Reconstructing Lives and the Place of Caste in the Intersecting Publics of Family, Community, and State in Eighteenth-Century Banaras

Historiographical interventions on caste in India have drawn attention to the ways in which caste identities are historically produced. However, critical debates underlie even such revisionist explorations. One of these concerns the role of colonialism in the making of caste in India. A few scholars have emphasized that colonial rule invented caste through ethnographic enterprises during the nineteenth century. Others have challenged assertions of colonial agency in the creation or invention of caste and drawn attention to caste as social practice during the pre-colonial and colonial contexts. In this presentation, I too emphasize caste as social practice. I examine the life story of a certain itinerant brahmin widow to illuminate the ways in which caste status was fluid and contingent upon power relations that simultaneously involved family, community and the state during the eighteenth century. This research is based upon an examination of familial disputes that came to the newly established colonial courts in late eighteenth century Banaras and were documented in colonial administrative records from the period. I demonstrate that as caste- based practices were charged with issues of power that necessitated familial, community and state involvement, destitute brahman widows used them to make claims upon all three intersecting sites. Examinations in this direction also reveal that as caste practices were intricately woven into relations of power, British officials struggled to offset the challenges presented by those practices to colonial extractive regimes.  I suggest that caste therefore becomes central to understanding the place of family and community in state-society relations in colonial India.