19 Ethnography, State and the Colonial Episteme

Vishal Jadhav

I. INTRODUCTION

Thus far we have discussed various aspects of the State and its inherent asymmetrical relationships of power within society. The colonial state in India was no different. Deeplyentrenched asymmetrical relationship of power existed between the colonial rulers and the nativesubjects. In this module we will be assessing how colonial rule in India was establishand enabled through techonologies of documentation and classification of social life of the natives. This ethnographic information was employed to construct a knowledge system and legitimize a structure of dominationthrough which the colonial rulers viewed the colonized world. In this module we shall begin by examining the role of ethnography as a discipline that was closely associated with colonialism. In subsequent sections we shall look at how the colonial state legitimized practices of domination in the guise of undertaking a civilizing mission, using as its weapon a knowledge of nativesociety obtained through the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology.

We want to suggest that the colonial encounter with India for the British was from its very outset an encounter with diverse communities interfaced with each other and inhabiting a territorial space dominated by numerous of kingdoms and chiefdoms. Each of these displays both homogeneity and heterogeneity. For British imperialism, the process of consolidating colonial power necessarily involved a need to obtain information about the customs and practices of the native population. For this purpose the colonial state had to firstly classify and document the diverse population, their customs and traditions and order it into a new framework that would facilitate the practice of governance by the colonial administrators. It was in this respect that anthropology found favour with the colonial stateand manyof its knowledge practices were in turn shape by this colonial encounter1.

II. ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE COLONIAL EPISTEME

As a discipline anthropology emerged out of the European colonial expansion in the non-western world. Borrowing from the methods of the natural sciences, European scholars of the 19th century believed that they could similarly study the natives and their life worlds in an objective manner. This methodology of comprehending and representing the ‘primitive’ ways of life was undertaken from the ‘high ground’ of the civilized west. In this exercise quite clearly as Talal Asad (1973) has argued, many of the anthropologists became enmeshed with the larger project of colonial domination. Not surprisingly then, anthropology as a discipline became engaged in the project of constructing a colonial episteme which functioned as a discourse of domination and subjucation all across the non European world.

1Refer to the volumes on Tribes and Caste of India (1916) Vol-I-V, published by Macmillian and Co. limited, London produced during the colonial period which offer a detailed ethnographic account of the various communities that inhabited the different administrative regions of British India.

How doesone characterise this colonial episteme? How does one represent the complex and dynamic ways in which the colonial episteme came to embody very contradictory claims of both dominations and progress? It may be noted here that from the very beginning it was ethnography and its techniques of data collection that functioned as the basis for an anthropological study of non-western societies. Thismethod employs a range of techniques to document and classify ‘exotic’ lifeworlds, such as participant observation, anthropometery, physical and morphological measurements, case studies, field studies etc. It follows then; these ethnographic techniquesprovided the colonial rulers with a strategy of ‘making sense of the social customs and practices of the natives’. In this connection ‘the myth of the civilizing mission’ as construed by the imperial west served as a useful legitimization to represent this entire knowledge through a Eurocentric lens.

It is this Eurocentric gaze as recorded by colonial administrators, scholars and missionaries which formed the core of the colonial episteme. In its representation the colonial episteme took the form of binaries as in the West and the East, the ‘I’ and the ‘other’. The ‘other’ quite clearly signified the native subjects as exotic, pre-modern, uncivilized, eccentric, backward, sensual, despotic and lazy, immoral, passive religious and spiritual. Clearly then, the ‘orient’ was constructed by the West as a mirror image of the “other” seen as what is inferior, alien anduncivilized to the West which saw itself as the superior civilization. Within the larger project of imperial domination these asymmetrical knowledge constructions soon became a source of power, a modus-operandi through which the British were to rule Indian subcontinent for more than two century. 2

Yet, it is important to note that even as the colonial episteme functioned as an ideological regime to legitimize the continued domination of the native people, it sought to justify the knowledge of anthropology by resorting to the principals of strict scientific investigation. With its emphasis on empirical observasation, measurement, enumeration, and classification, the science of anthropology came to be intricately entwined with agendas of colonial dominations. Not surprising then in many parts of the colonial world especially in Africa anthropologist also served as administrators within the colonial government3.

Further this ethnograpic project involved many of the colonial institutions engaged with administrative, militaryand judicial function. Several institutions like The Anthropological Society of London, The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, The Anthropological Survey of India, The Asiatic society of Indiathe Census of India among others were hugely involved in collecting and documenting information of the diverse native cultures. Military officers, civil servants, and members of the clergy were trained in collecting ethnographic details. As far back as the 1820s the East IndiaCompany had sought the services of Herbert Risley to conduct an ethnographic survey of the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. Similar such ethnographicsurveys were produced for the colonial state in other parts of India.conduct an ethnographic survey of the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. Similar such ethnographicsurveys were produced for the colonial state in other parts of India.

2 For further details read the introductions of Assad, T (1973) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Ithaca Press and Said, E (1978), Orientalism, Penguin. Also the introduction of Metcalf, T (1994), Ideologies of the Raj; The New Cambridge History of India, Volume III, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

3Thus for example, the anthropologist Daryll Forde, whose anthropological work in West Africa was also appointed as administrator by the British colonial powers in East Africa.

A quick survey of these ethonographic records clearly reveals the emphasis on types and classifications thereby providing the colonial administration with a much more comprehensive understanding of the native population and their diverse cultures. In addition such trained ethnographers many of whom also came from the native population also published in reputed scientific journals such as ‘Anthropological Magazine’and‘Man’. Such publications only further legitimizedthe biological and cultural backwardness of the natives.

It is little wonder therefore that anthropology is today viewed as a colonial construct thatlegitimized colonial state policies and its project of ideological rule over the native population. 4Across the colonial regions of Africa and Asia, colonial anthropology functioned in more or less the same manner. i. e. becoming the knowledge support for the practitioners of colonial governance. In the next section we shall look at the sites of practice in which anthropology and the ethnographic method were consistently deployed to maintain and reproduce the structures of colonial domination.

III. Consolidation of colonial rule in India

By the 1830s with absolute military domination of India, the East India Company (with instructions from the British Parliament in England) began consolidating its administrative and political control over a unified sub continental region. It is no wonder then, post 1857 the colonial state began to introduce diverse systems of enumeration that would have far reaching consequences on the practice of colonial rule and the structure of imperial domination in the sub continent. For the British this was a gigantic task and it entailed developingboth administrative conformity as well as ideological compliance from the native population.

Thus for example, the famous ‘Maculay minutes’ of 1835 made it clear that the colonialists wanted to create a small section of indigenous elites who would be ‘British like’ in taste, opinions, morals but Indian in colour. It was hoped that this section of indigenous elites would then operate as the intermediaries between the colonial rulers and the indigenous population. This entailed the establishment of a new education system together with several new institution in civic and political life that could become the formative ground on which thisnew class of indigenous elites would come to acquire not only a new learning and a new set of skills but also in the process become the interpreters and trusted ‘citizens’ of the colonial state.

With this objective the colonial state from the mid nineteenth century onwards began to organise new institutions such as education, judiciary, police, military (recruitment of indigenous subject), civil services, lower level bureaucracy, lower level revenue departments and also promoted organisation of civic organisations that would operate as ‘civil societies’ at the behest of the colonial regime. For entry and manoeuvring in these fields the colonial state made it mandatory that the indigenous subjects had to possess certain kinds of cultural, social and symbolic capital such as educational degrees, rudimentary level of literacy in English, ‘noble’ family/social background and recommendations from recognised indigenous actors among other such criterion. Such practice as enforced by the colonial rulers ensured that native subjects were henceforth to be recognized through their community membership rather than as individuals. There were many such institutional sites in which community membership took precedence over individual and we shall be considering some of these. What is important to note here is that once again such a knowledge construction creates another binary between individual and community. It is these binaries with assymetrical relationships that served as the basis to legitimize the knowledge power relationship of one over the other.

4 Further details inLewis, D (1973), Anthropology and Colonialism, Current Anthropology, 14(5); 581-602

IV. Sites of Enumeration and Classification

In 1861 the colonial administration began to undertake census operations and these had far reaching consequences on the way in which members of the native population came to identify and represent themselves. The Census enumerated the native population using a variety of social categories which themselves were the sites of considerable contestation amongst the native populations. Categories such as caste, tribe, religion and even race became the markers for recognising individuals as members of one group or another. Many caste associations and religious groups petitioned the colonial authorities contesting the way in which these markers had identified, represented and classified them within the census. Similarly census officials found it an extremely difficult task to put in place the system of classification that could neatly categories various sections of the Indian populations (Hutton, 1933).

Another such exercise in enumeration and classification were undertaken by The Anthropological Survey of India. Here again enumeration was carried out using the practice of anthropometry. In particular such anthropometric classifications were extensibly used to enumerate section of the tribal population in different parts of the country. Such an exercise culminated in the practice of ‘labelling’. Some communities which lived on the peripheries of the caste and tribe societies and some which were displaced tribal communities were labelled as ‘thugees’. The ‘thugees’ were supposedly those communities whose occupation was thievery and looting. Members of these communities faced constant surveillance from the colonial state and were also subjected to police harassment. Thus, the British invented a new category called criminal tribes in which these communities together with many of the nomadic and not so easily classifiable communities were henceforth placed under the restriction of an Act by the colonial state. This Act entailed that henceforth the movement of these communities was to be constantly monitored and that they were to be treated as unwanted subjects of the colonial state.

Ennumeration and classification were also adopted by the military and the police within the colonial state. The British Army could not fight its war of colonization on territories in Africa and Middle-East with other European nations on its own. It had to enlarge its Army to include natives as these soldiers were dispensable. After the Indian revolt of 1857, the Peel Commission in 1858-59 made the general recommendation on recruitment that a Native Army should be raised that should be composed of different nationalities and castes, mixed promiscuously through each regiment as the best safeguard against revolt. It was in this context that the colonial state introduced the concept of ‘Martial’ races in the last decade of the 19th century. Soldiers were explicitly drawn from the so called Martial castes. But the question that emerged during this time was how to identify members of this caste, who would be pure (Assal). In this context the ethnographic profiles of these so called martial castes were collated into an ‘Indian Army Handbook’. This handbook had detailed ethnographic data including physical anthropometric standards spelled out. This document also included details of the festivals, customs, habits, marriage practices, belief systems/religion among other such facets. Based on these the colonial state structured and raised various regiments. 5It is important to note that these regiments both within the military and the police played a crucial role in ensureing the continued domination of British imperial power over the native Indian population. So skillfully and efficiently were these security forces trained and organized that their services were continued without much chance in the perod after independence.

While undertaking the labourious task of cataloguing the Indian population, the colonial state simultaneously expanded its presence through legal infrastructure. After the revolt of 1857, it realized that it was mandatory to put in place certain laws meant only for the natives that did not apply to the white man. New legal codes in the form of civil and criminal Acts were introduced that ensured that the British rule could continue without losing out on its legitimacy of ‘pariah of civilisation’. The laws that were to govern the natives were far detached from their life worlds and were versions of what the native scribal class/caste interpreted for the British. Through the legal system the colonial state created another avenue of manipulating the private sphere.

The legal infrastructure was hierarchical in nature and was meant to instill fear of law in the minds of the natives. As the law codes were based on Brahmanical interpretations, there emerged various injunctions which were specific regarding various castes, tribes, gender, professions among others. The new legal system in place circumscribed an official language for its functioning- these were Persian and English, both detached from the life worlds of the people who were governed. Also this system could only be afforded by the few privileged natives- Rajas, land lords and the kind.

With the colonial state now recognising individuals through their communitarian identity i. e. caste, religion, race, language and region this practice was soon resonated in all the colonial policies. In land related policies, the colonial state decided to reorganise the existing land tenurial practices such that it did not completely rupture the ‘traditional’ structure but instead introduced a system that recognised caste and Varna system. A new practice, called the ryotwari system was introduced in addition to existing Zamindari and Mahalwari land revenue system. In this system the ryot or the small land owner had to pay taxes to the colonial state directly rather than through an intermediary like the Zamindar.

New cropping patterns and ‘food regimes’ were introduced such that the colonial state accrued more and more profits. These new practices ruptured the erstwhile ‘Balutedari’ system that was being practices for centuries. The most affected in this exercise were the artisan castes and classes as their services were no longer required. Some of these communities had to work as indentured labour in other British colonies such as Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, St

5 Further details in Omissi, D (1994), The sepoy and the Raj. The Indian army, 1860–1940, Macmillan, London. And also Roy, K (1997), Recruitment doctrines of the colonial Indian Army: 1859-1913 Indian Economic and Social History Review, 34: 321-354.

Lucia, Natal, St Kitts, St Vincent, Reunion, Surinam, Fiji, East Africa and Seychelles, to work on sugarcane, tea, spices and rubber plantations. 6 Other than just codification of societal information colonial rule also entailed documentation of territorial and land related practices. This exercise involved mapping of territory through cartography, documenting cropping patterns, land use patterns, creation of land registers, documents, manuals, official glossaries related to land use and tenurial practices and the requisite translation of native vocabulary and grammar. This classification manifested itself into the construction of a simplistic binary map. The agrarian society was classified as caste society and the inhabitants of the forests, isolated and remote geographical areas were typified as being tribals. There was a clear and discrete disjunction between the two.

In this framework the tribals were supposedly ‘primitive’ and beyond the colonial ‘project’ of civilizing the natives. According to this plan the tribal land, forests and other areas were to be acquired by the colonial authorities such that these could be exploited to maximize profits. The forest areas were henceforth to be barricaded and made unauthorized for the natives. Instead they were now reserved not only for the sole exploitation of forest and mineral resources by the colonial state, 7

Similarly, introduction of exotic varities of flora and fauna was undertaken; plantations such as tea and coffee together with spices became significant for the colonial state. Gradually as the forest lands were being cleared for further commercial agricultural use, the tribals who were the original inhabitants of these territories were displaced in large numbers. New laws and legislations were passed, together with military and police action in these territories, with the objective of legitimizing colonial rule.

What is important to note is that with the expulsion of the forest dwellers, overtime the community also lost their language as they became dispersed. With loss of script and language much of the traditional ‘wisdom’, artforms and knowledge were lost. For instance ethno-medicine and traditional forms of medical practices and science was lost in this exercise. The symbiotic relationship of the forest dwellers with the ecosystem of the forest was lost forever. Many of these communities had an inherent understanding of the ecosystem and their religious beliefs revolved around them. However Animism and animatism was deemed tobe primitive belief systems by the British and the missionaries who accompanied them. What is also interesting is the notion that the colonial anthropologist together with his administrative counterpart were keen to depict the forest dwelling communities as always isolated andwho never came in contact with the caste/agrarian society. Infact a later day anthropology critiqued this simplistic binary pointing to the close relationship that existed between tribes and castes from ancient times8.

6 For details refer to Tinker, H (1974), A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1820-1920, Oxford University Press, London and Torabully, K and Marina Carter (2002), Coolitude : An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora, Anthem Press.

7 Further details in Pati, B (2011), ed. Adivasis in Colonial India: Survival, Resistance and Negotiation, Orient Blackswan, New Delhi

8See, for example, the work Caste and Tribes in India by G. S. Ghurye (1980)

V. Ethnographic Representation and colonial Ideology

In its endeavour to visualise Indian society in terms of its European counterpart, the colonial state with the aid of native ‘scholarship’ (predominantly the members of the Brahmin caste) constructed a knowledge system in which the Varna model of caste came to be recongnised and legitimized. All castes and sub castes were ranked into a fourfold classification. The notion that caste was a pan-Indian phenomenon, a system based on purity and pollution i. e. Varna system was now subtely imbricated in the discourse of the colonial state. 9

In making caste an immanent, static, social and political entity, the census and other such ethnographic representations clearly open up spaces for caste contestations. In doing so, this contestation reaffirmed the idea of an omnipresent Brahmanical model as the way in which Indian society was ordered. 10Equally interesting is the way in which a dominant and totalizing knowledge system was instituted in colonial India and that prevails even to date. The colonial practices of domination through knowledge/power axis ensured the naturalisation of the idea of a uniform, all-encompassing, ideologically consistent and conceived caste system as the underlying keystone of understanding India.

It is through these mechanisms of representation that groups were construed as communities, tribes and castes. In due course of time tribes, communtities and caste (the colonial way of understanding them) was frozen in time and came to be connoted as the colonial state imagined it to be. Thus the colonial state in India ruled over the natives not only through overt military prowess but also through covert ideological domination. It was the latter method that proved to be much more profound and immanent in facilitating its rule. Thus the colonial practices of domination through ideology i. e. through the knowledge/power axis, structured an understanding of Indian society so as to suggest that it was timeless, static, rigid, uniform, all-encompassing and ideologically consistent.

This framework was convenient for colonial governmentality as it was internalized overtime by the natives who came to recognize themselves through this understanding. However such transformations at the level of identity and categorization proved to be deeply problematic. In pre-colonial India, the units of social identity had been multiple, and the interfacing and interstices were complex, dynamic and flexible. The referents of social identity were not only heterogeneous; they were also determined by context. However with the inauguration of colonial rule, the opportunities and the potential for individuals and social groups to transcend their social position in the ranked classification decreased. Further in the pre-colonial era, individuals and groups could capture power through military prowess and through control of the state thereby ensureing economic and social mobility. With colonial rule this proved to be impossible as the British had successfully separated the social and the political in two exclusive domains. The political domainwas now dictated by the colonial state. The only channel of social and economic mobility was streamlined through the access to the colonial structure and this was only possible when native subjects operated through the identities given by the binary model of the colonial state. 11

9 Please read the introduction of Dirks, N (1989), The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi and chapter 3 of Dirks, N (2001), Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, New Delhi: Permanent Black.

10For details read chapter one, (Placing Criminals, Displacing Thuggee) and two (How to make a Thug) in Schwarz, H (2010), Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief, Wiley-Blackwell publications

Conclusion

This module attempts to understand how the colonial state engaged in practices of collecting, documenting, classifying societal data through which they constructed a colonial episteme. This colonial episteme in time naturalized and interlizeed by the native population thereby ensureing the continuation of colonial rule and Governmentality. It is clear as this module suggest that the colonial state did not have to resort to military might to govern the native population of the sub-continent. They could instead attain the same objective much more efficient use of systems of knowledge constructions and knowledge strategies that helped sustain an effective regime of colonial governmentality over the natives. We have tried to show how ethnographic representation played a crucial role in putting together this colonial edifice of state domination and control. Such a use of the ethnographic method by the colonial state was to be found all across the colonial world.

However the story does not end there. This colonial episteme continues to play an important role in the post-independence period. It is only recently that these Euro-centric discourses are being questioned. The colonial episteme continues to influence our life worlds even in the post independence era. The practices and habits of the institutions continue to be informed of this episteme. Even the kind of democratic practices which we boast of are remnants of the colonial form of knowledge. Similarly the standardisation through law and legislation regading family, marriage practices, sexuality amongst many other such social practices is really a colonial artifact which needs to be questioned. Quite clearly the discipline of anthropoly itself needs to be asite of critical engagement.

11 Please refer to ‘Tribes and castes of Central India’ for instance by Russel or ‘Tribes and Castes of Bombay’by Enthoven among many others.

Further Readings

· Bayly, S (1999) Caste, Society and Politics in India: From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge University Press, and Cambridge.

· Beteille, A (1993), Sociology and Anthropology: Their Relationship in One Person’s Career,

Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s. 27 (2): 291-304.

· Brekenbridge, C and Peter Van Der Veer (1994), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament; Perspectives on South Asia (eds.), Oxford University Press, India

· Chatterjee, P (1986), Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Zed Books, London

· Chatterjee, P (1993), The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

· Chakrabarty, D. (2009). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press.

· Cohn, B. (1987), Is there a new Indian history? Society and social change under the Raj in Cohn (ed.), An anthropologist among the historians and other essays, Oxford University Press, Delhi

· Cohn, B (1987), The Census, Social Structure, and Objectification in South Asia, in Cohn (ed.), An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, Delhi

· Cohn, B and Kirks (1988) Beyond the Fringe: The Nation State, Colonialism, and the Technologies of

Power, Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (2): 224–229.

· Dirks, N. (2006) The ethnographic state in M. Kimura and A. Tanabe (eds.) The State in India: Past and Present, Oxford University Press, 229-54

· Daryll Forde, C. (1956). Habitat, economy and society: a geographical introduction to ethnology.

· Hutton, J. H. (1933). Census of India 1931 vol. I-India part I-report.

· Ghurye, G. S. (1980). The scheduled tribes of India. Transaction Publishers.

· Patel, S (2006) Beyond Binaries: Towards Self Reflexive Sociologies, Current Sociology, 54 (3), 381-395

· Patel, S (2010) At Crossroads: Sociology in India in Sujata Patel, (ed) The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions, Sage, London.

· Patel, S (2011) Interrogating the legacies and exploring the challenges in the Sociological Visions of M.N. Srinivas and A.R. Desai in Sujata Patel (ed.) Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations, and Practices, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

· Raheja, G (1996), Caste, Colonialism, and the Speech of the Colonized: Entextualization and Disciplinary Control in India, American Ethnologist, 23(3); 494-513

· Samarendra, P (2008), Between Number and Knowledge; Career of Caste in Colonial Census, in ed. Themes in Indian History; Caste in History by Banerjee Dube, 46-66, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

· Tribes and Caste of India (1916) Vol-I-V, published by Macmillian and Co. limited, London

· Internet sources: