SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Building Nations, Breaking Communities: the Locality of Caste Violence in Colonial North India

My paper will seek to provide at least a partial explanation for why upper castes in Bihar and other parts of northern India today assert dominance through violence rather than through older modes of negotiated, even if unequally negotiated, authority. I do not by any means suggest that caste-based dominance and subordination were not also characterized by great violence in the past but would like to understand why they rely primarily on violence today. I will argue that this happens because the spaces—conceptual and physical—that had kept superior and subordinated castes linked in broadly functional interdependence and social proximity were ruptured beginning in the late 19th century. While in the period preceding, this was certainly not an equal society, some of its most pernicious aspects could be mitigated since at least the rhetoric of compromise had to be preserved.

The intrusion of all-India politics and discourses, however, reoriented upper caste priorities beyond local arenas. The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by the emergence of more starkly divergent priorities and perspectives among upper and lower castes as they redefined their ideas about what constituted a just community and its relation to locality and nation. Whereas both dominant and subordinated castes in Bihar had begun to organize themselves through caste associations (sabhas) from the late nineteenth century on, the gradual inauguration of electoral politics within the framework of colonial (and independent) India’s highly centralized state structure gave upper castes a greater ability for and interest in vying for political rewards and power in the national arena. While Bihar’s dominant castes and classes reoriented older regional or local patriotisms to serve their national political and cultural aspirations, caste within the region acquired new sharp edges.