U.S. Anthropological Perspectives on Colonial Knowledge

When the British set out to govern India, they did not just deploy armies and tax collectors. They deployed surveyors, philologists, census enumerators, and ethnographers. A generation of historical anthropologists working largely from American universities argued that this knowledge-gathering was not a neutral side effect of empire but one of its central instruments. Figures like Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, and Arjun Appadurai showed that the categories we now treat as timeless features of Indian society, especially caste, were often reshaped, hardened, or even partly produced by the colonial drive to count, classify, and document. Understanding their arguments helps explain how an empire ruled not only through force, but through the power to define what India “really” was.

The American school of historical anthropology
Knowledge as a tool of conquest
Investigative modalities
The census as objectification
Nicholas Dirks and the making of caste
From kingdom to colony
Arjun Appadurai and the power of number
An unintended legacy
Why this matters today
Criticisms and debates

The American school of historical anthropology

The intellectual movement at the heart of this topic grew up mainly in the United States, even though its subject was British rule in India. Bernard Cohn taught for decades at the University of Chicago, where he held a joint position in history and anthropology. His blending of the two disciplines became a model for how to study empire as a cultural and intellectual project, not just a military or economic one.

This approach drew heavily on two influential thinkers. The first was Michel Foucault, who argued that knowledge and power are deeply linked, that the very act of describing and categorising people is a form of control. The second was Edward Said, whose theory of Orientalism described how Western scholarship constructed an exotic, inferior “East” that justified domination. Cohn worked out many of his ideas independently of Said, but the two streams converged into a powerful critique. The result was a school of thought that treated colonial administration itself as a subject for anthropological study.

Knowledge as a tool of conquest

The central claim is striking: colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it. To rule a vast and unfamiliar society, the British first had to make it legible, that is, to translate its complexity into forms they could read, measure, and file. This is why early colonial officials invested so much energy in mapping land, codifying laws, standardising languages, and collecting religious texts. Each of these activities turned a fluid social reality into something fixed and manageable.

Cohn argued that even the most apparently benign areas of governance carried this logic. The study of Indian languages, for example, was tied to the project of “control and command.” By writing grammars and dictionaries, British scholars were not simply learning to communicate; they were defining which languages counted, which dialects were “correct,” and how knowledge would flow through the administration. In the legal sphere, the British claimed to be applying ancient Hindu and Muslim law, but in practice they imposed their own assumptions about how a society of “others” should be regulated.

Investigative modalities

Cohn gave a useful name to the techniques the colonial state used to gather information: investigative modalities. These were the structured ways the British observed, recorded, and ordered knowledge about their subjects. They included the survey, which mapped territory and resources; the museological modality, which collected artefacts and antiquities; the enumerative modality, which counted populations; and the historiographic and ethnographic modalities, which produced narratives and classifications of Indian peoples.

What makes this idea so important is the argument that these modalities did not just describe India, they helped construct it. The act of collecting and codifying information created new categories and oppositions, dividing colonizer from colonized, modern from traditional, and West from East. A society that the British classified as “traditional” or “static” was, through that very classification, reshaped to fit the description.

The census as objectification

The single most influential example is the decennial census. In his essay “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” Cohn analysed how the count, conducted systematically from the 1870s onward, transformed Indian society. He used the term objectification to describe how the colonial state turned living, negotiable social realities into countable, nameable, classifiable objects.

Caste is the clearest case. In pre-colonial India, caste identity was often regional, occupational, and flexible; a community’s status could shift over generations and varied enormously from place to place. The census demanded something different. It required every person to be slotted into a single, fixed, all-India category. The 1901 Census, overseen by H. H. Risley, attempted to build an all-India system of caste classification, ranking over two thousand castes and even linking them to supposed racial types. By converting fuzzy, contextual identities into rigid census labels, the state helped make caste a permanent and inheritable attribute, recorded in official documents and tied to specific geographies.

Nicholas Dirks and the making of caste

Cohn’s student Nicholas Dirks extended this argument in his book Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Dirks held the Franz Boas chair in history and anthropology at Columbia University, and his work is perhaps the boldest statement of the colonial-construction thesis.

Dirks argued that caste, as we know it today, is a modern phenomenon, the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British rule. He was careful about what this claim does and does not mean. Dirks did not say the British invented caste from nothing; ideas of social rank and ritual status existed long before. Rather, he argued that under British domination, caste became a single, overarching term capable of naming and subsuming India’s many diverse forms of social identity. What had been one strand among many, alongside kinship, region, sect, and kingship, was elevated into the master category of Indian society.

From kingdom to colony

A key part of Dirks’s account is political. He traced how, before colonial rule, social identity in places like southern India was bound up with local kingship and patronage. The king was a central figure who could grant status and adjudicate disputes. When the British replaced local kingship with colonial power, especially after the Rebellion of 1857, they removed the political anchor of social identity. Into that vacuum stepped the colonial obsession with caste as the organising principle of Indian life.

Dirks also stressed the role of Indians themselves. Caste was reformulated through the work of British administrators and Indian actors together, including Brahmin informants and pundits whose interpretations shaped official knowledge. This is an important corrective: colonial knowledge was not simply dictated from London but emerged from a complex collaboration, however unequal. Dirks further argued that colonialism rested on two pillars, the brutal modes of military conquest and the cultural technologies of rule, the latter being Cohn’s investigative modalities at work.

Arjun Appadurai and the power of number

The third major figure, Arjun Appadurai, added a distinctive dimension in his essay “Number in the Colonial Imagination.” Appadurai, an Indian-American anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, pointed out that earlier scholarship had focused on classification but had paid less attention to quantification, the sheer colonial passion for measuring and counting.

Appadurai argued that numbers did more than serve practical needs like taxation. They became part of an illusion of bureaucratic control, a way of producing the feeling that a complex, unfamiliar reality could be grasped and governed. Counting people and resources at every level created the comforting sense of a “controllable indigenous reality.” The statistical table gave the administrator confidence that he understood a society he often barely knew.

An unintended legacy

Appadurai’s most thought-provoking point concerns the long-term consequences. Enumeration was meant to strengthen colonial control, yet it had effects the British never intended. By grouping, labelling, and numbering communities, the census gave people a new way to see themselves as bounded groups with measurable strength. Over time, these enumerated identities redirected indigenous practices in new directions, helping fuel communal and nationalist movements that eventually challenged the empire itself. The very tools of domination contained the seeds of resistance.

Why this matters today

These arguments are not merely academic exercises about the past. If census categories helped harden caste and religious identities, then the social tensions of the present have roots in nineteenth-century administrative decisions. Debates over caste-based reservations, communal politics, and the demand for a caste census all draw on categories whose modern form was shaped during colonial rule. Recognising this does not mean caste is “unreal” or that injustice can be wished away; the inequalities are painfully real. It means the categories we use to understand society have a history, and that history involves power.

The scholarship of Cohn, Dirks, and Appadurai also carries a warning for the social sciences themselves. Anthropology, the discipline that studied “native” societies, grew up alongside empire and often served it. Dirks went so far as to argue that historical and anthropological scholarship on India was itself implicated in colonialism. This reflexive turn, the willingness to question how knowledge is produced and whose interests it serves, is one of the lasting contributions of this American school of thought.

Criticisms and debates

It would be misleading to present these arguments as settled fact. Critics have pushed back hard. Some, like the historian Sumit Guha, argue that Dirks overstates the colonial role and underestimates how deeply caste structured precolonial society. Others note that the focus on the all-powerful colonial state can erase the agency of ordinary Indians, treating them as passive material to be classified. Research on the early censuses has shown that local Indian enumerators and village officials were indispensable to the actual work of counting, complicating any simple story of knowledge imposed from above. The strongest version of the “caste was invented” thesis is now widely seen as too sweeping. Yet the core insight, that colonial knowledge actively shaped the social world it claimed merely to record, remains hugely influential.

What do you think? If the categories we use to describe society are partly the product of historical power rather than neutral facts, how should that change the way we read official data like a modern census? And where would you draw the line between a community that was “constructed” by colonial classification and one that genuinely predates it?

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Table of Contents

The American school of historical anthropology 🔗

Knowledge as a tool of conquest 🔗

Investigative modalities 🔗

The census as objectification 🔗

Nicholas Dirks and the making of caste 🔗

From kingdom to colony 🔗

Arjun Appadurai and the power of number 🔗

An unintended legacy 🔗

Why this matters today 🔗

Criticisms and debates 🔗