an ideal of rule” (Geddes 1962: 95). The British civil servant, incredible as it
seems now, believed that he was infallible and invulnerable in dealing with
Indians. The army was there in the background, but many Indians had never
seen British soldiers. As Walter Lawrence put it in the 1920s, British power in
India was based on “mutual make-believe”: “They, the millions, made us believe
we had a divine mission. We made them believe that they were right” (Lawrence
1928: 42–3). It rested on mutual collusion, on illusion.
But this dominance came to be explained by race. Risley (1851–1911),
Commissioner for the 1901 Census of India, tried to show that caste had its
origins in the interactions of the Aryan and Dravidian races: the caste system
had its basis in community of race rather than community of function. He takes
as starting point in his People of India(1915) a carved panel from the Buddhist
stupa at Sanchi (100 bcto 100ad) which shows a monkey offering honey to the
Buddha.^4 Tutelary spirits, yaks.as, look on. The Buddha was not shown in person
in this early phase of Buddhist art – his presence is signified by the empty dais
beneath a sala tree. Risley bizarrely misreads this compassionate representation
of spiritual community as an “expression of the race sentiment of the Aryans
towards the Dravidians,” showing us “the higher race on friendly terms with the
lower, but keenly conscious of the essential difference of type and taking no
active part in the ceremony at which they appear as sympathetic but patroniz-
ing spectators” (Risley 1915: 5). Through ignorance of the basic conventions of
Buddhist art, Risley sees only a primitive ritual devoid of point carried out by a
subhuman no better than a monkey. He sees the demi-god yaks.as as Aryans, and
the monkey as a Dravidian!
In trying to understand caste as race, imperial officials were not setting India
aside as a separate ethnographic park, as the Other that is the unavoidable trope
of colonial discourse analysis. Such racial analysis was to be applied everywhere.
As Susan Bayly has pointed out, their work for them was pathbreaking science
(S. Bayly 1997: 167). It was neither oldstyle Orientalism nor new Orientalism.
It was for them an application and instance of universal reason, even though
today it seems false and absurd.
Cannadine argues that the British Empire was not really concerned with the
creation of “otherness”: society on the imperial periphery was the same or even
superior to society in the imperial metropolis; “for the British, their overseas
realms were at least as much about sameness as they were about difference”
(Cannadine 2001: 4). British colonialism exacerbated caste, made it a system,
but British interest in caste was by no means merely knowledge as power over
its object, for it arose from a sense of similarity, of fellow feeling. For many
Britons, says Cannadine, “the social arrangements in South Asia seemed easily
recognizable and comfortingly familiar” (2001: 16). The rigid hierarchy of the
British in British India has often been remarked on. “British India was as much
infected by caste as Indian India” (Mason 1978: 80).
Cannadine’s revisionism, salutary as it is, must not prevent us from examin-
ing the role of racial theory in understanding western and eastern confron-
tation. The supposition of racial characteristics and stereotypes, beyond the
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