Content area
Full text
IN A BOOKSTORE IN DELHI, a salesman, apprised of my interest in lower-caste politics, handed me a tome about the officially listed Dalit, or untouchable, groups, The Scheduled Castes (Singh 1995). The first thing to strike me was the cover, a glossy photograph of a presumably Scheduled Caste woman with her back against a tall stone wall, surrounded by her four grubby kids. She is beaming. The second thing to strike me was the title of this new series, of which this was the second volume. The series, by the central government's Anthropological Survey of India, was called the People of India, a name that had been used for several rather notorious colonial ethnographic projects.1 Intrigued, I began to examine this most recent avatar of the People of India.
From John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye's photographic collections to J. D. Anderson and Sir Herbert Risley's ethnographies, colonial portrayals entitled The People of India have classified, categorized, and mapped the people under study (Watson and Kaye 1868-75; Anderson [1913] 1982; Risley 1915). Historians, anthropologists, and political scientists have since critiqued the colonial state's "ordering of difference" on the basis of caste, ethnicity, region, race, or religion in such earlier studies (Metcalf 1995; Pandey 1992; Cohn 1987, 1996; Young 1994a). Despite the tainted past of such ethnographies, the Indian government's anthropological department, the Anthropological Survey of India, is engaged in an ongoing project also called "The People of India." According to its initial circular, "[t]his will be a project on the People of India by the people of India," a phrase ringing with nationalism, yet the goal of this national project is to generate a profile of each community in India, largely defined in terms of caste (Singh 2002, 11). Purportedly a work of apolitical anthropology, this endeavor is nevertheless sponsored by the state and uses the administrative categories of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs).2 Due to India's reservation policies, which reserve quotas of government jobs, parliamentary seats, and university admissions for these disadvantaged groups, controversy rages over their boundaries, numbers, and social conditions (Galanter 1984; Jenkins 1998, 1999, 2001). Although castes are a major unit of analysis for the People of India projects, both past and present, the latest project superimposes the...