Ghurye on Caste and Race

Indian sociology is a young discipline -- younger even than its European counterpart. Interest in the sociological way of thinking here goes back a little over a century, but sociology was taught at a university for the first time only in 1919, at the University of Bombay; Calcutta and Lucknow set up teaching and research programmes of their own soon after, in the 1920s. Even before any of this formal infrastructure existed, though, a few largely self-taught scholars were already doing the groundwork. L.K. Ananthakrishna Iyer moved from working as a clerk to teaching school and then college in Cochin state before being drawn, almost by accident, into an ethnographic survey commissioned by the Dewan of Cochin in 1902; he went on to help set up India's first postgraduate anthropology department, at the University of Calcutta. Sarat Chandra Roy, a Calcutta-trained lawyer, took a teaching post in Ranchi in 1898 that put him in contact with the region's tribal communities, and ended up spending over four decades documenting the society and culture of Chhotanagpur (present-day Jharkhand), eventually founding the journal Man in India. Neither man set out to become an anthropologist -- there was, at that point, no formal discipline in India to set out to join.

The four scholars profiled in this chapter -- G.S. Ghurye, D.P. Mukerji, A.R. Desai and M.N. Srinivas -- belonged to the generation that followed, growing up under colonial rule but carrying their careers into independence, and it was they who built the discipline's first real institutions. All had trained substantially within western sociological traditions, yet each had to work out, largely without a template, what a specifically Indian sociology should even look like. Could a discipline that had emerged to explain European modernity make sense of a modernity that, in India's case, was inseparable from colonial rule? What use was a social anthropology born from European curiosity about "primitive" societies, applied to a civilisation that was simultaneously ancient and home to genuinely tribal communities of its own? And what role could sociology play in a newly sovereign nation about to attempt democracy and planned development on its own terms?

Of the four, G.S. Ghurye is usually credited with giving Indian sociology its institutional backbone. He led Bombay University's sociology department -- the first postgraduate department of its kind in the country -- for thirty-five years, trained a generation of scholars who went on to shape the field, and founded both the Indian Sociological Society and its journal, Sociological Bulletin. His own scholarship ranged unusually widely: beyond caste and race, he wrote on tribal cultures, kinship and marriage, the sociology of cities and civilisation, religion, and social conflict, drawing on influences as varied as the diffusionist anthropology he encountered while training at Cambridge, Orientalist scholarship on Hindu religion, and a strong nationalist commitment to Hindu cultural identity. That last commitment fed directly into a running, very public debate with the anthropologist Verrier Elwin over how independent India should treat its tribal populations: Ghurye argued tribal groups were best understood as "backward Hindus" already gradually assimilating into the mainstream, against Elwin's case for actively protecting tribal culture from that same assimilation. It is Ghurye's earliest major work, however, that this section focuses on.

G.S. Ghurye's early scholarly reputation rested on his Cambridge doctoral dissertation, published in 1932 as Caste and Race in India. The book took direct aim at the dominant explanation of caste current among colonial administrator-scholars, most influentially Herbert Risley. Risley held that human populations could be sorted into distinct races using physical measurements -- the size of the skull, the length of the nose, the volume of the cranium -- and argued that India, where caste had for centuries forbidden inter-marriage between groups, was a natural laboratory for observing these racial types in their "pure" form. On this basis Risley concluded that caste itself had originated in race: the upper castes, in his reading, showed measurements closer to an "Indo-Aryan" type, while the lower castes resembled aboriginal, Mongoloid or other non-Aryan groups, suggesting that an incoming Aryan population had subjugated India's original inhabitants and that caste rank still tracked this ancient racial division.

Ghurye did not reject this argument outright -- he thought it captured something real, but only partially. His central methodological objection was that Risley leaned on average measurements without asking how much a given trait actually varied within a community; two groups could show different averages while overlapping heavily as individuals. Examining the anthropometric evidence more carefully, Ghurye concluded that the sharp Aryan/non-Aryan correlation with high and low caste held reasonably well only in the north -- what he called "Hindustan proper" -- where continuous endogamy really had preserved distinct racial lines over a long period. Elsewhere in the country the differences between caste groups were far less systematic, which told Ghurye that different racial stocks had been intermarrying for a very long time before caste endogamy was ever imposed on them; in the south, in other words, endogamy had frozen an already-mixed population in place rather than protecting a pre-existing racial purity.

Beyond this critique, Ghurye is remembered for giving Indian sociology one of its first rigorous, textually grounded definitions of caste, built from six features. Caste membership is segmental -- decided irrevocably at birth, with no other way of entering or leaving a caste. It is hierarchical -- every caste ranks above or below every other, at least in principle. It restricts social interaction, especially the sharing of food, through rules of purity and pollution that reach their most severe form in untouchability. It fixes differential rights and duties, both religious and secular, between castes. It restricts occupation, functioning at the level of society as a rigid, hereditary division of labour. And it restricts marriage through the paired rules of endogamy (marrying only within one's caste) and exogamy (rules on who, even within the caste, may not be married). Together these six features gave later ethnographers a precise, workable definition against which to test how caste was actually changing on the ground in independent India.