This chapter explores which brought ideals of Brahmanical rank to the fore in Indian life, without ever fully supplanting the ideals of the lordly man of prowess. It also explores why the Brahman's and merchant's ideal of a 'pure' dharmic way of life became so influential in the world of the so called caste 'Hindu'. In middle of the eighteenth century there were three main areas of advancement in which Brahmans and Brahman-centred values came increasingly to predominate: in the field of finance, statecraft and war, and ritual arena. In the peshwa daftar records, that is, the Maratha rulers' registers of state transactions and revenue obligations, the Peshwas documented acts of adjudication through which they as Brahman guardians of the realm proclaimed themselves arbiters of other people's jati and varna status. India's dynasts built their power through a drive for cash revenue. The techniques used to spread and tax commercial cash-crop production prefigured the strategies of Britain's colonial revenue machine.

This chapter concerns caste consciousness as it has been manifested in surprising though generally uncontentious forms, most notably where one can see conventions of jati and varna difference retaining their power in the modern workplace and in the thinking of educated city-dwellers. Since the 1950s, cross-cutting affinities of faith, class and ethno-linguistic identity have often had a more direct and lasting impact on both local and national life than the claims of anti-Brahmanism, or Harijan uplift, or caste reform movements. The chapter examines why caste has come to operate for so many Indians in the manner of an imagined community, that is, as a bond of idealised allegiance answering needs which both in India and elsewhere have been more widely associated with the claims of two other forms of supra-local attachment, the modern nation and the ethno-religious community. In the years after Independence, social scientists found further evidence of the spread of these modern-minded or substantialised forms of caste consciousness.

This chapter examines the understandings of caste propounded by Western orientalists from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, the massive bureaucratic machinery of the Raj had generated an enormous output of documentations in which jati and varna were used as basic units of identification. Two key themes have been identified in the vast array of regional ethnographic surveys, population censuses and other official and quasi-official writing. The first is an insistence on the supposedly ineradicable sense of community dividing Hindus from Muslims and other non-Hindus. The second is a view of Indians, apart from so-called tribals and followers of minority faiths, as slaves to rigid, Brahman-centred caste values. As of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'Aryan' caste Hindus were widely said by both Indian and British race theorists to be 'awaking' in evolutionary terms.

This chapter focuses on one of the two manifestations of caste consciousness, the phenomenon of so called 'caste war'. It explores how caste can divide modern Indians to the point of systematic armed violence between those of high- and low-caste origin. It is true that those involved in 'caste wars' since the 1960s have generally mixed the language of jati and varna with references to faith, class and nationality, defining themselves and their opponents not just as embodiments of caste-based `community', but as landlords and tenants, capitalists and workers, oppressors and oppressed. Since the 1970s the ideals of the `secular' nation-state have been regularly inverted by groups claiming to be under threat from the real or imagined aggression of militant `Dalits'. In many of the widely reported conflicts, `caste war' violence has tended to feed back and forth between urban centres and the rural hinterlands from which towns like Banaras and Aurangabad draw many of their students and factory workers.

This chapter explores the views aired in the subcontinent's emerging public arena, looking briefly at the early nineteenth century, but concentrating primarily on from the 1870s to the early 1930s. It examines why many Indian polemicists identified caste as a topic of vital concern for the modern nation, and seeks to identify the conceptual roots of the caste debates, as well as their intellectual and ideological consequences. The chapter also explores the ideas of the many Indians who made their mark in controversies about the spiritual and political meanings of caste. It discusses the conventional Hindu ideas about the low and unclean nature of 'untouchables'. Since the First World War, jati and varna were being so widely identified as expressions of Aryan/Hindu 'race genius', many theorists sought to distinguish between supposedly good and bad manifestations of 'caste spirit', and exalted the idealised solidarities of the twice-born as the embodiment of national faith and a cohesive national morality.