Notes on the History of Indian Society and Culture PDF

Here is the conversion of the document into a structured markdown format: # 1 ## Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture ### Bernard S. Cohn THE STUDY of social change and acculturation has become over the last 35 years one of anthropologist's major activities. Until quite...

Here is the conversion of the document into a structured markdown format: # 1 ## Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture ### Bernard S. Cohn THE STUDY of social change and acculturation has become over the last 35 years one of anthropologist's major activities. Until quite recently the American Indians and African and Latin American societies and cultures have been the locus of most social change and acculturation studies. The American Indian studies have tended to focus on the overwhelming effects that white American society has had on tribal groups. The African studies have tended to focus on the direct and indirect political effects of European incursions. The study of acculturation in Latin America has emphasized the initial effects of Hispanization, the destruction of indigenous Indian society, and the emergence of complicated new patterns of culture. These studies have taken a total system view of the societies in relation to overwhelming political, economic, and social power which were directly or indirectly applied to indigenous societies. The American Indian studies have illustrated how persistent indigenous patterns have been and to a large extent how effective American Indians have been in the face of often overwhelming pressure, in maintaining many of their indigenous patterns. In Africa by and large the studies indicate that in the political realm the Africans have adapted European institutions to their own political ends. The societies of India offer a much different situation from that of the American Indian or the African to study long-term social change under colonial and post-colonial conditions. Indian society and political development were recognized by Europeans in the eighteenth century as being at relatively the same level as European society. In India there was settled agriculture and a variety of craft production on a large scale, political institutions of kingship, a legal system based partially on written law, taxation based on regular assessment, with record-keeping, and military forces roughly organized along lines similar to those of Europe. Many of the political and economic roles familiar to Europeans clerks, judges, tax officials, generals, bankers, and traders, existed. In addition, there was a multiple cultural-religious system based on sacred texts, both Hindu and Muslim, with a wide range of ritual specialists and scholars. Relatively speaking, British domination until the middle of the nineteenth century had little direct effect on Indian social, economic, and cultural life. As a result of British revenue arrangements, there was some circulation of personnel in the rural society as land became marketable and as new methods of acquisition of land through the use of British administrative procedures allowed nonmilitary groups access to control of land. New groups who tended to take advantage of the conditions established by the British fitted into the traditional structure or were placed on top of the existing structure and took over lifestyles well established by the eighteenth century. ## The Study of Indian Society and the Caste System There have been recorded observations on Indian society since the third century B.C. It is useful in considering more recent developments in the study of social change in India to sketch briefly the nature and content of the observations and assumptions which observers have made of the Indian social system. ### Classical and Arab-Persian Accounts For the period 327 B.C. to 1498, there are scattered accounts of Indian society written by foreigners. These travelers included Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Jews, and Chinese, and, increasingly from A.D. 1,000 onward, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, and Persians. Most classical accounts of Indian society follow Megasthenes, who had the advantage of direct observation of parts of India. But as Lach comments: Although he was an acute observer, Megasthenes was handicapped by his ignorance of the native languages. Like many Europeans since his time, he was unable to penetrate deeply into the thought, literature and history of the country simply by looking and listening, or by using interpreters (1945, I: 1, p. 10). Megasthenes described Indian society as being divided into seven classes: (1) philosophers, who offer sacrifices and perform other sacred rites; (2) husbandmen, who form the bulk of the population; (3) shepherds and hunters; (4) those who work at trades and vend wares and are employed in bodily labor; (5) fighting men; (6) inspectors; and (7) counselors and assessors of the king (M'Crindle, 1901, pp. 47-53). Megasthenes also noted that each of these seven "classes” were endogamous and that one could not change his occupation or profession (M'Crindle, 1901, p. 53). From the context of his account it would appear, as with many subsequent observers, that Megasthenes' data came mainly from observation of urban political centers. It is also interesting to note that, at least in the materials of Megasthenes which have survived, he makes no reference to the varna theory. Although there was regular and extensive contact between Rome and India through direct trade contact, Roman accounts, although fuller on geographic information, add little in the form of sociological information to our knowledge of the stratification system in early India. The earliest Arabic accounts follow the classical view of Indian society in reporting the division of Indian society into seven classes (Elliot and Dowson, 1867, vol. 1, pp. 16–17, 77). Al-Biruni (973-ca. 1030) appears to have been familiar with Sanskrit sources and does mention the four-varna theory of the caste system (al-Biruni, 1962, pp. 132-40). In the seventeenth century many translations were made from the Sanskrit literature into Persian by Indo-Muslim scholars (Rehatsek, 1880; Sabah Al-Din, 1961). Abu'l Fazl 'Allami, the author of the *A'īn-i-Akbarī*, a late sixteenth-century gazetteer and description of Akbar's court, revenue, and administrative system, presents the view that the four varnas were produced from the body of Brahma at the creation of the world. He recognizes that there are internal divisions within the four varnas, but follows Brah-manic theory in attributing these divisions to the mixture of the original varnas through intermarriage (Abu'l Fazl 'Allami, 1786, vol. 3, pp. 82–84). Functionally, as can be seen in the lists of military and revenue obligations given in the *Ā'īn-i-Akbarī*, the Mughals clearly recognized that the operational level of the Hindu social system was not at the level of the varnas but at the level of kin-based social categories such as we are familiar with in twentieth-century literature on the Indian caste system. The split view of Indian society, which we will see is so typical of nineteenth-century European views of India, of a theoretical varna-based society which sees the four major ideological based categories of Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra as being the system, existed functionally along with the necessity on the part of the Mughals to operate with localized kin-based caste groups. ## The View of the Caste System of the Early European Travelers The earliest direct observers of the Indian caste system in modern times were Portuguese adventurers, administrators, merchants, and priests, who began primarily on the Malabar coast to have direct experience with Indian society. Malabar at one and the same time was a highly cosmopolitan society, with enclaves of Arabs (Moplahs), Syrian Christians, Jews, and other foreign peoples, and an area in which the hierarchic principles of the caste system had been worked out in one of its most extreme forms. The Europeans were also fascinated in confronting matrilineal and polyandrous groups. Early Portuguese observers like Duarte Barbosa (1866, 1918, 1921) naively but accurately reported major cultural features of the caste system which continue to be recognized as central today: the high position of the Brahmans (1866, p. 121), the significance of pollution in relation to untouchability (1866, p. 129), the bars to commensality among endogamous groups (1866, p. 136), the relationship of occupation to caste (1866, pp. 135, 137), the application of sanctions within castes to maintain caste customs (1866, p. 133), and the relationship between caste and political organization (1866, pp. 103–106). Striking in Barbosa's description is his matter-of-fact and objective approach in trying to describe what he saw and what he was told; he presents his description of the caste system organized as a hierarchy with Brahmans on top and Untouchables on the bottom. There is no reference to the Hindu theory of the varnas and no moralizing about the benefits or evils of the system. In many respects European accounts for the next 250 years do not progress much beyond Barbosa's reporting. Unlike many of the Europeans who followed him to India, for shorter or longer periods, Barbosa knew an Indian vernacular well and was recognized by his contemporaries for his linguistic abilities (1918, p. xxxvi). Although there were others over the next 250 years who became fascinated with Indian society, most accounts by Europeans which circulated in Europe tended to focus on the Mughal courts and on political and commercial matters rather than on Indian society itself. Jean Baptiste Tavernier, a French merchant and traveler who made six voyages to the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia between about 1631 and 1667, wrote accounts of his travels that are typical of the works of this period (1889). He describes in detail the various routes and points of interest historically and commercially in his travels in India, much like a forerunner of Murray's guide to India (1889, vol. 1, pp. 1–318). He provides a history of the reign of Aurangzeb mainly based on oral evidence, and extensive discussions of commercial activities. Finally, Tavernier reports on various Hindu beliefs, rituals, and customs. This reporting is based on conversations with Brah-mans and on eyewitness reports. The caste system receives very brief notice. Tavernier bases his views on what he “ascertained from the most accomplished of their priests" (1889, vol. 2, p. 182); that is, that although there are believed to be 72 castes, "these may be reduced to four principal [castes], from which all others derive their origin" (p. 182). Tavernier and other European travelers appear to have had little difficulty in finding Brahmans to discuss Hinduism with them. Abraham Roger, the first chaplain at the Dutch factory at Pulicat in Madras, studied Hinduism from a Dutch-speaking Brahman, Padmanubha, in the 1630's. Roger's account of Hinduism was published in 1670, twenty years after his death, and contains Padmanubha's Dutch translation of Bhartrihari's *Satakas* (Yule and Burnell, 1903, p. xliii). ## Developments in the Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries With the establishment of British suzerainty in the later eighteenth century, the rapid acquisition of knowledge of the classical languages of India by a few British officials, the need for administrative purposes of a knowledge of the structure of Indian society, and the intensification of missionary activities, systematic knowledge of Indian society began to develop very rapidly from 1760 onward. Three major traditions of approach to Indian society can be seen by the end of the eighteenth century: the orientalist, the administrative and the missionary. Each had a characteristic view, tied to the kinds of roles which foreign observers played in India and the assumptions which underlay their views of India. ### The Orientalist Although there was some knowledge of the learned traditions of India, both Hindu and Muslim, before the middle of the eighteenth century, it was not until the post-Plassey generation that a cumulative knowledge of Persian and Sanskrit and the vernacular languages began to develop which enabled the British to begin to comprehend the depth and range of texts and their contents through which the religion, philosophy, and history of India began to become known to Europeans. Alexander Dow, an officer in the East India Company's army, was one of the first to publish a translation of one of the standard Persian histories of India, *Tārīkh-i-Fīrīshtāhī*, which was published as *The History of Hindustan* in 1768–1771. As was typical for the period, Dow prefaced his translations with a number of essays, one on the nature of Mughal government, one on the effects of British rule in Bengal, and "A Dissertation Concerning the Customs, Manners, Language, Religion and Philosophy of the Hindoos." To Dow, customs and manners appear to have largely meant Brahmanic prescriptions derived from his study in Persian and "through the vulgar tongue of the Hindoos" of "some of the principal shasters." This he did with the assistance of a pundit from Bañaras. Although Dow had tried to learn Sanskrit, apparently, his official duties prevented him from mastering the language, but he was fully aware of the difficulties of understanding Hinduism through Persian translations. Matters which we would call sociological are treated in seven pages out of the fifty of his essay and cover the four *varnas*, which he sees as four great tribes, each of which is made up of a variety of castes; the tribes do not intermarry, eat, drink, or in any manner associate with each other. Dow presents the Brahmanical theory of the origin of the system as derived from parts of the body of Brahma. The caste system is treated in two pages. Other customs Dow thinks worth noting are astrological concerns at the birth of a child, early marriage, suttee, disposal of the dead, the privileged Legal position of the Brahmans, the role of sannyasis as conveyers of Hinduism and types of penances which both sannyasis and the public sometimes perform. The orientalists seem to have been convinced that the texts were indeed accurate guides to the culture and society of the Hindus. N. B. Halhead, who provided the first compilation and translation from the Dharmashastras under the title *A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pundits. From a Persian Translation, Made from the Original, Written in the Shanscrit Language*, published in London in 1776, commented that from these translations "may be formed a precise idea of the customs and manners of these people" (Halhead, 1777, p. xi). A view of Indian society which was derived from the study of texts and cooperation with pundits and *sastris* (scholars of Hindu scriptures) had several consequences. In the first instance, it led to a consistent view that the Brahmans were the dominant group in the society. This was the function of the view which came from the texts themselves—a view which sees the Brahman as the center of the social order, which prescribes differential punishments for crimes based on one's varna status, which prohibits other varnas than Brahmans from learning certain texts, and which generally exalts the sacredness of the Brahman. The acceptance of this view is all the more odd in that it flew in the face of the evidence of the political structure of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India, in which there were few Brahman dynasties, and political military power rested in the hands of other groups in the society. The acceptance of a textual view of the society by the orientalists also led to a picture of Indian society as being static, timeless, and spaceless. Statements about customs which derived from third century A.D. texts and observations from the late eighteenth century were equally good evidence for determining the nature of society and culture in India. In this view of Indian society there was no regional variation and no questioning of the relationship between prescriptive normative statements derived from the texts and the actual behavior of individuals or groups. Indian society was seen as a set of rules which every Hindu followed. ### The Missionary The missionary view of India developed slightly later than the orientalist view. The first full expression of this view was contained in Charles Grant's *Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals, and on the Means of Improving It*. Grant, who was one of the early evangelicals, and who served as a commercial official in Bengal from 1774 to 1790, wrote the tract in 1792 for Henry Dundas, president of the Parliamentary Board of Control, the body responsible for the supervision of the East India Company's government.¹ Grant's view of Indian society and Indian character is summed up in the following quotation: Upon the whole, then, we cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Hindostán, a race of men lamentably degenerate and base, retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation, yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices ... (Great Britain, House of Commons, 1833, vol. 14, p. 41). Grant felt that the caste system, the legal system, government, and above all the despotic role of the Brahmans who control the society are the cause of the degraded state of the Hindus. Since society and culture are based, directed, and maintained by the religious system, the only hope for the improvement of Hindus and Hindu society lies in the elimination of Hinduism. This can be accomplished by government support of a highly effective campaign by Christian missionaries to convert the Indian population to Christianity. The early nineteenth century saw a considerable literature by missionaries and by the evangelicals on Indian society. Claudius Buchanan, Sir John Shore, William Carey, and William Ward all produced extensive works in much the same tenor as Grant's *Observations*. In these later works, especially in William Ward's *Account of the Writings, Religion and Manners of the Hindoos*, originally published at Serampore in 1811 in four volumes, but subsequently republished with some changes in content and title in 1815 and in 1820, the nature and type of "documentation" of the condemnation of Hindu society changed. There is much more of an attempt to condemn Hindu society and to hold up the religion to ridicule with translations from the Sanskrit texts. In addition, increasing attention was paid on the basis of eyewitness and hearsay accounts of what the missionaries took to be everyday examples of the depravity of the Hindu, suttee, purdah, sale of children into slavery, veneration of the cow, worship of idols, and the caste system. The caste system was described by William Ward (1820): Like all other attempts to cramp the human intellect, and forcibly to restrain men within bounds which nature scorns to keep, this system, however specious in theory, has operated like the Chinese national shoe, it has rendered the whole nation cripples. Under the fatal influence of this abominable system, the bramhuns have sunk into ignorance, without abating an atom of their claims to superiority; the kshutriyus became almost extinct before their country fell into the hands of Musulmans; the voishyus are no where to be found in Bengal; almost all have fallen into the class of shoodrus, and shoodrus have sunk to the level of their own cattle (vol. 2, pp. 64–65). The venom heaped on the caste system appears not to have been accidental, as the missionaries considered it necessary to destroy what they thought was the social basis of Hinduism. As long as those who converted to Christianity were merely another caste, as far as the rest of the Hindu population was concerned, and as long as an individual who converted cut himself off from the rest of society, there was little hope of diffusion of Christianity through normal channels of communication. As groups and individuals converted, the missionaries found themselves having to take on total economic and social responsibility for them as well as providing them with a different religion (Ingham, 1956). The major thrust of the missionaries in their writing was to condemn Hindus and Hindu society along the lines indicated above; however, as a by-product of their proselytizing endeavors, they often made major contributions to the empirical study of Indian society. This partially came out of their need for translations of the Bible and religious tracts into the Indian vernaculars. Perhaps the first sociolinguistic study we have of an Indian language is William Carey's *Dialogues Intended to Facilitate the Acquiring of the Bengali Language*, published at the Press at Serampore in 1801. This work, which reads like a forerunner of modern language teaching materials for learning a language through the oral-aural method, is a series of dialogues between various types of Indians- zamindars and their tenants, zamindars and their officials, washermen and fishermen, cultivators, and various types of women. The different social and occupational groups are recorded as speaking presumably as they would in normal conversation. William Adams, who came to Bengal as a Baptist minister in the early nineteenth century, was commissioned to do reports on indigenous education. These were highly laudatory of the nature of traditional vernacular education and reported in detail on the continued vigor of indigenous education in the 1830's (Long, 1868). In the middle of the nineteenth century Robert Caldwell spent fifty years of his life in South India. His study, *Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages*, was one of the first systematic accounts of the Dravidian languages and was to have considerable indirect effect on the politics of South India. Stephen Hislop, a missionary in Central India, provided some of the earliest and most useful descriptions of the tribal peoples of Central India. In the twentieth century, Charles Freer Andrews and Edward Thompson were important interpreters of changing Indian society in relation to the rise of nationalism and were consistent defenders of India and Indians in the face of official British policy. The orientalists and the missionaries were polar opposites in their assessment of Indian culture and society, but were in accord as to what the central principles and institutions of the society were. They agreed that it was a society in which religious ideas and practices underlay all social structure; they agreed in the primacy of the Brahman as the maintainer of the sacred tradition, through his control of the knowledge of the sacred texts. Both groups essentially accepted the Brahmanical theory of the four *varnas* and saw the origin of castes in the intermixture through marriage of the members of the four *varnas*. Neither group related what they must have known was the structure of the society on the ground to their knowledge of the society derived from textual study and discussions with learned Brahmans. There was little attempt on the part of either to fit the facts of political organization, land tenure, the actual functioning of the legal system, or the commercial structure into their picture of the society derived from the texts. Both the orientalists and the missionaries agreed that Hinduism as practiced within the realm of their observation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was filled with "superstition" and "abuses" and that by and large the Hindus were debased and licentious. Their major differences lay in that the orientalists admired in theory the civilization and religion embodied in the texts and saw the difficulties of Indian society as being a fall from a golden age. The missionaries saw the society and culture as always having been corrupt, pernicious, and filled with absurdities. The differences in view of the missionary and orientalist were related to their respective social backgrounds and their occupational roles in India. The orientalists tended to be better educated and from the upper classes of Great Britain; some, as Sir William Jones, were trained as scholars before their arrival in India and they wanted to treat Sanskrit and Persian learning with the same methods and respect as one would treat European learning. Their general political and social stance was conservative in that they accepted the status quo. They saw stability and order in the theory of caste. William Robertson, one of the Scottish moral philosophers, who, although not a Sanskrit or Persian scholar, was a disseminator of early studies of Indian tradition, argued: The object of the first Indian legislators was to employ the most effectual means of providing for the subsistence, the security, and happiness of all the members of the community over which they presided. With this view, they set apart certain races of men for each of the various professions and arts necessary in a well ordered society, and appointed the exercise of them to be transmitted from father to son in succession.... To this early division of the people into caste, we must likewise ascribe a striking peculiarity in the state of India; the permanence of its institutions, and the immutability in the manners of its inhabitants What now is in India, always was there, and is likely still to continue: neither the ferocious violence and illiberal fanaticism of its Mahomedan conquerors, nor the power of its European masters, have effected any considerable alteration. The same distinctions of condition take place, the same arrangements in civil and domestic society remain, the same maxims of religion are held in veneration, the same sciences and arts are cultivated (1828, appendix, pp. 52–53). Many of the orientalists in India were concerned with judicial affairs of the East India Company, as were Halhead, Jones, and Colebrooke. In their role as judges they were confronted with Indians who by the nature of court action appeared to be litigious, purveyors of false testimony, dishonest, and cheats. On the other hand, they were studying Sanskrit legal treatises with pundits and were impressed with the learning and sophistication of Hindu law. They were trying to apply Hindu law to the cases they were hearing on the grounds that Indians would be best governed under their own law rather than under imported British law. The gap between the way Indians behaved in the courts and what the "orientalist" judges believed was the law and the theory of the society was seen as a fall from an older and better state of society caused by the intervention of foreign rulers, Muslim and European. The missionaries with much the same perceptions and information interpreted the situation differently because of their differences in background. They largely came, particularly the Baptist missionaries, from lower orders in British society; they were committed to reform of their own society as well as of Indian society, and they were concerned with changing India rather than with maintaining the status quo. ## The Growth of an Empirical Knowledge of the Structure and Functioning of Indian Society The period 1757 to 1785 was a time in which the officials of the East India Company in Bengal had to develop an administrative system capable of maintaining law and order and producing in a regular fashion income to support the administrative, military, and commercial activities of the company and to provide a profit for its owners. Through this period, the company officials had to learn from scratch a great deal about India, Indians, and how they had been governed. The assessment and regular collection of land revenue, it became clear by Warren Hasting's time, required considerable detailed knowledge of the structure of Indian society. As the East India Company in Madras, in Maharashtra, and in upper India came into contact with and had to establish relations with a wide range of states, a knowledge of Indian political history and a working knowledge of the internal political structure of Indian states became a necessity. Persistently, inquiries into the nature of land tenure in Bengal were made, and collections of documents and records of previous rulers were assembled to determine what rights and duties various persons connected with the production of agricultural products had. Although it is clear that many of the efforts to learn the nature of Bengal rural society were confused and incomplete, none the less there were an increasing number of officials like James Grant and John Shore, who from documents and firsthand experience had considerable knowledge of the actual functioning of Bengali society. The misunderstandings leading to permanent settlement were as much a function of philosophical and social conceptions about the general nature of society and polity and the goals of British policy as they were a misunderstanding of the complicated facts of Bengali social structure.² In addition to the duties which some British officials had to perform in collecting and studying information about Indian rural society, some British, official and nonofficial, out of interest and curiosity began to study and write on Indian society from firsthand observation in relatively objective fashion William Tennant, a military chaplain, wrote a two-volume work, *Indian Recreations: Consisting Chiefly of Strictures on the Domestic and Rural Economy of the Mahommedans and Hindoos*, originally published in Edinburgh in 1804, which contains a collection of careful observations of agricultural practices in upper India (see vol. 2). Tennant's goal was to instruct himself about the "condition of a numerous people, living in a state of society and manners to me almost entirely new" (1804, vol. 1, p. 3). His information was based on personal observation, "conversations and writings of several intelligent natives of India, both Mussulmans and Ilindoos," and "oral conversation with the most intelligent of the Honourable Company's civil and military servants" (1804, vol. 1, pp. viii, ix). In short, he applied the techniques which were typical of the earliest generation of anthropologists down to the beginning of the twentieth century: observation and interviews with key native informants and knowledgeable Europeans. Tennant describes a particular village, 36 miles from Bañaras, of about a thousand acres and a population of a thousand. He briefly mentions the crops and the methods of cultivation and also gives a brief description of the occupations of the principal villagers. In addition to the *zamindar*, the *patwari*, and the *Byali* (grain weigher), he describes the carpenters, blacksmith, washermen, barbers, potters, Chamars, Ahirs, *barhi* (leaf plate maker), *bhat* (genealogist), shepherds, and the Brahman of the village. Tennant notes that the most numerous occupation (by implication irrespective of caste) is that of plowmen, of whom there were about 100 in the village, who received five seers of grain a day and one rupee for each of two annual plowing seasons (1804, vol. 2, p. 196). Another example of careful description of rural society in relation to agriculture was provided by H. T. Colebrooke (1806), one of the early Sanskrit scholars. It is interesting that Colebrooke wrote *Remarks on the Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal* before he was far along in the learning of Sanskrit. His work combines statistical material and summaries of official reports with his own observations and provides a good general description of the cultivation of most of the commercial crops, cotton, indigo, sugar cane, and opium. Colebrooke believed that by and large Bengal was relatively prosperous and was capable of becoming even more so as agriculture developed and manufacturing increased. He was sure that the caste system and the religious systems were in no sense any bar to further development. After quoting an unnamed author who argued that there was a hereditary prohibition on undertaking other than one's father's occupation, and briefly summarizing the four-varna theory of caste, Colebrooke commented: In practice, little attention is paid to the limitations to which we have alluded; daily observation shows even Brahmens exercising the menial profession of a Sudra. We are aware that every caste forms itself into clubs or lodges, consisting of the several individuals of that caste residing within a small distance; and that these clubs, or lodges, govern themselves by particular rules and customs, or by laws. But, though some restrictions and limitations, not founded on religious prejudice, are found among their by-laws, it may be received as a general maxim, that the occupation, appointed for each tribe, is entitled merely to a preference. Every profession, with few exceptions, is open to every description of persons; and the discouragement, arising from religious prejudices, is not greater than what exists in Great Britain from the effects of Municipal and corporation laws. In Bengal, the numbers of people, actually willing to apply to any particular occupation, are sufficient for the unlimited extension of any manufacture (1806, p. 174). With the rapid expansion of the East India Company's territories in the last decade of the eighteenth century, leading up to the final defeat of the Marathas in 1818, the British became increasingly aware of the bewildering variety of peoples, histories, political forms, systems of land tenure, and religious practices which were to be found in the subcontinent The mid and late eighteenth century western myth of "an undifferentiated Orient characterized by the rectilinear simplicity of its social structure, the immutability of its laws and customs, the primitive innocence of its people" (Guha, 1963, p. 26) could not be sustained in the face of the experience that the Wellesley generation had in India. Through their direct experience, such as Munro's in the land settlements in Salem District in Madras, Malcolm's in his diplomatic duties in Mysore and with the Marathas, Tod's in his diplomatic duties in Rajasthan, Elphinstone's in his diplomatic and administrative duties in Maharashtra, as well as dozens of other officials, the British now began to have fairly deep if somewhat unsystematic knowledge of Indian society. Coincident with the relatively haphazard collection and reporting of sociological information, usually embedded in revenue reports or in historical works, the company directly supported surveys part of whose goal was acquisition of better and more systematic information about the peoples of India. One of the earliest and most famous of these endeavors to collect information was that of Dr. Francis Buchanan. Buchanan-who later in his life took his mother's name, Hamilton, on the inheritance of her family's estate in Scotland—was born in Scotland in 1762. He had an excellent education in Glasgow and Edinburgh and became a physician; he apparently made several trips to India as an assistant surgeon on an East Indianman, and then in 1794 joined the East India Company's service as an assistant surgeon (Prain, 1905). He initially served in what is today East Pakistan and began early to collect and report on botanical and zoological specimens. His work caught the attention of William Roxburgh, the great student of Indian botany. It was Roxburgh who recommended Buchanan to Lord Clive, Governor of Madras, and Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General, when late in 1799 they wanted a survey made of Mysore and the Company's territories acquired after the Fourth Mysore War. Buchanan's instructions from Wellesley were to collect information on agriculture, nature of tenures, natural products of the country, manufacturing, commerce, mines and quarries, and the climate. In addition, Wellesley said: "The condition of the inhabitants in general, in regard to their food, clothing and habitations, will engage your particular attention. The different sects and tribes of which the body of people is composed, will merit your observance; you will likewise note whatever may appear to you worthy of remark in their laws, customs, etc...” (Buchanan, 1807, vol. 1, p. xii). Buchanan's report was published as a diary, in which he notes under a particular date what he observed or was told about the wide range of topics he was sent to obtain information about. He was obviously a keen observer, and his descriptions of technology, historic sites, and plants are excellent. He also obtained considerable data on what we would today call ethnographic accounts of the various castes, their subdivision, and occupations. Most of his information was obtained through interviewing members of various castes, and he is frequently careful in telling us of his sources and his guess as to their reliability Buchanan's great work, however, was his survey carried out on the orders of the court of director's of the Company of January 7, 1807. They wanted a statistical survey of the country, under the authority of the presidency of Bengal. If it had been completed it would cover what is today East and West Pakistan, parts of Orissa and Assam, most of present-day Bihar and Uttar Pradesh exclusive of Oudl, and the Bundelkhand districts. Buchanan was engaged in this work for seven years and completed 25 folio volumes of manuscript. The results of this work have never been completely published and were known in the nineteenth century largely from Robert Montgomery Martin's editing of the materials, which are contained in The *History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India* ..., published in three volumes in London in 1838. Martin's volumes cover the northern part of Bengal, the Districts of Dinajpur and Rangpur, the southern part of Assam, and the portions of Bihar south of the Ganges, and Gorakhpur District in Uttar Pradesh. In the twentieth century the Bihar and Orissa Research Society and Bihar government undertook to edit and publish the full version of Buchanan's reports which related to Bihar. In all, five volumes on four districts were published, and in addition three volumes of Buchanan's field journal which give his itinerary and incidental notes were also published. The Bihar materials differ greatly in quantity and quality from the Mysore survey of Buchanan. There are extensive statistics on various aspects of the society, estimates of the number of houses classified by general types of persons who occupied them (that is, gentry, traders, artificer, and plowman), health statistics, statistics on types of farm laborers, size of families, types of houses, attempts at statistically estimating standards of living and the numbers engaged in various trades and crafts in the cities and districts. In addition to the statistical material, there are extremely well-organized and detailed descriptions of education and land tenure, as well as normative descriptions of a wide range of customs. Buchanan organized his material under five main headings, Topography and Antiquities, The People, Natural Products, Agriculture, and Commerce, Arts, and Manufactures. Under the heading "The People," he discussed demography, his statistics usually being based on interviews with native officials and various registers, which he frequently spot-checked. He paid a great deal of attention to the standard of living of the people and constantly tried to measure income and consumption; he also gave materials on the form and content of education in the districts he covered. He described the various sects of the Hindus and Muslims found and their ritual and theological differences. His discussion of castes was weighted to description of their occupations. Much of what he wrote about the ethnography of Bihar was presented in comparison to Bengal, which apparently was more familiar to him and his readers ## The Development of the “Official” View of Caste Buchanan's work in Bengal