December 7, 2001

'Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India'

By NINA C. AYOUB

British power changed in India after the Sepoy Mutiny and the uprising that followed. The 1857 rebellion, brutally suppressed, led Queen Victoria to declare the crown's direct rule on the subcontinent. But another new regime also emerged: what Nicholas B. Dirks calls the "ethnographic state." India, he argues, was "anthropologized in the colonial interest."

The ethnographic turn of surveys and censuses stemmed, in part, from an astonishing mistake. Indian soldiers under British command