Carter, Lionel

Lionel Caplan was born in Montreal in November, 1931 and attended schools in the same city before entering McGill University, where he completed a BCom degree in 1952. After a spell in the commercial world he returned to academic life, choosing the discipline of Social Anthropology, and completed MA and PhD degrees at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He joined the SOAS staff in 1965 as a Lecturer, was promoted to Reader in 1975 and to Professor in 1987, retiring in 1997.

Caplan’s research focused largely on the complex politico-cultural encounters between dominant and dominated sectors of society in diverse South Asian settings. In 1964-65, as part of his doctoral programme, he examined the relations between a marginalised tribal population in east Nepal and members of high Hindu castes who had entered their territory and taken control of their land. The thesis and subsequent book which emerged from this research placed the study of conflict over land at the centre of anthropological understanding of tribal peoples in South Asia. In 1969 he returned to Nepal, this time to the western hills to conduct a study of the links between a small administrative centre and its rural hinterland, paying special attention to the ways in which a largely disenfranchised local population seeks to engage with the representatives of central power in their midst.

In 1974-75, and again in 1981-82, Caplan undertook a major research project on Christians in Madras, south India in which he showed that the emergence of ‘fundamentalist’ forms of religiosity, especially among the less advantaged members of the community, challenged the liberal doctrines and practices originally introduced by Protestant missionaries and still preferred by contemporary indigenous church leaders and community elites. Religious views and behaviours were thus understood as part of a wider dynamic in which dominance and resistance to dominance were as much a cultural as a material struggle.

In the context of a growing interest in how non-Western peoples had been and were being depicted in the literatures of the West, Caplan’s next project involved an analysis of popular writings on the ‘Gurkhas’ - a category drawn from marginalised populations of Nepal - who have served in Britain’s Imperial and post-Imperial armies for close to two centuries. He demonstrated that these portrayals, most by British officer-writers, needed to be examined in their particular historical, military and political settings.

Caplan’s latest study was of the Anglo-Indian community in urban south India, a mixed-race group descended from the colonial encounter between European males and Indian women, and alternately favoured and victimised in the wake of changing political currents. This research enabled him to address issues of postcoloniality and cultural hybridity.

His main publications are: Land and Social Change in East Nepal: a study of Hindu-tribal relations (Routledge & Kegan Paul, University of California Press, 1970), Administration and Politics in a Nepalese Town: the study of a district capital and its environs (Oxford University Press, 1975) and Class and Culture in Urban India: fundamentalism in a Christian community (Clarendon Press, 1987)

In 1967 he married the anthropologist Pat (Bailey) Caplan, a graduate of SOAS, who was for over twenty-five years, until her retirement in 2003, on the staff of Goldsmiths College, London. She has also conducted research in West Nepal and urban south India, as well as in her principal field of East Africa. They have two children.

From the guide to the Caplan, Lionel, 1965 to 2003, (School of Oriental and African Studies)