The persistence of terrorism in India and Pakistan, the Kashmir crisis and domestic issues like the caste system in India make it difficult to forget the extent to which religion is politicized in South Asia.
India and Pakistan have gone to several wars since the British left the subcontinent in 1947, and although these wars have largely been wars over territory, the crux of the divide originated with the formation of the nation of Pakistan, whose raison d'etre was to provide a homeland for the Muslims of India. The partition of India and Pakistan is a telling story of religious divisiveness and persecution culminating in the loss of around a million lives. Less fatalistic and catastrophic than certain events in the history of Hindu-Muslim tensions is the story of the caste system in India -- a hotspot of discussion and criticism for human rights organizations and a subject of widespread international condemnation since India's independence.
Votes from the lower castes in India and the complicated issue of affirmative action benefiting these groups has decidedly effected the political ascendancy of the two major political parties in India -- the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress. While the historic reasons for the politicization of religion in India are many and far too complicated for this discussion, it is interesting to look at one purported reason: the influence of British colonialism in India during the 200 odd years that the British ruled over its Indian subjects and in particular the effect of the Colonial Census.
The colonial census -- a seemingly harmless instrument -- had great capacity to foster inter- and intra-religious divide. The census mechanism was supposed to strip away from the complexity of the Indian culture and essentially help the British colonizers understand Indian culture. The myriad cross currents between Indian religions and Indian castes had to be simplified, different communities needed classification in monolithic terms and the nuances and overlaps with other similar communities done away with, so the British could start to understand the land they were trying to rule over in more simplistic terms.
However, in its first century of existence, the census of India had already evolved from a neutral and relatively passive instrument to a powerful mechanism for distributing political power and government patronage. The census affected not only Hindu-Muslim relations, but also the relations between different castes within the Hindu religion. The census enhanced the formation of religious communities more detailed and exact than existed prior to the creation of the census. This happened because relative strengths and weaknesses of religious communities could be gauged by numbers of Hindus and Muslims in different positions in the professions and the politics. Thus, a measure of success in these religious communities was gathered, strengthening the sense of competition between Hindus and Muslims and increasing tensions between the communities.
When the British set foot on India they realized they needed Indian collaborators. They recognized that the community of high-caste Hindu Indians -- the Brahmins -- had considerable influence over public opinion, and the British thought it was necessary to placate them. Brahmin caste laws were often given precedence over existing customs in the family and in different communities. The census operations of 1901 -- when the decision was made to attempt ranking the castes in the census records according to "social precedence" -- caused much commotion. "Caste Sabhas" or "caste committees" sprang up to better represent their respective castes. The British colonial offices were swamped with petitions by lower castes dissatisfied with the hierarchical imposition the British colonial officers had forced upon them.
Thus, more and more people took their caste and religious identities seriously, merely because the colonizers or the people in power were taking these identities seriously. This was perhaps an overt effect of a power equation, in which the colonizers were in a position of power relative to the colonized and were in a position to actualize ideological impositions on the latter. Such effects of colonialism, however, were not limited to the British in India. French or even Belgian colonialism also told stories of continuous engagements to attempt to describe and, more importantly, control the complexity of culture in the people they ruled over. In the case of the British in India, the result was an increase in centrality of religion and caste consciousness. Many such identities were increasingly institutionalized and thus politicized during the age of colonialism.
However, the census is only one instrument among other seemingly innocuous colonial mechanisms that severely affected cultures of the colonized. The study of colonialism and the Age of Empire, whose negative consequences were largely regarded as economic exploitation of colonized lands, long neglected the underlying interaction between the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized, and the essential ways in which the cultures of the colonized were affected. But today, with the profound influence of Edward Said's seminal work, "Orientalism," and the scions of academic disciplines that Said's work has engendered, loosely labeled as "Postcolonial Studies," it is impossible to not engage in a discussion of culture when discussing imperialism and global conquest. Such discussions are also important because cognate with economic relationships between different countries is a relationship that is strictly between cultures, and because a power dynamic exists in different economic relationships between nation-states, the power equation is transferable to the domain of the cultural relationship. This has contemporary relevance in today's age of increased economic connectivity, as disparate cultures and traditions are reshaped, undermined or even strengthened by economic interaction between nation-states.
