Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

India, serves to confine India to a space of difference instead of enabling a focus on connections with other places. Against this, Appadurai posited, first, that “essences” should be viewed as the “temporary localization of ideas from many places” and, second, that “ethnographies [should]…emphasize the diversity of themes that can be fruitfully pursued in any place” (46). The problem, however, is that while the multiplying of differences can enable a more balanced perspective on the extent to which caste hierarchies define India, this does not resolve the need to interpret the meanings of caste in Indian society.

Another prominent critique of Dumont's version of caste is provided by Dirks (1989) who argued for an ethnohistorical approach against the ethnosociological approach of Dumont. For Dirks, caste as postulated by Dumont was dependent on colonial accounts—that is, on Western conceptions—rather than on the realities of caste in India. Within colonial texts, it was convenient to represent India as a land devoid of politics and ruled by religion, in order to facilitate the undermining of its political structures. Thus,

Yet the solution was not to reverse Dumont's formulation, to take a materialist perspective and view religion as pure politics and power. Instead, what was required was an approach that would work against the separation of religion and politics, making religious arrangements part of political arrangements, therefore coming closer to how religion and politics actually interrelate in India. Thus, whereas for sociologists, caste, and not the state, held the village community together, Dirks (1987, 404) viewed Indian society as based on a “complex interweaving of ritual-symbolic forms with the so-called actual mechanisms of state power,”