False Economy - Alan Beattie [144]
Given its ancient provenance, the classification of the Indian population by caste obviously predated British imperial rule. So, in fact, did the exploitation of those divisions for administrative purposes. The Muslim Moghul emperors who ruled India until the eighteenth century developed the technique of grading subjects by skin color: fair, medium (or "wheaten"), and dark. (These prejudices also endure in modern matchmaking.) After the Moghul empire declined, the rise of many smaller Hindu kingdoms to fill the vacuum increased the importance of caste distinctions. As we have seen, the fact that Brahmins had a monopoly on priesthood, and were far more likely to be literate, meant they were much in demand as clerics and bureaucrats. Even in the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, in the north of modern India, Brahmins got preferment because of the ruler's need to record and administer his realm. Someone, after all, had to collect his taxes.
But the hold of caste over Indian society increased under the British, especially after the crown took over in direct rule in 1857. The East India Company, as we have seen, preferred to operate through manipulating and co-opting local rulers rather than outright military occupation. Dividing and ruling required relatively detailed knowledge of Indian societies to work out where to divide and how to rule.
In particular, the Brits found it useful to organize the military along caste and sometimes religious lines. Having been impressed by the fighting ability of the Sikhs when defeating the Sikh kingdom in the 1840s, the colonists promptly recruited them into the imperial army. They designated the Sikhs a "martial race" and formed an all-Sikh regiment. (Some Hindu families would bring their eldest son up as a Sikh to foster his military career.) A regiment was also reserved for the Rajputs, a subgroup of the Kshatriya caste.
Increasingly detailed classified tables in the regular colonial census reported caste affiliations, standardized and cross-referenced along principles derived from zoology and botany. More and more, these classifications incorporated ethnic divisions. To its credit, the East India Company itself was not especially obsessed with ethnicity or the purity of bloodlines. It tolerated and even encouraged its own white officials to marry local girls, one of the best-known ways of forging political and business connections. (As the old saying goes, the son-in-law also rises.) Gradually, however, and chiefly after 1857, unpleasant Victorian notions of racial differentiation crept in. Caste distinctions became ossified with the application of the bogus but highly popular nineteenth-century pseudo-science of anthropometry, the biological classification of race.
H. H. Risley, one of the British empire's main propagators of this poisonous nonsense, divided India into seven races, from the darker, "primitive" Dravidians in the south to the paler, "advanced" Indo-Aryans in the north. According to Risley, the social status of each group was inversely proportional to the relative width of their noses. (In Africa, similar tests helped to separate Hutus from Tutsis in Rwanda, and we all know how well that turned out.)
By the early twentieth century, caste was sufficiently embedded in Indian society to infect the political campaign for independence from the British empire. True, many independence activists rejected the whole concept out of hand as a tool of colonialism. The campaigning