Knowledge and Classification of Indians
The missionary and colonial project of categorizing, classifying, and producing knowledge about Indian society — inventing caste categories, racial frameworks, textualizing traditions.
Inventing Caste Categories
The creation and hardening of caste categories through census, ethnographic surveys, and administrative classification.
Inventing Racial Framework
The imposition of racial categories — Aryan, Dravidian — onto Indian society, merging caste with race.
Secularizing Varna Categories
The transformation of varna from a theological concept into a secular sociological category.
Taxonomizing and Codifying
The obsessive drive to classify, categorize, and codify Indian society into fixed, legible administrative units.
Textualization and Canon Making
The project of reducing diverse oral and practical traditions into fixed textual canons modeled on Protestant scripture.
Infrastructure of Knowledge Production
The institutional apparatus — surveys, societies, universities, printing presses — that produced colonial knowledge about India.
Difficulty of Data Collection
The acknowledged challenges and failures in collecting reliable data about Indian society, religion, and customs.
Fluidity of Identity
Instances where colonial classifiers encountered the irreducible fluidity of Indian identity — caste, sect, and community boundaries that refused to hold still.