বিনামন্তব্যে...
Some modern writers have almost seemed to turn this argument on its head. Pre-colonial caste and religious practice for them was fluid, eclectic and uncodified. Families could change their caste ranking in quite short periods of time; degraded liquor distillers might serve armies, become revenue managers and even landlords, elevating their caste status in the meantime. Traditional India was not a rigid society. It was British rule which made it so, codifying many localised and pragmatic customs into a unified and Brahminised 'Hindoo Law' and classing people into immutable castes through the operation of the courts and ethnographical surveys. Colonial society was seeing a mirror image of itself when it understood Indian society as rigid and stultified.
...In the last centuries before colonial rule the growing power of Brahmins and scribal people and the desire of new dynasties to legitimate themselves in terms of orthodoxy ensured that this was a powerful tradition in the process of constant reinvention. And it was from the adepts of this tradition at Nadia in particular that H. T. Colebrooke derived the material and the ideology which was to form the basis of his Hindu law code prepared for the use of Warren Hastings's neo-traditional administration in Bengal.
Some modern writers have almost seemed to turn this argument on its head. Pre-colonial caste and religious practice for them was fluid, eclectic and uncodified. Families could change their caste ranking in quite short periods of time; degraded liquor distillers might serve armies, become revenue managers and even landlords, elevating their caste status in the meantime. Traditional India was not a rigid society. It was British rule which made it so, codifying many localised and pragmatic customs into a unified and Brahminised 'Hindoo Law' and classing people into immutable castes through the operation of the courts and ethnographical surveys. Colonial society was seeing a mirror image of itself when it understood Indian society as rigid and stultified.
...In the last centuries before colonial rule the growing power of Brahmins and scribal people and the desire of new dynasties to legitimate themselves in terms of orthodoxy ensured that this was a powerful tradition in the process of constant reinvention. And it was from the adepts of this tradition at Nadia in particular that H. T. Colebrooke derived the material and the ideology which was to form the basis of his Hindu law code prepared for the use of Warren Hastings's neo-traditional administration in Bengal.
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