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Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Nicholas B. Dirks. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 372 pp.
In Castes of Mind, Nicholas Dirks suggests that caste, a central social feature of India, took its present shape in the colonial encounter. He goes on to show how that happened, and what the consequences have been for postcolonial India and for scholarship on caste. The argument is clear and important. It is also, inevitably, prickling with controversy.
The scholarly work on which Castes of Mind is based has been overtaken by recent nuanced research by historians. This work sometimes straddles precolonial and colonial periods with ease and reports on the intermingling of language, caste, and gender politics in the formation of Indian middle classes and new rural social hierarchies. At the same time, anthropologists have noted the blurred boundaries between fluid caste and tribe identities well into the 20th century. In some cases, particularly in what are now prominent adivasi (tribal) homelands like Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, the new anthropological evidence suggests that identity conflicts around caste, tribe, and notions of "indigenous distinction" became more pronounced in the period after the 1921 and 1931 censuses. In the light of such...