Abstract
Through detailed postcolonial critical analysis, Nicholas Dirks’ 2001 classic Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India shows how ‘caste (again, as we know it today) is a modern phenomenon, that it is, specifically, the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule’ (p. 5). Regardless of the extent of their agreement with Dirks, historians and sociologists studying South Asia concur that Castes of Mind is a meticulous, rigorous, nuanced account of the anthropological history of caste in India/South Asia providing a significant counterpoint to the more popular Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont, 1980). The value of Castes of Mind lies not in ‘proving’ that caste is a British invention, but in revealing how the category and meaning of caste is made and re-made discursively by particular actors pursuing particular interests. It is this Foucauldian formation of the discourse and subject of caste through textualization and a governmental gaze that is of particular relevance to management scholarship on caste, yet Castes of Mind remains largely overlooked within management scholarship, often receiving only passing citation alongside Homo Hierarchicus.
Structured both chronologically, stretching from the 1700s to the 1980s, and thematically, Castes of Mind unfolds in four parts across 15 chapters. The first part – The “Invention” of Caste – launches the central argument of the book: that the presentation of caste as an atavistic feature, a stigma for a modernizing society that needs to be left behind for India to become suitably modern; is an imperial production aimed at justifying and strengthening colonial control. Furthermore, Dirks argues, this presentation has in turn led to the emergence of communal and Hindu nationalist counter-discourses. Weaving together missionaries and administrators’ readings of social practices and Orientalists’ textual interpretations, Dirks draws attention to their reductive characterization of India as devoid of civic virtue, defined by a hereditary caste hierarchy, deeply mired in ritual, ceremonial idolatry and Brahminical dominance. That is, a society in need of redemption and civilizing. In the third chapter, the first war of independence/sepoy mutiny of 1857 timestamps the shift in the colonial gaze from the redemption project – a personal passion of select proselytizing colonists – to the ethnographic project of the Crown’s government. Prior to 1857, the East India Company ruled for tax revenues first and proselytization second. With the sepoy mutiny, the British state assumed rule and, artificially demarcating the native world into distinct public and private spheres, espoused a policy of non-interference in the private religious-cultural sphere while the Crown’s explicit mandate to govern the public sphere made ‘knowing’ Indian society a governmental necessity. In this way, Dirks argues, ‘ethnographic knowledge’ of caste hierarchy was taken as a precondition for effective control of the colony on the erroneous but still-common idea that India equals caste. What’s more, the conception of caste developed for this governmental gaze was shaped by sociologists and anthropologists’ (mis)constructions soaked in racial colonial prejudices and mistranslations.
In part two – Colonization of the Archive – Dirks counters both the colonial construction of caste hierarchy and its importance in native society by tracing the markers of social identity and status in everyday practice in pre-colonial South India. He reveals: (1) the influence of caste was in fact negligible, and (2) fluid hierarchies were constituted through political patronage and economic activity rather than Brahminical dominance. It was rather, according to Dirks, the colonial preoccupation with land tax and the associated textualizing ethnographic project of cataloguing and mapping natives that shaped the meaning of caste as a religious and social category. Being so disconnected from everyday practice, the resulting archive was no faithful representation of native customs and traditions but rather functioned as a tool for silencing and invisibilizing its native interlocutors. This marks an inflection point in the emergence of caste as a category in India’s history, now characterized specifically in terms of Brahminical superiority, textual validity, marked on the body, and productive of exploitation and oppression through its ritualistic notions of purity, homophily, endogamy, etc. In more ways than one, caste here simply became the Indian/South Asian version of race, fuelled by the now- discredited Aryan invasion theory.
It is important to note that the argument of the book up to this point is vulnerable to cherry-picking and co-optation by nationalist and Hindutva versions of decolonization that would favour framing caste as a purely British invention that undermines an imagined monolithic Hindu society. Yet Dirks rejects this simplistic and dangerous interpretation, with the remainder of the book nuancing his assertion that ‘caste is a British invention’ and unpacking the harsh, complex realities of caste in light of this demystified history.
Part three – The Ethnographic State – offers an engaging, evocative narrative detailing the Foucauldian production and elaboration of the category and discourse of caste through the textual, discursive activities of diverse actors in pursuit of their own various, situated and partisan interests. Here Dirks emphasizes that this process involved both colonial and native actors, including critics, beneficiaries, colonial administrators and missionaries. Part four – Recasting India: Caste, Community, and Politics – directly focuses on native politics around caste pre- and post-independence. Here Dirks specifically explores how colonial constructions of caste were mobilized by anti-caste movements, including nationalist movements motivated to replace caste diversity with Hindu religious unity. If Periyar, Phule, Ambedkar, Gandhi and Tilak were the key actors in pre-independence discursive production, post-independence the constitutional provision of reservations and the rise of Dalit political parties worked in important ways to once again transform caste and its operation in India.
Some contemporary management research continues the project of tracing the complex ongoing construction of caste, for instance through the identity work of precarious and stigmatized migrant workers (Mendonca et al., 2024). Yet even within critical management studies, much research still treats caste as a self-evident, already formed category. This is particularly characteristic of research under the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) umbrella – the main context of research on caste in the field of management – which tends to present caste as a racialized, demographic, essentialized and individualized parameter (Bapuji et al., 2024a). Scarcely is there reflection on, for instance, the degree to which contemporary meanings of caste and caste identity overlap with or diverge from the meanings developed during the time of British colonial rule, elaborated by both Dumont and Dirks.
Addressing caste from a DEI perspective can, of course, serve emancipatory ends to the extent that, for instance, it makes visible a dimension of marginalization and oppression previously invisible within management studies (e.g. Joshi and Malghan, 2017; Vijay and Nair, 2022). Yet there is a worrying dearth of attention to the effects of such research in discursively performing a particular conception of caste, which potentially risks reenacting social science’s complicity in the colonial discursive project Dirks already described back in 2001. Indeed it seems quite likely that we are currently in the midst of a new round of remaking caste. Echoing the above-described colonial ethnographic project, DEI research today similarly comprises the cataloguing and enumeration of representation and outcomes according to various identity categories (e.g. Prasad et al., 2020). The gaze this time too appears governmental, treating caste as a managerial and organizational challenge (Bapuji et al., 2024b) where homophily is either helpful or hurtful for the organization and/or its individual members (e.g. Claes and Vissa, 2020).
As academics we clearly serve particular functions in the modern governmentality of management, and yet we remain apparently unconscious of our role in the (re)making of caste. Engaging with Castes of Mind prompts us to be reflexive about the ways in which we are remaking, reshaping or reinforcing caste and its prejudices through our academic, policy, organizational and managerial discourses and practices. Some such reflexivity is demonstrated by calls to self-problematize our knowledge production to be sensitive to issues of caste (Dixit, 2025) but, while correct, I believe responses like these are incomplete. Rather, Castes of Mind shows that we must go further: to reckon with our responsibility to make use of our position of discursive power and not to squander the emancipatory opportunities provided by our historical moment. 1 In proving that caste is being remade all the time, Dirks’ work invites us to think about how we may deploy our discursive powers to engage with caste beyond modernity to purposefully remake it in ways that serve greater emancipatory ambitions. Such ambitions warrant a Bhagiratha 2 effort of bearing responsibility for our words and actions literally, metaphorically and praxistically.
