[.ca] Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (ISBN 0691088950)

Excellent !:
The british did not invent caste but they exploited it to the hilt to divide the pluralistic Indian society. The thesis of the book matters. The thought provoking nature of the book is more valuable than its contents. Columbia and Chicago are doing a valuable job of undoing or atleast explaining the british (and german) rape on indian history. A thinking that an objective history can be written, like conducting a laboratory experiment where an observer is independent of the thing that is observed, is a major fallacy . No more attacks of scientific methods on humanities please!

A poor showing:
Well-read in similar works such as B.S. Cohn, Spivak, et. al., Dirks's is the least tenable, and a farcical display of scholarship. Although he argues that 'the British did not invent caste,' after reading the 315 pages one might actually think they did. Dirks seems to ignore the roles of Brahmanic institutions and hegemony and the role of 'collaboration' and 'capitalist development,' (the latter which he seems to dismiss outright) and one might actually conclude that India was, in the pre-British era, caste-less! Embarrisingly enough, he still refers (however naively) to the uprising of 1857 as the 'Great Rebellion.' The rhetoric and culture of domination must be put behind, if any of are to write unbiased (or a close approximation thereto) history. I wonder how long it will take for Columbia and Chicago to realise this.

Some Major Concerns:
A lucid and though provoking work, Castes of Mind would be close to THE authoritative work on the construction of caste. However the boldness of Dirks's argument, mainly that British rule is responsible for the state of caste today, raises some serious questions, which are not easily answered. Firstly, the book is heavily focused on Southern India, which raises the question of how did this play out in the North, and with whom. The colonial state was not the only actor, and the role of Christian Missionaries in the construction of caste is instructive: no matter how hard they tried to rid the Gangetic plain of caste, it was met with no avail. Secondly, his use of archival material is rather concerning. One one chapter relies heavily on archival material, whlst the remainder is dangerously rhetorical. And lastly, the epilogue raises serious concerns regarding similar scholarship and other interpretations on colonial rule in India. Dirks dismisses offhand essentially any work which might be remotely classified as 'neo-colonial', although he does not seem to quite understand what this concept means. What is most dangerous however is that Dirks dangerously approaches a moral judgement on the British Raj, which is a taboo in the historical profession.