Seeing Class as Caste: Colonial India and Perception of Social Order in Britain

During the colonial encounter between India and Britain, Britons ended up mapping and constructing discourse regarding natives and their social order. However, other parts of this encounter, that is, how colonized Indians perceived Britons and their social order, have been hardly explored in academic discourse. This proposed work explores the other part of this discourse, of how colonized Indians saw Britons and their social order. This work argues that when travellers from India started visiting Britain, they employed the colonial masters’ gaze of seeing social order, as Britons have done, while identifying the social order of colonized subjects as caste. Colonized Indians implemented the master’s gaze on the same scale of seeing and identified the class social order of Britain as hierarchical, exploitative and oppressive in function, the same as the caste of India, and at some point worse. However, this gaze on Britons’ social order was not independent in nature but a reciprocating lens of elite Indians on Britons’ allegations about Indians being exploitative and backward in nature due to caste structure, which is supposedly opposed to Britons’ equality ideals. Why this was a reciprocated lens and how its historical trajectories unfolded in the colonial space of India and Britain lies at the core of this proposal.