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Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to present the changes within the caste system produced during colonial India. The reason for choosing to analyze this subject it is because caste represents one of the key concepts of Indian civilization, giving its socio-cultural distinctiveness. Appeared in Ancient India, the caste system is a very elaborate and disputed phenomenon of social stratification, which is still present in today's Indian society. The political takeover by the British from the Mughals had important consequences also on Indian society. During British rule, which lasted from the eighteenth century until 1947, the caste system evolved and expanded into more than 3,000 different castes. Even though significant changed were brought to the caste system, it had not been removed. Interestingly, the British instead of eradicating the caste system, they actually have strengthened and reshaped it. This article will focus on the changes brought by the British to the Indian society, during the colonial period. Some of the political, social or religious measures influenced directly the caste system, however others being actually consequences of the colonization.
Keywords: caste, British India, caste system, colonialism, modernity, measures, census.
1. The Religious Measures
1.1. Sati and the Situation of Widows
Although at the beginning of their occupation, the British government promised that it would not intervene in Hindu religious practices, several reforms passed and were impose in India. One of these was GovernorGeneral William Bentinck's law from 1829, which made sati illegal in company territories. Sati, also spelled suttee, was the Hindu practice in which a newly widowed wife chose to be burned or buried alive with her husband's corpse. By custom high-caste widows were not allowed to remarry and a wife demonstrated her extreme devotion to her dead husband by becoming a sati. The woman who chose to become a sati, it was commonly believed, was reunited with her dead husband in the after-life. The custom was not mandatory for Hindu women and was never widely practiced, occurring mostly in the higher-caste in the Ganges River valley, Punjab and Rajasthan.1 Nevertheless, for "Christian missionaries and officials like Bentinck, an evangelical Christian, sati symbolized all that was evil and barbaric in an idolatrous Hinduism."2 Missionaries in Bengal had long campaigned against the practice,...