[āBut the British effort to understand ethnic, religious, sectarian and caste differences among their subjects inevitably became an exercise in defining, dividing and perpetuating these differences. Thus colonial administrators regularly wrote reports and conducted censuses that classified their subjects in ever-more bewilderingly narrow terms, based on their language, religion, sect, caste, sub-caste, ethnicity and skin colour. In the process of such categorization and classification, not only were ideas of community reified, but also entire new communities were created by people who had not consciously thought of themselves as particularly different from others around them.
The American anthropologist Nicholas Dirks explains it lucidly:
āColonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shoresā¦ Colonialism was itself a cultural project of control. Colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it; in certain important ways, knowledge was what colonialism was all about. Cultural forms in societies newly classified as ātraditionalā were reconstructed and transformed by this knowledge, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and Eastā¦ As India was anthropologized in the colonial interest, a narrative about its social formation, its political capacity, and its civilizational inheritance began increasingly to tell the story of colonial inevitability and of the permanence of British imperial rule.ā
Bernard Cohn, a scholar of British colonialism in India, has argued that the British simultaneously misinterpreted and oversimplified the features they saw in Indian society, placing Indians into stereotypical boxes they defined and into which they were assigned in the name of ancient tradition: āIn the conceptual scheme which the British created to understand and to act in India, they constantly followed the same logic; they reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms.ā
Laws had to be translated into terms the British could understand and apply. A complicated, often chaotic and always fluid society like India was āredefined by the British to be a place of rules and orders; once the British had defined to their own satisfaction what they construed as Indian rules and customs, then the Indians had to conform to these constructions.āā]
Shashi Tharoor, What The British Did To India
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