Colonial administrators helped to construct the very traditionalism which marked the Indian society as ‘backward’. Comment critically. (2020)
The statement contains a circle worth exposing. Colonial rule justified itself by India’s backwardness, and backwardness was located in its “tradition”. The claim is that the administration did not merely encounter that tradition: through survey, census, code and court it gave tradition a fixity it had never possessed, and then read the fixity as proof of stagnation.
How tradition was manufactured
- Bernard Cohn‘s colonial sociology of knowledge is the central argument. The survey, the census, the map, the gazetteer and the museum were not neutral instruments of description but the apparatus through which India was made legible — and in being made legible, was remade.
- Ronald Inden, in Imagining India (1990), showed orientalist scholarship essentialising India as caste-bound, otherworldly and agency-less: a society acted upon rather than acting.
- Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), argues that caste in its modern form is a product of the colonial encounter rather than an unchanged inheritance.
- Enumeration. Synchronous censuses from 1881, and Herbert Risley‘s 1901 attempt to rank castes by social precedence, made caste countable, comparable and all-India. The result was a wave of caste associations petitioning for higher classification — the count created the constituency it claimed only to measure.
- Law. Codification of Hindu and Muslim personal law, with pandits and maulvis advising the courts, converted plural, negotiable local custom into a fixed scriptural rule with a penalty attached. Lata Mani‘s Contentious Traditions (1998) shows the sati debates being fought over scriptural authority, with women as the ground rather than the subject of the argument.
- Administrative fictions. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 notified whole communities as criminal by birth; forest law made shifting cultivation and gathering offences. The self-sufficient, unchanging “village community” entered the record as an administrative convenience and became the standard image of Indian immobility.
- The general frame is Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger‘s The Invention of Tradition (1983): traditions that claim antiquity are often recent, and serve present power.
Where the claim overreaches
- Its strong version — that caste did not exist before the British — is not supported by the pre-colonial record, in which varna and jati ranking, endogamy, occupational closure and untouchability are amply attested. The defensible version is narrower and stronger: colonialism made caste the single organising idiom of Indian society and hardened boundaries that had been locally variable and negotiable.
- To treat Indians as the passive material of colonial construction is itself a form of the orientalism being criticised. Colonial categories were seized and turned.
- Jotirao Phule used the colonial idiom of Aryan conquest against Brahmanical authority; B. R. Ambedkar used enumeration, the courts and separate representation as instruments of emancipation; caste associations converted census classification into claims for status and, later, reservation. M. N. Srinivas‘s Sanskritization describes groups contesting rank rather than accepting an assigned one. Construction is not passivity.
Verdict
The statement is right about the mechanism and wrong if read as a claim about origins. Colonial administrators did not invent Indian tradition; they selected one version of it, wrote it down, counted it, gave it force of law, and then cited its rigidity as evidence of India’s unfitness for self-rule. The traditionalism was not fabricated from nothing — it was standardised, and standardisation is what made it look like stagnation.
Conclusion
That the instrument still works is the decisive point. Census 2027 will enumerate caste for the first time since 1931, and the intensity of the political contest over it shows a colonial technique of knowledge continuing to constitute the very groups it claims merely to record.