State and Caste Reformed under Indirect Colonial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Jodhpur

This paper explores the consequences of ‘indirect’ colonial rule for the reshaping of the state, and for the re-ordering of caste and caste-based social relations. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the East India Company employed various strategies to extract a stable annual tribute from the chiefdoms of Rajputana in northwestern India. In many instances, they did so by consolidating the princes’ power and resources at the expense of their hitherto recalcitrant chiefs. At the same time, the East India Company curbed the autonomy of the princes, particularly with regard to older modes of articulating their sovereignty – for example, through the patronage of entire groups of client castes. This was undertaken under the pretext of curbing and rationalizing princes’ expenditures, now recast as discretionary.

In tandem with these initiatives that reshaped the character of the state, such as it was, within these chiefdoms, indirect colonial rule also provided the context for redefined caste boundaries and hierarchies. This paper examines the first census to be undertaken in colonial Rajputana, the Marwar Raj Mardumshumari, conducted by the government of Jodhpur state in 1891. By examining the data generated in this census, I investigate how the Rajput chiefdoms were reclassifying particular groups as endogamous, and thereby as caste units. In exploring how the 1891 Census broke with pre-colonial models of household counts to generate new kinds of data, I trace new concerns on the part of the state within the Jodhpur chiefdom. I thus propose to engage from within the context of princely Rajputana under indirect colonial rule, the substantial research on other parts of nineteenth-century India under direct colonial rule, that has established the expansion of the colonial state and its expression in the drive to homogenize caste membership and rationalize and re-order caste hierarchies.