It’s been a few days since I last appeared here, so I don’t know what’s going on here. Either way, I had previously mentioned in some of my past comments about a few useful sources for understanding communal and caste conflict. One of the books that I mentioned was “The Colonial Origins of ethnic violence in India” by Ajay Varghese. I have been meaning to make a post about the book, but I couldn’t really fully summarize everything in a meaningful manner until I remembered a summary the author wrote in the concluding chapter himself, which I am just going to fully quote below since I think it’s an interesting insight about violence in present-day South Asia.
Summary of the Book
This book has argued that patterns of ethnic violence in India stem from legacies of colonial rule that were reinforced over time through institutions. India is well known as having been the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire; less well known is that the British never controlled the entire country. Most of the areas that were already British colonies prior to the conquest of India had been brought under direct rule, but the Rebellion of 1857 prevented the subcontinent from being entirely annexed. Afterward, roughly one-fourth of the Indian population lived in princely states ruled by largely autonomous native kings. This key historical divide forms the colonial origins of ethnic violence in contemporary India. Both the British administrators and the princely rulers governed heterogeneous populations, but they had very different conceptions of how to manage this ethnic diversity. In the provinces, British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste. Colonial officials chose this particular identity after the Rebellion of 1857, which they perceived as a religious(primarily Islamic) uprising, because they were intent on de-emphasizing religion. Caste (along with tribal identities) was promoted as the central organizing principle for a new, modern society. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the caste system was divorced from its Hindu origins and became largely a system of social categories. It was subsequently viewed as scientific in character, bearing resemblance (depending on the administrator) either to race or to the class structure of Victorian England.
Beginning with this assumption, British administrators then stratified ethnic groups by enforcing policies that benefited high castes but discriminated against low castes and tribals. High castes such as the jenmis in Malabar, for example, gained a new proprietary right over the land, while low castes and adivasis in the region suddenly became tenants-at-will. At the same time, in the interests of promoting secularism, the British embraced a policy of religious neutrality, or what Peter Hardy (1972) has called “balance and rule.” In effect, this policy meant that groups such as Muslims, a small minority in the country, were protected under colonialism. In provinces such as Ajmer, Muslims came to form almost half of the local administration, and a culture of religious cooperation between Hindus and Muslims was gradually fostered. The outcome of these policies in the provinces was intense caste and tribal violence, but over the long term, communal conflict was minimized.
In the princely states, ethnic politics was organized altogether differently. Native kings had always derived their legitimacy from religion—even in the precolonial period—and they had constructed theocratic states. Many territories were explicitly religious kingdoms; for example, Travancore, in the south, was officially dedicated to the Hindu god Padmanabha. In these areas, politics was organized around the centrality of religious legitimation, laws, shrines, customs, and rituals. Religion was inherently central to the princely states, but the British also reinforced this ethnic category: they believed that religious rule had been native to India, and some administrators relished the opportunity to highlight a divide between modern provinces and “backwards” princely states.
In their territories, native kings constructed policies of ethnic stratification that were the mirror image of British India; these policies benefited dominant religious groups but discriminated against minority religious groups. Even in states such as Kashmir, where most of the population was Muslim, the Hindu rulers of the kingdom brutally repressed them and enabled Hindus to dominate local politics. At the same time, many princes protected the lower castes and Adivasis. This was because, respectively, cultivators had a hereditary right to the land in many princely kingdoms, and certain tribes—like the Bhils in Rajasthan—were viewed as the earliest inhabitants of these states. These policies of ethnic stratification, in turn, created a pattern of intense religious violence, but minimal violence among castes and tribes. Thus, across India’s provinces and princely states, different conceptions of ethnicity led to different political cultures, then different policies of ethnic stratification led to different fault lines of ethnic violence.
This central theory—a new interpretation of British Indian history—is supported by extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence. The qualitative component is derived from fifteen months of fieldwork in India, in which primary source research was conducted in six archives and dozens of elites were interviewed in five carefully chosen case studies. The first two pairs of cases were controlled historical comparisons of two neighboring areas that were similar in most regards except that one was a British province and the other was a native state. Chapter 2 detailed a comparison of the districts of Jaipur and Ajmer in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. Jaipur was a Hindu kingdom, and Ajmer was selected by colonial officials to be their lone outpost in the area then known as Rajputana. Chapter 3 then detailed a state-level comparison between the northern portion of Kerala, known as Malabar, and the southern region of the state, known as Travancore. These two cases constitute a “historical accident,” because the British wanted to bring all of Kerala under their control, but a variety of contingent factors enabled them to conquer only the north. The South consequently remained under the control of a powerful Hindu dynasty.
In both Ajmer and Malabar, extensive primary source evidence showed that the British emphasized the centrality of caste and tribal identities. Colonial officials who descended on Ajmer in the early nineteenth century were among the first administrators to codify the designation“untouchable,” and the effect of census operations in the area was the heightened salience of caste identities. New landholding and forest policiesinstituted in both provinces enhanced the power of zamindars butdispossessed low-caste agriculturalists and tribal groups. For example, in pre-British Malabar, there was most likely no system of private property, but British administrators misinterpreted the existing agricultural system and granted proprietary rights to jenmis. This new policy resulted in skyrocketing eviction rates and, subsequently, the earliest political mobilization of low castes and adivasis in the region.
Colonial administrators in Ajmer and Malabar also sought to minimize the salience of religion, and minority Muslim communities were protected by the British policy of religious neutrality. In Ajmer, Muslims constituted a large share of the government administration, and equality between Hindus and Muslims led to the religious divide slowly receding over time. In Malabar, although Muslims were responsible for a series of uprisings against the government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the vast majority of rebels were actually recent low-caste converts, and the history of this region since the advent of colonialism included repeated episodes of intercaste tension and violence. By the end of the British period, however, Malabar, like Ajmer, experienced almost no communal conflict. The colonial histories of Jaipur and Travancore, by contrast, were quite different. Hindu rajas ruled these theocratic states, and they emphasized the centrality of religion. The rulers of Travancore governed a state that, unlike most areas of northern India, had never come under the control of Muslim armies; these rajas were therefore particularly staunch defenders of Hinduism. The leaders of both areas heavily favored the Hindu majority while restricting the rights of Muslims and, in Travancore, Christians. In Jaipur, for instance, newspapers from the early twentieth century described the kingdom as one of the worst areas for communal violence in the entire country.
In both Jaipur and Travancore, however, the same rajas instituted a number of protective policies toward low castes and adivasis, which in turn prevented the growth of caste and tribal violence in these areas. The rulers of Jaipur acknowledged, for instance, that the Meena tribe ruled most of the state in the medieval period and therefore guaranteed them a ceremonial position in the kingdom and a certain allotment of government jobs. Similarly, land policies toward Adivasis in Travancore were among the most progressive in India. The rajas of Travancore also pushed for low-caste uplift aggressively after the mid-nineteenth century, opening the doors of Hindu temples to untouchables before any other region in India.
Across these four cases, the patterns of history are clear: British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste and enforced policies that stratified ethnic groups along these lines, but they simultaneously protected religious minorities. In these areas, caste and tribal identities became hegemonic, and violence centered on these identities; the religious divide, however, receded over time. Princely rulers, for their part, emphasized the centrality of religion and enforced religious policies of ethnic stratification, but they protected the lower castes and adivasis. Religious violence increased, but caste and tribal violence were minimized. These four cases drawn from such different geographical regions of India—regions with sharply contrasting cultural and historical attributes—highlight that bifurcated colonial rule created clear fault lines of ethnic conflict.
Many aspects of the argument presented in this book challenge traditional historical work on the colonial era in India. For example, the dominant view on religious violence in colonial India can be summed up as “princes good, British bad.” The controlled comparisons in Rajasthan and Keralademonstrate the opposite. Similarly, the area that experiences the most immense tribal conflict in contemporary India is not a former British province but a former princely state. To consider some of the limitations of the theory presented in this book, Chapter 4 examined the theory’s key deviant case, focusing on Bastar, a small, remote former princely state that is the single deadliest battleground for Naxalite conflict in modern India. An analysis of this kingdom has shown that tribal revolt began in Bastar in the mid-nineteenth century precisely because of creeping British influence in the state. Bastar was unique among Indian princely kingdoms in terms of the sheer amount of British interference in its administration: for almost half a century, it was ruled directly by colonial officials. Therefore, Bastar is the exception that proves the rule: where the British were in power, tribal rebellion soon followed.
Disparate sets of ethnic policies across provinces and princely areas created very different patterns of ethnic violence in India. In the post-independence period, these patterns have not dissipated. Dozens of elite interviews spanning Rajasthan, Kerala, and Chhattisgarh were conducted to study the modern period. Respondents drawn from district- and state-level government departments, NGOs, ethnic organizations, political parties, police administrations, newspapers, and universities all showcased that patterns of ethnic violence have not changed in postcolonial India. In Ajmer and Malabar, respondents detailed that conflict still revolves around caste and tribal identities. In Jaipur and Travancore, however, respondents highlighted the central role of religion in fomenting political violence. For example, after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, mentioned at the beginning of this book, there were riots in both Jaipur and Travancore—but no corresponding riots occurred in neighboring Ajmer or Malabar. Patterns of violence established during the colonial period persisted into postcolonial India for two overarching reasons. First, they became embedded in both formal and informal institutions. Political parties in
Jaipur and Travancore, for instance, did not create new ethnic cleavage structures; instead, they built on the religious divide inherited from princely rule. Likewise, the Communist Party that has been so central to Malabar’s politics emphasized caste (then class) because of a long history of low-caste agitation in the region. Institutions as informal as the collective memories of different ethnic groups continued to structure ethnic conflict in one form or another. Patterns of violence became self-reinforcing; every riot hardened ethnic divides, built histories of animosity, and kept communities apart. Even major events did not alter these conflict patterns. For example, the partition caused much of the Muslim population in Ajmer to leave for Pakistan, but many of Jaipur’s Muslims also left. Partition affected both districts in similar ways, but in post-independence India, Jaipur continues to experience much more communal violence than Ajmer.
Second, the new postcolonial governments failed to implement the effective reforms of the past. For example, at the dawn of independence, agricultural reforms in Ajmer and Bastar began from a weakened position due to the power of British-backed zamindars, and new policies largely failed to improve the lives of landless, low-caste, and tribal laborers. One of the few exceptions was the state of Kerala, where the communists in Malabar used low-caste mobilization to come to power, implement a number of impressive reforms, and decrease the amount of ethnic violence in the state compared to most other regions.
Evidence from the case studies showcases a clear pattern of ethnic violence across contemporary India, but even five in-depth cases can potentially provide a misleading portrait of the entire country. Chapter 5, therefore, provided statistical evidence from almost six hundred Indian districts that similar ethnic conflict patterns exist across the country, even when controlling for a variety of alternative explanations such as poverty, geography, and levels of social development. British rule correlates strongly with contemporary caste and tribal violence, but negatively with religious conflict. The British experience in India after 1857 deeply influenced colonial administrators in London. They began to extol the virtues of what becameknown as the “Indian model” of colonialism. Colonial officials realized that combining direct and indirect rule was less expensive, less intrusive, and less likely to produce violent backlashes among native populations than outright direct rule. As the British Empire continued to expand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indian model was exported (in one form or another) to a number of new colonies across Africa and Asia. Chapter 6 provided an overview of ethnic politics and conflict in three such colonies: Burma, Malaya, and Nigeria. In all of these states, the British ruled certain areas directly but left other regions to be controlled by kings, sultans, or emirs.
In the directly ruled parts of these colonies, the British tended to implement a policy of de-emphasizing religion, no doubt drawing on the Indian experience. In Burma, for instance, the Buddhist monarchy was dismantled, and in Nigeria, the religious divide in Yorubaland was replaced by a concerted effort to make ancestral city membership salient. In some indirectly ruled areas, however, native rulers—often with the encouragement of British officials—continued to emphasize religion. The sultans of Malaya, for instance, became the defenders of Islam in their states. Bifurcated rule in these colonies created different fault lines of ethnic conflict. Even in the contemporary states of Myanmar, Malaysia, and Nigeria, there appear to be patterns of ethnic violence that descend from the British period. In northern Nigeria, religious violence has been a major problem, but not in Yorubaland. Racial tensions plague directly ruled Malaysia, but religious identification is still much stronger where the sultans once reigned. Chapter 6 provides evidence of the analytical power of drawing on the Indian model for insights into explaining contemporary ethnic violence in states around the Indian Ocean.
The arguments presented in this book contribute to several current debates within social science research. This project has aimed to advance work on the causes of ethnic violence in contemporary India, on the determinants of ethnic salience, and on the broader impact of colonialism on ethnic conflict. It is worth revisiting these three literatures to consider how the Indian case may provide answers to several of these important puzzles.
Ethnic Violence in Contemporary India.
An impressive body of literature within political science has examined the causes of ethnic conflict in India, specifically the recent and widespread occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots. Three central books (Brass 1997, 2003; Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2004) emphasize several similar factors, including the rise of Hindu nationalist groups such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the incentive for political elites to promote violence in the run-up to elections. These books not only have vastly expanded our understanding of ethnic conflict in India, but also have done much to popularize Indian politics to a broader audience across the social sciences. However, two critical factors are missing across these works: a consideration of the deeper historical causes of contemporary violence, and a focus on forms of ethnic conflict other than communalism. Existing scholarship on Hindu-Muslim riots has focused on proximate causes, highlighting relatively recent factors such as the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1980s. Variables such as these are no doubt important, but this book focuses instead on the underlying causes of violence. A major problem with research on Hindu-Muslim riots is the fact that extensive religious violence occurred throughout Indian history, dating as far back as the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, one of the earliest Islamic empires in South Asia. Therefore, a deeper explanation is needed to understand the root causes of modern violence. By looking at the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, this book offers a more historically grounded theory of contemporary communal violence.
A second problem of the existing literature is the singular focus on religion. Communal conflict in India has received an enormous amount of scholarly attention, but comparatively little consideration has been given to violence occurring along caste or tribal lines. This is a serious oversight, considering that these forms of conflict are prevalent throughout modern India. Thousands of atrocities are committed against members of the untouchable castes every year, and the Naxalite rebellion in eastern India was described by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the largest security threat in the history of the country. To broaden the scope of existing scholarship on ethnic conflict in India, this book offers a more comprehensive account, examining religious, caste, and tribal conflict together. In doing so, it highlights that most caste and tribal violence in contemporary India descends from the policies of colonial officials who discriminated against low castes and tribal groups. Importantly, this book also shows that religious violence had different causes and was prevalent even before colonialism.
Excerpt from The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India: Verghese, Ajay