Nicholas B. Dirks

Castes of Mind

parative sociology and in common parlance, caste has become a central trope for India, metonymically indexing it as fundamentally different from other places, synecdochically expressing its essence. A long history of writing, from the grand treatise of the Abbe Dubois to the general anthropology of Louis Dumont, or from the desultory observations of Portuguese adventurers in the sixteenth century to the eye-catching headlines of the New York Times, has identified caste as the basic form and expression of Indian society. Caste has been seen as always there in Indian history, and as one of the major reasons why India has no history, or at least no sense of history. Caste defines the core of Indian tradition, and caste is today the major threat to Indian modernity, even if we concede that it helped pave the way for the modern or realize that it has been exacerbated by modern institutions. If we are to understand India properly, and by implication if we are to understand Indias other principal claim to universal fame-Hinduism-we must understand caste.

From Little King to Landlord: Property, Law, and the Gift under the Madras Permanent Settlement

In the last few years, modern historians of India have pushed the historical frontier of their field backwards in time. Colonialism is no longer considered the great watershed it once was thought to be. Historians who concern themselves with economic processes such as protoindustrialization tend in particular to minimize the impact of the consolidation of colonial rule in the late eighteenth century. Changes viewed as significant by these historians usually begin with the introduction of capitalism and the early encroachment of a world system, both of which predate the full political realization of colonialism. Historians who concern themselves with political changes tend in the other direction, although increasingly they have proposed major continuities between the ancien regime and the early colonial state. Historians concerned with social change view colonialism as significant but invoke various new forms of dualism to account for the limited effects of colonialism on local social forms. Whatever their differences, all of these historians agree that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are crucial for viewing later changes in economy, polity, and society, and, from their varying theoretical and ideological perspectives, delight in excoriating traditional views of India as static and “traditional” before the arrival of the British.

Autobiography of an archive : a scholar's passage to India

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Passage to IndiaPart I. Autobiography1. Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History2. Autobiography of an Archive3. Preface to the Second Edition of The Hollow CrownPart II. History and Anthropology4. Castes of Mind5. Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact6. The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern IndiaPart III. Empire7. Imperial Sovereignty8. Bringing the Company Back In: The Scandal of Early Global Capitalism9. The Idea of EmpirePart IV. The Politics of Knowledge10. In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century11. G. S. Ghurye and the Politics of Sociological Knowledge12. South Asian Studies: Futures PastPart V. University13. Franz Boas and the American University: A Personal Account14. Scholars and Spies: Worldly Knowledge and the Predicament of the University15. The Opening of the American MindNotesPermissionsIndex

The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom.

List of illustrations List of maps List of tables Preface Glossary of terms Map of the Madras Presidency, 1900 Map of Pudukkottai State The Tondaiman line of Pudukkottai Part I. Introduction: 1. The study of state and society in India Part II. History and Ethnohistory: 2. The historical context of the old regime 3. The discourse of kingship: representations of authority in the old regime Part III. A Little Kingdom in the Old Regime: 4. Pudukkottai and the old regime: gift, order, and authority in a south Indian little kingdom 5. The early history of the Pudukkottai region 6. Tondaiman Raj: 1686-1801 Part IV. Social Relations of a Little Kingdom: 7. Royal Kallars 8. Political hegemony and social relations: caste in Pudukkottai 9. Temples and society Part V. Colonial Mediations: Contradictions Under the Raj: 10. Agrarian rebellion? Last gasp of the old regime 11. The colonization of the political order: land settlements, political intervention and structural change 12. Temples and conflict: the changing context of worship 13. The theatre state: princely politics in colonial south India Part VI. Conclusion: 14. Ethnohistory and the Indian state Appendix: land and privilege: inams in Pudukkottai References List of records and abbreviations List of archives and record offices Index.