This book began with an account of academic theories and debates, but it has argued throughout that no one model or explanatory formula can account for either the durability or the dynamism of caste. Indeed it has held that it requires the insights of both history and social anthropology to explore and interpret this contentious and multi-faceted element of Indian life.

Of course there have been other interdisciplinary studies of the subcontinent; these have inspired the methodology if not necessarily the conclusions of this work. Yet the fact remains that, for many historians of India, it has been difficult to relate the issues debated by anthropologists to the problems which they see in relation to caste, both in the distant past and in more recent times. So too for many anthropologists who, while acknowledging the fluidity of the Indian social order, have in some cases relied on oversimplified historical language in the attempt to identify its ‘traditional’, ‘colonial’ or ‘modern’ aspects.

It is not surprising then that the two disciplines sometimes seem far apart in their treatment of the subcontinent. Yet the two fields can and should be brought together, as has been done for so many other socially complex environments. As far as caste is concerned, striking things happen when we attach historical perspectives to the anthropologists’ models. The principles identified by social scientists need no longer be taken as contradictory or mutually exclusive; nor need we opt for only one key theme in the analysis of caste, be this power, purity or orientalist constructions. What can be seen instead is a multidimensional story of changing and interpenetrating reference points.

THEMES AND APPROACHES

This book is an attempt to account for and interpret the phenomenon of caste in the Indian subcontinent. It deals primarily with the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day, though the first two chapters explore the spread of castelike norms and values in the age of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Indian dynasts.

Of all the topics that have fascinated and divided scholars of south Asia, caste is probably the most contentious. Defined by many specialists as a system of elaborately stratified social hierarchy that distinguishes India from all other societies, caste has achieved much the same significance in social, political and academic debate as race in the United States, class in Britain and faction in Italy. It has thus been widely thought of as the paramount fact of life in the subcontinent, and for some, as the very core or essence of south Asian civilisation.

There is of course an enormous body of academic writing on caste. Studies by anthropologists and other social scientists provide a wealth of closely observed ethnographic detail; many propose sophisticated theoretical interpretations. So, given the notorious sensitivity of this terrain, what is the case for an attempt to explore it from an historical perspective?

In recent years historians have broken much new ground in the study of political and economic change in the subcontinent, both before and during the colonial period. But caste, which is best seen as a meeting ground between everyday Indian life and thought and the strategies of rulers and other arbiters of moral and social order, tends to provoke more heated debate than almost anything else in the specialist literature.