Susan Bayly: “Review: The History of Caste in South Asia,” reviewing Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karāva Elite in Sri Lanka,1500-1931 by Michael Roberts (CUP 1983) …. in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1983), pp. 519-527
The literature on the South Asian caste system is vast and contentious and the current war of words shows no sign of abating. This book conforms to current trends both in focusing on the experience of a single caste group under colonial rule, and also in adopting a polemical tone towards other historians. Roberts’ subject is the Karava population of Sri Lanka and his first aim is to explain why this group of poor fishermen and artisans managed to throw up a disproportionately large elite of businessmen, lawyers and other western-edu- cated professional men by the end of the nineteenth-century. The discussion is set against the background of works on comparable Asian business communi- ties such as the Marwaris and Parsis. An important theme, then, is the relationship between individual enterprise and the corporate structure of caste: did the Karava magnate class emerge because of, or in spite of, their roots in a hierarchical caste order? The conclusion here is that caste did not debar individual mobility and enterprise as the conventional wisdom once held, and that like other south Asian trading groups the Karava were able to use caste and kin networks to recruit labour and transmit capital, contracts and market information (pp. 127-30). The Sri Lankan setting provides a useful vantage point. Weber of course was the first to suggest that in Hindu society entrepreneurs were often outsiders-Zoroastrian Parsis and Jains-or that they held low caste status. Roberts shows that the same pattern applied in Sinhalese Buddhist society. As fishermen the Karava violated Buddhist sanctions against taking life; they, too, overcame the handicap of low status and a polluting occupation, moving from fishing to profitable new trades. Roberts argues that the Karava were able to turn their traditional skills to advantage in an expanding colonial economy. He traces their association with trade back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Portuguese and Dutch rule helped to create a demand for commodities and services which the Karava were particularly well equipped to supply. As fishermen many of them moved easily into ship-building and other waterfront industries in the new colonial port towns, and their skill in building fishing boats enabled them to take up carpentry and other trades patronized by Europeans. For some Karava the next move was into petty contracting and during the seventeenth century enterprising members of the group supplied timber and construction materials to the Dutch. Others engaged in those well-known standbys of low-caste ‘new men’, distilling and arrack renting (pp. 79-89).
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