ABSTRACT
A long history of writing—ranging from the voluminous treatise on caste by French Catholic missionary Jean-Antoine Dubois in 1816 to the highly controversial structural analysis of caste subsumed under the catchword Homo Hierarchicus proposed by French anthropologist Louis Dumont in 1966—caste has been identified as the major trope of Indian society. If colonizers did not “invent” caste the colonial regime definitely redefined, channeled, and politicized caste. The enumeration of caste was an ambitious endeavor and census commissioners were not unanimous about which criteria of classification the administration should work with. In the inter-war period prominent figures such as D. N. Majumdar and Irawati Karve used sero-anthropology to ascertain the racial origins of different Indian castes. In colonial India, beyond the official publications of Indian anthropologists, the discussion on the nature, origin and usefulness of caste was a hotly debated topic in a diverse set of other genres.
