john mage
[Some excerpts from Susan Bayly's book on caste. She tries to show how caste as it is understood today is the product of what she calls (perhaps euphemistically) "colonial modernity".
Here her history begins in the 19th century...]
...struggling seigneurial groups frequently claimed that the powers they were seeking to exercise over dependent labourers were of ancient origin, and that they were sanctioned in Hindu scripture as correct and righteous for the man of power in his capacity as upholder of dharmic propriety. In reality, these landed people were trying to take advantage of the fact that colonial India was coming to contain more and more people who were defining both themselves and others on the basis of an increasingly stark division between clean and unclean birth. Many of these so-called polluting groups were non-patrician peasants and field labourers. Others were newly marginalised forest people who have lost their privileged relationships with the Maratha dynasts and other rulers, but who were still without a settled niche in the village-based economies. When these people sold such skills as they had to the expanding agrarian populations, they were disparaged by the British as 'gypsies' and criminal predators.
[And from later in this same chapter, a compelling historical narrative indeed, Bayly shows how caste norms came to be more deeply entrenched in the new urban areas than they had been in the so-called traditional village ]
Paradoxically, however, the forging of more rigid concepts of pollution and untouchability was not a primarily a reflection of 'traditional' household practices. The most important of these changes in nineteenth century caste life was pushed forward in a far more modern and impersonal arena, that is, within military cantonments and urban industrial workplaces. [A]fter mid-century the decline of old-style artisanal and agrarian employment brought large numbers of non-elite migrants into the ports and industrial towns. Many of these were newly marginalised practioners of 'unclean' village trades, especially the smiths, tanners, potters whom the wider world new as Kumhar, Lohar, Chamar and so on. Although their occupations were quite skilled compared with those of field labourers, such workers were usually too poorly capitalised to compete with suppliers of cheap industrial products. Moving to the cities, leather workers generally became low paid labourers in such industries as tanning and boot-making. In colonial hospitals and medical colleges, many of the north Indian funerary specialists known as Doms were employed as mortuary attendants and dissecting room assistants. In textile production too mill hands were often from the groups which had come to be identified as 'impure' or 'unclean.
These newcomers encountered very different conditions from those which had previously defined the meaning of caste in their lives. In the villages, formerly open-ended labour and tenancy relationships were still being turned into 'caste'-based service bonds. [F]or both field labourers and the more specialised artisanal groups, this had the effect of eroding what remained of their entitlements as protected, if often harshly treated retainers of 'kingly' jajmans (patrons). Paradoxically, when they entered the industrial workplace, such people as the Bhangi, Chamar and Mahar became subject to caste conventions which were often more potent and 'essentialising' than the norms of the 'traditional' village.
Untouchability as we now know it is thus very largely a product of colonial modernity, taking shape against a background of new economic opportunities including recruitment to the mills, docks and Public Work Departments, and to the labour corps which supported both the British and sepoy regiments. The nature of casual labour in the factories, ship-yards and brick kilns also tended to enhance the power of the pollution barrier. In all these settings, people who were known by such titles as Chamar, Mahar and Dom were not likely to become detached from the 'caste Hindu' norms which had come to define them as lowly and unclean. Quite the reverse in fact, as life in the modern workplaces so often reinforced the 'untouchable''s low status. (emphasis mine)