The ethnographic data provided by ‘The Tribes and Castes of Bombay’ in the 1920s still hold water
The work we will look at today is a classic although it was written a little over a century ago. It is R.E. Enthoven’s The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, published in three volumes and still in print. A recent incident reminded me strongly of this book — I will come to that presently.
Reginald Edward Enthoven was born in 1869 (the same year Mahatma Gandhi was born and Ghalib died), studied at Oxford, and came to India as a civil service officer at the age of 20. Stationed in Bombay, he worked on the census, among other things. He made several contributions to the Gazetteer, a periodical through which the British mapped and understood India, its physical features and communities. The black leather-bound volumes on Bombay make for wonderful reading.
500 communities
Indian communities clearly interested Enthoven. The first one he describes in Volume II is that of oil-pressers in Gujarat who claimed mercantile descent though they were likely an occupational caste who broke off from the peasantry. Enthoven describes their family lives and rules of marriage. A man was allowed to marry his wife’s sister after the wife’s death; a widow could remarry her dead husband’s brother, but not the eldest one. Polygamy was also allowed if the earlier wife was provided for. Enthoven documents marriage rituals and related gods, inheritance laws and death rituals. Naturally, he also explains how their hereditary profession is carried out. He ends by noting that “they eat the flesh of goats, sheep, fowls and fish, and drink liquor”. The whole thing takes up two pages.
In this fashion, Enthoven documented 500 communities in all. At first, this effort likely fit in with what the government was trying to achieve through the census and other such documentation. But government funding for the community by community and caste by caste survey was stopped in 1909, according to a note published by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1924. It was left to Enthoven to use his own resources to complete the work. Enthusiasts working on similar projects pitched in (G.H. Desai compiled a glossary of castes, tribes, and races in Baroda State in 1912).
The three volumes of The Tribes and Castes of Bombay were published in 1920 and their contents have since then been widely used, including by the ‘The People of India’ series, which is a very large ethnographic survey of all of India started by the British in 1868 and taken up by the government in 1992. ‘The People of India’ survey uses Enthoven’s format, which is informative and easy to read.
Happy ending
Now to turn to the personal event referred to earlier. Recently, I had to attend the hearing for a complaint filed by a ruling party legislator who took offence to something I wrote about his leader’s community. What I wrote was anodyne and factual: the offence probably stemmed from ignorance.
But since it was registered as a criminal case, I had to defend myself by producing evidence. Here, I used a note published by the National Commission for Backward Classes, which was formed to introduce relevant communities into the list of Other Backward Classes (this is done State by State after ethnographically identifying the socio-economically backward sub-castes).
The note referred to the fact that the Muslim members of a particular caste had been given reservations as OBCs but not the Hindu members, though they shared the same caste occupation, even the name. In the mid-90s, the Hindus submitted a petition for inclusion: a senior Central government bureaucrat looked at the evidence and concluded that Hindus and Muslims from this caste were indeed one community. The Hindu caste, he wrote, should be treated as a synonym for the Muslim one.
The evidence the bureaucrat cited was from Enthoven’s Tribes and Castes of Bombay. The story ended happily for the Hindus, who were included in the Mandal list as OBCs and got reservations. I do not know if my own story will have a happy ending too, as the case continues, but it promises to be interesting.
Aakar Patel is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.
Source: https://www.thehindu.com/books/what-enthoven-knew-re-enthovens-the-tribes-and-castes-of-bombay/article32742331.ece