ABSTRACT
The colonial ethnography was crafted as an essential constituent as well as the tool of the legitimising discourse of the imperial Indian state from mid-nineteenth century onwards. With the epistemological shift from religion to science, the colonial administrators and policy-makers as interpreters and practitioners of the European rationalist discourse had given a new angle to the study and representation of the ‘other’ in Africa and Asia whom they were to ‘subdue, administer, convert and improve without halting and without question’. The hegemonic discourse as well as its strategies, like the colonial state was the product of European rationalist theory, which attached great importance to technical knowledge as an instrument of control, conquest and imaging invincibility. This chapter focuses on colonial ethnographic thinking, especially, its locale where information about caste was collected, classified, cross-tabulated, compared and presented.
