In the past year there have been two interesting events that made me recall the seminal work of Nicholas B. Dirks: Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001). The first event was the social and educational survey conducted in Karnataka in April 2015 that recorded caste. The second was the demand made by assorted groups of people to make public the all-India data on caste collected as part of the Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011. Why is the work of a historian and anthropologist like Dirks who has mainly worked on the history of colonial India relevant if a survey that records caste takes place in 2015 in one province of India or if there are demands to make public the data on caste?
October 2015, volume 39, No 10