Caste and Social Stratification in Medieval India
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
FOURTH SEMESTER M.A. HISTORY PAPER- 4.4 STUDY MATERIAL CASTE AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN MEDIEVAL INDIA UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION Prepared by : Dr.N.PADMANABHAN Associate Professor P.G.Department of History 416 2008 C.A.S.College, Madayi Admission P.O.Payangadi-RS-670358 Vol.II Dt.Kannur-Kerala. MA HIS Pr.4.4 (C&S.S.M.I) School of Distance Education UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION STUDY MATERIAL PAPER 4.4 CASTE AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN MEDIEVAL INDIA Prepared by : Dr.N.PADMANABHAN Associate Professor P.G.Department of History C.A.S.College, Madayi P.O.Payangadi-RS-670358 Dt.Kannur-Kerala. Type Settings & Lay out Computer Section, SDE © Reserved Caste and Social Stratification in Medieval India Page 2 School of Distance Education CHAPTERS CONTENTS PAGES I THEORIES OF CASTE IN INDIA 05-30 11 CASTE AND VILLAGE COMMUNITY 31-51 111 CASTE AND URBAN CENTRES 52-72 1V CASTE AND MEDIEVAL IDEOLOGY 73-164 V CASTE IN ORGANISED FORM 165-225 Caste and Social Stratification in Medieval India Page 3 School of Distance Education Caste and Social Stratification in Medieval India Page 4 School of Distance Education CHAPTER-1 THEORIES OF CASTE IN INDIA European Perception of Caste. It is not that other British commentators were entirely unimpressed by the salience of caste or its significance for a whole series of civilizational diagnoses.Late18th and early 19th century British writings on India, however, tended to say relatively little about caste and to be formulaic at best, long after Alexander Dow.Most British writing on India in the 18th century concerned military matters, and reflected a painstaking and painful history of conquest, negotiation, alliance, deception, and warfare. The great hero of the century was Clive, whose military successes in Bengal and Madras had established the basis for Company control over vast sections of India’s most fertile lands. But even after the successes of Plassey and Arcot, the history of colonial conquest was highly fraught. The Mysore rulers Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan had to be engaged four times before their final defeat in 1799, before which many commentators noted the possibility of a very different political future for the subcontinent.And the Marathas were a potent force until the military and diplomatic successes of the British in 1818.In writings about warfare and military and political intrigue, and in basic concerns about conquest and control, caste figured as of little significance.The belief that the British, like the Mughals and the Sultanates before them had merely walked into India, facing only minimal resistance because of caste divisions, could hardly have been generated, let alone sustained, at times of open and regular military engagement. Even when they were no longer explicitly engaged with matters of conquest, the British were concerned about land revenue and the growing need to provide regular income from agriculture to supplement the mercantile profits of international trade; this also mitigated a preoccupation with caste in favor of the village.Thomas Munro, Mark Wilks, and Charles Metcalfe all wrote eloquently about the importance of the village community.Metcalfe’s words are perhaps the most quoted: “The village communities are little republics, having nearly every thing they can want within themselves, and almost independent of any foreign relations….Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds to revolution; …. But the village community remains the same”.Thomas Munro, the architect of the Madras ryotwari settlement (which, unlike Cornwallis’s zamindari settlement in Bengal, was made with individual cultivators), wrote in a report from Anantapur of 15th May, 1806, that “Every village, with its twelve Ayangadees as they are called, is a kind of little republic, with the Potail at the head of it; and India is a mass of such republics.The inhabitants, during war, look chiefly to their own Potail.They give themselves Caste and Social Stratification in Medieval India Page 5 School of Distance Education no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms, while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred; wherever it goes the internal management remains unaltered; the Potail is still the collector and magistrate, and head farmer.From the age of Menu until this day the settlements have been made with or through the Potails”.The 5th Report of 1812 quoted Munro liberally in an endorsement of the view that village government had been in place “from time immemorial”, though it also reflects the debate over land tenure in Madras as to whether individual cultivators or the headman of the village should be the agent of revenue settlement, about which much more in a later chapter.Charles Metcalfe and Mountstuart Elphinstone elaborated the idea in relation to the abiding belief in the evanescent but extractive presence of Oriental despotisms. Elphinstone wrote that “These communities contain in miniature all the materials of a State within themselves, and are almost sufficient to protect their members, if all governments are withdrawn”, and Metcalfe elaborated his comment quoted above by nothing that the village communities have “nearly everything that they want within themselves, and [are] almost independent of any foreign relations”. The focus on the village was part of the early colonial preoccupation with questions of property, landholding, and revenue collection.In late eighteenth century Bengal, the views of John Shore, Philip Francis, and Charles Cornwallis had all led, after extensive debate, to a permanent settlement with zamindars, or landlords.This led to a massive reorganization of local power meant simultaneously to coopt the chiefs and magnates of late Mughal rule and install a loyal and landed aristocracy to serve a physiocratic vision for a new India.But as the immediate concerns of conquest gave way to the need for more revenue, Thomas Munro and others made their political careers by arguing for a completely different organization of revenue collection in the countryside. The colonial concern to know India began with the desire to understand local forms of landholding and agrarian management, and voluminous statistics and narratives both reflected this concern and fueled continuous arguments about the best ways to rule India and collect revenue.Suspicion of local magnates turned into a paternalist romanticism around the figure of the rural yeoman, and thus the colonial interest in local history and social organization crystallized first around images of gentry landlords, village republics, and sturdy yeomen.There were many different views, but virtually all colonial commentators were impressed by the integrity, and relative autonomy, of the village. Although by far the greatest number of early colonial records concerned questions of revenue and property, the Company, and numerous Company servants, were interested in discovering a more broadly based context in which to situate polemical debates over property, rent, and agrarian structure.Colin Mackenzie, who played a particularly important role in the rescuing of south India’s precolonial history (and he will play an important role Caste and Social Stratification in Medieval India Page 6 School of Distance Education in the story ahead), tried to distance himself from revenue debates, and committed himself to the collection of local texts while he engaged in his cartographic and surveying activities in the subcontinent between 1784 and his death in 1821.Significantly for our story here, he encountered very little concerning “caste” in his vast collection of local texts, traditions, and histories, nor did he comment frequently about it.In Mackenzie’s initial project of collecting representative texts, histories of places (particularly temples) and political families (and lineages) predominated.The south Indian landscape that he traversed was dotted with temples that served as convenient reference points for trigonometrical surveying and general route maps, due to the tall gopuram towers built over the gateways into temple structures that often served as centers for marketing and defense in addition to worship.Every temple had a history that inscribed the significance of its deity and the ground of the deities’ worship with a special past of miracle and power.The south Indian landscape had also been controlled by myriad little kingdoms, ranging widely in size, each with a family history for the chief or king.Thus the set of local tracts collected by Mackenzie contain literally hundreds of accounts of one lineage headman after another who managed to become a little king through a combination of strategies and successes.Frequently, of course, these stories were told as bids to become recognized as zamindars, if not as arguments per se for a zamindari-like settlement in the south. Mackenzie’s preoccupation with local chiefs and kings was in part the result of his clear recognition of the political landscape of late precolonial peninsular India; it was also in part a reflection of the more general recognition – both military and economic – of the need to understand the native aristocracy, its immediate past, and its claims to local authority. When Mackenzie began his survey of Mysore after the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799, the general assumption among most East India Company officials was that a revenue settlement with the local lords or zamindars, along the lines of the 1793 Permanent Settlement in Bengal, would be the most suitable form of local governance and revenue collection for Madras presidency.Thus Mackenzie’s archival concern with the political history of the Deccan made a great deal of sense for early colonial administration because of its emphasis on the pasts and pedigrees of the potential landlords of a zamindari revenue settlement. As the consensus around the need for a ryotwari settlement grew, interest among many of Mackenzie’s old friends in the results of his labors diminished.