role of 'human agencies' in
the making of history; that is, the unbiased study of the dynamics of indigenous social,
economic, religious, and political organizations and structures which are devised and
implemented by the Indians themselves.  
 
The caste system and its role in British rule has been an area of considerable interest for
historians. Some have seen caste as 'a modern phenomenon... the product of an historical
encounter between India and Western Colonial rule' (Dirks) whilst others have seen caste as a
historic and deep rooted system; few modern historians, however, would claim that British
rule did not have a lasting influence upon the crystallisation and continuation of caste in
Indian society today. Susan Bayly makes two important observations on the development of a
more 'caste-conscious' society. Firstly the broader context of social changes that were
underway before the intervention of colonial rule and secondly that the development towards
a more rigid caste framework could not have taken place without active indigenous
participation For Bayly the study of caste must concentrate on the 'orientalism' introduced by
the colonists as well as material and political context underlying its basis. Dirks takes this a
step further stating 'colonialsim made caste what it is today' by means of an 'identifiable
ideological canon' under British dominion.   
 
Caste clearly plays an important role in Indian society a role that can be seen in the daily lives
of may Indians from a range of regions and castes, from the 'untouchables' at the bottom end
of the hierarchy who are excluded from various jobs and are often social outcasts and
Brahmins at the other end of the scale who see elevated social status due to their caste rank.
On a wider political level though it is clear that caste was used deliberately in order to gain
and perpetuate power both on the part of the British administration and Indian collaborators
and intermediaries. What had previously been a relatively fluid social and religious hierarchy
was transformed into a means of political control. Caste, therefore, cannot be defined without
some understanding of preexisting social and religious conditions combined with a detailed
examination of the manipulation and modification, whether it was deliberate or not, of the
hierarchical caste system by the colonial authorities.

Caste is the hierarchical social system of India comprised of the Varna and jati. Varna

is the spiritual hierarchy found in the sacred text of the Vedas which Hindus are born into. It

is comprised in descending rank of Brahman, kshatriya, vaiysha and shruda. Of the twice

born Varna, Brahmans were historically Hindu priests and learned men, kshatriya were
traditionally warriors and vaiysha were traditionally merchants and agriculturists. Shrudas,

the lowest caste are traditionally labourers. Within these broad categories of Varna, are many

sub-castes and these are referred to as jati. Jati are the groupings relating to kinship and

specific occupational heritages. Another social group called the untouchables are considered

too impure to be part of this hierarchy.  They remain outcasts expected to work the most

impure jobs.

Caste had existed in Indian since the sacred texts were written. The sacred texts

describing castes rules and customs were of Vedic origin as well as later dharma texts of

Manu. The idea of Varna with Brahmans at the top came from the Manu texts. Although

caste had existed prior to British occupation, ideas of caste were expanded and sharpened

from the early nineteenth century because the British wanted to gain knowledge about Indian

customs. The British commissioned ethnographic studies as well as the first India wide

census in completed in 1872. The impetus behind the census was the Rebellion of 1857. The

thinking was that Indian subjects could be more effectively managed if they could be ruled

according to categories. This would allow for simplification of the administration and more

effective running of the colony. The British collected cultural data on Indians during the

census’ including caste name and Varna. Such classification proved to be contentious for

Indians who did not want to be valued according to their caste. Caste groups began

petitioning the government for what they believed to be their rightful place in the Varna

categories. This was the beginning of the emergence of caste consciousness initiated by the

British interest in defining caste and caste norms. In the census of 1901, the commissioner

H.H. Risley decided to rank each caste according to social standing. Such methods increased

the level of caste consciousness and more caste interest groups began to form to maintain or

assert a higher social position. From 1901, it could be said that caste politics became more

prevalent as castes began to assert caste identities and rights, and debates about how the
privilege of certain castes was directly related to the dominance and oppression of others.

Thus caste and especially untouchable uplift movements began, at the same time as Congress

was beginning to mobilize peasantry. The poor and oppressed castes opposed the dominance

of the British and the high castes such as the wealthy zamindars who were backed by the

British. Ultimately caste became a divisive force in Indian society, which gave the British the

upper hand. As Congress was supported by Brahmans and moneyed men, it had a

conservative backing who wanted to maintain the hierarchy of caste and caste rules. The

struggle over caste and caste identity persists to this day which owes a large part to the

reciprocal relationship of the British definition and policy on caste and the Indian response to

them.  

What is Caste?

The word caste was first used by the Potugese to describe inherited class status in society, yet
the word is more commonly linked with India. Caste is a complex social system of
occupation, endogamy, culture, social class and political power; however caste should not be
confused with class. Members of the same caste are deemed to be similar in culture, for
example, however members of the same class are not.
The Indian caste system illustrates the social hierarchy and social restrictions in which social
classes are defined by many endogamous traditional groups, known as jatis, or castes. Within
each jati exists a exogamous group known as a gotra, which is the lineage or clan of an
individual.
According to ancient Hindus scriptures, there are four varnas, which refers to the main
division of Hindu society into four social classes; the Brahmans, the Kshattriyas, the
Vaishyas, and the shudras. Varnas are decided upon Guna (tendencies), and Karma (actions).
Christians and Muslims as well as Hindus followed caste practises in India. Caste did not
include all members of society however; the untouchables, who worked in jobs that were
seen as ‘unhealthy’ or ‘polluted’, were not allowed to worship at the same temples members
of castes, or collect water or eat from the same places. If a member of a higher caste came
into contact with an untouchable, either physically or socially, they were said to be corrupted.

The castes did not compose a firm description of the occupation or social status of a group.
Since British society was divided by class, at the time of the Raj, the British attempted to
equate the Indian caste system to fit their own social class system. Caste was seen as an
gauge of occupation, social standing, and intellectual ability. The caste system obtained a
much more rigid structure at the time of the British Raj, when the British started to catalogue
castes during the ten year census, and codify the system under the rule of the Raj. The census
in addition to the British policy of divide and rule were large contributors to the hardening of
caste identities. The British tried to encourage caste privileges and customs in the beginnings
of the East India Company’s rule, but the law courts back in Britain disagreed with the
discrimination against lower castes, such as the untouchables.
Prior to the Birtish, caste ranking differed from one place to another – caste did not comprise
a firm description of the social status or occupation of the group.
In conclusion, caste cannot be confused with class due to the different specifics it includes.
The British changed the caste system in India to their own means, the social and political
significance was hardened.

What is ‘Caste’?

An enormous body of academic scholars have attempted to portray their understanding of

what constitutes ‘caste’ in a variety of ways. Studies by anthropologists and other social
scientists have provided a wealth of information, often conflicting, and published various
theoretical manuscripts that leave a historian with an ambivalent understanding of what it was
to be a ‘caste. Defined by many scholars as the system of an elaborate social hierarchy, based
on a variety of events and rituals that included praying at different temples and drinking from
different water wells, defining what constitutes ‘caste’ has antagonised the same level of
heated academic debate as discussions between race.

Since the 1970s, revisionist scholars have questioned the traditional commentators on caste
accusing the earlier scholars of exaggerating the importance of caste on Indian society.
‘Caste’ is a European word and an attempt to segregate Indian society into a more
controllable system of hierarchy in order to maintain more practical colonial control. In
defining various ‘castes’, some with more arduous qualities than others, Britain was able to
legitimise her role in India as one of helping a hopelessly chaotic India find some sort of
‘democratic’ coherent rule. It seemed that ‘caste’ hardened around British rule because prior
to the formation of ‘colonial authority’ Indian caste divide was indistinguishable. This
suggest that instead of ‘caste’ being an observable and physical phenomenon, one can look at
the influences on ‘caste’, like colonialism, and its ability to transform across various
provinces of India. Susan Bayly goes as far to question the very existence of a pan Indian
caste system, leading to the idea that the caste system was a colonial fabrication so data
collectors could quantify and rank Indian society conveniently.

Furthermore, from the nineteenth century onwards, colonial authority significantly expanded
the division of various social differences in India based around language and ideology that
was suitable for a more stable British rule. The practises of representative government
became more deeply rooted in Indian society because they further enhanced the importance
of political affiliation based around particular collaboration of interests. The assertions of
caste have made it possible for the British to build broad allegiances with the groups of
society with the most similar of interests, promoting their way of life as ‘pure’ in order to
establish an indigenous system of alliance. Yet at the same time, ‘caste’ definitions have
provided the means of excluding or subjugating those who did not conform to the particular
interests of the ruling elite.

Thus, it seems that ‘caste’ is generally a colonial interpretation of the social divisions in
India. Caste can be used as a way of British divide and rule (a term originally used for
colonial activity in Africa but applicable here) so that divisions within Indian society reduce
that threat of a pan Indian anti-colonial movement; something Gandhi tried to address in the
1920s. It does seem however, that a uniform system if caste differentiation was almost
impossible in India because of the sheer scope and diversity of Indian society.

After the Great Rebellion of 1857, the colonial authorities in India realised that they need to
form a fuller understanding of the Indian peoples in order to rule more completely.  This led
to attempts to categorise the indigenous population on first a regional basis and, later, a
national one.  Without fully understanding the Indian principle of what they termed ‘caste’,
the British “engaged in a continuous attempt to define, describe, interpret and categorise”.
[1]  It was this need to categorise that led the British to caste; and this increased the
importance of caste greatly.

One of the reasons why caste became important in the late 19 th century is because it was
made to seem important.  The British related the census to the completion of imperial
projects; and, also, as a guide to which groups could be trusted.  The British “stimulated
[competition] along communal lines; the prizes were government patronage, jobs and
political appointments”.[2]  This may suggest that it was not caste but the rewards on offer
that were more important originally.  This is further suggested by the reaction of the
Kayastha’s of Ajmere to General Order No. 9 of 1833.  This classified the Kayastha’s as “low
caste” and excluded them from military service.  Although the Adjutant-General offered to
remove the word ‘low’ from the classification, “what they really want” stated the Kayastha
Samachar “is that the orders about exclusion from the army should be withdrawn”. [3]  This
would suggest that it was the results of being considered a low caste rather than being of
low caste itself that was the real issue.

Caste differences became important for the British over this period as they sought to
validate their rule; often on racial grounds.  As Dirks argues, “caste was not only the central
means of colonial rule, it was also the dominant reason why colonial governance could
conceive of a limited future”.[4]  This suggests that by emphasising caste differences,
colonialists would be able to impose racial superiority.  This idea is further suggested by
W.R. Cornish, Madras commissioner, who stated that the “caste system had clearly been
invented to prevent the mixture of the white and dark races”.[5]  As a result, the ‘fair’
Brahman caste was considered to be of the highest rank.  This is a clear indication that
Aryan racial difference was used to assert mastery over the indigenous population.

W.C. Plowden might have known that “the whole question of caste is confused” that he
hoped that “no attempt will be made” to use it[6]; that did not stop it from becoming
important in the late Victorian period.  Caste became important as the colonial
administration needed a means to assert their superiority of Indians.  They used caste to
define racial differences and to deicide who was worthy of their trust and privilege.      
What is Caste?
Caste is a Hindu hereditary system into which the Hindu Indian population are divided
into according to different occupations and hierarchies. Brahmans, Ksattriyas, Vaishyas
and Shudras and ‘Untouchables’ or Pariahs are the main groups.  The caste system
divides society but also connects them with three main characteristics; separation,
division and hierarchy. It is very important that Hindus adhere to the customs and
traditions of the caste that they belong in. There is very much a culture of purity and
pollution that separates each caste, parents and families as a whole do not want their
child or a member of their family to marry a person in a lower caste, this is taken
extremely seriously in India when choosing a suitor for a child.

Caste goes against human rights, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it says
that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed
with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of
brotherhood”. The caste system almost promotes the complete opposite of this,
enforcing divisions and a clear hierarchy of peoples.

Untouchables are collectively all the castes that are ranked below the Sudra Varna. The
families of leather workers, butchers and scavengers are all Untouchables. There is a
general belief in India that these ‘Untouchables’ are being punished for sins they
committed in a past life, even if you are simply born into the tradition of your family,
which the majority are. During the colonial period they were seen as a polluting
presence and were made to drink out of their own wells and were segregated to a
separate corner of the community. In some places like Kerala felt that the pollution from
an Untouchable was so severe that his shadow only needed to fall on a Hindu of a higher
caste for him to be ‘polluted’.

During the colonial era the caste system was very much sharpened and defined by the
British; they expanded the system and brought it into government, showing just how
ingrained the system became in India. Caste is particularly difficult to define; some
figures and historians actually claim that ‘caste’ does not actually physically exist. This
has a compelling counter-argument however, Bayly claims that it cannot be said that
there is no such thing as caste, because it embodied such a large part of Indian thought,
action and ideas, that there is absolutely no way that anyone can simply ignore or deny
the caste system’s presence in India. He argues that caste is a “dynamic and
multidimensional reality of Indian life” and that caste is defined by how people perceive
it and how they subsequently respond to their perceptions. This can be applied to the
whole population of Hindus and the colonial state, who had complete power over the
people so whose perceptions of caste were highly significant.
Caste in contemporary terms is viewed as the foundation of Indian identity. Caste originated as a form
of hierarchy inherent in India, used to classify the different forms of stature in society. However, this
was often at a local or regional level, and included a range of spheres without being confined
individually to religion or basic social standing. However, the Colonial state changed this
phenomenon, distorting it into a category of social order used to exclude and justify British
dominance.

Hence, Caste became the central symbol for India, used to portray its distinction from other
cultures. Many historians view Caste as the basis of Indian society, whilst being described by Dirks as
“defining the core of Indian tradition.” Dumont states that hierarchy is the core value behind the Caste
system, providing a natural foundation of Indian society. He goes on to claim that it is a sign of India’s
religiosity and depicts its separation from the West. Dirks however describes Caste as a modern
theory and the product of a historical progression between Indian society and the British colonial
state. Although rejecting the claim that Caste originated from British ideology, Dirks claims that under
Colonial rule the symbol evolved into a single term to organize and explain India’s varied society.
Thus, Britain projected an “ideological canon” onto India to aid Western understanding. Therefore,
Dirks argues, Colonialism created the modern idea of Caste, alongside creating the necessary
conditions for this categorizing phenomenon to take shape.

 The term ‘Caste’ seems to originate from the Portuguese term ‘Casta,’ used to refer to the social
order in Britain. In the early sixteenth century the traveler Duarte separated the Indian social order into
three classes; the first contained the king, lords, knights and other fighting men, whilst the second
consisted of Bramenes, the priests or rulers of houses of worship. Additionally, the Mughal rulers of
India outlined the formal Varna scheme. The Brahmans constituted the first class, then the Ksatriyas,
the Vaisyas and agriculturalists, and finally the sudras and servants. Additionally, all subdivisions from
intermarriages primarily originated from these categories. However, from 1870 Caste was interpreted
as the primary form of social classification. After the mutiny, Britain’s need to understand India socially
as well as economically grew, with a belief that rule would develop using anthropological knowledge
to attempt to understand the diverse communities. Thus, Caste was progressively institutionalized,
becoming involved in the recruitment of soldiers and the implementation of legal codes, whilst
criminalizing entire Caste groups. Hence, Caste gradually became the “modernist apparition of India’s
traditional self.”

 In modern terms, Caste remains dominant despite the more ostentatious conflict between Hindus and
Muslims. Dirks puts forward the notion that Caste continues due to its predominant use throughout
History. Colonialism played a critical role in this, with Bernard Cohn claiming that Britain
“misrecognised and simplified” the concept, placing it within a Western stereotype of Indian society.
The transformation of Caste into a predominately religious system by the colonial state affected
everyday life, alongside the projection of inferiority involved within the British concept. Thus, under
Colonial rule Caste became an increasingly pervasive concept whilst progressively containing
religious elements within its definition. However, Caste was also viewed as a single category among
numerous others, failing to encompass the general sphere of Indian society as it had previously.
Towards the end of Colonial rule Caste once more took on political connotations, used to maintain
order and justify external rule.

 Therefore, Caste originated as a hierarchy, encompassing a range of categories to provide the

foundation of Indian hierarchy. However, Caste was then taken and molded to conform to the Western
perception of Indian society, eventually becoming a reminder of segregation and exclusion and used
to explain and control the diverse Indian community. 

The increased importance attributed to caste difference in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
must be understood within the wider context of changes to India’s political environment. A
significant body of increasingly outdated scholarship argues that the caste identity was an
entirely colonial construct, and the rise of caste consciousness was the direct result of
manipulative government policies, aimed at stemming the growing tide of Indian nationalism.
I agree with historians such as Bayly, in arguing that, although colonial attempts to acquire
knowledge of the Indian population through census data, and the consequent interpretation of
such data through sociological and ethnographic lenses had a significant impact upon the
solidification of caste ‘identity,’ caste is a concept that historically predates the colonial
period.

By focusing on the perspectives of figures such as Risley, Dirks acknowledges, that to

contemporaries of the time, caste was inextricably associated with colonial assumptions about
Indian civilization. Differences between castes were firmly inscribed by the 1871 census
which privileged the essentially Brahmanic notion of caste, which placed Brahmans at the
head of a hierarchical system. This census contributed significantly to the politicization of
caste by mobilising and unifying groups behind attempts petitions and attempts to influence
the manner in which their ‘group’ or ‘community’ was portrayed. Increased preoccupation
with class differences subsequently became a concern of nationalists who were wary that
successful caste mobilisation would result in the British balancing any political concessions
with safeguards for the “depressed” communities. Ghurye, a prominent Indian sociologist
condemned the anti-Brahman movement’s demands for reserved representation for low caste
groups, arguing that such policies were seriously damaging to the nationalist cause and
British responsiveness to these reflected a colonial pattern of nurturing class division.
Although Ghurye’s argument was undeniably influenced by his own Brahman identity, his
argument is given credence by the non-Brahman movement’s extensive collaboration with
the British.

Bayly and Katsur, although similarly acknowledging that the subcontinent did become more
pervasively caste-conscious in the late-colonial period, hold that this increased importance of
caste difference was part of a longer history of intergroup conflict. Bayly refers to instances
in which the projection of British stereotypes did have significant ramifications upon Indian
identity and societal organisation, notably the classification of certain ‘caste groups’ as
suitable for army recruitment and the classification of women by caste in the census, which
led to the trend of ‘upward marriage’ through which men could attempt to acquire a higher-
caste status. Bayly is most convincing however, in her claims that campaigns based on caste-
reform were not solely a product of modernisation but that the movements of alleged “great
caste uplift” actually had roots in honours and status conflicts which had become widespread
since the early nineteenth century. Rhetoric of social reforming activism was, according to
Bayly, just a public face for movements which had no intention of abolishing the caste-
system but sought new honours within the established hierarchy. Katsuri likewise purports
that colonial influence was central construction of Rajput identity in the North-Western
provinces, but that this identity had been formed as a multilayered and complex response to
British influence.

Like the scholarly debate surrounding the rise of communalism during this period, too many
historians have claimed that the increased politicisation of caste was a direct and
straightforward consequence of colonial manipulation. I argue that, although caste
differences, as they came to be understood by early twentieth century, were far from
primordial and intrinsic aspects of Indian society, the system of caste had a complex history,
and had long been used by Indians to pursue social and political agendas.
A NATION IN MAKING? ‘RATIONAL’ REFORM,
‘RELIGIOUS’ REVIVAL AND SWADESHI
NATIONALISM, 1858 TO 1914
Historians who focused on the politics of Western-educated elites had little hesitation in
identifying the beginnings of modern nationalism, narrowly defined, as the most important
historical theme of late nineteenth-century India. The foundation of the Indian National
Congress in 1885 provided a convenient starting point for those with a penchant for
chronological precision. The recent reorientation of modern Indian historiography towards
the subordinate social groups has dramatically altered perspectives and added confusion,
complexity, subtlety and sophistication to the understanding of Indian society in the high
noon of colonialism. Anti-colonialism can be seen now to have been a much more variegated
phenomenon than simply the articulate dissent of educated urban groups imbued with
Western concepts of liberalism and nationalism. The currents and cross-currents of social
reform informed by ‘reason’ and its apparent rejection in movements of religious revival are
being weighed and analysed more carefully. The overlapping nature of the periodization of
resistance is being recognized. The ulgulan (great tumult) of 1899–1900 of the Munda tribe
on the Bengal–Bihar border was, after all, roughly coterminous with the first major attempt
by the educated urban elite to mobilize mass support for the swadeshi movement of 1905–8.
What was novel, however, about the late nineteenth century was the inter-connectedness,
though not necessarily convergence, of social and political developments across regions on
an unprecedented scale. In that general sense it was during this period that the idioms, and
even the irascible idiosyncrasies, of communitarian identities and national ideologies were
sought to be given a semblance of coherence and structure. What needs emphasizing is that
there were multiple and competing narratives informed by religious and linguistic cultural
identities seeking to contribute to the emerging discourse on the Indian nation. If Indian
nationalist thought can at all be construed as a derivative discourse, it was derived from many
different sources – not just the rationalism of

post-enlightenment Europe, but also the rational patriotisms laced with regional affinities and
religious sensibilities that were a major feature of late pre-colonial India.

Some of the impetus to the redefinition of social identities and the quest for social mobility
was provided by the initiatives of the colonial state. The decennial censuses began a process
of enumeration and rank-ordering of castes which spurred a great competition among many
sub-castes by jati for high varna status. Upwardly mobile social groups rewrote their caste
histories and changed their caste names as they climbed the ladder of respectability. For
example, in north Tamil Nadu the Pallis claimed high varna status in 1872 and started calling
themselves Vanniyas; in south Tamil Nadu the Shanans did the same in 1901 and referred to
themselves as Nadars. Between 1872 and 1911, the Kaibartas of west Bengal became
Mahishyas, the Chandals of east Bengal Namasudras, and the Koches of north Bengal
Rajbansi Kshatriyas. The desire for higher social status through census manipulation was
discernible among Muslims as well: butchers started calling themselves Quraishi and weavers
Mumin. Many Muslims claimed foreign descent in order to gain recognition as members of
the ashraf classes in northern India and Bengal.

Although in 1858 the colonial power had announced its intention not to interfere in the
private realm of ‘religion’ and ‘custom’, its policies in the late nineteenth century ensured
that precisely these concerns had to be bandied about in the ‘public’ arenas of the press and
politics. A plethora of communitarian narratives written in ‘modernized’ vernacular
languages, therefore, filled the pages churned out by a burgeoning press and publications
market. In order to gain the attention of a colonial state minded to disburse differential
patronage, publicists needed to dip their pens in the ink of community. A direct public
statement of anti-colonial politics ran the risk of running foul of the laws of sedition
enshrined in a battery of vernacular press acts. The fictive separation of religion and politics
in the colonial stance was breached the moment the British took the momentous decision to
deploy religious enumeration to define ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ communities. Colonial
constitutional initiatives lent religiously based communitarian affiliations a greater supra-
local significance than regional, linguistic, class and sectarian divergences might otherwise
have warranted. The most important step in this regard was the construction of the political
category of ‘Indian Muslim’. Whatever the internal differences among India’s Muslims, this
encouraged them to lay emphasis on their religious identity in putting forward political
claims. Not all of the social stirrings, of course, are reducible to colonial stimulus, even if
they occurred within a broad colonial context of British rule. Brahman social dominance,
bolstered by a British-sponsored neo-Brahmanical ruling ideology, provoked a strong anti-
Brahman or non-Brahman backlash in parts of western and southern India. A prominent
example of such a lower-caste movement is Jyotirao Phule’s

Satyashodhak Samaj (Society for the Quest of Truth), established in 1873 in Maharashtra.
The debates between rival schools of Islam in the Punjab and Bengal also had a measure of
autonomy from colonial manipulations. The redefinition of a more religiously informed
cultural identity among Muslims in the late nineteenth century should not be mistaken,
however, for a kind of ‘communalism’ that has been read back into this period in
retrospectively constructed ‘nationalist’ pasts.

Social reform and religious revival were once seen by historians of the nineteenth century as
stark contradictory processes. Hindu revival in the late nineteenth century was reckoned to be
gaining the upper hand over reformist activities set in motion in the 1820s and 1830s.
Educated Muslim society was deemed to be experiencing a tussle between pro-West
reformers and conservative revivalists. Social trends among Hindus and Muslims alike were
much too nuanced to be captured by the reform–revival, modernity– tradition or indeed our
(Indian) modernity–their (Western) modernity dichotomies. It is true that Brahmo reform was
limited to a small circle and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s support for widow remarriage in the
1850s was the final episode in which reformers prevailed in the public debate in Bengal. The
atmosphere was markedly more conservative during the controversy over the Age of Consent
Act of 1891, which raised the legal age of consent for girls from ten to twelve. The
intrusiveness of the colonial state in seeking to impose Western medicine during the plague
epidemics of the late 1890s elicited an even more virulent protest all over India. This did not
amount to a wholesale rejection of the potential benefits of Western science, but represented
an attitude of resistance to an authoritarian colonial state. The conflation of the colonial state
with Western/modern medicine has led some historians to view modern science primarily in
terms of a grave assault on the body of the colonized and to greatly exaggerate the anti-
modern, religious overtones of resistance against epidemic measures. A more powerful
critique of the colonial state would concentrate on its inaction, if not complete dereliction of
responsibility, in the arena of public health, and a more historically fine-tuned analysis of the
attitudes of colonial subjects would reveal strands of resistance to, as well as selective
appropriation of, new scientific knowledge.

Religious sensibility could in the late nineteenth century be perfectly compatible with a
rational frame of mind, just as rational reform almost invariably sought divine sanction of
some kind. Speaking at the eleventh social conference in Amraoti in 1897, Ranade scored a
debating point against his ‘revivalist’ critics:

When my revivalist friend presses his argument upon me, he has to seek recourse in some
subterfuge which really furnishes no reply to the question – what shall we revive? Shall we
revive the old habits of our people when the most sacred of our caste indulged in all the

abominations as we now understand them of animal food and drink which exhausted every
section of our country’s Zoology and Botany? The men and the Gods of those old days ate
and drank forbidden things to excess in a way no revivalist will now venture to recommend.

What lay at ‘the root of our helplessness’, Ranade declared, was

the sense that we are always intended to remain children, to be subject to outside control, and
never to rise to the dignity of self-control by making our conscience and our reason the
supreme, if not the sole, guide to our conduct…. We are children, no doubt, but the children
of God, and not of man, and the voice of God is the only voice [to] which we are bound to
listen…. With too many of us, a thing is true or false, righteous or sinful, simply because
somebody in the past has said that it is so…. Now the new idea which should take up the
place of this helplessness and dependence is not the idea of a rebellious overthrow of all
authority, but that of freedom responsible to the voice of God in us.

Seven years later in a 1904 article entitled ‘Reform or Revival’, Lala Lajpat Rai sought to
argue that, while the reformers wanted reform on ‘rational’ lines, the revivalists wanted
reform on ‘national’ lines. Attempting to turn Ranade’s argument on its head, Lajpat Rai
wrote:

Cannot a revivalist, arguing in the same strain, ask the reformers into what they wish to
reform us? Whether they want us to be reformed on the pattern of the English or the French?
Whether they want us to accept the divorce laws of Christian society or the temporary
marriages that are now so much in favour in France or America? Whether they want to make
men of our women by putting them into those avocations for which nature never meant them?
… Whether they want to reform us into Sunday drinkers of brandy and promiscuous eaters of
beef? In short, whether they want to revolutionize our society by an outlandish imitation of
European customs and manners and an undiminished adoption of European vice?

By this time Ranade was dead and he could not reply that there need be no necessary
contradiction between the rational and the national.

In late nineteenth-century Maharashtra, Hindu ‘revival’ centred on Poona and it had a clear
and strong Brahmanical content. Yet it was also from its Maharashtra base that Ranade’s
Social Conference sought to make a case for reform rather than revival. Lajpat Rai was a
legator of the Arya

Samaj (Aryan Society) led by Dayanand Saraswati which had, in late nineteenth-century
Punjab and western U.P., sought to include reformist postures on issues such as child
marriage, widow remarriage, idolatry, travel overseas and caste – within a framework of the
assertion of Hindu supremacy over other religious faiths. If Hindu regeneration in
Maharashtra had a Brahmanical flavour and the variant in Punjab had supremacist overtones,
Hindu ‘revival’ in Bengal certainly had its ambiguities. Ramakrishna Paramhansa, a priest in
a Kali temple north of Calcutta, who cast an almost hypnotic spell over the Calcutta
intelligentsia (including staunch ‘rationalists’), clearly posed an antithesis to the Western
concept of rationality. But his disciple Swami Vivekananda, who gained international fame,
preached the twin messages of self-strengthening and social service. He told young men that
it was more important to play football than to pray and predicted a millennium in which the
poor, the downtrodden and the Shudra would come into their own. Vivekananda seemed to
have little difficulty in combining reason with his vision of nation and religion. He derided
the conservative opponents of the Age of Consent Bill and commented on northern Indian
protectors of the sacred mother cow – ‘like mother, like son’. Vivekananda was also
generally respectful towards other religious faiths, including Islam, and took a clear stand
against what he called religiously inspired ‘fanaticism’. So there was in the late nineteenth
century a great deal of interplay and overlap between the strands of reform and revival,
whose meanings varied by region.

A sharply defined fault-line between tradition and modernity as well as Indian and European
modernity makes it impossible to take full account of the contestations that animated the
creative efforts to fashion a vibrant culture and politics of anti-colonial modernity. These
efforts were not just staked on claims of cultural exclusivity or difference but also on
imaginative cultural borrowings and intellectual adaptations that consciously transgressed the
frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’. A difference-seeking distortion has crept into studies, such
as those of Partha Chatterjee, which privilege a particular strand of ‘our’ modernity as the
tradition of social and historical thinking on modernism and nationalism. Bankim
Chattopadhyay, the Bengali Hindu novelist of the late nineteenth century, has been seen as an
exemplar on this view of modernist, nationalist thought at its ‘moment of departure’. Yet
even within the charmed circle of the Bengali Hindu middle-class intelligentsia there were
many different responses to the challenge of Western modernity. Rationalism and humanism
were drawn upon by men like Rabindranath Tagore from both India’s pre-colonial and
Europe’s post-enlightenment intellectual traditions in projects of internal, social regeneration
and reform which, on the whole, strengthened the ability to contest Western colonial power in
the arenas of politics and the state. In its attitude to European modernity the first radical
intellectual challenge to moderate nationalism was remarkably discriminating, judicious and

balanced. Aurobindo Ghose’s remarks on this point in his sixth essay ‘New Lamps for Old,’
published 4 December, 1893, bears quoting at some length:

No one will deny, – no one at least in that considerable class to whose address my present
remarks are directed, – that for us, and even for those of us who have a strong affection for
original oriental things and believe that there is in them a great deal that is beautiful, a great
deal that is serviceable, a great deal that is worth keeping, the most important objective is and
must inevitably be the admission into India of Occidental ideas, methods and culture: even if
we are ambitious to conserve what is sound and beneficial in our indigenous civilization, we
can only do so by assisting very largely the influx of Occidentalism. But at the same time we
have a perfect right to insist, and every sagacious man will take pains to insist, that the
process of introduction shall not be as hitherto rash and ignorant, that it shall be judicious,
discriminating. We are to have what the West can give us, because what the West can give us
is just the thing and the only thing that will rescue us from our present appalling condition of
intellectual and moral decay, but we are not to take it haphazard and in a lump; rather we
shall find it expedient to select the very best that is thought and known in Europe, and to
import even that with the changes and reservations which our diverse conditions may be
found to dictate. Otherwise instead of a simple ameliorating influence, we shall have chaos
annexed to chaos, the vices and calamities of the West superimposed on the vices and
calamities of the East.

To put it in another way, colonized intellectuals were clearly seeking alternative routes of
escape from the oppressive present, not all of which lay through creating illusions about our
past and denouncing their modernity.

An extension of the scope of enquiry to Muslim ashraf classes of northern India immediately
reveals more intellectual variations on the theme of colonial and anti-colonial modernity. The
variety of the Muslim elite’s responses to British colonialism and Western modernity cannot
be captured within the facile distinctions between ‘liberals’ and ‘traditionalists’ or
‘modernists’ or ‘anti-modernists’. A reform-oriented current within Indian Islam was led by
Saiyid Ahmed Khan, who sought to alter British conceptions about inherent Muslim
disloyalty and urged his co-religionists to accept Western education but not necessarily all its
ideals. It was religious narrow-mindedness which, according to him, had prevented Muslims
from taking advantage of the new education. In 1875 he established the Aligarh Anglo-
Muhammadan Oriental College which attracted the sons of Muslim landlords of northern
India and drew British patronage. Yet, while making some compromises with the British, the
Aligarh movement, initiated by

Saiyid Ahmed, still jealously guarded against intrusions into what was termed custom as well
as personal law. Many affluent Muslims in north India and Bengal challenged the British
attempt to draw a distinction between legal public waqfs (charitable institutions) and illegal
private ones established for the benefit of family members. Since charity begins at home, they
saw no reason why they should be debarred from preventing the fragmentation of property
through recourse to the time-honoured loophole in Islamic inheritance laws. After all, in the
Punjab it was customary law rather than the Islamic sharia which decided matters related to
inheritance. Saiyid Ahmed’s rational approach to Islamic theology and law nevertheless
earned him the hostility of the ulema bunched in the theological seminaries at Deoband and,
less vociferously, Faranghi Mahal in Lucknow.

The ulema were not alone in opposing Saiyid Ahmed’s new-fangled views. His ardent
promotion of Western knowledge and culture as well as loyalty to the raj drew acerbic
comments from Muslims attached to their societal moorings and the ideal of a universal
Muslim ummah. The anti-Aligarh school was given a fillip by the great preacher of Islamic
universalism Jamaluddin al-Afghani, who lived in Hyderabad and Calcutta between 1879 and
1882. In India al-Afghani tempered his adherence to the political principles of Islamic
universalism with calls for Hindu–Muslim unity against British colonialism. The poet Akbar
Allahabadi, in his satirical verses, mercilessly ridiculed Saiyid Ahmad Khan and his
associates for their shallow imitation of Western culture:
The venerable leaders of the nation had determined Not to keep scholars and worshipers at a
disadvantage Religion will progress day by day Aligarh College is London’s mosque

But Akbar Allahabadi was equally derisive towards obscurantist maulvis. Maulana Shibli
Numani, an associate of Saiyid Ahmed Khan, endorsed the Aligarh line that Indian Muslims
were British subjects and not bound by religion or Islamic history to submit to the dictates of
the Ottoman Khilafat. Yet on matters closer to home, Shibli’s Islamic sentiments led him to
take political paths different from those charted by Saiyid Ahmed Khan. By 1895 he was
publicly opposing Saiyid Ahmed Khan’s policy of Muslim non-participation in the Indian
National Congress. So, in the 1890s, although there were serious instances of Hindu–Muslim
conflict – for instance, over the cow protection issue, the question of Hindi versus Urdu, and
the nature of electoral representation in much of northern India and beyond – intra-
communitarian debates, tensions and contradictions were almost quite as important as inter-
communitarian ones.

Deepening and widening the historical perspective to include subalternity along lines of
gender and class makes the cognitive map of colonial and

anti-colonial modernity even richer and more complex. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s early
twentieth-century tract, Sultana’s Dream, in which all the men were put in purdah, is perhaps
an extreme but revealing example of male dominance without hegemony. In any case, an
overemphasis on the discourses of elite men and the ‘modern’ political associations formed
by them would provide a very incomplete picture of the multifaceted contestations of the
hubris of colonial modernity. Anti-colonial resistance in the late nineteenth century certainly
took many forms. Civilian insurrections of the sort noted in the early nineteenth century were
less frequent but not uncommon. A multiclass rural revolt took place in Maharashtra in 1879.
Tenants’ protests against landlords took on a religious flavour among the Mappillas of
Malabar. The new context of colonial tenancy law appeared to rob peasant resistance in
Bengal of its communitarian character and injected a legalistic and quasi-class dimension, as
in the anti-rent Pabna agrarian movements of the 1870s. The collapse of the cotton boom
created the conditions for the Deccan riots of the mid-1870s, in which Marwari moneylenders
from the north were prime targets. No-revenue campaigns were launched in Assam and
Maharashtra in the 1890s. Where forests met the plains in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, central India,
Bengal and Bihar, tribes revolted against the incursions of foreigners, white and brown. The
most serious millenarian tribal uprising occurred in eastern India, led by Birsa Munda in
1899–1900. Subaltern anti-colonialism predated the attempts

by an urban elite to engage in the politics of ‘mass mobilization’ against British rule.

In the cities at this time, the intelligentsia were articulating their disaffection in organized
fashion and the small class of industrial labour made their early protests in a combination of
class and communitarian modes brought from the rural areas. Educated Indians had been
forming political associations at the regional level since the 1870s. The more prominent
among these were the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (1870), the Indian Association (in Bengal,
1876), the Madras Mahajana Sabha (1884) and the Bombay Presidency Association (1885).
After coming together at a couple of national conferences, these city-based professionals
were able to set up a permanent organization – the Indian National Congress – in 1885. The
first annual session of the Congress was attended by seventy-three self-appointed delegates.
The political character and role of the early spokesmen of Indian nationalism varied
according to region. In Bengal the professionals who formed the Indian Association had
broken ranks with rentier landlords who had their own British Indian Association since 1851.
The fact of European dominance of commerce and industry in eastern India also facilitated a
certain autonomy and radical disposition of the Bengali intelligentsia. Elsewhere, the vakils
(lawyers) who played such a dominant role in early nationalist organizations were no more
than publicists tied to the interests of the shetias (commercial men) in Bombay or the raises
(local notables) in Allahabad.

The early leadership of the Indian National Congress was moderate in its methods and aims.
The preferred method was the constitutional way of prayers and petitions. The chief political
aims were expansion of the elective principle in the legislative councils and greater
Indianization of the administration. On the economic front, nationalist writers and spokesmen
developed a powerful critique of the whole gamut of colonial policies – the high land-revenue
demand contributing to famines, the drain of wealth leading to general impoverishment and
the use of indentured labour on plantations in India and abroad resulting in degradation and
oppression. There were persistent calls for cutbacks in military expenditure and greater
opportunities for elected Indians to discuss the government budget. The successes of the
moderate Congress in extracting concessions from the British were modest at best. From the
mid-1890s a new generation of nationalists began to criticize the mendicancy of the moderate
leaders and called for a bolder approach. The intellectual critique of moderation gathered
momentum in Bengal from 1893, took concrete form in Tilak’s Ganapati festivals from 1894,
no-revenue campaigns and protest against the countervailing excise duty on Indian cotton in
1896, and then dramatically announced itself with the first terrorist assassination of two
British officials – including Walter Rand, the hated plague commissioner in Poona – by the
Chapekar brothers in 1897. But it was Curzon’s aggressive imperialism

between 1899 and 1905 which provided fuel to the ‘extremist’ strands of Indian resistance in
the first decade of the twentieth century.

Curzon tried to roll back some of the concessions granted to educated Indians by his
predecessors in the fields of education and local government. He passed laws restricting the
autonomy of universities from officialdom and reducing non-official Indian representation on
municipalities. By far his most controversial decision was to partition the province of Bengal
in 1905. Although sought to be justified on grounds of administrative efficiency, the partition
was clearly a political move. As Curzon’s home secretary put it, ‘Bengal united is a power;
Bengal divided would pull in different ways … one of our main objects is to split up and
thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule’. More insidious was the attempt to pit
Muslim against Hindu by claiming that the creation of a separate Muslim-majority province
in eastern Bengal with Dhaka as its capital would almost resurrect the lost glories of the
Mughal empire. Curzon received support from some Muslim landlords, particularly Nawab
Salimullah of Dhaka, on whose estate the Muslim League was eventually born in December
1906. Two months before that, in October 1906, a deputation of Muslim landlords from
northern India had called on Curzon’s successor, Minto, and, with some prompting, requested
separate electorates for Muslims and representation in proportion to their social and political
importance rather than numbers alone. The partition was an affront to most educated Bengali
students and professionals, Hindu and Muslim alike, who were proud of their common
language and culture. Even the moderate Surendranath Banerji vowed to ‘unsettle’ what
Curzon claimed to be the ‘settled fact’ of partition. Rabindranath Tagore gave poetic
expression to Bengali determination:

Bidhir bandhan katbe tumi?

 Emni shaktiman, tumi emni shaktiman!
(You will cut the bond decreed by Providence?
you are so powerful, are you!)

Resistance to partition signalled the beginning of the swadeshi movement. Although Bengal
was the main centre of agitation, the reverberations were felt in other parts of India. The
Indian National Congress took up the cause and the sophisticated moderate leader from
Bombay, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, stated in flattery of the Bengalis: ‘What Bengal thinks
today, India thinks tomorrow’. The swadeshi movement of 1905–8 has often been seen as the
initial coming together and the subsequent parting of ways of the moderate and extremist
nationalists. It would be more accurate to identify, as Sumit Sarkar has done, at least four
strands within the nationalist movement in this period. First, the old moderates who believed
in constitutional methods but were deeply offended by Curzon’s aggressive measures (men
such as Surendranath Banerji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale). Second, the

leaders of society who until 1905 had called for a process of self-strengthening or atmashakti
before engaging in a head-on collision with the British raj. Rabindranath Tagore is a good
example of this legion. Third, a new generation of assertive leaders who propounded the
doctrine of passive resistance which was to include relentless boycott of British goods and
institutions but also violence if repression became intolerable. Among the main votaries of
this form of political extremism were Aurobindo Ghose, Lala Lajpat Rai, Balawantrao
Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal, the last three forming a popular troika of Lal, Bal
and Pal. Finally, there were small bands of angry and impatient young men, and some women
too, who took to the cult of the bomb believing revolutionary terror to be the only language
that the colonial masters would understand.

In the early stages of the swadeshi movement, the political extremists and the believers in
atmashakti came to the forefront with their programme of boycott and national education.
Moderate constitutionalists were stampeded into accepting not only new methods of struggle
but also a redefined goal of swaraj, which the passive resisters interpreted as something close
to full independence. During 1905–6 boycott of British cotton textiles and

other consumer goods was quite effective. There was nearly a 25 per cent fall in the quantity
of cotton piece-goods imported in the first year of the agitation. The bonfires of cotton cloth
and the shunning of official courts and educational institutions foreshadowed some of the
methods of mass agitation to be used more widely later, in the Gandhian era. The cry ‘Bande
Mataram’ was used as the main nationalist slogan. As Aurobindo Ghose argued in 1907, it
was only when ‘the Mother had revealed herself’ that ‘the patriotism that work[ed] miracles
and save[d] a doomed nation [wa]s born’. He credited Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay with
having caught the first modern glimpse of this grand spectacle: ‘It was thirty-two years ago
that Bankim wrote his great song and few listened; but in a sudden moment of awakening
from long delusions the people of Bengal looked round for the truth and in a fated moment
somebody sang Bande Mataram. The mantra had been given’.

Bankim’s hymn to the Mother, originally written and printed in 1875 as a filler for a blank
page in his journal Bangadarshan (Vision/Philosophy of Bengal), had a chequered and
controversial career in the service of the nationalist movement:

Bande mataram,
sujalaang suphalaang, malayaja sheetalang,
 shasya shyamalaang mataram…
saptakotikantha-kalakala-ninada-karale,
dwisaptakotibhujaidhritakharakarabale,
abala keno ma eto bale!
Bahubaladhaarineeng, namami taarineeng,
ripudalabaarineeng mataram.
(I bow to you, Mother,
well-watered, well-fruited,
breeze cool, crop green,
the Mother!
Seven crore voices in your clamorous chant,
twice seven crore hands holding aloft mighty scimitars,
Who says, Mother, you are weak?
Repository of many strengths,
scourge of the enemy’s army, the Mother!)

The magic number of seven crore (seventy million) refers, of course, to Bengalis and the
Mother whom Bankim had in mind in 1875, even though there is no specific mention, is
Bangamata or Mother Bengal. It might have been less controversial and more universally
acceptable if the last verse did not go on to equate the mother country with the mother
goddess and, more importantly, the song had not been inserted in 1882 into Bankim
Chattopadhyay’s novel Ananda Math which dripped with anti-Muslim prejudice.

In rendering their homage to the mother country, the political extremists decided in 1905 to
avoid violence. The decision was tactical, not ideological. With the Indian populace totally
disarmed, Aurobindo pointed out that the use of violence would be unwise because it carried
the battle on to a ground where Indians were comparatively weak from a ground where they
were strong. Yet there were points of weakness even in the strategy of boycott. Educated
professionals, students and small sections of the working class in Calcutta and Bombay were
the main supporters of swadeshi. Boycott of foreign goods also enabled something of a
revival of artisanal crafts and industries, but indigenous mill owners in Bombay and
Ahmedabad took the opportunity to hike up prices and make unconscionable profits.
Swadeshi soon proved to be an expensive indulgence for the common Bengali peasant. There
were some outbreaks of violence in east Bengal in which Muslim peasants attacked Hindu
landlords, moneylenders and traders. Rabindranath Tagore captured the changing mood. In
1905 he had composed songs celebrating the unity of Bengalis responding to the mother’s
call. His novel Ghare Baire (Home and the World) reflected the sombre spirit of 1908, by
which time the coercive methods of swadeshi agitators had alienated the Muslim poor. When
the masses refused to rise in rebellion, the young swadeshi nationalists fell back on individual
terror.

Outside Bengal political extremism took root in Punjab, Maharashtra and parts of Madras
presidency. In Punjab, the British decision to put up canal-water rates provoked much peasant
discontent in 1906–7. In Maharashtra, extremists under Tilak’s leadership used religious
symbolism and Maratha folklore to enthuse the richer peasantry in the interior and workers in
the textile mills. In Madras, there was much sympathy for the Bengali cause and a spurt in
swadeshi industry in the extreme south of the province. But by and large the rest of India
remained quiescent. In 1907 the extremists found themselves on the defensive at the annual
session of the Congress at Surat, and left the meeting after hurling shoes at the moderates.
The latter had by now reneged on the resolutions on boycott and swaraj, declaring ‘steady
reform of the existing system of administration’ to be their goal. They had correctly
anticipated that constitutional concessions were on the anvil. In fact the Morley–Minto
reforms had the avowed objective of rallying the moderates. As the extremist leadership was
cast into prison, or sent into exile, the liberal secretary of state, Morley, could only ruefully
confess that he was becoming ‘an accomplice in Cossack rule’. Tilak was sent off to spend
six years in a Burmese prison. But the extremists won a pyrrhic victory. The British went
back on the promises made to their Muslim allies and annulled the partition of Bengal in
1911. This embarrassed the loyalist Muslims and cleared the way for the capture of the
Muslim League by nationalist professionals in 1912–13. The British also decided to remove
their capital from the troublesome province of Bengal.

As Viceroy Hardinge made a ceremonial entry on an elephant into Delhi in 1912, he was
greeted with a Bengali revolutionary’s bomb.

The swadeshi era was distinguished by a bold redefinition of nationalist aims and strategies
as well as an accompanying cultural awakening. Making a distinction between the
‘problematic’ and the ‘thematic’ of nationalist thought, Partha Chatterjee in his book
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World has suggested that it constituted a ‘different’ but
‘dominated’ or derivative discourse. In a more recent work, The Nation and its Fragments, he
draws a dichotomy between the inner, spiritual and outer, material domain. Arguing that anti-
colonial nationalism ‘creates its own domain of sovereignty’ in the former, he asserts that the
history of nationalism as a political movement by focusing on ‘the material domain of the
state’ has ‘no option but to choose its forms from the gallery of “models” offered by
European and American nation-states: “difference” is not a viable criterion in the domain of
the material’. If we are to unravel the contextual and contestatory dimensions of modernity
and of one of its key signs – nationalism – we need to disturb both binaries, the one
separating the inner, spiritual from the outer, material domain and the other about the ‘two
intellectual arenas of modernity’ – ‘the Western claiming to be the universal and the national
aspiring to be different’. Despite a measure of derivation in nationalist thought at the
founding moment of modernity in the so-called material domain of the state, there was a
powerful critique as well of modular forms supplied by the West. More important, the
national or anti-colonial definitions of modernity aspired to be both different and universal.
The claim to difference in the realm of the state was, for instance, articulated by Aurobindo
Ghose when he wrote that political ‘unification … ought not to be secured at the expense of
the free life of the regional peoples or of the communal liberties and not therefore by … a
rigidly unitarian imperial state’. The ‘lifeless attempt’ to ‘reproduce with a servile fidelity the
ideals and forms of the West’ was, in his view, ‘no true indication of the political mind and
genius of the Indian people.’ The claim to universality was perhaps most eloquently stated in
the works of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s writings on nationalism and modernity
disdainfully rejected European forms of the nation-state without surrendering an anti-colonial
intellectual position, while at the same time advocating and accepting universalist ideals of
reason and humanism. A claim to difference and universality had been explicitly articulated
by Bipin Chandra Pal in the inaugural issue of the English weekly New India on 12 August,
1901:

New India can, therefore, no more ignore the ancient spiritual treasures of the Hindus, than
the higher elements of Muhammadan culture, or the intellectual and moral ideals of modern
European civilization. Its standpoint is intensely national in spirit, breathing the deepest
veneration for the spiritual, moral and intellectual
achievements of Indian civilisation, and distinctly universal, in aspiration, reaching out to all
that is noblest and loveliest in Western culture.

Steering a creative path between an unthinking eulogy of European ‘enlightenment’ and an

undiscriminating assault on the ‘modern’, the more imaginative strands of anti-colonial
modernity fashioned a cultural and political space where there was no necessary contradiction
between nationality and human community.

On the key questions of relations between the overarching Indian nation on the one hand and
religious communities and linguistic regions on the other, anti-colonial thought and politics
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left contradictory legacies. The anti-
colonialism of both Hindus and Muslims was influenced in this period by their religious
sensibilities. But since the colonial state’s scheme of enumeration had transformed one into
the ‘majority’ and the other into the ‘minority’ community, it became easier for Hindu
religious symbolisms and communitarian interests to be subsumed within the emerging
discourse on the Indian nation. Even a Saiyid Ahmed Khan, his loyalism notwithstanding,
was more opposed to majoritarianism of the Congress variety than the idea of an Indian
nation. Class and regional affiliations shaped his political postures more than religion. Others
more inclined to making common cause with the Congress and seeking location within the
construct of the Indian nation found it increasingly difficult to be accepted as both Muslim
communitarians and Indian nationalists. The granting of ‘communal’ electorates in 1909
compounded the problem even further. As Maulana Mohamed Ali complained to his
Congress colleagues in 1912, the educated Hindu ‘communal patriot’ had turned Hinduism
into an effective symbol of mass mobilization and Indian ‘nationality’, but ‘refuse[d] to give
quarter to the Muslim unless the latter quietly shuffles off his individuality and becomes
completely Hinduized’.

If religiously based notions of majority and minority were already beginning to pose
problems for a unified Indian nationalism, as yet there appeared to be little contradiction
between Bengali or Tamil linguistic communities or ‘nations’ on the one hand and a broader
diffuse Indian ‘nation’ on the other. The poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Subrahmanian
Bharati could be equally harnessed in the service of regional patriotisms and all-India
nationalism, and indeed forged a connection between the two. Abanindranath Tagore’s
painting ‘Bharatamata’ was originally conceived as Mother Bengal and then ungrudgingly
offered in the service of a wider Indian nation. Few, if any, of the nationalist ideologues were
thinking at this stage of the acquisition of power in a centralized nation-state. The swadeshi
nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal pointed out that the legendary king Bharata had been described
in ancient texts as rajchakravarti. Pal took some pains

o explain that the ‘literal meaning of the term is not emperor, but only a king “established at
the centre of a circle of kings.” King Bharata was a great prince of this order.’ His position
was ‘not that of the administrative head of any large and centralised government, but only
that of the recognized and respected centre’, which was the ‘general character’ of all great
princes in ancient times. Under Muslim rule, according to Pal, Indian unity, ‘always more or
less of a federal type’, became ‘still more pronouncedly so’. He left his readers in little doubt
about the type of state he would prefer once swaraj was won. India’s two most celebrated
poet–philosophers, Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal, writing in Bengali and Urdu
respectively, had produced in 1904 and 1905 patriotic narrations of linguistic and territorial
nations of effervescent literary quality. But what they saw of the swadeshi movement in
Bengal – communitarian bigotry in Punjab as well as the European rivalries of a murderous
sort – turned both into powerful critics of the Western model of the territorial nation-state.
They were prepared to be patriots, not nationalists.

At the height of the swadeshi movement, Aurobindo Ghose had written warmly about
national ego, but he also saw nationalist India preserving itself in a kind of cosmopolitanism,
somewhat as the individual preserves itself in the family, the family in the class, the class in
the nation, not destroying itself needlessly but recognizing the larger interest. The relatively
comfortable coexistence of a multiplicity of identities – linguistic, regional, religious,
national and international – would not be left undisturbed in subsequent decades.