What is the difference between clan and caste system

Clearly the aforementioned approaches differ in the importance they assign to colonial rule in the historical trajectory of caste. Nonetheless, what they share in common is their treatment of caste as a discourse, sustained by certain techniques of information gathering and organization Peabody ; Dirks This approach is by no means new.

As early as , Richard Fox published a study demonstrating how conceptions of caste in pre-modern rural Uttar Pradesh varied with the political priorities of rural populations. David Gilmartin has shown that similarly pragmatic considerations shaped the boundaries of baradari brotherhood in Panjab p.

More recently, Sumit Guha has advocated shifting our attention from the ritual expression of caste and its ideological underpinnings to the drawing of caste boundaries. In each instance, differentiation was driven by local and regional politics, rather than by any set of values, although the latter certainly served a rhetorical purpose. Another corollary benefit is that it dismantles the fence of cultural peculiarity which has hitherto prevented the historical sociology of South Asia from drawing upon the same pool of methodologies that are used in the study of other world regions Guha More pertinent to the overarching theme of this special issue, a focus upon boundaries and politics grounds the study of caste firmly in local context.

Rather than searching for adherence to specific principles, it privileges the particular ecology and economy of the locality. For want of space, it will confine its attention to dominant landholding groups.

The analysis consists of four sections. The first two of these introduce respectively the geographical context and the primary sources consulted. The third explores some common social categories used in the region. One of these was the term qaum people, community —a malleable, multivalent concept, that appears to have designated groups defined broadly and imperfectly by occupation and geography. Another ethnic category was gota clan, lineage , which, despite the implication of biological kinship that it carried, was defined by political pragmatism rather than by blood alone.

The fourth section will therefore turn to the political context within which the boundaries of lineages took form. On the south and southwest it merges with the hills of Mewat and the Thar Desert, and to the north-east with the Siwalik mountains. This irregular strip of mostly flat and arid land today falls largely within the states of Haryana and Punjab.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, as in the present, it carried no single name. It fell within the jurisdictions of a number of different states, including, from , that of the East India Company. Nor was it possible to assign this area a single ethnic or linguistic character. A variety of languages and dialects were spoken here, brought by mobile populations that circulated between Central Asia, Sind, the Deccan and the Gangetic Plains.

Indeed, there was even a common saying that both bani aur pani language and water changed every forty kilometers Wilson They also carry linguistic and ethnic connotations which obscure the cultural heterogeneity of this space. Gommans identifies three ways in which this region was a frontier. First, it was a climatic frontier, located between the humid Gangetic Valley to the east, and the western fringes of the vast Arid Zone that stretches across much of Central and West Asia and reaches east and south into the Indian subcontinent.

Second, and relatedly, it was a subsistence frontier, where cultivation had historically overlapped with mobile pastoralism. Finally, it was a political frontier, where the control of formal states had always been limited, power resting instead in the hands of a variety of warlords and chieftains.

Its limited ecological suitability to sedentary cultivation as opposed to pastoralism meant that its rural populations led a mobile existence. As a consequence of its vulnerability to drought and the absence of any perennial rivers except at its extremities, the cultivated extent in this frontier fluctuated greatly from year to year.

Demographic pressure in neighboring regions periodically led to a flux of cultivators taking parts of the savannah under the plough. However, these settlements were ephemeral and, in years in which the monsoons failed, they would be abandoned, to be repopulated in a more favorable season. The uncertainties of cultivation in turn meant that this region did not serve as the revenue base for states dependent upon agrarian revenues.

Rather, the polities that tended to thrive in the Delhi frontier were frequently diffuse, nomadic lineages, who exploited this arid but rich country for its excellent pastures, and for its proximity to the wealthy raiding grounds of the Doab. Despite the important role he played in the establishment of Company rule in northern India Alavi , the British were sparing in the tributes and recognition they extended to him. At least in part, this appears to have been for fear that any apparent partiality to their own compatriots—to which Skinner numbered when it so suited the Company Alavi —would open them up to renewed charges of corruption Fraser [] b Based at his estate in Hansi, he seems to have maintained a fully functioning manuscript workshop, as well as to have periodically commissioned different artists from the region for specific assignments McBurney Part of his literary and artistic testament includes two beautifully illustrated and illuminated social and political histories of the region.

A total of three copies of each text were produced, and Skinner gifted a pair of these mutually complementary histories to three separate British officers.

One of these men was John Malcolm, whose earlier ethnographic accounts of Central India may possibly have inspired Skinner to embark upon his own literary enterprise McBurney Skinner then describes the hereditary occupations of each qaum, their religion dharam and their rites and customs, particularly those pertaining to marriage. In addition, he pays attention to their nature svabhava , khasiyat zati and their karam actions. Every account is further accompanied by a painting of a member of the concerned group that, so Skinner claims, realistically depicts its garb and craft.

This is natural enough, given that it was here that Skinner established himself as a magnate and a man of note. The Tazkira provides an account of a broad cross-section of the gentry and nobility of the Delhi frontier. A considerable chunk of its narrative appears to be drawn from lore and royal genealogies, especially in the case of the more illustrious and established royal houses.

Thus, for instance, Rajput lineages such as the Chauhans of Bikaner are treated by Skinner as the descendants of the Chandravansha lunar race. By comparison, the accounts of minor chieftains are somewhat more sober. For instance, Skinner narrates the manner in which Nawab Khan Bahadur Khan, the Bhatti chieftain of Fatahabad, began his career as a professional soldier in service of the kingdom of Bikaner, subsequently betraying his patron and giving himself up to a life of plunder gharatgari.

Each dynastic account is concluded with a description of the precise extent of its domains and the revenues earned from these, as well as the strength and composition of its army.

Together, the Tashrih and the Tazkira provide a window into rural society in the Delhi frontier in the transition to colonial rule.

They are used in this analysis primarily to reconstruct ethno-political fault lines in the early nineteenth century.

In this respect, the large body of official correspondence and reports left by the colonial state in the region is a fuller source. This material includes the annals of conflicts at the level of the village and thus provides a wealth of information about the political life of rural communities and their relationship with political actors outside the village walls. The communities of whom we find accounts in its pages, in all, are nominally organized along the principles of religion dharam and baran from the Sanskrit varna ; Brahmanical caste.

The primary differentiation made is between Hindu and Muslim peoples. Once its religion has been specified, each community is further assigned a varna affiliation, a task rendered somewhat awkward by the fact that the number of groups mentioned in the text far exceeds the fourfold Brahmanical stratification. Skinner explains this incongruence as the product of the intermixing of varnas baran samkara brought on by the depravity of the times.

Skinner, borrowing from his sources, then superimposes a single origin myth upon this foundation and seals the category with a few remarks about the temperament of those belonging to it.

It is worth noting that while religion could influence marriage customs and worship, it did not necessarily undermine the category of qaum itself, as long as one of the other two strands—occupation and geographical distribution—were present.

Their beliefs and customs are separate but their work is the same. This is largely because the traits that serve to bind each together in the text were far from unique, and were in fact common to a broad cross-section of society. This holds less true of the service and artisanal groups that appear in the Tashrih , for their respective crafts serve as clear identifiers. By contrast, social groups who earned their livelihood from the soil or by herding livestock are much less precisely defined and internally quite disparate.

This category is perhaps the broadest of any social group mentioned in the Tashrih , tenuously bound together by a common purpose alone. This purpose, writes Skinner, was to take the land they inherited from their fathers and increase it until they became rajas themselves. To achieve their goal, they engaged in both cultivation kisan and trade dad-o-setad. Their occupational diversity was matched by their confessional pluralism.

Indeed, Skinner suggests that the Ahirs and the Gujars were simply a particular kind of Jat, whose distinctness as a category was rooted partly in their occupational specialization as cow- and goatherds, and partly in their geographical concentration on either bank of the Yamuna River. As such, writes Skinner, they were not recognized as a different qaum by the Jats, with whom they ate, smoked and drank without compunction.

Skinner writes that the Bhattis were found mainly between Bhatner now Hanumangarh and Hisar, but half a century later, Denzil Ibbetson [] observed that it was simply a common identification claimed by landholding communities from Jaisalmer to the banks of the Chenab River p. Like Jats, Bhattis too included a number of different segments, and practiced a mixture of cultivation, livestock breeding and plunder. The salient differences between these groups, therefore, did not pertain to status or religion, but to geography.

For the rest, their customs and social organization were extremely similar. Jats and Ahirs ate meat and drank alcohol, while amongst the Bhattis, little distance seems to have been maintained between men and women.

Each group additionally partook of the broadly syncretic religious culture of Panjab, within which the emphasis lay upon personal devotion bhakti to the divine. Amongst the Jats, this bhakti had a Vaishnava, Shaiva and Sikh color. Amongst the Bhattis, devotion to Baba Farid Ganjshakkar was popular. Perhaps most notably, each of these communities was further subdivided into lineages or gotas , whose relationship with each other—as we shall see below—was often contentious.

These categories were institutionalised in the mid to late 19th Century through the census. These were acts of convenience and simplification. The colonisers established the acceptable list of indigenous religions in India - Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism - and their boundaries and laws through "reading" what they claimed were India's definitive texts.

What is now widely accepted as Hinduism was, in fact, an ideology or, more accurately, a theory or fantasy that is better called "Brahmanism", that existed largely in textual but not real form and enunciated the interests of a small, Sanskrit-educated social group.

There is little doubt that the religion categories in India could have been defined very differently by reinterpreting those same or other texts. The so-called four-fold hierarchy was also derived from the same Brahman texts.

This system of categorisation was also textual or theoretical; it existed only in scrolls and had no relationship with the reality on the ground. This became embarrassingly obvious from the first censuses in the late s. The plan then was to fit all of the "Hindu" population into these four categories.

But the bewildering variety of responses on caste identity from the population became impossible to fit neatly into colonial or Brahman theory. WR Cornish, who supervised census operations in the Madras Presidency in , wrote that "… regarding the origin of caste we can place no reliance upon the statements made in the Hindu sacred writings. Whether there was ever a period in which the Hindus were composed of four classes is exceedingly doubtful". Similarly, CF Magrath, leader and author of a monograph on the Bihar census, wrote, "that the now meaningless division into the four castes alleged to have been made by Manu should be put aside".

Anthropologist Susan Bayly writes that "until well into the colonial period, much of the subcontinent was still populated by people for whom the formal distinctions of caste were of only limited importance, even in parts of the so-called Hindu heartland… The institutions and beliefs which are now often described as the elements of traditional caste were only just taking shape as recently as the early 18th Century". In fact, it is doubtful that caste had much significance or virulence in society before the British made it India's defining social feature.

The pre-colonial written record in royal court documents and traveller accounts studied by professional historians and philologists like Nicholas Dirks, GS Ghurye, Richard Eaton, David Shulman and Cynthia Talbot show little or no mention of caste.

Social identities were constantly malleable. All the available evidence calls for a fundamental re-imagination of social identity in pre-colonial India. Priests, gurus, rishis, teachers, and scholars constituted the Brahmin community. They would always live through the Brahmacharya celibacy vow ordained for them.

Even married Brahmins were called Brahmachari celibate by virtue of having intercourse only for reproducing and remaining mentally detached from the act.

Brahmins were the foremost choice as tutors for the newborn because they represent the link between sublime knowledge of the gods and the four Varnas.

This way, since the ancestral wisdom is sustained through guru-disciple practice, all citizens born in each Varna would remain rooted to the requirements of their lives. Normally, Brahmins were the personification of contentment and dispellers of ignorance, leading all seekers to the zenith of supreme knowledge, however, under exceptions; they lived as warriors, traders, or agriculturists in severe adversity.

All Brahmin men were allowed to marry women of the first three Varnas, whereas marrying a Shudra woman would, marginally, bereft the Brahmin of his priestly status.

Nevertheless, a Shudra woman would not be rejected if the Brahmin consented. Brahmin women, contrary to the popular belief of their subordination to their husbands, were, in fact, more revered for their chastity and treated with unequalled respect.

As per Manu Smriti, a Brahmin woman must only marry a Brahmin and no other, but she remains free to choose the man. She, under rare circumstances, is allowed to marry a Kshatriya or a Vaishya, but marrying a Shudra man is restricted. The restrictions in inter-caste marriages are to avoid subsequent impurity of progeny born of the matches. A man of a particular caste marrying a woman of a higher caste is considered an imperfect match, culminating in ignoble offspring.

Kshatriyas constituted the warrior clan, the kings, rulers of territories, administrators, etc. It was paramount for a Kshatriya to learn weaponry, warfare, penance, austerity, administration, moral conduct, justice, and ruling.

Besides austerities like the Brahmins, they would gain additional knowledge of administration. Their fundamental duty was to protect their territory, defend against attacks, deliver justice, govern virtuously, and extend peace and happiness to all their subjects, and they would take counsel in matters of territorial sovereignty and ethical dilemmas from their Brahmin gurus. They were allowed to marry a woman of all Varnas with mutual consent.

Although a Kshatriya or a Brahmin woman would be the first choice, Shudra women were not barred from marrying a Kshatriya. Contrary to popular belief, a Kshatriya woman was equally capable of defending a kingdom in times of distress and imparting warfare skills to her descendants. The lineage of a Kshatriya king was kept pure to ensure continuity on the throne and claim sovereignty over territories.

Vaishya is the third Varna represented by agriculturalists, traders, money lenders, and those involved in commerce.