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Book Review

Asia

Susan Bayly. The New Cambridge History of India. Volume 4, part 3: Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 421. $59.95.

What are we to make of "caste" in Indian history and society? In a broad sense, quite a lot. The term "caste" has been mentioned, at least in passing, in the books of many historians, both Indian and foreign, writing of the various regions and periods of a vast subcontinental narrative. Some wrote of the institution as an enduring element of Indian civilization, while others noted how "caste" or "varna," or the "caste system," or similar social distinctions had varied in time and place. After the postmodern and postcolonial "turns," scholars went so far as to offer interpretations suggesting that "caste" was "invented" by the British as part of a colonial ethnographic project in India. The "invention of caste" has become a sort of historiographical sound bite that seems to conceal as much as it may reveal. Any attempt to sort out the questions of caste in modern Indian history would require a widely read scholar who is also brave. Susan Bayly is such a scholar. 1

Bayly has written an excellent, stimulating survey of the history of conception, description, analysis, and influence of the idea and institution of caste and community in modern South Asia. As part of the New Cambridge History of India series, it clearly fulfills the editorial mandate of presenting recent scholarship and changing historical conceptions of the modern subcontinent. 2

The story to be told is initially about the representations and uses of caste; the early chapters emphasize an intellectual history of the idea rather than the workings of the institution. Bayly explores visions of "caste" articulated by Europeans and Indians, the latter operating in an emerging arena of public opinion. . . .

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