Caste census and the impact of colonial sociology in British Assam

Abstract

This essay challenges the salience of the caste question for writing a social history of modern Assam. It argues that pre-colonial records contained enough indicators for arguing that caste in Assam was never a rigid and impermeable social grid. The variegated nature of Assam�s geo-political and cultural past meant that the progress of Brahmanical culture here was neither smooth nor unmitigated. The essay argues that the region�s social and cultural intricacies could not be comprehended through an interpretive framework developed in a pan-Indian context. The same was, however, used by the census officials to streamline the region�s discrete patterns into rigidly structured hierarchies and uniformly imagined categories. Through a close reading of the pre-decennial and decennial census reports and other records from the nineteenth century, this essay identifies numerous misreading of local level empirical data that enabled the British to produce a uniform caste history for the region.