Caste census and the impact of colonial sociology in British Assam

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.