Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present, by Sumit Guha: a Review

Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present, by Sumit Guha, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016 (Leiden: EJ Brill, 2013), pp. 291 + xxiii.

In the course of my research in Nepal I read a lot about caste. Caste is typically understood to be the characteristic social order of India and its neighbours. Debates about what makes it what it is abound. Researchers and theorists approach it from various angles: sociological, historical, political, economic, religious.

My study on the city of Lalitpur in Nepal was largely a sociological one depending heavily on my ethnographic methodology. I did, however, do a fair bit of historical investigation, by delving into the way groups had evolved over the centuries. I was disappointed that my publisher, Orchid Press, decided to entitle my work Caste and Kinship in a Modern Hindu Society because much of what I discovered was of more historical interest. Indeed, I argued that the ritual complex of the city told us a lot about how the city wasin days gone by, rather than what it is today. (Orchid Press, by the way, has not responded to any of my attempts at communication since the book was published and I have never received a single penny in royalties.) 

In Beyond Caste, Sumit Guha delves assiduously into previously unresearched historical material and interacts with nearly all the significant literature (though not all – see below). Replete in historical and geographical detail, it is a piece of serious scholarship that deserves careful reading. I will not attempt a thorough review here but merely state Guha’s thesis, note some significant historical facts that were new to me, and make some brief comments. (For a more comprehensive review please see that of H. L. Richard here. I was given a copy of the South Asian edition. The European and American editions are a ridiculous price.)

Guha argues that a caste is a “bounded social group demarcated by the exercise of power throughout its millennial history” (252). He reminds us that, in the study of caste, the exotic has often been highlighted over aspects that are shared with other social systems. In this way, then, caste became an Orientalist trope, as did so many other aspects of Hindu culture. Guha’s point is to demonstrate that “the bounded, status-ranked ethnic community or ‘caste’ is a social form that frequently appears in multi-ethnic societies” (3).

It is not that it is exactly like that of other societies because “in South Asia it became a highly involuted, politicised form of ethnic ranking shaped by the constant exercise of socio-economic power.” And that encapsulates Guha’s answer to the big question that emerges in all the good studies of caste: to what extent is caste in South Asia unique? In my study, I argue that caste is indeed unique because of the creative tension that arises from the competing demands of centralizing kingship and decentralizing kinship, but more on that below.

One of the strengths of Guha’s study is its historical approach, focussing as it does on “dynamic social processes” (6). But it is also valuable because he does not focus on the development of caste in just one part of India. He demonstrates, rather, how social processes have gone on in different parts of the subcontinent at different rates, are often not completed, and often set in reverse; he eschews an evolutionist theoretical position which deems certain systems as necessarily primitive.

In all the vicissitudes of history, however, “the bounded ethnic group remained and remains a powerful presence” (7).

Guha, rightly, after Nicholas Dirks and Susan Bayly, argues that caste is not a product of a single ‘Hindu’ ideology. I also argued that caste is structural rather than ideological. Rather, says Guha, power is the all-important ingredient.

Guha argues that castes are a sort of tribe, by which he means “large, stratified, socio-political organizations characterized by diffuse authority and collective leadership such as, for example, a council of important chiefs” (71). He says that such “identity-centred and geographically bounded communities” were “the domains in which ethnic politics was formed” and that this gives us a “deeper appreciation of how indigenous states in India grew out of and reproduced the lasting structures of inequality so inadequately captured by what has been called the ‘caste system’” (99).

Kinship is far from the fixed, bounded unit of social organization that we often see portrayed in the literature: “kinship and exclusion from the kin were both socially constructed statuses, and a person could move from one to the other in the course of a lifetime” (150). And yet, as my research seems to suggest, there are times when kinship groups do indeed attempt to maintain a tighter boundary. 

How did caste develop under British rule? Guha reports how important the colonial administration of British India was in the formation of South Asian identities. Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks, he reports, “argued that colonialism was more than a system of power: it was also a mode of knowing that constructed its objects of knowledge” 174). The colonial administration created a significant apparatus to classify and count all the peoples in its domain. Sometimes administrators visited a region and, working with local Brahman literati, as in the Bombay Presidency at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “simply divided the people into Muslims and Hindus, and the latter into Brahman, Rajput, ‘Shoodruh’ or Maratha, and Ati-Shudra or outcastes” (201), masking and distorting a much more complex reality on the ground. Interestingly, twenty years later, in the mid-nineteenth century a change had occurred, with the “basic ordering seems to have been religious (201). This would seem to correlate with the developing notions of religion in the emerging paradigm of ‘world religions’.

After the great anti-colonial uprising of 1857-8 the notion of race became a significant category in a way it had not been hitherto (203). And this was a surprise to me: by the late eighteenth century, “It was the political value of this sense of European-born identity that…led the [East India] Company to assiduously limit the development of a local power elite with any genealogical depth. It also caused the Company to discourage the immigration of non-official Englishmen into India. All this was designed…to pre-empt any local claim to the ‘rights of Englishmen’ that had just been forcefully raised in North America. The disavowed India-born offspring formed a socially inferior class of Eurasians, excluded from power” (218). In order to encourage English officials to return to Britain once their term of service was complete, Lord Cornwallis, the then Governor-General of India, sanctioned a large pay increase, allowing them to return at middle age with a substantial nest egg.

Returning to his main point, Guha tells us to “abandon the futile search for a social essence” because “social structures, old and new, have been politically ordered in ways that we cannot grasp unless we deploy the concept of caste as a bounded corporate body shaped by socio-political power throughout its long history” (255).

I have a few quibbles with Guha’s analysis.

Firstly, I think he makes too much of ranking. That is, he seems to follow the standard idea that all the castes in a society are in a clear hierarchy relative to each other. He quotes Weber: “A status segregation grown into a ‘caste’ differs in its structure from a more ‘ethnic’ segregation: the caste structure transforms the horizontal and unconnected coexistences of ethnically segregated groups into a vertical social system of super- and subordination” (13).

As I demonstrated in my work, with the exception of Dalits (those formerly known to others as Untouchables) and, to a lesser extent, other impure, but not untouchable castes, such as Butchers, those vertical relations are often contested and indeterminate because of no ritual intercaste relations. Guha does acknowledge, at least, that ethnic boundaries are porous.

Secondly, although Guha examines caste throughout traditional India (including the territories now Pakistan and Bangladesh), dividing it helpfully into five regions, and makes several references to caste in Sri Lanka, he barely mentions Nepal. In a sense Nepal is little different from other parts of the subcontinent, especially in the old Mithila kingdoms of the southern plains (Tarai). But the Newar former kingdoms of the Kathmandu Valley – Kathmandu, Lalitpur (Patan), and Bhaktapur – are particularly significant exemplars of archaic caste systems because the Nepal Valley was never under Mughal or British rule.

Although he does indeed discuss the phenomenon of kingship, and interacts with Dirks and A. M. Hocart, he doesn’t even reference Declan Quigley’s important theoretical work, The Interpretation of Caste. Thus, in my opinion, kingship and the city are not given their due.

Has Guha’s study led me to change my view of caste? Not a lot. But it has broadened it. Guha’s careful elucidation of the ongoing centrality of power in the development of caste society is convincing. In so arguing, Guha is stating that caste is not unique but is, rather, a South Asian example of political realities found in every society, but in a way that previous materialist writers had not managed.

However, Guha makes no mention at all of the ‘climax communities’ of the Kathmandu Valley. I think that is a failing. In so doing he misses the centrality of kingship in those societies. But his central thesis is solid, and I now think such cities must be regarded not as the apex of caste society but as perhaps caste's most complex instantiation.

There are missiological implications to this analysis, but more on that later.

Transcending Mission: The Eclipse of a Modern Tradition, by Michael W. Stroope - a Review

Transcending Mission: The Eclipse of a Modern Tradition, by Michael W. Stroope (London: Apollos, 2017, £24.99, 457 pages).

This is a book about language, specifically about how particular words can be used in such a way that an idea can have the appearance of being biblically and historically sound, while being neither. The key word under spotlight is ‘mission’ but its cognates, ‘missionary’, ‘missions’, even ‘missional’ are also thoroughly implicated.

   mission is rhetoric

In his Introduction, Stroope, who teaches at Truett Seminary, Baylor University (USA) and has been a missionary in Sri Lanka, England, Germany and Hong Kong, describes how the word mission is used chiefly as a noun and adjective and only occasionally as a verb, with a host of meanings. The oldest and most common use of ‘mission’ is as a political or diplomatic term (2). As we all know, mission has become ubiquitous in contemporary life, with companies, clubs, and military units employing the term to describe their purpose and activities. In the sense in which the term has been employed among Christians, however, it has generally had a narrower set of meanings connoting specialization, utility, and viewpoint: thus, “mission is rhetoric that describes specific Christian ideals and actions unique to its encounter with the world” (4).

However, much ink has been shed in recent years over what exactly mission means. Stroope engages with all the key writers on this theme: David Bosch, Andreas Köstenberger, Chris Wright, Lesslie Newbigin, Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, and others. The key point that Stroope is making, however, is not that the word has such a range of meanings but that the word itself is the problem: “Words,” he writes, echoing other scholarship, “more than represent reality; words…form reality” (10). The way we use words, then, creates conceptual frameworks for the reality they are being used to describe. Differentiating ‘mission’ and ‘missions’ doesn’t help either because the distinction is blurred and indistinct (15).

Stroope’s thesis is that mission,

birthed and developed in the modern age, is itself inadequate language for the church in the current age. Rather than rehabilitating or redeeming mission, we have to move beyond its rhetoric, its practise, and its view of the world. The task is one of transcending mission. (26, original emphasis)

In part one, Justifying Mission, the author critiques the ways that Partisans and Apologists, as he calls them, have sought to defend the use of the term. This has usually been attempted by means of biblical and historical scholarship. Defenders of the term mission as an interpretive category of Scripture argue their case by way of three methods: creating a biblical foundation, e.g. J. H. Bavinck, Peters; reading the Bible through a missional hermeneutic, e.g. Wright, Bauckham; and the identification of missionary themes, e.g. Kaiser, Köstenberger and O’Brien. Alongside these methods a lexical trail, e.g. J. H. Bavinck, or semantic field, e.g. Köstenberger, may be constructed to demonstrate the appropriate use of the language of mission. But mission in all these approaches is not just seen as a means to an end (104): “means become an end” (104-105) and in so becoming mission becomes sacred language. But mission “fills the whole horizon”, eclipsing more “theologically rich and biblical concepts such as covenant, reconciliation, witness, and love”.

The problem with all these methods is that mission is a priori

In historical studies, likewise, early and medieval examples of ministry are labelled as mission, even though the term is never used in contemporary writing. The problem with all these methods is that mission is a priori: that is, mission is assumed as a category and examples are then sought in the data (biblical or historical). But mission is a category that has a particular meaning that is rooted in the modern era. So, it is anachronistic to read the Bible and Christian history though this lens.

In part two, Innovating Mission, Stroope examines the origin of mission terminology. Exile, sojourner, and pilgrim were common terms used to describe the expansion of Christianity during the Middle Ages. Pilgrim language was then co-opted by Christendom powers for political ends and territorial expansion, most starkly in the crusades and in the founding of colonies in the Levant.

In the modern period pilgrim terminology became mission terminology as Ignatius Loyola and his band of Jesuits made a vow to go anywhere the Pope would send them to do his bidding. Mission became what they are to do and the structure to carry that out. It is only with the passage of some time that Franciscans and Dominicans, then others in the Roman Catholic church, and finally Protestants adopt the word and, with it, the conceptual framework.

In part three, Revising Mission, Stroope argues that during the nineteenth century there developed the “rhetoric of a modern tradition” (289). The author engages with the debate over whether the Reformers had an interest in mission. Apologists for mission argue that they did, based on their evangelistic zeal and the odd foray outside of Christendom. It has been argued that the massive work of reforming the church, the political troubles that dogged their efforts, the lack of missionary structures (in contrast to the Roman Catholic orders), and the late involvement of Protestant powers in the colonial project delayed full-blown Protestant entry into mission. But Stroope points out that mission language is absent among Protestants during the early years of the Reformation: “Mission and missionary were not adopted until the early eighteenth century and did not become stablished, common rhetoric until the nineteenth century” (294, original emphasis). Though Calvin did indeed have a desire that the gospel might be preached to Turks, Jews and ‘heathen’ and had a part in commissioning two pastors to travel with the dozen Huguenots to establish a colony in Brazil in 1557 it is not clear whether they went to evangelize the South American Indians or to pastor of the Huguenots or both (295). These facts “do not represent a programmatic commitment to a mission or mission strategy” (296). The Reformers’ lack of mission rhetoric “has more to do with the absence of the conceptual framework of ’mission’ at their time than their understanding of the gospel as universal in scope” (ibid.). One reason for this was that the term was used by the Jesuits in their programme against the Reformers. So, in fact, the Reformers actively opposed ‘mission’.

The high point, as others have also noted, was the Edinburgh Mission Conference of 1910.  “The modern mission movement…represents a set of historical occurrences imbued with religious, social, national, and emotional connotations” (318). The phrase “functions as rhetorical device…of a tradition…. In this way, the modern mission movement structures reality…” (318-19). The tradition gave validity and significance to mission. Missionary language at Edinburgh was militaristic and reminiscent of the distant memory of the Medieval Crusades. There was a language of conquest and occupation and Christianization “akin to the Latinization of the Levant following the First Crusade and the subjugation of peoples in Spanish and Portuguese colonizing efforts” (336).

After Edinburgh, however, attitudes toward mission began to change rapidly. From the International Missionary Council meeting in 1928, and especially with the publication of the Layman’s Enquiry (Re-thinking Mission) (the full version of which was published in 1933) attempts were made to revise mission. Now, argues Stroope, we live in a “post-foreign mission situation” and that requires us to reconceive the church and world encounter, not redefine or reform mission” (352-53). That, the author attempts to do in the Epilogue.

Central in the Bible’s storyline, says the author, echoing other writers, is the kingdom of God. This brings Stroope to his central proposal:

Embracing the kingdom of God does not remove us from the world but transforms our encounters within the world. Orientation to and formation in the kingdom of God readies us for engagement with the world by transforming us into witnesses to the kingdom and pilgrims of the kingdom. As pilgrim witnesses we participate in the coming reign of God. (370, emphasis in the original)

            this is a brilliant book

I think this is a brilliant book. It is meticulously researched, cogently argued, and utterly convincing. It should become a standard textbook in mission courses, though those courses will probably now need be called something different! It must surely take its place as one of the seminal arguments in the rehabilitation of a truer form of gospel living as the church emerges out of modernity.

Without wanting to sound too critical, however, I think in places the author overstates his case. In writing of Paul, for instance, Stroope argues that the apostle supported himself as a leatherworker and “thus did not become a full-time religious professional of any kind” (95). This is surely going too far. He certainly worked with his hands to support himself. But it is also clear that he was not averse to asking those he had brought to Christ to help him out so that he might be freed from having to do so (2 Cor 11: 8-9; Phil 4:14-18). Some pilgrim witnesses in the NT were clearly reliant on contributions of the Lord’s people. Absolutizing tentmaking, which Stroope apparently is keen to do, does not do the whole text justice.

Furthermore, one is left wondering what part, if any, organizational structures might have in the pursuance of pilgrim witness. Clearly, if people who are beyond reach of pilgrim witnesses at present, because the latter do not naturally wander into their neighbourhood –as is probably the case for three billion of the world’s population – some urgent thought is called for. Urgent thought will surely result in intentionality, which then asks questions about stewardship and, yes, even strategy. I share with the author his apparent allergy to a reliance on management in gospel witness. But, ultimately, some level of organization is called for to enable disciples of Christ to carry out their pilgrimage in the company of people who are presently outside its scope.

It must surely take its place as one of the seminal arguments in the rehabilitation of a truer form of gospel living as the church emerges out of modernity

The following are minor errors that should have been eliminated by the proof reader: ‘illusions’ should be allusions (110); ‘affect’ should be effect (311 & 369); ‘work’ should be world (351); there is an extraneous ‘can’ (372) and ‘that’ (385). There also seems to be a problem with the arithmetic in the account of the Portuguese ambassador requesting Ignatius for ten men to be allocated for their interests in the East. From Ignatius’ reply it seems only six were requested (283). Finally, there are a few typos: insisit (158); pereginantes (171); is is (175); ecclesical (296).

Spurgeon's Autobiography: The Early Years

Over the summer I have had the pleasure of reading the first volume of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's Autobiography: The Early Years. What an encouragement that has been! Spurgeon (1834-92) is one of the most remarkable men of whom I have ever read. By the age of 19 he was preaching weekly to a congregation of thousands in London.

He was clearly a very intelligent individual - he excelled in maths at school among other subjects and on leaving school was hired by a former teacher to help him set up a new one in Cambridge. But it is not his intelligence that strikes me so much as his godliness. He was brought up in nonconformist village chapels that were pastored by his father and grandfather but came to faith at the age of 15 when he turned in to a different chapel on a snowy evening and heard the words of Isaiah 45:22: "Look under me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." Spurgeon writes, "Oh! I looked until I could almost have look my eyes away".

It is striking that, having been instructed so carefully growing up, he had nearly all his doctrinal convictions sorted out before he was converted. It is no surprise, then, that he was soon involved in teaching Sunday school.

But it was at Cambridge that a deacon saw the potential in the young man and tricked him into going along to an outlying village chapel, where, he was told "a young man was to preach there who was not much used to services, and very likely would be glad of company". Walking to the village, Spurgeon found out that he was the young man and "lifting up my soul to God...it seemed to me that I could surely tell a few poor cottagers of the sweetness and love of Jesus, for I felt them in my own soul". He was soon called to be the pastor of one of these chapels and over the following two years pastored that congregation faithfully as well as preaching frequently around the Fens. During that time he preached over 600 times! What a tremendous training he received through that experience.

The call to London gave him a wonderful arena for his ministry and he was soon the talk of the town, with newspapers carrying articles about the boy preacher and scathing letters from older men who, sadly, were probably consumed with envy. He was supremely gifted as an orator, had a great memory for facts and stories, and could communicate with educated and uneducated alike. Indeed, he took great delight that the poor came in such numbers to hear him. But it is his closeness to the Lord that strikes me as the reason for his fruitfulness. He was a man of prayer and a man of the Word. His ministry was a demonstration of the words of the Lord Jesus: 'out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks' (Matt 12:34). No amount of theological education can substitute for that. It is what every preacher needs; and what every congregation needs to look out for when seeking to call a minister.