ABSTRACT
The theme of the argument to be developed here can be divined easily from the titles of some of the works that form the ethnographic and theoretical backdrop: Imagining India and ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’ (Inden 1990, 1986); ‘The Invention of Caste’ and ‘Castes of Mind’ (Dirks 1989, 1992), ‘Inventing Village Tradition’ (Mayer 1993). At a substantive level, the claim being made in these and a number of other works is that some of the most cherished concepts used by anthropologists and sociologists to depict institutions in India are at best so problematic as to be virtually useless, and at worst simply figments of the imagination. I will focus here on the construct that has come in for most criticism-caste.1
