• According to Whitehead, while caste existed during the precolonial period, it acquired a political and ritual rigidity during the latter half of the nineteenth Century as it became linked to new disciplinary forms of the colonial state.
• Early census ethnographers saw it as a timeless institution originating in the distant past, thus an original mark of difference from Europe.
• Indeed, European representations of India in the late nineteenth century often identified caste as the principal cause of India''s lack of economic progress and of its domination by outsider''s.

Colonial assertions

Judy whitehead points that:

• Colonial ideology emphasised the moral and scientific inferiority of India''s tradition.
• The position of Indian women and supposedly “barbaric” Hindu practices such as child marriage and devadasi system became symbols of Britain’s higher level of Civilisation and of its moral right to govern a subject population.
• British rule raised and provided that sole index for understanding India is caste, the reduced everything to a single explanatory category of caste.
• Caste was not merely a fabrication of British rulers designed to demean and subjugate Indians.

The contradiction lies in the fact that it did serve the colonial interests by condemning the ‘Brahmanical tyranny’ and appeasing to other castes and community to weaken the National Movement

Whitehead’s viewpoint on colonial understanding of caste

• European perceptions of the caste system came to mix historical reconstructions with projections of their own cultural prejudices which channelled future commentaries and analyses of caste.
• Colonial rulers saw caste as a key symbol, as it constituted ‘the most powerful element of stability in this Feudal structure, which secured rural areas from the convulsions with which individual ambition might threaten it’.
• The definitions of caste incorporated into successive colonial discourses collapsed history into nature, appearing timeless and exotic: and apt symbol of the ‘archaic’ east.
• Caste became the synecdoche of India, a single social institution that symbolized the character of the entire society
• He saw in this ‘essential institution’ causes for the lack of separation between religious and secular law, which in turn determined the lack of evolution of the state, a lack exacerbated by the local division of the caste system.

Whether caste has potential to displace class and colonial contradictions

Whitehead writes that there are several logical lacunae in a direct reduction of caste forms to class domination of colonial ideas:

• Interpreting the ideological domain as an immediate reflection of class interest ignores conditions by which subject consent to ruling class definitions of social reality. That is, the conception of class hegemony cannot address the question of why it assumes different shapes across societies and through time.
• Dumont ‘conveniently smuggled’ empirical relations in as example of the materialisation of imputed categories of thought. By such a procedure, the possibility of critically understanding the historical processes which produce different forms of social consciousness is eradicated.
• The fact of brahmins being landlords represents secularisation of and deviation from the principle of religious hierarchy, highlighting how caste and class are already mingled in practice. Dumont transformed real class and caste contradictions into oppositions in thought, which though looks like a critical understanding of the social relations which produce caste ideology, but is an apology for Brahminical Hinduism.
• Colonialism exaggerated cultural specifies into rigid evolutionary contrast between Europe and the rest of the world which reproduced images of timeless ‘others’ existing outside real historical process, maintaining a temporal distance between Europe and its colonies as effectively as did more elaborate evolutionary scales elsewhere. caste cannot replace this understanding.
• Orientalists saw the Hindus as victims of an unchangeable, hierarchical and Brahmanical value system. Their insistence on this played a crucial role in the making of a more caste-conscious social order. The basic objective of the colonial state was to procure data about Indian social life so as to tax and police its subjects. From the early nineteenth century, the company officials turned increasingly to literate Brahmans or to scribal and commercial populations to obtain such information. The Orientalists treated shastra texts as the authoritative sources on ‘native’ law and custom. Such informants had an incentive to argue that India was a land of age-old Brahmanical values. They insisted that effective social-control and cohesion could be achieved only if hierarchical jati and varna principles were retained. Many nineteenth century Orientalists saw priestly Brahmans as an important but also pernicious force in the society. They doubted the veracity of claims of these indigenous literate specialists.

Shortcoming in whitehead’s ideas

• Whitehead develops on ideas of Dumont, which are in particular encouraged a caste view of Indian society.
• L N Venkataraman writes (in EPW) that the growing disappearance of economic dependency which was a product of caste-based division of labour is freeing the erstwhile “lower” castes from the dominance of the “other”. This is an important aspect as caste-based division of labour is changing to class-centric one. The role of education in this change is intersectionally influential in the villages.
• Whitehead’s criticism is based on how Dumont imagined the caste system in India.  since Dumont’s Views or much on what caste used to be and not what caste today is, whitehead’s understanding of caste system also seems misplaced in time.
• It is also worth noting that superiority of hegemons is also questioned by others who see power concentrated in their hands.

Summing ups

• Robert deliege writes that the diversification of occupations related modernity has transformed traditional caste interdependence into mutual rivalry and, at times, outright competition for classes.
• Caste dimension still remains important and India has gone for only selective modernisation and not complete modernisation as explained by Yogendra Singh neither has it reminded totally traditional as Dumont as put it.
• For both British and French traditions (colonial rulers of India), the power of caste as a symbol resided in its multivocal ability to displace class and colonial contradictions and condense them in a metaphor of India’s essential and pre-existing deviations from the sociology of western Europe,
• Whitehead uses these understanding between colonial past development models and prevalent social policies to offer valuable insights and lessons on the type of social policy that can foster democratic and right-based models of social development.