In the aftermath of the revolt, the government of India followed a policy of non-interference in Indian affairs relating to religion and caste. Nervous of a repeat of the widespread military and civil unrest experienced during 1857–8, the government was keen to dispel the apparently popular belief that its aim was the cultural defilement or even wholesale conversion of the entire population to Christianity. British administrators were also eager to untangle the seemingly tight knot that bound together the question of native ‘loyalty’ and ‘treachery’, and increasingly came to understand individual posturing with or against the state in relation to broader collective groups and relationships. In its drive for cultural understanding, if not empathy, the government created what is now commonly described as an ‘ethnographic state’, through which it differentiated, distinguished, and sharpened categories of religion and caste. These fed into colonial forms of governance generally, particularly new modes of recruitment into the Bengal army, as also the specifics of colonial alignment with particular sections of the Indian population. Indian communities were themselves central to the formation of such social discourses and practices. As during the pre-colonial period they continued their attempts to reposition themselves socially, economically, and culturally according to their own needs and desires.

Yet, as we have seen, colonial concerns about the relationships between the individual, society, religion, caste, and tribe were not solely a post-1858 development.