Identity, Consciousness and the Past: Forging of Caste and Community in India and Sri Lanka

These nine lucidly written essays extend the frontiers of understanding between history and anthropology. The essays are grouped into two parts. The first part, "Myth, history and ethnicity’, focuses on passions of ethnic and national identity as these impinge on how the past is imagined. The essays in this section analyse how the past is continually reconstructed by the events, perceptions and interests of the present. The second part, ‘Caste, kingship and colonialism’, consists of a set of essays which try to understand the caste order, its links with kingship, and the manner in which colonial domination defined and redefined this relationship. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, these essays will be valued by anthropologists and historians.