Caste Hierarchies and Social Tensions in Cuttack: 1920–30

Abstract

The emergence of caste as a key category of classification, enumeration and control under colonial rule has created a refectory taxonomy of administrative categories through officially enforced labelling activities. The census categories made an opportunity to occupy institutional space and promoted identification with caste and stimulated lower caste people, such as the Bauri community, for their rights and representations. The stigma associated with the native agencies, such as Chamars, Pig Herds (Ghusuria) and others in the Hindu stratification, was challenged by the anti-colonial nationalist, who re-signified them as sites of cultural authenticity and collective sovereignty. The government’s passion for labels and pigeonhole, which led to crystallisation of caste system, could hardly tame intractability or ‘vagueness’ of social category in the middle rung and spurred a series of negotiations and contestations among the caste groups across the Hindu hierarchical spectrum. As against, it transfigured in the colonial modernity’s endeavour to grapple with tensions between the universal and particular, normative and stigmatised subjects leading to caste radicalism’s re-exegesis of Hindu religious tradition to produce an original ( Adidharma) view of social stratification and the post-colonial state reinforcing it by a rational legal regime opposed to the idea of civic inequality.