I’m reading Lata Mani’s Contentious Tradition: The Debates Around Sati, wherein she quotes a missionary, William Ward, who talks about the caste system in India by analogy with Chinese shoes: “like all other attempts to cramp the human intellect, and forcibly to restrain men within the bonds that nature scorns to keep, this [caste] system, however specious in theory, has operated like the Chinese national shoe, it has rendered the whole nation cripples” (Qtd. in Mani 133)
June 4, 2009
June 5, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Well put. However, it’s debatable exactly how crippled India was under the ancien regime. To my knowledge India produced over 20% of the world’s GDP in the early 1700s compared with just about 2% today. So caste as a system of division of labour seems to have worked well.
June 5, 2009 at 9:24 pm
And China was tops economically in the 1700s if you believe Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Roy Bin Wong.
June 6, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I agree – I was by no means agreeing with the British narrative of the Orient – just relaying it