Historiography of Caste: The Notion of the ‘Declassed’ Castes in Michel Boivin’s ‘Sufi Paradigm’

Abstract

The ethno-nationalist historiography in South Asia primarily emerged as the postcolonial critique of British colonialism. Alternatively, the anti-caste historiographers have criticized the postcolonial historiography for reflecting the similar hegemonic bias towards the possible pre-or-post colonial histories of the internally colonized classes and castes. In this article, while appreciating with epistemic humility the equally legitimate position of Michel Boivin, I interrogate the concept of the ‘declassed’ caste groups as it tends to relativize the erasure of caste, the structural aspect that is peripheral to Boivin’s avowed goal of capturing diversity instead of difference, but central to the contemporary critical anti-caste scholarship that I rely on as an alternative framework of reference. Contending his selective epistemic prioritizing of the privileged Amil, Khoja, Mirza castes, I argue that Boivin’s archival ethnography has not effectively attended to the embedded caste-based political orders. He has failed to adequately address the possible erasure of caste, thereby adding to the ahistorical portrayal of the underprivileged castes such as Kolhi, Bheel, Meghwar, and Jogi. Boivin’s rendering of the ‘Sufi Paradigm’, therefore, is in continuation with the scholarship on Sindh that undermines hierarchical differences based on caste discrimination, and facilitates Sindhi progressive intelligentsia to historicize the privileged caste myth of caste-neutral Sufi Sindh.