This article explores colonial representations of the crime of cattle poisoning and uses it as a starting point to investigate questions related to the formation of Chamar identity. Starting from the 1850s, it looks at the process whereby the caste group was imbued with certain undesirable traits of character. Simultaneously, it also explores the larger trend towards fixing the caste with certain occupational traits, so that it began to be identified completely with leather work by late nineteenth century. The role of new specialisms such as ethnography, toxicology and medical jurisprudence in the formation of new definitions about Chamars is also highlighted. The overall aim of the article is to reveal the complexities involved in the formation of colonial discourse about caste and caste groups.

Despite the centralised nature of the fiscal system in colonial India, public education expenditures varied dramatically across regions with the western and southern provinces spending three to four times as much as the eastern provinces. A significant portion of the inter-regional difference was due to historical differences in land taxes, an important source of provincial revenues in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The large differences in public spending, however, did not produce comparable differences in enrollment rates or literacy in the colonial period. Nonetheless, public investments influenced the direction of school development and perhaps the long run trajectory of rural literacy.

Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have been very well represented in the educated professions, especially law and administration, medicine, engineering and nowadays, information technology. This is partly a continuation of the Brahmans' role as literate service people, owing to their traditions of education, learning and literacy, but the range of professions shows that any direct continuity is more apparent than real. Genealogical data are particularly used as evidence about changing patterns of employment, education and migration. Caste traditionalism was not a determining constraint, for Tamil Brahmans were predominant in medicine and engineering as well as law and administration in the colonial period, even though medicine is ritually polluting and engineering resembles low-status artisans' work. Crucially though, as modern, English-language, credential-based professions that are wellpaid and prestigious, law, medicine and engineering were and are all deemed eminently suitable for Tamil Brahmans, who typically regard their professional success as a sign of their caste superiority in the modern world. In reality, though, it is mainly a product of how their old social and cultural capital and their economic capital in land were transformed as they seized new educational and employment opportunities by flexibly deploying their traditional, inherited skills and advantages.

This article examines the making of a modern colonial city through the rhetoric of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’ in relation to water. The reference is to the history of water in the city of Delhi and what may be called ‘the first science of environment’ in a colonial urban context, with a focus not so much on the ‘extent’ of water supply and drainage, and its (in)adequacy in the colonial city, as on concerns around the ‘(im)purity’ of water, narratives of pollution, technologies of purity and the transformations they effected in a colonial context. In doing so it hopes to build upon a rich tradition of writings on urban water, its modernisation as also its location within a colonial regime, being suggestive of a framework in which we may consider water both as infrastructure and as environment, as much a network of pipes and drains as matters of pollution and well-being, as much a story of the search for and protection of the source as of the fate of the sink into which it ultimately flows.