জাতপাত ও সাম্রাজ্যের দায়

আবারও...

Brahmins and high Brahminical ritual introduced by eighteenth-century rulers such as the rajas of Travancore or the poligars, spread in the protected states of the nineteenth century for whom conspicuous piety replaced warfare as the chief charge on state revenues. New men who built up their fortunes through the service of the British invested in elaborate death anniversary ceremonies (sraddas) in rural Bengal, while many of the great temples of Madras were renovated and expanded in the vivid styles of the early nineteenth 

জাতিবাদী সাম্রাজ্য

আরও একটা...

Early officials began the process of ranking and grading the Indian social order in an attempt to understand and control it. So James Tod's neo-Gothic extravaganza, The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829-32) itself became a reference book for the princes of that region in history and marriage customs. In the same way British law began to dispense to all castes and communities the high Brahminical and scholarly traditions derived from the seminaries of Nadia or Tanjore. Yet the colonialists did not create this interpretation of India; rather they speeded up and transformed social and ideological changes which were already in train.

সাম্রাজ্য আর জাতপাতের কড়াকড়ি

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.