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When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

Many have told of the East India Company's extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company's exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company's corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization.

Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, it has been virtually impossible to study the colonial world without explicit or implicit reference to Edward Said's charge that the sources, basic categories, & assumptions of anthropologists, historians of the colonial world, & area studies experts (among others) have been shaped by colonial rule. This article charts Said's influence on anthropology, tracing both anthropology's engagement with colonialism & the frequently ambivalent (& sometimes defensive) responses within the field to Said's critique. The article also considers the larger terrain of Said's engagement with the field, from his concern about its \"literary\" turn of the 1980s to his call for US anthropology explicitly to confront the imperial conditions not only of its epistemological inheritance but also of its present position. Though Said's direct writings on the discipline have been limited, the article concludes that anthropology has not only learned a great deal from Said's critique, but has become one of the most important sites for the productive elaboration & exploration of his ideas. Adapted from the source document.

It is contended that India & Hinduism cannot be understood unless caste -- the foundation & core of Indian civilization -- is considered. The political logic of Indian society is focused on to redress a former emphasis on religion & to underscore the fact that caste structure, ritual form, & political process were all dependent on power relations. The phenomenon of caste is explored by considering both a colonial & nationalist sociology. It is contended that, if colonial discourse & the documentation apparatus that provided the evidence & the ground for the colonial caste of mind was not autonomously constitutive, neither was it epiphenomenal. Orientalist versions of India's essence & anthropological representations of the centrality of caste have conspired to deny Indians their history. The potential subjectivity of Indians was not suppressed outright but shifted into the cultural logic of reproduction implied by terms such as custom & tradition, which in India meant caste. It is concluded that, in India, the forms of casteism & communalism that continue to work against the imagined community of the nascent nation state have been imagined through the same historical mechanisms that, in the colonizing nations of Europe & the US, were more securely harnessed to the project of state formation. S. Millett

The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's development in the eighteenth century and beyond. In this powerfully written critique, Nicholas Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable, we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.