Published Paper Details:

This article analyzes how colonial governance in the Madras Presidency transformed caste into a modern political identity between 1870 and 1947, with a focus on Teluguspeaking districts. It argues that the colonial state's knowledge practices--especially the census and ethnographic classification--reified locally flexible social relations into standardized categories of rule, while agrarian revenue policies consolidated material power for dominant cultivating castes. Caste associations harnessed the opportunities of education, professional employment, and limited representative politics to pursue upward mobility, often by combining Western institutional forms with Sanskritic idioms of status. At the same time, radical anti-caste currents--from Phule and Periyar to Ambedkar--mounted a systematic critique of graded inequality, yet remained politically constrained by agrarian dependencies and the priorities of nationalist mobilization. The article concludes that colonial modernity did not dissolve caste; it politicized it, leaving institutional and discursive legacies that shaped postcolonial democracy.