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.
Continue reading The origin and variation of ethnic violence in South Asia
