Continuing with the thread on Susan Bayly. During the 18th and 19th Century CE, the British made heavy revenue demands. It made sense for many traders and commodity producers to try and protect their skills and credit networks as 'respectable men'.

For many, who were facing the insecurity of rural life at that time, were receptive to the teachings of the devotional orders which exalted the qualities of industry, sobriety and thrift.

And this point is important. "The colonial state Brahminised" Indian society through its data collection and law making. The British, through their dealings with client kings and encounters with both secular and priestly Brahmins, began to have a far reaching impact on...

people's experience with caste. Bayly argues that "Even well into the 1820s, India was not a 'homogenous' caste society." However, it did seem that Jati and Varna titles were more widespread at this time.

For the British, in order to rule India effectively, information was important. They were invested in a process of essentialism. The British view was that "Indians are slaves to rigid, Brahmin centred values." This was basically the Orientalist view that Indians were...

unvirile, irrational and socially atomised, thus unfit for self-governance. Another aspect of British view of caste was it's interaction with race. This is quite well-known. For Indians, especially in the 19th century CE, the issue of whether caste was virtuous or...

destructive was raised indirectly in the works produced in both the Sanskrit and vernacular languages. Many were produced by Pandits themselves.

Now from another angle. From the 1820s-End of 19th Century CE, the colonial state acquired substantial powers of coercion and surveillance. There was:
1. Growth in population
2. Quest for revenues
3. Combined priorities for commerce and military security

Forests were felled and their inhabitants disarmed and subordinated. By mid 19 century, new roads, ports and railways nourished the increasing commercialisation of agriculture and commodity production.

For Indians:
Caste categories came to be used in two distinctive ways.
1. A kind of defensive shorthand
2. A reflection of unsecured gains and losses.
Bayly asks: Why did exclusive boundaries of caste harden?
In the colonial period, Jati and Varna ideals were used to...

dominate by insecure rural elites struggling to meet authority over tenants. Also, in the 19th Century CE, growing number of patricians and their imitators tried to change their relationships with the large scale labouring and petty cultivating groups who lived amidst them.

They exalted them as Jajmans and claimed the right to demand servitude from them as subordinated kamins. Much of this was done coercively, and in ways that introduced strict norms of hierarchy and purity-pollution consciousness.

Now, here we reach an interesting point. Historically, most Indian regions contained small but distinctive service castes like scavengers, barbers, washermen. But there was another group of people, the dependent labourers. This point is important.

1. Comparatively small groups of 'unclean' specialists.
2. Very much larger group of dependent labourers.
Bayly says the second group included Mahar and Cha__r in the North. In the South, these were Paraiyan, Mala, Holeya, Cheruma...

The ritual subordination of the second group is in relatively recent time. There were many areas where conventions of caste-specific purity-pollution were widely embraced in the recent times, especially in the 17th and 18th Century CE as many aspiring Kshatriyas became

more formally Jati and Varna conscious. A lot of untouchability is relatively modern in origin, she argues.
END
Will do one more thread on 20th Century.