Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India 9780822391012

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Crooked Stalks

anand pandian

Crooked Stalks Cultivating Virtue in South India

duke university press durham and london 2009

∫ 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Katy Clove Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Earlier versions of parts of chapter 2 originally appeared in ‘‘Securing the Rural Citizen: The Anti-Kallar Movement of 1896,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 1 (2005): 1–39. Earlier versions of parts of chapter 4 originally appeared in ‘‘Devoted to Development: Moral Progress, Ethical Work, and Divine Favor in South India,’’ Anthropological Theory 8, no. 2 (2008): 159–79.

To my parents and grandparents— for we grew in their shade, v¯ahlai afti v¯ahlai . . .

Valiant kings of unflagging grace and ceaseless tribute remain resplendent, the scales of merchants stay in balance, the Brahmins do not forget the Vedas, and righteousness does not falter for a single day, all due to the steadily sprouting nature of the paddy fields of those who do not mistake the proper way of the world. — attributed to the tamil poet kampar,

ca. eleventh century c.e.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration xv

Introduction 1

one

‘‘A Rough Spade for a Rugged Landscape’’ On Savage Selves and More Civil Places 31

two

‘‘What Remains of the Harvest When the Fence Grazes the Crop?’’ On the Proper Violence of Agrarian Citizenship 65

three

‘‘The Life of the Thief Leaves the Belly Always Boiling’’ On the Nature and Restraint of the Criminal Animal 101

four

‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets, Evil Sown Yields Evil’’ On the Moral Returns of Agrarian Toil 141

five

‘‘Let the Water for the Paddy Also Irrigate the Grass’’ On the Sympathies of an Aqueous Self 181 Epilogue 221 Notes 241 Glossary 283 Bibliography 289 Index 309

Acknowledgments

The Tamil Tirukkuhral suggests that the aid of those who give freely— without weighing returns—is greater than the sea in the span of its goodness. Seeking to convey my gratitude to those who have made this book possible, I find myself confronted by a debt beyond measure. Were I to try and chart out the many entangled ways in which every word and phrase of this book has been born of the relations I have enjoyed in the years of its writing, I would quickly face the conundrum met by Jorge Luis Borges’s mythical cartographer: a map whose quest for accurate witness would lead it to surpass in size the very thing that it was mapping. I can therefore do no more here than to name some of my debts, with the hope that those I name and fail to name may find some trace of their counsel in the text that follows. This book began as a dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am grateful for the wisdom and friendship of my teachers. Donald Moore first welcomed me into the field of anthropology, and I hope that this work may somehow attest to his acumen, inspiration, and meticulous care. Lawrence Cohen also roused me with the brilliance of his imagination and the humanity of his example. I am deeply grateful to a few other mentors who have nurtured my work and especially this project with acute and generous attention: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Val Daniel, Veena Das, Akhil Gupta, M. S. S. Pandian, Indira Peterson, Hugh RaΔes, and K. Sivaramakrishnan. Pandian has been the most long-standing of all of my teachers, and I have him to thank in particular for the kernel of the present project. Tom Dumm, George and

Kausalya Hart, Gene Irschick, Stefania Pandolfo, Paul Rabinow, and A. Thasarathan are other teachers to whose lessons this text is indebted. The insights and support of colleagues at Hamilton College, the University of British Columbia (ubc), and Johns Hopkins University have been crucial for the emergence of this manuscript; in particular, I would like to thank anthropology faculty and graduate students at Johns Hopkins for a lively and challenging collective reading of the introduction and epilogue that was essential to their final form. Many others have seen all too many drafts of what follows. I am grateful to my writing groups at UC Berkeley for enduring this work in its most awkward form, most especially to Tahir Naqvi and Lucinda Ramberg. A. R. Venkatachalapathy, Sharad Chari, Lisa Davis, Nate Roberts, Steve Yao, three anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press, and the students of two graduate seminars at ubc and UC Berkeley were kind enough to reflect upon various versions of the manuscript as a whole, and my revisions have depended heavily upon their judgment. Others who have shared useful and insightful readings of this work include Daud Ali, V. Arasu, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, John Barker, Barney Bate, Jennifer Biddle, Isabelle Clark-Deces, Frank Cody, Saurabh Dube, Judith Farquhar, Adam Frank, David Gilmartin, Gaston Gordillo, Chandan Gowda, Heiko Henkel, Susan Hicks, Craig Je√rey, Naveeda Khan, James Laidlaw, Saba Mahmood, Andrew Martindale, Renisa Mawani, Bhavani Raman, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Maya Ratnam, Rupa Viswanathan Roberts, Adheesh Sathaye, Lee Schlesinger, Brian Tilley, and Ana Vivaldi. Intellectual friendships with Musa Ahmed, S. Anandhi, Ahilan Arulanantham, Falu Bakrania, Amita Baviskar, Manoj K. Bharathi, Yolanda Chen, Karen Coelho, Kavita Datla, Vinay Gidwani, Will Glover, Charles Hirschkind, Priya Jaganathan, Eric Keenaghan, Tom Kemple, Ashok Kotwal, Rajan Krishnan, Rajan Lukose, Kyoko Omori, Josephine Park, Jasbir Puar, Natasha Schull, Mona Shah, Ajay Skaria, Pete Skafish, Jen Sokolove, Rebecca Stein, Ajantha Subramanian, and Tom Wilson have enlivened and sustained this project in critical ways. I am especially thankful to Jake Kosek for his unflagging enthusiasm in the face of the most inchoate ideas. I am grateful to audiences at the many workshops, conferences, and university settings where these materials have been presented in the last few years. Support from the Simpson Memorial Fellowship and the Townsend x

Acknowledgments

Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, along with the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, sustained the writing of the first draft of this work. In the years that have passed between this first draft and the present book, related versions of certain portions of this work have been published elsewhere, as follows: portions of the introduction and chapter 5 in ‘‘Tradition in Fragments: Inherited Forms and Fractures in the Ethics of South India,’’ American Ethnologist 35, no. 3 (2008): 466– 80; portions of chapter 1 in ‘‘Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil Country,’’ in History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context, edited by R. Cheran, Darshan Ambalavanar, and Chelva Kanaganayagam (Toronto: Toronto South Asia Review Publications, 2007); portions of chapter 2 in ‘‘Securing the Rural Citizen: The Anti-Kallar Movement of 1896,’’ Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 1 (2005): 1–39; portions of chapter 3 in ‘‘Pastoral Power in the Postcolony: On the Biopolitics of the Criminal Animal in South India,’’ Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 85–117; and portions of chapter 4 in ‘‘Devoted to Development: Moral Progress, Ethical Work, and Divine Favor in South India,’’ Anthropological Theory 8, no. 2 (2008): 159–79. I am grateful to my editor, Ken Wissoker, at Duke University Press for his expert counsel in working toward the ultimate form of the book manuscript, and to Mandy Earley and Tim Elfenbein, also at Duke, for their prompt and careful attention to the evolving work. I also thank Chitra Venkataramani for essential lessons concerning Adobe Illustrator, and Eileen Quam and Theresa Wolner for their assistance with indexing. The American Institute of Indian Studies and the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation funded the primary fieldwork in south India, from 2000 and 2002, upon which this book is based, while a Lowie Fellowship from the Berkeley Department of Anthropology, and research grants from Hamilton College and the University of British Columbia, supported supplementary work here and elsewhere in 2004 and 2005. Families too were the institutional foundations for this fieldwork, and I am grateful to my relations in Madurai and Chennai—my grandfather M. P. Mariappan, my grandfather and grandmother M. Soundraraj and S. Rajapushpam, my aunts and uncles M. Murugesan and M. Selvi, M. Senthikumar and S. Nirmala, S. Ambikapathy and A. Meenakshi, M. Jeyaprakash and J. Sowmini, S. Thayalan and T. Mala, along with my many cousins—for their continual love, care, and goodwill as I drifted in Acknowledgments

xi

and out of their houses at the oddest hours. It was in the alley behind my grandfather’s wholesale fruit warehouse that I met the retired Tahsildar Muthu Karuppa Thevar and his nephew lawyer Sundarapandian for the first time, and the chain of relations that would lead to many of my closest ties in the Cumbum Valley began here. I quickly found in Sundarapandian and his party comrade Su. Venkatesan intellectual fellow travelers and extraordinary friends, and many of the ideas at work in this book were first developed in the midst of our journeys together through the Kallar country. I remain grateful to P. Sucila Pandian and T. Fatimson, who first exposed me to the social and political life of rural Tamil Nadu in 1995. And these local government servants and public figures provided invaluable assistance with this project: K. M. Abbas, C. S. Amalraj, Ganapathi Rajan, V. Krishnamoorthy, V. K. Malkani, I. Muthiah, Poonjar Rama Varma, George Virumandi, and Thavamani Kalyani Thevar. Most of the encounters and dialogues that animate this book took place in the Cumbum Valley of southwestern Tamil Nadu. It is di≈cult to convey in a handful of words the immense gratitude I feel for those who not only welcomed me into their lives as a brother, son, cousin, or grandson, but shared so freely of their wisdom, humor, joy, and despair. They remain in my dreams, in my classroom lessons, in moments of moral reflection, in the gestures with which I find myself pruning in our small backyard in Baltimore. The most I can o√er to acknowledge this debt are the words that trail behind this page, an o√ering made with the naïve belief that such scholarship may yet infuse such lives with the real promise of something better. Fieldwork is sustained by such faith, but also by more practical gestures of care and attention. I therefore want to thank the devoted family in the village of Karunakka Muthan Patti with whom I ate, lived, laughed, and complained—Kannan, Iswari, Sudha, and Athal—as well as Chittarasu and Stalin for introducing me to them. I am equally grateful to Vairam Pandian and V. Perumayi in the adjacent village of Kullappa Gounden Patti—where I spent most days and evenings—for welcoming me into their home. Their son Bose and his kinsmen Malaichamy and Jegadisan were steadfast and loyal friends. Devarasu, Dharmar, two men named Logandurai, Madhavan, Mahendran, Manichamy, Rajendran, and Sivankalai were amiable companions and invaluable teachers. A few elder men and women—Ayyar Thevar, xii

Acknowledgments

Duraichamy Gounder, Duraisingam, Kathiriyamma, Mookiah Thevar, M. Parvathi, Periyaramu Thevar, Pekkathi Mayandi Thevar, Thangathai, and Uthandan—graced me with their knowledge and experience. But if there is one person who could be taken as the soul of this book—the life of justice to which I found myself drawn in its writing—it may well be V. Karupayi, and I am thankful not only for the limitless proverbs, songs, and tales that she shared, but also for the kindness of her prayers. Pieces of this book were written in many di√erent places beyond south India, even as my thoughts kept returning there day by day, and I am lucky to have had friends throughout its writing who were willing to indulge such absent-mindedness. Vidhya and Karthik Pandian have been the most loyal of siblings, and their clarity and fidelity has never failed to revive me in moments of the deepest doubt. I would be nothing without the boundless and always forgiving love of my parents, Lalitha and Ganesa Pandian, whose goodness has always been a matter of nurturing care and patient example. I am grateful to Devika and K. B. Nair for the generous faith with which they took me on as a son, even though my e√orts to make sense of anthropology fell woefully short at our first meeting and more. And to their daughter Sanchita Balachandran, who read and reflected on every word of this book, I am grateful most of all for the grace and conviction of the life she has given me to share. She has taught me that however daunting it may feel to be fully and impossibly indebted to another, there is always shelter to be found along the edges of such seas.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Note on Transliteration

Tamil terms have been transliterated and spelled following the University of Madras Tamil Lexicon scheme. Long vowels (¯a, ¯ı, u¯ , e¯ , o¯ ), along with all alveolar (cr, nc ) and retroflex (at, n, a la, cl) consonants and certain palatal (ñ) and velar (n) ˙ consonants, are distinguished by the use of diacritical marks. I distinguish long or stressed consonants by doubling the appropriate letter. All Indian terms are pluralized the way some words are pluralized in English, by adding an ‘‘s’’ to the ends of plural words. In the case of proper names of deities, castes, individuals, and places, I have used the most common Anglicized spellings without diacritics, for ease of recognition and readability. I have also relied upon the most common Anglicized spellings for Tamil film titles (hence Kizhakku Chimaiyilee rather than Kihlakku C¯ımaiyil¯e ), for ease of identification, although proper names of printed texts are written using the Lexicon scheme. Words from other Indian languages are written using their most common Anglicized spellings, generally without diacritics. Spoken terms are spelled and written according to the conventions of spoken Tamil rather than the more formal conventions of literary Tamil, unless deliberately spoken in a literary or formal manner. Borrowings from English in spoken discourse are italicized when their usage conveys something slightly di√erent from their customary meaning in English. Names and other personal details concerning many of the individuals described in this book have been altered to protect their identity, most especially in the case of sensitive subjects of discussion.

Introduction

We could see the police jeep parked among the withered saplings even from a distance. Spindly and misshapen boles of young teak rose along one side of the rocky dirt track winding through the uplands to the foot of the mountains. A battered sign planted against the rusted fencing advertised the proprietors of the defunct estate: ‘‘vgp ever green plantation (ltd).’’ That sunny March morning in 2002, the young local manager of the enterprise had taken his own life. I raced through the trees to find a small crowd around the doorway of the plantation guard shack, just a few hundred meters from the village where I had been working. The body lay sprawled on the dirt floor of the shack, beside a heap of clothes and a quarter bottle of McDowell’s. The liquor, like the bag of fried sweet dumplings hanging from a branch outside, remained untouched. Rajesh Kumar had been pursuing a Ph.D. in agriculture in his spare time. When we first met at his o≈ce, he showed me the small rose bush that he had grafted to yield both red and yellow petals from the same bud. ‘‘Look at all we can do!’’ he said, stammering out a few terse words in stilted English: ‘‘Agriculture . . . utilize mind . . . di√erent flowers . . . peaceful heart.’’ Back inside the o≈ce, Rajesh vented an earnest diatribe against the many toxic chemicals that Indian farmers heedlessly poured onto their fields. ‘‘How to improve these people?’’ he asked with genuine concern. But he died just five weeks later. Constables found a metal drinking cup tossed among the wilted saplings ringing the shack that morning, tinged with the reddish dregs of Novocron pesticide. Rumors about Rajesh circulated for days after his suicide. His company

salary long unpaid due to the failure of the enterprise, he had quietly and illicitly sold o√ bits of the plantation piece by piece to try to clear deep personal debts. ‘‘That thievish lad . . .’’ a former vgp watchman named Arasan muttered to me one afternoon. Arasan blamed other vgp guards in the village for corrupting Rajesh with brandy, cigarettes, and prostitutes. ‘‘It was enough to bait him. He came dancing along.’’ I asked the watchman skeptically whether the matter could be so simple. Would Arasan himself come dancing along in the face of temptation? The elder man denied this forecast: ‘‘Thoughts would come to me. Home . . . children . . . if I did this, what would happen next?’’ But that young man seemed to him to have thought only of indulging himself in whatever he could before it killed him. On the morning of Rajesh Kumar’s final act, there was no one on hand to relay the news to the vgp head o≈ce in the city of Chennai. I placed a call to Padmanabhan, the senior manager of Evergreen Plantations, whom I had met just a few months prior at the dingy greenish headquarters of the abortive venture. ‘‘Tell me, is there one word that you can use to explain all the di√erent needs that people have?’’ Padmanabhan had asked me when we met. As I fumbled clumsily for a reply, he provided himself the answer he was waiting for. ‘‘Want.’’

o To condemn desire is to condemn nature: the nature that human beings seem to have and the nature of a world that appears to support the worst of their inclinations. Nature has often been cast in the image of a stubborn depravity, to be overcome, if at all possible, by the exercise of moral judgment. Such judgment may be expected to arise from the workings of human reason and reflection, freed of the body and the pull of its appetites. Its exercise may be attributed instead to the force of social life: to the dictates of obedience, the rule of legal principles and scriptural injunctions, or the pressures of civilization. These familiar and pervasive arguments take for granted the existence of a deep tension between natural and moral life, finding people to act as they should only when freed from, or forced to give up, their most basic urges. We often fail to acknowledge the moral potential of ordinary existence and its unstable play of aspiration, hesitation, struggle, and betrayal. People sometimes come to want the very lives that they and others feel they ought to have. 2

Introduction

This book confronts a simple yet enduring question: how do people come to live as they ought to live? I suggest that we may seek an answer to this question not in the denial of natural life—in the domination of what is given, in the world and in the character of those who inhabit it—but rather in its cultivation. By cultivation I mean several things at once: the developmental horizons that lend individual lives a moral impetus and direction; the practical techniques through which people may engage their own desires, deeds, and habits in the pursuit of a moral life; and the material labor that may transform a world of embodied experience into an environment for both moral and natural growth. I argue that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Here as elsewhere, progress has demanded a radical remaking of character—personal and natural, moral and terrestrial—through close relations of supervision. But to take these dimensions of modern life as matters of cultivation is to acknowledge as well that their development, like that of any earthly form, is riven with uncertainty and disappointment. We may also therefore find in this image of cultivation a way of negotiating another abiding question, one that so often seems to shadow the first with a melancholy tinge: why do people still fail to live as they ought to live? Take, for example, the promises and pitfalls attested by this opening tale of cultivated ruin. Far more was at stake here on the undulating uplands of the Cumbum Valley—a triangular vale tucked between the mountains of the Western Ghats and the plains of Tamil Nadu in southern India—than the moral failure of a single young man. vgp Evergreen Plantations was only one among the thousands of botched corporate plantation ventures that attracted and squandered the savings of millions of urban Indian investors in the 1990s, with the empty promise of a scientific cultivation of nature. This ‘‘plantation bubble’’ was a national scandal.∞ But especially here in the Cumbum Valley, tragedy seems to have repeated itself with uncanny precision. In 1917, the British colonial state had tried and failed at enlisting these very acres as an instrument of moral uplift among a notorious caste of putative thieves. Over eighty years later, inveterate descendants of the same community were blamed for having corrupted young Rajesh Kumar. This book chronicles the postcolonial afterlife of this colonial enterprise. I present the agrarian landscape as a terrain of both natural and moral cultivation, and the Introduction

3

topography of the postcolonial self as a palimpsest of living traces from many overlapping moments in the past. This book, in other words, explores circumstances in which the cultivation of the soil may be taken to sustain a cultivated life. Arasan and the other vgp watchmen were born into the Piramalai Kallar caste, a community of less than one million living mainly in the villages and towns of the southern Tamil plains of Madurai.≤ Blamed for habitual cattle theft, blackmail, and highway robbery by colonial o≈cials throughout the nineteenth century, the entire caste was designated a ‘‘criminal tribe’’ in 1918. For nearly thirty years, all Piramalai Kallar men were fingerprinted, required to report for regular roll calls, and prohibited from leaving their villages for any reason without written permission, regardless of whether or not they had been convicted of any crime. These extraordinary measures in colonial policing were supplemented by an array of experiments in social reform, including a prominent use of agrarian strategies for the cultivation of virtue. It was here on the edge of Kullappa Gounden Patti (or K. G. Patti) village in the Cumbum Valley that an agricultural reformatory settlement was established for the Kallars under missionary supervision in 1917. When the elderly Arasan condemned young Rajesh as a thievish and reckless lad, he spoke in part as an heir to these abiding legacies of moral education. At the same time, however, older moral traditions also lend their authority to the ethical life of the present in India. The word kafllfar literally means ‘‘thief ’’ or ‘‘deceitful person’’ in Tamil, as colonial critics of the caste pointed out endlessly from the eighteenth century onward.≥ When exactly this disparaging word began to identify an endogamous community remains unclear.∂ What is certain, however, is that the Kallars have been distinguished for centuries as antagonists of the settled agrarian order in south India. I argue in this book that virtues such as civility, restraint, and sympathy have long been associated in the Tamil country with the nature and customs of its lowland cultivators.∑ Kallar chieftains, warriors, and village watchmen on the dry upland plains exercised a rival form of authority in the countryside, widely identified as the savage antithesis of agrarian civility. These distinctions also survive in the present, as ideas of the virtues of cultivation in postcolonial south India resound with both archaic and modern discourses of moral improvement. When Rajesh Kumar credited agriculture that day with 4

Introduction

the hopeful development of a peaceful heart, he echoed this hybrid moral heritage. A special deputy collector remains responsible for the task of ‘‘Kallar Reclamation’’ in southern Tamil Nadu today—perhaps the only senior civil servant in independent India charged explicitly with the advancement of a single caste. Partly due to the hundreds of schools and other developmental schemes promoted by this o≈ce from the early twentieth century onward, the Piramalai Kallar caste has attained an unprecedented degree of prosperity and respectability in recent years.∏ At the same time, however, it is widely alleged that their newfound wealth and prominence depend on their singular willingness to pursue ‘‘crooked paths’’ such as smuggling, racketeering, and other illicit trades. Not a week went by during my fieldwork in the Cumbum Valley when I did not confront two starkly opposed judgments: ‘‘they have reformed well’’ and ‘‘they will never reform at all.’’ Both conclusions testify that the nature of Kallar selfhood remains widely conceived as a moral and ethical problem in south India—as an object of relentless critique, labor, and even despair. Like the plantation debacle itself, this ambiguous condition sharply attests to the essential contingency of cultivating endeavors, whether moral or agrarian in their nature. This book addresses a series of historical struggles with ‘‘Kallar human nature’’—a phrase I borrow from an early twentieth-century American missionary closely involved with the agricultural reformatory settlement in the Cumbum Valley—and their lingering weight on the moral imagination of the present. The remainder of this introduction lays out three conceptual stakes of the project. I begin with a discussion of development in India as a moral horizon investing both personal lives and material environments with an impetus for transformation. I then turn to the practices of virtue through which people here work to transform themselves, relating their appeal to the abiding heritage of both colonial and earlier pasts. This sets the stage for a closer consideration of cultivation as a twofold enterprise: a labor on the nature of the self, and a work of improvement exercised upon the agrarian landscape. We may be accustomed to thinking of the countryside as the signature realm of backwardness and inertia, as an idle space that can and must be overcome by forces of transformation always assumed to arrive from somewhere else. In these pages, however, the rural citizen confronts the present as heir to Introduction

5

an agrarian tradition of moral cultivation—as a subject of ongoing development, that is, rather than an antagonist to change. Subjects of Development The Cumbum Valley village of K. G. Patti has a prosperous and picturesque aspect, its main lanes flanked by brightly painted cement houses and small stores set within a landscape of verdant fields and orchards, perennial streams, and forested mountains rising up in nearly every direction. Some youths here have found enough evidence of its development—in the dense tangle of electric lines and television cables, abundant two-wheelers, and a growing number of cellular phones—to playfully describe the place as ‘‘K. G. Nagar’’ rather than K. G. Patti: a small ‘‘city’’ of sixteen hundred households rather than a village.π But also like cities in the Indian imagination, this village was easily sketched in much darker terms: as a place of bottomless frauds and intrigues, one of incorrigible swindlers, pickpockets, and motorcycle thieves, one where expensive cigarette packets tucked prominently into shirt pockets held nothing more than bundles of cheap beedis, and one where, as I was often warned to remember, people would do anything for the trappings of wealth. ‘‘This place is a terrible place, Anand. All empty people. They will never, ever reform,’’ a middle-aged Kallar ploughman with a gru√ demeanor complained to me one morning. Like many others here, he identified this as a problem of upbringing. ‘‘We all came bursting out of the soil,’’ he said, as though they had grown out of the soil with no more cultivating care than a bunch of wild mushrooms. Development is one of the most important objects of desire, imagination, and struggle in contemporary India.∫ What I mean by development is the promise of a gradual improvement of life, and the fulfillment of its potential for progressive growth through deliberate endeavors in transformation. Promoted through state policies, voluntary agencies, commodity advertisements, televisual programming, and many other media, this is a promise both powerfully appealing yet frustratingly elusive for many in India today. Its force registers not only in the visible transformation of living conditions, but also in the forms of conduct that people expect of themselves and of others. As ambivalent assessments of change in places such as K. G. Patti might suggest, development in contempo6

Introduction

Cumbum Valley agrarian terrain: a landscape of development. Photograph by author.

rary India is a matter of moral as well as material aspiration. Those who struggle for such advancement in this book are best understood as subjects of development: subject, that is, to the force of a demand to develop themselves, to the weight of a burden to overcome the felt inadequacies of their own nature.Ω Their lives reveal development as both a project of government and a work upon the self, an endeavor that seizes bodies and materials but also desires, habits, and feelings.∞≠ I am interested here in the many kinds of historical forces that make such development desirable in the present, and that identify its failure—as my ploughman friend Durairasu did—with the lack of a necessary cultivation. Influential writings of recent years have identified development with the political and economic milieu of the postwar era—the dense network of national and multilateral institutions that coalesced around this goal beginning in the 1950s.∞∞ The many projects and schemes of postwar Introduction

7

planners, bureaucrats, and aid workers have no doubt greatly influenced popular desires for development in India and elsewhere. But we must also keep in mind the abiding significance of earlier programs for state-led social transformation. With its establishment under the British crown in 1858 the colonial government of India was required to submit a statement to Parliament each year detailing the ‘‘Moral and Material Progress of India.’’ Progress was a consistent language of legitimacy for the colonial state, with much of the framework to advance development in independent India—networks of roads and railways, bureaucracies for agriculture and natural resource extraction, institutions of public health, and so on—established in the colonial era.∞≤ Throughout this book, I chart unexpected echoes of these historical enterprises and rationales for progress. To identify contemporary India as ‘‘postcolonial’’—as I do—is to argue that the demands of the present can only be understood in relation to the events and exercises of this past. In other words, there has been no clear break from this colonial heritage.∞≥ The ploughman Durairasu’s complaint, for example, concerned not simply a place but the recalcitrant character of a people that dominated it: Piramalai Kallar castefolk. His sense of their collective depravity as a failure of upbringing closely echoes the ways in which British o≈cials in colonial south India tried for decades to ‘‘wean’’ the Kallars from their criminal habits.∞∂ Kallar criminality was judged as childlike in relation to a broader standard of maturity, a modern developmental imagination in which history itself could be taken as a general course of progress toward perfection.∞∑ Such indeed was the rhetoric of colonialism at its most confident moments in India and elsewhere—a promise of political freedom to those captive and inferior beings who had slowly and painfully learned to govern themselves with reason and responsibility. This vision of a possible progress, guided and inspired by Western example and expertise, still defines how many in India continue to see themselves and their shared condition. Development today must be understood in relation to these broader and older horizons of maturation, improvement, and progressive change.∞∏ When Kallar men and women deride each other and themselves as savage, childlike, and even animal in their natures—a subject I discuss in greater detail in the first and third chapters —they testify in part to the enduring weight of colonial subjection. What I also emphasize throughout this book is that paths of collective 8

Introduction

development in contemporary south India depend as well upon the persistence of much older horizons of moral and material possibility. There may be something very modern about development as a field of projects undertaken by state agencies with an implicit vision of history itself as a course of general progress. However, vectors of change with much deeper roots may also intersect with such modern e√orts in significant ways. From medieval centuries onward in the southern Tamil country agrarian lowlands formed the settled domain of a civilized social and political order. Cultivating castes such as Vellalas dominated these tracts, with marginal groups such as Kallars and Maravars inhabiting more peripheral dry uplands. Tamil literary materials record the hostile threat of the latter to the lowland tracts, but also suggest that many of these groups began to identify themselves as cultivators over time and to emulate the social and ritual practices of the cultivating castes.∞π One Tamil adage in particular testifies to this upward trajectory: ‘‘Kallar, Maravar, Agambadiyar slowly slowly become Vellala.’’ British o≈cials confirmed its truth in the nineteenth century, noting that many Kallars in coastal Tanjore were acting and even dressing themselves as Vellalas, having ‘‘settled down permanently to peaceful and lawful occupations.’’∞∫ Indeed, this archaic course of social progress—and perhaps, indeed, development —was a key inspiration for colonial strategies of agrarian social reform.∞Ω Prominent Tamil nationalists in the early twentieth century identified the very origins of civilization in south India with the cultivating practices and cultivated virtues of the Vellalas.≤≠ The following chapters argue that such forms of virtue and trajectories of transformation continue to shape how rural citizens in south India today fashion themselves as subjects of development. Their evidence suggests that the structures and distinctions of social caste in India—long understood as an essential cause of Indian backwardness, a ‘‘social anchylosis’’ or sti√ening of collective life in the memorable words of one observer—may be taken alternatively too as an arena of progressive transformation.≤∞ These vectors of change also imply that the subjects of development in postcolonial India may be understood to include not just individuals working upon themselves, but also social collectives engaging themselves and others as wholes in relation to their mutual histories. The second chapter, for example, examines an alliance among many castes to secure the countryside as a virtuous domain in the late nineteenth century by driving out Introduction

9

Kallars altogether. Lastly, as I will show, the deeper developmental horizons engaged here bind prospects for a moral existence together with the foreseeable returns of a specifically agrarian form of life.≤≤ To heed such histories and their e≈cacy in the present is also to expand the scope of relations we may conceive as developmental in their nature. Development depends upon a relation of ‘‘trusteeship,’’ historians of the concept have suggested, one through which state o≈cials, social planners, and other agents assume responsibility for the progress of others in their care.≤≥ In much of the world, the optimism with which national and international institutions pursued such programs for collective welfare in the postwar era has long since proven naïve. Between the botched roads laid down by countless government contractors and the mealy rice for sale at many government ration shops, between the many policemen charging for their services at local stationhouses and those medical sta√ willing to collect fees for free beds and medicines at public hospitals, the state in postcolonial India is widely seen by many of its citizens today as a predatory apparatus rather than an agent of care. It is indeed important to challenge such practices. But we must also understand how people come to live with such di≈cult and uncertain outcomes: the place of chance in their hopes for advancement, and the other agents and forces to which they ultimately entrust their fates. I pay heed in this book not only to constables, foresters, and teachers, but also to parents, friends, and local leaders, to the care exercised by and expected from cosmic agencies and divine guardians of various kinds, and even to the concern of the earth itself for the fulfillment of justice upon its face. I would therefore resist using the ironies and failures of state-led development schemes to call for alternatives to the idea of development itself, as some critics have done in recent years.≤∂ Subjects of development in India react to its disappointments not by questioning the desirability of progress itself, but rather by holding even more closely to this prospect as an aim of life. Development is a powerful expectation that its subjects impose both upon themselves and upon the agencies that have long promised it to them—a durable vehicle of moral and political critique.≤∑ This book examines the idioms through which rural citizens in India demand improvements of themselves and of their peers, and the moral traditions of the past that make sense of such demands. I take de10

Introduction

velopment, in other words, as the moral horizon of a project of selffashioning. Let me turn now to the practices of virtue through which this project gains substance. For a Life of Virtue Lessons in development are taught in many places in rural India: tilled fields, storefronts, cinema halls, classrooms, domestic courtyards, and kitchens. I was waiting out the rain indoors with Karupayi amm¯a on a Saturday afternoon in K. G. Patti when she happened to bring up one such parable: ‘‘What does not bend when young will break when it matures.’’ She was an astute and generous agricultural laborer who treated me as nothing less than a son. We were chatting about childrearing, and this particular proverb addressed the dangers of an untimely stubbornness in both sapling branches and young children. She mentioned her grandson, who was five at the time. She, his mother, and his father, all would tell the boy what to do: ‘‘Talk like this, behave like this, write like this, be like this,’’ they would say. But he would grow up well only if these were good words, and if he heeded them. Suppose he came home crying that some other boy had hit him. He might pick up a rock or a knife and shout, ‘‘I’ll beat him down with just one blow!’’ in rage. So many others would tell the child to run back and retaliate: ‘‘Grab a rock and go hit him, kid, run!’’ But Karupayi amm¯a would counsel patience instead. ‘‘You must bear it,’’ she told me. You had to learn how to hold in your own feelings and make them pliable. Otherwise a small quarrel might lead as far as the police station. With these few words exchanged on a rainy afternoon, Karupayi amm¯a o√ered a vivid glimpse of a practice of moral pedagogy. A child would learn how to treat others well only by learning how to govern himself or herself with care. Maturity could be found in those who had developed a reflexive relation to themselves: those who had learned to work upon their own habits, desires, and impulses, training them to bend naturally toward the good, in the manner of a flexible sapling. This cultivation of virtue—of a good nature, character, or disposition—that she described bound up the collective horizon of development with an interior horizon of selfhood. In this book, I aim to account for how and why such selfcultivation has come to matter so much to ordinary people in the Tamil Introduction

11

A young Kallar child. ‘‘Rowdy fellow! Look at him playing with a stave already,’’ his grandparents joked. Photograph by author.

countryside. Karupayi amm¯a was born into the Piramalai Kallar caste, and it is my contention that the moralizing legacies of social antagonism and colonial policing here have profoundly shaped caste ideas of a life of virtue. The inner nature of these selves bears a complicated collective history. How do people come to live as they ought to live? One approach to this question would place these parallel yet dissimilar prospects—the rearing of a good child, the moral uplift of a community—within a general history of civilization. Philosophers in the West have long depicted the nature of the self as an interior terrain of struggle between civil and savage forces, aligned alternatively with rival passions, with reason against passion, with conscience against desire, or with the soul against the body.≤∏ Beginning in the eighteenth century, the term ‘‘civilization’’ came to identify the process of teaching individuals to master these rival forces within themselves and to regulate their own impulses in relation to each other.≤π Perhaps the two most famous proponents of this view in the twentieth century were Sigmund Freud and Norbert Elias. Freud identi12

Introduction

fied civilization with the psychic renunciation of instinct, while Elias described the di√usion of a courtly culture of self-restraint throughout Western society.≤∫ The breadth of these models may be appealing, but they must be resisted for precisely this reason. This book examines a particular tradition of agrarian civility in south India, in part as a challenge to the idea of an essential human nature and the universal means of its civilization. Another influential strand of thought—inspired by the work of Immanuel Kant and later Emile Durkheim—has identified morality with obedience to rules or laws of proper conduct. To address moral life solely as a matter of rules, duties, or obligations, however, risks neglecting a crucial set of problems: why would one want to act morally in the first place; are such desires to act well in fact mutable and cultivable; and how might one work practically upon one’s own customary inclinations or those of one’s peers, friends, kin, or pupils in order to draw them closer to some shared imagination of the good?≤Ω In an e√ort to tackle such problems, Michel Foucault had identified ‘‘ethics’’ as the project of making oneself into a di√erent kind of moral being—the myriad practices through which people engage their own acts, desires, or feelings as objects of praise and dismay, reflection and critique, cultivation and transformation. Here I follow Foucault in insisting on the historical specificity of any such ethical ‘‘art of life’’ and the moral horizon toward which it might aspire.≥≠ Throughout this book, I explore how Kallars and other rural people in southern India grapple with the moral challenges of modern life by working ethically upon themselves and others. In their engagements with a Tamil moral tradition of ahram or ‘‘virtuous conduct,’’ virtue emerges as a practice of navigating ‘‘the good and the bad’’ of worldly life by turning one’s own desires, bodily acts, habits and customs, sensual indulgences, and social engagements toward the good.≥∞ The urgency of how one ‘‘ought’’ to live is a moral sense that develops in the shadow of particular histories of experience. One of the historical moral pressures I consider most closely here is the enduring influence of colonialism. British attempts to provoke the moral progress of India with tools such as the Criminal Tribes Act still echo in the ways in which their postcolonial heirs imagine themselves today. Karupayi amm¯a , for example, had warned that a minor failure to temper impulse might lead as far as police custody. This was far more than a prosaic threat to a wayward Introduction

13

and heedless child. As I will argue in the third chapter, the specter of ‘‘violent and lawless habits’’ among the Piramalai Kallars authorized their designation as criminal by nature in 1918. In the century of antagonism leading up to this verdict, o≈cial observers insisted repeatedly that this was a community uniquely lacking in judgment and restraint, a volatile people whose sudden deeds were unguided by reason or reflection.≥≤ Judged incapable of policing their own impulses, the Kallars were forced to submit to a brutal policing from without, with colonial law promising freedom from these strictures only to those deemed responsible enough to regulate themselves. Every chapter of this book tracks the complex inheritance of these colonial dictates in postcolonial memory, how they have turned selves against themselves as objects of critique and restraint.≥≥ As I have already suggested too, though, longer histories of moral conduct also matter deeply in the postcolonial present. Subjects of colonial rule in British India did recast the character of their own lives in response to its pressures, with imperatives for change drawn into the quotidian realms of custom, habit, and faith by reform campaigns of many kinds. But rather than simply parroting the moral expectations of colonial public life, these nationalist writers and social reformers drew these elements together with the existing inheritances of Indian moral thought to form what Ranajit Guha has described as a ‘‘tissue of paradoxes.’’≥∂ Poets like Rabindranath Tagore drew from Upanisadic philosophy, Buddhist aesthetics, and Bengali folk mysticism in order to craft a novel sense of the self as a locus of meaningful change. And when Gandhi argued in Hind Swaraj that Indians could civilize themselves only through ‘‘mastery over our mind and our passions,’’ he likely relied on his reading of the Bhagavad Gita as much as on the Victorian foundations of his education.≥∑ The virtues that emerged from the colonial crucible in India, in other words, were fusions of rival moral projects: they were sometimes fully alloyed into a new and indistinguishable unity, while at other times they remained in a state of tense distinctness.≥∏ In what follows, I make this argument not with respect to the experience of an urban, literate, and upper-caste nationalist elite—where many histories of colonial India have focused in recent years—but rather with respect to the moral life of a rural subaltern milieu. All moral traditions rely upon the lessons of the past to critically 14

Introduction

engage the demands of the present.≥π The form of postcolonial selfhood presented in this book remains indebted to a centuries-old tradition of the virtues in south India, as embodied in the moral argumentation of Tamil literary, philosophical, and religious texts, in the images and narratives of moral selfhood presented by abiding genres of oral verse, and in durable practices of quotidian moral engagement. The rural men and women who populate the following pages find their moral bearings today from many di√erent sources: didactic lyrics and dialogues in popular cinema and teleserials; cautionary tales printed in vernacular newspapers; lessons on character from schoolbook texts; rhetorical claims of public leaders; religious discourses broadcast through temple loudspeakers and personal cassettes; and popular proverbs, jokes, and folk verses shared in tea stalls, courtyard stoops, and working fields. These diverse media draw archaic textual allusions, folk idioms of judgment, and novel practices of social and juridical exclusion together to compose a fragmentary mosaic of moral inheritance. Cultivating ethical inclinations toward ideas of the good, these elements make possible a life of virtue.≥∫ In India as elsewhere in the world today, there is no doubt much to lament in a moral sense. Some would blame the predominance of various vices in modern times on the fracturing of our moral horizons, on the loss of a shared understanding of what is good and just. My prognosis of this condition is somewhat di√erent. I argue that practices of virtue provide an e√ective means of navigating the contradictions and dilemmas of daily life in contemporary India precisely because of their multiplicitous nature. Their power lies in their supple adaptability to shifting circumstance. Each of the following chapters tracks one virtue in turn— civility, propriety, restraint, toil, and sympathy—as a particular way of living well in colonial and postcolonial south India. I explore o≈cial e√orts to cultivate these virtues as habits of conduct in colonial times, the local moral traditions through which colonial subjects interpreted and engaged these o≈cial e√orts, and the ways that these virtues orient today the ethical lives of the heirs to these histories. The exercise of each of these virtues makes for a certain point of intersection between the moral armature of colonial power and south Indian traditions of moral conduct: a point of convergence, or deflection, or even displacement. Each virtue establishes a unique terrain for the interior development of the Introduction

15

postcolonial subject—each elicits and enacts a dissimilar kind of ethical selfhood. In addressing the virtues as crossroads of ethical possibility, I treat the self as a site of translation, as a locus of exchange between rival understandings of its nature. The moral discourses and ethical practices at work in this book engage qualities of the self as varied as those of desire, impulse, feeling, thought, and will. For the colonial agents who sought to police the putatively criminal classes of India, these were qualities to be attributed to native instinct or character. But for the Indian subjects wrestling with the legacies of colonial reform today, these qualities are most often understood as aspects of the manacu or ‘‘heart.’’ For many centuries, various schools of Indian thought have identified the interior faculty of the manacu as a critical locus of reflexive engagement within the self. Spanning the distance between the English ‘‘heart’’ and ‘‘mind,’’ the manacu is sometimes praised as a means of carefully discriminating between right and wrong, and at other times rebuked for its own fickle and wayward nature.≥Ω For the postcolonial subjects of this book, this indefinite ethical quality of the heart—as I call it for the sake of simplicity— testifies to the uncertain yet crucial promise of a life of virtue. The travails of this vernacular heart may also remind us that a genealogy of interiority in south India—an account of the formation here of an interior depth of selfhood—must grapple with much more than the heritage of Western thought.∂≠ Ethical work upon oneself is always engaged in a certain milieu, be it the austere solitude of forest retreats and monastic cells, or the bustle of a social world of teachers, peers, and kin. Relations between interior ends and exterior engagements assume many di√erent forms: a number of anthropologists working in South Asia and elsewhere have outlined, for example, the importance of outward practices of prayer and discipline— often ritual and collective, always embodied—in the cultivation of inward dispositions among their practitioners.∂∞ In what follows, I hope to extend such insights beyond the domain of religious practices, schoolroom lessons, and campaigns for moral uplift, and into the milieu of ordinary and perhaps not obviously moral practices such as farming, herding, or watering plants. Each of these chapters tracks back and forth between ethical work upon the self and the practical labor of bodies on the land. Recall that Karupayi amm¯a had compared the development of a 16

Introduction

docile child to the ripening of a pliable sapling. Throughout this book, analogies such as this one testify to the living power of a natural imagination of development in modern India, binding the transformation of an ‘‘interior landscape’’ of selfhood to the inhabited landscape of rural experience.∂≤ Under what conditions does the cultivation of the soil aid in the cultivation of a good life? Let us consider more closely the place of agriculture in the cultivation of moral virtue in postcolonial south India. Cultivation as an Ethos Wandering through the undulating uplands south of K. G. Patti village early one March morning, I stumbled across my friend Mohan and his wife, Jayamani, both racing back and forth across a small plot of sandy red soil. They had planted onions there, and their task that morning was to irrigate the tender green shoots with water spilling from a motorized well pipe on one corner of the field. As soon as he spotted me, Mohan lightly called out for me to take o√ my own shirt and get to work with them: time was of the essence and they could use another pair of hands. He showed me how to lead the running water along a winding course through the labyrinth of channels crisscrossing the field, using a short spade to cut o√ and turn the water quickly from irrigated bed to bed. The trick was to keep the water moving along an indirect course through the tract. ‘‘You have to make the water turn and come around,’’ he explained later while we sat beside the field and took a break: if the water was allowed to flow directly downward from higher to lower beds, the latter would fill too much and too quickly and eventually rupture. But this danger, Mohan went on to argue, was in the nature of all flows. Water, money, liquor, or desire: each had to be released and indulged with measure. ‘‘One should not follow the path the heart has taken,’’ he added. ‘‘That too must be turned.’’ Intrigued, I brought up this comparison again a few days later at the same spot. ‘‘Here you turn the water,’’ I said. ‘‘If you let the water take its own course, it will break the barriers and ruin your crop. To turn that water you pick up a spade and heap some soil up there: that’s enough. To turn the path of the heart?’’ ‘‘The spade called wisdom [ahrivu enra h manvef f ttf i ],’’ he replied with an Introduction

17

Mohan showing how to irrigate a plot of cabbage. Photograph by author.

artful turn of phrase. ‘‘One must take that spade of wisdom to cut o√ and to turn.’’ ‘‘Cut o√ what?’’ I asked. ‘‘One must cut o√ the heart,’’ he said. ‘‘Suppose we are going down a bad path. We must turn the heart . . . bring it around again. In the heart there is the desire to bathe. Can we just go and fall into the river? The water may look beautiful, but there are whirlpools hidden there. We would die . . . For people, desire is like a wave. I say all this not because I lack desires. I too have desires. I should be well, live well, and even if I su√er my children should not . . . My mother and father let our family slip. We should not do the same.’’ Mohan identified himself with pride as a ‘‘new farmer’’ who relied on the agronomic techniques appropriate to a civilized era. These were hybrid onions that he and his wife had raised, nursed on a heady cock18

Introduction

tail of broad-spectrum pesticides and bound for sale in national and international markets. And yet, it was clear that something more than a modern material prosperity was being cultivated on this land. That morning, Mohan had taken the work of irrigation as a practice of managing water, but also as an incitement to manage the fluid course of his own desires. ‘‘Cutting’’ between the landscape of experience and the landscape of the heart, the spade of wisdom made possible a turning of the self. Agrarian practice had yielded here both model and milieu for a life of virtue. Mohan was a young Kallar man, and as I shall show, agrarian cultivation was a crucial instrument in the colonial enterprise to redeem his caste from the compulsions of thievery. ‘‘The Kalla evil is largely an agrarian one and may be best met by agrarian remedies,’’ one senior Madras Presidency o≈cial wrote in 1917.∂≥ In the following pages, I take cultivation as both an operation on the land and an operation on the self, as a struggle with the imagined ‘‘nature’’ of the heart as well as with the material nature of the soil.∂∂ Each chapter considers various ways in which the very nature of the Kallar self has been taken as a problem by state o≈cials and other communities in rural south India: as a savage, undisciplined, and predatory disposition. I look at how the harsh and arid rural milieu inhabited by Kallars was deliberately remade as a means of overcoming this interior condition, through the use of o≈cial strategies such as agrarian development loans, land grants, and massive irrigation works. But I also situate this moralizing endeavor in relation to another trajectory of rural uplift in southern India: a much older emergence of the agrarian cultivator as a paragon of virtue and civility in the Tamil country. The chapters that follow track this braided legacy in moral cultivation and development.∂∑ I take cultivation as a living language of experience, circling between the material work of the cultivator and the metaphorical imagination of a cultivated heart.∂∏ In the West, the work of cultivation has long held an important place in discourses and practices of moral pedagogy. The classical Greek text Oeconomicus advised elite Athenian men to engage deliberately in farming as a means of mastering their own appetites and pleasures.∂π The Roman orator Cicero famously described philosophy itself as the agrarian ‘‘culture’’ or cultivation of the soul.∂∫ And Christian theologians for centuries urged the heirs of Adam to restore a fallen Introduction

19

world to perfection through the gardening of its soils. In the eighteenth century, proponents of a nascent science of statecraft in modern Europe drew on such legacies to propose the government of nature as a crucial instrument of collective human welfare. Agrarian ideologues pressed for the scientific management of fields and forests in order to generate national prosperity but also to improve the moral qualities of the body politic.∂Ω By the late nineteenth century, European powers throughout the globe regularly sought to moralize the human beings they ruled by making their environments into vehicles of pedagogy, be they agricultural colonies for urban paupers in France, nursery school gardens for young children in Germany, or plantations for the tropical subjects of British colonialism.∑≠ The project to order and ‘‘improve’’ the natural world of the colonies along with the nature of their inhabitants lay at the heart of the imperial enterprise in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.∑∞ These two dimensions were closely articulated with one another. The moral failings of colonial subjects were often blamed on the degenerate qualities of their tropical environments, just as the untilled worthlessness of these landscapes was easily attributed to the indolence of their native residents.∑≤ Agricultural development emerged as a global linchpin of colonial government, promising yields of both revenue and moral virtue. In most of the Madras Presidency of southern India, the colonial state invested individual peasants or ryots with title to cultivated land and the task of using it productively. O≈cials here conceived the peasantry as the backbone of rural progress: industrious, honest, peaceable, and settled in place.∑≥ It is no surprise that agricultural reformatory settlements were often established throughout British India as a means of transforming recalcitrant castes and tribes into ‘‘moral subjects’’ of colonial rule.∑∂ The Kallar Voluntary Settlement was one such experimental venture, opened under American missionary supervision in the Cumbum Valley in 1917. The fourth chapter of this book chronicles its original purpose and its ill-fated career. My friend Mohan’s field lay on a tract of land that colonial o≈cials had reserved for the Kallar agricultural settlement in the early twentieth century. It was widely known in the area that the state had given out these lands as an incitement to reform, and Mohan spoke to me that morning partly as an heir to this colonial legacy, viewing his own forebears with the same harsh gaze that had once been directed toward the entirety of 20

Introduction

his caste. But his talk of a critical ‘‘spade’’ within the self also bore the traces of another tradition of moral improvement in south India. Agricultural metaphors for virtue have circulated since medieval times in the Tamil country as idioms of popular practice, moral pedagogy, and religious and philosophical discourse. Consider the following poem by the seventh-century Tamil Saiva devotional poet Appar: Using the plow of truth sowing the seeds of love plucking the weeds of falsehood pouring the water of patience; they look directly into themselves and build fences of virtue. If they remain rooted in their good ways, the Bliss of Siva will grow.∑∑

Echoed in similar form in numerous later texts and verses, such discourses have long presented the heart itself as a figurative field to be weeded of vicious desires and sown with the virtues of a settled life. This reverberating archive of images and practices presents what I describe in this book as an agrarian civility: a way of pursuing the refinement of the self in terms of the historical experience and exemplary status of the cultivating citizenry. Agrarian metaphors for moral self-cultivation in Tamil convey a sense that there is something intrinsically virtuous about the practice of agriculture as well as those who engage in its exercise. In Tamil as in English, it is worth recalling, ‘‘culture’’ is closely linked to cultivation.∑∏ This association of agrarian cultivation and moral cultivatedness in the Tamil country is tied to the social history of intercaste relations that I sketched earlier in this introduction: the long-standing political and economic dominance as well as moral preeminence of certain agrarian castes and communities in the region. The persistence and vitality of these agrarian moral traditions—as they intersect with more modern agricultural histories—may be taken to support a rejoinder to a pervasive image of rural inhabitants as ‘‘failed subjects of the project of modernity,’’ as Akhil Gupta has explicated this problem.∑π In recent years, we have come to identify the development of novel forms of life with many di√erent kinds of places: with the city, the factory, the laboratory, the school, Introduction

21

and even the dark blueprint of prisons and concentration camps.∑∫ The countryside is easily imagined as an antithesis of these places: trapped under the weight of ossified traditions, a space that must be urbanized, organized, mechanized, or simply left behind if some semblance of contemporary relevance is to be attained. From such a vantage point, the very possibility of a modern rural citizen may appear unthinkable.∑Ω This book is intended as a counterpoint to this widespread point of view. I present the cultivator as a subject of ongoing self-development, and the cultivated field as an essential topos of modern existence. I make these arguments with the recognition that the present stands as a strikingly di≈cult time for cultivators throughout much of India. Scarce rural credit, plummeting water tables, precipitous fluctuations in market prices, and other routine di≈culties have driven many farmers to spurn this vocation in the Cumbum Valley, as in many other places elsewhere. ‘‘Let our troubles end with us,’’ many men and women told me, underscoring a desire for their children to study well and do anything but work upon the land. They often described the present as an age of machines, its codes and rhythms fixed from afar by these insensible vanguards of newness. Cultivators of agrarian terrain—displaced as ploughmen by tractors, competing as laborers with mechanical threshers and harvesters, racing as farmers to glean the latest pesticides and seed varieties, wrestling as producers with the vagaries of prices fixed in distant global markets—fell out of step with its momentum all too easily. I therefore pursue the idea of a cultivated heart even as many cultivators come to doubt its relevance to the present. A spirit of salvage may appear to underlie this endeavor. But I take my cue from Walter Benjamin, who encouraged us to confront the violence of the present by bearing witness to the other ways of life lying strewn among its ruins.∏≠ Agrarian civility remains an unfinished project in south India. The Piramalai Kallar caste has indeed attained an unprecedented degree of economic prosperity and political prominence in recent years. But many in the region attribute their newfound success to a litany of ‘‘crooked paths’’ other than agriculture: ganja cultivation, country liquor distillation, organized crime, contractual profiteering, usury, and the tra≈cking of illicit timber, sandalwood, and other black market goods. It is for just this reason that their historical and contemporary experience provides such an invaluable perspective on the paradoxes of developmental trajec22

Introduction

tories. Even Mohan himself, for example, had admitted to financing the cultivation of his onion field that season with a generous interest-free loan from a friend reputed to deal in ganja out of a nearby town. ‘‘Disguise yourself as a dog and you have no choice but to bark,’’ he once had told me. Such casual and ordinary intimacy between cultivation and criminality no doubt casts agricultural strategies of moral uplift in a sharply ironic light. But as I will show in the fourth chapter, toil and deceit stand today as rival avenues of advancement that are all too easily reconcilable. Throughout this book, I try to capture both the tension and the complicity between these contrary visions of modern life. These are contradictions etched deeply into the surface of the land itself. Notes on the Terrain Research for this book was largely conducted in the countryside west of the city of Madurai, a bustling commercial center on the Vaigai River that served for centuries as the royal capital of southern Tamil kings. My own father grew up in Madurai, and I often broke from fieldwork to visit with my grandfather and other relatives who live there to this day. Each time I rode back from the city on my Hero Honda motorbike, westward along the national highway, I passed through a patchwork terrain of developmental prospects. Beyond the university on the outskirts of the city lay the arid and rocky expanse of the kafllfarn¯atfu or ‘‘Kallar country,’’ a tract overwhelmingly dominated both numerically and politically by Piramalai Kallars. These ancestral Kallar villages were the subject of eminent anthropologist Louis Dumont’s first ethnographic research in India. The road passed briefly through a greener zone of paddy and other crops sustained by wells and canals—and indebted to a history of irrigation that I will discuss in the fifth chapter—before climbing into a low range of scrubby hills once infamous for their threat of highway robbery. Beyond these hills the temperature would suddenly drop quite noticeably as I crossed the river into the Cumbum Valley: a lush triangular plain whose irrigable fields and orchards had drawn Kallars and other migrants from the arid east for well over a century. Kullappa Gounden Patti lay on a side road near the head of the valley, under the looming mountains of the Western Ghats and the high-altitude Periyar Dam that has watered the valley and the rest of the region since 1895. Introduction

23

Scale in km

0

N

50

E

W

TAMIL NADU m m bu Cu alley V

k

ts

arn aḷḷ

āṭu

Madurai

i Va

Wester n

Gh a

S

ga

K.G. Patti

i Ri

ve r

Palk Bay

KE R

AL A

Periyar Dam Mountains and hills Reservoirs Interstate boundary

Map 1. The Cumbum Valley and Madurai countryside in south India.

Dumont himself was perhaps the most influential anthropologist of South Asia in the twentieth century, and I have trailed him through this landscape with some trepidation. I visited the house in which he had stayed in the hamlet of Tengalapatti in 1949 and 1950, only to find it an abandoned ruin. As this was the milieu in which he had first explored the idea that ‘‘everyone has his being outside himself ’’—so important to his later work on caste—Dumont would have no doubt been amused to learn, as I did, that the descendants of this household remain identified to this day as the ‘‘white man’s lineage.’’∏∞ His dense monograph on the Piramalai Kallars remains an extraordinary instance of ethnographic acumen, and I rely upon some of its insights in each of the following chapters. We must also recall, however, that Dumont was most interested in Kallar social and religious life as an illustrative instance of a broader ‘‘Indian’’ or ‘‘Hindu’’ civilization. Change was a force exogenous to the structures and principles that organized this life. ‘‘There is the recent alteration of the mode of life in an agricultural direction,’’ he had found, but this was a trajectory that he attributed to ‘‘government policy among other things.’’∏≤ No point of intersection between the forces of the Criminal Tribes Act—lifted just two years before Dumont’s arrival in the area— and older vectors of social and cultural transformation in the region can 24

Introduction

be discerned in his text. ‘‘To orthodox higher-caste people, the Kallar is a kind of savage,’’ he writes, but it is di≈cult to see here why Kallars may have come to understand themselves in the same critical light.∏≥ Dumont might have had to wrestle with such problems had he based himself among the Kallar households of the Cumbum Valley, where I conducted most of my own ethnographic fieldwork five decades later. Although most of these migrants kept kin and ritual ties to their ancestral temples and lineal territories in the east—the institutions that Dumont had documented so carefully—they also derided the ‘‘savagery’’ of life in the Kallar country, marking its contrast with the prosperity they enjoyed in these booming villages and market towns. The present work relies most heavily on over a year of research in the village of Kullappa Gounden Patti—where a reformatory settlement for criminal Kallars and their families was opened in 1917—and other settlements in the Cumbum Valley and in the Kallar country. Like most villages in the valley, and quite unlike those of the Kallar country, K. G. Patti was a place inhabited by many castes. My dialogues here were staged in kitchens and verandas, in courtyards and tea stalls, in muddy open fields and shaded understories, in shopping bazaars and liquor dens. I wandered through fallow scrublands with herders, picked my way along canal banks with irrigators, tried my hand at weeding paddy and driving oxen, and spent a few nights in the peanut fields chasing o√ wild pigs. Working with men and women of all ages and many castes, I found a lifelong place in some homes, failed to win either warmth or respect in others, and left one old K. G. Patti shopkeeper wondering even in my final weeks of fieldwork whether I was in fact an itinerant TV repairman. I also spent many months chasing down foresters, constables, engineers, teachers, and other civil servants throughout the region for o≈cial narratives of ‘‘Kallar Reclamation’’ as a state project, as well as numerous politicians, activists, and social development workers. Beyond these interviews, colonial and postcolonial state records gleaned over the course of five months of archival work in south India and elsewhere have made for one textual counterpoint to ethnographic testimony. A diverse collection of Tamil textual evidence—literary, folk, religious, pedagogic, cinematic, televisual, and propagandistic—gathered slowly again, makes for yet another archive of crucial significance for the arguments of the folIntroduction

25

lowing chapters. Let me say a few words now about the tales woven together with the aid of these various materials. A certain historical thread runs through the sequence of chapters in this book, tracing the course of successive developments imposed upon the Kallar caste. The overall narrative does not proceed, however, along a linear course through time. Modernity has long been recounted as a decisive break from the past, as an open horizon set against the inertial drag of history and tradition.∏∂ The postcolonial present that I sketch in these pages is deeply indebted instead to the whorls and eddies of retrospection, to the work of memory and all the forms that it may assume. Each chapter begins with a social drama in the present and tracks backward toward the elements of the past that lend it tension, coherence, and meaning.∏∑ The many pasts at stake in this book confront the subjects of the present in the form of historical narratives, oral traditions, involuntary flashes of memory, didactic proverbs, vicious slurs, durable categories of legal classification, enduring metaphors, ardent desires, habits of bodily practice, nightmares, ruins, and other material traces impressed upon the landscape.∏∏ They call for a mobile genealogy of the postcolonial self—the sort of attention to moments of accident, displacement, and reversal that Friedrich Nietzsche had famously called for—rather than a linear history of its gradual subjection.∏π ‘‘Has it worked? Have they changed?’’ I was often asked such questions by others in India curious about my research, questions I usually tried to resist and evade. In this writing too, rather than trying to orchestrate a harmonious crescendo of progressive uplift over time, I depict moral life in the present instead as a tissue of dissonant echoes and unintended reverberations.∏∫ The narrative movement mimics the teleological or goal-directed course of development only to confound its premises with rival prospects at every turn. The five chapters are therefore organized as follows. Each describes one historical moment in the moral and political subjection of the Kallar caste, charting both expectations for reform at this time and their ultimate limit. Each of the chapters anchors these movements of both anticipation and frustration in one particular virtue (civility, propriety, restraint, toil, and sympathy), taken in each instance as a distinctive means of conceiving and cultivating the qualities of an ethical life. Every chapter reveals an arena of engagement between rival 26

Introduction

conceptions of this particular horizon of moral cultivation. And lastly, each of these virtues also yields in turn a distinctive prism with which to imagine the development of the agrarian landscape, in relation to the moral development of those who tend it.∏Ω The first chapter outlines civility and savagery as contrary orientations of rural selfhood in south India today. Attributions of savagery are the preeminent means by which Kallars are imagined as underdeveloped selves, by others and by their own kith and kin. This discourse of savagery, I argue, serves as a powerful incitement to refine and work upon oneself. I describe its historical debt to an agrarian ideal of civility in the Tamil country, one that has long associated refinement with the practice of agriculture and those who engage in it. The chapter discusses the genesis of these ideas in medieval tensions between marginal communities like the Kallars and the settled cultivators of the agrarian lowlands, and charts their place in the imagination of contemporary farmers. The clearing of agricultural land, I argue, is widely understood as a means of displacing savage places with civil environments. This association marks Kallar selves as uncivil by nature, an attribution that is the object of critique but also sometimes a≈rmation. In the domain of local politics, I suggest, savagery itself may emerge as a contrary ethos to cultivate and celebrate. The second chapter examines the role of propriety in fashioning the countryside as an exclusionary domain of moral belonging. I focus on an escalating antagonism between Kallar village watchmen and dominant cultivating communities in the Madurai region: its foundations in relations of rural sovereignty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its deepening by colonial political and economic intervention in the nineteenth century, and its culmination in a violent popular campaign to drive Kallars out of hundreds of villages altogether in 1896. I explore how a certain convergence between subaltern sentiment and colonial state policy at this time catapulted an idea of the moral impropriety of rural watchmen into an understanding of the Kallar caste itself as thievish and predatory by nature. The kuftiy¯anava h nh or ‘‘agrarian citizen’’ emerges here as an exclusive and still powerful category in which even settled Kallar cultivators have no place. I argue that the moral quality of propriety is essential to its exclusive force. Introduction

27

Restraint is the subject of the third chapter, which juxtaposes European and Tamil ideas of thievishness as a consequence of unrestrained impulses and desires. I turn to the Criminal Tribes Act in British India, discussing its genesis in currents of evolutionary reasoning in Victorian England and the imposition of its severe restrictions upon the Piramalai Kallars between 1918 and 1947. Postcolonial heirs to the Criminal Tribes Act in the Tamil country understand the moral quality of restraint as the marker of a distinctively human nature, attributing thievishness to the persistence of animal tendencies within the self. In this chapter, I explore three animal images of human thievery in the Cumbum Valley: the unruly virility of the thievish bull, the hungry foraging of the ripe field sparrow, and the restless leap of the fickle monkey. Each of these images di√racts thievery through a distinctive prism of moral judgment, either celebrating, excusing, or chastising such conduct in turn. How one relates to restraint as a virtue in postcolonial times, I argue here, ultimately depends very much on the kind of animal one might be understood to embody. The fourth chapter considers agrarian toil as virtue, fate, and tool of moral pedagogy. I focus on the place of land and labor in the o≈cial strategies of ‘‘Kallar Reclamation’’ that evolved in the early twentieth century as buttresses to colonial policing. It is here that I look most closely at the earnest planning and unforeseen legacies of the Kallar Voluntary Settlement, established on the outskirts of K. G. Patti village in 1917 under the supervision of American missionaries. The chapter confronts their Christian faith in the redemptive power of toil with Indian devotional discourse on toil as a state of su√ering deserving of cosmic release. Cultivators in the Cumbum Valley today see agricultural wealth as the gift of arbitrary chance and fate more than as the fruit of diligent labor. Tracking the perverse outcomes of numerous early twentiethcentury grants of land to Kallars, I also point toward a deep intimacy between virtuous toil and illicit conduct in the pursuit of agrarian development. The fifth chapter explores sympathy as a cultivable virtue and an aqueous quality, a manipulable flow of feeling along with others. I describe how rural irrigation emerged as a fulcrum of Kallar Reclamation strategies in the early twentieth century, plotted as a means of overcoming the collective antipathy between Kallars and others. Tracking the use 28

Introduction

of irrigation as an instrument of moral and sentimental uplift into the 1950s and beyond, I confront a colonial economy of thrifty care with an older ideal of sympathy as a free and disinterested gift in Tamil moral tradition. It is from the vantage point of this latter tradition, in which moisture serves as an essential sign and vehicle of sympathy, that colonial hydraulic engineers appear even today as paragons of liberal giving in the Tamil country. The chapter follows these ideas of liquid care from the domain of irrigated fields into the realm of Kallar elegies, which present the experience of su√ering as the fate of a desiccated selfhood. In the ritual laments of Kallar women lies a practice of sympathy that draws the recollected pain of collective history forward into the present. Although the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1947, its legacies remain an inescapable presence in the lives of those whose forebears fell within its reach. The book therefore closes with a brief epilogue concerning the postcolonial afterlife of colonial law, social distinction, and moral strategy. I focus on the life of a single Kallar subject of belated reform, a middle-aged cultivator and shopkeeper in K. G. Patti who had given up two decades of inveterate criminality only to find his sleep haunted for years thereafter by the fearsome traces of colonial judgment. His tale of a nightmare and its implacable return is presented as one final allegory for both the tragedy and the promise of cultivation in postcolonial times. For many such individuals, the practice of an agricultural livelihood retains the aura of a proper existence, one that sustains—even in the face of its apparent obsolescence—the hope of an ultimate justice. The proverbs that frame every chapter of this book are also meant to convey this interplay between agrarian practice and agrarian ideal, between the tilling of the soil and the cultivation of an ethical life. All of these were adages that I heard in the midst of fieldwork in the Cumbum Valley, and I reflect on their resonance with the texture of contemporary rural existence. These words, like the many other tales, quips, didactic verses, and fragments of native thought scattered throughout this book, testify to the deep and original ways in which ordinary men and women in south India have negotiated the paradoxical demands of their postcolonial experience. I introduce these ways of seeing, feeling, and being into a scholarly conversation about modernity with the conviction that they have something new to teach us. Pondering the utterances of a nineteenth-century insurgent in central India, Dipesh Chakrabarty has Introduction

29

asked a vital question: ‘‘Is that way of being a possibility for our own lives and for what we define as our present?’’π≠ Each of the images and practices of cultivation lending life to this book is meant as a means of pluralizing our own thought of progress. To neglect them is to rob our present of some of its most profound and inventive resources.

30

Introduction

one

‘‘A Rough Spade for a Rugged Landscape’’ On Savage Selves and More Civil Places

The Tamil commercial film Karuthamma of 1994 opens with a bespectacled schoolteacher stepping o√ a bus into scrubby brown village environs. One night soon thereafter, he is horrified to spy an old wet nurse pouring the sap of a poisonous cactus onto the lips of a newborn girl. The nurse is acting on the callous request of the child’s father, who does not want to bear the expense of another daughter. The teacher rescues the girl and takes her away to a city, while the titles roll and the film flashes forward into the present. Young Rosie has grown up to become a doctor, and she unknowingly visits the very village where her life was almost taken. One of her sisters has since been murdered by her husband and mother-in-law for failing to produce a son, and another is left no choice but to kill this man in order to save herself from a similar fate. The film depicts the cruelty and backwardness of a rural milieu, and the struggles of doctors, teachers, police, and other outsiders to save these villagers from themselves. ‘‘Class of proper savages, it seems,’’ a veterinarian mutters to himself as he trudges through the dusty heat toward the settlement for the first time. Pedagogic in its narrative tone and trajectory, the film presents itself as a parable of moral progress and its tragic limits in the Tamil countryside. But language, backdrops, and social customs in the film make clear that Karuthamma most specifically concerns the di≈cult lives of Piramalai Kallar castefolk. Directed by the noted Tamil film auteur Bharathiraja—a Piramalai Kallar himself—the movie appeared in the wake of a nationwide scandal concerning female infanticide in Kallar households. Just a few years prior to the film, a sensational cover story on the subject in the

Rosie surveys a barren landscape. Digital video still, Karuthamma (1994).

newsweekly India Today had opined that ‘‘the Kallars of Usilampatti remain the prisoners of their burdensome, savage traditions.’’∞ Social activists working in the region in fact attributed the problem to spiraling dowry demands on brides, precipitated by the economic prosperity of certain newly irrigated Kallar villages. The film Karuthamma, however, presented a rather di√erent and deeply suggestive etiology for the prevalence of infanticide in the Kallar heartland: such savagery was the bitter fruit of a barren and undeveloped environment. The film relies on a certain poetics of place for much of its visual and narrative force. Numerous shots underscore the harsh character of the terrain in which the story unfolds. Lightly dozing on her bus journey to the village, for example, Rosie dreams of arriving in a joyous pastoral paradise: lush green fields of waving paddy, parakeets singing, smiling women dancing through the irrigated fields, and bright flocks of pink and blue chicks chirping along the road. A chicken suddenly startles her awake, however, and a crestfallen Rosie surveys along with viewers the thorny untilled expanse where she has landed. This jarring shift of perspective is critical to the film. As the director himself suggested in one printed interview, ‘‘That desiccated earth is the reason why Karuthamma seems very realistic. The killing of children there imprints itself on the heart. No one would believe this story if it had shown a fertile village.’’≤ Director Bharathiraja appears to have in mind here an audience more evidently refined than the tortured protagonists of his film. Critical for his appeal to the imagined civility of such a viewership, however, is the visual and a√ective force of a harsh and barren rural landscape. This chapter concerns the place of savagery and civility in Tamil cultural 32

Chapter One

imaginations of the countryside. How have elaborations of place and landscape come to provide such a powerful means of judging the quality of those who inhabit them? I turn in the following pages to untilled terrain as a cipher for uncultivated selfhood. To talk of Kallar savagery is to think with an agrarian landscape of civility and incivility. The morality of a possible modernity in the region comes into clearest focus when posed against the backdrop of such imagined terrain.

o This chapter concerns savagery as a condition of Kallar selfhood, and the role of agrarian landscape in the conception of this unshakeable interior nature. ‘‘How does it feel to be a problem?’’ asked W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. For Du Bois, the query inflamed a war within the black self—‘‘measuring one’s [own] soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.’’≥ I hope to show that abiding legacies of social reform have left Piramalai Kallar castefolk in much the same condition. The specter of savagery casts a long shadow on the very fact of being Kallar in postcolonial south India, subjecting every feeling, thought, and action to a potential attribution of anger, impulse, violence, and haste. Assertions of savagery are the preeminent means by which Kallars are imagined as underdeveloped selves, both by others and by their own kith and kin. When this critical discourse is interiorized, Kallar selfhood emerges as an ethical problem. The discourse of savagery, in other words, serves as an incitement to work upon, reform, and refine an inadequate way of being. At issue here is the very possibility of a civil selfhood. What is at stake in civility as a virtue, as a cultivated quality of selfconduct? Modernity has been widely identified with the triumph of civilization over various forms of savagery throughout the globe.∂ But civilization may be taken not only as a certain stage in human history—as Enlightenment thinkers and many others since have done—but also as a certain kind of relation to oneself. This possibility lies at the heart of Norbert Elias’s classic study, The Civilizing Process. Elias identified civilization with the reflexive restraint of impulse and the ability to relate judiciously to others, qualities dependent upon the slow and uneven historical emergence of an internal faculty of self-regulation among the elite classes of modern Western Europe. He and his later interlocutors have attributed the development of civility as a virtue either to the games ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

33

and perils of courtly life or to the rigors of Christian monastic milieus.∑ From the vantage point of such investigations, civility as an elite mode of self-conduct in places such as modern India might appear as yet another poisoned gift of European colonialism.∏ This chapter takes issue with such a perspective. I call attention here to the abiding legacies of a precolonial tradition of civility in south India, one that derives much of its moral force from the exercise of virtue in agrarian milieus. Although harsh critiques of savage conduct and undeveloped villages featured prominently among colonial representations of the Kallar caste, in other words, I will address such modern pressures most closely in the chapters that follow this one. Here, I focus instead on savagery’s debt to a much older conception of ‘‘agrarian civility’’ in south India, one that has long tied refinements of character and conduct to the historical experience and exemplary status of the cultivating citizenry. It is here that questions of landscape prove especially relevant.π What I write of as ‘‘savagery’’ is expressed most often in Tamil as k¯atftfu tanam: h what might be described as k¯atfu-ness or the condition of being like the k¯atfu, that is, like the wilds on the margins of a settled social order. Many discourses of civility in Tamil literary tradition have long cast civilization itself in agricultural terms, charting the development of moral virtue as a process enabled by spade, plough, and sickle. Relying themselves on normative distinctions between lands and peoples bad and good, these literary discourses were tied historically to a lowland agrarian order to which Kallars and other warrior communities were marginal. In the pages that follow, I discuss the presentation of agrarian civility in the early medieval Tamil literature on virtue, going on to relate these ideas and images to contemporary di√erences of agricultural terrain. Dry upland tract, lowland paddy field, and irrigated orchard prove distinct topoi of savagery and civility: these are landed classifications wedded to moral contrasts between Kallar and other, articulated through both the imagined qualities borne by particular landscapes and the embodied labor that they are understood to require. Work on the agrarian environments of the Cumbum Valley serves as a means of identifying Kallars themselves as savage and unworked in their nature. To pay heed to such subtle moral distinctions on rural terrain is to challenge the idea—common in the West and in India—of rusticity itself as the very antithesis of civility. It is also to confront the many ways in which mod34

Chapter One

ern individuals seeking to develop themselves today may continue to rely upon the moral traditions of much earlier times. Distinctions of agrarian civility and savagery place Kallar collective nature on a developmental hierarchy somewhere between the opposed poles of itinerant forest dweller and settled rural citizen. Defined in relation to such polarities, the rhetoric of savagery that I outline in this chapter betrays both a desire for reform and a pained recognition of its impossibility. Here lies a crucial ambivalence, as this cause for shame is easily transformed into an emblem of pride.∫ The chapter therefore closes with a consideration of savagery as an object of celebration rather than critique, staged in relation to the political culture and electoral politics of the region. Is virtue to be found in the careful government of one’s own feelings, desires, and impulses, or in the ability to threaten and exercise unbridled violence? The form of moral selfhood outlined in the following pages is fundamentally ambivalent with respect to this question. Let us begin with the inescapability of the savage in Kallar life today. A Life of Savagery Throughout my fieldwork in the Cumbum Valley, I was surprised by the extent to which Kallar men and women seemed to insist on their own savage nature. One November morning, for example, I stood chatting with Mokkarasu Thevar in the wet mire of the paddy field that he and his wife were weeding. He suggested that insolence was a quality born of diet. People like me ate in a ‘‘decent’’ fashion, he said, taking in by spoon no more than a little at a time. But people like him would grab big handfuls of rice and stu√ them into their mouths all at once: ‘‘We are the same as savages, living out in the fields and wilds.’’ There was an element of rueful pride in the comparison. Mokkarasu spoke of being an unlettered man who could not even read the signs on buses, while his young son, Manoj—playing nearby—joked that his father had hurled rocks at his teacher as a child. Mokkarasu hoped that in this ‘‘computer age’’ others would not say that his son spoke like a savage. But, at the same time, it was clear that the father himself took a certain pleasure in the unrestrained insolence of his own appetites and impulses. Savagery may be understood as a personal state of uncivil selfhood in addition to a collective condition of backwardness. Over fifty years ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

35

ago, the ethnographer Louis Dumont o√ered an allusive ‘‘psychological sketch’’ of the Piramalai Kallars and their characteristic manner: ‘‘in the end,’’ he wrote, ‘‘it is a stylization of aggressiveness.’’ The ethnographer’s terse assessment is widely echoed in the Tamil country today by a remarkably consistent popular language with which Kallars are judged by others and themselves: karaftu muraftu, a singsong phrase connoting roughness, ruggedness, and obstinacy, sometimes rendered into the mellifluous English ‘‘rough and tough’’; a stubborn hardness of character and conduct; an unwillingness to listen to the counsel of others; a tendency to quarrel and to fight with great and sudden passion; an easy anger at the slightest provocation; an indiscriminate violence of word and deed; and drunken insolence and proud arrogance—mappu and timiru—in public discourse and conduct. The single Tamil notion that sums up these ideas most fully perhaps is k¯atftfu tanam h or savagery.Ω Savagery is often identified in the masculine aggression of Kallar men. But Kallar women too are liable to charges of such violent misconduct, especially in the realm of public speech. Sharp talk in public places provides one of the most consistent foundations for such allegations. Drunken and aggressive rants on the street corners of the bazaar, vulgar slang traded back and forth between schoolchildren, morning quarrels between women competing for scanty water from hand pumps and water pipes, coarse insults cast at poor and delinquent Dalit borrowers by arrogant moneylenders: instances such as these are easily enlisted by denizens of the Cumbum Valley as evidence of Kallar incivility. When others speak of Kallar savagery, they attribute to the caste both a fixed and hardened nature as well as a need for its cultivation and refinement. Such charges echo the criminal reputation of the caste historically as well as the uncertain prospects for its reform and rehabilitation in the present. The discourse of Kallar savagery presents men and women of the caste as subjects reluctant to change, charging them with an obstinate, recalcitrant way of being. At the same time, it also takes for granted the possibility and the necessity of their acting otherwise. When this rhetoric is turned inward as an incitement to more civil conduct, it therefore serves to open the self as an arena of ethical transformation. For Kallars living under the sign of their own viciousness, the discourse of their own savagery has become one of the most important languages of reflexive 36

Chapter One

‘‘I am a farmer,’’ Perumayi amm¯a said proudly as she swung her spade. Photograph by author.

critique. Serving as an intimate rhetoric of reform among Kallars themselves, invocations of savagery produce some of the sharpest spurs to change oneself and one’s family and peers.

o I want to convey the potency of savagery as a discourse of self-critique by presenting a few vignettes from the Kallar household that took me as its own most readily. I write of the app¯a [father] and amm¯a [mother] who welcomed me into their home both day and night from almost the first week of my fieldwork onward, insisting that I was to them the eldest of their sons. Vairam Pandian—who, like many others in the area, shared my surname—was a self-trained homeopath who had married and settled in K. G. Patti over twenty years ago. His wife, Perumayi, hailed from one of the first Kallar lineages that had settled the village. As we sat in the cool drawing room of the house they had built about a decade ago, app¯a and amm¯a often told me riveting stories concerning their struggles to ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

37

scrape together a measure of stability and respectability, working for a domestic hearth that began with next to nothing. Bookbinder, observatory assistant, arrack dealer, wooden furniture contractor—there are few trades that app¯a had not dabbled in over the decades before resigning himself to pedal up and down the lanes of the village dispensing medicines and injections. His was among the best English in the village. Amm¯a , who had never gone to school, was equally adept with both ladle and spade; ‘‘I am a farmer,’’ she once told me with a proud and weary smile as she brought a hatchet down onto the woody brush spilling out from an overgrown edge of their dry upland sesame field. Their elder son, Sundar, found a store clerk posting in Saudi Arabia in the months that I was there; he was only the second young man from the village to pursue employment abroad. His canny younger brother, Bose, had trained himself as an electrician and pursued wiring contracts throughout the valley. There was little that was evidently ‘‘savage’’ about this household. And yet, the sheer frequency and vehemence with which allegations of savagery were cast about within the home were striking. Some instances: Amm¯a returned dejected from a visit to a nearby town, disappointed that the family there was uninterested in a marriage alliance with Sundar. Her son had counseled patience: ‘‘Why must you hurry and run so savagely behind every girl you see?’’ To slowly gather details without leaping to any conclusions, she told me—this was a more civilized way of proceeding. App¯a discovered that someone had scribbled some arithmetic onto the face of a beautiful young woman gracing the cover of a magazine he had just bought. ‘‘Savage fellow!’’ he exclaimed. Amm¯a warned me never to trust certain criminal characters in the village. On her list was her cousin Devendran, who had recently assaulted Bose with violent and vulgar words. ‘‘They are savages,’’ interjected app¯a , ‘‘uneducated people whose character changes minute by minute.’’ A somewhat faithless relation came by and demanded to be paid a second time for the same sheaf of banana leaves. App¯a leapt up from his chair to curse him out with a sharp and furious burst of abuse, his veins popping and eyes flashing. Amm¯a asked loudly whether it was really necessary to speak so ‘‘savagely.’’ 38

Chapter One

Amm¯a laid a t¯ocai on my plate, soft and thick unlike the flat and crispy crepes typically served in restaurants. ‘‘Savage,’’ observed Bose, eliciting a judgment he thought I might be keeping to myself—‘‘not ‘nice’ like you are used to eating.’’ ‘‘Savage!’’ app¯a exclaimed as we rolled along on my motorcycle down a bumpy dirt lane on the outskirts of the village. I asked him to explain. ‘‘It is like an obstacle,’’ he replied, ‘‘because of its uplands and lowlands, like jungle.’’ App¯a complained one afternoon about the ‘‘savage’’ manner in which clothes were heaped and scattered all over his bed. What was savage about this situation? He clarified with a single word in English—‘‘irregular.’’

Neither patient nor careful, neither steady nor calm, neither refined nor regular, neither discerning nor moderate—scattered throughout these vignettes of savage conduct are the traces of a discourse of civility, one that finds the goodness of quality in the measured exercise of feeling, word, and deed. Such allegations of savagery are sometimes casual and lighthearted. At other times, they cut straight to the bone. These few instances, drawn somewhat arbitrarily from the domestic life of a single family, suggest the extent to which the specter of savagery dominates the imagination of a problematic selfhood in contemporary Kallar households. The discourse of savagery opens up the heart of the self as a space of reflexive critique—calling for, if only rather ine√ectually at times, exercises in the deliberate cultivation of a more civil life. ‘‘For a man or for a woman,’’ Karupayi amm¯a told me as we sat chatting one cloudless night on the Pandian household rooftop, ‘‘what is important is patience.’’ We were speaking at the time about a sudden yet thankfully unsuccessful suicide attempt by her own granddaughter, who could not stand the way her husband had insulted her in a quarrel. ‘‘You have to restrain it,’’ Karupayi amm¯a mused, referring to the sense of being slighted: ‘‘You have to keep it within your heart. If it leaves your tongue, then it is nothing but an explosive.’’ Civility came only by exercising the heart as a space of restraint, as an organ of containment. To speak or act or feel unbound was only to court disaster. ‘‘Those with patience will rule the earth, while those who boil over will rule the burial ground,’’ she said before trailing o√. ‘‘Run away, you donkey . . .’’

o ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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This rebuke of an imagined figure with which Karupayi amm¯a trailed o√ her musings recalls the spatial dimensions of savage conduct in Tamil. What I translate as ‘‘savagery,’’ or k¯atftfu tanam, h is literally k¯atfu-ness: being like the space of the k¯atfu. Like the English word ‘‘nature,’’ k¯atfu is arguably one of the most complicated and important entities in the Tamil language.∞≠ K¯atfu is a word for many di√erent kinds of peripheral places: thick forest, scrub jungle, barren desert, cemetery or burning ground, fallow open ground, dry upland field. Binary expressions oppose k¯atfu most often to the cultivated country named as n¯atfu, and the inhabited home named as v¯ıtfu. As an adjective, k¯atftfu names the savage, rustic, primitive, brutal, wild, rough, rude, or uncultivated condition of people, plants, animals, and places alike. Lurking here is a potent imagination of a civilizing project; here, however, the settling of place and the restraint of the self are both conceived as closely intertwined endeavors.∞∞ The rhetoric of Kallar savagery attributes a series of essential qualities to the caste itself, indices of an inadequate moral development betrayed by body, mouth, and heart alike. But as the very language of k¯atftfu tanam h implies, these are more than merely individual, interior, or personal attributes. Kallar dispositions are often opposed point by point to the proverbial nature of the cultivator or kuftiy¯anava h n: h gentle, calm, patient, ∞≤ meek, yielding, compassionate, settled. This contrast, which I will explore more closely in the next chapter, turns on the qualities embodied in the vocation and activities of the latter. I therefore turn now to questions of agrarian place, labor, and conduct in the Tamil imagination of savagery. There is something specifically, and perhaps even surprisingly— given our own common sense about the village as the antithesis of refinement—rural about the kind of civility at stake here. What I intend now is to sketch a genealogy of this imagination of civilized conduct in south India, one that conveys its deep indebtedness to the moral traditions of the precolonial past. An Agrarian Civility An assistant surveyor by the name of T. Turnbull submitted one of the first English accounts of the Kallars in 1817. His narrative dwelt especially closely on ‘‘the unrestrained barbarity of their manners and morals.’’ Turnbull alleged that Kallar men and women alike indulged in ‘‘Cus40

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toms’’ such as ritual thievery, wanton polyandry, and retaliatory filicide. Attempting to convey the uniqueness of these moral shortcomings, the surveyor resorted to a sharp contrast at one point in his account: ‘‘they possess none of the virtues nor the gentle and interesting qualities, which are peculiarly characteristic of the industrious husbandman.’’∞≥ Who were these cultivators, and what was the source of their peculiar claim to virtue? Did the contrast reflect presumptions that Turnbull himself had carried from the British Isles, or was he speaking here in the voice of a more respectable local informant drawn from a cultivating caste? What relation did such qualities of moral refinement bear to the rural social order in south India? Penned under the name of an unruly Scottish border clan, the writings of T. Turnbull appear to betray in part the influences of the Scottish Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century scholars such as Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and David Hume credited agrarian environments with civilizing force, casting the quality of civility in developmental terms.∞∂ Their writings reflect what might be understood as a political economy of sentiment: a gradual refinement of morality and sensibility enabled by the regulated progress toward a commercial economy and society.∞∑ Advancements in agriculture were held both to buttress and to propel such developments. It is against the backdrop of such ideas that the philosophy of agrarian intervention in colonial India is best understood. But while these developments may partly explain Turnbull’s interest in the virtues of the Indian husbandman, they do not thereby reduce this figure to a figment of the colonial imagination. Indeed, in certain ways, Tamil poets appear to have anticipated the famous Scotsmen by several centuries in their imagination of the civilizing powers of agrarian production.∞∏

o ¯ utf i, a collection of pithy moral principles composed by the Consider Attic¯ medieval Tamil poetess Auvaiyar most likely in the eleventh or twelfth centuries.∞π The work comprises 109 items of advice to children, each expressed in no more than two or three words and each inaugurated by a distinct character of the Tamil alphabet. Arranged from a and a¯ , i and ¯ı onward, the instructions introduce both the Tamil language itself as well as a grammar for the good life. Most of these are simple and would ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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A contemporary statue of Auvaiyar at the Batu Caves near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photograph by author.

appear neither surprising nor unfamiliar to modern readers: study from a young age, do not leave aside good friends, bathe each Saturday, do not divulge secrets, enjoy giving, do not enjoy theft, care for your mother and father, do not wander about lazily, and so on. Amid these many commands, however, is one that is much more distinctive in the specific kind of life that it recommends: ‘‘raise rice paddy.’’ Like a few other similar injunctions in the text—‘‘eat by ploughing the land,’’ for example—this is a recommendation made bluntly and without elaboration, its virtuous quality resting on a presumption of commonsensical truth. That it is in fact ‘‘virtue’’—that is, a cultivable disposition of the self—at stake in these terse injunctions is implied by the very first of them: ahram seya virumpu or ‘‘desire to do the virtuous.’’ Here as elsewhere, the composition promotes the development of natural inclinations or tendencies toward engaging in good acts.∞∫ In the same years that David Hume and Adam Smith were growing up in Scotland, Tamil pandits in Tanjore and elsewhere were asking south ¯ utf i at the very outIndian schoolboys to memorize the principles of Attic¯ 42

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set of their education.∞Ω The works of Auvaiyar remain a central element of elementary Tamil instruction in postcolonial Tamil Nadu, inculcated in o≈cial language textbooks today from the first grade onward. There are of course complicated questions surrounding the genealogy of moral discourses such as these in modern south India: their long-standing place in vernacular traditions of schooling in south India, their ambivalent reception in colonial educational practices and institutions, and their enthusiastic recuperation and reformulation by twentieth-century Dravidian ideologues writing in the wake of colonial power.≤≠ What I want to stress now, however, is that in didactic works such as these, Auvaiyar herself had echoed a long tradition of Tamil moral verse depicting the pursuit of cultivation itself as an essentially virtuous endeavor. ‘‘Only those who live by eating what they plough do live—all others follow behind begging to eat,’’ one couplet from the sixth-century Tirukkuhral proclaimed.≤∞ The verse was one among ten in the Kuhral celebrating the proper exercise of the plough or uhlavu. The Kuhral was one of the ‘‘Eighteen Minor Works’’—a canon of Tamil works in verse likely composed between the sixth and eighth centuries C.E. Betraying a strong Jain and Buddhist influence, these texts were largely concerned with the subject of ahram or virtuous conduct. The moralizing couplets of the Kuhral represent one of the most durable elements of Tamil literary heritage. It is therefore not surprising that Auvaiyar had presented an echo of such language—eat by ploughing the land—in her own medieval collection of maxims. As one medieval commentator on the Kuhral had suggested, this particular verse was meant to distinguish between a life truly lived and a mere existence defined by nothing more than the ‘‘growing [of one’s] stomach.’’≤≤ What exactly was praiseworthy about an agrarian life? ‘‘One called a V¯elfa¯ lfanf will not eat while guests go hungry,’’ observes one line in another seventh-century collection of moral verses. Another verse here named three qualities desirable or appropriate for v¯elfa¯ nf kufti or agrarian citizens —avoiding the fruits of gambling, maintaining a fearful distance from Brahmins, and enjoying work with the plough.≤≥ The earliest uses of v¯elfa¯ nmai f itself in Tamil literature—understood today to mean the actual work of ‘‘agriculture’’ in a literal fashion—conveyed a sense of beneficence and liberality rather than agrarian cultivation as such.≤∂ As late as the ninth century, a Tamil glossary identified v¯elha¯ nmai f with two virtues ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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of a distinctly civil nature—upak¯aram and upac¯aram, which might best be translated as hospitality and courtesy.≤∑ Such texts explicitly praised cultivators as a class of essentially good people, but they also turned to agrarian practice as an allegory of virtuous conduct, and the cultivated landscape as an emblem of moral order. Take the N¯alaftiy¯ar, one of the most prominent of the Eighteen Minor Works. Among its four hundred verses are ones suggesting that the virtuous retain their character even in bad company, like the sweetness of a plantain fruit ripening under bitter neem leaves; that those who live on nothing more than handouts will perish, like paddy watered by a meager irrigation tank; that the small win protection through their friendship with the great, like the grass that rings a tree trunk beyond the reach of a ploughblade; that the words of a poor man go unheeded, like a plough scratching the surface of dry soil; that the disposition of a son will follow that of his father, like the shoot of good paddy yielding the same grain with which it was planted.≤∏ Claims such as these—clothed in the language of metaphor, simile, and allegory—present virtue in the form of ecology, employing the agrarian environment as a didactic instrument of moral pedagogy. Early Tamil works on virtue used such language in order to draw distinctions between higher and lower forms of personal conduct and social life—between the great and the small, the noble and ignoble, the learned and unlearned, and indeed, the civilized and savage.≤π In this, they were little di√erent from Sanskrit treatises on dharma or Western philosophies of virtue. In the making of such typological opposites, however, there is also one critical di√erence that must be emphasized: early Tamil literature did not identify incivility, vulgarity, or baseness with rusticity as such. Unlike classical Sanskrit works—in which the urban and courtly civility of the n¯agarika was often opposed to the unrefined coarseness of the rural gr¯amya—classical and medieval Tamil texts did not depict rural life as the antithesis of cultured existence.≤∫ Sharp moral distinctions were drawn here as elsewhere between higher and lower classes of people. However, these distinctions were made not by opposing country folk to those of the city, but rather by opposing the denizens of contrary forms of agrarian, pastoral, and uncultivated landscape. The nature of such distinctions is illustrated in one of the verses from 44

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Pahlamohli N¯an¯urh u or ‘‘Four Hundred Proverbs,’’ dating back to the seventh or eighth century C.E. Each of these verses presents an interpretation of a proverb, delivered in the form of a lesson to a young man or woman. One particular verse seeks to explain the proverbial truth that ‘‘the quail’s heart belongs to the fields.’’ The saying is elucidated by means of the following striking comparison: Indiscriminate sinners living out in the wilds [k¯atfu] will not submit even settled in the country [n¯atfu]— even if kept always in hand, the quail’s heart belongs to the fields.≤Ω

The proverb lends a natural metaphor for the stubborn limits of any form of upbringing: a quail, however carefully raised, will always long for and tend toward the fields of its origin. The poem conveys the necessity of this truth, however, by drawing an implicit comparison with the immoral nature of those living beyond the ambit of the settled countryside: beings whose own refinement is a tenuous endeavor at best. Both terms of the comparison evoke a trajectory of moral development, both the possibility and the failure of a more cultivated way of life. The crucial distinction at work in this verse is one that opposes n¯atfu to k¯atfu: the life of the cultivated country counterpoised to the life of the forests, thickets, and other untilled tracts on its periphery. By early medieval times, cultivated lowlands in the Tamil country had consolidated into local agrarian territories known as n¯atfu.≥≠ Vellalas and other dominant cultivating communities directed the settlement, development, and tillage of new lands on the periphery of cultivated tracts. They sought legitimacy for such authority by a≈liating themselves with kings and chieftains, and patronizing religious mendicants, scholars, and temples. K¯atfu came to stand for the wild and unruly peripheries beyond the pale of these agrarian territories, tended and inhabited by hunters, grazers, and marginal cultivators who were assimilated only with great di≈culty into the orbit of the lowland social and political order.≥∞ To this day the k¯atfu of the Tamil country retains the sense of a dangerous and troubling margin cultivated only tenuously. The antagonism between n¯atfu and k¯atfu presents a south Indian variation on the broader theme of country against city—a distinction pointing here toward an agrarian civilization with its own norms of civility. ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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This was a cultural formation that slowly consolidated in the Tamil country over the course of many centuries, beginning in the latter part of the first millennium C.E. The historian Burton Stein has described this preeminence of cultivators as one of the most significant features of early south Indian history: ‘‘It was a condition which was to endure for a millennium and contributed to the identity of one of the most durable peasant culture areas in history.’’≥≤ His language of a durable ‘‘culture area’’ may seem anachronistic from the standpoint of contemporary anthropological e√orts to put both culture and place into question.≥≥ To his credit, however, one might argue that Stein sought through such language to account for the historical conditions under which dominant cultivators, and the agrarian activity with which they were identified, attained a certain kind of cultural hegemony in south India. These dimensions of medieval history provide one means of interpreting the prominence of agrarian motifs in the texts of the early Tamil moral canon. Such works began to proliferate in the sixth and seventh centuries. Most were therefore composed in a period of intense strife between rival religious sects and traditions, struggles that would continue in the Tamil country well into the twelfth century.≥∂ Literary historians have identified strains of Jain, Saiva, and Vaishnava theology and philosophy in these works to varying degrees.≥∑ It appears highly plausible to suggest that such truths were presented in agrarian terms by many of these verses as a means of appealing to both patrons and followers in the countryside. Religious sects in early medieval India depended as much on the patronage and support of peasant cultivators as they did on kings, warriors, and merchants. Agrarian idioms of virtue would have provided one powerful means of winning the allegiance of these cultivators, translating moral sentiment into the terms of daily life. The reliance of ‘‘Four Hundred Proverbs’’ on utterances that were already understood—or already identifiable—as proverbial is highly significant in this regard. The purpose of the Tamil moral canon was didactic, and its success in these terms may be judged by the enduring influence of its formulations. Tamil literature has alluded to or quoted verbatim verses from the Tirukkuhral nearly continuously from the time of its composition.≥∏ N¯alaftiy¯ar was described by the missionary G. U. Pope in the late nineteenth century as the Vefllfa¯ lfar V¯etam— ‘‘The Bible of the Cultivators of the soil.’’≥π 46

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And among the medieval moralists of later centuries, Auvaiyar likely was the most memorable. The authors of one twentieth-century Tamil literary history go as far as to suggest that ‘‘perhaps, no day passes without a Tamilian’s hearing or repeating, quite unawares, some profound and poignant reflection or other, of the People’s Poetess, on life.’’≥∫ Although the hyperbole in this last speculation demands caution, I was struck myself by the extent to which my rural interlocutors in the Cumbum Valley echoed the idioms and images of Auvaiyar’s various verses, without ever citing her by name.≥Ω These elements from the past remain in the service of the present.

o Agrarian similes for virtue appear in Tamil literary tradition as nodes of intersection between literary form, pedagogic purpose, and popular knowledge. They continue to circulate in contemporary moral discourse as proverbs and maxims, ‘‘old sayings’’ and folk verities, stripped of their historical referents and carrying with them nothing more than the concrete scenes of agrarian livelihood they invoke. This reverberating archive of language, image, and experience betrays the traces of what I would describe as an agrarian civility: a way of imagining the refinement of self and conduct in relation to the historical experience and exemplary status of the cultivating citizenry.∂≠ Agrarian idioms of moral development rely on and reiterate a sense that there is something intrinsically virtuous about the practice of agriculture, the tools by means of which it is exercised, and the people who wield these tools. They suggest that the topos of the cultivated landscape be taken as an essential setting for the ‘‘civilizing process’’ in south India, to be credited with the same importance that Elias and others have lent the courts, towns, and monasteries of Europe. What I propose under the rubric of agrarian civility is not an argument for Tamil ‘‘culture’’ in the conventional sense of a stable and coherent symbolic order. Nor do I mean a social hierarchy—grounded in caste identity, ritual purity, economic class, or some mixture of the three—that determines one’s place in rural society in an axiomatic manner. With ‘‘agrarian civility’’ I gesture instead toward a language of power, an authoritative and persuasive means of representing civilization itself in ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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agricultural terms, one that casts the refinement of conduct as an organic process aided by spade, plough, and sickle. Interior states of desire, feeling, and disposition fall within its purview as much as superior or inferior conditions of soil and water. At work here is an imagination of improvement arrayed along a developmental trajectory, reaching from the most savage inhabitant of savage tracts toward the civil cultivator of the most civilized terrain. Agrarian civility is embodied in figurative claims as well as moral and social practices, powerful yet nonetheless contestable for all of its persuasions. Like any idiom of power and distinction, there are limits to its e≈cacy. The social history and condition of the Kallars prove especially interesting for this reason. In medieval times, Kallars mainly inhabited upland tracts marginal to the lowland agrarian order. Some of these Kallar settlements found ‘‘a model of a way of life’’ in the customs of nearby peasant n¯atfus, ‘‘slowly slowly’’ becoming like Vellalas indeed as the old proverb claims.∂∞ Others posed a continuing threat to agrarian conceptions of order and propriety, maintaining a posture of hostile antagonism. In the following chapter, I will delve into the complex historical texture of Kallar-cultivator collective relations. Before I do so, let me first spell out the implications of agrarian civility for Kallar selfhood today more carefully. I turn now to the ways in which this tradition works to distinguish the qualities of Kallars from those of others on a landscape of agricultural development. Let us consider the moral topography of an agrarian environment: the ways in which the variegated qualities of the cultivated landscape emerge as keys to a life of virtue. Rough Spades and Rugged Lands The undulating lands at the head of the Cumbum Valley are studded with the remains of megalithic settlements: giant funeral urns unearthed by spades and tractor blades turning brush into field, dry upland into irrigated orchard, gravelly surfaces into sand mines. Their sudden eruption on the surface of the soil reminds its inhabitants that the k¯atfu or uncultivated wild surrounding an inhabited place is a periphery of struggle. To settle and to cultivate agrarian terrain is to hack and keep away the thorny scrub and brambles always pressing in from without. Like shaving the face or delousing the hair, as men and women here often suggest, 48

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clearing the land is an ongoing labor. The terrain is littered with many such remnants of those who have already tried and failed. ‘‘They went fallow,’’ it is sometimes said of the many families who picked up and left, leaving behind no more than scanty traces. Kullappa Gounder—whose name the village of K. G. Patti bears—was a prosperous Okkaliga Gounder who first followed his herd of cattle into the area in the mid-nineteenth century.∂≤ Legend has it that the man fell asleep one night on the bank of a stream and awoke to find his herd grazing on standing crops of millet, castor, and hyacinth bean. Learning that these fields belonged to a man from the nearby village of Cumbum, he purchased all eighteen acres in order to found a settlement here. For the next century or so, as local accounts have it, the village was something like an island: cut o√ by streams to north and west, and nestled against steep mountain forests to the south and east. Wild elephants, tigers, deer, and boar came up to the edges of the residential quarter to raid crops and livestock. The wild was close, and threateningly so. K. G. Patti is inhabited today by numerous castes—Maravars, Chettiyars, Asaris, Dalits, and Madaris as well as Gounders—but its population is dominated numerically by Piramalai Kallar households. Kallars began to migrate westward out of the arid kafllfarn¯atfu into the Cumbum Valley in great numbers in the wake of the severe famines of 1876–78.∂≥ The opening of tea and cardamom plantations in the forested hills surrounding the valley in the late nineteenth century, along with agricultural work in the plains, catalyzed much of this movement. Many of the first Kallars who came here found employment as watchmen and laborers for landholding cultivators, while others tended herds of cattle and hacked away the copious woods and scrub to cultivate dry grains. This was a slow and uneven colonization of a relatively open frontier in land and a thriving market for labor. The Cumbum Valley today stands out as a ‘‘vanguard agrarian region’’ in the state of Tamil Nadu.∂∂ Two crops of rice paddy are raised here each year on a slim ribbon of wetland running along the spine of the valley, irrigated by waters released from a late nineteenth-century dam in the Malabar hills. The undulating uplands above these paddy fields have been steadily developed into a patchwork canopy of irrigated orchards over the last three decades, sustaining commercial crops of coconuts, grapes, bananas, cabbage, cauliflower, onions, beets, and other vege‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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Paddy fields in the Cumbum Valley, with coconut and grape orchards in the distance. Photograph by author.

tables. Some of these are bound for global markets. As the wire fences of these orchards snake ever closer to the edge of the mountains, a diminishing dry k¯atfu covers the remaining terrain. It is on this rocky and uneven v¯anam h p¯artta p¯umi— ‘‘land looking skyward’’ for rain—that farmers make their most precarious gambles: peanuts, sesame, tamarind, dry pulses, and the occasional millet field. Leveled and replaced by wetland and orchard developments alike, the rough and craggy landscape of the k¯atfu today is little more than residual terrain. Farmers in the region imagine uplands, wetlands, and orchards in relation to a developmental trajectory that takes the last of these as much more civilized than the first. The qualities attributed to these distinctive agrarian spaces, however, are also easily attributed to the laboring bodies and interior dispositions of those who cultivate them. In the following pages, I consider such intersections between cultivated landscape and moral quality in relation to a proverb I heard every now and then in the Cumbum Valley: karafttfu k¯atftfukku murafttfu manvetti, f ‘‘a rough spade for a rugged landscape.’’ I was always intrigued by the maxim and its various understandings, all of which seemed to rely on a series of contiguous or metonymic associations: between a rugged tract and the necessary 50

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roughness of the tool to clear it, between this rough implement and the coarse individual who would wield it, and ultimately between the coarseness of this rhetorical figure and the savagery of Kallar castefolk, for whom the dictum ultimately stood as an emblem of collective nature or identity. A. K. Ramanujan has called attention to the ‘‘metonymic view of man in nature’’ presented by classical Tamil love poems.∂∑ Drawing inspiration from his foundational work on Tamil poetics, I seek to convey here a sense of the agrarian landscape as a terrain of moral distinction, by tracking the many practical and moral resonances of this one contemporary proverb for agrarian conduct.

o upland The yellow peanut flowers out in the mountainside k¯atfu begin to wither by the end of June, dropping thin tendrils down into the soil that will swell and ripen into scaly pods. June is the month that peanut farmers must scramble to put up makeshift shacks on the edge of their fields, bribing the local foresters for permission to cut down a few poles— herds of wild boar will descend from the mountains soon enough, and it is di≈cult these days to shoot or poison them and still escape unpunished. By late July the k¯atfu resounds at night with the sharp calls of weary men and women, forsaking sleep each night for endless torchlit ‘‘rounds’’ against the teeming gangs of porcine thieves. 20 July 2002—I spent my last night of fieldwork that year wandering through the peanut k¯atfu with my young Kallar friend Malai. We picked our way easily under the waxing moon across raised bunds and low plants, making for the inhabited shacks flickering in the distance. We found Malai’s uncle Dharmar dozing lightly in the raised straw loft of his small open shack, while a pocket radio softly broadcast a Hindi film song. He awoke with a sudden start when I tapped him on the shoulder and called out his name—I learned only later that night how lucky I was that he had not drawn out instinctively the hunter’s knife that he had strapped to his waist. ‘‘Out here we live like Vedars,’’ he told us, conjuring up an apocryphal image of itinerant jungle dwellers. It was a night of drunken rambles, with fragmentary and sometimes inscrutable bursts of loose talk registered on the small tape recorder I had carted about. Educated folk like me, Dharmar later observed as we made ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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a long looping round calling out for wild boar, might dismiss people like them living out in the k¯atfu as ‘‘rough fellows,’’ those who worked as crazily and jaggedly as they wished. He acknowledged this voice only to challenge it at the same time. How did he interpret ‘‘a rough spade for a rugged landscape’’? That night Dharmar found in the proverb a reason for pride and a means of identifying with the landscape he was cultivating: ‘‘I do pass roughly through this rugged upland, but without fearing anything. There are snakes here, ghouls and goblins, elephants, tigers and lions. It is my contrary character—whatever comes, we will face it. We are the ones who restrain all the animals that come out of the forest. We light our firecrackers, shine our flashlights. Only because we are rough fellows can we stop these animals, no?’’ The proverb, for Dharmar, gestured toward both the nature of the k¯atfu and the nature of those who tilled it. To inhabit the k¯atfu, it appeared, was to struggle against boars and elephants but also against the judgments of those living less precariously in a more settled place.

o wetland ‘‘I can no longer work roughly,’’ Kallar Virumandi Thevar complained to me one morning as we cut with spades through a knot of grassy weeds that had engulfed his paddy field. ‘‘You have to cut, to pick up, and to cast away.’’ Grumbling that he could no longer do such di≈cult work, his language was nonetheless startling. With these very same words—vefttfanum, h t¯ukkanum, h ehriyanum—he h could just as well have been speaking of a scuΔe in the streets.∂∏ I brought up this question of roughness a few days later with the Gounder cultivator Logandurai beside one of his own paddy fields. A hard storm had sent water in spate along the irrigation canals, breaking through countless raised bunds on the flat tract. Bolstering these battered ridges was also tough work, he conceded, but roughness was not exactly appropriate for it. Karafttfu k¯atftfukku murafttfu manvetti, f he suggested—a rough spade was best suited for a rugged k¯atfu. I was puzzled, but he explained further as we walked along the bunds toward the river. The stony terrain of the dry uplands demanded a sturdy blade that could be wielded roughly without bending when it hit a rock. This was less of a concern on the soft and yielding mire of the irrigated 52

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lowlands. Here, a cultivator had to guard against the danger of cutting too wildly, the possibility of slicing one’s own feet through an indiscreet swing of the blade. Accidents were likely among those who worked with haste and speed. One must therefore work slowly, Logandurai insisted: at a measured and deliberate pace. In his imagination, the proverb cleared out a space for critical reflection through its metonymic reach, from the qualities of the tool to the quality of the body that wielded it. The advice of this farmer and the anxiety of the other stood in stark contrast. This was not the first time that Logandurai had counseled the virtue of patience, which he seemed to have mastered as an art of conduct. My easygoing Gounder friend took pride in his forbearance. He often pointed out to me that no one could tell whether he was inebriated or not—even dead drunk, he would walk calmly back to his house and just lie down without shouting raucously in the bazaar along the way. That morning in the paddy fields, Logandurai had quietly fertilized one of his own fields rather than demanding the work of his hired irrigator, Selvadurai. The task was actually Selvadurai’s responsibility, but this man was in a foul and hostile mood after struggling with the debris of the storm. We later spied the irrigator fearfully performing this same service for a stout Kallar farmer just a few fields away, cowed by the latter’s threats of reprisal. I asked Logandurai why he did not do the same himself. He laughed lightly and replied—‘‘Why all that for us?’’ It was a familiar laugh, one that I had seen before: a Gounder’s cautious refusal to act roughly in a village dominated by Kallar people.

o orchard ‘‘This is our machine,’’ Jyothi said with a laugh as he fished a Lilliputian sickle out of his shirt pocket one June morning in a Cumbum Valley grape orchard. He and his fellow workers were charged with the task that day of tying down the tiny green bunches of fruit budding from the flowering vines so that they would hang freely as they ripened. The tiny sickle or a¯ kkariv¯alf that Jyothi had tucked into his pocket was designed to fit snugly within the confines of a single palm, enabling the workers to slice away lengths of fastening cord while leaving both thumbs and forefingers free to tie the knots. His almost rueful joke emphasized the minute care that grape orchards demanded of their laborers. Snap‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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Grape orchards demand the attentions of nimble fingers. Photograph by author.

ping away leaves one by one after a successful harvest; tying new vines to the wire trellises; pruning away useless growth; breaking o√ green tendrils to restrain the spreading vines; tying down the tender fruit and then cutting free ripe bunches of grapes: each of these were tasks for nimble fingers, not rough spades. Virannan, the owner of this orchard, sco√ed gruΔy that morning when I brought up the saying regarding rough spades and the rugged landscapes of their exercise. He found it much easier to imagine the enclosed space of the orchard as a classroom, and himself as an elder headmaster barking out instructions to refractory pupils. But the environment itself made such discipline di≈cult, the latticed vines too dense and intricate to permit e√ective supervision. These young men played their own schoolroom games. At one point Chandran broke o√ a bunch of grapes by accident, but then quickly dropped and stamped it 54

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into the loose soil before Virannan took notice. ‘‘Criminal work,’’ he admitted slyly to me while another one of the guys working nearby likened his deed to smuggling a cheat-sheet into an exam hall. Under the shady canopy of the grape vines, rough and careless haste was out of place and liable to punishment. These young men belonged by birth to several castes: Kallar, Gounder, Maravar, and Dalit alike. Many had studied up to the twelfth grade, spending their youth in the plains or on short stints in industrial towns such as Tiruppur. They worked to the steady tempo of the clock, taking a onehour break for lunch and even fifteen minutes each afternoon for tea and savory snacks. Some of them had removed their shirts, but others wore them still—pressed and patterned shirts that could be worn even on special occasions, and not the torn and dirty garments with which men deliberately clothed themselves for upland k¯atfu or paddy field. Neatness, patience, discipline: such were the principles for working with grapes. The eminently modern space of the orchard provided a model for the proper conduct of oneself, a governing of the body with both civility and restraint.

o identity Karl Marx famously wrote of labor as a ‘‘metabolism’’ between human beings and nature: human beings, he argued, act upon and change the external world, transforming their own nature by means of this process.∂π The Tamil proverb that I have been tracking through three di√erent agrarian spaces gestures toward this relationship of mutual transformation: it describes how savage and civil qualities of selfhood can be bound together with the material nature of particular environments and the tools appropriate for their cultivation. What needs further emphasis, however, is that these shared qualities bear a distinctive sociological character in south India. In his classic study of a Tamil village he named Kalappur, E. Valentine Daniel described the passage of specific qualities between human bodies and the soils they inhabited, identifying a domain of a≈nities between the earth of particular villages and the nature of particular castes. In the Cumbum Valley, I found that such relations took on an even more specific character: Kallar bodies, that is, were most notably marked by the qualities of the dry upland k¯atfu and the dictum of the rough spade.∂∫ My recitation of the maxim concerning ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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spades and lands often elicited among my Kallar friends and acquaintances a particular laugh of recognition: ‘‘That is us only . . .’’ The murafttfu manvetti f or rough spade, in other words, belonged in Kallar hands as much and as specifically as it did on rugged terrain. ‘‘Our people are the rough spades,’’ Sivanamma insisted, for example, over cups of black co√ee on that July night of ramblings through the peanut k¯atfu. She was speaking of her Kallar kinsfolk as agrarian laborers. These men and women alike could not wait, she suggested: tuftupuftu tuftupuftu, they would work in a rush and head home as quickly as they could. Her husband, Pandian, interjected, gesturing toward a Gounder peanut field just a little further west from the one they were guarding that night: ‘‘For them, neither should the spade wear down nor should the person tire and wither.’’ At stake here were matters of disciplined work as well as bodily care: ‘‘Working cleanly, carefully, precisely, [a Gounder woman] will make it home with her combed hair unruΔed and no dirt sticking to her hands and legs,’’ Sivanamma insisted. She elongated each of these words—cleanly, carefully, precisely—to emphasize their deliberate tempo. These were stereotypes to be sure. But they point toward the ways in which imagined qualities of land and labor lend themselves to imaginations of collective identity. I have translated k¯atfu as ‘‘landscape’’ in these pages because it provides a way of identifying the character of certain communities with the qualities of particular terrain. The language of savagery—k¯atftfu tanam h or k¯atfu-ness—provides a particular and powerful point of view on a nature shared by both. It was not the case that Kallars either owned or worked the dry uplands to a greater extent than Gounders. And the ‘‘rough spade’’ with which such fields were cleared these days was more likely a disc plough trailing behind a tractor. Nevertheless, like the soil of the k¯atfu itself in Sivanamma’s account, the proverb stuck most tenaciously to the laboring bodies and interior dispositions of the Kallars who tended it. Proximity to the k¯atfu positioned Kallar cultivators in some uneasy zone between unkempt forest-dweller and meticulous husbandman, between a life of evident savagery and potential civility. Each of the agrarian landscapes I have discussed in this section presents distinctive ways of conducting oneself in relation to place. These contrary fields echo many of the long-standing associations between cultivation and civility in the Tamil country that I have discussed throughout the 56

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chapter. Like any developmental trajectory, however, these powerful conceptions of an agrarian civility are trailed by critical rejections, contrary imaginations, and even ironic reversals of their import and outcome. If civility constitutes one direction toward which the marginal subjects of the Tamil countryside must orient themselves, the savage incivility of marginal spaces makes for yet another. It is this contrary orientation— and the ambivalence that it marks at the heart of Kallar selfhood—to which I turn now. Dharmar’s account of his upland travails had gestured toward such ambivalence. But the celebration of savage selves and places, I will suggest, is even more clearly marked in the domain of Kallar collective politics. To consider such contrary associations is to confront the contradictory virtues of advancement itself. Savagery in Politics What does it mean to be a good citizen of independent India? The Western liberal political tradition concedes freedom only to those human beings recognized as capable of governing themselves with virtue. Others have long had to submit to the dictates of a domineering tutelage that recognized them less as human or citizen and more as animal or child.∂Ω Between 1918 and 1947, the Criminal Tribes Act in colonial south India deprived the Piramalai Kallars of their autonomy on the grounds that they were as yet unable to act well on their own. But postcolonial emancipation from the act has yielded certain ironic and unintended consequences. Matched up against the civilizing pretensions of colonial authority, the collective politics exercised in the southern Tamil countryside appears at times to be altogether di√erent in its moral orientations. For parties rallying the caste solidarity of a Kallar electorate, a reputation for savagery is often to be celebrated rather than condemned. And here as well, imaginations of agrarian landscape and the forms of violence they demand prove crucial to the articulation of this contrary ethos. As Tamil political parties have realigned along caste lines in the last few decades, Kallars have emerged as a major voting bloc in the southern districts of the state. Along with Maravars and Agambadiyars—the other two putatively ‘‘martial’’ castes of the south by popular reputation and colonial imagination—they are feted regularly at party rallies as the mod‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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ern heirs to the Chera, Chola, and Pandyan kings of the classical Tamil political order. The M¯uv¯entar Munn¯ercrca Kaclakam (mmk), or ‘‘Federation for Progress of the Three Kings,’’ is only one of many parties relying on such discourse to claim the allegiance of these castes. I caught the wealthy doctor and entrepreneur who had founded the mmk addressing a boisterous rally of young Kallar party cadres in a small kafllfarn¯atfu village in 2002. The idiom in which he appealed to this audience was both deeply resonant and unsettling. Vehrrh i konf f tu v¯a enr¯alf n¯ı vefttf i konf f tu varuv¯ay, Dr. Sethuraman exclaimed to loud cheers in the crowd. ‘‘If I tell you to bring me victory, you will cut and bring!’’ The party leader had punned on the aural proximity of vehrrh i and vefttf i, ‘‘victory’’ and ‘‘cut.’’ In e√ect, he had proudly proclaimed the fact that his cadres would misrecognize his own instructions—asking only for victory, they would return instead with a cutting. But what kind of sickle or working instrument was he invoking at this rural rally, and what or who would be cut and brought in the service of this violent politics? The rally was held in the village of Perungamanallur, in the heart of the Kallar country. On the fourth of each April, regional politicians and caste leaders arrive here in order to commemorate the anniversary of an uprising in 1920 against the Criminal Tribes Act. Residents of the predominantly Kallar village had refused to allow colonial authorities to fingerprint the village’s men under the auspices of the act. In the pitched battle that followed, fifteen Kallar men and one woman lost their lives. Caste welfare associations rallied to build a monument to these dead in the 1990s. Their observance of colonial martyrdom has since grown into something of an annual political spectacle. On 4 April 2002, was Dr. Sethuraman invoking the memory of this colonial-era struggle with his celebration of a sickle cut? Was he gesturing instead toward the fate of other contemporary parties that opposed his own, or perhaps toward the fate of those men and women who now stood in the way of Kallar caste dominance in the area? Or was he simply celebrating the routine work of cutting and clearing that the agrarian citizens of the region enacted on a daily basis? Tamil grammar does not require that the objects of such verbs be specified, and the doctor left it to his cadres to work out the implications of his violent rhetoric. In their printed pamphlets and political rhetoric, organizations like the mmk often celebrate the ‘‘valorous earth’’ of the Kallar country. But 58

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such invocations of nationalist pride may also incite other forms of domination in the present. For many Dalit laborers and other marginal communities in the Tamil countryside, Kallar conduct stands as threatening and oppressive. Three of the Kallar villages in the vicinity of Perungamanallur, in fact, have gained a statewide notoriety in the last few years for preventing Dalit men and women from exercising their constitutional rights to hold public o≈ce.∑≠ It is easy enough to find in such conflicts the failure of a modern ethos of civility and the kinds of development expected to yield it. One might also suggest, however, that such public conduct bears the traces of a di√erent form of modern selfhood, one in which savagery itself is valorized as a virtuous mode of conduct. To sketch this possibility and its own contrary appeal to uncivil terrain, let us consider the rhetoric and stakes of a local election campaign conducted in K. G. Patti village in 2001.

o the election The village council or panchayat is a crucial locus of political authority in contemporary India. When I arrived to conduct my fieldwork in the Cumbum Valley, I found that the K. G. Patti village council had lately become a rather controversial o≈ce. The Kallar incumbent, Sekharan, had made many enemies in his five-year tenure as president of the panchayat. The distillation and sale of country liquor had been completely halted in the village; usurers had been targeted for their soaring private interest rates; encroachments on the main road were forcibly cleared; ganja plantations were raided and seized in the hills; the Forest Department had clamped down on everything from tree felling to the collection of wood for fuel. Many perceived Sekharan as a turncoat and collaborator in these measures of state-enforced discipline. Police and forest o≈cials now routinely entered the village to raid homes and sheds, it was often alleged. ‘‘When the door is kept open all the street dogs will come inside,’’ an inveterate lumberman grumbled to me regarding the state’s trespass of village boundaries with impunity. Sekharan’s prospects in the elections of 2001 looked grim. But his two chief rivals in the contest promised radically di√erent visions of village government. S. Anbaclagan was a direct descendant of Kullappa Gounder himself. Small, quiet, and even timid in public, his childlessness was ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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‘‘Mountain Bandit’’ K. Devendran with his signature tiger-print cloth. Photograph by author.

often cited to project his honesty in o≈ce—after all, for whom would he steal? Passing from door to door in the days before the election, Anbaclagan’s supporters from Gounder and Kallar households alike described him as the true heir to a long tradition of selfless giving on the part of Kullappa Gounder’s lineage. His erudite cousin S. Murugesan— speaking from a bullhorn mounted to a campaign jeep one evening— went as far as to compare the candidate to the ancient Tamil chieftain Ay, who was eulogized for his generosity by numerous classical Tamil poets. But others posed a di√erent question: how well could he manage a village dominated by Kallar castefolk? Representing this constituency most openly was Kallar K. Devendran, an unlettered former hunter with a thick goat horn mustache and a checkered history. Quick on his feet and adept with a rifle, he had prospered for years by illicitly hunting wild animals in the forest reserves ringing the villages—rabbits, deer, bear, bu√alo, even elephants. De60

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vendran had earlier won o≈ce as a local ward member under the nickname Malai Kallan: ‘‘Mountain Bandit’’ or ‘‘Mountain Kallar,’’ a moniker echoing the immensely popular Tamil film of 1954 of the same name that had starred the film legend and populist chief minister M. G. Ramachandran. But the candidate was also widely known by another less flattering nickname—Pacnnc ikkuatta i or ‘‘Piglet,’’ earned when he had raised domesticated pigs for sale many years prior. As the nickname implied, there was much of the k¯atfu in this gru√ and coarse man. ‘‘Savage animal,’’ sneered one old Kallar woman in confidence, pointing with her nose toward Devendran’s house—‘‘like a pig wandering about the k¯atfu at night sni√ing for peanuts, fit only to ruin.’’ Critically, however, it was this very proximity to incivility that won Malai Kallan a firm base of electoral support among the landless and unlettered households of the village. It was widely believed that if Devendran were elected president, the mountain forests would once again be open to access and exploitation—a means of livelihood pursued mainly by the poorer Kallars of the village. Devendran himself had spread rumors that he would prevent the Forest and Police Departments from ‘‘troubling’’ the people. Many were convinced. Only he had the ‘‘arrogance’’ to stand up to forest guards and police constables, I was often told: to speak boldly and insolently to them, to tuck Rs. 20 into their shirt pockets and convince them to release an o√ender, even to beat these o≈cers if need be. Many believed that only he could close the bounds of the village to these ‘‘street dogs’’ of the state. It was in the traces of his rough and rugged nature that numerous Kallar men and women found a reason for allegiance. These allegiances, however, proved insu≈cient. Ballots tabulated in the nearby town of Cumbum three nights after the election showed that Anbaclagan had won by 133 votes. I rode back to K. G. Patti that night atop an overloaded minibus, packed among a drunken crowd of young Kallar men. Overhanging branches, sudden gusts of rain, and aggressive promises of masculine violence made for a slow and frightening ride. Their threats swelled up with every passing vehicle and settlement—‘‘You people of a whoring pussy! You Gounders, you Parayars, you Kallars born for Gounders! We’ll break your bones, chase you out, pin you down, cut you up, you thieving pussies . . .’’ I fully feared an outbreak of rape and bloodshed as the minibus slowly trundled past lanes of darkened houses ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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into the nighttime stillness of the K. G. Patti bazaar. A few Dalit men and women had even fled their homes that night, I later learned, hearing such cries echoing down the streets. Thankfully, the young men did little more than wander back to their own doors in anger and frustration. I was left both relieved and puzzled at the course of these events. It is always dangerous to generalize from a single instance. It is nevertheless the case that singular events sometimes disclose what is more generally possible and generally impossible in a given situation. Even while it was unfolding around me, I felt that there was a paradigmatic quality to the antagonism between these two candidates, Anbaclagan and Devendran. One stood for a politics anchored in the virtues of patience, restraint, and a cultivated civility. The other insisted on the personal and political virtues of an arrogant and unrestrained violence. Both candidates had managed to enlist a degree of support from the Kallars of the village. Their rival campaigns cast a certain light on the crossroads of moral possibility where men and women of the caste stand today. The morning after the ballots were counted, the village itself was remarkably quiet. One young man gave me a sheepish smile behind his tea stall when I asked him about his wild and angry cries of the night before: ‘‘We’re a tension party,’’ he explained with an English phrase: ‘‘It’s become natural for us to shout a¯y u¯ y. What to do?’’ Those with patience will rule the earth, while those who boil over will rule the burial ground, Karupayi amm¯a might have said in response. Some would find the quiet civility of her wisdom appealing. For others, virtue is a game of savage and deadly stakes. Either way, moral selfhood and its absence are best understood in relation to the cultivated qualities of agrarian terrain.

o This chapter has addressed the ways in which the cultivation of civility as a virtue may work to divide the self against its own putatively savage nature. Many readers will have found here an echo of the ways in which colonialism itself has been understood as a form of psychic trauma as well as a structure of material domination.∑∞ Weighing the a√ective dimensions of colonial power, Ashish Nandy has argued that colonized peoples survived their rule from without by means of such splitting within. One learned to endure one’s own su√ering by passing it o√ as the 62

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experience of another being lodged within the self, one within who demanded or perhaps even deserved the stern voice and iron diction of a foreign schoolmaster. Selves turned against themselves, and pain and humiliation were widely embraced in the name of ‘‘education, upbringing, or development.’’∑≤ The colonized self had discovered an ‘‘intimate enemy’’ to keep in disgruntled company, one that could not be expelled so easily. Nandy’s critical account of psychic colonization provides one compelling means of interpreting the force of savagery on Kallar conceptions of selfhood. The collective backwardness of the caste is easily and often associated with criminal reputations and deeds of the past. To speak of savagery is to distance oneself from the ongoing legacy of a historic state project: to identify as di√erent from oneself those qualities and tendencies within oneself once classed as criminal and in need of reform. Whether it is made in a spirit of condemnation or celebration, the identification of savagery as an essential feature of Kallar selfhood reflects in part the continuing career of colonial power in postcolonial times. Throughout this book, I grapple with the various dimensions of this afterlife, examining much more closely the texture of state interventions and their memories and legacies to which I have only alluded here. At the same time, however, there is much more at stake in the rhetoric and practice of savagery than the continuing pain of a colonial wound, or an ongoing struggle to evade it. Kallar savagery is interpreted today from the vantage point of an agrarian civility with its own history in south India, one that reaches far beyond the moment that the East India Company first seized hold of the Madurai countryside in the late eighteenth century. This agrarian conception of a civilized life cast a shadow on Kallar disposition and conduct long before the colonial era: it worked in support of a prior form of political, moral, and social subjection. I have argued in this chapter that the cultivated landscape still bears the traces of this deeper history in the very way that it is imagined and worked over today by its cultivators. The Kallars of south India, in other words, must be understood as doubly marginal, doubly colonized: their subjection to reform has taken place at the intersection of two distinctive orders of agrarian power and improvement. In each of the chapters that follow, I sketch this point of intersection in relation to the demands and dilemmas of a particular virtue—each both ‘‘A Rough Spade’’

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like and unlike the civility that I have discussed here. The chapters show, in various ways, how moral life among the Kallars in the present remains indebted to the persistent force of these many deeper pasts. I address the work of these virtues in fashioning a certain kind of selfhood, as well as the varied historical circumstances that have encouraged their cultivation. The first of these that I engage is what I would call ‘‘propriety.’’ The next chapter explores the emergence of propriety as a moral foundation of collective belonging in the southern Tamil countryside, charting its ties to both regional agrarian history and the colonial projects of the nineteenth century. I examine the role of this virtue in the eruption of a sudden movement to exclude the Piramalai Kallars from the region altogether in 1896, and its continuing career as an instrument of social and moral distinction today.

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two

‘‘What Remains of the Harvest When the Fence Grazes the Crop?’’ On the Proper Violence of Agrarian Citizenship

The Okkaligar Community Agricultural Field Police Station occupies a small brick building on the southern edge of the Cumbum Valley village of Surulipatti. A private agency of the local Gounder caste association, the station employs twenty guards to patrol 1,200 acres of orchards and paddy fields largely belonging to cultivators of this wellestablished agricultural caste. I met Agent Gopalasamy there one afternoon in 2002 to talk about the theft of grapes from some of these fields. A small gang of Kallar men and women from an adjacent village had been lifting baskets of grapes each night to sell. It took them little more than a brandished billhook and an occasional quarter-pint of whiskey to cow the elderly guards of the station into silence. A frustrated Gopalasamy showed me a thick stack of petitions and newspaper clippings concerning the problem, all to no avail. Thievery, he insisted, was the very essence of these Kallars: ‘‘Grapes are sweet wherever you plant them. Tamarind is sour wherever you plant it. Margosa is bitter wherever you plant it.’’ That some would stand as collective obstacles to the progress of the region was a taxonomic fact as natural as the taste of vegetative life, he implied. But one of the senior cultivators managing the field police station resisted the bitter tang of his agent’s analogies. There were neither good grapes nor bad grapes by nature, G. Anandavel maintained when we spoke one month later: ‘‘Each plant we cultivate yields according to our toil.’’ He had in fact proposed an experiment in social husbandry to tackle the Kallar grape thieves, drafting five of these same men as the newest guards of the station itself. The strategy was proverbial: ‘‘Give the key to

the thief,’’ it is often said here as elsewhere. An optimistic Anandavel likened the approach to that of British o≈cers in colonial times, who had sought to cultivate and educate the Kallars in various ways. Even this redemptive narrative, however, drew out a darker and more cynical prospect. One British major had grown so tired of Kallar thieves in the Cumbum Valley, Anandavel remarked at one point in our conversation, that he had apparently proposed to ‘‘close’’ them all. The English word ‘‘close’’ in spoken Tamil is used as a euphemism for deliberate assassination; indeed, Anandavel was implying that the colonial state had thought of exterminating the Kallars outright. In his mind, this idea was ultimately dismissed with the faith that they too could be endowed with virtue. Genocide is the ‘‘dream’’ of modern power, Michel Foucault has written, the terrifying horizon of force meant to secure a social body from the putatively foreign elements threatening its integrity from within.∞ There are no records to suggest that state o≈cials struggling to police the Kallars in colonial times contemplated, sought to carry out, or even fantasized about such lethal strategies. And yet, it is true that a widespread popular movement to evict the Piramalai Kallars outright swept through hundreds of villages in the region in the late nineteenth century. This chapter concerns the colonial and subaltern grounds of this startling campaign, and some of its persistent traces a century later. How did it become possible to imagine one particular caste as a bitter race of weeds appropriate for a total uprooting? I examine a moral politics of propriety in the southern Tamil countryside in order to address this question. The exercise of this virtue as a foundation for collective belonging also sheds light, I argue, on the relationship between forms of community and the very possibility of progress in rural India.

o The basic foundations of collective identity in India have long been conceived as some of the most stubborn obstacles to the moral and material advancement of its varied peoples. Western observers in the nineteenth century identified two social institutions as the worst culprits of such ‘‘arrested development’’ in India.≤ One was the division of society into mutually exclusive castes, which G. W. F. Hegel argued had condemned Indians to ‘‘petrify and become rigid’’ in their social and spiri66

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tual lives. Another was the apparently isolated and independent quality of its villages, to which Karl Marx in turn had attributed the ‘‘undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life’’ of their inhabitants.≥ British colonial o≈cials and native elites alike celebrated the emergence of novel forms of association in urban milieus—civic, religious, and nationalist organizations of various hues and scales—as a more secure foundation for social and moral progress, lauding their a≈nity with European bourgeois public life. But even these forms of collective agency were always haunted by the specter of a lapse into partisan sentiment and violence. It has often appeared in India—as it still often does—that any expression of community attachment threatens to derail the pursuit of universal horizons of advancement.∂ Such narratives may be complicated in many ways. Far from constituting petty and isolated ‘‘village republics’’ as Marx and many others had imagined, rural localities in India have long been integrated into dynamic political and social orders.∑ Castes too have worked for centuries as vectors of social change, as endogamous groups of lower status appropriated the rituals and customs of higher communities as a means of improving their own standing.∏ Devotional movements and religious cults have drawn diverse populations into novel and collective projects of ethical transformation, cutting across the boundaries of established social life. And newer movements for social reform in the colonial era relied heavily upon such older mobilizing tactics, bonds of a≈nity, and traditions of virtue in sketching the character of modern ways of being. In other words, as many scholars have insisted, modernity in India is best understood not as a radical break from existing forms of community, but rather as a novel cultural horizon deeply indebted to these social and moral forces from the past.π This particular argument, however, has been made most often with respect to the domestic and public life of the urban colonial bourgeoisie. In what follows, I want to suggest something similar about the agrarian protagonists of a rural struggle for social and moral improvement in colonial India: the anti-Kallar movement of 1896.∫ Over the course of several months that year, thousands of cultivators organized themselves throughout the region in order to drive Piramalai Kallars out of the northern and western reaches of the colonial Madura District altogether. The manifest aims of this campaign were to secure villages from crime, to enforce moral conduct, and to promote collective ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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welfare. In meeting after meeting, cultivators swore by their ploughs to suspend Kallar village watchmen on the grounds of their intrinsic thievishness, and to appoint men from other cultivating castes in their stead. All transactions with Kallars were halted. Kallars were prevented from drawing water from common wells. Village artisans, barbers, and washermen were prohibited from serving Kallar households. Merchants were forbidden from selling them ‘‘the necessities of life,’’ and discourse or ‘‘friendship’’ of any kind with Kallars was banned altogether.Ω The movement spread through hundreds of villages, and countless Kallar households fled the region in fear of arson and robbery. I am interested here in the origins and consequences of this unusual form of collective action in the Tamil countryside. This chapter argues that long-standing distinctions of moral virtue and rural sovereignty intersected with colonial currents of state racism and popular social reform to propel this violent e√ort. O≈cial observers at the time celebrated the movement as a novel and ‘‘almost unique instance of the ryots [cultivators] combining to help themselves.’’∞≠ At the heart of this assessment, however, lay a crucial and striking paradox: the peasants of many castes who led the movement had refused to recognize even settled landowning Kallars as rural citizens like themselves. Crucial to this refusal, I argue, were the moral virtues attributed to the long-standing social category of the ‘‘agrarian citizen’’ or the kuftiy¯anava h n. h It may seem peculiar to identify the figure of the citizen with an agricultural tradition, given its usual associations with urban modernity. I will argue, however, that there is no better term to characterize this form of rural community. I trace the lineaments of a moral practice of oflukkam or propriety and its role in consolidating a collective distinction between Kallars and the agrarian citizens of the southern Tamil countryside. This moral terrain of belonging, I argue, was partly grounded here in historical relations of rural political authority. Kallar men worked widely as crop and livestock watchmen or k¯aval in the region, wielding the sta√ as an instrument of power contrary to the moral sanction of the plough. Essential to the work of the sta√ was its moral ambiguity, its promise of both safety and threat, protection and predation, freedom from thievery and subjection to it. The image of an agrarian citizen stood out in contradistinction to this threat. Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial o≈cials in the Madura 68

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District condemned Kallar k¯aval as nothing more than a protection racket, a species of blackmail and even ‘‘terrorism.’’∞∞ In what follows, I will suggest that the anti-Kallar movement unfolded as a collaborative enterprise between the colonial state and the dominant cultivators of the region, albeit one that local o≈cials did not intend as such.∞≤ At the very moment that the movement broke out, a proposal to declare as ‘‘criminal tribes’’ the entire body of putatively ‘‘martial’’ castes in the southern districts of the Madras Presidency was circulating among local district collectors, magistrates, and police o≈cers. I trace an accidental yet highly consequential chain of relations between this state endeavor and the antiKallar organizing of regional cultivators. Colonial racial ethnology and subaltern moral imagination met at an assessment of Kallars as thieving and predatory by nature. State o≈cials and agrarian citizens came together to define the countryside as a realm of moral development in which Kallars had no place. Outside a handful of villages where particularly fierce battles between Kallars and their antagonists remain commemorated in tales and physical remainders, few today recall the events that had galvanized the entire region a century prior. For the most part, these elements from the past have, as events, long slipped beyond the orbit of oral narrative, historical lore, and deliberate recollection. At the same time, however, more di√use echoes of the struggle do remain at work. It is unclear exactly how and why, for example, G. Anandavel of Surulipatti envisioned the possibility of a colonial ‘‘close’’ to the Kallar problem. But the scale of collective violence entertained by this hazy recollection of a fictive proposal, I would argue, bears the distinctive imprint of a submerged history. Long forgotten by most of its heirs, the anti-Kallar movement continues to subtly inflect the way in which Kallars are imagined by more settled neighbors. I conclude this chapter with some of these inflections. Let us begin then with the moral distinctions of the present: with the making of rural community through an exclusive category of social and moral belonging. Identifying the Agrarian Citizen Virumandi Thevar and I sat talking in his riverside shack one morning when a lizard skittered between the thatched panels of one corner. ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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P¯ampur¯ani, f he named the sinuous species—absent its narrow legs but with the same winding gait, he explained, it would look exactly like a p¯ampu, a snake. I thought to pursue this classificatory thread. ‘‘What is a kuftiy¯anava h n?’’ h I asked, bringing up a category of social taxonomy that had continued to puzzle me at the time. I had heard the term applied in many di√erent ways in the Cumbum Valley: to those who worked on agricultural fields; to those of an especially patient, peaceable, and proper nature; and to most castes in the area save that of the Kallars. The category was intriguing precisely because of this ambiguity, the way that it seemed to cut across more conventional social lines. On this occasion, Virumandi Thevar happened to identify it with both caste and occupation. ‘‘Gounder people,’’ he replied, naming the caste of a man who had just passed by the doorway. ‘‘Just him. See, look at how he’s tied his lungi like a loincloth, how he’s cut grass, how he’s carrying it.’’ Ponnurasu Gounder let the round bundle of green grass fall from his head and stopped to chat for a few minutes. A kuftiy¯anava h n, h he explained, would not feel the desire to follow ‘‘crooked paths’’ or ‘‘shortcuts.’’ Such a man would feel instead the demands of an agricultural life: ‘‘Must tumble about in the mud,’’ this individual would think, ‘‘must pluck weeds, must cast fertilizers, must attend to all that work.’’ I remained unclear as to how this passion for agriculture intersected with the classifications of caste. Virumandi said more after Ponnurasu had left, gesturing toward a nearby sapling: ‘‘All of this was established in that age [long past], the name karuvelam to this tree, the name of this or that caste.’’ These days there were indeed many thieving Gounders, and many Kallars who tended instead to their own lands and homes with honesty, he observed. However, even one of the latter could not be said to have become a kuftiy¯anava h n. h ‘‘A good man. He is living harmlessly, like a kuftiy¯anava h n,’’ h one might say in praise of a Kallar or a Maravar who had embraced a life of settled husbandry. But the comparative ‘‘like’’ would always remain, stubborn testament to a likeness without identity. What was this identity that people of such castes might approach without ever reaching? Kuftiy¯anava h nh is best understood, I gradually learned, as a name for the agrarian citizen, one that relied upon shared moral conduct as a basic foundation of rural belonging. A brief glance at its historical usage sheds some light on its scope in the present. The term is built around the Tamil root kufti; grammatically, a kuftiy¯anava h nh is one who is or has become a 70

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kufti. This latter root bears a broad semantic load in Tamil: citizen, subject, family, house, household, inhabitant, tenant, and peasant are only some of its many senses.∞≥ Early Tamil literary texts used kufti broadly to contrast various social classes and kinds. The epic poem Cilappatik¯aram distinguished between ahrakkufti and mahrakkufti—between the virtuous and settled inhabitants of the plains, and the marauding bands of hunters and warriors whose bows were described as no more than figurative ploughs.∞∂ Tamil moral and didactic works identified kufti with particular lineages or social groups of an exemplary moral quality. In a series of ten verses on the subject of kuftimai or ‘‘being kufti,’’ for example, the sixthcentury Tirukkuhral pronounced that those born as kufti lived always with the virtues of propriety, honesty, and modesty. The term also distinguished a body of dependent subjects from the ruler responsible for their well-being. ‘‘[As] the whole world lives looking to the sky, the kufti live looking to the scepter of the king,’’ claimed another verse from the Kuhral.∞∑ While being kufti was a matter of both personal virtue and subjection to another, the possibility of becoming kufti raises more complicated questions. Early Tamil literary works on virtue often used the term to delineate a given population of noble or respectable subjects of a kingdom, in sharp contrast to those of a lower and less-esteemed birth. But certain of these works also identified the possibility of attaining or assimilating the good qualities of highborn kufti—one might consider a verse from the Pahlamohli N¯an¯urh u that suggested that ‘‘the low’’ absorbed the qualities of ‘‘the great kufti ’’ living beside them like stalks gaining fragrance from the flowers they bore.∞∏ By medieval times, inscriptional records identify kuftiy¯anavarkaf h l (in the plural) as those who had become kufti in a specifically agrarian sense. The term is used to identify donors of grain to temples, chieftains, and representatives of the king: these proceeds were cultivated on their own lands or by tilling as tenants the lands of others.∞π Signaling their contribution to a public life of ritual observances and collective obligations, the inscriptions identify these cultivators as participants in a rural moral order. It is in this sense that kuftiy¯anava h nh is best understood as a designation for an agrarian citizenry: those engaged, that is, in a settled life of agricultural husbandry, collective responsibility, and moral belonging.∞∫ Rural inhabitants of the Tamil country today use the term kuftiy¯anava h nh ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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variously to refer to cultivators, landlords, tenants, agricultural laborers, and others, depending on the particular region. In the Cumbum Valley and the Madurai countryside, however, the term has gained a more specific sociological twist. Although almost every caste in this thriving agriculture region has a stake in the land, I learned to my surprise in locality after locality that the referential reach of the kuftiy¯anava h nh halted at an imaginary line drawn between the Kallars and other castes. While even washermen, artisans, and Dalit laborers could sometimes be grouped under the aegis of the agrarian citizen, the possibility of a Kallar kuftiy¯anava h nh proved almost unthinkable. The word, in fact, provided one of the most convenient means of singling out Kallar nature for scrutiny and critique. Despite having become a dominant landholding caste in the Cumbum Valley, Kallars are identified and characterized here most easily today in contrast to the agrarian citizenry. This contrast is essentially moral in nature, turning most regularly for its force to the presence or absence of oflukkam: that is, an ideal life of propriety or proper conduct in relation to prevailing social expectations. Pandian app¯a conveyed this quality in a conversation we had one afternoon. Vairam Pandian was the sole Kallar I met over the course of my fieldwork in the Cumbum Valley who was willing to identify himself as a kuftiy¯anava h n. h In his understanding, this was an identity rooted in norms of daily conduct among rural men. The kuftiy¯anava h nh got up early each morning to work in the fields. His wife would bring him his food and they would sit quietly and eat together. He would come straight home after he finished his labors to eat and then sleep. In his interpretation, the term was a synonym for kuftumpam¯anava h n—one h who had gained a kuftumpam, family or domestic life. I asked why then others in the village kept using the word as a euphemism for Gounders and other related castes. He objected to such usage. In earlier times, app¯a said, the Gounders, Vellalas, and Chettiars of the valley quietly and peaceful attended to their own business while the Kallars wandered about like criminals.∞Ω But now the Kallars too had settled into habits, routines, and spaces of proper conduct. They too therefore ought to belong to this social category. I turned to Andavar, app¯a ’s brother-in-law, who had also stopped by the house to chat that evening. Would he too call himself a kuftiy¯anava h n? h Although Andavar held a respectable posting as a clerk in the village 72

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government o≈ce, he answered with a more conventional no. Referring elliptically to a past history of fights and quarrels, he laughed and suggested that his brother-in-law knew very well about his own true nature. There was a second meaning buried in the classification to which Andavar had pointed with his refusal of its appropriateness for him. The quiet domesticity of the agrarian citizen, the tolerance and forbearance of this proverbial figure, also marked a servile spirit. The kuftiy¯anava h nh was one bent before others with hands clasped in a gesture of subservience, Andavar insisted, willing to put up with any indignity. In his proud recollection of an unruly past, the agrarian citizen stooped low as an emblem of fear. These contrary evaluations of the figure of the kuftiy¯anava h nh point to the historical ambiguity of Kallar relations with Gounders and other cultivating castes in the Cumbum Valley. In prior decades, the agrarian economy and the rural social order of the valley were organized around the dominance of landholding castes. Ritual observances took the instruments they wielded in the countryside as symbols too of a moral preeminence. A veneration of the headman’s plough would take place in each village of the valley on the first day of each new year. Before harnessing his own plough for the cultivating season, every farmer was expected on this day to pray before and lead once around a field a plough that the headman had harnessed and kept ready for this purpose. Hundreds would wait their turn, the aging Gounder headman of K. G. Patti told me one afternoon, musing nostalgically over a public respect he had long since lost. His narrative dwelt fondly on an order of precedence in which all castes—Gounder, Kallar, and Dalit alike—participated. The ritual affirmed the necessity of the headman to bring prosperity, rain, and a bountiful harvest. ‘‘Only he was fit to support and protect [everyone],’’ an elderly Kallar cultivator later explained. Collective rituals such as these consecrated the moral authority of the plough and that of the most powerful among those who wielded it, putting the agrarian instrument to work as an a≈rmation of a proper social order. But the headman of course was not the only individual invested with the responsibility of protection in these villages. ‘‘If the Kallar takes the sta√, the Gounder will bar the door,’’ it is sometimes still said in the Cumbum Valley with mischievous or rueful pride. The proverb narrates Kallar-Gounder relations as a compact between house‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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The work of the plough. Photograph by author.

holder and watchman. Its import, however, is fundamentally ambiguous: does the Gounder bar the door to sleep soundly inside while a Kallar guards his things, or does he bar the door to protect his family from a Kallar threat outside? Plough and sta√ meet at this threshold as rival instruments of sovereignty. Throughout the last century, propertied cultivators in the Cumbum Valley made informal arrangements for k¯aval or protection with landless Kallar households. The latter men and women were entrusted with the authority to watch over contiguous tracts of cultivated land, guarding standing crops from thieves, livestock, and wild animals in exchange for a portion of each harvest. In practice, cultivators often had no choice but to hire the very people they feared would otherwise steal from their fields, their contracts sanctioning a degree of theft rather than eliminating it altogether. Men who had worked as such watchmen sometimes told vivid and boastful tales of grain, fruit, timber, and goats wrested from the possession of hapless and fearful kuftiy¯anava h nh cultivators. ‘‘Like a fence grazing on the crop that it should protect,’’ app¯a told me with a bemused smile one afternoon at a tea stall as we listened to the exploits of one of his kinsmen. The proverb o√ers a popular image for a state that 74

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Dharmar assuming the stance of the watchman. Photograph by author.

preys on its own wards.≤≠ Its relevance here o√ers one insight into the stubborn collective antagonism between Kallar and kuftiy¯anava h nh in the Madurai countryside: through the defiant impropriety of their watch, Kallars exercised a form of sovereignty over the body of agrarian citizens. These elements of the social history of caste and cultivation in the Cumbum Valley provide a glimpse into the conditions under which the anti-Kallar movement erupted at the close of the nineteenth century. On 26 June 1896, for example, leading cultivators at the head of the valley sent an urgent telegram to the governor of the Madras Presidency, lamenting the thievery of recent Kallar immigrants to the area: ‘‘ . . . We poor ryots pay kist [taxes] to government and have to give half of our property to prevent them from robbing us on our petition to our heigher [sic] authorities requesting to take immediate action on the mischief of these Kallars to drive them away to their own tirumangalam taluq. . . .’’≤∞ Here as elsewhere, cultivators aimed at a total expulsion of the caste. Their complaint of having to pay o√ those who would otherwise rob them identifies watchmen as the crux of the problem. The thievishness of Kallar k¯aval was a claim made from the standpoint of propertied rural citizens, one that worked to powerful e√ect throughout the district that ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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year. But before turning to the movement itself, we must examine this institution more closely from the historical standpoint of Kallar sovereignty in the region, and how this was exercised in relation to agrarian community. The moral and political stakes of rural protection itself were radically transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. From Sovereignty to Blackmail From as early as the tenth century C.E. onward, Kallars, Maravars, and other warrior communities established themselves as chieftains of the upland plains in the southern Tamil country. Their authority over these localities was closely bound up with their right to protect them from attack and plunder; Nicholas Dirks has identified such protection rights as the foundation of kingly authority in the royal state of Pudukottai, ruled by a lineage of Kallar kings beginning in the seventeenth century.≤≤ In the Madurai countryside to the south, Kallars exercised a political sovereignty less recognizably royal in its public honor and legitimacy. Louis Dumont reported the following general form taken by most historical origin stories for Piramalai Kallar villages: ‘‘They get themselves hired as watchmen by a large landowner. Later, this master and his people leave the country, either as a result of an agricultural disaster or because the Kallar make life impossible for them, and the Kallar alone remain.’’≤≥ From the vantage point of such oral narratives, Kallar lineages appear to have established their dominance in the Madurai countryside by entering into an order of agrarian authority, only to upturn it altogether. In the seventeenth century, Nayak kings ruling from Madurai tried repeatedly to enforce their own political and economic overlordship in the Kallar tracts to the east and west of their capital city. These e√orts met with only limited success, as the following observation made by a Jesuit friar in 1700 suggests: ‘‘This Caste of Thieves are become so powerful within these few years, that they have made themselves independent, in some measure, of the king of Madura, and by that means pay him what tribute they please.’’≤∂ One popular Tamil folk ballad depicts a Nayak king of the time harried by Kallar rebelliousness: fields remained fallow and remittances went uncollected in the Melur countryside, while the capital city endured numerous raids by Kallar thieves hailing from this tract. The 76

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ballad blames tanh aracu n¯atfu tanikk¯ h atftfu kafllfarkafl for these disturbances: Kallars, that is, ‘‘of self-governing country and independent tract.’’≤∑ One of the crucial foundations for Kallar sovereignty in the region was the rural institution of the watchman or k¯avalk¯arar, charged with protecting the countryside and its inhabitants from thieves and petty plunderers. In the centuries prior to colonial rule, the post of the watchman was a hereditary village o≈ce with fixed rights and duties. ‘‘It is the indispensable Duty of the Cawelgar [k¯avalk¯arar] according to the ancient Custom to watch the Produce of the Soil, and to be accountable for all losses sustained,’’ reported the Madura collector George Parish in 1805.≤∏ Another collector elaborated in 1811: The duties of a Cawolgar have always been considered, to watch over the Crops on the Ground, to guard them when reaped, and when thrashed, the produce is measured in his presence, and delivered over to his charge entirely; after which whatever loss is sustained, he is considered the accountable person for it. To protect the Village to which he belongs, and should any of the Inhabitants be robbed, he is obliged to make good from his own Mauniam Lands, the value of whatever Articles may have been stolen unless he can deliver up the o√enders to Justice, and in that case he is absolved from all responsibility.≤π

As this account emphasized, the village watchman was endowed with a grant of rent-free land or m¯aniyam, h both for his own maintenance and as a means of assuring his honesty and e≈ciency in preventing and detecting theft. In the more marginal reaches of the country west of Madurai, ‘‘little kings’’ or p¯alfaiyakk¯arar chieftains often assumed these responsibilities. These chiefs took shares of harvested grain as ‘‘watching fees’’ in the villages they claimed as their own. They used such levies and assignments of land to maintain their own armed warriors, often hiring Kallars in particular as retainers and mercenaries. In the later decades of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company identified these chieftains as agents of ‘‘terror’’ and ‘‘plunder’’ in the southern Tamil countryside. The company put down a widespread rebellion among the p¯alfaiyakk¯arars in 1801, forcibly disbanding their corps of armed men and assuming control over the rent-free lands they had held in exchange for protection.≤∫ Two years later, the settlement of revenues due to the company from the ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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villages of northern and western Madurai abolished their watchmen’s m¯aniyams h altogether.≤Ω In the midst of the struggle between local chiefs and the East India Company at the close of the eighteenth century, British o≈cials often reported Kallars raiding local villages for loot to share with refractory chieftains. Paradoxically, it is precisely in such accounts that we may also find evidence of Kallars working as watchmen in the region. On the night of 6 May 1799, for example, a band of Kallars carried o√ sixty-six bullocks from the village of Vadugapatti. A few weeks later, they sent a palmleaf missive to the assistant collector explaining that although they held the right to protect this village, they had not been paid their watching fees for the last two years. In a second palm-leaf missive they requested that the farmers send cash and sheep to pay for an upcoming festival. Crucially, this second communication signaled the a≈liation of these Kallars to two local chieftains while at the same time a≈rming their own sovereign authority in the area: ‘‘We are become a proud and independent people despising and holding in contempt both the order of the Poligars and those of the Circar.’’≥≠ The uneasy intimacy of protection and predation led British observers to decry the character and conduct of the watchmen. In his report on the native police Collector Parish described them as ‘‘the Only Robbers by Profession’’ in the district. At first these guards were put under the ‘‘watchful Eye’’ of colonial o≈cers, a measure of subordination that the collector argued would render them ‘‘useful Instruments in the Hands of Government.’’≥∞ Judicial reforms in 1816 sanctioned allowances in money and grain to watchmen while at the same time relieving them of any responsibility to compensate for the loss of stolen goods. By the midnineteenth century, the fees demanded by guards freed of such restorative obligations had reached ‘‘fantastic heights.’’ Exaction of watching fees ‘‘due by custom’’ was declared illegal in 1864, albeit with little e√ect.≥≤ Despite the creation of a uniform constabulary for the Madras Presidency in 1859, a vacuum in rural policing remained, which Kallars and other watchmen were able to exploit in the southern districts of the presidency. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, many Kallars migrated into newly established settlements in the Palni Taluk and the Cumbum Valley, acquiring land and taking up duties as village guards for other 78

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otherwise make o√ with their cattle and crops. However, certain other o≈cials were forced to admit that despite their shortcomings, watchmen did in fact a√ord ‘‘a protection to the villagers which the police are unable to give.’’≥∑ Watchmen continued to work throughout the nineteenth century, David Arnold has argued, as a ‘‘rival system of rural control’’ not easily eradicated.≥∏ Many of these men were understandably reluctant to relinquish their authority. A magistrate in the Cumbum Valley, for example, advised the Kallars of his jurisdiction to give up their ‘‘thievish habits’’ in 1896. But the watchman of one village here pointedly refused to abandon this line of work: ‘‘How can I take to the plough after having done circar [government] work so long?’’ This Kallar man, reported the magistrate, considered agriculture ‘‘beneath his dignity’’ but the watch an ‘‘honorable’’ work of government. ‘‘Most Kallars in these parts,’’ he continued, ‘‘are under this impression.’’≥π Kallar watchmen in the Madurai countryside exercised a form of authority predicated on the threat or possibility of violence—it is in this sense that I suggest that their authority be identified as a kind of sovereignty. Predation among these men was less an ingrained habit or a vicious tendency born of hard times, and more a specific means of wielding power, one bound up intimately with the o√er of protection.≥∫ The persistence of this form of rule ultimately authorized the declaration of the Piramalai Kallars as a ‘‘criminal tribe’’ in 1918 and the enforcement of extraordinary policing measures in villages inhabited by Kallar castefolk, a subject I will consider in greater detail in the next chapter. Almost two decades prior to this declaration, however, the villagers of the Madurai countryside suddenly rose up against Kallar rule. I turn now to the circumstances surrounding this unprecedented event, and in particular the moral claims that appear to have founded it. How was a rural politics of virtue enlisted to justify the violent displacement of the entire caste of Piramalai Kallars? 1896: Agrarian Citizens Rally Writing under the pseudonym ‘‘FACT,’’ an anonymous reader penned a plaintive letter to The Hindu on 13 June 1896. The letter reported on a movement of ‘‘the ignorant and the illiterate’’ that sought to drive Kallars out of the northern reaches of the Madurai district. It dwelled in particu80

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lar on the ‘‘heart-rending’’ scene that had transpired in the village of Nellore on 9 June. Thousands of men had assembled from the surrounding villages to evict the Kallars who lived there. All of the Kallar houses were set afire. Women and children fortified in the houses were said to have perished in the flames. One Kallar woman was dragged out and ‘‘outraged most brutally’’ while another Kallar man was tortured and cast into a pile of flaming ploughs and oil sticks. Properties were looted and carried away. Most galling to the writer was the apparent indi√erence of the state to such violence against Kallars: ‘‘Mr. Editor, what have these poor Kallars done to the Government that the Government may thus for the while withdraw their support to these poor people? What right have these ten thousand hounds to hunt after these poor people? Are we living under the British Government or not?’’≥Ω Nellore was a small hamlet on the edge of the Palni Hills that was inhabited almost exclusively by Kallars. A Nellore Kallar man had been caught in the act of stealing a few bullocks from a nearby hill village. A large number of hill villagers came down into the plains in pursuit, blowing hunting horns as they followed him; a local o≈cial described the latter as ‘‘a signal to invite people.’’ By the morning of 9 June a crowd of several thousand people was massed around Nellore. The crowd surrounded the village and demanded the surrender of the alleged stolen bullocks. Some Kallars tried to frighten o√ the assailants with sickles, and somehow a fight erupted. Notified by telegram, the joint magistrate arrived two days later to find four men dead and several Kallar women with ‘‘marks of injury.’’ The attacking party had disappeared. ‘‘Everything was quiet,’’ but all seventy-nine of the Kallar houses had been burned to the ground.∂≠ The Kallars told the joint magistrate that an announcement had recently been broadcast locally calling for their eviction and boycott. The aftermath of the riot proved that the crowd that had attacked Nellore was mixed in composition. Among the dead assailants were a Naicker and a Pallar by caste, while Muslims from a nearby village were also reportedly involved. All these plains people had joined with the hill villagers: ‘‘The others hearing horns blown joined and being inclined to Sympathise with the Periyur [hill] men against Kallars backed them up,’’ one o≈cer reported. But some village o≈cers appeared to be just as sympathetic. Reporting on the incident to his superiors, for example, the head o≈cer ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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Madura District boundaries

N

Mountains and hills

E

W

Usilampatti S

Mathanampatti Markampatti Vedasandur

Palni

Dindigul Nellore

LLS

I NI H PAL

Vadugapatti

k

aḷḷ

u arnāṭ

Madurai ig a Va

m mbu Cu lley Va

Melur

iR iver

Gudalur

Map 2. The Madura District of the Madras Presidency, 1896.

of the local police station alleged that ‘‘the Kullens of the village set fire to their houses themselves and deserted the village.’’∂∞ How best to interpret this powerful and widespread sympathetic inclination that drew together people of di√erent castes and distant villages for a common but violent cause? What is most striking about the antiKallar horn is the novelty of the collective that it hailed. These assemblies were rallied around a new identity constituted through a hitherto unknown negation.∂≤ The joint magistrate in his report described the ‘‘original aggressors’’ in Nellore as ‘‘Anti Kallars.’’ A marginal comment here noted that this term—Anti Kallars—was widely used to denote the ‘‘opposite party’’ in the chain of agitation, one that included shepherds, merchants, artisans, barbers, and untouchables, along with cultivators paying revenue to the state. What was the ground of antagonism between Kallar and anti-Kallar? Why was it that, as state o≈cials observed, ‘‘the villagers embraced [the movement] with open arms’’?∂≥ An attempt to answer these questions must begin with the many petitions sent by desperate Kallars throughout the district to state o≈cials, all of which named their antagonists in the plural as either kuftikafl or kuftiy¯anavarkaf h l . The body of rural citizens mobilized against the Kallars was a collective assembled through the social networks of the domi82

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nant peasantry. It is clear that landed elites led the anti-Kallar assemblies and relied on existing channels of village authority to enforce solidarity. These collectives employed service castes in a subordinate role: the latter were appointed to collect subscriptions from individual houses, for example, and to inform Kallar households that they were expected to leave within a matter of days. Those who failed to attend anti-Kallar meetings were liable to severe fines and boycott by village servants. Leading cultivators were so successful in forging a ‘‘union among all classes of people’’ that Kallars repeatedly failed to garner any witnesses willing to testify to their persecution.∂∂ However, the identification of the agrarian citizenry as the antagonists of the Kallars opens up a significant paradox: prosperous Kallar cultivators were just as likely to be evicted by the anti-Kallar movement as landless watchmen or coolies. Of the twenty-nine Kallars reportedly leaving their villages in the Palni Taluk in June 1896, for example, sixteen had either sold lands or were preparing sale deeds. In this region, nearly a third of Kallar residents were identified as registered landowners paying revenue to the state each year; these landholders included at least half of the Kallar watchmen in these villages.∂∑ A petition from one Kallar farmer in the Taluk described the compulsions that forced such sales of land: if the kuftikafl blew the horn, a mob would descend on his orchard to pillage the crops. He and his relations had been forbidden from taking up fallow government lands for cultivation, and they were no longer allowed to impound cattle that they caught grazing surreptitiously on their own lands.∂∏ By the late nineteenth century, the landed cultivating classes of the Madras Presidency had been firmly established both by revenue policy and by administrative ethnology as the bedrock of the rural social and economic order. Private property in land was identified as one of the surest means of securing the lawful obedience of putatively ‘‘martial’’ castes such as the Kallars throughout the presidency. Yet evident here was a radical divide between Kallar cultivators and the agrarian citizens of Madura District, one that had worked to such violent e√ect in the months of 1896. The depth of this hostility was a great puzzle to the administrators of the district. ‘‘Why do they want to drive out the Kallars, and especially Substantial ryot Kallars,’’ asked the Madura collector Twigg.∂π This question is best addressed as a problem of moral judgment. ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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In the following pages, I will argue that the Kallars of these villages, however proper with respect to their rural possessions, were nonetheless taken by their inhabitants as dangerously improper with respect to their moral conduct. Kallars were imagined as a people predatory by nature, posing a natural threat to the security of others. The movement seized on this judgment, born of both colonial administrative strategy and native stereotype, to rally the entire anti-Kallar social body against the entire body of Kallars. Codes of rural moral propriety—anchored in the plough and other symbols of agrarian order—were harnessed here as instruments of collective dispossession. Security, Property, Propriety A series of reflections entitled the ‘‘Present Social Outlook’’ published in The Hindu in May and June 1896 challenged Indians to give up their ‘‘instinctive love of every thing handed down to us from generation to generation.’’ One of these editorials lumped thieving Kallars along with ‘‘nautch girls,’’ ‘‘Thugs,’’ and ‘‘cannibalistic Fijians’’ as groups of people who mistakenly believed that their vocation was an honorable one.∂∫ The movement against the Kallars of Madura District clearly bore some relation to the many currents of social reform galvanizing diverse Indian publics at the close of the nineteenth century. One Indian o≈cial celebrated the anti-Kallar assemblies as ‘‘volunteer corps’’ joined freely by villagers who had found it to their advantage.∂Ω Such evaluations underscore the striking modernity of the enterprise and its complex moral character. The primary and explicit aim of the anti-Kallar assemblies was to address the failure of both local watchmen and state police to secure village property. Members were inducted into these bodies on their swearing of several oaths: not to employ Kallars as watchmen, not to buy stolen property, never to fail in catching thieves. In at least one instance observed by police constables, members vowed in addition to ‘‘give up all bad habits.’’∑≠ The assemblies appointed ‘‘their own men’’ to watch their villagers instead of Kallars. Every house was expected to supply one ablebodied person for watch duty and to heed the call of the hunting horn if summoned for defense. Each of the assemblies also created ‘‘a sort of 84

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mutual insurance fund’’ in order to recompense those who lost their properties to thieves, or those who lost their houses or straw heaps to arson. Landed cultivators and ‘‘poor people’’ alike were expected to contribute toward this fund.∑∞ What was recognized by the state as an anti-Kallar assembly bore the popular name of panf f tu k¯utftfam, or ‘‘fund assembly,’’ in the Madurai countryside.∑≤ State o≈cials appear not to have attempted to explain this peculiar denomination. Panf f tu is a loanword in Tamil, borrowed directly ∑≥ from the English ‘‘fund.’’ Its usage here presents a striking echo of the Local Fund Boards established by the colonial state from 1871 onward as administrative devices for local self-government.∑∂ Though the agitation spread from village to village as a movement against Kallar watchmen, it gained vernacular notoriety as an accumulation of local funds. In this manner, assembly leaders appropriated the signifier of a state project in the service of their e√orts. At the same time, however, the assemblies also directed traditional signs of moral authority and rural order toward these ends. It was here that the plough proved especially significant. The plough looms in the evictions of Kallars as a complex and enigmatic sign of moral community. The implement was fixed into the earth at the heart of each anti-Kallar gathering: adorned with flowers, worshipped by those assembled, and touched with both hands by those swearing oaths against the Kallars and other watchmen. Older Tamil ¯ Ehlupatu—literally, ‘‘Seventy literary works such as the Tirukkuhral and Er Ploughs’’—took the plough as a metonym for not only the work of cultivation but also for an entire social and political order anchored in the rectitude and bounty of the ploughman’s furrow.∑∑ In 1896, cultivators organizing against the Kallars relied on their ploughs as the most precise symbols of agrarian propriety. These instruments helped to consolidate the virtuous character of rural places, anchoring assertions of a proper social order in the act of tillage and its moral economy of praiseworthy gifts and receipts.∑∏ These were places to which Kallars could no longer belong. Gestures of social degradation were also used to cast Kallars out of these villages. Asses were driven into Kallar homes, or ‘‘Low Caste men such as Pariahs and Chucklers’’ sent to tell them to ‘‘run away.’’∑π Such willful pollutions of domestic space suggest one means of interpreting ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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the denial of service, trade, water, and any social intercourse to the Kallars and other castes targeted by the assemblies. Refusals to transact with them indexed their impropriety, relying on one of the most powerful means of abjection in the traditional Indian social order. In response to such measures, however, state o≈cials claimed, ‘‘We have no power to interfere in the matter.’’∑∫ Many working within the colonial state at this time were wary of breaching the domain of an imagined custom.∑Ω The agrarian citizenry turned to collective codes of proper social conduct as a means of excluding Kallar castefolk from the social life of the countryside altogether. Kallars were conceived by their neighbors as heedless and unprincipled in their conduct, an intrinsic threat to the security of others. Even tax-paying Kallar landowners were imagined to bear the same moral deficiencies and therefore to require the same outright expulsion, as one local revenue o≈cial suggested: ‘‘The ryots seem to think that by permitting them to reside in the village, reaction would set in and their arrangements to prevent crime would very soon prove futile and there is no guarantee for the future safety of the country. They consider that they are ryots yet they have thieving propensities born in them.’’∏≠ Public insecurity appeared to be a consequence of Kallar impropriety. Insofar as Kallar castefolk lacked the ability to temper or direct their own desires and impulses, they could be identified as natural predators suitable only for eviction. This subaltern imagination fused the name of a troubling caste with a determination of its improper tendencies in an essential identification. The protagonists of the movement took the name ‘‘Kallar’’ as a signifier of both ‘‘thief ’’ and ‘‘thievishness.’’ Their moral idiom of propriety served as an anchor of collective belonging as well as an instrument of collective dispossession. The force of its distinctions is well illustrated by the following incident.

o In early June 1896, Virappan Servai presented a complaint of ‘‘dacoity’’ or robbery against the anti-Kallar assembly of Markampatti village. On the morning of 6 June, he alleged, villagers had assembled at the blowing of a horn to enter his house, drive away his bullocks, and carry away his 86

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vessels and jewels. Police inspectors confirmed that within the house ‘‘the things were thrown in great confusion.’’ Pots were destroyed, a large hole had been burned into the middle of a mattress, and a broken granary had left grain scattered all over the floor.∏∞ Virappan Servai hailed originally from the Pudukottai country to the north. His was a Kallar lineage, but one that did not intermarry with the Piramalai and Melur Kallars predominating in the Madurai district. Virappan had in fact petitioned to join the local anti-Kallar association about a fortnight prior to the alleged robbery at his home on the grounds that the movement was directed only against Piramalai Kallars. He presented written proof that his own castemen had been admitted to antiKallar assemblies in several nearby villages. But the Markampatti assembly decided to deny his petition. As a local state o≈cial explained, the chief members ‘‘decided that he is a Kallan.’’ One week later, four hundred villagers raided Virappan’s house by torchlight. Despite evidence of this raid, the village munsi√ denied that Virappan had been robbed unlawfully. He and other local leaders sought to prove instead that the plainti√ and his kinsmen were people of ‘‘bad character’’: ‘‘They were formerly kavalgars [watchmen] of these villages. But as it was found that they themselves committed thefts their services were dispensed with about a year ago.’’ Virappan Servai had described himself as a substantial landowner in his complaint to the police. There was no doubt that he was a Kallar by birth. Rather than denying this identification, Virappan sought to prove that he was a respectable Kallar emigré from the nearby principality of Pudukottai, headed by a Kallar sovereign. But the villagers, in ‘‘decid[ing] that he is a Kallan,’’ had decided that he was both a caste member by blood and a thief by inclination.∏≤ Virappan may in fact have been an unscrupulous watchman and an oppressive landlord. This we will never know. Here, however, it was the fact that he was a Kallar that sealed his fate. To be a Kallar was to be a person, as one local o≈cial put it, of ‘‘least character.’’ This identification of a hereditary impropriety—a proclivity to prey on others—was deemed punishable enough by the village assembly. Moreover, suspicions raised by his very nature were enough to suspend the response of the state. The district joint magistrate had insisted that ‘‘Kallans should have no reason to suppose that their complaints do not receive prompt attention.’’∏≥ But ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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claims such as those of Virappan Servai met repeatedly with skepticism and dismissal on the part of the state. Kallars stood convicted prima facie by agrarian citizen and state o≈cial alike.

o A few days later, an o≈cial notice issued the following warning: ‘‘The Villagers are informed that Kallars are equally entitled with themselves to live peaceably in villages, and that any persecution of Kallars will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law.’’∏∂ The word ‘‘peaceably’’ here was an unavoidable qualification. Kallars bore rights as residents of villages to the extent that they were peaceable. Insofar as they held the others in a state of fear and insecurity, they forfeited their right to protection. Time and again, cultivators organizing against the Kallars made clear that they acted under the impression that the state supported them. Their activity was bound up closely with the state’s conception and administration of social di√erence in the Tamil countryside. I therefore turn now to the subtle yet unmistakable relationship between state policy and subaltern moral agency at the close of the nineteenth century. It was against this horizon that the line between Kallar and kuftiy¯anava h nh was etched most sharply. State Racism and Rural Feeling: Or, The Crow and the Falling Palm Fruit For colonial administrators, fear was the force that wedged a divide between the Kallars and the rest of the native population. British recourse to ‘‘terror’’ to explain the e√ect that Kallars had on all others who lived alongside them was remarkable for its sheer redundancy. Reflecting on his past experiences in Madurai, for example, F. Fawcett, the Malabar superintendent of police, described the ‘‘abject dread’’ in which even a couple of Kallars were held by other natives: this great fear was a ‘‘terrible power’’ that they wielded in order to maintain a ‘‘distinctly parasitic’’ existence. The Kallars and Maravars were the ‘‘reverse of timid,’’ with very little of the ‘‘gentle Brahmin’’ or the ‘‘mild Hindu’’ in them. This was only to be expected, according to Fawcett, for their di√erence in character was caused by a di√erence of blood: Kallars in his mind were an 88

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aboriginal race preying on the descendants of the other races that had displaced them long ago.∏∑ In the late nineteenth century, colonial sociologies of caste were often informed by such a racial grammar of di√erence. But there was a crucial ambivalence lodged in o≈cial conceptions of caste as race: some took racial identity as a fixed essence, while others took racial di√erence as an object of evolutionary transformation.∏∏ On the one hand, Kallar thievery was imagined as ‘‘in the blood’’: a stubborn and ineradicable tendency toward violence and depredation demanding repression and surveillance on the part of the state.∏π On the other hand, however, o≈cial observers also insisted at times on the possibility of redeeming Kallar nature. The Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency of 1871 noted the ‘‘great change’’ that had come over the Kallars and Maravars thanks to the Pax Britannica: ‘‘they have now settled down in peaceable occupations.’’∏∫ The question, in a sense, was whether or not the Kallars could be absorbed indistinguishably into the great body of common plainsfolk. These contradictory possibilities lay at the heart of a series of administrative measures undertaken in the latter half of the nineteenth century to police the conduct of so-called criminal tribes and classes in British India. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 singled out a number of communities of itinerant traders, forest dwellers, and putatively professional thieves in northern India for special surveillance, spatial constraint, and rigid controls. The act—which I will discuss in greater detail in the following chapter—took crime in India as the immemorial tradition of certain independent and unified groups, living and preying almost imperceptibly from the margins of rural society.∏Ω This legacy of confrontation between cultivators and thieves was readily perceived by colonial administrators as a ‘‘war of races,’’ to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault.π≠ Here was a rural social body needing defense from the enemies lurking within its own tissues. In 1895, the government of the Madras Presidency disseminated an audacious circular regarding the ‘‘best means of weaning the criminal tribes in the Southern districts from their predatory habits.’’ The ‘‘tribes’’ in question at this moment were identified as three castes amounting to an astonishing 18 percent of the population of the southern districts of the presidency: 409,811 Kallars; 308,175 Maravars; and 296,849 Agambadiyars.π∞ The Board of Land Revenue described these castes as former ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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soldiers ‘‘more or less loosely and inadequately settled on the soil,’’ liable by instinct, tradition, and pleasure to prey on the remaining people of the region. The board solicited the opinions of a number of widely dispersed judges, police o≈cers, and revenue o≈cials regarding the advisability of administering these castes as criminal tribes. And the antiKallar movement flared up in the same weeks and months that these papers were circulating between the regional outposts and the provincial headquarters of the presidency. What—if any—bearing did colonial discourses of race and terror have on the motives and methods of rural subjects engaged in precisely this form of social warfare? It would be a mistake to assume that the protagonists of the anti-Kallar assemblies simply assimilated and acted out the dictates of a colonial discourse. Yet, there was in fact a relationship between the racial ideology of the colonial state and the stark violence of the movement—more accidental, but nonetheless e√ective. Let us follow the trail of a state survey that appears to have touched o√ a spiral of radical exclusion.

o Ammayappa Kone, the headman of the village of Usilampatti in the Vedasandur Division of Dindigul Taluk, was widely identified as the ‘‘originator’’ and chief organizer of the anti-Kallar movement.π≤ He was an Idaiyan, belonging to a shepherd caste especially vulnerable to Kallar depredations. It was widely rumored that the headman nursed a ‘‘strong personal grudge’’ over a theft not of cattle or sheep but of women. A ‘‘Kallan Lothario’’ was said to have stolen away first his wife and then his daughter, keeping both under his ‘‘protection.’’π≥ However, the headman himself denied this ‘‘abduction theory’’ and any ‘‘vindictive feeling’’ it may have inspired on his part.π∂ In his own account of the origins of the movement, Ammayappa Kone began not with a problem of illicit love but with a question posed by the state itself. In early 1896, A. Rajagopal Chettiar, the sub-magistrate of Vedasandur, had been ordered to collect information regarding Kallar crime in his jurisdiction as part of the broader inquiry initiated by the Board of Land Revenue in 1895. He circulated a local survey asking, ‘‘Why [were] the Kallars . . . being employed as kavalgars [watchmen] instead of the 90

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ryots themselves?’’π∑ Ironically, it was this very question that Ammayappa Kone singled out a few months later as the inspiration for the anti-Kallar movement itself. Once he had received this circular, Ammayappa alleged, he and his associates had decided to dispense with Kallar watchmen altogether. The state o≈cial was therefore responsible for what appeared to be an autonomous act of his subjects. Reporting somewhat fearfully on these claims to his British superiors, the native sub-magistrate insisted on his own innocence and freedom from seditious implication: ‘‘Your honor may see from the wording of the circular that the present movement was not at all suggested.’’ Rajagopal was of course a petty Indian o≈cer suddenly caught in the midst of a minor crisis in imperial rule. Most interesting, however, is the rhetorical device he then employed in order to challenge any suggestion of his culpability: ‘‘This is only an illustration of what is called Kaka Thali Nyayam in Sanskrit (Law of Coincidence) which is that in the case where the crow sits upon a palmyra fruit which is so ripe as about to fall down and the fruit falls down, the people ascribe the falling of the fruit to the [crow].’’π∏ Kakataliya nyaya, literally ‘‘the law of the crow and the palmyra palm,’’ is a common parable of chance in classical Sanskrit literature and philosophy. In certain textual expositions of the principle, the fruit lands fatally on the head of the crow, while in other versions the crow feeds luckily upon the fallen, broken fruit. While the figure therefore marks instances of both good fortune and bad luck, its kernel is always the purely accidental coincidence of only apparently related phenomena.ππ It is not clear how a native o≈cer posted in the hinterlands of the Madras Presidency learned of this heuristic device: whether it was an artifact of a classical training in Sanskrit, an attendance of religious discourses delivered by Hindu pundits, or a testament to the circulation of the image as proverb in the region. Regardless of its origins, we may find in this surprising utterance not only a means of rhetorical defense, but also a principle of historical interpretation. The parable of the crow and the palm o√ers a unique prism for the accidental convergence of moral judgments between colonial state and rural citizen that set o√ the anti-Kallar movement in 1896. Sub-magistrate Rajagopal argued that the circulation of his survey and the sudden appearance of the anti-Kallar movement only appeared to be ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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related, like the landing of a crow and the subsequent falling of a fruit. But to argue for the accidental consequence of the former is to insist on the inevitable necessity of the latter.π∫ Within the terms of the parable, the fruit would have fallen at the very moment that the crow had landed only insofar as it was ripe enough to do so. In precisely this sense, Rajagopal contended that the spread of the anti-Kallar assemblies throughout his jurisdiction was a natural and necessary consequence of a long-endured su√ering at the hands of Kallar thievery. An incidental brush with a hypothetical state plan could not have sent the agrarian citizens of his district tumbling down a course of punitive excess. The feelings of the latter had developed on their own, independent of any nudging by a proverbial crow. Rajagopal succeeded in exonerating himself with these arguments. ‘‘The undersigned does not attribute the movement in any way to the Submagistrate’s circular,’’ the district sub-collector wrote in response to his report. By laying the matter to rest in this fashion, the colonial state also exculpated itself from any culpability for the rise and spread of the movement more broadly. And yet, the initial course of anti-Kallar organizing challenges this simple judgment. Villagers in the region began to dispense with the services of Kallar watchmen as early as January 1895. They appeared to keep the matter hidden from the courts at first as they were ‘‘doubtful whether the movement would be proper or improper in the eye of law.’’πΩ By the spring of 1896, however, it was widely believed that the state itself supported cultivators rallying against the Kallars. District o≈cials now found themselves struggling to prove that the Kallars enjoyed equal protection under colonial law. What had changed so suddenly? ‘‘The ryots extol to the skies the good omened hour which generated in their minds the idea of forming the assemblies,’’ wrote Sub-magistrate Rajagopal.∫≠ This invocation of an auspicious time to mobilize suggests that the anti-Kallar movement may indeed have been sparked by a sudden state initiative, as Ammayappa Kone himself had insisted. The kernel lies in the seemingly innocuous question posed by Rajagopal in his circular regarding ‘‘why they chose Kallars in preference to ryots.’’ The survey asked cultivators why they chose Kallars rather than others like themselves as guardians of their cattle, fields, and property, taking for granted a binary antagonism between the Kallar and the cultivator. Powerful 92

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forces were at work naturalizing this racial opposition at the very moment that the movement began to spread through the Madurai countryside. The sub-magistrate’s query clung to these e√orts, one might suggest, by more than a slender stem. In the chain of events that propelled the anti-Kallar movement, a kakataliya or accidental relation between the mechanics of state ethnology and the articulation of agrarian community is unmistakable. The circulation of a state survey organized around a sharp distinction between Kallars and others elicited an unexpected practice of radical social antagonism in the countryside. The racial orientation of colonial discourse on the so-called criminal tribes met with a moral interest among the agrarian citizenry to put an end to Kallar impropriety. Rural assemblies interpreted the tepid reaction on the part of state o≈cials to the harshness of their tactics as a tacit signal of approval. At this accidental yet crucial point of intersection, a racial ideology of the colonial state worked to incite and sanction an unprecedented campaign of popular violence.

o At first, British observers celebrated the anti-Kallar movement as a ‘‘private police innovation’’ that had put a complete halt to crime in the district for several months.∫∞ This position grew increasingly di≈cult to maintain as the unrest continued to spread. O≈cial notices warning against any ‘‘foolish’’ conduct failed to stem the insistent e√orts to drive Kallars out of the region altogether rather than merely suspending their watching duties. There were also glimmers of a more radical politics of freedom underscoring the conduct of the assemblies. Groups of men were found rescuing sheep impounded by village o≈cers for grazing on the cut stalks of government avenue trees. Many assemblies were reported to have assumed the powers of civil and criminal courts in their areas: adjudicating disputes, forcing Kallars and others to make restitution to aggrieved parties, and making compacts to hide their deliberations and decisions from government servants. One assembly even vowed to punish the police constables who had charged its leaders with stealing Kallar cattle, threatening these o≈cers with the same social boycott and violent fate that had been meted out to their enemies.∫≤ A ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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subaltern program of policing appeared finally to have turned against the watchmen of the colonial state. District o≈cials ultimately intervened against this inchoate resistance to the armature of the British Raj. Anti-Kallar leaders were singled out on charges of persecution until a violent wave of Kallar reprisals cowed the assemblies into quiescence. As former Kallar antagonists began to flood the district collector with desperate telegrams for assistance, he noted the following with resigned misgivings and a distinct tinge of melancholy: ‘‘we prevent them from protecting themselves in the only way they seem to understand.’’∫≥ Traces of the movement disappeared from o≈cial eyes by March 1897.∫∂ The event itself was ephemeral. Over a century later, its force nonetheless persists in the structure of collective belonging and moral judgment in the region. Echoes of Distinction Kallar k¯aval was likely never deemed entirely proper in the Madurai countryside, exercised as it was in opposition to the moral authority of the agrarian citizen. The colonial state deepened this antagonism in the nineteenth century by criminalizing both the institution of the rural watchman and the castes that typically took on this work. In 1896, cultivators of the region seized on these political conditions in order to expel Kallar households altogether from the domain of their villages. They acted on the understanding that the state had sanctioned the violent implications of their collective moral judgment. Kallars had no place in the social vision they articulated. It is impossible to say precisely how many Kallar households su√ered the evictions that the assemblies plotted in the northern and western reaches of Madurai. Many fought back and remained in the villages that they had populated in greater numbers. Most who fled headed with their cattle, sheep, and chattels to their ancestral villages in the kafllfarn¯atfu south of the Vaigai River. Some forty Kallar families, within weeks of their evictions, settled in the village of Gudalur at the head of the Cumbum Valley, just a few miles from the hamlet founded by Kullappa Gounder. Their arrival here prompted one nervous and unsympathetic local o≈cial to complain of their ‘‘indiscriminate squatting’’ on government land.∫∑ Over a century later, I met no one in the Cumbum Valley itself with ex94

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plicit narratives or recollections of the movement and its consequences, aside from hazy echoes of the sort with which I began this chapter. There is no doubt, however, that Kallars are typically imagined by others here today as a race apart, as people of a di√erent and problematic nature. The firm distinction between the Kallar and the kuftiy¯anava h nh or agrarian citizen—both here and elsewhere in the region—testifies to the continuing persuasions of moral propriety as a discourse and practice of social exclusion. This quality of propriety remains categorically unavailable to those of the Kallar caste. While numerous factors have no doubt contributed to the sharpness of this persistent divide between Kallars and others—the legacy of Kallar sovereignty, the racial tactics of the Criminal Tribes Act, evidence of thievery and other ‘‘crooked paths’’ to prosperity—the legacies of collective organizing against the caste may also be identified as a crucial force. In 1916, over one hundred Gudalur cultivators protested the assignment of state waste lands to landless Kallars; the district collector of Madura noted that these petitioners had divided themselves into two categories: ‘‘kallans and other castes.’’∫∏ In 1933, the kuftikafl here petitioned to prevent another fallow tract from being assigned to Kallars on the grounds that the land met the ‘‘common needs of the people’’; here, all but two of the ninety-seven signatories belonged to castes other than Kallar.∫π In 1965, the leading citizens of Kullappa Gounden Patti organized a ‘‘Western Street Youth Club’’ to which all castes but Kallars and Dalits were invited to join; the name itself underscored its intention, as most Kallars lived on the eastern side of the village. Collective yet exclusive e√orts like these gesture toward a continuing antagonism. Elsewhere in the Madurai countryside, those with a clearer memory of the events of 1896 draw such lines more forcefully. A hamlet in the village of Usilampatti now bears the name Ammayappa Konur, in honor of the movement leader who was born there. In a startling inversion of histories of political sovereignty in the region, Ammayappa’s lineal descendants insist that the Kallars of Madurai worship him to this day as panf f tu r¯aj¯a , the ‘‘Fund King.’’ They shared tales of his valor in battle and the bravery of his legendary white horse, pointing out a small roadside stone that the animal was said to have scoured with a hoof as it leaped over a thorny barrier, an army of Kallars following behind in fast pursuit. The leader of the movement had earned the title kafllfan karuvahrutta ammayapp¯a c¯ami, ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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Ocha Thevar and Pakava Thevar, commemorated as martyrs in Nellore. Photograph by author.

the centenarian Gounder headman of Usilampatti mused slowly—‘‘Lord Ammayappa who exterminated the Kallan.’’ In the recollections of these agrarian citizens, the movement put a halt to Kallar koftumai or ‘‘tyranny’’ in the region. The palpable fear with which they spoke of these matters to strangers, however, alluded to the temporary character of that victory. In Kallar villages such as Nellore—burned to the ground in June 1896 —the movement is recollected very di√erently. Within a flower garden beside the village school, a pair of statues commemorates two Kallar men who had died in defense of the settlement. Ocha Thevar and Pakava Thevar are said to have held their ground while everyone else ran for safety, killing countless numbers of their assailants before perishing themselves. Their valor still wins praise for having halted the momentum of the movement itself. Long since deified, their statues are venerated with an annual public festival on an auspicious day each March. This mustachioed pair of stone figures—their arms raised with weapons 96

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poised to strike—presents two nineteenth-century martyrs in the tangible and familiar form of village guardian deities. They a≈rm the authority of such watchmen over the society of agrarian citizens that had sought to evict them. Kallar sovereignty in the countryside remains a living memory and an ongoing possibility. ‘‘Panf f tu . . . panf f tu . . . panf f tu . . . Protect me!’’ For decades after 1896, these last words of an anti-Kallar assailant were heard echoing from within the well where he had died in the village of Mathanampatti. Like Nellore, this was a Kallar hamlet that had been surrounded and burned completely to the ground in the midst of a pitched battle. Panf f tu survives here as a voice from the past but also as a practice of organized violence between castes. ‘‘Even now a panf f tu happened,’’ Kallar villagers here observed. In an ironic return to its colonial usage, the term now identifies collective funds accumulated for a specific purpose: to handle the legal expenses ensuing from an attack by those of one caste on another. Recurrent instances of such conflict suggest that the panf f tu lives on as a tactic of social exclusion. Tears rolled slowly down his face as Sivanandi Thevar spoke in a cracking voice of kuftiy¯anava h nh attackers setting fire to the village over a century ago. I asked him to define the boundaries of this social class. ‘‘We are Kallars,’’ he replied. ‘‘Everyone else, aside from us, they are kuftiy¯anava˙ h nka.’’

o Let me draw this chapter to a close with a few comments on the significance of its histories. These narratives could perhaps be taken as elements of what Nicholas Dirks described as an ‘‘ethnohistory’’ in The Hollow Crown, his magisterial study of the colonial fate of the Kallar kingdom of Pudukottai. Indeed, I too have been interested in the ‘‘local details and dynamics of social history’’ in the region, and more specifically—with devices of thought such as the crow and the palm fruit—in the ‘‘reconstruction of an indigenous discourse about the past.’’ However, though I have also traversed terrain like that of The Hollow Crown in this chapter, my overall intention has been somewhat di√erent. Dirks had focused on the codes of kafttfupp¯atfu or orderly conduct articulated by the ruling Kallar lineage of Pudukottai as a means of reconstructing the moral order understood to have once oriented this social milieu in the ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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past. I have tracked an ongoing conflict between propriety and impropriety in the Madurai countryside in order to sketch a long-standing domain of moral tension that still challenges social life in the present. History has of course mattered here too in the emergence of the antiKallar movement at a specific moment of colonial convergence. Ultimately, however, I have sought not only to reach the past through a ‘‘relentless historicizing of the present’’—as Dirks writes—but also rather to reach the present through a relentless dehistoricizing of the past.∫∫ What I mean by this last and admittedly opaque statement ought to be clarified. To historicize the present is to account for how things come to be what they are now; to ‘‘dehistoricize’’ the past is to account for why things persist as they once were. The moral distinctions that oppose the proper nature of the agrarian citizen to the improper nature of the Kallar are lines that cut across the flow of historical time. Elements born out of and propelled further by the specific events of multiple moments in the past, they continue to work powerfully even today. They force a recognition, that is, of moral life in the present as an experience of commingled echoes from earlier times: some of these echoes are clearly defined in their origins and demands, others are only muΔed and unclear in both provenance and consequence. The pasts of this chapter represent a history of inheritances, debts, and legacies that cannot be confined so easily to a particular moment or period in time. These elements remain here and now—they have not simply slipped beyond the reach of lived experience in the present or our own critical examination of that experience. ‘‘Even now a panf f tu happened,’’ the villagers of Mathanampatti had said. We can do more than to assume that such claims seek only to reinvent a past that has since been lost.∫Ω Propriety emerged as a powerful principle of collective belonging in the colonial Tamil countryside through the convergence of numerous moral and historical forces. Each of the following chapters tackles other ways in which such elements from the past have come to matter in the moral life of the present. The anti-Kallar movement may be identified in retrospect with a historical moment in which the Kallars appeared to have no place in the moral and material progress of the countryside. Subsequent historical developments, however, challenged this presumption. In the following chapter, I turn to the Criminal Tribes Act and the tactics of moral and social reform it directed toward Piramalai Kallar 98

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villages and populations in the early twentieth century. Somewhat paradoxically, the assertion that these were people criminal by nature also opened up the prospect of changing that nature. At stake here was restraint as a virtue, and the recalcitrant animal disposition upon which it was understood to work.

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‘‘The Life of the Thief Leaves the Belly Always Boiling’’ On the Nature and Restraint of the Criminal Animal

Working oxen are cherished animals in rural India. As with many other domesticated creatures, however, obedience is the price of a√ection. Plough bulls are typically restrained and guided by means of a thick braided cord passed through the nostrils and back around the neck. A sharp tug on this m¯ukk¯an˙ kayihru or nose-rope is enough to inflict a flash of pain in the soft tissue within the nose, and to force the animal in a di√erent direction. In the Cumbum Valley, oxen immune to such suggestion may be identified as ‘‘thievish’’ in nature and subsequently driven to nearby markets for beef. One afternoon, ninety-one-year-old Mokkarasu Thevar likened colonial law to precisely this tool of bovine discipline. ‘‘The Criminal Tribes Act was like a nose-rope,’’ he told me as we sat chatting on his cot in the Cumbum Valley village of Anaipatti. Surprised, I asked him what he meant. ‘‘With the nose-rope, an ox will obey in fear of pain. The white man tried to do the same with the Thevars. But their valor cannot be controlled so easily. It will not change. It will not soften.’’ The old man spoke with no small measure of pride. He was well known as a freedom fighter, entitled to a pension from the Indian state for his nationalist activism during colonial times. Mokkarasu Thevar described his own Piramalai Kallar caste as a community so bold that they had threatened to expel the British from India outright. And his village in particular remains notorious in the region to this day for its own defiance of the norms of agrarian civility. Kallar thieves of Anaipatti had stolen grain, fruit, and livestock

Ploughmen rely upon the noserope to keep their oxen in check. Photograph by author.

throughout the Cumbum Valley, wresting wealth and property from the cultivating castes of their own village through the force of a predatory watch. ‘‘With the insolence of [our] blows, the whole place was ours,’’ said one young man who candidly identified himself to me earlier that day as a thug-for-hire. As a thick cloud of beedi smoke gathered between us, my tape recorder whirring on the floor in plain view, he and a handful of other men casually yet proudly spoke of how their brethren in the village had beaten, grabbed, and stolen their way to prosperity. Later, an older man nicknamed ‘‘Stab’’ Pandi described how he and his kinsmen had sallied forth in earlier decades to steal oxen in exchange for ransom. He too recollected the practice as a certain kind of power exercised over animal bodies. ‘‘Today the state catches hold of men and demands money to bail them out. In those days, we caught hold of cattle and demanded the same.’’ Men and cattle, state and thief: there is something startling and pro102

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found in these comparisons between the government of a di≈cult human population and the handling of bulls in an agrarian economy. But what exactly did it mean to conceive state o≈cials in concrete terms as cruelly ambitious cowherds? And in what sense could the objects of their policing be taken as animal in their nature?∞ These claims gestured unintentionally toward an understanding of moral development as an enterprise of governing the animal qualities of certain beings. They called attention to the virtue of restraint as a quality that might be understood to distinguish humans from animals, and to the force of a need to restrain those beings deemed unable to restrain themselves. Cast, however, in a spirit of proud and stubborn defiance, the reminiscences of Mokkarasu Thevar and his kinsmen marked the humanizing pretensions of such policing only to upend them altogether.

o ‘‘It is a duty to cultivate the crude capacities of our nature, since it is by that cultivation that the animal is raised to man,’’ wrote Immanuel Kant in 1780.≤ Faith in the possibility of perfecting human nature was a crucial feature of Enlightenment thought and the many enterprises in moral and social progress that it spurred in Europe and elsewhere. At a basic level, these endeavors assumed that human beings could learn to submit their wayward desires, passions, and impulses to critical judgment and control. For writers such as Kant, virtue itself could be identified with such a capacity for self-restraint: with the ability of reason to take ‘‘the reins of government in its own hands’’ among those who had cultivated its exercise most carefully.≥ That Kant found reins at work here was not altogether accidental. Modern political thought in the West has often relied on such animal analogies, examples, and metaphors as a means of articulating the rightful government of human beings, from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees to Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages.∂ These varied usages imply not only that animals have been good to think with— as Claude Levi-Strauss had famously written—but also that a certain kind of critical engagement with one’s own animal nature is at stake in the very task of being and becoming a good human being in modern times.∑ The high stakes of this engagement have been most evident in the case ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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of those beings who have veered away from or failed to find altogether this course of expected progress. John Locke had argued that any criminal who had renounced ‘‘the common Rule and Measure’’ of human reason ‘‘may be destroyed as a Lyon or a Tyger, one of those wild Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security.’’∏ And such indeed was the fate of some of Europe’s most resistant colonial subjects, who confronted a form of power that worked explicitly upon beings beyond the threshold of the fully human. Judged as juvenile, animal, devil, or simply sick, subjects of colonial rule throughout the globe struggled against the double bind of a biological politics of di√erence. Those who were deemed not quite human either had to submit themselves to ambitious projects of training, discipline, and domestication or to endure the implacable violence of an exclusionary humanism. As Frantz Fanon had observed, ‘‘The terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms.’’π Mobilized in arenas as diverse as museums, labor colonies, and battlefields, such terms dictated that those incapable of restraining their own impulses were best governed or dealt with by others of better judgment. I turn in this chapter to one such arena of colonial intervention: the classification of the Piramalai Kallar caste as a ‘‘criminal tribe’’ in 1918. The legal instrument that underwrote this classification—the Criminal Tribes Act in British India—was incubated in an intellectual milieu of evolutionary reasoning in which habitual crime was pegged to the workings of hereditary instinct. Victorian social reformers named the conscience as a critical faculty distinguishing human conduct from the vagaries of animal impulse. The Criminal Tribes Act substituted the pressures of law for the perceived absence of this internal faculty of restraint among the act’s many native wards. For nearly three decades, I argue, Kallars subjected to the act were governed as organisms of instinct, pleasure, and habit, the most routine of their movements through space restricted by the judgment that they were unable by nature to resist thievery and other criminal indulgences. I am most interested here in the relationship between this colonial politics of restraint and the exercise of restraint as a moral virtue among the heirs to the act in postcolonial times—how such relationships of power come to shape the ways in which individuals relate to and work upon themselves. This point of intersection between politics and ethics, 104

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however, emerges as far more than a matter of simple cause and e√ect. Have people here come to relate critically to themselves as animals, and if so, how? In the region today, thievishness is widely interpreted indeed as the consequence of a bestial inner nature. However, this understanding of an underdeveloped moral self is indebted to the legacies of both colonial criminology and south Indian moral tradition. In what follows, I elaborate on Tamil ideas of restraint or aftakkam as the marker of a specifically human nature, one that identifies thievishness or deceit with a state of unrestricted desire and a capitulation to the flighty attachments of the senses. In this vernacular moral imagination, the manacu or heart emerges as both agent and object of a distinctively human practice of self-restraint. The criminal animal ultimately appears as a being of hybrid origins. To take up this animal as an object of reform is to project humanness as the telos or endpoint of moral development. As the proud reminiscences with which I began this chapter insist, however, animals are often celebrated precisely for their obstinate defiance of human demands. Moral restraint cannot therefore be taken as a singular horizon of development in postcolonial India. In the Cumbum Valley today it is often suggested that Kallars rose quickly from penniless refugees to wealthy householders precisely because they alone were willing to follow every ‘‘crooked path’’ to prosperity at their disposal. In what follows, I trace three modes of animal conduct through which Kallar men, women, and youth make sense of these trajectories: the proud virility of disobedient bulls, the hungry and forgivable foraging of field sparrows, and the restless and fickle leap of monkeys. Each of these images of animal being di√racts thievery and thievishness through a distinctive prism of moral judgment, either celebrating, excusing, or chastising such conduct in turn. How one relates to restraint as a virtue ultimately depends very much on the kind of animal one might embody.∫ Throughout this chapter, I track back and forth between the animal qualities attributed to thieves and the thievish qualities attributed to animals. Donna Haraway has reminded us that animals ought to be understood as much more than symbolic tokens of theory and thought: among us they are also ‘‘here to live with.’’Ω Bestial images and metaphors are best understood, that is, in relation to concrete practices of engagement, labor, and struggle between our kind and others. With this insight ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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in mind, these pages address acts of theft by animals and humans alike on the agrarian landscape of the Cumbum Valley. They confront the pastoral strategies of state o≈cials with the pastoral tactics of ordinary herdsmen. They match up e√orts to police the borders of fields and forests with struggles to secure the boundaries of domestic space, tracking the theft of fruit and crops, but also the pilferage of hearts and a√ections. What we find on this terrain are multiple ways of inhabiting one’s own animalness: diverse ways of being that call into question the very presumption that development demands a moral elevation of the not-quite-human self. Our trail begins with the colonized animal. Descent of Criminal Man In my opinion you could no more eradicate this hereditary instinct of theft from these men than you could from a magpie.—j. a. davies, district and sessions judge, 1895 ∞≠

In 1918, the government of the Madras Presidency declared the entire ‘‘section of the tribe of Kallas generally known as the Piramalai Kallas’’ as criminal by nature. This extraordinary measure drew on the Criminal Tribes Act of 1911, which, amending and extending the act of the same name of 1871, authorized provincial governments to classify any section of any tribe, gang, or class ‘‘addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable o√enses’’ as a criminal tribe. The district collector of Madura justified the collective designation of the Piramalai Kallars by invoking their indulgence in an amoral passion: ‘‘Theft, if not their principal occupation, is, at all events, their principal recreation.’’∞∞ There was nothing new in this o≈cial assertion of an a≈nity between Kallars and thievery. European administrators and onlookers had anchored this proclivity for decades in the name of the caste itself: kafllfan meant ‘‘thief ’’ in Tamil.∞≤ More novel at this time was the suggestion of crime itself as a means of misbegotten pleasure. Highway robbery was described as a favored ‘‘pastime’’ among the men of the caste, a source of ‘‘natural excitement’’ for youths nursing a ‘‘love of adventure.’’∞≥ As one superintendent of police emphasized in 1895, ‘‘The Kullen loves stealing.’’∞∂ The new criminology of nineteenth-century Europe invested the crim106

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inal self with a new topography of internal drives, pressures, impulses, and instincts.∞∑ Properly trained and exercised, these forces could be endowed with the virtuous habits and tendencies of good character. Governed improperly, they careened toward ruin.∞∏ At stake here was moral restraint as an emblem of the fully human: virtue taken as a compulsion born of social life, cultivated and passed onward through instruction and example, habit and reflection, to be turned against the momentary tugs of lower instincts and impulses. As Thomas Huxley insisted in a lecture on ethics at Oxford University in 1893, human progress required a renunciation of animal tendency: ‘‘civilized man brands all these ape and tiger promptings with the name of sins; he punishes many of the acts which flow from them as crimes. . . .’’∞π The moral life of man began where the bestial struggle for existence was suspended— through the exercise of restraint as a virtue. Criminals, like animals, savages, and children, were widely imagined by late nineteenth-century observers as reckless and impulsive creatures largely insensible to moral persuasions. This articulation of a shared nature often relied on a theory of evolutionary atavism, one that found in certain beings an unexpected revival of lower and more primitive traits.∞∫ Such atavism formed the kernel of the criminal anthropology propounded by the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, a ‘‘Natural History of the Criminal’’ pinning innate delinquency to the outlines of a brutish and retrogressive physiognomy: apish arms and jutting jaws, noses hooked like birds of prey, and so on.∞Ω At the same time, however, the notion of criminal heredity was itself poised at the crossroads of two modes of evolutionary reasoning, creditable to the workings of innate disposition on the one hand but also the noxious influence of social milieu on the other. ‘‘The dog returns to its vomit and the sow to its wallowing in the mire,’’ wrote Henry Maudsley in 1874.≤≠ Delinquent tendencies were seen as incubated most quickly in a vicious habitat of squalor and degeneracy. Both the English Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 and the Indian Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 were conceived in this intellectual milieu. Within urban England, inveterate delinquents were spatially segregated from the putatively honest working class. In India, allegedly criminal castes and tribes were physically segregated from the peasants and landholders of the Indian plains.≤∞ Between colony and metropole, the tra≈c in ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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criminological discourse and practice flowed in two directions. On the one hand, European treatises in criminal anthropology relied heavily on anecdotal narratives of savage crime—accounts of Indian thuggee, for example, that lent a lurid fascination to countless exegeses of criminal depravity.≤≤ On the other hand, legislation such as the Criminal Tribes Act extended to India strategies evolved in metropolitan England to address the threat posed by urban gangs of habitual o√enders. While hereditary criminal inclinations were assigned in Europe to the familial transmission of pathological traits, criminal inheritance in colonial India was ascribed to the tugs of community.≤≥ The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 took habitual crime in India as the immemorial tradition of independent and endogamous groups living in and preying from the margins of rural society.≤∂ The act singled out a number of groups of itinerant traders, forest dwellers, and putatively professional thieves in north India for special surveillance, spatial constraint, and extraordinarily rigid controls, granting provincial o≈cials the authority to confine entire communities to prescribed places of residence. Individuals who violated these spatial constraints were liable to rigorous terms of imprisonment. Such measures, extended to the Madras Presidency of south India in 1911, arguably worked upon the animal nature or biological being of suspected criminals. They sought to govern instinctual tendency by restricting the movement of bodies through space: by forcibly restraining those seen to lack the will or inclination to restrain themselves.

o At the outset of the twentieth century, the Madura District held a reputation ‘‘from a police point of view [as] by far the heaviest and most troublesome in the [Madras] presidency.’’≤∑ Much of this was due to cattle theft in the region, a crime largely attributed to Kallar men. Repeated e√orts to combat cattle rustling proved completely ine√ectual, as perpetrators routinely outran the scattered men of the state. There were no more than fifty-eight police stations and ten outposts dispersed throughout the Madura District countryside, each post responsible for an average of 160 square miles of territory.≤∏ Their detection rates were abysmal, and many of those who were caught by the police easily ab108

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From a stereoscopic image of four Madurai Kallars, 1858. ∫ The British Library Board. Photo 957/69.

landowning castes. The terrible famines of 1876–78 had hit the arid stretches of the kafllfarn¯atfu particularly hard, forcing countless Kallar families to move into these areas in search of livelihood.≥≥ Leading Kallar immigrants often assumed responsibility to watch over the property of a few villages, appointing their own relations as ‘‘deputies’’ to protect each locality. These arrangements were often made through social relationships between particular castes and lineages. In tracts such as Palni and the Cumbum Valley, Kallars established particularly close relations with dominant cultivating castes such as Gounders. District o≈cials reported that leading peasants would often encourage the ‘‘thieving classes’’ to commit o√enses against their own enemies, employing them as ‘‘tools . . . for wreaking their feelings’’ against each other in factional struggles. Violence and thievery among watchmen, in other words, was a calculated social tactic as much as a spontaneous disposition.≥∂ Many British administrators at the close of the nineteenth century derided the Kallar watch as a ritualized form of blackmail, a protection racket forcing cultivators to pay tithes to the very thieves who would ‘‘When the Fence Grazes the Crop’’

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Indian police o≈cers, 1947. Among them is M. Krishna Murthi, charged specifically with Kallar Reclamation, and E. H. Colebrook’s evidently obedient pet dog. ∫ The British Library Board. Photo 469/15(2).

sconded soon thereafter. Almost one-third of the charge sheets filed by a special party mobilized against Kallar cattle thieves in 1908, for example, were registered as pending because the accused had fled.≤π Failure to detect and deter this class of ‘‘most irritating [and] almost disastrous’’ crimes was cited as a principal rationale for the application of the Criminal Tribes Act to the Piramalai Kallars as a whole in 1918.≤∫ A more general reason, as I noted earlier, was their supposed pursuit of pleasure through theft. By 1921, the names and fingerprints of 23,642 Kallar men belonging to 848 villages of the Madura District were registered on local police station rolls.≤Ω Fresh names were added annually, while a small number were removed each year on evidence of ‘‘good conduct.’’ The number of registered Kallars peaked at 39,056 in 1932, representing well over half of those subject to the Criminal Tribes Act throughout the Madras Presidency.≥≠ Those registered under section 10(1)(b) of the act could not leave their ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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villages for any reason between sunrise and sunset without first acquiring a written passport, be it to work, trade, or simply visit relatives. A much smaller number registered in addition under section 10(1)(a) were required to report for a roll call every night at the nearest police station at both 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.—most of these men likely spent each night sleeping as best they could in stationhouse doorways rather than trekking several miles twice nightly. At the same time, while state o≈cials often charged the women of Kallar households with aiding and encouraging the criminality of Kallar men, at no point were any Piramalai Kallar women registered under the act. The Criminal Tribes Act was held in terrorem over the Kallar villages of the Madura District, to use the Latin phrasing of a district o≈cial central to the endeavor.≥∞ Every adult male was fingerprinted and registered as a ‘‘possibly active criminal,’’ regardless of whether or not he had been convicted, imprisoned, or even fined for previous infractions.≥≤ Each of these men was subject to the spatial restrictions of 10(1)(b). The more restrictive provisions of 10(1)(a) were reserved as a threat to be imposed on the men of uncooperative or recalcitrant villages. Special panchayats or village councils were constituted in each village to manage the operation of the act, along with other collective reforms under the rubric of ‘‘Kallar Reclamation,’’ a subject I will discuss in further detail in the following chapter. Punitive jails, compulsory schools, army regiments, rural cooperatives, plantation labor colonies, and Kallar villages themselves formed a ‘‘carceral archipelago’’ within which each and every Kallar man, woman, and child could be confined if necessary.≥≥ No evidence of guilt justified these extraordinarily invasive measures. The Criminal Tribes Act punished tendencies rather than crimes, submitting the vagaries of unrestrained inclination to the full force of legal violence. One district o≈cial described the act in 1931 as a ‘‘giving of the benefits’’ combined with a ‘‘shaking of the big stick,’’ echoing the carrots and canes with which proverbial mules are goaded.≥∂ Its policing measures were directed toward those inherited dispositions that tested any faith in the ‘‘humanizing influences’’ of British rule.≥∑ They imposed certain ‘‘discomforts’’ upon the Kallars ‘‘to induce them to give up theft of their own accord.’’≥∏ Those who demonstrated individual responsibility for their own criminal inclinations—or collective responsibility for those of their neighbors and kin—would earn a certain measure of 110

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freedom and relief from the restrictions of the act.≥π But those who refused to cooperate in this inculcation of virtue would be governed solely by the hazards of their instincts. The rationale for the Criminal Tribes Act reflected the deep paradoxes of colonial liberalism, radically depriving its subjects of freedom in order to cultivate an autonomous exercise of moral restraint. And here too, as elsewhere, this politics of restraint earned a reputation for sustaining instead an unrestrained indulgence in violence. On many occasions between the 1920s and the 1940s, Kallar caste leaders and community representatives complained of rampant extortion, degradation, and abuse at the hands of police personnel. ‘‘In ninety cases out of [one] hundred the poor registered members live a life of abject cowering fear, always dreading some charge or other, always the object of unjust suspicion, always the scapegoat of some capricious V[illage] M[agistrate] or Police O≈cer,’’ one petition to the governor of Madras argued in 1944.≥∫ On the eve of Indian independence in 1947, native delegates to the Madras Legislative Assembly repealed the Criminal Tribes Act not for having successfully humanized its targets, but rather for having reduced the state and its own o≈cers to the ‘‘monstrous’’ and ‘‘inhuman’’ cruelty of animals.≥Ω The moral evolution of an independent nation would need to be fostered by other exercises in restraint.

o An evolutionary understanding of moral nature underpinned the criminology of late colonial India. But reasoning in relation to an imagined arc of natural and moral progress was not a penchant of Europe alone. Recall Thomas Huxley’s lecture on evolution and ethics at Oxford University in 1893. In his prolegomena to this address, Huxley wrote that as early as two millennia ago, the philosophers of ancient India and Greece had discovered in ‘‘evolution’’ the truth of cosmic nature. India had its own name, he suggested, for the hotly contested theory that characteristics acquired over a lifetime could be transmitted onward by heredity. Identified in Europe with the zoological work of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, he wrote, the sages of India had called it karma. For Huxley, modern thought was built upon the base established by these ancient thinkers who had first contemplated ‘‘the heroic childhood of our race’’ and the possibility of its ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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progress over generations.∂≠ While the evolution of nature may have tended toward diversity, the ethical development of the human being appeared to have a single endpoint. Let us also follow Huxley’s imaginative leap to India but overstep the mark just slightly. We are on the trail of animals—and ethics—unseen by the Victorian naturalist. Flight and Restraint of the Bestial Heart The police constable Adithan broke suddenly and surprisingly into song early one morning in the midst of a conversation at the Gudalur South Police Station: ‘‘If the thief himself fails to look and reform / thievery cannot be eradicated.’’ He drew these lines from a popular song in the Tamil film hit Thirudathe (Don’t steal) of 1961 starring M. G. Ramachandran as a repentant young thief. Adithan and I were chatting across a green steel desk in the narrow stationhouse hall. His words were meant to shed light on the nature of the people about whom I was writing, individuals who also fell within his o≈cial jurisdiction. The thick and bespectacled senior constable described the village of K. G. Patti as a ‘‘criminal center’’ and declared its residents less than human. ‘‘They are without human quality,’’ the constable insisted—‘‘they will never ever reform.’’ Although he did not mention them by name, it was clear that he had Kallar castefolk in mind. What was this specifically human quality that promised a capacity for reform? There were no doubt traces here of a hereditary state criminology and its attribution of an animal quality to a particular caste of people. But something else was also at stake in the constable’s bestial allusion. A thief had to examine himself and his own conduct in order to reform, claimed the lines from the film that Adithan had quoted: this was a personal task to which one had to submit oneself. The quality of selfhood that this reflexive engagement demanded was subtly marked by the way in which the constable described the nature of local crimes: cafttfattil afta˙nk¯ata kuhrrh a˙nkafl or ‘‘o√ences unbound by law’’—that is, crimes that would not bend, yield, or submit to the classificatory boundaries of the law itself. There was something a bit baroque in this image of acts so criminal that they defied containment by the very penal categories of the law itself. Nevertheless, the claim gestured obliquely toward the essential problem by dwelling on the afta˙nk¯amai or ‘‘unrestrainedness’’ of certain 112

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Tamil magazine article on fingerprinting. The upturned moustache on face and thumb invite the reader to identify this thief as Kallar or Thevar by caste, and evoke colloquial recollections today of the Criminal Tribes Act as a ‘‘Fingerprint Law.’’ Kumudan, 10 September 2001.

acts: Adithan was speaking of humanness as a moral quality nurtured by a restrained exercise of desire. The quality of aftakkam or restraint has long won praise in the Tamil country as an essential virtue. ‘‘Guard your restraint as you would a thing / there is no greater wealth [than this] for life,’’ advised the early medieval Tirukkuhral in one of ten couplets on the subject of ‘‘The Possession of Restraint.’’ These couplets concerned how ‘‘to become one whose body, speech, and heart submit without going along a bad path,’’ wrote the fourteenth-century commentator Parimelalakar.∂∞ The movement through space evoked by this commentary is more than metaphorical and ought to be understood to mark the itinerancy of the senses: the way in which bodily organs of sense have been said for centuries by various schools of Indian thought to reach out restlessly toward a fleeting succession of worldly objects of desire.∂≤ From this vantage point, the manacu— the heart or mind—emerges as the interior faculty of selfhood responsible for guiding and governing the fickle mobility of the senses: it is the preeminent instrument, in other words, with which people struggle with ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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and work upon their sensual tastes and wants.∂≥ In order to work e√ectively in this restraint of the senses, the heart too must be restrained in its own desires. And as we shall see, animal nature provides a crucial means of reflecting on the di≈cult nature of this heart—both docile and stubborn, both e√ective at restraint and elusive in itself. ‘‘A youth’s restraint [alone is] restraint,’’ suggests one of the verses of the seventh-century N¯alaftiy¯ar, likening this quality to the matchless generosity of the poor and the incomparable patience of the strong.∂∂ Each of these qualities—restraint, generosity, patience—represents a virtue only because its exercise defies the nature or disposition one might otherwise expect of the vigorous, the destitute, and the powerful in turn. The form of reasoning at work in this early medieval Tamil verse betrays the influence of renunciation as a philosophical and practical orientation of life in India: the many forms of ascetic practice through which adherents of diverse schools, sects, and faiths have sought to free themselves from the su√erings of worldly struggle. But this verse also bears a certain striking resemblance to the specific way in which Immanuel Kant had sketched the character of moral deeds in eighteenth-century Europe: as actions against inclination and circumstance, like the honesty with which a merchant may limit prices even in times of high demand.∂∑ How then might we di√erentiate a Tamil ethics of restraint from the modern European themes we have considered thus far? The virtues in India have long been conceived as cultivable dispositions or qualities of selfhood, as with the classical Aristotelian tradition in the West. While modern thinkers such as Kant also stressed the importance of cultivating feelings and inclinations to act in accord with duty, they broke with the classical tradition in characterizing moral life as a dark struggle to control the essential shortcomings of human nature.∂∏ Works on virtue in south India too have praised for centuries those who establish a critical and reflexive distance from their own customary inclinations. The commentator Parimelalakar, for example, had found restraint only among those capable of seeing their own faults with the same clear vision that they train upon the faults of others. At the same time, however, there are a few crucial distinctions to be drawn. Tamil didactic literatures have generally dwelt upon the exemplary conduct of superior individuals and social classes rather than the universal potential of all 114

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human beings; they have often directed attention to virtuous manners, habits, and everyday acts rather than to the moral quality of abstract duties; and they have grounded imperatives to act morally in the practical experience of worldly consequence rather than in a rational understanding of moral law.∂π Consider, for example, thievishness as a problem of moral restraint in south India. Moral and religious literatures in Tamil identify theft with a state of unrestrained desire and sensual indulgence. Ten couplets on kafllfa¯ mai or the ‘‘Avoidance of Theft’’ in the Tirukkuhral describe stealing as an amorous habit contrary to a life of virtue. ‘‘Those with an abiding love for theft / will not conduct themselves with measure,’’ one of these verses maintains.∂∫ If this text represents theft as a momentary capitulation to the senses, other works present these bodily faculties themselves as thievish in their very nature. The Tirumantiram, one of the earliest Saiva devotional texts in Tamil, describes the senses as kafllfar bandits lurking within a wide forest and threatening to waylay the soul on its passage toward oneness with the deity Siva.∂Ω More recent genres of Tamil literature such as the nonf f ti n¯atfakam or ‘‘cripple plays’’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries chronicle the misadventures of inveterate thieves who squander their wealth in pursuit of sensual pleasure. Each of these instances suggests that those who bow to their senses are most susceptible to thievishness; that those who fail to heed the consequences of their actions are most likely to yield to such pursuits; and that one may work upon and improve the customs of one’s own life as a means of avoiding this danger. Not all living beings, of course, are both willing and able to engage in such moral practices of restraint. Humanness itself has long been understood in the Tamil country as a form of existence distinguished by the presence of the heart as a faculty of self-restraint. The classical Tamil grammar Tolk¯appiyam, for example, identifies the manam h (heart or mind) as the sixth and unique sensory organ distinguishing humans from other forms of life. Lest we confuse this classification with the verities of modern biology, we ought to remember that the text goes on to class m¯akkafl —those lacking the ability to discriminate among their desires—among the beasts and other beings whose senses numbered no more than five.∑≠ Tamils today draw the line between proper humans and ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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other living beings in various ways. Many of these contemporary understandings take the work of the heart or mind in restraining and controlling the wandering senses as essential to this distinction. It is in relation to these ideas that a local imagination of the relationship between animal nature and thievish conduct emerges, one that may be counterpoised to the state criminology I have discussed thus far. Animals—rats, dogs, boar, deer, monkeys, crows, parakeets, ants, and endless others—are indeed the most regular and familiar thieves of the cultivated countryside, lifting fruit from trees, grain from fields, and even cooked food from unguarded hearths. But the association between animals and thievery in the Tamil country is a matter of moral judgment as well as habitual practice. On a landscape given over to human preoccupations, animals must take in stealth, unknown and untitled to what they have seized. Theirs is a deceit born of bodily want and need. Thieving may therefore be understood here as an animal mode of conduct insofar as it gives in to the tugs of sensual desire. ‘‘The life of the thief leaves the belly always boiling,’’ I was told in the Cumbum Valley. The adage conveys an anxiety over being discovered or captured in an act of theft, but also the restlessness of the hunger driving such conduct. Animals yield persuasive images of human failing in the Tamil country insofar as their sensual impulses may be taken as roving and unrestrained. These living beings may be understood to steal because they lack the virtue of restraint, but it is also the case that people may learn what it means to be a proper human being by struggling in the task of engaging, managing, and living with such creatures. After all, when considered more closely by species, type, and even individual, the nature attributed to each animal grows far more complex. In what follows, I explore three distinct animal allegories for thievish conduct in the Cumbum Valley. Each of these figures draws from both rich traditions of Indian thought and deep histories of everyday practice in order to make a particular argument concerning the moral nature of thieves. In what ways have Kallar castefolk come to relate themselves to an ethics of restraint? I want to suggest that grappling with one’s own animal nature provides one important means of endowing oneself with moral quality. But everything turns, as we shall see, on the kind of being one has in mind and at hand—on whether the concerned creature may be understood as rival, friend, or muse. 116

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Thieving Bull ‘‘Aren’t the police those who graze men?’’ —retired constable v. perumal, k. g. patti

Slightly after dawn one cool October morning, I found Logandurai driving his pair of plough bulls along the main road through K. G. Patti. He had joined a long train of bullock teams trundling toward the paddy fields to the distant southwest: the transplantation season was underway, and the ploughmen had been hired to blend and level the wet mire of the fields for tender seedlings of rice. As we followed behind his pair of bulls, Logandurai taught me some of the calls with which he spoke to these animals: tfluk tfluk for them to walk, aftiy¯e! to drive them forward quickly, h¯a! for them to stop. Oxen would not respond to such commands to work, he told me, unless they had the will to do so. A good ox could be described as just that: ‘‘good.’’ But like other cultivators and ploughmen in the region, my friend reserved for a bad ox the startling epithet kaflav¯ani f or ‘‘thievish.’’ Thievish oxen were lazy animals that wished to eat without toil, he explained. A thievish bovine might steal into a field or orchard to nibble at ripening crops rather than ambling as far as a forest or pasture. And on the ploughing fields, a thievish ox would toss its neck repeatedly to shake o√ its yoke, Logandurai told me, or just lie immobile in the mud without getting up to pull. Many ploughmen and herdsmen had insisted to me that nothing could be done with such an animal—the butcher shops in the nearby hills of Kerala were the only appropriate recourse. Logandurai, however, avowed that one could subject such beasts to reform. A man might change only as a result of his own volition, he conceded, citing the example of the contrite thief in the film Thirudathe (Don’t steal). But kaflav¯ani f oxen could be worked on and reformed by human cultivators. One could light a fire to the hindquarters of a lazy animal that refused to move. And cattle that roamed willfully could be restrained with a konf f ti kafttfai—a stick dangling between the forelegs from a wooden block placed around the neck of the animal, discouraging it from running quickly. These were exceptional measures. Thievishness in a bovine, Logandurai insisted, was largely a matter of habit and habituation. Working oxen were accustomed to working. Pilfering cattle were accustomed to feeding ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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on ripening crops. As we followed a long morning of ploughing in the paddy fields with an afternoon of labors in his banana orchard, Logandurai invoked a relationship between bovine customs and the customs of those that tended them. ‘‘Some men will just let their cattle graze on the crops of others. But my oxen never act thievishly . . .’’ I was and still remain intrigued by this image of criminal oxen, which I learned was ubiquitous among those who handled these animals in the region. It depicted animal misconduct in the moral terms of the most challenging problem of government here, and it presented the agrarian landscape as one of varied temptations to stray: ripe crops close at hand, cool wet mud, the comfort of a body at rest, and so on. In what sense could such bovine misconduct be described as particularly thievish in nature? To begin, it is important to note that the ‘‘thievishness’’ at stake in the Tamil term kaflav¯ani f is a capacity for cunning, guile, or deceit. Both kaflav¯ani f and kafllfa—two words that share a common root—find use as adjectives to describe conduct of a particularly deceptive nature. Kafllfa identifies a range of illicit scenarios: a kafllfa vote is a forged ballot, a kafllfa note is counterfeit currency, kafllfa k¯atal a clandestine love a√air, and kafllfa purufsanh a secret male lover. Kaflav¯ani f may also be put to work in similar fashion. A ploughman turning widely between furrows and neglecting to push his ploughshare deep enough into the soil, for example, may be accused of perpetrating a kaflav¯ani f uflavu: that is, a thievish ploughing. The deceit particular to a thieving bull largely concerns where and how it is grazed—the customary circuits through which it is led and managed. In past decades, large herds of livestock would roam with scant supervision over the variegated agrarian terrain of the valley. But encroachments on common land, restrictions on forest use, and the proliferation of fenced orchards have left no more than spotty fallows for itinerant herds. Chemical fertilizers and tractors fitted out with disc and rotor blades have also displaced most oxen from their crucial role in the agrarian economy. Plough bulls and dairy animals are now largely grazed in the restricted spaces of riverbanks, roadsides, and orchards, or reared on special diets in domestic courtyards. Those animals still led through cultivated landscapes, however, prove flashpoints of tension when standing crops are compromised. Livestock are sometimes even deliberately unleashed on ripening fields in the event of personal feuds or episodes of 118

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collective violence between castes. The figure of the thieving bull gestures toward such histories of pastoral depredation. The image also bears an additional resonance, however, one that concerns not the malice or neglect of a herdsman but the adamant will of the animal itself. Bulls are thievish insofar as they seek pleasure over labor, all the while resisting restraint. There are many antecedents to this imagination of an unruly bovine nature within the archive of Tamil literary tradition. A verse from the sixth-century Tirumantiram, for example, one of the earliest of the Tamil Saiva texts, likens the senses within the self to errant cows: In the house of the seer there are five milk cows— without a grazer they wander frenzied. If with a grazer their fury subsides, the seer’s five cows will gush forth with milk.∑∞

The five milk cows in this poem represent the five sense organs, which drift furiously and uselessly without the guiding sta√ of the deity Siva. In this literary topography of the heart—for which the interior space of the house serves as an allegory—the perfection of an animal nature requires the careful attentions of a divine herdsman. These creatures embody virtue and goodness insofar as they submit their passions to restraint. In the Cumbum Valley as in most of India, the ploughing of fields is generally exercised as an exclusively male task. The control of bulls also serves therefore as an arena for the assertion of masculinity. One Tamil proverb in particular—‘‘A single blow [is enough] for a good ox, a single word [is enough] for a devoted wife’’—conveys the ideologies of gender and power circulating through practices of bovine discipline. At the same time, however, precisely because of their own maleness, the resistance of bulls to such restraint also allows for the celebration of a virile sovereignty shared between man and animal. Ploughing expeditions, oxen races, and jallikafttfu contests—a popular sport in which young men compete to bring down bucking bulls and seize the bundles of coins fastened to their horns—serve as arenas for such playful association. Several wildly popular Tamil films of recent decades—such as Murattu Kalai (Rough bull) of 1980 starring the action hero Rajnikanth—identify the virility of such contestants with the defiant indiscipline of the bulls ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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Young men wrestle with a resistant bull in a jallikafttfu contest held during the M¯atata u Pongal festival in K.G. Patti village, January 2002. Photograph by author.

they tame. From the vantage point of these games, thievishness is the sign of a will unbent and still unbound by tactics of policing.

o In colonial times, the arrival of police parties on horseback into the Cumbum Valley sent droves of men flying into the hills to evade their reach. Inveterate Kallar rogues of those earlier years are recalled today as canf f tiyar m¯atfu, ‘‘obstinate bulls’’ who refused to bow to the yoke of another. Chokkar Vellaiyan, a notorious outlaw hailing from the Cumbum Valley village of K. M. Patti, was one such man. ‘‘He was a man of erect character,’’ his aging grandson Ponnu Thevar told me with a chuckle and an unmistakable measure of pride: there was no one that the man had bowed down toward in fear. Ponnu Thevar insisted that his grandfather was the only man to challenge the constables who came regularly to the village in order to confirm the presence of all Kallar men registered on the rolls of the Criminal Tribes Act. His tales of such encounters gave me a vivid glimpse of how subjects of the act may have struggled with its dictates. 120

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‘‘Maya Thevan?’’ the constable would call into the crowd of assembled men. ‘‘Present !’’ the man would reply promptly and loudly to avoid a caning. ‘‘OK . . . Chinnasamy?’’ ‘‘Present !’’ the reply would come. ‘‘Right. Karuppa Thevan?’’ he would call, and on it would go until Chokkar Vellaiyan’s name was called. ‘‘Present, constable!’’ this man would call out from a full furlong away, hidden in the darkness, refusing to approach any closer: ‘‘I cannot come. Just put my name down.’’ Chokkar Vellaiyan is said to have spent his days and nights in the forests, sleeping in dry streambeds and returning to his house in the village only to eat his meals. He was finally caught trying to melt down a golden statue he had pilfered from a nearby temple. ‘‘Chokkar Vellaya, have you gotten stuck this time? Grab him!’’ the commanding o≈cer was to have ordered. They caught hold of him then, Ponnu Thevar told me, drawing the narrative to a close, and severed his Achilles tendons to stop him from running. Chokkar Vellaiyan was only one of many men deliberately hobbled as a disciplinary measure by subordinate native o≈cers in the colonial constabulary.∑≤ Seen in retrospect, the cruel tactic bears a remarkable resemblance to the ploughman’s wooden konf f ti kafttfai dangling between the legs of an impatient ox. Colonial police in the Tamil countryside, one might suggest, handled Kallar men as beings akin to thieving bulls. Their practices may indeed be understood as a form of what Michel Foucault has described as a ‘‘pastoral’’ mode of power: the government and policing of a population of human subjects, that is, modeled on the relationship between a figurative shepherd and the individual members of a flock. At the same time, however, the quality of defiance shared by thieving bulls and men alike also suggests that the pastoral tending of such bodies is best understood as an open relationship of ‘‘permanent provocation’’ on both sides, rather than a one-sided application of unremitting force.∑≥ The Tamil film Thirudathe (Don’t steal) happened to be playing in grainy black-and-white on a tea stall television in K. G. Patti one afternoon, for example, when a young Kallar acquaintance came walking by. He had just been released from a few days of detention at the local jail, charged by the Forest Department with smuggling sandalwood from the nearby Meghamalai hills. The o≈cers had caught hold of him at home, he told me. But if he and his companions were out in the forest, he boasted, they would have quickly escaped from their pursuers—‘‘we ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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would have leapt and run away like animals.’’ Kallar men and women on the margins of the agrarian economy often denounced police constables as ‘‘thieves’’ in their own right, proudly recounting the animal vigor with which they had outrun these putative guardians. As another young smuggler in the village bragged to me with a laugh one evening, ‘‘I run so fast that even the police cannot catch me.’’ His friends celebrate his speed with a nickname that might best be translated as ‘‘royal bull.’’ An ongoing tension between the moral force of government and the adamant nature of a resistant will best explains how the image of the thieving bull circulates in the Cumbum Valley today: as a description of bovine excess, but also as an essential emblem of Kallar resistance to the historical strictures of the Criminal Tribes Act as well as more contemporary forms of policing. Somewhat like the ethos of savagery I discussed in the first chapter, the adamant qualities of the thieving bull support an ethics of unrestraint counter to the moral projects of the state. Here as elsewhere in India today, police hold little in the way of moral authority, as o≈cers of the law are deemed more likely to prey on their own wards than to lead them toward any superior means of livelihood. Judged against the misdeeds of an inhumane state apparatus—both in the past and in the present—thievery itself may come to be admired for its defiance of restraint.

o The image of the thieving bull conveys a masculine animal willing to defy the many boundaries of the social order. Another one of these limits is the t¯ali or marital cord, tied by the groom around the neck of the bride at the most auspicious moment of each Tamil wedding. Married women in the Cumbum Valley often described this cord to me as a mufl v¯eli or a ‘‘thorny fence’’ beyond which women should not step. More often than not, they complained at the same time of their husbands willfully transgressing that very boundary. In an afternoon spent in the shade of a stately mango tree, two elderly Kallar women I knew quite well shared ribald tales of amorous misadventures, often featuring their own philandering spouses. Both insisted that their husbands would hack them to pieces if they ever suspected these women of the very deceits they pur122

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sued themselves. ‘‘That thieving ox, it will graze in ten fields and then come [back, but] that honest ox, it will graze in just one field and come [back] on its own,’’ Virumayi amm¯a said with a wry snort of resignation. The thieving bull makes excusable among men that which remains unforgivable among women. Other animals, as we shall see, are better suited to elicit wider sympathies—even with respect to their thievishness. Ripe Field Sparrow K. G. Patti 13.8.02 Anand— My son who came hungry, you found ripe fruit that you plucked and ate to relieve your hunger, and then you flew away. Your loving mother, Chillari alias Karupayi

A few of the elder women in the village found it in their hearts to take me as a son. They reminded me that I had wandered into this place with a kind of hunger, and that I would no doubt leave again when that need was satisfied. Between mothers and their children, the bonds of kinship were frail and ephemeral. Iswari amm¯a would at times recite the lines of one particular poem from Viv¯eka Cint¯amani, f a well-known anthology of moral and didactic verse, as a way of making sense of this frailty: If the banyan yields flowers and fruit unripe then nourishing, all the flocks of birds make it their home, and youths come by the crore to pay their respects—but if the source of the banyan leaves falls, are there any who will come to stay?∑∂

Parakeets would linger in one place only as long as they could feed and then would fly away, Iswari amm¯a explained to me. Family ties also were closest in times of prosperity. She complained herself of being an aging mother abandoned when she had little left to give: no agricultural labor for days, moneylenders at her heels, her children indi√erent to her state. But she would also summon up these lines more sympathetically to ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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describe the condition of all those forced to find means of livelihood wherever they could. She had lately been traveling by bus to join weeding parties in another village. And her sons and their wives had spent much of the last year making clandestine expeditions to gather cardamom pods and other saleable goods from defunct estates up in the mountains. They were like parakeets dancing on distant branches, she said, calling out with evidence of ripe fruit discovered: ‘‘Like this, like these parakeets, man’s nature, Ananda.’’ The allusion to the nature of avifauna at the heart of Iswari amm¯a ’s verse both laments and excuses the reliance of certain beings upon the bounty of others. Birds—crows, sparrows, parakeets, egrets, and so on— are some of the smallest thieves of the cultivated countryside. In the early mornings and late afternoons, young boys may often be spied on small platforms atop canopies of grapes and other orchard vines growing in the Cumbum Valley, slingshots in hand to chase away flocks of petty bandits. The rural depredations of these creatures are often featured in field songs and other genres of Tamil verse as allegories for clandestine and illicit a√airs.∑∑ Such verses, however, take pilfered crops and foliage as a markedly disarming image of stolen love: thieving pigeons, sparrows, and other creatures manage nonetheless to elicit some sympathy because their injuries are inflicted under the cover of insignificance. In the following pages, I turn to other ways in which the image of birds stealing from cultivated fields may be enlisted to sketch theft as a forgivable o√ense. Simply put, for poorer Kallar men and women in the Cumbum Valley, an avian hunger excuses thievery born of need.

o One January morning I found Sivan, Ayyappan, and a few other men lounging about on the stoop of ‘‘Ganja’’ Cheran’s house with nowhere else to go. The threat of betrayal, Sivan complained, made it increasingly di≈cult for the landless men and women of the village to pursue a clandestine livelihood in the forest reserves of the surrounding mountains. What new means of survival could they devise? Several years ago, Sivan was one among four vanloads of men who would travel regularly from the Cumbum Valley to Pollachi—several hundred kilometers to the 124

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north—to hack out blocks of sandalwood from the mountains. He met men who had come there from as far away as Chennai and Salem when they heard that there was money to be made. ‘‘We are all viflaiñca k¯atftfu kuruvi,’’ he told me, sparrows searching out ripe fields to graze. Over the next few months, I came to recognize this ‘‘ripe field sparrow’’ as a common euphemism in poor and landless Kallar households for the itinerant and petty poacher of things. The men and women of these households often identified themselves as appir¯ani: f feeble, harm∑∏ less, and undesigning beings. The image of the sparrow represented their pilfering in a sympathetic light, as an inconsequential and forgivable act of hunger, as a minor injury propelled by need. Ripe field sparrows were those who did not have enough to keep them in place, Ayyappan went on to explain that morning. Land or cash reserves could be held in hand as capital, like a spot of yesterday’s buttermilk with which today’s milk could be soured. But those who held nothing beyond their daily necessities had to run from place to place wherever there was work to be found: ‘‘just like that to the forests, like the crows,’’ he added. Piramalai Kallars first came to the Cumbum Valley like such sparrows or crows, I was sometimes told, fleeing famine in the arid stretches to the east. Gounders, Vellalars, Chettiars, and other cultivators here struggled for decades to guard their fields against the nocturnal raids of those landless and desperate Kallars willing to take from ripening fields and grain heaps. Such depredations had long since ceased in K. G. Patti, due in no small part to the tremendous variety of valuable goods to be culled from the slopes of the Western Ghats looming over the village. Gathering bundles of cane and blocks of sandalwood; stripping trees of aromatic bark; felling teak, rosewood, and other prized hardwoods; hunting fauna such as deer, boar, and elephants; clearing small plots of canopied forest for montane ganja plantations: each of these illicit operations in the forest reserves surrounding the village was described as having had its own past ‘‘season’’ of predominance. These were forest exploits dominated for the most part by Piramalai Kallar households: like the notorious Tamil forest brigand Veerappan, it was widely said, these castefolk alone had the dil or ‘‘heart’’ to face down foresters and elephants alike most boldly. And for many of these households in the years that I came to know them, more than anything else it was cardamom season. ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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For much of the twentieth century, wealthy cultivators in the region had enjoyed renewable leases on cardamom estates planted in the high forests on the southeast rim of the Cumbum Valley. Thousands of laborers from plains villages such as K. G. Patti had been hired each year to maintain and harvest the spice pods grown on five hundred acres of forest land, until a new conservation policy in the 1990s forced a halt to these leases. Ordered to vacate their estates in 1998, the wealthy lessees instead brokered a novel compromise with local forest o≈cials to continue cultivating these tracts on a secret basis. On paper, the estates had been closed down and evacuated, while on the ground, cultivators parceled out one-third of each harvest as tithe to local foresters in exchange for their quiet cooperation. News of this illicit collusion eventually leaked to precipitate a statewide scandal. A sudden truckload of forest o≈cers forced the lessees and laborers to vacate the estates on 10 January 2001, with padlocks fixed immediately on the many buildings. Physical traces of the clandestine plantations now had to be erased. And in the campaign of orchestrated ruin that followed, the ‘‘ripe field sparrows’’ of K. G. Patti gained both a central role and a passing means of livelihood. The cardamom cultivator T. V. M. Kartikeyan related some of these events to me one morning as we sat on a pair of plush velour sofas. A prosperous heir to one of the leading Gounder lineages of Gudalur, he was closely involved in the legal struggle against the evictions. He complained that local forest o≈cers were colluding with ‘‘enemies of society’’ in the pillaging of estate property. ‘‘They come and go as they please . . . as though we had left the doors of our own houses open to thieves,’’ he suggested. He was no more specific, but I knew where his finger was pointed. For well over a year, goods from the abandoned estates had been carried down various forest paths to be hidden away in the Kallar quarter of K. G. Patti. Ripe pods of valuable high-grade green cardamom were the first things to be plucked, sold for months to local traders for up to Rs.500 per kilogram. When these grew scarce, the pilferers turned their attention first to inferior and unripe cardamom pods, and then to whatever else that could be traded for cash: lacquered beds, benches, and desks; wooden planks and slats; sturdy door and window frames; corrugated sheets of tin roofing; industrial stoves; disassembled oil motors; even pieces of bathroom porcelain. As these mountain foragers hit local 126

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A cardamom estate house fallen prey to wild elephants and ripe field sparrows. Photograph by author.

bazaars flush with Rs.100 notes, others in the village observed acidly that everyone on the ‘‘Eastern Street’’ appeared to be building proper mortared houses these days. ‘‘Eastern Street’’ was a euphemism for the poorer Kallar quarter, closest to the edge of the mountains. More prosperous households both Kallar and otherwise sco√ed distastefully at the expeditions as instances of theft. But most of those who had returned from the estates contested this scornful assessment. Inasmuch as they had to make their way through the forest unseen by certain o≈cers—¯otf i ofliñcu, that is, ‘‘running and hiding’’—the practice could be construed as thievish. But property rights on the forsaken plantations had become obscure and open to conflicting interpretations. Some insisted that they were now government property that ‘‘anyone could eat.’’ Others argued that the estates had become ‘‘guard-watcher’’ property, the private keep of local o≈cers. Indeed, two local guards were reportedly willing to accept Rs.100 from anyone who would pay for the right to glean pods and furnishings unmolested. Many no doubt sought to steal away unseen, but the more cautious could be accommodated in such ways. In any case, as the friends and kin of these gleaners often told me, they went only out of hunger. ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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Iswari amm¯a ’s eldest son, Kandasamy, was one of the last to take up this trade in the village. A massive man with a heart of equally generous proportions, he had spent most of his life felling and hauling hardwood trunks from the surrounding forests that others could not have lifted on their own. He and his family had prospered little from these travails, and they lived still under a thatched roof in a mud-walled house. When they had turned to taking from the cardamom estates, all the most valuable things were already gone—‘‘like one who made o√ with just a mortar stone, when all of Madurai was being looted,’’ he laughed and said. On the eve of one of these expeditions to these hills, Kandasamy had promised to o√er his hair to a local hilltop deity if he and his wife had returned home safely. They had endured cunning leeches, midnight rains, and sudden patrols, but they had made their way back with both cardamom and other goods for sale. The deity himself would excuse such clandestine attempts to ward o√ hunger, Kandasamy told me. And one of his widowed aunts reached for an analogy to make sense of such forgiveness: take a few sheaves from one corner of someone else’s field, she said, and many more would ripen somewhere else. Such were the convictions of a sparrow.

o Sparrows and parakeets are rather small thieves. As they are shooed easily away only to return at an unseen moment, the e√ects of their depredations are di≈cult to see and measure. The ‘‘ripe field sparrow’’ o√ers an image of allowable pilferage to those who follow its lead. Most Piramalai Kallar men and women in the contemporary Cumbum Valley consider the theft of things a soiled trade and a relic of a savage past. But those who have little choice but to indulge in such practices today invoke this relatively harmless avian predator in order to evade the burden of condemnation. The figure allows for a tenuous reconciliation of social injunction and personal need under conditions of rural inequality and ongoing hardship. ‘‘We were only picking what would otherwise be eaten by toads,’’ those who raided the cardamom estates often insisted: as long as daily necessities and sheer survival were at stake, there was nothing wrong in minor takings unseen. Such assertions of animal hunger recast rural property as an element of moral economy and rightful seizure.∑π 128

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Subsisting on the margins of the cultivated landscape, they had done no more than to graze on the edges of what had o√ered itself to them. For those who imagine petty thievery in this light, such practices may not fully foreclose a life of virtue inasmuch as they are engaged with conscience, restraint, and a sense of necessary limits. Kandasamy himself, lingering in the village bazaar one evening after another weeklong trip to the cardamom estates, took pains to distinguish his own ‘‘clandestine trade’’ from more serious crimes like the tra≈cking of ganja or heroin. ‘‘The wrong is a small wrong. We can do small wrongs even though we know that they are wrong. We should not do big wrongs, no?’’ What struck me most was not what he said then but how he said it, his deep voice rising with a mischievous smile and a high squeaky pitch for the Tamil word cihru or ‘‘small,’’ all the more surprising when juxtaposed against his barrel chest and towering stature. I do not know whether this lumberman might have imagined himself at that moment as the small creature that his voice had conjured. But it was abundantly clear nonetheless that although he had just traversed a ‘‘crooked path’’ to wealth, he could still speak in all seriousness of being a good man with a good name. Small transgressions would find forgiveness, at least with respect to pilfered things. It was ultimately not in the matter of stolen plants, but rather in the matter of stolen love, as we shall see, that restraint would emerge most forcefully as an ethical practice of self-reform among Kallar castefolk in modern times. Monkey Hearts in Love Discovering that I roamed about driving my monkey heart to dance, Lord did you have your foes the thievish monkeys of the heart drive me? The lowest I became, I can bear it no longer. —ramalinga adigal, nineteenth-century tamil saint ∑∫

In the early twentieth century, colonial o≈cials diagnosed romance as one spur to delinquency among Kallar males. ‘‘The successful criminal is a hero,’’ a superintendent of police observed in 1921: young Kallar women were said to swoon most readily over proven thieves.∑Ω However, currents ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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of social reform circulating within the Kallar community at the same time identified a far closer relationship between thievishness and love. Petitions for redress submitted by Kallars of the Cumbum Valley to their caste headman in the 1920s complained overwhelmingly of illicit liaisons: a√airs between Kallar men and women and those of other castes, unwedded relations with widows, abductions of girls from other castes, pregnancies out of wedlock, incestuous trysts between men and women of agnatic lineages. Such a√airs were often identified in themselves as ‘‘thievish’’ enterprises hastening the ‘‘ruin’’ of the caste. One appeal requested that the Kallar caste headman force a Gudalur Kallar man to leave the Ottar castewoman he had been drinking and sleeping with nightly: ‘‘Only if all those who act like this are chastised,’’ the petitioners wrote, ‘‘will our caste attain reform.’’∏≠ Colonial vectors of moral transformation appear here to have taken an unexpected turn. In 1949, Louis Dumont had observed that Piramalai Kallar men and women divorced and remarried rather freely and frequently when compared with other castes: ‘‘We can almost say that the pattern of several successive marriages is the rule.’’∏∞ Oral narratives today confirm this ethnographic observation: older Kallar men and women described to me with some amusement how it took no more than the symbolic breakage of a piece of paddy straw before a body of witnesses in order to formalize an arrangement for divorce. Caste petitions and other forms of historical evidence suggest that such open proceedings would have been sharply distinguished in the past from the illegality of clandestine and especially intercaste a√airs.∏≤ In the retrospective gaze of collective memory, however, all such amorous engagements appear equally tainted by the moral shortcomings of an uncivil selfhood, the serial relationships of the past easily derided as emblems of a savage time. This is no doubt due in part to the unremitting slogans for marital harmony, fidelity, and moderate productivity circulated by the postcolonial state in India. But one may also identify the consequences here of a form of colonial subjection that treated desire itself as a criminal problem. One evocative proverb in particular—‘‘Even having reared ten children, not enough life for the Kallar [man or woman]’’—conveys the overweening desire with which those of bygone generations are now imagined to have chased after sexual fulfillment. Liaisons and infidelities beyond the bounds of sanctified marriage remain legion, of course, 130

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among Kallar households as with those of other castes. What is most striking among the men and women of this community, however, is the way in which the pursuit of illicit love has come to be identified as one of the most persistent and vexing arenas of an amoral thievishness. In the following pages, I explore some of the cultural legacies in relation to which love might be understood as a form of ‘‘thievish’’ conduct in the Tamil country. But I also turn to the ways in which love itself may be conceived alternatively as an ethical practice of attentive devotion. This ambiguity in the moral quality of love, I will suggest, opens up the interior landscape of the heart as a space of possible restraint, shifting the developmental conceits of the state into an altogether di√erent register. Here we best enlist yet another creature as our guide.

o At the age of forty-seven, the lumberman Kandasamy bought a small herd of goats. He was slightly embarrassed about taking up an occupation generally reserved for old men and women and unlettered boys, but he had gained some bulk over the last few years and climbing into the mountains for wood had become too strenuous. I tagged along with him one July morning as he drove his ewes, kids, and lone ram into the fallow stubble to the south of the village, where women were harvesting sesame on scattered expanses. As we ambled along, I brought up the rash of recently unveiled adulteries in the village. ‘‘A man should not behave just like cattle,’’ Kandasamy observed, likening such excesses to an animal thievishness: ‘‘He should not feel desire for the things of another.’’ These were actually lines from a film song whose name he had forgotten. But then his recollection of yet another suggested how one might learn to restrain such desires: The heart is a monkey, man’s heart is a monkey— Let it leap, let it escape and run, and it will land us in sin, it will shove us into attachment.

‘‘The Heart Is a Monkey’’ was a song I often heard repeated. A monkey could be coached even to ask men for money, Kandasamy went on to ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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explain: ‘‘It must be habituated.’’ He and his wife would not sleep beside each other now that they were sharing their small house with adolescent children. Those who failed to train their own monkey natures by checking the course of their sensual impulses should be tossed aside, he said, like a rotten fruit among a basket of good tomatoes. Monkeys, like rats, pigs, and other ubiquitous animal denizens of the inhabited margins in rural and urban India alike, make ready parables for the worst of human nature. Monkeys are nonetheless unique among such creatures in their closeness to the human, an obvious proximity that also raises the prospect of reform. Modern science curricula in schools have made Darwinian evolution into a popular commonplace in contemporary India. However, these truths jostle uneasily with the echoes of Indian literary and religious tradition, in which monkeys often careen about as figures for an insu≈cient humanity.∏≥ Children, rustics, and savages are often said to betray a monkey nature insofar as they are naïve, mischievous, and undisciplined. The simian leap indexes both a wayward quality of the heart and the possibility of its restraint. Perhaps the most illuminating exposition of this intimate tension between the moral vocabularies of Victorian evolution and religious devotion lies in the film from which Kandasamy drew his simian verse: Manam Oru Kurangu (The heart is a monkey). The film, scripted by the Tamil playwright and critic Cho. Ramaswamy and released in 1966, was a loose adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion of 1912.∏∂ In Shaw’s play, the zealous linguist Henry Higgins transforms the curbside flower vendor Eliza Doolittle into a London high society jewel, largely through the refinement of her English.∏∑ Similarly, in Manam Oru Kurangu, the wealthy socialite Gobinathan teaches the impoverished vegetable hawker Maruthayi to pass herself o√ as a repatriate doctor from London. Tamil Gobi, however, has an antagonist that the Englishman Higgins lacks: Maruthayi’s intended fiancé, Murugesa, a sober rural cultivator and a deep skeptic of the urban rich. Murugesa warns Gobi that the latter is playing idly with a human being, only to be prevented from seeing his would-be wife. The dejected farmer tosses aside a bunch of flowers and his few belongings to wander empty-handed through a desolate landscape with a single question echoing in his head: ‘‘Is the heart a temple or a monkey? Is the heart a temple or a monkey . . .’’ Both are figurative possibilities drawn from the lyrical 132

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Murugesa wanders through a desolate landscape, musing on the monkey nature of the heart. Digital video still, Manam Oru Kurangu (1966).

universe of Tamil devotional verse. As Murugesa walks barefoot through this dry and lonely terrain, he gives voice to the title song of the film in the unmistakable manner of a roaming poet and saint: ‘‘The heart is a monkey, man’s heart is a monkey . . .’’ To address the heart as monkey, as he does, is to open it up as a potential space of ethical engagement. The monkey has long been harnessed in Indian literature as an emblem of an unsteady and inconstant internal disposition. Instances of this usage run far and wide, from Buddhist scripture to Saiva hymns to anthologies of popular tales.∏∏ In the Sanskrit Ramayana of Valmiki, the fickleness of monkey nature has the status of a commonplace. ‘‘Ah, monkey, it is all too clear that you are a monkey. You are too capricious to reach any firm decision,’’ says Hanuman, admonishing his fellow simian Sugreeva.∏π Here as elsewhere, the exceptional devotion of Hanuman himself to the deity Rama serves to emphasize the broader shortcomings of his kind. Devotional hymns in various traditions characterize the human heart as a monkey to challenge the restless and fickle quality of its attachments. In one particularly striking hymn to the deity Murugan, the nineteenthcentury Tamil mystic Ramalinga Adigal chronicles his wrenching realization that far from driving his simian senses to dance like an itinerant performer, he was driven about himself by these very ‘‘thievish monkeys of the heart.’’∏∫ Devoted love proves the only means of restraining and directing a bestial disposition. The image of the animal is essential here as a means of learning to imagine and engage oneself critically. ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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The heart for Ramalinga Adigal was a kafllfa monkey. This imagined a≈nity between thievishness and simian nature has its own lengthy pedigree in Tamil literature. Classical Tamil poets of love often relied on the image of monkeys pilfering from mountainous forests and fields in order to depict clandestine a√airs.∏Ω Such a√airs were literally classified as ‘‘stolen’’ loves, identified as a genre by later commentators with the terse name kaflavu or theft. Union between an unwedded pair was understood as stolen insofar as it transpired unknown: hero and heroine stumbling upon each other by chance in an isolated mountain grove, arranging secret trysts thereafter through the intercession of trusted confidantes, courting the dangers of public gossip, risking the ire of parents and brothers.π≠ The Hindu devotional poets of early medieval times later drew heavily on such classical conventions in singing of their own devotion. Countless numbers of their hymns, cast in the voices of adoring women, hailed deities such as Siva and Krishna as the ‘‘thieves’’ of their lovesick hearts.π∞ They sang of their own hearts as stolen insofar as the deity had possessed them unknown.π≤ Both of these icons—the thievish heart and the stolen heart—cast a long shadow on the imagination and experience of love in contemporary south India. I write not of ‘‘love’’ in all its many senses but specifically of love—the vernacular usage of an English equivalent for the Tamil k¯atal or erotic attachment.π≥ An astonishing span of clandestine desires and deeds transpires under the cover of love in the Cumbum Valley, in earnest passion or as joust and jest: extramarital a√airs between married men and women, consummated in shaded orchards, narrow alleys, and abandoned houses; flirtatious looks exchanged between schoolboys and schoolgirls in classrooms and bus stops, at water pumps and river banks; furtive encounters in the dark between unmarried boys and middleaged male cooks hired to prepare wedding repasts; wedded men rapping quietly at midnight on the doors of their widowed sisters-in-law; pintsized messengers carrying notes and letters between households of a≈nal lineages, sent as ambassadors by slightly older boys and girls plotting to arrange their own legitimate marriages to each other; eloping couples racing unknown to bus stations, distant towns, and mountain estates; young men returning from industrial towns with wives of unknown caste; sexual liaisons between uncles and nieces, landlords and laborers, 134

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teachers and students, clouded all too often by the dark threat of rape or desperation. Young lovers in K. G. Patti had devised many elaborate strategies to force their parents to consent to their weddings, from feigned suicides to deliberate pregnancies. The silhouette of love had grown so threatening in this ‘‘cinema age’’ that many parents admitted to arranging marriages for their children at ever younger ages, seeking to bypass the dangers of adolescence altogether. ‘‘A daughter is like a cucumber,’’ Rasayya Thevar stopped one morning to quip with me in the midst of passing out wedding invitations for his own teenage daughter, Kavita. ‘‘Won’t some boy passing by that field seize her for his thirst?’’ Nearly every one of the married and widowed men and women with whom I spoke agreed that love was unquestionably thievish. Considered either as a field of extramarital liaisons or premarital a√airs, love demanded a particular mode of conduct: running and hiding, meeting in alleys and hollows, always skulking about unseen and unknown, sanctioned neither by parental consent nor by social convention. But many of their children strongly disagreed. I was unable to speak with young women about the subject. Among the young and unmarried men of K. G. Patti, however, I learned that a single-minded devotion in love could surpass its sense of thievishness. And it was here that the monkey returned to demand an ethos of restraint.

o I spent the evening of 14 February 2002—Lover’s Day as it was known there—in the company of young men belonging to the K. G. Patti Youth Club, hearing and sharing various stories of amorous entanglements. The club drew both teenage schoolboys and educated young men in their twenties, many of whom worked by day in the grape orchards while their applications for salaried employment remained pending. Members gathered each night at the club o≈ce to chat, smoke, play cards and chess, and listen to the Tamil and Hindi film song cassettes piled beside the stereo in the corner. This was a space for young and generally unmarried men—their own sisters would scarcely risk tarring their reputations by passing close by. But talk here turned often enough to tales of young ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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women met elsewhere. Prakash and Mahendran came into the o≈ce that evening just a few minutes after I had stopped by, each with unshaven beards of a few days’ growth. ‘‘Love failure,’’ they joked in English—‘‘We both loved the same girl, but she just married someone else.’’π∂ Love of girls was an experience familiar to most boys hanging about the o≈ce that evening. Was such a practice thievish? In the rollicking series of quarrels and conversations that followed this pointed question of mine, most of them objected to its bluntness and pejorative implication. To be sure, there were those who courted young women for time pass—‘‘They make eyes at one girl in this bus stop, at another in the next, watch this one, set up the next, kiss her, then put her aside,’’ a young man by the name of Kumar observed. But in his mind a true love involved a very di√erent state of interior being: ‘‘Only the girl we love will appear before our eyes, and we cannot bear a single minute without seeing her. The attention of those who love for jolly will go here and then go there. Those who love sincerely with one mind, will recall only that girl, wherever they are, wherever they work.’’ Kumar had spoken ruefully, musing on a girl he had failed to marry. He understood such failures in strongly ethical terms, blaming them on the common inability to direct all of one’s thoughts, desires, and sensual experiences to a single place of attention. A few minutes later, a drunken young man named Senthil stumbled into the o≈ce to dismiss such fidelities: ‘‘Take this cigarette. You feel high while you smoke it, but then afterwards, you feel badly even thinking of it. Love is the same way. Ninety-nine percent failure.’’ He drew wide laughs, but most of his peers rejected his cynicism. The kind of love to which they aspired was ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘sincere’’—a deeper commitment of selfhood. The young men of the youth club that night reached widely for exemplars of a lover’s conduct, from cigarettes and luxury bus coaches to legal categories of criminal delinquency such as the rowdy. But in this menagerie of amorous possibility, the monkey too held an important place as an incitement to engage oneself with restraint. A teenager mentioned a recent Tamil commercial film named Azhagi, in which two childhood lovers accidentally meet again as married adults but refuse to consummate their rekindled feelings for each other. At this point, Prakash broke into the conversation: ‘‘That film is like a model for these boys: an attraction flowers and develops into a√ection then love then impos136

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sibility. But 99 percent of these boys come to that stage and look around, leap to something else, like a monkey.’’ And when Kumar described how he imagined the interior state of a sincere lover, I asked what he meant by using this English term ‘‘sincere.’’ Prakash broke in again to invoke a model for the development of a devoted love: ‘‘Without a monkey heart.’’ A slender lad with a boyish and clean-shaven face, Prakash had just graduated with a B.A. in economics from a nearby college. He could certainly recite the lyrics to ‘‘The Heart Is a Monkey.’’ But he also insisted that the image of this restless animal came out of his own experience growing up in the Cumbum Valley: ‘‘In mischief begins the monkey. How do we know the monkey? Our ancestors, all of that is something else, we don’t know much about that—‘we came from that,’ origins, all of that, we learn this when we study. [But] ordinarily at home, when they scold me what will they do? ‘Yel¯e don’t do monkey mischief tfa¯ ’ they will say. The monkey is nothing but that word ‘mischief.’ From that it comes. The business of mischief turns into love.’’ Prakash acknowledged the evolutionary narratives emerging from the milieu of the classroom only to insist on the greater salience of domestic education to the monkey’s popularity as an epithet. The animal had appeared in the space of the home as a rebuke passed from parents to children, an incitement to maturity of disposition and deed. In his dialogues with the other young men at the youth club that evening, these inheritances came together with the abiding traces of earlier poetic and religious traditions of devoted love, all coalescing in the figure of the monkey as ethical provocateur. Prakash and other older members of the youth club understood the experience of love itself in evolutionary and progressive terms. Love came to the youngest boys unbeknownst even to them, Prakash said, in the manner of a childish infatuation with something beautiful. In higher secondary school, boys and girls would begin to cast looks at each other deliberately, in bus stops, classrooms, and down by the river. Boys would pass their time in a ‘‘thieving’’ love, chasing object after object for selfish pleasure. It was only in their early twenties that boys could ‘‘develop the maturity’’ for a true and devoted love, although even then, most admittedly continue to engage in fraud. True lovers who could not overcome the social obstacles to their love might take their own lives rather than live apart, while only a handful of these a√airs would ultimately end in ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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marriage. For those few who were lucky enough to live out their loves, the restraint of desire could be taken as a practice of virtuous love. This was not a matter of worldly renunciation, as with the ascetic and religious traditions this discourse echoed, but rather of teaching oneself to remain faithful to a single object of everyday a√ection. Prakash was Kallar by caste, like most of the boys at the youth club that night. While he had once described his own father as a man of sudden temper and ‘‘rough and rugged’’ heart, the young man was evidently cultivating a di√erent demeanor for himself. He admitted that many ‘‘sexual attractions’’ had come to him till now, but his ‘‘principle’’ was to develop only ‘‘friendships’’ until he had come to a point when he could earn and support a household on his own. ‘‘One must think, one must calculate,’’ he said. ‘‘If I do this, that side will su√er, we will also su√er.’’ I do not know how carefully he exercised such restraint with respect to the desires of his own life. But it was clear to me that the image of the monkey would appear to Prakash and his peers as one kind of reminder to conduct oneself in this particular way. Balconies, riverbanks, bus stops, and evening lounges such as this one serve young men as spaces of boisterous pedagogy as well as raucous play. Monkeys and other critical images of interior nature emerge from such spaces as signposts in a possible trajectory of moral development. ‘‘We welcome Valentine’s Day,’’ said Prakash. ‘‘Let those who love truly celebrate it.’’π∑

o Legal principles, scriptural injunctions, and other didactic means to distinguish right from wrong have clearly had a powerful influence on the moral orientations of ordinary life in modern India. But how exactly such moral codes come to matter and work in the ethical lives of particular people is a problem that is neglected too often.π∏ It is no doubt the case that the norms and procedures of colonial modernity in India brought into being novel kinds of moral subjects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When posed at an undue level of abstraction, however, such arguments risk occluding the deep contradictions and limits that have fractured these forms, as well as their persistent and ironic debts to the legacies of earlier traditions. This chapter, for example, has examined the moral politics of restraint 138

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at work in one project of colonial government in south India. Turning to the postcolonial heirs of these interventions, however, we have found sharply divergent orientations to the notion of restraint as a virtue. Some have refused defiantly to recognize restraint as a desirable way of conducting oneself at all. Others have sought to make a place for their own minor infractions and indulgences within the domain of this virtue. Still others have taken these moral expectations into altogether di√erent engagements with desire. Each of these turns reveals a certain gap between moral norm and ethical practice, but also suggests how such gaps may be navigated by relying upon the resources of contrary moral traditions. An archive of south Indian ideas and practices of moral restraint has therefore played a crucial role in enabling the negotiations, displacements, and denials of colonial power that I have documented here. And in particular, multiple understandings of animal nature have been essential to the ways in which people here relate to thievery and thievishness as moral problems. The animals that I have described in these pages steal into the present along many paths: through the echoes of colonial social pedagogies and ongoing classroom lessons, through the recollection of moralizing film songs and didactic literary verse, through the struggles of rural citizens to restrain and manage their conduct, and through their own insistent pilferage on the margins of the cultivated landscape. These creatures are an inescapable feature of moral life in the Tamil country. Their presence may be tracked along the paths, stalks, and limbs of agrarian terrain, as well as within the imagined and elaborated topographies of the moral self. As we trace their slippery traversal of the very boundary between exterior and interior nature—between landscapes of experience and landscapes of the imagination—we may see how it is that tangible moral forces of various sorts come to refashion the very substance of selfhood. For the thieving bulls, ripe field sparrows, desirous monkeys, and other such creatures that inhabit this terrain sustain a practice of ‘‘becominganimal,’’ as described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: they invest those who live as they do with inclinations to both sustain and upturn the moral bearings of collective life.ππ They serve as vectors of both reproduction and dispersal. This same point may be made in a slightly di√erent fashion. ‘‘The ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process ‘‘The Life of the Thief’’

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by which it frees itself,’’ wrote Frantz Fanon.π∫ In his searing and vivid imagination, the struggle for freedom had promised a transcendence of animal nature. This chapter has also concerned the afterlife of colonial violence. What I have attempted to sketch here, however, is an alternative to postcolonial humanism. To be sure, reform is understood in rural south India today as an imperative to make oneself into a proper human being, an understanding that reflects deep debts to both the colonial pasts and the older moral legacies that I have sketched here. Even within these humanizing selves, however, the inherited strains of an animal character remain: elements that may be celebrated, excused, or further trained in relation to one’s own moral dispositions. How one ought to be in an ethical sense in such a milieu ultimately depends upon the kinds of beings one a≈liates oneself with. Pursued by means of such unexpected kinships, postcolonial freedom appears less as a path to becoming human in any one sense, and more as a possibility of inhabiting the animal —in multiple, overlapping, and inconsistent ways. It may be di≈cult for us to think of animals without confronting the idea of evolution, and the forms of development understood to make it possible in social and natural realms alike. The histories presented in this chapter insist that moral evolution and development, however understood and engaged, always involves di≈cult work, not only upon particular objects of intervention, but also upon the self as a subject of transformation. With this insistence in mind, I want to turn now to a more particular arena of colonial moral labor in south India and its postcolonial legacies: the place of agrarian toil in o≈cial strategies of Kallar Reclamation, and the many faces of toil as a virtue in the Cumbum Valley today. Here again, as we shall see, the pursuit and practice of virtue yields strange and unforeseen fruit.

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‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets, Evil Sown Yields Evil’’ On the Moral Returns of Agrarian Toil

Agrarian fields are spaces of both grim necessity and hopeful possibility. The contradiction is sharpest perhaps for poor women in rural India: fields, thickets, and meadows promise some relief from domestic pressures and social expectations, yet at the same time, it is here that women must complete the back-breaking tasks that men often refuse to do. Field songs and stories can soften this contradiction somewhat, giving women a means of laughter and distraction from the toil of weeding, planting, or plucking. Karupayi amm¯a was an acknowledged master of these verbal arts, a generous and inexhaustible fount of tales, verse, proverbs, and quips. Like other women, she spoke most freely in agrarian spaces far from the confines of village lanes. And in such spaces, the narratives she shared often cast a critical light on the demands of her own calling. One December morning on the edge of a distant sesame field, Karupayi amm¯a told me a story about toil that went something like this: There was a king and his wife. They died suddenly, leaving four sons and a daughter. These sons married well, but they married their sister to a lazy boy who did no work: all he did was eat his rice and lie down to rest. What could that girl do? She sat at home and cried, until a king and queen took pity on her and hired her to clean their house. Time passed. The girl became pregnant and gave birth to a turtle. She wailed to the king and queen. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ they said. ‘‘Only good will come to you.’’

One day the turtle went to see his uncles. They were going to the forest to hack out fields to till. The turtle also wanted to clear a field to till himself. ‘‘Crazy turtle donkey!’’ they said, chasing him away. As the turtle sat crying in the forest, all the animals came to him—elephants, bears, tigers, all of them. ‘‘Turtle king, don’t worry,’’ they said, and cleared four kuli of fields for him. They planted pumpkin seeds, and in twenty days, the whole field hung with huge ripe fruit. The turtle caught hold of a lorry and four men to harvest the crop and take it home. His mother broke one open—it was filled with nine kinds of jewels! They broke open the pumpkins till dawn. The turtle loaded all the jewels in another truck and took them to Madurai to sell. He hired masons, carpenters, diggers, and craftsmen to build a seven-story house. He sat his mother down on a swing. He gave his father a watch and ring. The turtle married the daughter of his mother’s youngest brother. One day, she saw him taking a bath: under his shell, it was the body of a man, a king, glowing like gold. His mother quickly burnt his shell and said that her son should raise a family of his own. He wore a v¯esf tf i, shirt, watch, and rings, on each of ten fingers. They are living like that as a family, happily.∞

I knew Karupayi amm¯a as an elderly and diminutive Kallar woman with a deep reverence for the deities inhabiting the cultivated landscape. In past decades, she and her husband had tilled a dry field on mortgage just north of where we spoke that day, raising peanuts, sesame, lentils, millets, and other crops. They had given up this land to marry o√ their children, and in her old age Karupayi amm¯a relied on daily wage labor to feed herself and to support her asthmatic husband. Her tale that morning was su√used no doubt with the character of her own struggles for survival. Reflecting on it further, however, we may also find in the tale of the turtle king a parable of development, one that both a≈rms and challenges the virtue of diligent toil in modern times. Wanting to work as a farmer, the young turtle had succeeded in becoming a fully human being, winning wealth and comfort for himself and his family. Yet, it is crucial to note that the events of the tale rewarded his desire to work rather than any work that he actually did. The fruits of agrarian labor here were magical rather than practical, ripening as gifts of divine agency. Taken as 142

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others in need of improvement. At the same time, however, and in various ways, such agencies have often promoted the sense that development is something for which one should be willing to work in one’s own life: the idea, that is, of labor, work, or toil as a virtue of the developmental self.≥ Building on a series of comparative investigations of China, India, and the Near East, Max Weber had famously argued that the ethos of rational advancement in the modern West was indebted to a Protestant sense of labor in the world as ‘‘an absolute end in itself, a calling.’’∂ While Weber had found in the castes of India a certain social foundation for devotion to one’s own work, other Western observers were far less generous in their assessments. ‘‘Phlegmatic indolence pervades the nation,’’ James Mill commented sharply, for example, in his monumental nineteenthcentury History of British India.∑ Such laziness was widely seen in British India as a characteristic tendency of its native populations in general; however, the conduct of the so-called criminal classes posed a more particular problem too, in that their crime was understood as a symptom of customary laxity as well as a caste-specific sense of ‘‘honourable occupation.’’∏ For colonial state o≈cials, overcoming these idiosyncratic customs and tendencies would require—in Weber’s terms—a ‘‘long and arduous process of education’’ meant to convey the moral worth of labor itself.π As one Tamil police superintendent wrote in 1923, ‘‘The Kallars are as a class intelligent but they are a lazy and ease-loving people. They are to be goaded and driven to work.’’∫ This chapter examines the place of toil in the project of ‘‘Kallar Reclamation’’ in the early twentieth century and the complex legacies of these endeavors nearly a century later. Most particularly in what follows, I consider labor on the land as a lever of moral transformation. By the late nineteenth century in colonial India, as Vinay Gidwani and David Gilmartin have shown, work was conceived not only as a desirable quality among moral individuals but also as a duty to be exercised with respect to the natural world. Colonial o≈cials sought in ‘‘useful’’ work a means of counteracting the natural tendency of Indian landscapes as well as their inhabitants to run to ‘‘waste’’ on their own.Ω These e√orts drew abiding inspiration from the writings of John Locke, who had argued in his Second Treatise on Government that God gave ‘‘the world and its lands . . . to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be 144

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his Title to it).’’∞≠ In colonial India, such arguments underpinned o≈cial strategies not only to grant landed property to those deemed virtuous enough to cultivate it responsibly, but also to employ promises of land as means of cultivating the virtue of hard work itself. The following pages focus on the enlisting of the rural landscape as an arena of such moral education in the Madurai countryside: on a rural environment put to work as a means of convincing its inhabitants to do the same. Charting the trajectory of Kallar social reform as a colonial state project, I pay special attention to o≈cial partnerships with Christian missionaries in the pursuit of rural development. In south India as elsewhere in colonial Asia, Africa, and the Americas, foreign missionaries took up enterprises as mundane as schools, hospitals, and economic cooperatives as means of cultivating virtue among heathen wards.∞∞ In what follows, I describe the emergence of the Kallar Voluntary Settlement in the early twentieth century as a collaborative agrarian enterprise between district police o≈cials and American Protestant mission workers, chronicling its founding premises and its untimely demise. The chapter identifies a surprising contrast between the settlement’s ideologies of virtuous agrarian toil and the contemporary memories of its living descendants, who recollect the scheme as an o≈cial sanction for indolence. With these narratives in mind, I confront an understanding of toil as virtue with another sense of toil as fate, juxtaposing the moral horizons of state intervention with the eschatological orientations of ordinary cultivators in the Cumbum Valley today. While uhlaippu or ‘‘toil’’ is widely lauded in Tamil public discourse on development, the term uhlaippu itself also carries a sense of su√ering as a condition to be escaped rather than praised. I trace this latter understanding to Tamil religious discourses on the perils of worldly life and karmic accounts of the moral fruit of action. From this vantage point, the returns of agrarian labor are subject to cosmic forces far beyond the toil of individual farmers. Chance, accident, and fate therefore play a crucial role in the celestial economy of gifts and penalties within which many cultivators work today. Subaltern deeds remain invested with the work of gods, spirits, and other supernatural agencies, Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed, even as they are recast as modern and secular acts of labor. This chapter bears witness to such remainders, contrary ways of imagining a moral milieu and the life of laboring upon its surfaces.∞≤ ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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Taken as a virtue, toil is projective in nature, exercised with an eye toward the likely future consequences of acts in the present.∞≥ Toil works as a lever of moral and material advancement only insofar as this temporal horizon holds true: only so long as one may presume that the future will bear out the expectations of the present. While all modern development interventions share this same premise, it is well known that such campaigns never work out as intended. This chapter therefore closes with a look at the unintended results of colonial agrarian intervention in the Cumbum Valley: the strange and accidental fruit, so to speak, of colonial cultivation. I focus on some of the perverse and ironic ways in which colonial land grants to Kallars have served as instruments of unscrupulous advancement. These stories are meant to convey the importance of chance and accident in developmental routes and the di≈culty of assigning them any clear moral valence: the di≈culty, that is, of distinguishing honest toil from ‘‘crooked path’’ in the pursuit of advancement. Experiments in Agrarian Pedagogy ‘‘The best and probably the only way to reclaim the Kallars is by giving them property,’’ a senior o≈cial in the Madras Presidency insisted in 1910.∞∂ By this time, land had long been invested with moral value in British India. Methods of revenue administration devised in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth charged landholders with the task of setting India on a course of progressive improvement. Throughout most of the Madras Presidency, the state granted private property rights in land to individual ryots or cultivators rather than large landlords, on the grounds that the former would labor most closely over their parcels and extract from them the ‘‘greatest possible produce.’’∞∑ Their toil was understood to yield both economic and moral returns, generating revenue but also serving as an example and spur to others on the margins of the agrarian order. The colonial state in southern India treated agrarian work as an instrument of moral pedagogy. In the following pages, I consider labor on the land as a tool of Kallar social reform. Although the Piramalai Kallars as a whole were identified as criminal in 1918, district o≈cials selectively applied the punitive provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act to those villages and individuals most resistant to 146

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state reform measures. Imperatives for social reform were therefore part and parcel of o≈cial strategies to ‘‘wean’’ Kallars from crime. In 1920, the police superintendent A. K. Raja Ayyar was appointed as ‘‘Kallar Special O≈cer’’ and charged with a portfolio of responsibilities vastly outstripping the duties of ordinary policemen. He formed local panchayats or village councils in Kallar villages, opened elementary schools and boarding hostels for Kallar children, supervised the disbursal of loans and lands, settled disputes both civil and criminal, and even organized Boy Scout and Girl Guide corps for Kallar youths.∞∏ By 1925, these measures had reached several hundred villages with a predominant Piramalai Kallar population. Ten centers for cottage industry provided vocational training in trades such as weaving, carpentry, tailoring, and smithery. Loans at low interest were advanced to cooperative societies and to individual cultivators for wells and bulls. Others were encouraged to join labor pools in nearby plantation estates and industrial enterprises.∞π The threat of compulsion hovered over all of these multifarious ventures in rural development. Kallar fathers courted jail terms by failing to send all children between the ages of five and twelve to school. Village panchayats were required to control crime and report criminals within their jurisdictions; those that refused or failed would invite the application of the harshest provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act to their villages. This system of communal responsibility was meant to serve as a form of moral tutelage. Police o≈cials expected that the instruments of compulsion necessary at the outset would gradually give way to an autonomous exercise of responsible judgment. ‘‘It is hoped that in course of time the whole thing will be quite voluntarily done without exception,’’ noted Raja Ayyar in 1923.∞∫ Nevertheless, it is no surprise that the Kallar subjects of such reclamation strategies nicknamed jails as ‘‘school’’ and recollect compulsory schools as ‘‘jail.’’∞Ω If the Kallar special o≈cer served as ‘‘nurse’’ to the population, as one district collector wrote, this was a care that had exacted its dues in fear.≤≠ O≈cial reformers enlisted the rural environment as a crucial tool in these endeavors. For many decades, the colonial state in India had subjected itinerant groups of forest dwellers, pastoral herders, subsistence hunters, gypsies, and traders to the rigors of forced settlement and agrarian sedentarization.≤∞ It was clear to Madura district o≈cials that the Kallars were ‘‘generally not wanderers’’ like other marginal groups classi‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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fied under the Criminal Tribes Act. The problem here appeared less as a resistance to agricultural livelihood, and more as a failure of the land to yield su≈cient returns. As one senior police o≈cial averred in 1915, ‘‘The root cause of their criminality is pressure on the soil.’’≤≤ The arid, rocky, and infertile reaches of the Kallar country were deemed incapable of supporting all those Kallar households that depended upon them, leaving behind a ‘‘surplus population’’ with no choice but to depend on crime for its survival.≤≥ In this Malthusian imagination of social disorder and its natural underpinnings, shifting the balance between population and environment promised the possibility of social change. District o≈cials attempted to right this balance and relieve the economic needs of ‘‘surplus’’ Kallars through a variety of means. In 1910, the Madura district collector identified a total of almost 30,000 acres of government land scattered throughout sixty-four Kallar villages that were suitable for assignment to the landless Kallar households residing within them.≤∂ Over the next seven years, however, the state had managed to assign no more than 842 acres of these lands to needy individuals. Numerous other avenues were also explored at the same time: the labor lines of the Madura Mills factories, the Kannan Devan tea estates in the hills of Travancore, colonization of forest tracts in the Palni hills, recruitment for the army and the estates of Ceylon, even indentured emigration to the plantations of Assam. Most of these proposals proved unfeasible, and agricultural development loomed as the single most e√ective means of improving Kallar livelihoods. As one senior revenue o≈cial insisted, ‘‘The Kalla evil is largely an agrarian one and may be best met by agrarian remedies.’’≤∑ By 1917, police and revenue o≈cials had settled on the idea of a collective agricultural settlement as the most e√ective agrarian remedy for Kallar criminality. The strategy dated back to at least the 1830s, when provincial governments in British India began to settle itinerant communities suspected of habitual crime on uncultivated government wastelands.≤∏ Desertions from such early ventures were rife, propelled by oppressive police surveillance and the torment of usurious and rack-renting landlords. Although settlements under police supervision were recognized as failures by the close of the nineteenth century, the intercession of the Salvation Army encouraged a revival of the strategy under the aegis 148

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of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1911. In the newer agricultural and industrial enterprises managed by mission agencies, settler labor was forcibly extracted through a ‘‘Gospel of Compulsion’’ intended to produce both economic and moral value. Missionary ideology converged with pecuniary interests in the cheap work of a tethered and permanent population. By the late 1920s, over sixty o≈cial settlements—most only slightly less repressive than jails—held thirty-one thousand inmates throughout British India.≤π In the agricultural settlements initiated under the aegis of the Criminal Tribes Act, collective life was oriented around the virtues of agrarian toil. Administrators drafted individual families as tenants on individual parcels of land, aiming to make each of them ‘‘capable of maintaining themselves out of the fruits of their own labour.’’ These fruits of labor were both moral and material in nature. Over time, permanent rights to land would be granted to those who had proven ‘‘by continuous industry and good conduct [their] fitness to own it.’’ Toil, in other words, stood as the clearest evidence that settlers had attained ‘‘an honest means of livelihood.’’ At this point, as one o≈cial review of the strategy observed, the task of reclamation could be considered ‘‘very near complete.’’ But even then, the force of heredity remained a problem. Only when the living generation of adult settlers had died out altogether could their children— ‘‘properly educated in a non-criminal atmosphere’’—be considered free of ‘‘criminal habits and ideas.’’≤∫ From the outset, moral tutelage required a milieu of virtuous example. In the western reaches of Madurai in 1915, a tract of government land at the head of the Cumbum Valley was found suitable to settle 170 Kallar families. ‘‘The Gudalur land is 1,200 acres in extent—very good dry land, red soil, good rain-fall, healthy country,’’ the district collector observed.≤Ω O≈cials confronting a wartime environment of scarcity and financial austerity were reluctant at the time to sanction a compulsory settlement for Kallars: this approach was viewed as a costly experiment with unpredictable consequences and questionable urgency. A voluntary settlement won o≈cial approval instead. Edward P. Holton, a longtime servant of the American Madura Mission, was picked as a suitable manager for the nascent enterprise. He and a sta√ of police constables set up camp south of the hamlet of Kullappa Gounden Patti in 1917. ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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An American Tiller in the Cumbum Valley The Kallar settlement was intended to provide an alternative to those Kallars seeking to avoid the strictures of the enforcement of the Criminal Tribes Act in their native villages. ‘‘If they know that their movements would be watched in their villages, they would be ready to go to the settlement where an e√ort could be made to reform them,’’ the Madura district collector projected in 1918.≥≠ The agency entrusted with this task of reform was the American Madura Mission. The mission was a central enterprise of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the largest American missionary society of the nineteenth century. Fanning outward from their Boston headquarters, board workers disseminated the truths of a Calvinist theology reworked to suit the rationalist spirit of nineteenth-century New England.≥∞ In the Madurai countryside, mission workers involved themselves in civilizing ventures as diverse as boarding schools, medical dispensaries, industrial training centers, and model farms, over and above their itinerant preaching tours and the ‘‘planting’’ of independent churches. ‘‘The Kallar country for Christ by 1921,’’ one American missionary prophesied boldly that same year.≥≤ Reaching closely into numerous Kallar villages, mission workers in the early decades of the twentieth century collaborated closely with state o≈cials in the project of Kallar reclamation. The police department financed the operation of sixty-four schools in the Kallar country previously run by the mission alone.≥≥ Pastors and mission workers were enlisted with the task of drawing truant Kallar pupils back to school. The mission established a training school in Tirumangalam to train instructors, directing its own pastorates to conduct monthly meetings of teacher associations as well.≥∂ Even the Kallar special o≈cer Raja Ayyar himself was educated at the mission’s American College on the outskirts of Madurai town.≥∑ In decades of o≈cial correspondence, American evangelists mused on the unique challenge of making ‘‘worthy citizens’’ of thieving Kallars.≥∏ The imagined di√erence of Kallar nature continually posed a challenge to the universal aspirations of their work. Like most of his colleagues in the mission, Edward P. Holton freely identified Kallars as the ‘‘Robber’’ or ‘‘Thief Caste’’ in his letters, describing the community as an ‘‘Indian equivalent of New York’s ‘gunmen’ ’’ in an e√ort to make sense of them to his American friends and 150

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family.≥π Holton himself was born in a small Illinois township in 1864. The son of a noted botanist of South American plant life, Holton decided during his own years of schooling at the Yale Divinity School and the Andover Theological Seminary to make south India ‘‘the scene of [his] life’s work.’’≥∫ He was ordained in the Congregational Church at Everett, Massachusetts, in May 1891 and set sail for India a few months later to commence over three decades of service with the American Madura Mission.≥Ω The Kallar Voluntary Settlement was only one of his many engagements with the idiosyncrasies of what he sometimes called ‘‘Kallar human nature.’’ In grappling with the qualities of any human nature, Holton credited the ‘‘environment’’ with greater influence on moral character than ‘‘heredity.’’∂≠ He therefore placed his personal and professional faith in the benevolent force of a virtuous milieu and the customs to be cultivated within it. In their Indian schools and congregations, Holton and his wife, Ruth, appear to have devoted a meticulous and unrelenting attention to the smallest acts of their young wards.∂∞ While they admitted that open conversions to Christianity were rare and scattered, they held nonetheless that such practices of ‘‘Christian Nurture’’ bore their own moral fruit. Managing a boarding school for seventy-five boys and girls in a Kallar country town in 1915, for example, Holton recounted success in instilling the ‘‘inconvenient Occidental virtues’’ of ‘‘cleanliness, truthfulness, punctuality and order’’ through both ‘‘precept and example.’’ The missionary sketched this instance in a missive opening with a single word from 2 Peter 3: 18—‘‘Grow.’’∂≤ Holton’s commitment to the promise of ‘‘Christian Nurture’’ was likely indebted to the writings of Horace Bushnell, an influential nineteenthcentury Hartford Congregationalist. This Romantic theologian had argued that Christian grace was best cultivated within the ‘‘ductile’’ hearts of children through practices of attentive care. The domestic exercises of a ‘‘Christian atmosphere’’ would ‘‘quicken’’ the latent good within growing children, leading them to a love of Christ without their even realizing it. Bushnell emphasized that this process held no guarantees: ‘‘The growth of Christian virtue is no vegetable process, no mere onward development,’’ he wrote, identifying the need to struggle actively with evil. Nevertheless, he argued, parents could rely on the ‘‘organic power of character’’ passing from God to their children in order to develop vir‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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Karupayi amm¯a under the shade of a familiar tamarind tree. Photograph by author.

such, these fruit from elsewhere call into question the relationship between toil and the enterprise of agrarian development.

o It would hardly appear to be controversial or even illuminating to suggest now that development takes work. But who is to work for development, in what ways, and on whose behalf ? Nineteenth-century European ideologues of development, as Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton have shown, broke with earlier understandings of progress in arguing that at stake here was not an immanent and natural process of change, but instead a social horizon demanding deliberate intervention and intentional action.≤ The ‘‘trustees’’ or agents of such collective transformation have been imagined diversely, from the leading capitalists celebrated by the positivist social planners of the nineteenth century to the state agencies, multilateral institutions, private organizations, and church associations identified with global development today. From a sympathetic standpoint, these agencies may be seen to work for the development of ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

An early twentieth-century promotional pamphlet for the American Madura Mission depicts agricultural education at the mission campus in Pasumalai. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. ABC 78.2/12(8)/18.

tuous conduct as an unconscious ‘‘habit of life.’’∂≥ In a climate of liberal and progressive theology, many workers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions were drawn to Bushnell’s vision of a gradually cultivated Christian ethos.∂∂ American missionaries in southern India clearly conceived agrarian labor as one means of nurturing such Christian virtue.∂∑ Like overseas evangelists in other imperial settings, American Madura Mission workers insistently represented their e√orts using agricultural images and metaphors—a harvest of Indian souls ‘‘Waiting for the Reapers.’’∂∏ But the mission was also involved in numerous practical ventures in agrarian development and training. Agricultural education was one plank in a broader program of industrial education pursued in India at the turn of the century by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.∂π The American Madura Mission established an experimental farm in 1902, raising rice crops, mulberry trees, and African peanuts as an ‘‘object-lesson’’ for its native neighbors. Such work continued at the mission’s central educational campus in Pasumalai, where an agricultural instructor lent boarding-school boys practical training in ‘‘agrihorticulture’’ on mission lands.∂∫ 152

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

Photograph of Edward Payson Holton in colonial Madura District, October 1919. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. ABC 78.1/21.

part of this ‘‘flock,’’ a burden that discouraged him from spending even a single night away from them.∑≥ An o≈ce writer, medical o≈cer, primary school teacher, and several policemen were on hand to assist the Reverend Holton in his pastoral duties. But the role of ‘‘Big Brother,’’ as he described it, fell primarily to the missionary himself: ‘‘I have had to be doctor, legal, financial and agricultural adviser, stimulator to industry, generator of hope, courage and enthusiasm, sanitary engineer, town-planner, surveyor, architect, horse-doctor and intimidator of predatory influences, within and without. Food-purveyor and general accountant, as a matter of course, fell to my lot.’’∑∂ Open conversions to Christianity were a di≈cult prospect, Holton conceded: ‘‘They are one of the hardest of all castes to influence,’’ he wrote in a letter addressed to his American friends in 1918. Nevertheless, he claimed to have won the confidence and a√ections of his Kallar wards. Shaken ‘‘out of pettiness, laziness and the constant danger of slumping into mendicancy,’’ none appeared to have lapsed into crime under his eye.∑∑ One of the primary instruments of such moral education was of 154

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Edward Holton himself was a lifelong tiller of sorts. He rewarded the children of the schools in his care for tending their own individual garden plots.∂Ω In his free time in India, he busied himself by chopping wood, raising his own household gardens, and digging out weedy prickly pear, and he continued to engage in tilling, weeding, and harvest work whenever he was on furlough back in New England. Musing on such experiences in a letter to the mission secretary, Holton insisted that ‘‘there is an ethical value in work, or shall I say an ethical need in man that he should work.’’ Mission activities that built upon and further deepened this ethical need won special praise from the missionary: ‘‘An agricultural education . . . means renewing exhausted soils, and the preventing of the many forms of waste—of labor, time and material, under the old system. This means a better scale of living, for those who are willing to work for it, that is, development of character.’’∑≠ Cultivation relied on a willingness to work, but it also served to develop that will even further. Agrarian toil was virtuous insofar as it was an intrinsically good and useful act that yielded greater virtue and prosperity as its fruit. Its moral and material benefits were clearly bound together. For these very reasons perhaps, Holton ultimately found in the Kallar Voluntary Settlement an irresistible opportunity for ‘‘lasting good.’’∑∞

o ‘‘It is as a sort of a sub-pro-tem penologist that I am marooned here 60 miles from the nearest white folks of my acquaintance,’’ wrote Edward Holton in a nevertheless buoyant missive to the secretary of the American Board in June 1917.∑≤ The missionary was pleased with both the task ahead and the quality of the agrarian terrain set aside for its exercise. Shortly after his arrival, two rows of eight rooms were raised and thatched for settlers and their families, along with a schoolhouse and quarters for the teacher. Within a few months, nineteen Kallar convict males, along with many of their wives, parents, and children, had been settled in these rows. Beside them, supervisory quarters had been erected for a sub-inspector and six police constables. Holton himself lodged for the most part in an 18’ x 9’ khaki tent pitched on the edge of the settlement itself. He felt personally accountable for any ‘‘sudden lapse’’ on the ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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course cultivation. The settlers had come in 1917 with neither ploughs nor bulls, and Holton managed to rent these out from the village nearby for the first season. Agrarian work was undertaken at first on a communal basis, with the future promise of individual plots of land—‘‘given good conduct,’’ as the missionary put it, ‘‘each shall enjoy to the full the fruits of his labor.’’∑∏ The fruits of such toil were meant again as both moral and pecuniary returns. A visiting o≈cer from the Department of Agriculture outlined a year-round cropping schedule that would keep Kallar men and women alike engaged in honest work. The linchpin of this system was a continuous cycle of agricultural tasks intended to distract the cultivator from more customary temptations: ‘‘When he is idle naturally, he will brood over his past engagements with his robber friends. He may be tempted to try his own story. But if he is kept engaged in his own land throughout the year, I think this can be avoided.’’ The o≈cer encouraged Holton himself to cultivate his own parcel of land, undertaken as an object lesson and ‘‘a model which the others can copy.’’∑π Despite such expert counsel, harvests on the settlement were largely a failure. Holton blamed the untimely nature of their e√orts, delayed far too long by insu≈cient state funding. Agricultural advisors singled out the unruliness of Kallar farmers and their aversion to cooperative labor, in response to which ‘‘they either pretended to be ill or did sham work.’’∑∫ Above and beyond these factors, there was the candid hostility of local villagers to the settlement itself. Cumbum Valley farmers had cultivated much of the government land allocated for the venture on a temporary and informal basis.∑Ω Not only were they ordered to vacate these fields, but Holton and his colleagues specifically selected ‘‘land that was already partially ploughed’’ for the settlers’ first crops of millet, groundnut, and cotton.∏≠ These heedless seizures may have been responsible for the surge of local livestock caught grazing on settler crops in late 1917, and the ‘‘enemies’’ that set fire to the thatched roofs of settlement buildings around the same time.∏∞ Government records provide no more than a murky glimpse into these events and antagonisms. ‘‘This is a land of good intentions, and the unexpected,’’ the Reverend Holton had written optimistically in June 1917.∏≤ The Kallar Voluntary Settlement was ultimately condemned by malaria rather than by the force of local hostility. An epidemic broke out in the Cumbum Valley ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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almost immediately after the camp was inaugurated. Recurrent outbreaks prostrated the manager and almost the entire population of sta√ and settlers, killing one child and driving several settlers away. O≈cial studies concluded at last that little could be done to eradicate the disease from the valley altogether.∏≥ Holton left for America at the end of 1918, and police sta√ withdrew from the settlement by the middle of the next year. Seven settlers stayed on with their families and possessions, tilling the lands that they had been assigned by the state. Ninety years have now passed since the closure of the Kallar Voluntary Settlement, and much of course has changed. In my work in the region, I met no practicing Christians among the Kallars living in the vicinity of the erstwhile project—indeed, few among the Piramalai Kallars as a whole may be identified as Christian today.∏∂ In the village of K. G. Patti and its surrounding environs, almost none of the lands once granted to the settlers remain in the hands of their own descendants. Most appear to have left the area without a trace. Let us turn now from the record of colonial intervention to the memories of some of those who lingered in its wake. We find here a certain association of toil and virtue indeed, but one indebted again to rather more complicated moral inheritances of the past. Indolence in Retrospect There are few physical traces of the Kallar Voluntary Settlement remaining on the topography of Kullappa Gounden Patti today. What was once the settlement well lies at the heart of a trash mound just behind the main road running through the village—dead dogs were reportedly tossed into the disused cavity for years until it was finally filled with dirt, brick, and stone. Wooden planks were reportedly stripped decades ago from the decaying row houses and built into a Christian church in the Dalit quarter. Besides the well and these planks, there are only English place names marking the site of the venture: a ‘‘Settlement’’ street where the settlers once lived and a ‘‘Settlement’’ landing on the river, both of these on the ‘‘Bungalow Ridge’’ corner of the village where the colonialera buildings would have stood. The lanes of the Bungalow Ridge today are dominated by the descendants of ‘‘Settle’’ Karuppa Thevar, one of the seven original settlers who 156

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Pekkathi Mayandi Thevar in the last months of his life, 2002. Photograph by author.

had stayed on in the area. The eldest among them was Karuppa Thevar’s son Pekkathi Mayandi, who was born in one of the row houses around 1917 just after his parents had been brought here from the east. In our many conversations, Pekkathi never said much about his father other than that the man was a k¯etf i and a scoundrel who had threatened and stolen from others. ‘‘Settle’’ Karuppa Thevar had drunk and gambled all his possessions away until nothing remained of the 8.74 acres of land assigned to him by the colonial state. ‘‘Great rowdies!’’ Pekkathi exclaimed sharply whenever I raised the subject of these settlers and their legacy. Like many other elders in the village, Pekkathi and his wife, Mayakkal, remember Edward Holton as kufttfa turai—the ‘‘short white man’’ who had tried to make the settlers into good men, or more simply, into men. But in the recollection of these heirs to his endeavors, life in the erstwhile Kallar Voluntary Settlement seems to have been far di√erent from an ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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apprenticeship in agrarian rigor. Husband and wife took turns describing the inconsistencies of the past in a lively conversation one afternoon. mayakkal: [The white man] brought them here and built them good houses and a bungalow and a well in that place. Each week [he gave them] one goat. Each week, gave them 2 kilograms [of ] rice, a can of oil. [The settlers] ate and bathed well, rubbed coconut oil on their bodies, ate that mutton, and slept as they wished. anand: Comfortably! mayakkal: Comfortably, how else! pekkathi: The white man stayed here for three years, to watch over them, so that they would not run o√ to their old places. mayakkal: All those fields needed to be ploughed, no? pekkathi: One head constable, one sub-inspector, two police, and that same white man, close by. Three years. Seven families. mayakkal: The white man gave each one 30 kuli of k¯atfu. Must be ploughed, no? But giving rice, giving goats—if the whole place kept on eating this would they be able to plough? pekkathi: From anyone’s field [the settlers would] pluck cotton, take the crop that came. Only if they tended to their own work would they be men. What if I came and scooped up the crop that you had raised? makakkal: [Other villagers] should not go along this road. Should not come this way. The white men would see. They would cast the eye. ‘This black fate should not come to us,’ [villagers] would say and pass another way. They should not talk to the people of these seven houses . . . pekkathi: [The white man] stayed and ruled for three years, gave them doors and frames and cattle and calves, and telling them to live responsibly, he went back to his own country. mayakkal: They didn’t want to work, and left the bungalow just like that. pekkathi: They left it all just like that. They could not manage. These thieving fellows, who would not bend to work. Would they work? They left it all just like that and ran o√. 158

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The Kallar Voluntary Settlement is recalled in the village that has grown around it today as a zone of menace, one in which trespass by outsiders invited the evil eye and an inauspicious fate. At the same time, it is also remembered as a realm of immunity for its own internees. Settlers brandished sticks to extort grain from other cultivators rather than bending their backs to till and weed their own lands. No one else would dare to oppose such insolence because of their intimacy with the manager and police: it was almost as if the settlers could pilfer grain by day as long as they abstained from stealing by night.∏∑ Edward P. Holton is remembered as a generous and lenient warden indeed. Pekkathi paused at one point in our conversation to tease an infant grandson waddling across the hall: ‘‘Eh! Thief !’’ In their recollections of the settlement, he and his wife emphasized above all the failure of the missionary manager to make his wards work. Freely sharing with the settlers all that they wanted, the Reverend kufttfa turai appears in this narrative to have neglected to instill either a desire or a necessity to toil: he failed, that is, to turn a moralizing intervention into a virtuous disposition of selfhood. Other heirs to this colonial legacy imagined its fate in a similar fashion. The head constable K. Karamani was the grandson of Sevathi Veerana Thevar, another one of the seven settlers who had stayed behind in the Cumbum Valley only to gamble away his entire inheritance. ‘‘They did not have the maturity to clear the land that they had been given,’’ the middle-aged policeman told me one evening at his station. ‘‘Drinking, being rowdy . . . They just sowed some millets and took what came up.’’ Here again, his narrative emphasized a failure among the settlers to act in relation to the likely consequences of their deeds. Pekkathi Mayandi Thevar himself was well known as one who was drawn to ‘‘toil’’ or uhlaippu. He had worked for decades as a woodcutter, watchman, and wetland irrigator for leading Gounder cultivators in the village. He was nearly on his deathbed by the time I concluded my fieldwork in 2002, a victim of a caustic cleaning powder that had been corroding his intestines since he accidentally ingested it a few years back. Whenever we spoke, he would have to gather his breath for each sharp burst of a few short words, skin hanging like folds of paper from emaciated bones. And yet, I was told that as late as the previous year, the old man had to be restrained by his sons from rushing out with a loincloth and spade to work on the family’s fields. ‘‘They’ve broken my ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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legs and made me sit here,’’ he complained one evening as we sat chatting beside his bed. The euphemism at the heart of this lament suggests that Pekkathi had indeed cultivated a moral disposition as a toiler: one who had to be forced from without to stop working in the fields, against the will and tendency of his own body. Had the American missionary ironically succeeded here in teaching the ‘‘ethical value’’ of work, even as he had failed to convince those in his immediate care of it? Or was there some other way through which Pekkathi had arrived at hard work as a practical orientation for his own life? How are we to understand his insistence on toil as a desirable quality of selfhood? Was toil for him a matter of virtue, duty, foresight, or something else altogether? ‘‘Only if you su√er on the earth will [its crops] ripen,’’ Pekkathi insisted to me. While his words conveyed a sense of good dispositions put in the service of a ‘‘life-task’’ or calling ‘‘set by God’’—as Max Weber had described the Protestant work ethic—he was not asserting that such toil could be taken as an end in itself.∏∏ Nor was he suggesting that work served as a means of producing valuable ends in a strictly economic fashion. Instead, the aphorism bore the traces of a cosmology of consequence, one in which su√ering would bear fruit through the intercession of chance, fate, and divinity. ‘‘Those who take crooked paths will wither, while those of good nature will find an open path even through the thorns,’’ Pekkathi maintained in the midst of another bedside chat. One had to toil diligently and responsibly with the humble faith that one’s reward would come from elsewhere. His invocation of hard work, in other words, partly echoed the developmental premises of colonial intervention, only to displace its ultimate e≈cacy into an alternative and far from secular economy of power and consequence. In recent years, prosperity had finally come to the descendants of ‘‘Settle’’ Karuppa Thevar. Many now tended their own orchards and wetlands, while others had opened tea stalls, grocery stores, and loan o≈ces along the main road of the village. Two of Pekkathi’s own sons and one of his grandsons served with the Central Reserve Police Force in north India, while another grandson had just recently enlisted with the Tamil Nadu Police Department. The old man understood these achievements as arbitrary acts of divine favor rather than as necessary consequences of his own toil. Beyond the moral cultivation of certain disposi160

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tions, God had played a crucial role in his family’s changing fortunes. ‘‘Iswaran is like a signalman,’’ Pekkathi said, comparing the deity to a railway employee charged with sending trains down di√erent tracks. ‘‘If he sees something bad he will turn away. But he helped us a little. Seeing his face, all of us flourished.’’ With this image of an auspicious gaze, Pekkathi had invoked the power of darfsan, which is understood in Indian religious tradition as a line of force passed from deity to devotee through the path of eyesight.∏π Colonial o≈cers, like malevolent demons, were said to wither crops and ruin families simply by casting eyes in their direction. The look of a kinder god, in contrast, could make crops and persons alike thrive. In insisting that the earth would ripen only for those who had su√ered, Pekkathi Mayandi Thevar implied that the gods would look most kindly upon those who had struggled for a living. But even here, however, there were no guarantees as to whether and when their su√ering would be rewarded. In philosophical terms, hard work was a necessary but insu≈cient condition for a ripening crop. Its causes lay beyond the exertions of the cultivator, falling in the domain of chance, divine will, and natural order. With this moral imagination in mind, let us consider more closely the many meanings of toil in the Tamil country: hard work, that is, not only as a moral virtue of ordinary life, but also as the sign of a terrestrial fate from which freedom often proved an elusive promise. Cosmologies of Toil Late one March morning, I headed with a young farmer friend to a tract of orchard land south of K. G. Patti—the onion shoots he had planted there were developing small white lesions, and he had prepared a dose of chemical relief. Rushing to reach the plants before the morning mist had cleared, we passed by an older Kallar farmer stooped over the raised soil beds of his own onion field. Perumal Thevar stood up and gave me a smile of recognition as we passed by, holding out a spade caked with earth. ‘‘See the toiling hands,’’ he said—‘‘like MGR.’’ The lighthearted quip playfully cast his exertions in a heroic light. Uhlaikkum Kara˙nkafl (Toiling hands) was the name of a Tamil film of 1976 that starred the beloved icon M. G. Ramachandran. Most of the toil on Perumal Thevar’s field that day had come in fact from the hands of Dalit wage laborers, a ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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team of whom had laid down the raised beds of soil earlier that morning. But with his quip the owner of the land had claimed their labor as his own. In so doing, he shed light on the crucial significance of toil to the rhetoric of agrarian development in contemporary Tamil Nadu. ‘‘Toil’’ or uhlaippu is a ubiquitous presence in twentieth-century Tamil social and political discourse. A sampling of book titles published in Tamil in the last century—Toil Alone Yields Greatness; The Victory of Toil; Toil and Greatness; Those Who Rose Through Toil; One Who Rose Through Toil; Toil Alone Is Greatness—suggests its prominence as a contemporary key to advancement. Toil in Tamil is best understood as an indexical sign, Sharad Chari has written: an element of language pointing directly to the act or practice that it names, like an arrow or a finger.∏∫ This argument clarifies why Perumal Thevar did not have to do anything more than show me his spade in order to make himself understood: between these hands and words there was little room for misinterpretation. And yet, critical questions may also be posed at this juncture: Has toil always served as a sign of good work in the Tamil country? If so, then how to explain the absence of the term uhlaippu itself in the canonical Tamil literature on virtue? Verses concerning the value of hard work in the Tamil moral tradition betray an interesting tension with respect to its exercise. The Tirukkuhral, like most of the moralizing works that followed thereafter, singles out zealous e√ort and perseverance as praiseworthy qualities while chiding those with sloth. ‘‘The length of the lotus stem varies with the depth of the water, as the greatness of men varies with their e√ort,’’ one of its couplets maintained.∏Ω At the same time, however, the early and medieval Tamil literature on virtue reproached those who acted with a heightened attachment to the results of their deeds. ‘‘Do not act for a desired end,’’ ¯ utf i.π≠ While Auvaiyar advises, for example, in her twelfth-century Attic¯ these works praise the act of cultivation, as I have already observed, nowhere do they describe the practice as an endeavor of toil.π∞ The term uhlaippu itself is far more prominent in the canon of Tamil devotional literature, from early and medieval works through to the nineteenth century. In these texts, uhlaippu is used primarily as a sign of hardship and su√ering. One hymn in the Tiruv¯acakam, for example, presents a devotee lamenting his own uhlaippu to the Lord Siva in the following terms: ‘‘If this man of evil deeds struggles is there any gain?’’π≤ 162

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Other works describe such su√ering once again as the consequence of desire for the fruit of worldly acts, an attachment to be overcome only by full devotion to the worship of the deity. In a fifteenth-century hymn the former merchant and renunciant Pattinathar implores Siva for release from a life of endless running, searching, and useless toil or su√ering.π≥ Agrarian uhlaippu appears in such works as an emblem of misplaced desire rather than as an object of praise. Thus in the nineteenth century Ramalinga Adigal bemoans his ignorant su√ering among the world’s enticements: experienced in the manner of a bull, he says, tethered to a farmer’s plough.π∂ There is therefore something curious in contemporary Tamil praise of uhlaippu. Su√ering for the fruit of action has been transformed from an object of critique into an object of veneration. Fully accounting for this profound change is di≈cult. The rise of a colonial capitalist order rewarding the exertions of certain individuals with property and greater wealth has doubtless exercised a decisive influence. Christian campaigns in moral improvement—agrarian experiments such as the Kallar Settlement, but also pedagogic materials representing uhlaippu as ‘‘The Gospel of Strenuous Life’’—are another significant factor.π∑ The celebration of su√ering and toil for the collective good of the nation in Tamil nationalist oratory, prose, and poetry must also be acknowledged.π∏ Rural Tamil men and women today identify uhlaippu as a means of advancing oneself through diligence, bodily exertion, and honest struggle. The term is still invested, nonetheless, with a sense of su√ering meant only to be escaped. Toil in this second sense remains less a life to be chosen deliberately for its e≈cacy, and more an inescapable consequence of providence or fate. With this idea in mind, I want to try to reposition agrarian struggle within a more expansive domain of cause and e√ect than the evident consequences of intentional acts. What, for example, would it mean to understand the su√erings of a cultivating life in the terms of karma?

o In my many months in the Cumbum Valley, I met scarcely any men or women who hoped that their children would pursue an agrarian livelihood. ‘‘Let all our hardships end with us,’’ they would invariably say, knowing well that this was unlikely. Bent low over a muddy plain trans‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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planting paddy seedlings one by one, clearing thorny brushwood from the precarious edges of upland fields, spending countless nights sitting over running irrigation water and guarding against nocturnal animals: the single word that I often heard muttered to condemn these and other routine struggles of rural life was karmam. My own earnest visits to the fields of their toil elicited similar speculations: ‘‘Whatever would you have done, Ananda, to have to su√er with us under this sun?’’ What is at stake in such questions? There has never been any one way of identifying the essential meaning of karma in Indian thought. Certain schools of Indian philosophy have held that every deed will eventually be rewarded or punished with iron necessity at a future time. Other schools have held that fated outcomes may always be overcome through e√ort and perseverance, or through the intervention of a sympathetic deity. Regardless, what is generally at stake in the idea of karma is a notion of moral consequence reaching across the arc of time: the nature of the present understood as the fruit of past deeds, and the shape of each future seen as indebted to acts in the present.ππ Farmers today may indeed imagine their fate as a consequence of karma. But at the same time, it is also important to recall that the act of cultivation has itself been one of the most consistent analogies with which Indian thinkers have presented the nature of karmic fruit. A seminal text in the Tamil Saiva philosophical tradition describes karma as a storehouse of grain growing with every act and its e√ects: ‘‘As the fruit of husbandry yield us food for present enjoyment and seed for tomorrow, so also, our acts also account for our present enjoyment and form seed, the fruit of which will be enjoyed in a future birth.’’π∫ Reflecting on the prominence of such imagery in classical yogic texts, Karl Potter has speculated that Indian philosophers used the agricultural model to ‘‘provide the ordinary person with a basis for understanding the theory of karma and rebirth.’’πΩ Gananath Obeyesekere, meanwhile, suggests that similar imagery in Buddhist texts addressed a more prosaic necessity: ‘‘The idea of the field of merit, with its symbolism of fertility, is obviously to keep the monastic order fed and looked after.’’∫≠ The ultimate origins of the agrarian analogy for karma may elude us now. Nevertheless, we may still consider a di√erent problem: how were the mechanics of this agrarian model to be interpreted? 164

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An abiding question that arises here concerns the identity of the figure at its heart, and how his or her returns are to be understood in karmic terms: if this farmer represents an ordinary person, then how does he or she manage to experience the results of labor even after his or her death? How could seeds yield fruit to one who had disappeared upon planting them? Classical and medieval Indian philosophers working within theistic and devotional traditions of thought resolved this problem in an ingenious fashion by identifying God as the ultimate manager or agent of karmic husbandry. Medieval Tamil Saiva thinkers depicted the deity Siva as a landlord doling out karmic returns in the manner of a landlord passing out wages to his laborers: ‘‘There is a Gracious Lord who unites each to eat the fruits of his proper Karma, as persons who employ labor give each man his wages according to the work turned out by him.’’∫∞ It was through the active oversight of a deity, in other words, that individuals would come to experience and engage with the fruit of their own actions. In the Saiva tradition, as with many other Indian religious traditions, attachment to these returns of a divine economy is understood to bind an individual to endless rebirths into earthly su√ering. In the end, only those who learn to react with equanimity to both fortune and misfortune alike may succeed in escaping their karma into a complete and final union with the divine.∫≤ Equanimity and renunciation in the face of su√ering are much to ask of anyone, even if couched in the terms of ordinary experiences such as farming. It is not surprising then that scholars of popular Hinduism have found contemporary Indian men and women invoking karma in multiple and inconsistent ways. The idea provides ‘‘a frame of reference that is potentially applicable in any situation that calls for the interpretation of destiny,’’ writes Lawrence Babb: one that jostles with fate, chance, malice, and moral weakness as a means of coming to terms with the vagaries of worldly life. Karma therefore serves not only as a means of explaining what may have happened in the past, but also as an incitement to act more carefully and responsibly in the future. Far from reducing its followers to passive spectators of dramas scripted long ago—as Western interpreters once liked to allege—the idea of karma imbues the daily life of action with moral consequence, will, and responsibility, provoking what Obeyesekere describes as an ‘‘ethicization’’ of ordinary life.∫≥ Take, ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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for example, the moral considerations of those who su√er daily for such mundane returns as seed, grain, and fruit.

o The public rhetoric of development presents toil as a dependable means of advancement. This promise is belied in rural India by the tremendous uncertainty of agrarian livelihood. Cultivators in the Cumbum Valley routinely describe agriculture as a game of chance: yielding as unpredictably as a lottery ticket, a dice game, or a round of cards. The returns of cultivation often utterly failed to make up for the labor of eliciting them. Seasonal rains would neglect to water dry upland crops as anticipated. Outbreaks of disease would easily sweep through wide swaths of irrigated paddy raised from government seed. Orchard growers would find themselves entirely at the mercy of market prices fluctuating with global cycles of production and demand. Certain farmers identified nothing more in these events than the workings of blind chance. Many others found traces here of gods toying with human fate. For these latter men and women, the cultivated landscape yields ample testimony to the moral order of the cosmos and its lessons for a life of development. A cone-shaped hill looms on its own over the plains to the north of K. G. Patti, its wide slopes tapering like a pile of grain. This was once a heap of threshed rice, I was told every now and then: its wealthy yet stingy owner had refused to share even a handful with the Lord Siva— passing by disguised as a mendicant—and the deity punished him by turning it to stone. Such tales serve as reminders that there is a principle of justice at work within the capricious nature of rural livelihoods. ‘‘I looked to those mountains to raise my children,’’ woodcutters may say, implying that the hills had graced them in turn with a benevolent glance. Petty crop thieves may argue that fields will produce more in one corner to make up for what they have plucked out of need from another. Cultivators might insist that those who grow rich with neither sweat nor toil will find themselves tripped up by the earth they tread so proudly upon. Tinai vitaicc¯a tinai, vinai h vitaicc¯a vinai, h a Tamil proverb suggests: ‘‘Millets sown yield millets, evil sown yields evil.’’∫∂ To toil under such circumstances is to work with the conviction that 166

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A heap of stone testifying to cosmic justice. Photograph by author.

God will eventually reward your su√ering, even when a crop, cloud, market, or employer fails to do so. Cultivators elicit such divine attentions through many means. Prayers are often said and sticks of incense lit at the most auspicious northeast corner of a field, just before it is sown with seed. Ritual o√erings of meat, liquor, and cigars may be made to the deities that inhabit the trees and copses on the fringes of cultivated fields. Certain cultivators would deliberately remove their slippers before setting foot on the earth of their fields, and abstain from sexual relations before important tasks were to be undertaken there: both were gestures of cleanliness meant to respect the sanctity of that space. Such practices acknowledged that the work of cultivation depended deeply upon divine favor for the realization of its fruit. I found this to be the case among both landholders and laborers whom I knew: both those who awaited the harvest itself, and those who were entitled to nothing more than a wage in cash or kind for making it possible. ¯ nf A f tavanh pafti aflapp¯an: h ‘‘God will dole out our measure,’’ poorer men and women often said to me, invoking the wage, gift, or loan that would enable them to eat and to feed their families on a di≈cult day. This ‘‘measure’’ or pafti at stake in the saying is a standard tin vessel with which grains, pulses, and other foodstu√s are poured out for use and ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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exchange in grocery stores, domestic kitchens, and harvested fields. ‘‘God has doled out our measure’’ is something that may be said with gratitude and relief when a team of hunters brings down an animal in the forest, when an idle man or woman is o√ered a day’s work, when laborers are paid for long-completed tasks, or when the destitute and infirm are granted the gift of a meal. The saying expresses a hope and even faith that all beings in need may rely on the beneficence of God—down to the smallest individual ant, as an oft-cited tale of Siva suggests. Although the expression is suited for many circumstances, it also echoes more specifically the use of the pafti as a means of repaying agrarian labor. Although most agricultural labor in the Cumbum Valley is repaid with a cash wage, many forms of work are compensated in kind with the aid of a tin pafti: one pafti of peanuts along with a cash wage to peanut field harvesters, several pafti of unhusked rice for each acre of harvested paddy, and more of the same to the men charged with guarding and watering ripening rice fields.∫∑ To ask the gods to dole out a measure is to invoke a long-standing image of the cultivator as a giver of livelihood to others. At the same time, however, the saying proposes that behind the generosity of the farmer lies a gift of God, casting the deity in the form of a gracious landlord. Karupayi amm¯a —Kallar tenant farmer and wage laborer for most of her life—drew these two figures together one morning as we sat chatting on the edge of a peanut field: ‘‘Parvati, Paramasivan, dole out a measure for my four children,’’ I say, waking up at dawn to pray. You may ask what it is to dole out a measure to the ants and however many thousands [of others]. How does [God] dole out for that many people? When we think of him, what happens to us? They [cultivators] call us for work. In the late afternoon after we work, they give us money. We take that, buy food, make rice for our children, eat . . . We scatter rice for the chickens and chicks—the stones and broken rice that are there too. The chicken eats that and leaves it and goes. At once, what does it do, the ant? What is left down there, the broken rice, the ant gathers it and keeps it in its nest. What we put out, the chicken eats it, and the ant gathers it, and a crow pecks at what remains, at those one or two remaining grains, running and coming, jabbing at what is left. Then how does God dole out a measure? We threw that broken rice for the chickens. That chicken ate, this crow ate, and what remains the ant also took. 168

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Karupayi amm¯a sketched this great chain of giving as a means of resolving a particular problem: how did God manage to look after the infinite number of living beings? Her vivid narrative made clear that this end was achieved through the incidental deeds of these beings themselves; the farmer here was no more than one link in a vast network of heedless and accidental gifts to others. I pointed out that farmers doled out pafti measures of their own on the threshing ground. But Karupayi amm¯a saw nothing surprising in this particular resemblance. ‘‘Only if God doles out a measure will a heap of grain come here!’’ she insisted: the good graces of a deity ripened the crop in the first place. Well before each harvest was to be divided among cultivators and workers, the crop itself would have to have ripened as a measure doled out by God. This was indeed a vision of a ‘‘moral economy,’’ to borrow a famous phrase from E. P. Thompson and James Scott, but one in which the right to a precarious subsistence was underwritten by divine favor rather than by the largesse of the wealthy.∫∏ The moral economy of the divine gift places chance, accident, and unforeseen circumstance at the heart of agrarian production. The fruits of agrarian labor in this imagination are subject to forces far beyond the toil of individual cultivators. These forces serve as spurs and warnings to cultivators to act on the land with moral conviction, and to act with the hope that such care may one day find just reward. Here too, however, there are no guarantees, either in the maturing of crops or in the moral progress of those who raise them. To work at ripening plants does not always ensure that one will ripen as a person oneself, and this gap in moral consequence, as we shall see, yields one important way of grappling with the eventual legacies of colonial agrarian pedagogy in the Cumbum Valley.

o Agriculture is a field of developmental signs and means, available for working and reworking in many di√erent ways. Medieval Tamil Saiva poetry depicted pious disciples as ripened stalks of paddy, bowing down with the weight of a full devotion to divinity.∫π Christian missionaries and the developmental state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented labor on the land as a durable means of cultivating the maturity of those who practiced it. But the vicissitudes of organic develop‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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Women stoop to do much of the most punishing work on cultivated fields. Photograph by author.

ment trouble any such faith in steady progress, regardless of the moral traditions in relation to which it is sketched. Consider the following episode. One cloudy morning in October 2001, I ran into a labor party of middle-aged women I knew well; they were stooped over the muddy gray slush of a paddy field, transplanting seedlings one by one. They were in a raucous and feisty mood that morning, insisting playfully that I accept a pile of wet mud in my own hands if I wanted to step down into the field and speak with them. One jokingly identified the Gounder women in the group as grass-eaters like cows and the Kallar women as shit-eaters like pigs. Others teased me and warned that they would hurl mud in my direction if I tried to photograph them or tape them singing. I shot back as best I could, unable to keep up with the fast pace of their jests and barbs. ‘‘Donkeys burst out from the side,’’ the older woman supervising 170

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their work commented sharply—‘‘Vil¯avil¯e vefticca kahlutai . . . Burst beside the ripened.’’ The ‘‘side-burst donkey’’ is a paddy husk that develops too early from the sides of a rice plant. These are husks that appear before the stalks attain their full height, and well before the plant is capable of filling them with the milky white fluid that will harden into grain. Appearing at the wrong time, their development is stunted and useless. When applied to human beings, and especially to women, the phrase serves as both a grudging compliment and a light-hearted insult. It challenges the innocence and potential that might otherwise be associated with such beings and their development. It acknowledges the presence of a sharpness or cleverness that is nonetheless judged as premature: like untimely fruit, I was told, destined only to fall and rot before the harvest. The image of the side-burst donkey provides one of many ways in which the moral quality of those who engage in agrarian work may be questioned and mocked. The image suggests that such people, like the vegetal husks in which they find an echo, ripen out of time: some too early to yield any good, others too late for redemption. Many of those who toil on agrarian fields in rural India today imagine their labors as no more than a sign of their own moral degradation, as a fate they could not avoid, one to be acted out with bitter faith more than with candid hope. More often than not, to praise hard work in the Cumbum Valley is to make a virtue of necessity, to somehow come to terms with a su√ering that only few are lucky enough to escape. It is in this light that we best assess the colonial e√ort to uplift the Kallar caste by endowing them with land and teaching them to labor. I close this chapter by returning to this historical endeavor in moral cultivation, and the perplexities of its moral harvest a century later. Strange Fruit For nearly a century, Kallar men and women drifted into the Cumbum Valley from their ancestral villages in the east, carrying little more than what could be loaded first onto bullock carts and then onto buses.∫∫ Today, there are abundant signs of material wealth among many of their households: cement-walled houses, televisions, gold chains and rings, ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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W N

S E

K.G. Patti village

1923 Kallar land grant

Mountain forest

1923 Dalit land grant

VGP plantation

Su r uli yar R iver

Map 3. The environs of K. G. Patti, and the location of colonial land grants to Kallars and Dalits in 1923.

well-tailored clothes, cellular phones, and ever more two-wheelers navigating village lanes and rural roads. Kallar landholdings in many of the most prosperous villages and towns of the region rival those of Gounders and other castes of long-standing cultivators. Many of the most profitable trades and industries lie in Kallar hands. Are these developments best understood as the slow fruit of diligent toil or as the sudden result of ‘‘crooked paths’’ to prosperity? Ordinary citizens and state o≈cials alike often pose the question in these stark terms. Let us work toward an answer by surveying the postcolonial legacies of colonial agrarian intervention in the Cumbum Valley. The colonial state in the early twentieth century employed grants of agricultural land as a critical lever of both moral and economic development. ‘‘I can see no [other] way towards mitigating the condition of the Kallars and rendering them less noxious to the general community,’’ one district collector had insisted in 1910. The doomed Kallar Voluntary Settlement was organized around this premise. Even after its untimely demise in 1919, the state continued to pursue a related strategy. In 1923, close to 2,000 acres of the tract originally reserved for the settlement were parceled out in grants of 1 to 10 acres to several hundred landless Kallar households and a roughly equal number of landless Dalits: 1,041 acres to 172

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the former and 787 acres to the latter.∫Ω Colonial revenue o≈cials had described the approach as an ‘‘experiment’’ in agrarian improvement. Over eighty years later, the trial appears to have yielded some rather surprising results. Each of these colonial land grants was a conditional o√er: its recipients were required to retain the land in their possession for at least ten years, and they were allowed to sell, give, mortgage, or lease it only to others of their own caste at any time thereafter. If these conditions were violated in any way, the state had the right to resume possession.Ω≠ Despite such stipulations, these properties today form a convoluted tissue of overlapping claims and entitlements, governed alternately by legal title, customary use, and threats of forcible seizure. The tracts that were granted to Kallars and Dalits in 1923 have for the most part exchanged hands many times over since then by means of various transactions both licit and illicit. Some remain dry upland fields, while many others have been ploughed and leveled for wetland paddy crops or for the development of irrigated orchards. Consider the following ‘‘biographies’’ of individual tracts and the families that once held them.Ω∞ If there is anything that these stories should underscore, it is the morally ambiguous and highly chancy quality of progress toward development.

o The handwritten registers at the local Taluk O≈ce record M. Peya Thevar as one Kallar beneficiary of the grants of 1923. The ninety-sixth entry on the list, he was assigned 5.00 acres of land on two adjacent tracts. His son reportedly drank all of his properties away. ‘‘They lived like simpletons, like fools,’’ Peya Thevar’s great-grandson, Muthu, wanly told me one afternoon with karmic certitude: ‘‘We experience all the sins that they committed.’’ For decades his forebears hunted elephants and other forest animals, shooting even cow elephants and their calves to discourage them from rallying around the prized tuskers. Muthu narrated these tales as an orphan himself. Both of his parents had succumbed to tuberculosis while he was in the eighth grade, leaving their children to survive on casual labor and furtive thefts of vegetables and grain. A snack merchant picked up his younger brother at the age of four and took him north to ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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Gujarat as an assistant. Prone to stealing from his employers in order to buy himself food, the boy was shuΔed for years from trader to trader. He was like an orphaned deer trying to forage on its own, Muthu suggested: ‘‘How would it wander? Hiding, roaming. We also survived somehow.’’

o A century ago, Peruma Thevar found work with the colonial Forest Department in the Cumbum Valley, after his orchard well in the Kallar country ran dry. He was granted four acres of land in 1923, which he and his wife planted with peanuts and sesame. Their son prospered and amassed land for years until a murder case forced him and his family to flee to a neighboring valley. They returned after twelve years to cultivate once again the lands that they had rented out in their absence. Peruma Thevar’s grandson Viramani built up a small fortune running a collective savings scheme and trading grain and forest goods. He invested these profits in commercial crops of bananas, onions, grapes, and other produce on the fields that he had inherited, bought, and taken on mortgage, earning hundreds of thousands of rupees on a string of good harvests. Cultivating the land was like playing cards or buying a lottery ticket, he and his wife told me once as we chatted in their cavernous new living room—they had gambled often and gambled well.

o The only daughter of Padiya Thevar inherited all four acres that her father was granted in 1923, along with his remaining possessions. Her husband had an unfortunate passion for racing oxen, and he gave away pieces of this inheritance bit by bit in order to buy bulls to race. The land that remained was dry and dependant on rain, and their sons sold it to a prosperous Muslim trader from a local town in the 1980s. Periyasami, the elder of these two brothers, invested his profits from the sale of the tract into a cinnamon bark trading enterprise and a ganja plantation hidden deep in the nearby forest reserves: two illicit arboreal enterprises surely unforeseen by the colonial state. He was nabbed on a patrol raid in 1991. Jailed briefly and slapped with four serious o√enses, he managed to clear his record after eight years of audacious bribery, including a lavish and 174

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decadent ‘‘tea party’’ thrown for senior forest o≈cials in an exclusive hotel. When I knew them, Periyasami and his wife, Nirmala, cultivated a small tract of paddy land and infiltrated the cardamom plantations in the mountains whenever they could, ripe field sparrows like most Kallar households on their lane.

o Vira Thevar was granted 5.53 acres of land in 1923. He took out a loan from the Indian government three decades later to dig a well on the tract, lifting water mechanically with a team of work bulls for orchard crops of eggplant, onions, and chilies. His son Thangayya Thevar inherited the tract and outfitted the well with an electric pump motor in 1972. The household prospered. I tagged along with Thangayya’s son Cheran and a wage laborer one March afternoon as they headed to the orchard to remedy an infestation of beetles in a few young coconut trees. Cheran had planted these trees just three years back. Why? I asked. He pulled up his short stout frame and proudly cast his chin upward with a playful smile—‘‘We have become big men.’’ Coconut orchards demanded very little labor of their owners, as contractors for the fruit would do most of the work of tending them. I often spotted Cheran lounging on his front stoop in an immaculate and well-pressed white shirt. He expected his own son to become a doctor or a lawyer, while he let out the orchard for a regular windfall of contractual income.

o Vellaya Thevar was one of five brothers who drove their cattle into the Cumbum Valley at the close of the nineteenth century. In 1923, he was assigned 4.6 acres just south of the village. His son Vijayan wrested control of the entire tract from his siblings and dug a well in 1949; bananas, beets, tomatoes, grapes, and other orchard fruits and vegetables have been raised there almost continuously ever since. Vijayan was an influential local leader for decades, and his own son Surya grew to become a prosperous private contractor. In the midst of a conversation beside the orchard one morning, Surya insisted that his lineage had always pursued an honest living. Like black soot wiped clean o√ the ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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surface of a scorched conch shell, he said, the reputation of good families would always come back to them: like a ‘‘flashback,’’ he proposed with cinematic flair.Ω≤ But as he spoke, my own thoughts flashed back to the image of a nearby road laid down by this contractor a few years ago: fictive tar had washed quickly away, leaving only a treacherous bed of jagged rubble for hapless travelers to navigate. Orchard accounts provide an easy means of hiding funds earned otherwise.

o No more than a handful of the lands assigned to Dalit recipients in 1923 remain tilled by Dalit cultivators today. These lands began to slip away within a few years. ‘‘They grabbed it,’’ some told me without knowing who was responsible or when it happened. Certain tracts were simply occupied by Kallars and other higher caste cultivators. Others took the lands on a fictive premise, disguising the deed as a sale from one Dalit to another. Many narratives identify legal and moral failings on the part of Dalit cultivators as a cause of the loss. The problem is often recollected today as a consequence of their illicit desire for beef, forbidden by caste Hindu custom. Many Dalits were accused of stealing cows to eat and their lands seized as compensation. Others were invited to scavenge the meat of a dead ox to satisfy their hunger, a gift made with a single condition: ‘‘Just put your signature down on this white paper . . .’’ In past years, Dalit women were sometimes overheard scolding their husbands for such indiscretions: ‘‘This man signed away four kuli of land for three measures of grain and a calf !’’ A young Dalit political leader recently banned the gathering and cooking of cattle carcasses in the village as a gesture of ‘‘cleanliness’’ made on behalf of visiting Kallars. Most of these Kallars pass through the Dalit quarter as private moneylenders in search of interest payments.

o Rama Thevar was granted over nine acres of land in 1923. This dry upland tract passed to his sons and then his grandsons, who sold it just over a decade ago in a di≈cult time. Kumar was one of these brothers. He 176

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managed to accumulate some money running a clandestine trade in government rations and then began to lend out cash to desperate borrowers at illegally inflated rates. Each day Kumar would pass through the lanes of the village on two rounds of what he called ‘‘walking,’’ searching out his many debtors. He and his wife once spent a fortnight in jail for assaulting a Dalit borrower over a delinquent loan. Lending money is like farming, Kumar told me as I tagged along on a collection round one evening: you throw out a lot of money, the market suddenly goes flat, and you lose it all. But the man himself appeared flush with cash. He had recently bought about forty acres of mountainside uplands, and he intended to develop them into an orchard when he had built up more capital. Among these fields were colonial land grants once received and later relinquished by his landless kinsfolk.

o In the mid-1990s, vgp Evergreen Plantations worked through local land brokers to establish a teak plantation in the uplands west of K. G. Patti. This tract included up to 43 parcels of land first assigned to Kallars and Dalits in 1923.Ω≥ Among these were 1.3 acres of land also claimed by C. Sekharan, a Kallar by caste and an influential local party leader. Sekharan argued that the company had bought this parcel from a man who held no legal title to it. The vgp manager dismissed his claim. Incensed, Sekharan worked stealthily to buy back every parcel that the company had taken, promising an extra Rs.1000 to each of the sellers if they would cancel their contracts with vgp and sell to him instead. He was finally summoned to Chennai to settle the dispute: the company fired its local manager, returned the contested acre, and paid out a royal sum of Rs.230,000 to regain its right to the lands he had since claimed. Sekharan went on to win the village presidency in the elections of the following year. Village youth playfully narrate his ascent in three stages: from an ordinary and somewhat woeful ‘‘chicken thief,’’ to a careless and bombastic ‘‘rowdy,’’ to a crafty and deceptive ‘‘criminal’’ who had learned to turn a keen intelligence to strategic benefit.Ω∂

o ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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What I have presented here are idiosyncratic histories, a handful drawn from a pool of hundreds of potential narratives. Their presence here was determined both by the constraints of my own fieldwork—the di≈culty of identifying those who could tie together colonial pasts, family histories, and present-day agrarian practices so closely—and by the unique interpretive possibilities a√orded by these particular tales. These accounts do not amount to a representative sample by means of which the aggregate impact of colonial agrarian intervention might be assessed. At the same time, however, each of these particular narratives, in the very uniqueness of the routes it identifies, sheds some light on the distinctive features of postcolonial development in the region. Have the Kallar households of the Cumbum Valley advanced themselves by means of diligent agrarian toil or through the pursuit of other, more ‘‘crooked’’ paths? Although the question itself is familiar and persistent, the antagonism at its heart is clearly overstated. Cultivable land may be wrested from others by means of violence or deceit, or bought by reinvesting the returns of illicit yet more lucrative trades. Returns from the cultivation and sale of agricultural lands may also be used in turn to finance clandestine occupations, or to disguise the profits earned in such enterprises. Agrarian toil itself may involve the clandestine cultivation of illicit crops on pilfered forest plots and unguarded commons. Economic pursuits in the Cumbum Valley are rife with such exchanges, compulsions, and compromises. From the vantage point of such complex engagements, taking agriculture as a simply moralizing activity appears naïve at best. For state o≈cials and mission workers in the early twentieth century, the very act of toil was the most significant instrument of agrarian pedagogy, serving both to instill moral virtue and produce economic value. Here lies a further irony, for few men and women indebted to these colonial legacies in the Cumbum Valley see hard work as a reliable means of uplifting themselves. Running closer to the grain of their experience is a rather contrary idea: great men are those who are free from the need to toil at all. Whether pulses for household consumption or onions destined for overseas markets, agricultural crops are profound gambles. Only a lucky few can shield themselves from both the toil of husbandry and its regular losses, taking full advantage of profits when they come. Under these circumstances, grants of land to the landless have often done 178

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the opposite of what they were intended for: falling into the hands of the already propertied rather than enriching the lives of the marginal. Toil emerges not as a means of progress but rather as a sign of its still elusive character. There is much about these experiences, then, that confounds dominant ways in which trajectories of collective advancement have been imagined in modern south India. Take the narratives and experiences recorded in one of the most significant studies of a Tamil caste in historical terms: Robert Hardgrave’s examination in 1969 of the Nadars of southern Tamil Nadu as a ‘‘community in change.’’ The study called attention to the terms with which Nadars themselves had conceived their trajectory from marginal and despised tree-climbers and toddy-tappers to a community of prominent traders and industrialists between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: ‘‘The average Nadar firmly believes that through frugality and hard work, he can, like the many before him, come up in life—from a shop assistant to a wealthy businessman, from a village school teacher to an important government o≈cial.’’Ω∑ One might also consider Sharad Chari’s much more recent study of the garment industry in the western Tamil town of Tiruppur, in which narratives and practices of diligent toil sustained the transformation of male Gounder workers into industrial proprietors in the 1960s and 1970s.Ω∏ Such stories of deliberate and hard-won change yield a concrete foundation for the prominence of hard work in the developmental rhetoric of contemporary Tamil Nadu. But the Kallar path to prosperity—if this can indeed be described as a path in collective terms—clearly challenges the merits of toil. The moral value of hard work here is deeply ambiguous, both because it is often woven so closely with various forms of illicit conduct and because its very appeal is questioned by the easy wealth of those who do not toil that much at all. Furthermore, qualities such as cleverness and cunning—the ability to navigate the simplest and most convenient route through complicated social and economic terrain, regardless of how ‘‘crooked’’ that path may be—often appear here to net appreciable returns much more quickly than the patient forecasts and deliberate acts of a life of toil. Lastly, the unpredictable workings of accident, chance, and fortune that I have sketched here call into question the very faith in time upon which toil depends: the sense that acts in the present may be expected to yield ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets’’

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predictably in a distant future. The ‘‘life histories’’ that anchor the studies by Hardgrave and Chari were di≈cult to elicit from those I knew in the Cumbum Valley, neither because they were less articulate as individuals, nor because I was less interested in such stories, but instead for the reason that these men and women did not conceive their lives as narratives with a continuously unfolding plot and direction. They inhabited instead a time of accidents, gifts, and sudden misfortunes that mocked the certitude of labor as a reliable means to anticipated ends. Yet, of necessity, they still worked for such yields. All of these complications underscore the moral complexity of development and the many means of its attainment. They also emphasize that what lies at stake in such trajectories is not only an ethical relationship to oneself but also particular kinds of relations with others. After all, it would be di≈cult to take the evident returns on labor that I have charted here solely as consequences of a responsible disposition to work. Among all those discussed in these pages, the laboring poor are perhaps most aware of this limit to toil as a virtue of self-conduct alone. In their checkered histories of lands and livelihoods won and lost, they find both evidence of punishment for prior faults and reasons to look elsewhere for a better lot. Advancement from their vantage point appears most clearly as a consequence of chance, luck, fate, or God. Unable to sustain the fiction that they can uplift themselves solely through toil, such men and women have no choice but to look to others for the gift of livelihood. Their experience confronts, in other words, the moral worth of toil with that of sympathy. It is to the vicissitudes of this latter virtue—and to the agrarian landscape in which it finds expression—that I turn in the following and final chapter.

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‘‘Let the Water for the Paddy Also Irrigate the Grass’’ On the Sympathies of an Aqueous Self

Landscapes bear the marks of virtues other than toil as well. On the arid plains of south India, rivers and rain clouds yield not only the basic means of survival but also the signs of a life well lived. Classical panegyric poetry in Tamil depicted prosperous conditions— fertile lands, unfailing rains, copious rivers, abundant birds and beasts— as the tangible expression of righteous and generous rule. For many centuries hence, the substance of water in particular has embodied qualities such as sympathy, generosity, and kindness in Tamil moral and literary tradition. These virtues of selfhood, however, remain as fickle and elusive today as the fluid medium long understood to convey them. The thousands of irrigation works built throughout India in colonial and postcolonial times have doled out liquid wealth to many while cruelly consigning others to a state of penury. To reflect on the nature of such waters, as many contemporary writers, poets, and filmmakers have done, is to confront both the moral promises and sharp disappointments of modern life.∞ Consider Kizhakku Chimaiyilee (In the eastern country), a film made by the renowned Tamil director Bharathiraja in 1993. The picture opens with a silhouette of the filmmaker himself, sitting on the ground and facing a dry thorny tree. ‘‘To my sweet Tamil people,’’ he says. ‘‘Those bruised people that are there on that scorched earth: a√ection is the old feeling that still keeps them moist. Here is this black babul tree, a rough tree to be sure, but it oozes sap when it is cut. Those rough people are just like that.’’ He is speaking here of his own Piramalai Kallar castefolk,

Director Bharathiraja seated before a black babul tree. Digital video still, Kizhakku Chimaiyilee (1993).

whose particular nature and customs the film is meant to convey. The narrative depicts the struggles of a brother, Mayandi, and a sister, Irumayi, to maintain their bond as siblings in the face of malice, jealousy, and mistrust. Irumayi is wedded to a proud and callous man who forbids Mayandi from visiting her and their children at all. Each time Mayandi’s earnest gifts and entreaties are rebu√ed by him, the sad chorus of a song echoes across the dusty landscape dividing brother from sister: ‘‘In the southeastern country with its red earth fields, there is a moisture to this simple people . . .’’ This image of a possible moisture or ¯ıram at the heart of the self is critical to the narrative course of the film. Dialogues are peppered with references to the ‘‘hereditary inclinations,’’ the ‘‘thieving disposition,’’ and the ‘‘savage nature’’ of many Kallars in the story, such as Irumayi’s husband. The film portrays their antipathy toward others as the consequence of an essential dryness of the heart, a harsh interior state mirrored by the arid and unirrigated condition of the Kallar country in which the story unfolds. ‘‘Will a man without moisture understand our a√ection?’’ Irumayi asks tearfully as she lays dying in her brother’s arms, hacked accidentally by her own violent husband in the midst of a pitched battle between rival clans. This moisture that she evokes is a fluid medium of sympathy, the essence of a more cultivated selfhood celebrated throughout the film. But there is also a more subtle tone of ambivalence here that we must note. Kizhakku Chimaiyilee is a paean to the ancestral traditions of the Kallar country, looking backward across space and in time from the lush and more developed Cumbum Valley where Bharathiraja himself was raised. For the director, the sympathy borne by characters like Mayandi and 182

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Irumayi depends on the ‘‘simple’’ and uncultivated quality of their feeling. Modernity, paradoxically, promises both its proper development and its inevitable loss.

o Persistent su√ering and cruelty exemplify more than anything else perhaps the moral ambiguity of modern life. In India as elsewhere in the world, much has been said of the callousness of many projects for reform, uplift, and development.≤ At the same time, qualities such as sympathy, care, and compassion remain widely imagined as the cornerstones of progress itself: in the rhetoric and tactics of modern o≈cial agencies and public campaigns, but also more generally as foundations for the very possibility of collective advancement. Adam Smith and other influential theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment described sympathy— taken as the ability to imagine oneself in the place of others—as the very wellspring of virtuous conduct and moral improvement. More recently, Norbert Elias sketched the ‘‘civilizing process’’ in the modern West as a gradual remaking over many centuries of warriors—‘‘wild, cruel, prone to violent outbreaks’’—into more refined and sensitive courtiers, willing and able to ‘‘attune their conduct to that of others.’’≥ How might we reconcile such ideas with the stubborn persistence of cruelty in the modern West, and with the various ways in which its exercise has found newer forms of rational justification? And how might we understand what is at stake in the pursuit of sympathy in other kinds of places? This chapter engages sympathy as a cultivable virtue and an aqueous quality, as a manipulable flow of feeling in consonance with others. For various reasons, I suggest, water may be taken as an especially appropriate medium to reflect upon this virtue. Enlightenment thinkers found a physiological basis for sympathy in the idea of a vital ethereal fluid circulating through the nervous system and coordinating functions and sensations among diverse bodily organs.∂ The tenets of this physiology were displaced by the newer sciences of the nineteenth century. I argue in this chapter, however, that the traces of such sympathetic reasoning may still be found in the hydraulic currents of sociality understood by colonial Indian o≈cials to traverse the social body. In what follows, I work further to confront the aqueous rationale of colonial social reform with a ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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similar yet di√erent imagination of sympathy developing out of Tamil moral tradition in south India, one that takes ¯ıram or moisture as the natural condition of sympathetic hearts. This moral encounter between rival traditions of fluid sympathy is staged on a specific material ground: the irrigating channels of an agrarian landscape.∑ The cultivation of sympathy and careful responsibility for others was a primary aim of Kallar Reclamation in the early twentieth century. ‘‘We shall make of the Kallar youth a fine race of stalwart, useful, well-behaved citizens who will live for and not on one another,’’ one local authority proudly spoke while the governor of Madras laid the foundations for a Kallar boarding school in 1926.∏ While education was one critical instrument in this moralizing enterprise, the watering of the agrarian landscape was another, and perhaps more surprising, device. In what follows, I chart the history of an o≈cial campaign to bring water to Kallar lands in the early and mid-twentieth century as a means of resolving the collective antagonism between Kallars and others. The chapter explores the forms of hydraulic reasoning that underpinned this use of canal irrigation as a technology of policing and moral uplift, and traces its uneven results. The state itself may be seen to have tackled the poverty of water in Kallar tracts with merciless thrift rather than sympathy. Despite the frugal economism of colonial irrigation intervention, the engineers who brought water into the Madurai countryside a century ago are recalled today as paragons of generous giving. This puzzle in postcolonial memory, I argue, is best understood in relation to a Tamil moral and political tradition of taking the gift of water as a sign and medium of sympathetic care. The chapter tracks this tradition of thought through literary representations of good government and virtuous conduct, as well as in the everyday practices of those who irrigate the fields of the Cumbum Valley today. At work here is another kind of sympathy, different from the natural and universal capacities for ‘‘fellow-feeling’’ that colonial power sought to deepen and develop among its wards. Rather, the Tamil imagination of ¯ıram or sympathetic moisture is closer to the image of compassion that Dipesh Chakrabarty has drawn out of modern Bengali reformist literature: the special gift of an exemplary heart toward su√ering beings in need.π From the vantage point of such an imagination in south India, Kallars still appear as collective subjects of an arid and hostile interior nature. 184

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The final third of this chapter o√ers a counterpoint to this perspective, turning to a particular kind of sympathetic imagination exercised by Kallar women. I focus on the oral tradition of the funerary elegy and its vivid allegories of loss and ruin. The performance of elegies is a practice of sympathy, I argue, one that works to dissolve the boundary between self and other, and between self and landscape. Laments depend on the quality of moisture for their e≈cacy: in the tears they draw from others, but also in their depiction of loss itself as a condition of desiccation. By means of such images, Kallar elegies draw the pain and hardship of collective history forward into the present, eliciting sympathetic feeling by evoking shared experiences of su√ering. We see too, however, that new forms of civility have eroded this capacity rather than developing it further. Sympathy itself begins to appear as a relic from the past. Channels Through the Kallar Heartland O≈cial observers in the early twentieth century often remarked on the fear and dislike that warlike Kallars inspired in other castes. The labor commissioner T. E. Moir attributed these palpable feelings to the fact that few other than Kallars lived in their villages, an ‘‘isolation from the rest of the community’’ that led them to regard all others as their ‘‘lawful prey.’’ For the project of reclamation to succeed, Kallars had to stop celebrating such antagonism and begin to see themselves instead as others saw them: ‘‘to realize the reproach that attaches to them,’’ Moir suggested, ‘‘and to resent it.’’ The labor commissioner made these comments in 1921 against the backdrop of widespread nationalist protests against British rule throughout India. In his opinion, the antipathy between Kallars and others challenged the very premise of these struggles. As long as the Kallar ‘‘stands aloof ’’ from the rest of the community, Moir argued, native political autonomy in the region was a dangerous gamble. Here as elsewhere, e√ective liberal government depended on ‘‘the acceptance of general interests being powerful enough to overrule sectarian antagonisms or centrifugal tendencies.’’∫ These colonial subjects would earn the right to rule themselves only insofar as they learned to submit themselves to the pressures of collective judgment. The declaration in 1919 by Edwin S. Montagu, the secretary of state, that British rule in India would aim toward the gradual develop‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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ment of self-governing institutions had no doubt inspired these reflections on the part of T. E. Moir. But the labor commissioner’s language also bore the imprint of an older discourse of self-rule and its moral foundations, one that can be traced to the philosophy of Adam Smith. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759, Smith identified sympathy as the basis of both individual self-command and collective harmony. He defined sympathy as the capacity to imagine oneself in the place of another: the ‘‘fellow-feeling’’ that enabled one to feel as others would and to judge oneself as they would judge. Smith understood this faculty of sympathy in developmental terms, as a capacity intrinsic to human nature as such but cultivated most fully among civilized nations. He described social intercourse—‘‘the hustle and bustle of the world’’—as the ‘‘great school of self-command’’ in which individuals learned to regulate their own passions in relation to each other.Ω Adam Smith had famously argued that all of mankind passed through four stages of progressive sociality: an age of hunting, an age of herding, an age of agriculture, and an age of commerce. His lecture in 1751 on these stages in Edinburgh was profoundly shaped by the ongoing political and economic struggle in Scotland to subdue and civilize the unruly pastoral clans of the Scottish Highlands.∞≠ One hundred seventy years later in colonial south India, the labor commissioner T. E. Moir found it fitting to describe the Kallar as a ‘‘brave but undisciplined guerilla warrior’’ comparable to the legendary Scottish Highland chieftain Rob Roy MacGregor. While the notorious Scottish cattle rustler had finally become ‘‘a pillar of society,’’ Moir observed, the Kallar remained ‘‘at loggerheads with his environment.’’ Like Adam Smith before him, the British o≈cial insisted that such marginal populations needed to be drawn into ‘‘the ordinary course of progress and development.’’∞∞ However, there is a novel and unique resonance in Moir’s language of progress that deserves further emphasis. By the early twentieth century in colonial India, the hydraulic manipulation of rivers and indeed, their courses, had emerged as a critical instrument and powerful symbol of collective advancement. ‘‘We must divert harmful traditions into new channels,’’ Moir suggested in 1921, musing on the prospects of Kallar Reclamation in the Madurai countryside. Although this was no more than a metaphor, its usage here was less than arbitrary. From the 1840s onward in British 186

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India, the diversion of rivers for irrigation served as a potent means of settling and policing itinerant and putatively predatory groups. As David Gilmartin has observed, the proliferation of dams and canals in colonial India enabled the state to try to exercise control over both the natural environment and those who inhabited it.∞≤ Trained engineers rose to an unprecedented prominence in the bureaucracies of India and other colonies in the late nineteenth century, propagating an ideal of colonial authority as an endeavor to put available resources to maximally e≈cient use. Massive irrigation works promoted an o≈cial imagination of river basins as integrated environments in which hundreds and even thousands of families might learn to ‘‘live in accord with one another,’’ as the eminent engineer William Willcocks buoyantly wrote in 1919.∞≥ This vision of a civilization founded on hydraulic currents of sympathy and sociality proved a powerful influence on the administrators of the Madurai countryside in the early twentieth century, and the particular means they devised in order to tackle Piramalai Kallar defiance. As one senior police o≈cial argued in 1923, ‘‘For the ultimate crowning success of this Reclamation work, an irrigation scheme for the Kallarnad is a sine-qua-non.’’∞∂ With this insistence in mind, let us consider irrigation as a tool of moral and social policing in the Kallar country: how water was tapped to encourage these men and women not only to feel with the rest of rural society, but also to flow with it.

o The Melur Kallars—an endogamous subcaste of Kallars inhabiting a flat and arid plain to the northeast of Madurai town—were the most notorious of the ‘‘Colleries’’ condemned by eighteenth-century colonial narratives. Several British military campaigns and two brutal massacres of thousands in the mid-1700s proved unable to halt their predatory raids on the cattle and property of other nearby villages. As late as 1895, district o≈cials lumped together the Melur Kallars along with their Piramalai Kallar brethren to the west as inveterate partisans of blackmail, highway robbery, and cattle rustling.∞∑ Yet, two decades later, the voluminous o≈cial correspondence authorizing the declaration of the latter population as a criminal tribe made mention of the Melur Kallars always and ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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only as an instance of successful reformation. Surprisingly, credit for this sudden ‘‘revolution in the habits of the people’’ was given to irrigation.∞∏ The Madura District Gazetteer elaborated in 1908: Hope for the reformation of the Kallan has now recently arisen in quite another quarter. Round about Melur the people of the caste are taking energetically to wet cultivation, to the exclusion of cattle-lifting, with the Periyar water which has lately been brought there . . . The department of Public Works may soon be able to claim that it has succeeded where the army, the police and the magistracy have failed, and made an honest man of the notorious Kallan.∞π

The account drew attention to the energies of the Kallars themselves in bringing about this startling outcome: their desire for agriculture, and the drive of Melur headmen to forbid theft throughout their villages. But the ultimate agent of policing here was identified as a dam drawing water from the Periyar River in the distant west. The Periyar Dam is a towering wall of masonry and rubble lodged within the Western Ghats, the range of forested hills bisecting India from Mumbai down to the southern tip of the peninsula. Rising above the southwestern rim of the Cumbum Valley, the dam channels millions of cubic meters of monsoon flow each year from the Periyar River into the bed of the fickle Vaigai River, turning into the eastern Tamil plains waters once coursing westward through Travancore into the Arabian Sea. The dam was completed under the guidance of the project’s chief engineer, John Pennycuick, in 1896, chiefly as a means of tackling famine in the arid tracts of Madurai. The severe famines of 1876–78 had hit the Melur countryside especially hard, and the o≈cial Famine Commission that followed in its wake projected the Periyar Dam as a ‘‘magnificent engineering feat’’ that might avert such catastrophes in the future. By 1901, the dam irrigated 132,000 acres of rice paddy in the Vaigai River basin, mostly in the drought-prone plains of Melur. As early as the late eighteenth century, native Tamil rulers and British o≈cials contemplated turning the abundant waters of the Periyar into the bed of the scanty and unpredictable Vaigai River. It was widely rumored that the simple removal of ‘‘a Certain Rock’’ would allow water to flow freely from the one into the other. One district collector personally investigated this prospect in 1807 only to denounce it as completely 188

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The Periyar Dam, over a century after its completion in 1896. Photograph by author.

chimerical. Three miles of undulating terrain divided the Periyar from the Vaigai watershed, and cutting a channel through these hills was ‘‘not a work which Men can perform—Nature opposes it and therefore we must submit to its will.’’∞∫ By the close of the nineteenth century, however, colonial engineers in British India were determined to submit this same nature to the will of the state. A fresh series of studies revived the project in 1862. Major John Pennycuick proposed to impound the Periyar behind a 176-foot dam and to blast a mile-long tunnel between its reservoir and the Vaigai watershed. Negotiations with the princely state of Travancore over access to the necessary lands were concluded in 1886, and work on the dam commenced under Pennycuick’s direction the following year. Water first tumbled through the tunnel into the Cumbum Valley and downstream through the Vaigai River basin in 1895. O≈cial histories describe the making of the Periyar Dam as an unprecedented feat of environmental mastery. The dam was raised in a narrow valley between rugged mountain slopes, clad in thick tropical forests teeming with elephants, tigers, bears, and leeches. Hundreds of Indian laborers perished in the annual epidemics of malaria and cholera that swept through their camps. More truculent than all these natural forces was the river itself, whose flow could multiply tenfold and even ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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hundredfold with sudden thunderstorms. Fresh masonry foundations were swept away again and again by violent surges of water and debris. As the executive engineer A. T. Mackenzie wrote in his detailed chronicle of the project, ‘‘no dam has ever hitherto been built across a river so large as the Periyar and combining so many refractory characteristics.’’∞Ω Ironically though, within a decade of the dam’s completion, this struggle against the conduct of a refractory river was credited with having subdued an equally rebellious human nature: the unruly character of the Melur Kallars. This was hard work indeed for a river that colonial engineers had once scorned for having emptied ‘‘uselessly’’ into the Arabian Sea.≤≠ The Periyar Dam was intended to check famine in the Madurai countryside and to generate revenue for the state—not to put a halt to crime. Yet, in the decades following its construction, state o≈cials increasingly claimed that irrigation could be taken as a key to e√ective policing in the region. The Melur Kallars had reportedly united ‘‘as a body’’ to publicly renounce theft in the years after the Periyar’s waters had reached their villages.≤∞ Could the Piramalai Kallars be convinced to do the same if their own environment was irrigated? ‘‘If all this country could be brought under irrigation,’’ the revenue secretary Andrew Cardew argued with respect to the Piramalai kafllfarn¯atfu in 1910, ‘‘that would probably do more to put down the criminal habits of the caste than the Police will ever achieve.’’≤≤ District revenue o≈cials had already begun to grant loans to Piramalai Kallar cultivators to support their digging of wells. Beginning in the 1920s, however, o≈cial strategies deliberately enlisted the Vaigai River itself as a tool of reform. Prompted in part by many petitions from local cultivators, T. E. Moir and other state o≈cials raised the possibility of extending Periyar irrigation waters into the arid villages of the kafllfarn¯atfu. Engineers of the Public Works Department objected that the hills dividing the tract from the Vaigai watercourse could not be surmounted very easily, and that water flowing through the river was already insu≈cient to meet existing needs.≤≥ Negotiations were pursued with the state of Travancore to divert yet another of its rivers into the plains of the Madras Presidency, only to ground to a halt in 1926. The following year, a Madura engineer proposed to drill a second tunnel under the existing passage from the Periyar 190

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Arid expanse of the kafllfarnaftu, as photographed by Edward H. Colebrook of the Indian Police in 1947. ∫ The British Library Board. Photo 469/8(75).

reservoir in order to generate hydropower and to irrigate twenty thousand acres of dry land in the Kallar country. Backing this proposal, the Madura district collector projected that irrigation would turn the Piramalai Kallars away from crime ‘‘as surely and automatically as . . . their brethren in Melurnad thirty years ago.’’≤∂ Water, it would seem, lent mechanical certainty to the work of policing. Such faith was partly anchored in an environmental reasoning that attributed crime to the poverty and scarcity of a harsh milieu. ‘‘A great part of the Kallar country is very poor and dry, and this has much to do with the Kallars’ hereditary practice of preying on well-to-do neighbors,’’ Cardew observed in 1910.≤∑ But also at stake here was the interior nature of those who inhabited such terrain. O≈cial correspondence often sketched the possibilities of Kallar reclamation in markedly hydraulic terms: a language of current and pressure, discharge and diversion. One influential memo prepared by District Superintendent of Police Loveluck in 1921 outlined a series of e√orts to ‘‘direct the energies of the younger and more adventurous Kallars to other channels than that of crime’’: education, agriculture, cottage industries, and so on. Taken together, ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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he argued, these interventions would propel a collective transformation: ‘‘the current of reform has set in strongly and steadily.’’ Loveluck was only one of many colonial o≈cials who described the endeavor to transform the Kallars as an e√ort to divert and rechannel ‘‘misdirected energies.’’≤∏ Beginning in the late nineteenth century, European writers increasingly turned to trains, telegraphs, and other electric and mechanical devices for models of human nature. The new truths of physical science and mechanical engineering exerted a powerful influence on the popular imagination of human bodies and minds and their most e≈cient uses.≤π In colonial south India, the echoes of such discourse led many o≈cials to portray the nature of their subjects in terms of hydraulic tendency and manipulation.≤∫ Such language also made it all the easier to propose the management of rivers as a means of managing the inclinations of the most unruly humans living along them. If useless and refractory rivers could be turned to benefit, so too perhaps could reckless and stubborn races. Canalizing water provided both a model for and a means of canalizing conduct. As G. F. Paddison, the Madura district collector, argued in 1916, only through a regular supply of irrigation water would the Kallar also ‘‘confine himself to legitimate agriculture.’’≤Ω In the reckoning of such o≈cials, irrigation was the surest way to lead the Kallars toward a life of peaceful coexistence with the agrarian citizenry. But the pursuit of such harmony in the countryside also demanded a certain capacity for sympathy on the part of the state. Irrigation served as an instrument of colonial policing by working along the grain of evident inclinations, channeling them in the right direction rather than seeking to eliminate them outright. ‘‘Why should he spend all his time working a piccotah [to draw water manually from a well] when he can earn enough by one night’s house-breaking to keep him for a month?’’ Paddison had asked pointedly. The irrigation strategy tackled the proverbial indolence of criminal communities not by kindling a desire to work harder but rather by making agrarian work less di≈cult, by transforming agriculture itself into a ‘‘fairly easy living.’’≥≠ In their most optimistic moments, state o≈cials placed their faith in the fluid ease and redemptive promise of a well-engineered hydraulic system. Such sympathies, however, had their price. I turn now to the enduring conflict between principles of sympathy and e≈ciency in the practice of 192

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colonial irrigation, and the stubborn limits set by this conflict on the prospects of irrigating the Kallar country.

o British observers in the late nineteenth century typically blamed recurrent bouts of drought, famine, and scarcity in India on the cruelty of nature. But as many critics have long pointed out, the millions who died in such episodes also fell as mute witness to the cruelty of colonial political economy, to the rigors of a liberal economic order in which the market rather than the state ultimately dictated the terms of public welfare.≥∞ Irrigation works in British India, for example, were generally expected to generate enough revenue to compensate for the costs of their construction. The catastrophic famines of 1876–78 prompted the colonial state to create a category of ‘‘protective’’ irrigation measures that were not expected to yield returns. But, as David Ludden has pointed out, expenditure on such protective works ultimately amounted to no more than 19 percent of capital outlays for irrigation in the Madras Presidency.≥≤ Even the Periyar Dam—proposed as a response to famine in the Melur countryside—was classified as a ‘‘productive’’ enterprise, anticipated to yield at least enough agrarian revenue each year to cover the interest on the capital that the state had borrowed to build it. Any o≈cial sympathy for those who depended on the dam for their livelihoods would have to be weighed against this principle, as the following exchange between state o≈cials and private citizens might make clear. The Periyar’s water passed through the Cumbum Valley on its way to eastern Madurai. The state permitted cultivators here to draw on this water to irrigate fourteen thousand acres of wetlands. In 1919, the Revenue Department granted temporary permission to cultivators in the Cumbum Valley to irrigate an additional one thousand acres of dry land: the rationale was a worldwide grain shortage and skyrocketing market prices.≥≥ Two years later, a group of agriculturists from the village of Kovilapuram in the valley praised the ‘‘greatest sympathizing heart’’ with which the state had passed this order and requested that the extension be regularized. Their case for permanent rights to Periyar water was richly textured. ‘‘Legions of people [from the valley] had worked and lost their lives in Hilly Malarial tracts’’ in order to raise the dam, they argued with ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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an appeal to justice. People here had also ‘‘quietly and calmly’’ relinquished their own easement rights to the river water in order to ‘‘help the brother Taluk Ryots’’ of Madurai and Melur, they suggested. Lastly, a comparative table submitted along with the petition outlined the various ‘‘facilities of agriculture’’ in the valley that would make irrigation an attractive investment for the state: rich soils, a cool climate, cheap cattle and manure, and so on.≥∂ On this table of desirable features, item No. 10 was perhaps the most striking entry: ‘‘Crimes are rife in the Surliyar [Cumbum] Valley.’’ Startlingly, the specter of Kallar crime appeared to make a good environment for agrarian development. The petition suggests that ordinary cultivators in the Madurai countryside perceived the extent to which the logic of policing had infiltrated state-led irrigation e√orts. But the o≈cial response to their plea for sympathy also illustrates the conditions under which this rationale worked most e√ectively as a justification for irrigation expenditure. J. F. Hall, the district collector, ultimately agreed to sell Periyar water at an enhanced rate of levy to farmers cultivating a third of the lands in question. His reasoning was precise: ‘‘The supply of water,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is purely a commercial transaction.’’ State o≈cials found irrigation in the Cumbum Valley most attractive because it was remunerative. Matters were much more di≈cult, however, in the kafllfarn¯atfu to the east. Throughout the 1920s, proposals to irrigate the Piramalai Kallar country foundered on the shoals of high cost and technical di≈culty. Taking water down a circuitous course over rugged terrain and into this tract promised severe losses through evaporation and seepage; such an intervention could hardly be construed a ‘‘productive’’ expense in economic terms. As one o≈cial of the Public Works Department conceded in 1922, ‘‘The expenditure can only be justified on administrative grounds, that is, to settle the Kallar problem.’’≥∑ Proponents of various plans to irrigate Kallar villages insisted that the contributions of these schemes to policing bore ‘‘a value quite apart from that shown in Revenue returns.’’≥∏ But senior civil servants were unwilling to factor such returns into their calculations. Even at the height of o≈cial enthusiasm for Kallar Reclamation then, the persuasions of a hydraulic imagination failed to draw water for the Kallar country. Plans were filed away without further comment. Two decades later, a ‘‘Grow More Food’’ campaign intended to stabil194

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Periyar M

S

Melur

ṭu

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kaḷ

y

Cu m bu m

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River Periyar

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ain Cana l

Madurai Tirumangalam Main Canal

i Va ga

Kovilapuram Periyar-Vaigai irrigated area Periyar Dam

E

W

Vaigai Dam

KERALA

Reservoirs Mountains and hills

iR

ive r

TAMIL NADU

Interstate boundary

Map 4. Reservoir irrigation in the Periyar-Vaigai river basin.

ize Indian food supplies during the Second World War revived the prospect of irrigating Piramalai Kallar villages. It was now proposed to construct a subsidiary reservoir across the Vaigai River just west of the kafllfarn¯atfu to harvest additional water for irrigation. The Madura district collector argued in 1950 that the goal of this Vaigai Dam project was to wean Piramalai Kallars from crime ‘‘in the same way as the main Periyar Project was intended to reform the turbulent criminal classes in Melur Taluk of those days.’’≥π The Periyar Dam was now remembered as a project aimed specifically at producing the very e√ects with which it was credited in retrospect. Engineers of independent India completed the Vaigai Dam in 1959 under the aegis of the First Five Year Plan. Amid fierce debates over which areas were most entitled to its waters, fourteen thousand acres of land cultivated by the ‘‘backward’’ denizens of the Kallar country were irrigated by the following year.≥∫ Nevertheless, political machinations on behalf of various other electoral constituencies left much of the tract still dry and dependent on rainfall, tanks, or wells. In 1996, a full century after Periyar water had first been released into the Vaigai River, the Public Works Department of the Government of Tamil Nadu approved a plan to divert a small quantity of surplus flood waters into the irrigation tanks of fifty-eight additional villages in the kafllfarn¯atfu.≥Ω Petitions from Kallar cultivators and their political representatives now portrayed this plan as just desert for the ‘‘injustice’’ perpetrated upon the Piramalai Kallars through the Criminal Tribes Act. One ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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chief engineer with the Public Works Department went as far as to describe the project as an amelioration of colonial e√orts ‘‘to suppress their national spirit.’’∂≠ But it remains unclear how often and to what extent surplus waters will be available for discharge through these canals. Kallar Reclamation has come full circle, from a colonial claim on intemperate subjects to a postcolonial claim on an indi√erent state. Sympathy emerges not only as a principle of political rationality but also as a language of moral and political critique. Let us turn now to its many faces in the cultivated environs of the contemporary Cumbum Valley. Memories of Moisture, Flows of Sympathy I knew of several men named ‘‘Logandurai’’ in the Cumbum Valley, all named after E. R. Logan, the popular superintendent of plant and machinery who had directed tunneling operations for the Periyar waterworks. There were no Pennycuicks to be found, likely on account of the di≈culty of bending such a peculiar combination of syllables into an attractive south Indian name. But the colonial engineer has nonetheless attained a unique visibility in Tamil Nadu in recent decades. Portraits and statues featuring Pennycuick’s ramrod posture and sallow complexion have rapidly multiplied throughout the Madurai region, lending a rather surprising tint to a Tamil monumental landscape peopled otherwise by film stars and political leaders. The engineers of the Tamil Nadu Public Works Department o≈ce in Madurai even renamed their campus ‘‘Pennycuick Place’’ in 2002. Such gestures are due in part to a sharp and ongoing struggle between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu over access to the Periyar River’s waters.∂∞ But these commemorations also reflect a durable legacy of popular narratives concerning the personal sympathies and sacrifices of the colonial engineer. One evening at his modest house in K. G. Patti village, for example, the elderly irrigator Perumal Thevar shared a tale that he had heard from his own father, a man who had worked as a daily wage laborer on the Periyar Dam site over a century ago. When the Englishmen had announced that they were ready to ‘‘open up’’ the flow of water, Perumal Thevar told me, local landlords from the Cumbum Valley rallied to present them with a token of their gratitude. They had reportedly cast the likeness of a full tray of betelnut and lime fruit in solid gold to o√er to 196

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Sign for a roadside nursery in the Cumbum Valley, named after Colonel John Pennycuick. Photograph by author.

the engineers. But Pennycuick had refused these gifts: ‘‘Let all these go into the water itself, for your Tamil Nadu. None of you give me anything. As soon as I open the sluice, let it go into the water.’’ The visiting landlords are said to have cast these o√erings into the water as they were instructed. The stream then rushed into the plains for the first time as an auspicious current, Perumal Thevar told me: ‘‘That water came down full of sandalwood and garlands.’’ In the Cumbum Valley today, Colonel John Pennycuick is imagined almost universally—and mistakenly, if o≈cial annals are to be believed instead—to have mortgaged o√ his own vast estate in England to finance the completion of the Periyar Dam.∂≤ There is a profound irony lodged in the insistence of such recollections. The Periyar Dam may have been classed on paper as a remunerative enterprise—one that would ultimately yield a profit over the cost of its construction—but popular memories of the project today recall its waters as a pure gift that needed no reciprocation. Memories of the dam muster no equivalents in value that might lend it a semblance of exchange. In the following pages, I seek to account for this startling remaking of the colonial past and its hydraulic economy. The image of colonial engineer as generous giver is deeply ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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indebted to the agrarian foundations of political sovereignty in the precolonial Tamil country, an alternative tradition of virtuous government in which moisture served as aqueous sign and practical medium of sympathetic care.

o Water has often surfaced as a sign of virtue in Tamil literary tradition. Classical Tamil poets praised kings and chieftains for their cloudlike liberality, their willingness to shower gifts upon their subjects as indiscriminately as rain.∂≥ Early medieval works on virtue often singled out rain, river, and well waters as emblems of pure and generous giving. Two didactic verses from the seventh-century N¯alaftiy¯ar suggest that the truly great will aid others even while facing hardship themselves, in the manner of springs welling up from the beds of tanks and rivers to preserve a people in the midst of drought. Another advises that one must approach even the selfish and small-minded in friendship, in the same way that a channel brings water to distant paddy fields.∂∂ Liquid resources win praise in these works along with those deemed responsible for providing them. A poem from the seventh-century Cihrupañcam¯ulam suggests that one who builds an irrigation tank, plants its edges with seedlings, clears a path for people to walk, turns fallows into cultivable wet lands, and digs a well to draw water—in short, one who makes an agrarian place habitable by others—will go sweetly to the heavens.∂∑ Another verse from this collection goes even further in identifying irrigated fields as the very foundation of royal authority and political sovereignty: Woman of long tresses! As the bunds rise higher and the water rises, the paddy also rises—as noble subjects rise in life without distress, the great king also rises in esteem: so the whole world says without end.∂∏

The poem sketches a chain of uplift beginning with the raising of irrigation bunds to hold water on cultivated fields, and culminating in the security and prosperity of subjects and their rulers. At the heart of this verse, like the others, is an ethos of sympathetic care founded on the provision of water to other beings in need. 198

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In order to grasp what is at stake in such literary representations, we must recall the crucial significance of gifting to the classical Indian political order. Kings and chieftains in south India, Nicholas Dirks and other historians have argued, secured their authority not by policing borders but rather by giving gifts, by incorporating recipients into the domain of their sovereignty through the sharing of royal largesse.∂π One of the chief vehicles of the sovereign gift in the Tamil country was irrigation. The numerous riverine barrages, irrigation channels, and tank systems scattered throughout the countryside were financed and built by kings and petty chieftains as means of securing revenue and as symbols of their responsible patronage. This pattern of political authority ramified down to local landlords and peasant assemblies, as David Ludden suggests: ‘‘Schematically speaking, rich peasants dug wells, chiefs built tanks, and kings built large dams, while local landowners dug channels, village distributaries, paddy fields, and other relatively small works like temporary dams.’’∂∫ Such practices of irrigation were central to the forms of agrarian civilization and civility that developed in the Tamil countryside. Medieval Tamil literary depictions of irrigation presented those who provided water to their dependents as liberal givers of livelihood. By portraying such deeds as acts of compassion rather than as means of profit, such works no doubt served to naturalize the deep inequalities of agrarian economy and society. At the same time, these images also idealized the rural environment itself as a natural order of generosity and care. Sympathy emerges from such representations as a moral quality deeply bound up with the practice of giving water to needy others. Consider the following verse from M¯uturai, a collection of didactic poems attributed to the twelfth-century poetess Auvaiyar: Water drawn for the paddy runs along the channel to soak too the grassy weed—in this old world if there is one good man, for his sake the rain will fall for everyone.∂Ω

Water meant to irrigate a field of paddy will also water the weeds growing along its banks, in the same way that rain will fall for the general good even when meant as a reward for one. These lines convey the essential morality of a natural world in which virtuous conduct yields cosmic returns. But also at work here is a principle of sympathy in which returns ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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flow well beyond those who justly deserve them. Here is a moral economy whose transactions maintain an essential openness, imbalance, or excess: nature itself is understood to defy any pretensions of equivalent exchange. ‘‘If the rains wane, gifts wane,’’ claims Konh h raiv¯entan, h another medieval ∑≠ work of moral counsel credited to Auvaiyar. The pithy expression gestures toward the reliance of the second on the prosperity yielded by the first. But both are alike in that their beneficence—like the water coursing through paddy and then grass in the other verse—is a downward flow from above to below. The direction of these flows is significant because it challenges the classical image of the gift in anthropology: that is, a reciprocal exchange of equivalent or greater values. The paradox of the gift that Marcel Mauss first identified was its failure as a gift: prestations were made in diverse social worlds with the anticipation that they would one day be returned. The liquid endowments at stake in these Tamil works might be understood as closer to the pure or free gifts whose possibility Mauss had refused: grants from above whose very nature defied the ability of their recipients to return them in equal measure.∑∞ The gift of water could be taken as akin to a free gift insofar as it was exercised from a superior position—in cosmic, political, or moral terms—with respect to a social order, denying the possibility of the reciprocal obligations that routinely turn gifts into nothing more than deferred debts. ‘‘Deeds of duty need no return,’’ one couplet from the Tirukkuhral insists: ‘‘What does the world give in exchange for rain?’’∑≤ To be sure, Tamil literary works have not spoken of moisture in a single voice. Many Tamil works made use of the quality of moisture in order to challenge the very absence of sympathy in rural milieus. One verse from the eighteenth-century Mukk¯utfal Pafllfu mocks the cruelty of a landlord whose heart remains callous and dry even as his clothes are soaked by a storm.∑≥ And moralizing texts in Tamil have long made recourse to the image of clouds pouring water into the sea while standing crops scorch and wither, as a means of condemning the circulation of wealth among the already prosperous while those in need remain neglected.∑∂ Critiques such as these illustrate how the image of a liquid gift has provided an enduring idiom for both the celebration of sympathy and the condemnation of its loss in south Indian moral tradition. One 200

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may not always be able to count upon the receipt of sympathy from those beings able to act with this virtue, but one may still lament its absence from an inhabited world. In many ways, colonial power in India disrupted these relationships between sovereignty, sympathy, and acts of irrigation. Indeed, the colonial state all but abdicated responsibility for the scattered tanks and smaller irrigation works upon which most cultivators relied.∑∑ Nonetheless, ¯ıram or moisture persists in the postcolonial present as one of the most significant embodiments of sympathy in the Tamil language: in everyday talk, political rhetoric, religious discourse, and cinematic soundtrack alike, a sympathetic heart is distinguished most readily by its moist or wet condition. The image of irrigated paddy and watered weed lives on as a proverbial truth in Tamil, one that underscores the desirability of giving freely to others in need without expecting anything in return. Let us take a closer look now at what this particular proverb means for those who actually direct water through the cultivated lowlands. Looking from their vantage point, we may see more clearly the place of sympathy in contemporary agrarian milieus.

o Monsoon failure made 2002 a di≈cult year for cultivators relying on the Periyar Dam. As late as July the dam held little water, and it remained unclear whether enough would be released to sustain the monsoon paddy crop. Some farmers in the Cumbum Valley held ritual prayers for rain. Others planted their wetland fields with pulses and other dry crops rather than risking an expensive failure of paddy. Still others made surreptitious diversions of available water. One afternoon that July, I intercepted Thangadurai, Kallar irrigator, pedaling briskly down the main road. He was on his way to meet the government o≈cer responsible for water distribution to local channels. The farmers whose fields Thangadurai managed had raised nursery beds of paddy on the thin stream of seasonal spring water flowing through the river. They had gambled that enough rain would fall to transplant and raise these shoots to maturity. In the meantime, they had to ensure that the state o≈cer responsible for water would maintain their access to the little that was already there. ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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Thangadurai had collected a donation of cash from each of the cultivators, which he was taking now to the government agent. But he freely admitted to me that he too would also share in this clandestine sum. ‘‘Let the water for the paddy also irrigate the grass!’’ he exclaimed with a canny grin as he raced away on his bicycle.∑∏ Thangadurai had responded to my skeptical queries about his fundraising with a playful plea for sympathy. But the adage that he invoked also served to mark his own place within the agrarian economy of the Cumbum Valley. Throughout the region, cultivators employ irrigators to tend, water, and guard large tracts of wet lowland fields in common. ‘‘We are the ones who make the paddy grow,’’ many of these irrigators often told me proudly. Water was the most important instrument at their disposal, running continuously from channel to channel and field to field through the maze of wetland plots. ‘‘It just keeps on flowing,’’ one Cumbum Valley irrigator explained as he described how he and his colleagues would direct and redirect these waters in order to raise young paddy plants to maturity. The irrigators were rewarded for their labors at each harvest with a single sack of threshed grain for every kuli of land they tended as wage. They were in fact the figurative grass that had to be ‘‘watered’’ or paid along with the paddy each season: the latter could not be raised without tending to the former. The image of the paddy and the grass works especially well as a depiction of the place of the irrigators because these men daily traverse the very banks inhabited by grassy weeds. I was struck by this resonance one February morning as I followed the Kallar irrigator Sivankalai on a long amble through the paddy fields he managed at the head of the Cumbum Valley. Yellowing stalks of rice stretched to the horizon all around us: the harvest would begin the very next morning. As we traced a zigzag course along the narrow grassy bunds dividing fields and channels, Sivankalai reached out regularly with the long billhook slung over his shoulder to hack away thorny weeds from the paths. ‘‘We just wander about cutting,’’ he explained as he nudged one stalk into the running water of a small channel with a parting valediction: ‘‘run away.’’ This was extraordinarily fluid terrain, worked and reworked by the countless daily labors of the irrigators. Sivankalai and his colleagues were responsible for cutting and cleaning the aqueous pathways between irrigated plots. They spent much 202

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as they matured. ‘‘Just as you keep feeding a child milk,’’ he observed, ‘‘you must keep on watering that tender mud.’’ Paddy was reared on a flow of gifts from above: from the gods that granted rain, to the state agencies that channeled water downstream, to the cultivators who ensured a livelihood for those surviving on wage labor, to the irrigators who raised their plants to a healthy maturity, to the children who were reared like such plants by their own parents. The image of the paddy and the watered weed celebrates an agrarian order founded on sympathy, and the tendency of this feeling to spill over on behalf of less fortunate living beings. But we must also note that these were the lineaments of an ideology often belied by agrarian practice. In the Cumbum Valley as elsewhere, the pressures of market production work to rob such relations of their social and moral dimensions, relentlessly recasting gifts as contracts, credits, wages, or debts.∑π Under these conditions, the virtue of sympathy threatens to fade into little more than a feeble challenge to the brutal economism of the present. A few years ago, for instance, a clan of powerful local landlords tried to replace one group of irrigators tending their Cumbum Valley fields with more pliable employees. The irrigators rallied to successfully defend their claims to the work, casting their labors as a right or entitlement rather than as a consequence of sovereign good will. ‘‘The fields belong to you, but the channels belong to us,’’ they had told the landlords defiantly. For irrigators in such circumstances, the image of the paddy and the grassy weed could also be enlisted as an element of social critique: ‘‘It is rich people that are paddy,’’ Chinnaramu told me he has said to settle quarrels over the distribution of water among his younger colleagues: ‘‘Why should we wage laborers wrestle with each other like this? What flows to the paddy also flows to us, the grass.’’ Solidarity came with the harsh insight that they were no more than weeds to the wealthy bodies they worked so carefully to feed. But theirs was a unity of necessarily limited scope. Most irrigators were poor men of various castes who depended for their livelihood on the sacks of paddy they were paid with each harvest. As laborers with uncertain title to the very arena of their work, they could ill a√ord to extend their own sympathies very widely. Irrigators, for example, were entitled to an additional bundle of harvested paddy 204

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sheaves for every four kuli of land they managed to protect from gleaners. The elderly women who gleaned for the most part in the Cumbum Valley were allowed to gather grains from harvested fields only after all the bundles of sheaves had been lifted o√ the fields: to take any earlier was an act of theft that risked coarse insults and even beatings. ‘‘All gone if you look on with pity,’’ Sivankalai once told me: he would rather give a few rupees to someone in need than to allow them to take unlawfully from fields he was guarding. The ripe field sparrow was a being that drew little sympathy from the irrigators, even if it stood for men and women of their own caste and kin. Solidarity had its limits. With these a√ective boundaries of the agrarian economy in mind, let us return again to the idea of sympathy and antipathy as problems of caste identity.

o A journalist I once met in Chennai easily reduced the nature of the Kallars to a single word in English: dry. It was immediately clear to me that by ‘‘dry’’ he did not mean tedious, dull, or plain. Evoking the arid condition of the kafllfarn¯atfu he had left for the city two decades ago, John Rajayya identified the inner hardness of its people with the ambient harshness of their milieu. Those who judge Kallar nature from a critical distance—writers and o≈cials, people of other castes, Kallars like Rajayya himself who had resettled far from their natal villages—often rely on qualities of the environment in order to sketch the essential interior aridity of the caste. This is a form of reasoning long sustained by Tamil literary tradition. Indeed, the journalist himself summoned up the poetic conventions of Tamil classical verse, which had associated the wanton cruelty of highway robbers with the barren and uncivil qualities of their desert tracts.∑∫ In light of such representations, Rajayya’s suggestion that Kallars bore arid hearts ‘‘fit for that soil and that life’’ makes eminent sense. But from the vantage point of the social and environmental history of the region, such depictions make for a profound paradox. Kallars who have settled in the moist irrigated milieu of the Cumbum Valley are no less ‘‘dry’’ than their kin who have remained in the Kallar country. In fact, most of those who drew a contrast with me between these two surroundings ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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completely upturned such environmental reasoning. To be sure, Kallars in the Cumbum Valley had learned to live and prosper among men and women of other castes. But their wealth here had come, I was told again and again, at the cost of p¯acam or a√ection. The social life of this lush milieu was dominated in such narratives by feelings of rivalry, avarice, and jealousy, and shallow ties between friends and kin. Like the film narrative with which I began this chapter, many looked back at life ‘‘in the eastern country’’ of the dry kafllfarn¯atfu with nostalgic fondness: it was recognizably harsher in material terms, but seen as all the more genuine too in its concerns and a√ections for others. Although plentiful waters now coursed over the lucrative fields of the modern Cumbum Valley, in other words, the quality of sympathy itself seemed to have evaporated here. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment imagination of Adam Smith, sympathy stood as a capacity for e√ective moral judgment in diverse circumstances rather than a concern in particular for the su√ering of others; for Smith, the rise of a commercial society and its web of expanding social ties therefore encouraged the further development of sympathetic imagination, rather than threatening its exercise and expression.∑Ω In the Tamil traditions presented here, however, something very di√erent is clearly at work. Sympathy in south India is best understood as the compassionate consequence of an uncalculating inner nature, oriented around the bonds of the past and the needs of the present, rather than directed toward the foreseeable attainment of a desirable future. It is therefore not all that surprising, perhaps, that modern pressures of development have had the e√ect of eroding this orientation rather than cultivating it further. Here as elsewhere in the world, the emergence of a society of deliberate calculation appears to be the price of social peace. The Kallar moneylenders who control much of the Cumbum Valley economy today are more than willing to give to others, but only with the firm assurance of a foreseeable return. Such principles of return now govern many liquid flows through the region, both financial and otherwise. I conclude this chapter by charting the fate of Kallar sympathies, and especially those of Kallar women, under these contemporary conditions: by following the flow of tears as they shift their course through an agrarian landscape. 206

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A Cumbum Valley irrigator and a mature crop of paddy. Photograph by author.

of their time managing the flow of water through these channels: blocking o√ one course with spadefuls of soil, wood, and grass, and then opening up a bund to lead this stream into yet another field. If there was an ethos at the heart of these irrigating practices, it was most clearly anchored in a habit of sympathetic giving. Irrigators would broadcast paddy seeds over a thin sheet of water held in a small bed and allow the moist soil of this nursery bed to dry only in order to prevent seeds from ‘‘souring’’ before they sprout. Once mature sprouts had been transplanted into the wet mire of the fields, the latter would be drained only once to let an application of fertilizers soak into the soil without escaping. These paddy plants were fed with water as carefully and consistently as children, the irrigator Chinnaramu Thevar told me as we walked through the fields under his care on another occasion. The wet mire in which young paddy grew was itself known as pifllfai tofli, a tender ‘‘child’s mud.’’ ‘‘It is the same as a tender child, that crop and that mud,’’ Chinnaramu said. Like well-fed children, these plants would grow without ailments only if they were prevented from ‘‘drying’’ or going hungry ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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Sympathy in the House of Loss Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.—walter benjamin, the origin of german tragic drama

One afternoon I found Thangathai amm¯a sitting on her porch beside an aluminum vat of milk for sale. She called me over to sit down beside her; she knew that I had been recording folk songs, and she asked whether I had ever heard any oppu or funeral elegies. Gopal Gounder stopped in just then to buy a liter of milk. Thangathai, pointing him out, told me that only Kallar women like herself mourned the dead with passion: letting their hair loose, flailing their limbs, screaming and crying aloud. Gounder women, she argued, could not stand such a violent expression of sorrow: their hearts would sour and spoil, like cooked rice that had been left out in the heat of day for too long. When a Gounder man had died recently of liver failure across the narrow lane, she insisted, she had cried more fiercely for him than any of his own relations. A skeptical Gopal challenged her: ‘‘These women cry only for themselves,’’ he said, ‘‘thinking of their own troubles, and not the one who has just died.’’ But Thangathai quickly countered his challenge with a familiar proverb: ‘‘Let the water for the paddy also irrigate the grass!’’ she retorted. The funeral lament expressed both sympathy with others and concern for oneself. Elegies, it would appear, drew tears by flooding hearts with an unrestrained flow of feeling. Funerary elegies or oppu are verbal poems of grief. Performed by women alone in the midst of vigils to mourn the dead, these oppu give voice to individual experiences of su√ering as a means of lamenting the collective experience of death. The verses with which women speak their grief rely on vivid and wrenching allegories of loss, anchored often enough in scenes of the agrarian landscape. Kallar women are not the only women in the Tamil country to perform oppu: this is an oral tradition common to many lower and middle castes in the region, as rich and thoughtful studies by Margaret Trawick, Isabelle Clark-Deces, and others have shown.∏≠ In the following pages, however, I focus on the elegy as a practice of sympathy among Kallar women in particular, one that is ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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Thangathai amm¯a. Photograph by author.

deeply concerned with the powers of moisture. The tears released by oppu work to dissolve the boundary between self and other, between self and landscape, and ultimately between past and present. To confront the work of this living practice is to challenge any imagination of Kallars by caste and by collective nature as bearers of an arid and hostile moral character. To confront the tenuous fate of this tradition too, however, is to grapple with the moral cruelty of an indi√erent present.

o On the afternoon of 17 April 2002, an elderly man named Karuppa Thevar ended his own life with a handful of poisonous oleander seeds. The abdominal pain that he had endured for the last few months had apparently grown unbearable. His many relations gathered that night for a vigil at his small house in K. G. Patti. Karupayi amm¯a invited me to attend as well to hear her oppu, although I had never known Karuppa Thevar myself. I came by at about eleven that night to find a big crowd 208

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of men gathered in small groups outside the house, playing games of rummy under fluorescent light. They would gamble there until daybreak. Ippafti t¯anh kahlipp¯an˙ ka, an acquaintance of mine told me by way of explanation. With these words, he could have meant either ‘‘this is how they pass the time’’ or ‘‘this is how they pay their debts.’’ Within the compound wall of the house, women settled their accounts with the deceased in their own manner. I knew most of the older and younger women there, and they welcomed me in when they saw me at the door, asking me to sit beside the body of the deceased. Karuppa Thevar was propped up on a chair inside, a long white cloth holding back his head and tying shut his mouth. Women approached his body to speak in turn, rocking back and forth in wrenching, tearful address while others wept quietly along with them. Each who spoke sobbed her oppu until others found her passionate cries too overwhelming: they rose to touch her, break her out of the spell she had fallen under, and bring her over to a corner where she could rest and recover her breath. There were long gaps of silence, punctuated sometimes even by spells of laughter when some women tried to convince others to wail directly into my tape recorder. I stayed till about 2:30 a.m. But the women somehow had to sit out the whole night at the ihlavu v¯ıtfu: the house of loss. Those who took turns to sit at Karuppa Thevar’s feet that night cried not only for him but also for their own experiences of loss and despair. Pechi choked out words for her dead husband, and for a son who had just eloped with a washerman’s daughter. Annapillai tightly clasped her sari as she lamented two sons who had both died in sudden accidents. Karupayi amm¯a gritted her teeth and clenched her small arms as she cried for her widowed daughter. She turned her grief to these elegies— The black sari you would wear My daughter that I bore With a hem of golden thread In your time to wear such a sari My daughter that I bore You took it o√ and put it in the chest The sari to put on again and again My daughter that I bore ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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With its border color of gold In your days to wear such a sari My daughter that I bore You slipped it o√ to place in the chest Although the garlands today My daughter that I bore Were heaped on all the streets We searched and took them all My daughter that I bore For you the worst of the flower garlands Although on all the paths today My daughter that I bore The garlands were scattered for you We looked and took them all My daughter that I bore The most wretched garlands for you Cactus flower garlands today My daughter that I bore The flower garlands for your neck If you knew the torment coming to you My daughter that I bore You would have cast them aside Turned your hands and feet to begging Country mallow garlands today My daughter that I bore The flower garlands for your shoulders If you knew the sadness coming to you My daughter that I bore You would have thrown them away Taken on an ascetic life

Crushed garlands scattered on the streets unveiled marital hopes as funerary flowers. Wedding garlands of cactus and country mallow—plants found only on the edges of inhabited and cultivated places—depicted abortive marriage as a promise of exile. As Karupayi amm¯a told many 210

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more of these elegies, I saw that her oppu were contagious. Several other women were driven to tears by the words that she cried. When she finally fell to silence, Karuppa Thevar’s own wife had already begun to cry again.

o Oppu are verses of resemblance. This small word with which Kallar women name the elegy literally means resemblance, likeness, consonance, or similarity. Resemblance is therefore also at the root of opp¯ari, the more widely used term in Tamil for the genre of funerary verse. To say oppu is to speak likeness and to speak of likenesses. Consonance is both an element in the formal structure of the oppu and a sense evoked by its words. Each verse is alliterative in its form: the vowel or consonant that opens the first line is echoed by the vowels or consonants that open each succeeding line of the verse. The words tutti, t¯ul, tunpam, h t¯ukki, and tuhravatai, for example, open each of the lines in the last of the verses I have translated here.∏∞ Resonance of syllable makes possible a second order of resemblances: every verse such as this one finds its echo, term by term, in the lines that immediately precede or follow. Oppu are always said as pairs of verses, the second of each pair mirroring the first in both syntactical form and semantic content.∏≤ Sympathy therefore, one might suggest, is the formal principle that defines most precisely the poetics of the genre. Every line of an oppu evokes a su√ered loss from a figurative distance: an abandoned sari, a castaway garland, a desiccated seedling, a runaway horse, and so on. The elegies therefore rely on a third order of likeness, one that binds together worldly things and private losses. Such relations are sutured by the personal addresses introjected into the scripted form of the verses: my daughter that I bore, the king with whom I lived, the one that was born with me, and so on. Such invocations build on a sense of su√ering shared among individual experiences of loss. To mourn the immediate dead with oppu is to mourn one’s own history of losses, and to lament one’s own losses is also to lament the immediate dead. Elegies also work then to elicit sympathetic feelings from their listeners. Women performing oppu at a vigil for the dead draw out every line with long and quavering breaths, punctuating each verse with a ritual sob. The words of a good teller draw tears from the eyes of others listening, and similar ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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words from other mouths. To weep without uttering these words, no matter how loudly or wrenchingly, is to shed what Kallar women describe as u¯ mai kanf n¯ f ır or ‘‘mute tears.’’ Oppu is the very language of grief, the means of its expression between oneself and another.∏≥ What is most striking about this language is its allegorical character. Kallar women do not console one another by assuming the su√ering of the other as their own. Oppu is therefore a practice of sympathy at odds with the ‘‘fellow-feeling’’ that Adam Smith had described so persuasively as the seeing of oneself as an imagined spectator would. Kallar elegies close the distance between spectator and su√erer by evoking instead the distress of a third domain of beings: those who endure hardship and loss within the imaginary world of the poems themselves. Rather than describing the pain of those who say them, or the pain of those for whom they are said, these elegies imagine the su√ering of someone else altogether. Consider the following oppu: Well beside the doorstep Bottomless well of ghee To come and to rinse my face Am I but a passerby? Deep well receding steps Undying well of ghee To touch and to rinse my face Have I grown so distant here?

With these words a married woman laments the loss of her natal home and the indi√erence with which her brothers and their wives may greet her once her parents have passed away. Rather than complaining about this situation directly, the speaker describes a thirsty wayfarer denied access to the replenishing waters of a deep well. This image is presented as an allegory of loss. In the setting of a funerary vigil, imagined figures such as these create a bridge between the one who cries and the one who has just lost a parent, child, or husband. Sympathy depends on the shadowy presence of these other wounded. Like this pair of verses, most elegies sketch the lightness of hope in their first lines and the dull thud of despair in their last. Isabelle ClarkDeces has suggested that such funerary images are best understood as 212

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means of persuasion, conveying the truth of their teller’s own disappointments. Women who cry such words individually, she argues, intend to move all those within earshot to feelings of pity for the record of their losses.∏∂ What I have seen of Kallar elegies, however, calls for a slightly di√erent interpretation. These verses work to move others not by artfully convincing them of the truth of a private life, but rather by sketching the perimeters of a collective experience shared by all women present.∏∑ Oppu compose a living tradition of spoken verse. Learned from one another, they are rarely improvised at vigils or invented anew by the women who cry them. And the allegories of loss at the heart of each elegy disrupt the very distinction between self and other. Their images populate the interior space of the self with the traces of other beings, bodies whose own su√erings echo and redouble the pain of the self.∏∏ It is in this light that the landscapes of experience conjured by oppu are best understood. The subjects of elegies wander near and far in the representation of their despair: empty homes and hearths, roads strewn with the rubbish of funeral processions, hillside temples of divine yet fruitless grace, indifferent rivers and ponds, cultivated tracts gone to waste. Especially prominent among these poetic landscapes are agrarian scenes. When her son died suddenly of a heart attack some fifteen years ago, among the oppu that Viramma cried were the following lines: Transplanting the ginger and then Planting among the ginger a single lime The cool water which soaked the ginger Did not flow for you the lime Transplanting the turmeric and then Planting among the turmeric a lemon herb The cool water that soaked the turmeric Did not flow for you the lemon herb

With these and other verses, Viramma commemorated her son’s prowess as a farmer. Their poetic force lies in the slight but crucial displacement they make in their evocation of a cultivated landscape. In the span of a few short lines, a living man is turned from a tender of ginger and lime to the very lime that died among the irrigated ginger. The lines carry their ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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listener from a recollection of these crops as the objects of a dead son’s care to an imagination of this very man as the object of inadequate care. The image is both literal and figurative: through the work of resemblance, this poetry bends experience against itself, finding a language of mourning in the memory of an agrarian practice. A lost son haunts the intercropped space opened up by this pair of verses, appearing as both subject and object of cultivating care. Oppu such as these dissolve the distinction between self and other by identifying the self with a landscape of loss: A single stalk of jasmine rice I planted beside the river dam The water did not top the dam I withered beside the dam A single stem of k¯arttikai paddy∏π I planted beside the river bank The water did not top the bank I withered beside the bank

These two elegies depict the plight of a married woman who finds herself barren and unable to conceive. They begin by taking a cultivated plant as an object of gaze and labor, and then suddenly transform this living being into the subject of the very hardship allegorized by the verse. The speaking ‘‘I’’ assumes the position of the struggling thing described: the one finds voice in the experience of the other. Oppu bind self with landscape in a relation of sympathy. Their topographies of loss make a language for the m¯etfu pafllfam—the ‘‘uplands and lowlands’’—of a grieving woman’s own life of attachments. This phrase is more than a metaphor, as rural Kallar women often learn particular oppu from each other as they work together in fields, pastures, and forests. Gathered in these elegies are the reverberating trials of such places. To cry them is to feel with their imagined qualities. And in particular, what is often expressed is the distress of need or thirst. Each of the agrarian verses above depicts plants withering from inadequate moisture. Water is typically identified with the compound noun tann¯ f ır in contemporary Tamil: n¯ır or ‘‘water’’ prefixed with the adjectival tan, f coolness, grace, or love. Oppu often lament the loss of tender moisture. 214

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To tell oppu is to cry of desiccation, to voice the barren heat of loss. Perhaps for this reason, elegies are never said while fields are being planted.

o What do elegies do for the women who say them, those who find themselves wilting in desiccation even as they weep? There is a certain kind of catharsis at work in this crying, as Clark-Deces rightly observes: in the words of one of her own informants, ‘‘resentments accumulate and pour out like water flows out of a well.’’∏∫ At the same time, however, there is no clear end to such mourning. In the life of loss that oppu represent— evictions from natal homes, ongoing struggles with husbands and siblings, the fraying and disappearance of countless ties among kin—there is always more to cry for. Sigmund Freud might have described this as a condition of melancholia: a refusal to let go of what one has lost by immersing oneself in the memory of its death. With respect to this condition, Judith Butler has written that ‘‘what remains unspeakably absent inhabits the psychic voice of the one who remains.’’∏Ω One might argue that in like manner, Tamil elegies—calling forward a litany of losses without end—preserve the traces of the absent and relentlessly draw these pasts back into the present. Elegies therefore concern not only what is lost, but also what remains behind.π≠ Disrupting the boundary between self and other in verse after tortured verse, oppu fold all kinds of experience—domestic, agrarian, migratory, devotional, political, bodily, passionate, and so on—into the collective life of those who say them and those who hear them said. Far from recounting the private trials of an individual woman, then, these elegies dwell most closely on the myriad forms of violence and trauma that continue to mark the common experience of a community. One of the most profound ways in which elegies do this is by drawing at times the injustices of the state into the realm of mourning, and it is to this practice that I wish to turn now. In the chain of verses to which Kallar women give voice at funerary vigils, two o≈cers of the state sometimes make a sudden and surprising appearance: tahsildar and p¯olic¯ar, district revenue o≈cial and police constable, each contributing their syllables in turn to the structure of ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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alliterative expression. Invariably, these two figures are represented as heartless emissaries of a hostile order. In one elegy, they declare the death of a young girl as her proper fate rather than the fault of the well water she fell into. In another, they sentence a woman to a lifetime of crying upon the death of her husband: A golden key it seems The tahsildar’s o≈ce it seems The sentence of the tahsildar : It will not end until I die A key of gold it seems The policeman’s station it seems The sentence of the policeman: It will not go until I go

In yet another, these o≈cers arrive by drumbeat and villagers have no choice but to submit meekly to their authority: As the golden tom-tom is beaten As the tahsildar comes and stands To silence the mouth of the o≈cer Was there no golden one born to us? As the tom-tom of gold is beaten As the policeman comes and stands To silence the mouth of the policeman Was there no leader born to us?

Kallars are by no means the only community in the Tamil country to summon up such o≈cers in their elegies. And yet, these particular scenes bear a startling resemblance to the ways in which this particular caste has been engaged by the colonial and postcolonial state. Thousands of Piramalai Kallar men spent each night for decades in the courtyards of police stations while their families endured their absences. Throughout the years in which the Criminal Tribes Act was enforced in the Madras Presidency, the beat of a tom-tom by visiting o≈cials would require all Kallars registered under the act in a given village to assemble immediately for a roll call. And as I have stressed in previous chapters, many Kallar men and women alike still engage the law with antagonism and 216

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defiance. It would of course be very di≈cult to identify such histories as the source of particular oppu. But for those reared on tales and recollections of these struggles, a deep resonance between such elegies and the tensions of the past would be inescapable. There is a particular cruelty to the sentences passed by revenue o≈cer and police constable alike in the pair of oppu that I have translated here. Neither o√ers any chance of redemption from the violence of the law, nor any escape from a life of sad submission. These elegies evoke a legal order utterly devoid of sympathy or care. Debt to this law is infinite and unforgivable, freedom from its reach a permanent loss. To be caught in a confrontation with such a state is to surrender without choice to the trauma of an ongoing subjection. I dwell on this image of an eternal sentence because it captures something essential about the postcolonial condition I have sought to convey throughout this book. What remains or is left behind within this image of loss are the traces of a history that cannot be forgotten, the violence of a past that must be carried forward in order to make sense of a painful and disruptive present. Sympathy ultimately stands therefore as an art of survival, one that does not depend on an escape or release from the events of the past, but rather on the life yet to be cultivated among their ruins. If the flow of tears promises anything at all, it is perhaps this sober possibility.π∞ Lamenting Today Irrigation projects stand in India today as symbols of cruel indi√erence as much as benevolent care. Many of those unfortunate enough to dwell under the shadow of the massive dams dubbed by Nehru as the ‘‘temples of the new age’’ have su√ered deeply.π≤ Such somber tales are written even onto the rippled surface of the Vaigai River. In the 1950s the Vaigai Dam itself displaced at least five thousand people from twelve hamlets of the river valley. In a telling sign of the times, the Madura district collector expressed remarkably little concern over these exiled (and mostly Kallar) households: ‘‘They will get themselves accommodated in the other villages which are also mostly inhabited by Kallars.’’π≥ To what extent his optimism was justified remains unknown. In 2001, the Tamil poet and film lyricist Vairamuthu, who was born into one of these households, commemorated the loss of his own native village with the serial publica‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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tion of a novel entitled Kallikattu Ithikasam (Epic of a cactus landscape). The story closes as the advancing waters of the dam swallow up the fictional village of Kallipatti ‘‘like an army of a thousand cobras.’’ There is little compassion in these merciless currents. The mud walls of the protagonist’s former house collapse around him as he dives to retrieve one last fistful of domestic earth. And an elegy is cast over the unrelenting waves: ‘‘Today too only the Varushanad wind blowing over the Vaigai Dam cries oppu [for him].’’ There is no doubt an element of lyrical excess to this closing image. And yet, it testifies well to the kind of sympathy I have sought to sketch in these pages. It is the landscape that emerges in Vairamuthu’s novel—if only belatedly—as the bearer of a mournful voice and conscience whose concern remains even as that of others fades. This voice may remind us too that sympathy as a virtue depends upon attentiveness, not only to oneself in the manner that we have seen in previous chapters, but also to the claims of another’s su√ering upon oneself. Reflecting upon the life to be lived in the midst and wake of collective violence in India, Veena Das has described pain as ‘‘a claim on the other—[an] asking for acknowledgment that may be given or denied.’’ Das insists that the cry of pain may not always be recognized, that practices of mourning may confront the stubborn ‘‘failings of the spirit’’ possible within any tradition of sympathetic listening.π∂ And indeed, if there is anything that is apparent to the women who cry oppu in south India today, it is the frailty of their elegiac tradition. Not everyone lends the su√ering an attentive eye and ear, and the women who do cry now worry that those who follow behind them will not lament their passing. ‘‘That tenderness,’’ Thangathai said, ‘‘does not come to those with stony hearts.’’ She and other women complained of callous men in their lives: husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, none of whom would or even could mourn losses as keenly as they did.π∑ Even more troubling to them was the idea that their nieces, daughters, and granddaughters might themselves become indi√erent and unfeeling to the event of death. The emerging problem they identified had to do with newer norms of civilized conduct in the region, novel postures of deliberation, calculation, and restraint that challenged the mode of elegiac expression itself. Women these days have got a ‘‘Dindigul lock’’ on their mouths, the elderly Raniyamma complained at Karuppa Thevar’s vigil, suggesting that this famously sturdy device for household doors marked 218

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most precisely the bolted quality of modern mouths and hearts. And in the midst of another conversation about oppu, a middle-aged Kallar woman named Sita sketched a caustic and bitterly funny portrait of this new civility and the younger women who found it appealing. There was a time, she said, when women would rush out of their houses at the news that someone had died, running out in whatever they were wearing, without even braiding or oiling their hair. But now they counsel each other to compose themselves first: ‘‘Wear your sari well, and borrow a chain to wear if you’ve mortgaged your own. People will come from out of town! How would it be if you simply sat there with nothing [around your neck]?’’ Sita went on. Women used to tire themselves out by weeping, refusing co√ee or anything else to drink. But today they will take ten cups of co√ee and sit back to survey avidly the latest arrivals at the house of mourning: ‘‘Who are those people? Those are the people from across the street. Look, those are the legislator’s people!’’ Grieving women who break out into oppu these days, she complained, are often persuaded by others to stop: ‘‘Hey, why are you spluttering like this? Just be quiet. Come over here! Exhausting yourself like this . . .’’ Meanwhile, the ‘‘decent’’ young women in the crowd might issue a few cursory words like ‘‘Ayy¯o , amm¯a , my mother has died . . .’’ in a slight whiny voice before reaching out their hands for another bottle of soda. From a giver of unrestrained tears to a taker of bottled drinks: here as elsewhere, civilization brings new routines of exchange and novel imperatives in self-management. What, after all, are the young women in Sita’s biting sketch teaching each other to do? They must learn to see themselves from the vantage point of a distant judge, to become aware of how they may appear to others in the expression of their feelings, even as they give voice to them. These are indeed the returns of virtues such as civility, propriety, and restraint, and the modernity that promises their attainment. And this is how Adam Smith himself had imagined the value of sympathy, as an instrument of critical self-command. Yet, here, it is clear that the cultivation of such qualities comes at the expense of an enduring practice of sympathetic reckoning. The decay of the elegiac tradition itself ultimately bears witness to the tragic character of moral cultivation in modern times. Perhaps there is no progress without the ruin of something beautiful and just. I draw this book to a close by reflecting on the possibility of justice under such di≈cult conditions. ‘‘The Water for the Paddy’’

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Epilogue The cruel one who spurns me in waking life, Why does he aΔict me always in my dreams? —tirukku rc al 1217

Just after midnight on 18 November 2001, a child was born into the family I lived with in the Cumbum Valley. When Sudha suddenly went into labor that evening, her mother, Iswari, summoned a midwife and ushered all the men into one room of the house. We could hear her wailing in the back room for several minutes, and then we suddenly heard him crying. Pale and wrinkled, he was bathed and laid out onto a cotton cloth on the floor. Iswari akk¯a had stirred a mixture of brown sugar and spices into a small bowl of oils. She asked me to touch this substance to his lips, the first that he would taste after leaving the womb. The custom relies on the faith that the child will assume the qualities of the first one to touch this c¯enai h to its lips. In past years, a trusted relative might have done this with a small sickle in the hope that the newborn too would grow adept at farming. Today, the instrument is the pen, and its promise an education. ‘‘Let your nature go, let my nature come to you,’’ I said as I was told to do, dipping my own black-ink pen into the bowl to daub at his lips while reciting this formula. The ritual left me touched but also secretly anxious: indeed, even in the days that followed, Sudha began lightheartedly to blame me for the child’s abundant mischief. Like most Tamil women, Sudha had returned for this childbirth to the household of her parents. Kannan and Iswari both hailed from respectable Vellala lineages that had shared in the founding of this village, less than two kilometers down the road from K. G. Patti. Their once plentiful agricultural lands had dwindled over the years, and they owned little

Brought from the house first to this field, in the hope that he would always return here. Photograph by author.

more at that point than a small tract of coconut and paddy on the edge of the river. Ten days after Prasanna’s birth, it was to these fields that we had brought him beyond the yellow walls of the household for the first time: there was a sense that he would keep returning to this first place of exposure and prayer. This hope, however, has since grown somewhat faint. A year later, I learned by letter that Sudha’s parents had mortgaged o√ their village lands to settle in the bustling industrial town of Tiruppur to the north, where Kannan anf n¯ f a now packed vests on twelve-hour shifts at a knitwear factory. When I visited them there in 2005, he admitted that he mourned the ‘‘heritage’’ they had left behind in the Cumbum Valley, gesturing lightly with a hand to his chest. ‘‘But a kuftiy¯anava h nh cannot ∞ prosper there, Anand,’’ he also complained with a bitter laugh. Meanwhile, Sudha still toiled in the fields and orchards of her in-laws alongside her husband, Murugan, in another Cumbum Valley village. ‘‘Let him also wander in the paddy fields like his father,’’ she had mused with a wry laugh about Prasanna as we had walked back from the river that morning in 2001: then as now, however, she also hoped most avidly that he would learn to do something else altogether. 222

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Tradition and Aspiration Desires for development in contemporary India are propelled by many di√erent visions of advancement—material, spiritual, familial, social— that are not always easily reconcilable. Individuals may find their prospects entrusted to the moral expectations of various kinds of agencies: parents and other respected kin, friends, teachers, labor bosses, community and party leaders, revered deities, even the moral judgment of the earth upon which one may toil, or the insistent reminders of one’s own ripening heart or conscience. How then do people ultimately come to live as they ought to live? In what circumstances do they come to be as they and others feel they should? Under what conditions do they fail to do so? One may seek answers to these questions in numerous arenas of social life: from the forecasts and stratagems of rituals at birth, to the disciplines and exercises of schoolroom pedagogy, to the developmental promises and pitfalls of particular vocations, all of which had something to do, for example, with the futures imagined for Prasanna long before the moment of his birth.≤ In these pages I have paid closest attention to the echoes and consequences of two moral forces in everyday life: the desires set into motion by the developmental endeavors of a modern state apparatus, and the abiding legacies of a moral tradition of cultivation in south India. Between these two forces, particular virtues emerge here as desirable ways of living, articulated closely with the daily rhythms and practical engagements of the present as well as with the inherited substance of historical experience. These virtues ought to be understood not only as abstract ideals and principles of a good life but also more particularly as habits of self-conduct— as cultivable tendencies to act, think, and feel in a worthy manner, as practical elements in the ethical work of becoming a certain kind of being. I have focused in particular on agrarian cultivation as a domain for the imagination and exercise of such virtues: on everyday rural practice as an arena of moral reflection, as a means of developing virtuous habits and inclinations, and as a model for the cultivation of a good heart. We have seen how rural people in south India came to conduct themselves with civility and restraint, to engage others with propriety and sympathy, and to address the earth through their toil and su√ering. Epilogue

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Each of these virtues makes visible a unique intersection between the moralizing legacies of modern state reformism and the fragmentary echoes of south Indian moral tradition. Each has also testified to the deep and abiding limits of moral transformation. Virtues may be nurtured with hope, care, and deliberate e√ort, but they are also always subject to the more arbitrary play of power, chance, and fate. The making of moral subjects is a complicated and uncertain process, never easily deduced from the plans that people may fashion for their own lives or from the goals projected for them by others. Ethics of selfhood work upon a condition of interior fracture. Torn between rival ways of being, and bu√eted by the many forces constantly working to open and close particular paths, individual selves have surfaced in these pages as arenas of strife and contradiction. Few manage to reconcile abiding tensions between what is and what ought to be the substance of their lives, between what is felt as desirable and what is felt as good, even while one works upon oneself to close this gap.≥ This may be the very contradiction that so often lends a powerful moral charge to struggles for development. But at times, more intractable forms of impasse may also arise here. Consider these three. First, this book about persistent traditions has been composed in an atmosphere of heady optimism concerning the global future of India, at a time when countless observers find the country finally breaking free from the shackles of a dim and stifling heritage. These pervasive narratives of a definitive rupture with the past circulate far beyond the realm of the urban middle classes whose exploits they celebrate most explicitly. In the Cumbum Valley today, rural men and women diagnose the present as a ‘‘time of civility’’ demanding new levels of politesse, a ‘‘time of cinema’’ luring their children into the pitfalls of reckless desire, and a ‘‘time of ruin’’ promising ever more trickery, violence, and decay. But most of all, whether lettered or unlettered, they too name the present most often as a computer k¯alam: as a ‘‘time of computers’’ whose distant and unseen machines have already come to dictate the terms of their existence. Cast against the spiraling momentum of these times, many of the idioms, customs, and aspirations I have presented in these pages may appear as the relics of a rude and bygone era. ‘‘Tradition’’ remains widely invoked of course in political and social rhetoric as an idealized buttress for various claims to national and cultural integrity. Of lesser interest, how224

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ever, are the more subtle ways in which people rely upon the moral resources of the past even as they claim modernity for themselves.∂ Second, I have written here of virtue at a moment when advancement in India often seems like a rather vicious enterprise. Each of these chapters has dwelt on the moral pedagogy exercised by state o≈cials, missionaries, teachers, poets, parents, and others, and on the many ways in which ordinary men and women also struggle to make themselves into moral beings. Such redemptive accounts may be easily overwhelmed, however, by the prolific and often baroque narratives of scandal, neglect, and abuse that enliven the vernacular presses of contemporary India. Many of the wealthiest citizens of the Cumbum Valley, for example, enriched themselves through the relentless pursuit of ‘‘crooked paths,’’ putting moral qualities like restraint to use as e√ective covers for deceit. Their clandestine economies in ganja, usury, liquor distillation, and sandalwood theft have fully depended as well on the illicit cooperation of foresters, constables, and other state agents of a putative uplift. ‘‘A teacher educates speech, a police o≈cer educates conduct,’’ one proverb claims. Slurred and bent to suit the times, it is now heard much more often in a di√erent sense: ‘‘A teacher lacks good speech, a police o≈cer lacks good conduct.’’∑ Hefty bribes often secure either government post in Tamil Nadu today. Third, these pages have sketched cultivation as a moral endeavor in a time when agriculture itself is rarely imagined as a means of social and economic well-being. While the kuftiy¯anava h nh may remain a proverbial emblem and practical exemplar of virtue in the Tamil countryside, Kannan’s complaint about being unable to prosper as a farmer carries a bitter tang for just this reason. Young men and women cultivate the soil as proprietors and laborers today not by choice but despite the best intentions of their parents and other caretakers. ‘‘Let our di≈culties end with us,’’ a middle-aged Kallar couple told me one afternoon, narrating how the erratic perils of rain and crop prices drove them to seek military and nursing postings in distant towns for their son and daughter. They made sense of this choice in agrarian terms: ‘‘In our agriculture, we never plant the same crop again and again. We rotate them: first some peanuts, then a pulse. Let them also do something else for a change.’’ However, it is less likely that young men and women raised in other environments would find wise counsel in such analogies. As one of my own cousins in ChenEpilogue

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nai, an engineer himself, quipped in retort to the earnest symbolism of a telecast Tamil film called Uhlavanh (Ploughman) one afternoon, ‘‘My heart is random access, not serial access like a tractor. Modern tilling!’’∏ If his moral self had an architecture, in other words, it would assume the form of a circuit board. In sum, I have written of an agrarian tradition of virtue in south India at a present moment when each of these terms—agrarian, tradition, and virtue—appears far removed from the most promising paths of advancement. A certain spirit of salvage has therefore guided this work. As this is a term that represents a controversial legacy in anthropology, let me say a few words about what I do not mean by it. In describing this book as a work of salvage, I intend neither to mourn what is no longer possible nor to simply celebrate what has somehow endured. The first of these gestures lay at the heart of the ‘‘salvage ethnography’’ that animated much of American anthropology in the early twentieth century. Alfred Kroeber, who lent his name to the building where I received my own disciplinary training in California, once described this as an endeavor to gather the remnants of ruined cultures from a few surviving Native Americans already clad in blue jeans.π Although fashions of dress have vividly changed in modern India, such elements of the cultural past have not been obliterated altogether. Nor is it plausible to imagine that every Indian household will one day depend upon a call-center operator. Agrarian civility remains a necessary orientation for many in the Tamil country today. Neither have I meant to celebrate rural tradition as the emblem of a vital ongoing resistance to modernity. Jawaharlal Nehru famously recounted his discovery of an attractive yet ‘‘di≈cult to define’’ quality among the ‘‘countryfolk’’ of India, something missing among the middle classes.∫ In nationalist discourse from the nineteenth century onward, the countryside in India has often been saddled with the burden of embodying the customs and traditions of a distinctive national ethos. Visiting India from America as a child myself, I was sometimes told by bespectacled elder men, ‘‘Son, if you want to know the real India, you must go to the villages.’’ This book has aimed to show that myriad modern engagements and devices—land revenue policy, schoolbook texts, public agencies of law and order, cinema and televised broadcasts, and so on—have played a critical role in the making of this real rural India and its signal virtues. The moral norms of the countryside work 226

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today as instruments of power and exclusion, and have in fact always done so, even prior to their enlistment in the tactics of nationalist pedagogy. Far from composing a unitary fabric of meaning, feeling, and being, these ideas themselves have long been spurned and contested by those living at their margins. What I mean by salvage then is a critique of the present made possible by a confrontation with the visible ruins and persistent remnants of its pasts. My approach has been inspired in part by the work of Walter Benjamin, who had depicted the modern ‘‘angel of history’’ with the enduring image of a figure hurtling backward, transfixed by the piling wreckage and debris of progress. I too have rummaged here in the ‘‘garbage heap’’ of historical progress for a way of imagining modernity in critical terms.Ω But my concern for the past has also been attuned more specifically to the conditions of life in postcolonial India. ‘‘The bitter truth about our present is our subjection,’’ Partha Chatterjee has written, ‘‘our inability to be subjects in our own right.’’ Modernity was imposed upon India from without, and long past the dusk of European colonialism its promises for many retain the quality of foreign gifts or debts. In these circumstances, it is di≈cult to conceive a modern future as a clean break with or exit from the past. Instead, as Chatterjee observes, elements from the past still serve the ‘‘once-colonized’’ as means of coping with the more imperious pressures of the present: ‘‘for us it is precisely the present from which we feel we must escape.’’∞≠ There is no doubt something tragic in this flight, as it is often precipitated by a sense of the impossibility of becoming truly or fully developed on the terms laid down by the West. Underdevelopment as I have sketched it in these pages is best understood as an ongoing state of being, rather than as an initial point of departure to be displaced by a clear point of arrival. In other words, there is no end to the moral tutelage and ethical development of the postcolonial self.∞∞ But how is one to live under such conditions? How best to make a life between the horizons of an endless expectation and its relentless disappointments?∞≤ It is here that traditions of virtue may provide certain essential resources to subjects of development. Moral traditions draw on the past to support arguments with the present and its promised futures: they organize the field of play in which contemporary life struggles to assume its many forms.∞≥ The force of their virtues may be deep and powerful in certain circumstances Epilogue

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yet weak and ine√ectual in others. People do not always do what they feel they ought to do. And yet, when such moral imperatives open up the interior terrain of the self as a domain of ethical feeling, thought, and action, they can provide a way of navigating the di≈cult impasses of the present.∞∂ They may even yield, as we shall see, the glimpse of a distant yet possible justice. An Afterlife of Cultivation For the Piramalai Kallars of southern India, reverberations of the colonial past remain an inescapable feature of contemporary life. Although native delegates to the Madras Legislative Assembly repealed the Criminal Tribes Act in 1947, this gesture cannot be taken as a clear moment of postcolonial emancipation. As Kallar community representatives lobbying for the abolition of the act had themselves observed in the 1940s, ‘‘the brand of criminality set on the tribes burns itself into their spirit.’’∞∑ In the Tamil country today, idle talk of reckless impulse, persistent savagery, and criminal deceit continue to bear the traces of such branding, as do myriad forms of moral self-cultivation built upon these caustic assessments. It is in this sense that the present that I have described must be understood as postcolonial in its character: it is deeply indebted, that is, to the events, dictates, projects, and legacies of colonial history. I have also stressed, however, that these remnants of a more recent modern past do not exhaust the field of historical inheritance in the rural Tamil country today. Older practices of agrarian virtue yield many Kallar men and women durable moral orientations and means of struggling productively with the violence of their modern experience, even as others among them fail and even refuse to live up to such moralizing expectations. ‘‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,’’ Karl Marx has famously written.∞∏ While sharing his concern for the weight of the past, I have sought in these pages to address both the pressure and the potential of this afterlife. I have written of agrarian cultivation as a domain of both power and freedom, as a realm of subjection to law and discipline, to fate and chance, to the authority of others and to oneself, but also as a means of seeking out the possibilities of a more cultivated existence. Those who cultivate the land may not freely choose to do so. But having been fated through the force 228

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of circumstance to pursue this life, they may still find within it a means of living well—in a moral sense, at the very least, if not in an economic sense. Rather than closing this book then with a promise of full freedom from the force of the past, I o√er instead a portrait of the life that may be lived even in its absence. We may find in this tale—of a nightmare, in fact, endured by a single subject of belated reform—one last lesson in the fate of virtue and its agrarian cultivation in postcolonial times.

o Rasayya Thevar was the proprietor of a small tea stall and grocery store on a wide road in K. G. Patti village. I knew him as a man incessantly plagued by the thought of his own sudden downfall. In a little over twenty years, he had amassed a small fortune tra≈cking ganja, brandy, black market rice, and clandestine bundles of cane between the mountains of Kerala and the Tamil Nadu plains. But the constables and foresters finally caught up with him about a decade ago, and the cost of clearing over thirty-five criminal cases left him with little more in hand than the store and a small orchard tract along the river. One particular fact underscored for him the blind injustice of this outcome. Almost every time that Rasayya and I spoke, he brought up the phenomenal success of his associate Pandiyaraj, his closest friend and longtime partner in illicit trades. This man, who could once do no more than to borrow even his beedi smokes from Rasayya, now owned two palatial houses and a fleet of rental vehicles in the district capital further north in the valley. Some of us were fated to rise and fall like paddy plants in three short months, Rasayya told me: others would live in wealth for a single year, while only a few would grow as far and prosper as long as orchard trees. This was a lesson of nature steeped in a bitter irony. It was agriculture, Rasayya insisted, that had ruined him. He had once been flush with so much cash that he could hide away six full sacks of ganja and still a√ord to forget where he had stashed them. All these countless thousands of rupees had been invested and finally squandered in an ill-fated e√ort to cultivate the land. He knew full well that the colonial state had once sought to reform his Kallar caste by encouraging them to take up agriculture. In fact, his own grandfather Periya Karuppu Thevar was one of the Epilogue

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first criminals settled at the Kallar Voluntary Settlement in 1917. The riverside orchard that Rasayya tilled was a tract that the colonial state had granted to the elder man. But this grandson had not simply chosen to dedicate himself to working this land as a means of setting his own life on a lawful course. Instead, he maintained, a sudden and involuntary memory of his grandfather had forced him to pursue this disastrous path. At issue was a nocturnal vision of the colonial state. And its injustice haunted him relentlessly. One morning at his orchard, Rasayya began to describe this vivid dream. We sat on a shoal beside the muddy water of the river, shaded by the canopy of a few tall banana plants. He talked a lot about ganja, which he described as the chemical cause of every high from brandy to heroin. For two decades, Rasayya and a few companions had smuggled kilos of ganja at a time into Tamil Nadu, selling the bundles on wholesale for double the price. They would drink heavily on these excursions, socializing at times with the Europeans who camped out in the same Kerala hills to distill the plants into a dark green liquid. It was from the latter that they picked up the practice of chewing ‘‘rubber’’ candy—that is, bubble gum—and experimenting with other hallucinogens. ‘‘We would wander about like unyoked oxen,’’ he said, conjuring up the pleasures of a bohemian rural existence. He was flush with cash, Rasayya told me, consuming much of it, throwing much of it into fields and other possessions, and ostensibly passing enough of it on to his wife and daughters to keep them happy as well. At this time, fifteen or sixteen years ago, he said, he suddenly saw this dream.∞π ‘‘White man is coming, white man is coming!’’ they say. Then my father’s memory comes to me [as I am dreaming]. ‘‘If the white men came they would beat everyone the whole way as they went. We would all run,’’ he would say to me. Then let’s also run away, I think. When I looked around, one was running this way, one was running that way. I can see a cloud of dust near my store . . . As everyone else runs, Rasayya and four others stand in place and look back— All five, all seven are coming on horses, wearing good dress. The Kerala police wear dress like that. They wear just that today, even in the cinema pictures. Even then, it appears like that to my eyes. The sub-inspectors wear that dress, no? Just like that, they sit and come . . . Each of them with a rifle and a billy club. 230

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‘‘Only white men?’’ I ask. White man. The minute he comes up the rise we appear in his sight. Just like that he shoots . . .‘‘Mother!’’ they cry, and as I look the four of them fall. As I looked they shot me in the back of the head. Just when I turned they shot me. The four of them fall, crying ‘‘Ayyayy¯o!’’ All of them, shot in the stomach and here and there, died. Because I was shot [behind the head, the bullet] grazed the skull and went. I am also lying on the ground like a dead man. I am lying on my own. The white men climb down o√ their horses and speak among themselves— They are speaking in their language, but I can understand. One said, ‘‘Let this be a lesson to them. Leave them in the water. No one need bury them, or do anything. Leave all this in the water,’’ he said. Right away they built rafts, built them round, covering them with white cloth and with straw, to put the bodies on. They place them and let them go. Why? ‘‘Let these bodies go with the water. Let [everyone] see [them] the whole way. Let everyone reform.’’ Rasayya has been shot, but he can still see what they are seeing and doing— I am conscious. All the thoughts are there. I just cannot talk or move my hand. I am just like the dead . . . They build rafts, take the four men, throw one onto each of the rafts, go above the dam and leave them together [in the water] . . . As each man comes down the water, that image is clear to me. They left me in the water last. Floating down the river, Rasayya opens his eyes to look ahead at the others— Allowing just the face to show, they covered up everything else in white. As if ¯ e, these guys died already, they are going to bury [us] in the graveyard. ‘‘Att¯ peacefully. Only if our life goes will we get peace, man, but alas I’m going to die little by little,’’ I’m thinking. As soon as [they] left [us] in the water, takata takata takata—I can hear them leaving on their horses . . . As soon as the white men leave, the other villagers come rushing loudly— ‘‘They shot five people it seems, they left them in the river it seems, the white men!’’ [they say]. Those who went this way came, those who went that way came. As soon as they shouted out to those who had gone up the hillock, they come along that way to gawk . . . A whorl in the current takes Rasayya’s raft upstream, back toward the bank— ‘‘Ayy¯o, I am alive, I am alive,’’ I try to say, but nothing comes from the mouth. That old man Vellaya Thevar who just died, he is standing there. ‘‘Hey, Epilogue

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Mayandi Thevan’s son is coming here, man,’’ he says [seeing Rasayya]. I can hear [this] well. He is beating his head and crying. This raft goes right near him. ‘‘Those murderous sinners, they killed him this way,’’ he cries, beating his head. Then when he looks closely at me, I shake my finger. ‘‘Uncle, uncle,’’ I say. He cannot hear. As his uncle wails in despair, Rasayya tries desperately to get his attention— Beating his head, he looked closely for a moment. I shook my head slightly. ‘‘Hey, Mayandi Thevan’s son is alive, lift him man, lift him man!’’ he says, and they lift me up [onto the bank]. Putting me down, when they look, blood is flowing from the wound . . . The flowing of the blood, it’s spilling here and there, I can still see it well . . . As soon as they put me there, I open my eyes. They are all going. ‘‘Lift him man.’’ To the hospital, it seems. I wake from the dream.

As we sat beside the river where the dream had unfolded, Rasayya narrated its events in the present tense, as if to emphasize their closeness to the life that followed. For years afterward, sudden recollections of the dream would plunge him into crippling bouts of fear. There was a trauma in what he had seen and felt: his pursuit by the implacable servants of an untimely death, an end to his life that was meant to come but somehow did not, the visceral spectacle of his own wounded and leaking body, the inability to give voice to the simple fact of his survival— in short, the horror of a living demise.∞∫ It would be no abuse of language to suggest that he was haunted. But what specter still stalked him in the form of a vengeful colonial posse and an oneiric bullet? Were these visions the manifestations of a sense of guilt? Although this may seem a likely possibility, we need not assume that dreams recapitulate and rework events drawn solely from the history of an individual life.∞Ω Rasayya Thevar’s dream reached forward into a haunted present and backward into a long-dead past. Its events repeated the trials of a single life but also the violence of a collective history. The dream, we must recall, began with a memory within the narrative itself, a recollection of what his father had once told him. At night when he was a boy, Rasayya later explained, his father would tell him tales of his own father, Periya Karuppu Thevar. He was reputedly the largest and most fearless of the criminals relocated in the Kallar Voluntary Settlement. While the others would run and hide from the white o≈cers who came on horseback for inspections, this man alone was said to have stood 232

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The rafts would have been set into the water from here. Photograph by author.

with clasped hands to face them directly. Apparently an o≈cer had once lightly swung a horsewhip at him to brush him o√ the path. Periya Karuppu Thevar grabbed the whip and pulled the o≈cer down o√ his mount, ‘‘like in the cinema pictures,’’ Rasayya said with a laugh. Rasayya’s father had been hiding nearby. He saw the white men first surround the elder man in fury and then agree to let him go. ‘‘An auspicious time for my father,’’ Rasayya would later tell his own son, ‘‘otherwise on that day he would have died.’’ Through the medium of his dream, Periya Karuppu Thevar’s grandson appeared to have recalled precisely these stories of confrontation. Even the handful of men that he dreamed turning with him to face the spectral Englishmen on horseback present an uncanny echo, recalling the band of Kallar settlers who would have faced the original colonial enterprise. ‘‘Whatever my father said to me when I was a young child,’’ Rasayya averred, ‘‘it was seen again that day.’’ And yet, the narrative of the dream stages not only a rerun of this history but also a critical reworking of its legacies. Subtle twists emerge from this scene of reenactment. The o≈cers are white, for example, but they are dressed in the garb of contemporary sub-inspectors or police constables. Through such details, the dream collapses the events of the past into the contests of the present. It Epilogue

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ultimately yields a certain critique of the modern project of moral development itself. The postcolonial afterlife that I have sketched in this book is one of moral reform and ethical struggle: a life defined by an insistent turn against the current of inherited desires and habits. It is true that Rasayya himself narrated his dream as a series of turns: back repeatedly to see the o≈cers arrive in a cloud of dust, back around again to feel himself shot behind the head, back upstream around a whorl in the river, back and forth on the bank once found. As the o≈cers stood over his prone body, it was the prospect of reform that they discussed in a foreign yet intelligible tongue: ‘‘Let this be a lesson,’’ they said. And it was with this aim that they had proposed to float the bodies down the river so dramatically. Yet, Rasayya sco√ed when I suggested to him that the o≈cers of the colonial state might have advanced upon the Cumbum Valley with this aim in mind. ‘‘What! Did he come to reform?’’ he asked. Those o≈cers would pass through the valley on regular rounds of surveillance, he admitted. But when they did, their law would appear not as an agency of uplift but rather as a threat of mortal danger: ‘‘One should run and hide, it was said. That was the law.’’ To be seen by the eyes of the white man was itself to risk death, a chancy end, one that might come suddenly and without evident reason or justice. ‘‘Murderous sinners,’’ Vellaya Thevar had wailed in the dream when he spotted his nephew floating downstream. The vision revealed no o√enses on account of which the villagers might have fled from the horseback police party. They ran only to save their lives. The lesson was spectacular, inscrutable, terrifying in its violence. The contradictions of colonial power stand out most sharply in the imagination of this lineal heir to its machinations. Its e√ects were ironic, unexpected, unintended, disabling the very afterlife it enabled. Kallar Reclamation as a state enterprise may have aimed at developing qualities of judgment and restraint among a community of supposedly impulsive thieves. Within and beyond the dream of one of its scions, however, the state propelled exactly the opposite e√ect. Rasayya insisted that he began to act most recklessly in the wake of this colonial vision. And most importantly, he averred that this was due to the bullet within the dream itself, which had scrambled his ordinary sense of judgment. ‘‘He shot in the dream,’’ Rasayya said. ‘‘As far as I am concerned, it means that he shot 234

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[me] in truth.’’ This was not a portent or a warning but a concrete e√ect, a consequence spilling over from one realm of experience into another.≤≠ Slightly o√ target, the oneiric bullet had left him alive but crippled his reason. Its wayward course punctuated a deep reworking of the colonial legacy. Power proved most e√ective when it missed the mark. There is another incongruity lodged within the dream of Rasayya Thevar, and this concerns his fate as a cultivator. For years he had simply hired other people to tend the orchard tract, and the several other acres of land that he had bought with his illicit wealth, while he and his partners tramped through the forests as they pleased. But somehow overwhelmed by fear in the wake of this dream, he told me, Rasayya gave up his ganja trade to focus on his fields. ‘‘I stood by myself and worked every morning for ten years,’’ he said. And it was here that his now scrambled sense of haste had killed him. Living by the minute and its fickle desires, he told me, he worked the land with no regard to what was needed when, casting fertilizers and pesticides out of the convenience of the moment rather than need. ‘‘The crop I planted, I would ruin it myself,’’ he told me. Harvest after harvest went to waste, hundreds of thousands of rupees were eventually squandered, and he and his family were forced for years to mortgage nearly everything they had. ‘‘I became a man of nothing,’’ Rasayya Thevar said. Let me conclude the narrative course of this book with an account of the kind of life he cultivated thereafter: the space in which it found moral possibility, and the limits too that this life had ultimately confronted. Earth as Conscience and Witness to Justice Rasayya Thevar had endured a unique fate, to be sure. His was also the narrative of an intensely personal struggle to come to terms with the ruin that a life had become. And yet, it was clear that even he sometimes imagined this experience as an allegory for a larger story. ‘‘It happened like a cinema,’’ he often said, suggesting that there was a recognizable form to the narrative plot and its dramatic enactment. It is in this spirit that I draw the many stories of this book together by reflecting on this singular account. Rasayya’s dream presents an echo of the larger moralizing project to which his community was subjected, only to recast it as a story of tragedy rather than one of salvation: one that bears witness, in Epilogue

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David Scott’s terms, to ‘‘the contingent, the ambiguous, the paradoxical, and the unyielding in human a√airs.’’ Scott has argued persuasively that tragedy is the narrative form most appropriate for a present condition in which ‘‘the anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares.’’≤∞ Dwelling further upon Rasayya’s narrative, we may come to understand the stage for this drama as the earth itself, and its stakes the very possibility of justice for those who toil upon its rutted surfaces. Many vernacular terms for justice in Tamil—such as n¯ıti, niy¯ayam, and n¯ermai—serve too as names for virtuous conduct as such.≤≤ In the West as well, justice has long been understood as a signal virtue of exemplary individuals and as an ideal social and political condition.≤≥ From the standpoint of these rival moral traditions, much of the span of Kallar moral and political struggles in the southern Tamil countryside— with the state, with other communities, with their own desires and dispositions—may be understood as a problem of justice: as a struggle, that is, to cultivate the political relations, social conventions, and individual dispositions necessary for a rightful and harmonious collective existence. The startling and indiscriminate violence of Rasayya Thevar’s dream cast such prospects in a sharply critical light: for him and many others among its heirs, the Criminal Tribes Act was an exemplary instance of colonial injustice. Nevertheless, however, this vision did eventually lead its dreamer toward a deep engagement with justice as an essential quality of a well-lived life, and it is worth lingering on the way in which this prospect unfolded. In the years that followed his utter ruin, Rasayya told me, he had learned to act with a sense of justice by heeding the witness of his manacc¯atfci, his conscience: ‘‘What is known as conscience is keeping me alive,’’ he said. Over time, he came to distinguish between two ways of being, bending into service a pair of English terms from the judicial world that had enmeshed him so thoroughly. A life of what he called ‘‘criminal matter’’ was one of excessive desire for possessions, he told me one evening: for quick money, two wives, ten houses, and so on. ‘‘Criminal is only a name for desire . . . One living that life will kill, will do anything, will even sell his own wife.’’ It was such a life of limitless want that he had lived, he reflected, until it had capsized him. But against this form of existence, Rasayya juxtaposed another way of being that he named ‘‘civil 236

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matter’’: one of patience, restraint, and humility in the face of others. ‘‘Let God leave us however he left us. Let whatever happens happen. We will live between these two [poles],’’ he explained. It was this life of conscience—this life of candid surrender to both fate and the will of others—that Rasayya struggled to reconcile himself with now. Conscience as manacc¯atfci in Tamil combines two terms: manacu and c¯atfci, ‘‘mind’’ or ‘‘heart’’ together with ‘‘witness.’’ The etymology might lead one to place this faculty within the interior recesses of a self, where Western traditions of reflection on the moral conscience have long placed it as well. But this is not how Rasayya Thevar found a conscience to heed, by devoting himself to a meditative act of introspection alone. And while it was a markedly judicial language with which he distinguished these two rival ways of living, the conscience that he described was no outgrowth of a judgment of guilt and consequent contrition. ‘‘The law cannot reform a man,’’ Rasayya said. Although too he admitted that he had come to fear God and to act always with a sense of divine reproach for potential misdeeds, he denied that such deities could force a human being to change. Neither god nor law but rather su√ering on this earth, he mused with me, had led him to ask himself whether what he did was just: ‘‘That earth knows if we are good men for our conscience.’’ To act with justice was to act with a sense of witness to one’s own deeds upon the earth. Such witness could be found in the fates Rasayya imagined for his daughters and son, forecasting the pain of poor or di≈cult marital alliances. But crucially, he also found the witness of conscience in the experience of su√ering on agrarian terrain. Agriculture was a ‘‘civil matter,’’ he discovered over time, and it would not yield to a ‘‘criminal’’ haste: the soil would ripen well for those with virtue and implacably wreck those without. ‘‘In [ganja dealing] work, or thieving, even if we hurry, it will work out. If we rush at this [land], it ruins us,’’ he said. Engaging the land with such lessons led him, Rasayya told me, to pause, to reflect, and to act with judgment. And as he came to address his fields with the care they deserved, they too rewarded him; the bananas he planted by the river finally began to yield well. ‘‘If he works with thought and care,’’ Rasayya said with hope as we spoke under their canopy in 2002, one could survive on half an acre of land. The trials of agrarian practice had taught him to act with justice. Haunted by the moral and Epilogue

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practical expectations of the earth, turning inward those moral qualities of a world of work, he had learned to live. Throughout this book I have argued that people may remake themselves as ethical beings by engaging with the spaces, rhythms, and relations of an inhabited world. I have stressed that the agrarian landscape may be taken in particular as a moral milieu in south India. Qualities such as civility, sympathy, and justice pass back and forth between cultivated environments and the bodies that work upon them, shaping the ways in which such labor is undertaken as well as the quality of its ultimate fruit. There is, however, one final and troubling irony that we must mark in this tale of a single cultivator and his convoluted trajectory. True, Rasayya Thevar did reform himself by devoting himself to an agricultural practice, eventually realizing in a sense the original ambitions of a colonial project. All the same, though, he had come to justice not because of the state but despite it: a state of injustice, that is, which ultimately left him with an ethos, but robbed him of a place to exercise it. I have in mind here not only the historical grievances attested by his dream, but also the contemporary trials endured by many cultivators like Rasayya today. Agrarian policy in India still favors the interests of large and well-established landholders over those of smaller and more marginal cultivators like him. Global terms of trade in a liberalized marketplace drive agricultural prices through precipitous highs and lows. Traders insulate themselves from risk by passing these fluctuations onto the farmers whose produce they contract. Private usurers lend at extraordinary rates of interest in the absence of available rural credit. Merchants persuade cultivators to invest in the costliest chemical inputs, in the absence of e√ective agricultural extension agencies. In many of India’s most important agricultural zones, thousands of farmers have taken their own lives in the face of such pressures.≤∂ There are other less final but still troubling means to which cultivators may also resort. They may economize on their claims for labor, further impoverishing the ranks of the landless poor. Or they may invest their profits in deeper wells and more capital-intensive crops, as a temporary means of outpacing the less fortunate cultivators of neighboring fields. In the Cumbum Valley as elsewhere in India, those who cannot cope in such ways often have little choice but to mortgage or sell o√ their land. When I returned to K. G. Patti in the summer of 2005, I learned that 238

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Rasayya Thevar himself had just done this, netting a moderate sum of cash that he divided evenly between his three children. One daughter had been wedded to a trader, the other to a truck driver. His son, meanwhile, wanted to be a police o≈cer. ‘‘Can you say this about anyone,’’ Rasayya asked me as we sat that summer beside the river, ‘‘that he did agriculture, that he survived, that he developed well?’’ Deeply frustrated again, he had meant to do no more than to mortgage o√ the orchard tract. But the other party had been generous with liquor, and had tricked him into signing a deed of sale.

o Conditions of daily life grow ever more desperate for many in rural India, even as economic developments bring prosperity to others. State and law guarantee justice to all, but few have the means of forcing their agents to make good on this assurance. In these circumstances, many in the countryside have no choice but to look to nature for the possibility of justice: for the promise that sometime, in this life or even in the ones that follow, deeds will bear the fruit they ought to yield. To cultivate the land is to gamble with the prospect of a due return. To take this earth as conscience, as Rasayya Thevar and countless others have done, is to draw from its face a lesson in the art of a virtuous existence. Those who struggle for such cultivation, with the earth and with themselves, surely deserve a good life in all its senses.

Epilogue

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Notes

introduction 1.

2.

Glossy invitations to invest in corporate tree plantations flooded the presses of India throughout the 1990s. vgp’s crafty advertisements depicted teak trees as soaring founts of value, promising spectacular returns to investors through the scientific cultivation of natural bounty. ‘‘To make your dear daughter a great doctor in the future, think and act right now,’’ the caption below one image of a stethoscope-clad infant advised. The company persuaded about eight thousand city-dwellers to purchase plots on the vast tracts of cheap rural land it had bought and planted with the valuable hardwood. But its promises of organic progress quickly proved ephemeral. Public exposés charged similar ventures throughout India with profligate corruption and financial insolvency. In 1998, the Securities and Exchange Board of India froze the assets of numerous plantation companies and banned them from soliciting new deposits. Advertisements disappeared, and countless o≈ces shut their doors to hundreds of thousands of hapless investors. See ‘‘Plantation Bubble,’’ Indian Express, 29 January 1999; Mathew, ‘‘Lost in the Forest of Deception’’; and India Today, Tamil edition, 21 July to 5 August 1995, for the advertisement. The Piramalai Kallars are one of the most important endogamous subcastes of the Kallar caste, a community of several million individuals dispersed throughout southern Tamil Nadu. I use ‘‘Kallar’’ generally with reference to the Piramalai Kallars, and not the Kallars of Melur, Tanjore, or Pudukottai, unless specifically indicated. On various Kallar populations of south India, see Turnbull, ‘‘Account of the Various Tribes of Cullaries’’; Dumont, A South Indian Subcaste; Dirks, The Hollow Crown; and Blackburn, ‘‘The Kallars.’’

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 242

In Tamil, kaflflar is the honorific or plural form of kaflflan. The Tamil Lexicon provides the following definitions of the latter: ‘‘kaflflan, n. 1. Thief, robber, depredator; 2. Deceitful or cunning person.’’ Classical ethnographies of India took the structure of caste-based endogamy for granted as the foundation of Indian social life. In the last two decades, many have examined the historical conditions under which particular forms of caste (as well as their authoritative representations) were consolidated. Bernard Cohn was an influential early voice here, but see also the more recent Dirks, Castes of Mind, and Bayly, Caste, Society, and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. I use ‘‘Tamil country’’ throughout this book as a handle for the predominantly Tamil-speaking region of southern India, a region that comprised much of the Madras Presidency in colonial times and is identified today with the state of Tamil Nadu. Two other south Indian languages, Telugu and Kannada, are also spoken by particular communities in the Cumbum Valley where I conducted research. Over 50,000 students enroll each year in the 260 regional elementary, middle, and high schools managed by this o≈ce. While Piramalai Kallar students are provided free schoolbooks and notebooks, pens, slates, and uniforms, and scholarships too in many cases, the schools themselves are open to students of all communities. The schools are the only remaining holdover from a broad state program of social reform initiated in the 1920s, a history I discuss in the fourth chapter. The chapters of this book focus on the historical projects of the colonial state rather than the postcolonial state for the most part, as it was the Criminal Tribes Act (lifted in 1947) that took the Kallars most seriously as objects of a distinctive form of government. Nagar as a term for ‘‘city’’ of Sanskrit derivation resonates closely with n¯akar¯ıkam or ‘‘civility,’’ while the Tamil term pafttf i signifies ‘‘village’’ but also implies backwardness, as in the often derisive pafttf ikk¯atfu. I pose this argument somewhat forcefully against the ‘‘death’’ of development pronounced by Wolfgang Sachs (The Development Dictionary) and other scholars. I mean neither to belittle the significance of other objects of desire and struggles in contemporary India, nor to draw attention away from the important consequences of neoliberal state restructuring, but rather to suggest that such struggles and politics remain marked by the desirability of a gradual and progressive improvement in the conditions of life, and the necessity for collective agents of such improvement. On this broader idea of development and its historical origins in the West, see Rist, The History of Development. ‘‘There are two meanings of the word subject,’’ writes Michel FouNotes to Introduction

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

cault in ‘‘The Subject and Power’’: ‘‘subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or selfknowledge’’ (212). Underdevelopment is a powerful form of postcolonial identity, Akhil Gupta has argued, dedicated to the overcoming of a backward, deficient, and inadequate nature. The desire for development, he suggests, is anchored in a sense of being both distant from and far behind the progress of the West (Postcolonial Developments, 11). Although Gupta observes that development discourse makes people subjects in both of the senses proposed by Foucault (39), his exploration of this theme is confined to a discussion of agrarian populism and its popular articulations. Like Gupta, I turn here to the experiences of farmers and other rural citizens in order to explore how the struggle for advancement informs daily life and agrarian practice in rural India. Ultimately, however, I am less interested in how these men and women imagine the prospects of agricultural development—the primary focus of Gupta’s book—and more in the ways in which ideologies of agrarian cultivation shape their imagination and conduct of their own selves. I engage more closely with the ways in which people in south India struggle to develop what they understand as their own nature, in relation to the developmentalism of the modern state as well as the persistent force of much older trajectories of social and moral transformation. Like many other recent anthropological works on the subject of development, I build on the notion of ‘‘governmentality’’ elaborated by Michel Foucault. I stress, however, that at stake here are relations of power organized around care and welfare, as well as relations to oneself that one might deem ‘‘ethical.’’ For a further discussion of these themes and this literature, see my ‘‘Devoted to Development.’’ Escobar (Encountering Development ) argues that henceforth the citizens of the Third World could only be imagined as ‘‘underdeveloped’’ populations in desperate need of expert help. See Zachariah, Developing India; and Ludden, ‘‘India’s Development Regime.’’ Gyan Prakash explores the continuity of developmental intervention across the colonial divide in Another Reason, while Darren Zook describes rural citizenship campaigns, in his ‘‘Developing the Rural Citizen.’’ For more on post- as a continuing legacy rather than a decisive break, see Gupta, Postcolonial Developments, 7–11; and Lloyd, ‘‘The Memory of Hunger.’’ See, for example, Board of Land Revenue, G.O. no. 33 Board’s Proceedings (Misc.), 6 January 1896, Tamil Nadu State Archives (tnsa). ‘‘Progress’’ itself became a singular and collective term in the eighteenth Notes to Introduction

243

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 244

century, Reinhart Koselleck has observed: it emerges as a name for the universal horizon of possibility toward which all humanity may develop under the right conditions. See his ‘‘ ‘Progress’ and ‘Decline’ ’’ in The Practice of Conceptual History, 218–35. On development and such larger horizons of maturity, see Rist, The History of Development. ‘‘The allochronism of development,’’ Gupta (Postcolonial Developments, 41) also argues, ‘‘presents to the West an image of itself at an earlier stage of its life cycle.’’ On the political paradoxes of liberal imperialism, see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 304. Horsfall to Price, 8 October 1895, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. Here were ‘‘four generally recognized grades in the agricultural social scale,’’ J. H. Nelson noted with reference to the proverb in his The Madura Country manual in 1868. My argument implies that these premodern trajectories may be identified with ‘‘development’’ insofar as they concern the possibility of a generalized social advancement among certain communities, from a recognized incivility to a recognizable civility through collective practices of self-improvement. Maraimalai Adigal, V¯efla¯ flar N¯akarikam, for example. See M. S. S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, for a close reading of this text. See Bouglé, Essays on the Caste System, 165, and Inden, ‘‘Orientalist Constructions of India,’’ for critiques of such reasoning with respect to caste and Indian history. The histories I address here are related to what M. N. Srinivas had famously called ‘‘Sanskritization’’ but the normative model in this case would be the conduct of Vellalas and other cultivating castes rather than that of Brahmins. Marriott’s ‘‘Hindu Transactions’’ and Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus had also called attention in di√erent ways to the social relations through which castes are organized in opposition to each other. My approach to intercaste distinctions here is anchored neither in the exchange of substances that Marriott studied, nor the axis of purity and pollution that Dumont elaborated, but rather in supple and mobile typologies of moral character and quality, all indebted to historical developments. Working with the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell on ‘‘forms of life,’’ Veena Das in her Life and Words (88–89) calls attention to both ‘‘horizontal’’ and ‘‘vertical’’ di√erences among ‘‘forms’’ and ‘‘lives’’ respectively, distinguishing among shared horizons of cultural inheritance, but also among various kinds of living being. Both forms of di√erence are arguably at stake in the present project. Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton (Doctrines of Development ) emphaNotes to Introduction

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

size the moral dimensions of such trusteeship as it emerged in the nineteenth century—a concern for social order and collective moral progress, for example, among the Saint-Simonian reformers of Europe and Latin America. On the theory of trusteeship articulated by Mohandas K. Gandhi in South Asia—which called upon the wealthy to take responsibility for the welfare of their less prosperous neighbors—see Hopkins, ‘‘Gandhi and the Discourse of Rural Development in Independent India.’’ See, for example, Sachs, Development Dictionary; and Escobar’s Encountering Development. One might instead consider James Ferguson’s insight, in The Anti-Politics Machine, into one of the most unexpected ‘‘successes’’ of global development institutions: their consistent failures often work to further entrench the very necessity of development itself as a normative ideal. While Ferguson has argued this point with respect to o≈cial development agencies, I focus here on the quotidian aspirations of those who form the target of their strategies. For a valuable glimpse of such paradoxes from the standpoint of aid workers within a development project in rural India, see Mosse, Cultivating Development. Donald S. Moore in ‘‘The Crucible of Cultural Politics’’ emphasizes ‘‘the discursive practices and micro-techniques through which specific interventions have been imposed, opposed and fought over’’ (673). ‘‘Compromising Power’’ by Tania Li calls attention to the ‘‘contingent and compromised space of cultural intimacy’’ in which developmental enterprises are negotiated and ultimately carried out (295). See also Gupta, Postcolonial Developments, 33–105, for Indian agrarian populism as political critique. For some of these themes in seventeenth-century European philosophy, see James, Passion and Action. In ‘‘The Word Civilization,’’ Jean Starobinski takes civilization as an idea whose evolving meanings maintain ‘‘both an inner and an outer face’’ (26) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political discourse. I refer here to Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; and Elias, The Civilizing Process. See Rosenwein, ‘‘Worrying about Emotions in History’’; and Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, for critical responses to Elias from the vantage point of medieval and early modern social history in Europe. Laidlaw (‘‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’’) argues that Durkheim had identified the desirable with the obligatory, obviating the Kantian problem of freedom in ethical self-conduct. See Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure and his ‘‘Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.’’ For anthropological engagements with this Notes to Introduction

245

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32. 33.

34.

35.

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work, see Faubion, ‘‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics’’; and Rose, ‘‘How Should One Do the History of the Self ’’ in Inventing Our Selves. In a provocative critique of Foucault’s use of classical materials, Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life) argues that ethical interiorization for the Stoics, Platonists, and others was also an exteriorization, a ‘‘going beyond oneself ’’ toward a ‘‘new way of being-in-the-world’’ (211). His emphasis on such movement resonates well with the social and cosmological horizons of cultivation as an ethical way of life that I discuss here. I will turn more closely to the tradition of the virtues at stake in the Tamil term ahram—of which the phrase nallatu kefttfatu or ‘‘the good and the bad’’ can be taken as a vernacular approximation—in the first chapter. This is a moral language somewhat analogous to the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues in the West—as elaborated by MacIntyre (After Virtue) and others in recent years—insofar as there are cultivated dispositions toward the good at stake here. There are also certain a≈nities with the notion of ethics more commonplace in the West since Kant, in which one might be understood to bear a duty to act against one’s baser inclinations and desires, resonances I explore in the third chapter concerning restraint. See also Cutler, ‘‘Interpreting Tirukkural,’’ for a discussion of Tamil ahram as against the Sanskrit dharma. Throughout this book, I use the term ‘‘moral’’ to refer to various normative horizons, and the term ‘‘ethical’’ to refer to the ways people relate themselves to those horizons. For example, see Turnbull, ‘‘Account of the Various Tribes of Cullaries.’’ A comment on ‘‘the’’ self in India may be in order here. Shulman (‘‘Tirukk¯ovaiy¯ar’’) notes that Indian languages lack terms analogous to the Western ‘‘self ’’ (except for the mostly metaphysical a¯ tm¯an in Sanskrit), although Tamil has numerous permutations of reflexive forms of ‘‘selfness’’ such tanam h or tanmai. h He uses self as an ‘‘external, analytical categor[y]’’ (131). I write here of the ‘‘self ’’ only as the subject or locus of a reflexive engagement, at times individual and at times collective. Ranajit Guha, ‘‘Colonialism in South Asia,’’ 62: ‘‘The element of the past, though moribund, is not defunct,’’ he writes; ‘‘the contemporary element, so vigorous in its native metropolitan soil, finds it di≈cult to strike roots as a graft and remains shallow and restricted in its penetration of the new site.’’ On Tagore, see Kaviraj, ‘‘The Poetry of Interiority.’’ For Gandhi, see Hind Swaraj, 150. Importantly, his introduction to the Gita was from Edwin Arnold’s translation of The Song Celestial. See also Chakrabarty, ‘‘The Di√erence-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity,’’ on the dharmic grace and modesty that wealthy Bengali householders demanded from the ‘‘new Notes to Introduction

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

women’’ of their homes, as well as cleanliness and punctuality along European lines. In his ‘‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,’’ Sudipta Kaviraj sketches numerous possible relations between traditional and modern forms: ‘‘At times, the older and newer practices might tend in the same direction, and become miscible, as, for instance, in the case of the idioms of traditional religious toleration and modern secular institutions in India. In other cases, they might be more oppositional or contradictory’’ (519). Like Dilip Gaonkar, I am concerned here with ‘‘alternative modernities,’’ and in a theory of modernity capable of coping—in Kaviraj’s terms—with ‘‘historical di√erence’’ (497). Charles Hirschkind, in The Ethical Soundscape, describes tradition as ‘‘an attitude that valorizes the past as relevant to the task of living in the present’’ (212). Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety similarly asks ‘‘how is the present made intelligible through a set of historically sedimented practices and forms of reasoning that are learned and communicated through processes of pedagogy, training, and argumentation?’’ Both of these scholars signal their debts to the work of Talal Asad and Alasdair MacIntyre on tradition. I explore the significance of such fragmentary forms of inheritance for an anthropology of tradition in my ‘‘Tradition in Fragments.’’ See also Prasad, Poetics of Conduct, for the ‘‘plural sources and vocabularies of the normative’’ and the ‘‘labyrinthine relationships between canons that prescribe conduct . . . and complex exigencies of everyday life’’ (12) in a southern Indian pilgrimage town. See Chennakesavan, Concept of Mind in Indian Philosophy. Although manacu is often translated as ‘‘mind’’ in Indian English scholarly works, I have been struck by the frequency with which those speaking of this organ would gesture to their chests even when uttering the English word ‘‘mind.’’ Burrow and Emeneau, A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, translates other Tamil terms for the interior nature of the self as follows: akam as inside, house, place, agricultural tract, breast, and mind; uflflam as mind, heart, intention, thought, and soul; neñcu as mind, conscience, heart, breast, bosom, chest, center or heart of a thing, bravery, and courage. On the historical relation between ontological, physiological, and sentimental vocabularies of the ‘‘heart’’ in the West, see Erickson, The Language of the Heart ; and Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion. For a related discussion in another Asian milieu, see Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts. While Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self provides a history of Western ‘‘inwardness,’’ this project may be taken as a postcolonial ‘‘genealogy’’ of Notes to Introduction

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41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

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interiority in a more Nietzschean sense, as I elaborate further in my ‘‘Interior Horizons.’’ My approach to the topic of selfhood in India is also distinct from the ‘‘dividual’’ and social-transactional nature of the self proposed by McKim Marriott in his classic work ‘‘Hindu Transactions,’’ as I am interested here in the formation of interior depths. See Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation; Mahmood, Politics of Piety; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape; and Robbins, Becoming Sinners. I borrow this phrase from A. K. Ramanujan on classical Tamil poetry in The Interior Landscape. See also Ludden, ‘‘India’s Development Regime,’’ on the importance of this organic notion; and Agrawal, Environmentality, on the constitution of ‘‘environmental subjects’’ in the Himalayan foothills. E. A. Harvey, 3 June 1917, G.O. no. 1725 Home (Judicial), 18 August 1917, tnsa. On nature in this broader sense, see Williams, ‘‘Ideas of Nature’’; Moore, Pandian, and Kosek, ‘‘The Cultural Politics of Race and Nature’’; and my ‘‘Ripening with the Earth.’’ I borrow the language of ‘‘braiding’’ from Guha, ‘‘Colonialism in South Asia.’’ With ‘‘metaphor’’ I do not mean to oppose the figurative to the experiential, or representation to reality. In ‘‘On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense,’’ Nietzsche turns to metaphor as a means of writing against a language of truth ‘‘powerless to a√ect the senses.’’ Metaphor, which originally meant to ‘‘carry over’’ in Greek, may be understood in this sense as a carrying over between life and language. See Johnstone, ‘‘Virtuous Toil, Vicious Work,’’ for a discussion of these techniques. Markus, ‘‘Culture,’’ 7. See also Williams, ‘‘Culture’’ in Keywords, which notes that culture and cultivation stem from the Latin cultus, the past participial form of colere: to till, tend, care for. Drayton, Nature’s Government. ‘‘Out of the economics of Eden had come an ideology of development which was fundamental to the making of the British Empire,’’ he writes (59). See Crossley, ‘‘Using and Transforming the French Countryside’’; Herrington, ‘‘The Garden in Frobel’s Kindergarten’’; and Casid, Sowing Empire, for an examination of the place of the farm as ‘‘cultivated, constructed site of agri-culture’’ (xxii) in the ‘‘mythic construction’’ of eighteenth-century British and French empire. See Drayton, Nature’s Government ; and Grove, Green Imperialism. Drayton observes that the very term ‘‘improvement’’ was originally connected with operations on the land. Notes to Introduction

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

See Pratt, ‘‘Scratches on the Face of the Country.’’ See Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal; Irschick, Dialogue and History; and Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, on these themes in colonial South Asia. I borrow the phrase from Nigam, ‘‘Disciplining and Punishing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’ ’’ Part 1, 161. Poem translated by Pechilis Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti, 166. All other translations in the book are my own, unless stated otherwise. See my ‘‘Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil Country’’ for a discussion of this subject, and more specifically the varied resonances of the Tamil verbal forms panpaf f tutal and panpaf f ttfutal. Gupta, Postcolonial Developments, 232. I have in mind here the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben on the subject of modernity and its essential spaces. ‘‘The peasant as citizen,’’ comments Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘keeps looking like a relic of another time’’ (Provincializing Europe, 249). Also consider Karl Marx’s famous characterization of the French peasantry as a ‘‘sack of potatoes’’ in his On the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. This work is undertaken in the spirit of Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ (in Illuminations). I address the controversial legacies of ‘‘salvage’’ anthropology in the epilogue of this book. The quote is from Dumont’s monograph on the Piramalai Kallars, A South Indian Subcaste (461), published first in French in 1957 and only much later in English (1986). In ‘‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions,’’ an essay published in 1960, Dumont writes that ‘‘the direct study of a small Hindu group led me to abstract certain principles which, it then appeared, could be more widely applied’’ (37). The germ of the structuralist account of caste hierarchy that he later developed, and for which he is most renowned, in other words, may be understood to lie in his work with the Kallars. For further reflections on Dumont’s legacy in the popular memory of the region, see my ‘‘The Remembering Village.’’ Dumont, A South Indian Subcaste, 30. Dumont states quite flatly, for example, that among the Kallars ‘‘we find almost nothing of the entire art of living that the Tamils have codified in precepts, from the moral maxims of the Kural to prescriptions concerning the qualities of foods and the smallest acts of daily life’’ (A South Indian Subcaste, 459). He goes on to admit, however, that he might have detected ‘‘many unconscious conformities’’ with such ethical orientations had he had a ‘‘deeper knowledge of [them] and of Kallar life’’ himself. He also speculates here that ‘‘contact between di√erent castes Notes to Introduction

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64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

250

must play a large part in the propagation of these notions,’’ a hunch he may have confirmed had he focused on Kallar households settled into the intercaste milieu of the Cumbum Valley. ‘‘All that is solid melts into air,’’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto. Edward Shils (Tradition, 201) notes that the rhetoric of modernity has long been founded on a tension with the ‘‘weight’’ or ‘‘drag’’ of tradition. On the idea of the social drama, see Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. ‘‘How is it possible to consider the present, and quite specific present, with a mode of thought elaborated for a past which is often remote and superceded?’’ asked Antonio Gramsci in his Selections from the Prison Notebooks. ‘‘When someone does this, it means that he is a walking anachronism, a fossil, and not living in the modern world, or at the least that he is strangely composite’’ (324). Relying upon very di√erent intellectual resources—the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze—that further disrupt the temporality of such distinctions, Veena Das has also elucidated how ‘‘certain regions of the past are actualized and come to define the a√ective qualities of the present moment’’ (Life and Words, 99). On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche has been an abiding inspiration for this work. In ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,’’ Foucault elaborates on his method: ‘‘Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary . . . it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us’’ (81). For a Nietzschean genealogy of virtue in Tamil literature, see Gauthaman, Ahram/Atik¯aram. Walter Benjamin in ‘‘The Task of the Translator’’ (in Illuminations) describes translation as an enterprise aimed at producing the echoes of a work in a foreign tongue, reverberations that do not simply give ‘‘voice’’ to the original but rather, as Bettine Menke has suggested, ‘‘ruin words and voices’’ (‘‘However One Calls into the Forest,’’ 95) through the disruptive afterlife they call into being. This understanding of the echo provides an e√ective allegory for the life of virtue I seek to present in these pages. These five virtues are not meant to be exhaustive. Catalogues of cardinal virtues have been notably fungible from classical times onwards, in both East and West alike. Although other desirable qualities such as patience, sincerity, docility, and wisdom also surface occasionally throughout this book, I have oriented its chapters around the most prominent horizons Notes to Introduction

70.

in the moral life of Kallar ‘‘reclamation’’ as both modern state project and realm of self-engagement. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 108. Pierre Hadot’s sketch of philosophy as a domain of ‘‘spiritual exercises’’ in Greco-Roman antiquity resonates well with the zone of intersection between moral thought and material livelihood that I explore in this book. For much of its Western history, Hadot reminds us, philosophy was ‘‘a way of life’’ to be taken ‘‘not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way’’ (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 107). It is in this spirit that I dwell upon quotidian practice as a space of moral thought and ethical possibility.

one ‘‘A Rough Spade for a Rugged Landscape’’ 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

‘‘Born to Die,’’ India Today, 15 June 1986. Quoted in Shanmugasundaram, P¯aratir¯aj¯a , 294. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 45. The formulation recalls Nietzsche’s discussion of the ‘‘soul’’ as an internalized consequence of the reflexive turn against oneself in On the Genealogy of Morals. ‘‘Essentially, the West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world,’’ according to Talal Asad in ‘‘Conscripts of Western Civilization’’ (345). Truillot, ‘‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot,’’ identifies the savage in Western discourse as ‘‘a figure of speech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and the universe’’ (34). I argue here that savagery must be taken as both material condition and discursive form, and that it has non-Western genealogies as well. See, for example, Revel, ‘‘The Uses of Civility’’; Knox, ‘‘Erasmus’ De Civilitate and the Religious Origins of Civility in Protestant Europe’’; and Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, for contrastive discussions of the origins and spread of civility as both individual ethos and social practice in early modern Europe. Roy, Civility and Empire, takes such a position concerning the normative function of civility in colonial India. Elias himself had noted that the civilizing process happens outside the West ‘‘in conjunction with preexisting forms of civilization’’ (The Civilizing Process, 465). For a rich discussion of such preexisting forms in medieval India, see Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India. Like its German forebear Landschaft, the term ‘‘landscape’’ carries a slippery double meaning in English, referring both to physical space and to the perspective from which that space is imagined (Olwig, ‘‘Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape’’). I utilize landscape here as a Notes to Introduction

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18.

way of both seeing and acting on terrain, as discussed in Moore, Pandian, and Kosek, ‘‘The Cultural Politics of Race and Nature.’’ For related reversals with respect to ‘‘wildness’’ among forest-dwelling a¯ div¯asis in India, see Skaria, Hybrid Histories. I translate k¯atftfu tanam h here as savagery rather than wildness or rusticity to convey its pejorative cast with respect to a civilizational trajectory. Considering the prevalence of street quarrels in the cool hours after sunrise, for example, Dumont found more than an ‘‘unbridled violence of the feelings.’’ The vehemence of speech and gesture suggested to him ‘‘a certain stylization,’’ impassive observers lending each quarrel a sense of ‘‘spectacle.’’ See Dumont, A South Indian Subcaste, 310–11. Dumont’s observations, while recorded with a trace of unmistakable censure, provide nonetheless an intriguing glimpse into the possibility of savagery as an ethos or a way of being: a deliberate, nuanced, and often e√ective engagement with stylized aggression. Williams, ‘‘Ideas of Nature,’’ makes this point with respect to the word ‘‘nature’’ in English. I echo Elias but resist calling this a ‘‘process’’ in order to emphasize its contingent and unfinished quality. Diane Mines (Fierce Gods) writes of the k¯atfu as an outside space of danger in the rural Tamil country, a landscape of disorder and upredictability making a place for the ‘‘chaotic aspects of self ’’ (213). This chapter concerns such unruly potential as well as the possibility of its settling. Such contrasts in temperament correspond somewhat to long-standing distinctions between sattvic and r¯ajasic dispositions, stemming from classical Samkhya typologies and instantiated in important discourses such as that of the Bhagavad Gita. See Jacobsen, Prakrti in SamkhyaYoga; and Bhagavad Gita XIV. Turnbull, ‘‘Account of the Various Tribes of Cullaries.’’ My italics here. J. Darwin, ‘‘Civility and Empire,’’ describes this as ‘‘the ‘historicist revolution’ in the idea of civility’’ (324). I pay closer attention to the agrarian discourse of the Scottish Enlightenment in chapter 5. Lawrence, ‘‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment.’’ Gillingham, ‘‘From Civilitas to Civility,’’ traces such themes in Britain back to the twelfth century. Personal communication from V. Arasu, Department of Tamil Literature, Madras University. Auvaiyar’s works referenced here are collected in numerous contemporary editions, such as N¯ıti N¯ul M¯alai. Virtue ought to be understood here not as a struggle against desire as

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Notes to Chapter One

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

such, but rather as a cultivation of higher forms of desire and a restraint of lower desires, as I will discuss further in the third chapter. As reported in a letter to Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (An Account of the Religion, Manners, and Learning of the People of Malabar) in 1712: ‘‘So soon as the Child has learnt his A. B. C. he is put to read a little Book containing wise moral Sentences, which are not then explain’d unto him, but only they teach him to read distinctly.’’ I infer that it is indeed ¯ utf i that is described here, as the letter goes on to mention Auvaiyar’s Attic¯ other noted works Konh h raiv¯entan, h M¯ut¯urai and Nalvahli by name. My thanks to Indira Peterson for this reference. See Raman, ‘‘Disciplining the Senses, Schooling the Mind,’’ for a discussion of the central place of Auvaiyar’s works within Tamil verandah schools and the colonial fate of these institutions, as well as Blackburn, ‘‘Corruption and Redemption’’; Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue; and my ‘‘Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil Country,’’ for more general elaboration of these questions. Tirukkuhral no. 1033. See Parithiyar’s commentary in Tirukkuhral Uraikkottu: Poruftp¯al, 637. Tirikaftukam 12 and 42 (in Patine h nf K¯ıhlkkanakku). f Ludden, ‘‘Archaic Formations of Agricultural Knowledge in South India,’’ 48. See Tiv¯akaram entry on v¯ehla¯ nmai. f N¯alaftiy¯ar, nos. 244, 191, 178, 115, and 367. See Gauthaman, Ahram/Atik¯aram, for a discussion of such distinctions. See Ramanujan, ‘‘Towards an Anthology of City Images,’’ 71; and Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India, 67–68. My thanks to George Hart and Indira Peterson for valuable exchanges on this issue. h m¯akkaflai / n¯atfuhraiya No. 166, in Tamil: k¯atfuhrai v¯ahlkkaik karuvinai nalkinum h nankoh h luk¯ar—n¯atfo¯ rh um / kaiyufla t¯aki viftinum, h kuhrump¯uhlkkuc / ceyyufla t¯aku manam. h Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 90–140. Ludden, ‘‘Archaic Formations of Agricultural Knowledge in South India,’’ 60–61. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 67. See the discussions in Gupta and Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place. See R. Davis, ‘‘The Story of the Disappearing Jains.’’ Kamil Zvelebil, in his Lexicon of Tamil Literature, identifies invocations to Siva, Balarama, Mayon, and Murukan in Inh n¯ h a N¯arh patu; Vaisnava au-

Notes to Chapter One

253

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

254

thorship of Tirikaftukam and N¯anmanikkaf f tikai; and Jain authorship of N¯alaftiy¯ar, Pahlamohli N¯an¯urh u, and Cihrupañcam¯ulam. Cutler, ‘‘Interpreting Tirukkural,’’ notes quotations and allusions in works such as Cilappatik¯aram, Manim¯ f ekalai, and Kampan’s Ram¯ayanam. h ‘‘In Tamil culture Tirukkuhral is the quintessentially quotable text,’’ he writes (552). See Pope’s translation of the N¯alaftiy¯ar. Jesudasan and Jesudasan, A History of Tamil Literature. I explore such echoes as constitutive of a moral tradition in my ‘‘Tradition in Fragments.’’ There is of course something paradoxical in this formulation, as civility has long been associated with the urban life of citizens in the West, and the closest analogous term in Tamil—n¯akarikam, derived from the Sanskrit—is itself identified not only with ‘‘civilization’’ but also with the ‘‘manners, speech and dress pertaining to a city’’ by the Tamil Lexicon. My insistence on the possibility as well of an agrarian civility here is supported by the influential work of the twentieth-century Dravidian intellectual Maraimalai Adigal, whose 1923 account of V¯elfa¯ flar N¯akarikam or ‘‘Vellala Civilization’’ argued that the special virtues of this caste were the fruit of their agrarian practices. See M. S. S. Pandian, Brahmin and NonBrahmin, for an account of his work. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, 140 and 304. Kannada-speaking migrants from the north, the Okkaligas most likely began to settle in the valley four or five centuries prior. See Francis, Madura District Gazetteer, for one mythical account of their migration. They are not to be confused with the Tamil Gounders that predominate in the Kongu region to the north as well as elsewhere in Tamil Nadu. See The Bandit Brothers: The Story of Cantanattevan for a folk narrative of such migration. Ramachandran, Swaminathan, and Rawal, ‘‘How Have Hired Workers Fared?’’ See Ramanujan, ‘‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?’’ Rather than making an argument here for a continuity of tropological practice, I am relying on the heuristic value of this attention to metonymy. Like many other Kallar men, he would describe a good soil as ‘‘arrogant’’ and ‘‘insolent,’’ imbued with mappu and timiru, qualities conveyed by the aggressive masculinity of a clenched arm and taut muscles running from fist to shoulder. Marx, Capital, 1: 285. Farmers in the Cumbum Valley did describe the way in which qualities such as the strength or weakness of a soil may be transmitted to the Notes to Chapter One

49. 50. 51. 52.

bodies of those who ingest its produce, along the lines of what Daniel and also Gupta (Postcolonial Developments) have described. But the relationship here between soil and developmental trajectory was less one of ‘‘compatibility’’ between earth and caste—as was the case for Daniel’s Tamil informants—and more a matter of the mode in which that terrain was engaged and worked. See Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, for a lucid discussion of these exclusive liberal conventions. Social and party activists finally succeeded in overcoming such antagonism here in the local elections of 2006. Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon remains the classic statement on this subject. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 96–113.

two ‘‘What Remains of the Harvest When the Fence Grazes the Crop?’’ 1.

2.

3. 4.

Foucault, History of Sexuality 1:137. Tamil terms such as karuvahruttal—to exterminate or annihilate, and literally, ‘‘to cut out the embryo’’—hint at precolonial antecedents to such biopolitical violence in south India. The sixteenth-century hero of the Madurai Veeran folk ballad, for example (see note 25 in this chapter), is described as having ‘‘exterminated’’ troublesome Kallars in the region (Maturai V¯ıranh Katai, 56). Royal genealogical narratives in the region also describe the grant of lands and royal titles to chieftains who had cleared the countryside of scrub jungles and violently subdued the bands of Kallars, Kurumbars, and Vedars who had lived there (see, for example, Kulandhaivelan, P¯alfaiyappafttfukkaflin Varal¯arh u, 106–8). I borrow the phrase from Bouglé, Essays on the Caste System, and the identification of caste and village as twinned objects of concern from Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays. See Inden, ‘‘Orientalist Constructions of India,’’ 424, for a discussion of Hegel on India; and Karl Marx, ‘‘The British Rule in India,’’ 40. See Chatterjee, ‘‘Community in the East,’’ for a discussion of this widely held tension between modernity and community, leavened only by the imperfect possibility of the nation as an impersonal ground of collective attachment. Chatterjee has called attention to popular forms of collective mobilization in a ‘‘political society’’ of competing claims, made by marginal populations for whom ‘‘the normative status of the virtuous citizen will remain infinitely deferred’’ (282). The form of agrarian citizenship I discuss in this chapter, however, cuts across his distinction Notes to Chapter One

255

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

256

between civil and political society, mobilizing virtue as an instrument with which social reform in the interest of collective welfare may be organized. Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, is a compelling synthetic discussion of this history. Processes of ‘‘Sanskritization’’ elaborated by Srinivas (‘‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization’’) fall within this frame, as do the histories of ‘‘becoming Vellala’’ that I discussed in chapter 1, while here I address intercaste trajectories of change. See Chatterjee, ‘‘Community in the East’’; Chakrabarty, ‘‘Dwelling in Modernity’’ in Provincializing Europe; and Kaviraj, ‘‘Filth and the Public Sphere,’’ all of which highlight modes of collective life stemming from the ‘‘indigenous, irreducible forms of our modernity’’ (Kaviraj, ‘‘Filth and the Public Sphere,’’ 100). Valayar and Koravar watchmen were also targeted by some assemblies, albeit to a much lesser extent. For ease of explication, I follow the o≈cial convention in describing the movement as ‘‘anti-Kallar.’’ For a more detailed discussion, see my ‘‘Securing the Rural Citizen.’’ Madura Taluk Inspector’s Diary, 25 July 1896, R.Dis. 90/Mgl, 24 November 1899 (hereafter R.Dis. 90), mda. Francis, Madura District Gazetteer, 92. One interesting point of comparison would be the riots in Tinnevelly District against the Nadar community in 1895 and 1899. Here, the broad alignment of castes led by Maravars against the Nadars was more obviously a consequence of the economic dominance and emergent social mobility of the latter. See Good, ‘‘The Car and the Palanquin.’’ Cardew to Price, 3 December 1895, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. In Castes of Mind, Nicholas Dirks identifies colonial rule in India in the late nineteenth century as an ‘‘ethnographic state’’ whose administrative priorities were greatly shaped by anthropological knowledge. While ethnographic institutions such as the decennial census clearly exerted an enormous impact on the social lives of the communities they represented—as Cohn had argued and Dirks later elaborated—the practical consequences of colonial knowledge in India were often more subtle and di√use, intersecting with native judgments of social di√erence in multiple and unexpected ways. This chapter aims to show in part that the antiKallar movement is best understood as such an accident of convergence. Tamil Lexicon, 968. Kufti might approximate the Anglo-Indian ‘‘ryot’’ in its wider, popular sense. See Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 588. Re-

Notes to Chapter Two

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

gional variations are also significant; in the Kongu region, for example, Chari (Fraternal Capital ) suggests the term kuftiy¯anava h nh refers to ‘‘landless Gounder families who stayed with landed Gounder families and worked for them’’ (343). Shulman, The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry, 350. Tirukkuhral 952 and 542. I translate oflukkam, v¯aymai, and n¯anf as propriety, honesty, and modesty. Pahlamohli N¯an¯urh u 321. See Kailasapathy, Panf f tai Tamihlar V¯ahlvum Vahlip¯atfum, 130; Karashima, Towards a New Formation, 127; James Heitzman, Gifts of Power, 70; and C¯etupati Cepp¯etfukafl , 16, ln. 18. The notion of citizenship in Western liberal political discourse, write James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘requires that people perceive, through a kind of leap of faith, that they are su≈ciently similar to form common purpose’’ (‘‘Cities and Citizenship,’’ 190). They identify the fluid and tumultuous life of cities as the ‘‘strategic arena’’ (188) for this form of allegiance, which is ‘‘volitional and consensual rather than natural’’ in its character (190). My argument for an ‘‘agrarian’’ citizenship, however, is meant to suggest that there is nothing ‘‘natural’’ about rural collective identity; here too, a hegemonic sense of common purpose may be built across social lines through the articulation of a common moral project. The term he used was k¯etf i, a vernacular rendering of K.D. or ‘‘known depredator,’’ a policing category. Often used with respect to politics throughout contemporary India, the image appears in The Bijak of Kabir (101), composed in the northern Indian city of Varanasi in the fifteenth century. Stuart to Madura District collector, G. O. no. 1087 Judicial (Ordinary), 30 July 1896, tnsa. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 144–55. Dumont, A South Indian Subcaste, 20–21. Quoted in Sathianathaier, Tamilaham in the 17th Century, 187. I refer here to the Madura Veeran folk ballad (see Maturai V¯ıranh Katai ), purporting to describe events during the reign of Tirumalai Nayakkar (1623–59) but probably composed at a later time. See Shulman, The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry, 355–66; and Blackburn, ‘‘The Folk Hero and Class Interests in Tamil Heroic Ballads,’’ for discussions. Parish to Committee, 10 July 1805, Madura Collectorate Records (hereafter mcr) vol. 1148, tnsa.

Notes to Chapter Two

257

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

258

Peter to Madura Zillah Magistrate, 28 November 1811, mcr vol. 1158. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 19–28. Parish to Committee, 10 July 1805, mcr vol. 1148. Ravenshaw to Hurdis, 11 July 1799, mcr vol. 1176. Parish to Committee, 10 July 1805, mcr vol. 1148. History of the Madras Police, 250 and 314–15. Tirumangalam Taluk, which included the ‘‘Kallar country,’’ lost 15.6 percent of its population between 1871 and 1881. See Arnold, ‘‘Dacoity and Rural Crime in Madras, 1860–1940,’’ 156. Palni Tahsildar to Madura District Collector, 27 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. O’Farrell to Price, 25 September 1895, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. Arnold, ‘‘Dacoity and Rural Crime,’’ 155. Aiyasawmi Sastri to Batten, 6 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. The predatory Kallar watchman of the late nineteenth century was a perverse product of colonial administrative policy, Stuart Blackburn has argued in his essay ‘‘The Kallars’’: he was robbed of political authority, stripped of tax-free land grants, and restricted in his ability to levy su≈cient funds from cultivators. Written on behalf of a community stigmatized for decades as ‘‘criminal’’ by nature, such exercises in historical rehabilitation are important indeed. However, as Dirks (The Hollow Crown, 74) has also stressed—relying in part on David Shulman’s ‘‘On South Indian Bandits and Kings’’—the intimacy of protection and predation in the traditional economy of the watchman must not be forgotten. ‘‘ ‘Ammayappa Konan’s Fund’, Or the Persecution of Kallars,’’ The Hindu, 13 June 1896. Narasiah to Batten, 9 June 1896, and Batten to Twigg, 13 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Batten to Twigg, 13 June 1896, and Subba Naidoo to Baudry, 9 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. On negation and subaltern agency, see Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Batten to Twigg, 13 June 1896, and Rajagopal to Batten, 31 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. Palni Tahsildar to Madura Sub-Collector, 27 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Ibid. Nallaveera Thevar to Madura Collector, 2 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Undated questionnaire from Madura District Collector, R.Dis. 90. ‘‘Present Social Outlook V,’’ The Hindu, 9 June 1896.

Notes to Chapter Two

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

Venkateswara Iyer to Batten, 30 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. Vedasandur Inspector’s Diary, 15 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Nilakottai Sub-Magistrate to Madura Sub-Collector (undated); Venkateswara Iyer to Batten, 30 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. Palni Tahsildar to Madura Sub-Collector, 27 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. It has its place in the Tamil Lexicon of the 1930s as a word of modern derivation: ‘‘Pandu: Fund; permanent fund; provident fund; endowment.’’ These boards, comprising both o≈cial and non-o≈cial members, were authorized to administer funds levied by the government from local inhabitants for the public purposes of elementary education, sanitation, maintenance of roads, and medical aid. The local fund boards were dissolved in 1884 and replaced by a more elaborate hierarchical structure of district, taluk, and union boards, which were now authorized to levy their own local funds (Baliga, Tanjore District Handbook). At least one taluk board member—Kistnasami Reddiar—was close enough to the movement to be interviewed by the superintendent of police regarding its aims and objectives (Venkateswara Iyer to Batten, 30 May 1896, R. Dis. 90). I am deeply indebted to Gene Irschick for suggesting this connection between ‘‘fund’’ and panf f tu. See, for example, Tirukkuhral no. 1032 for the ploughman as the linchpin of the world. Gloria Raheja describes the threshing ground as a center of rural temporal authority in The Poison in the Gift. My argument here concerns the historical emergence of a zone of power anchored in the plough, rather than the timeless coherence of a symbolic structure to which her argument appears to refer. Muthusamy Iyer to Madura Deputy Magistrate, 28 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. Venkateswara Iyer to Batten, 30 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. See Nicholas Dirks on the hook-swinging debates and the state recodification of native custom and tradition in the late nineteenth century in Castes of Mind. Palni Tahsildar to Madura Sub-Collector, 27 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Vencateswara Iyer to Batten, 11 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. As evidence for this claim, one might also turn to Kamalamp¯afl Carittiram, a Tamil novel written by B. R. Rajam Aiyar and serialized in the Tamil monthly Viv¯ekacint¯amani f from February 1893 and January 1895. Rajam Aiyar hailed from a small town in the Madurai district, and his realistic depiction of rural Madurai life includes a fictional account of a notorious Kallar bandit. In a satirical exchange between a village Brah-

Notes to Chapter Two

259

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

260

min and the bandit’s uncle, the novelist presents Kallar thievishness as common knowledge: ‘‘Suppu Tevan: ‘You’re right there, c¯ami. Stealing is our business. You Brahmins chant the Vedas, and we Kallars steal. But is that a reason to turn us in to the police?’ ’’ See Rajam Aiyar, The Fatal Rumour, 77. Batten to Vencateswara Iyer, 11 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Notice issued by J. K. Batten, 19 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Fawcett to IGP, 20 November 1895, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. See Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age; and Dirks, Castes of Mind, on race in colonial India. Ann Stoler in Race and the Education of Desire discusses colonial racism as a grammar of social di√erence. On this particular ambivalence between essence and improvement in nineteenth-century racial thought, see Moore, Pandian, and Kosek, ‘‘The Cultural Politics of Race and Nature.’’ Twigg to Price, 10 April 1896, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. Cornish, Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency, 1871. See Nigam, ‘‘Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’ ’’ Parts 1 and 2; Sen, Disciplining Punishment ; and Anand Yang, Crime and Criminality in British India. Foucault, ‘‘Society Must Be Defended,’’ 62. Board of Land Revenue, G.O. no. 33, Board’s Proceedings (Misc.), 6 January 1896, tnsa. Venkateswara Iyer to Batten, 30 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. This village is not to be confused with the town of Usilampatti, the commercial capital of the Piramalai Kallar country west of Madurai. Batten to Twigg, 25 June 1896, R.Dis. 90; and Francis, Madura District Gazetteer, 92. This tale, whether apocryphal or not, recalls Wendy Brown’s discussion of the state as a gendered protection racket whose ‘‘politics between men are always already the politics of exchanging, violating, protecting, and regulating women.’’ See her States of Injury, 188. Venkateswara Iyer to Batten, 30 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. Rajagopal to Batten, 31 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. Ibid. Maurice Bloomfield, ‘‘The Fable of the Crow and the Palm-Tree.’’ Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty has discussed these dimensions of kakataliya nyaya with respect to the Yoga Vasistha, an early Sanskrit text that relied heavily on this particular image in order to evoke the accidental nature of the phenomenal world. In the worldly play of illusion as depicted

Notes to Chapter Two

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

here, she argues in Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, elements of pure chance and the ‘‘gravity of karmic tendency’’ meet to make ‘‘certain coincidences not only possible but probable’’ (219). Batten to Rajagopal, 4 June 1896, and Rajagopal to Batten, 27 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Rajagopal to Batten, 23 May 1896, R.Dis. 90. See, for example, Baudry to Inspector-General of Police, 13 April 1896, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. Notice by J. K. Batten, 19 June 1896; Rajagopal to Batten, 28 May 1896; Palni Tahsildar to Madura Sub-Collector, 27 June 1896; Vedasandur Inspector of Police Occurrence Report, 17 August 1896, R.Dis. 90. Madura District Collector, 16 October 1896, R.Dis. 90. Grimley to Madura DM, 2 March 1897, mcr R.Dis. no. 206/Mgl, 13 March 1897, mda. Aiyasawmi Sastri to Batten, 6 June 1896, R.Dis. 90. Paddison to Board of Revenue, 12 December 1916, G.O. no. 165 Home (Judicial) 23 January 1917, tnsa. R.Dis. no. 1439/32, 17 February 1932, mda. Quoted passages are from Dirks, The Hollow Crown, xiv, 58, and xxvi respectively. Another way to frame the distinction I am drawing is to suggest that neither the cultivator’s plough nor the watchman’s sta√ were fully ‘‘hollowed’’ out by colonial power—as was the case with the Pudukottai crown—because neither of these was ‘‘full’’ to begin with. Dirks acknowledged that his ethnographic fieldwork was driven by a desire to ‘‘return to what was left of the little kingdom’’ (13, emphasis added), underscoring the mood of loss and alienation that he suggests must orient all access to ‘‘native’’ cultural materials in the wake of colonialism. My argument here is that cultural life in the present betrays the tension and incompleteness that it had always borne in the past; colonialism cannot therefore be taken as an epochal rupture of its order. While Dirks had insisted upon the significance of order or kafttfupp¯atfu to his Pudukottai case with the claim that ‘‘kingship does make a di√erence’’ (261), he appears also to risk overstating the symbolic integrity of the ‘‘old regime’’ reconstructed so carefully. In the political order Dirks sketches, king and bandit confront each other across the gulf of a structural polarity, their modes of violence radically incommensurable: sovereignty here closes in upon itself. ‘‘Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history,’’ Walter Benjamin reminds us (‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ in Illuminations, 254).

Notes to Chapter Two

261

three ‘‘The Life of the Thief Leaves the Belly Always Boiling’’ 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

262

For a closer discussion of the Foucauldian notion of a ‘‘pastoral’’ power that might be understood to underlie these questions, see my ‘‘Pastoral Power in the Postcolony.’’ I argue here that pasturage is best conceived as both an image of power and a practice of rule in such agrarian settings, and that attending to such intersections between the government of animals and that of humans sheds light on the di√erence of biopolitics in milieus beyond the modern West. I build upon a number of recent e√orts to rethink the human in relation to the conceptual and practical challenges raised by living animals, such as Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto, and the papers published in the following edited collections: Wolfe, Zoontologies; and Daston and Mitman, Thinking with Animals. See Kant, ‘‘Preface to The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics,’’ 302. Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy, as cited and discussed by Baxley, ‘‘Kantian Virtue.’’ In such works, Oliver (‘‘Animal Pedagogy,’’ 108) argues, ‘‘Men learn to become man only by virtue of animal pedagogy.’’ Building upon Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 and elsewhere, recent works on the anthropology of modern ‘‘life’’ have sought to free the study of human beings from the burdens of an intellectual humanism. Paul Rabinow’s Anthropos Today identifies ‘‘multiple new logoi’’ (28) such as genomic truths spanning the distance between multiple forms of biological being, while João Biehl’s Vita identifies the ‘‘ex-human’’ as a form of being abandoned to the condition of inferior humanity, and Adriana Petryna’s Life Exposed articulates a concept of ‘‘biological citizenship’’ as the terrain upon which such social inclusion and exclusion may be negotiated. Giorgio Agamben’s arguments in Homo Sacer concerning the violent dehumanization and extermination of that ‘‘bare life’’ deemed as obstacle to collective welfare have also been quite influential in recent anthropological writing. The materials presented in this chapter are meant to suggest that the human-animal line may be blurred and crossed on plural grounds with disjunctive political implications, testifying alternatively to both creative and destructive modes of animalization. See Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, 292. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 42. See also Mbembe, On the Postcolony, on the colonial subject in Africa as an ‘‘object of experimentation’’ (27), and Magubane, ‘‘Simians, Savages, Skulls, and Sex,’’ for a discussion of Notes to Chapter Three

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

relations between zoological science and imperial conquest in southern Africa. Attending to the diverse forms of animalization endured by colonial subjects serves to highlight the specificity of colonial and postcolonial biopolitics and their paradoxical forms of care. These are not meant as exhaustive possibilities. One might also call attention, for example, to the lions and tigers so often invoked in contemporary Thevar politics in southern Tamil Nadu: the work of these symbols in ‘‘royalizing’’ claims to power, and authorizing the exercise of a proud and martial violence. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 5. See also Patton, ‘‘Language, Power, and the Training of Horses,’’ for thoughtful reflections on the practical government of equine nature. Davies to Price, 30 September 1895, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa, writing about the Kallars, Maravars, and Agambadiyars of the southern districts of the Madras Presidency. Paddison to Judicial Secretary, 27 April 1918, G.O. no. 1331 Home (Judicial), 5 June 1918, tnsa. Earlier Criminal Tribes Act notifications had been directed toward the Piramalai Kallars of a few distinct villages. See, for example, Mullaly, Notes on Criminal Classes of the Madras Presidency; and Nelson, The Madura Country district manual. Francis, Madura District Gazetteer ; Mullaly, Notes on Criminal Classes of the Madras Presidency; and Loveluck, ‘‘The Kallar Problem in South India,’’ G.O. no. 596 Law (General), 16 June 1921, tnsa. Fawcett to IGP, 20 November 1895, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. Foucault, ‘‘About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry.’’ In Victorian England, such ideas betrayed the influence of what Stefan Collini (‘‘The Idea of Character’’) has identified as an ‘‘unreflective Kantianism’’: an anxiety that those of weak will might readily neglect their moral duties for the temptations of base inclination. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, 51–52. See Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 122–45, for a lucid discussion of atavism and the associated notion of ontogenetic recapitulation. See Lombroso’s Criminal Man, and also Leps, Apprehending the Criminal, on Victorian English characterizations of the bestial and animal nature of born delinquents. Responsibility in Mental Disease, cited in Leps, Apprehending the Criminal, 30. Charles Darwin himself had found an element of ambiguity in the origins of the moral conscience, the strength of its ought to ‘‘either

Notes to Chapter Three

263

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

264

innate or partially acquired.’’ See his The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 88. On di√erences between the two acts, see Nigam, ‘‘Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,’ ’’ Part 1. While Meena Radhakrishna’s Dishonoured by History argues that concerns for reform disengaged hereditary crime in colonial India from biological determinants (5), I draw attention to these currents of evolutionary improvement to reconcile them with the possibility of reform. The most sensational of these accounts no doubt was Confessions of a Thug by Captain Meadows Taylor. See Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, on the export of fingerprinting from Bengal to the metropole. On familial pathology, see the discussion of the ‘‘Jukes’’ in Rennie, The Search for Criminal Man. Importantly, the object of Criminal Tribes Act notification in India was never a criminal ‘‘caste’’ as such, but always a criminal ‘‘tribe, gang or class.’’ Late nineteenth-century designations of collective criminality were provisional and contradictory wherever applied, argues Freitag (‘‘Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North India’’), often sacrificing the subtleties of native self-identification to the necessities of police administration. Horne to Chief Secretary, 12 January 1906, G.O. no. 193 Judicial, 3 February 1906, tnsa. G.O. no. 193 Judicial, 3 February 1906, tnsa. Cowie to Hammick, 13 July 1908, G.O. no. 1213 Judicial, 3 September 1908, tnsa. Paddison to Judicial Secretary, 27 April 1918, G.O. no. 1331 Home (Judicial), 5 June 1918, tnsa. The first Kallars notified under the Criminal Tribes Act belonged to a novel collectivity, the ‘‘Keelagudi Kallars,’’ comprising neither a hereditary lineage nor any other locally recognized subgroup, bound together in colonial law instead by the notorious reputation of the village in which they resided. These men were subjected to the dictates of the act in 1914, followed by the Kallar males of two other villages in the following year, and then the caste as a whole in 1918. Moir to Rao, 25 April 1921, G.O. no. 596 Law (General), 16 June 1921. G.O. no. 436 Public (Police), 18 August 1933, tnsa. Aside from Kallars, there were a total of 36,471 others registered as criminal tribe members that year, of whom 4,901 were women. At no point were Piramalai Kallar women registered under the act. On the controversy surrounding women of other communities registered under the act, see Radhakrishnan, Dishonoured by History, 60–64.

Notes to Chapter Three

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44 45. 46.

47.

Paddison to Legislative Council, 28 August 1915, G.O. no. 1649 Judicial, 27 June 1916, tnsa. Loveluck, ‘‘The Kallar Problem in South India,’’ G.O. no. 596 Law (General), 16 June 1921, tnsa. I borrow this phrase from Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 297. J. F. Hall to Inspector-General of Police, 6 April 1931, G.O. no. 485 Public (Police), 12 September 1931, tnsa. O’Farrell to Chief Secretary, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. Paddison to Judicial Secretary, 27 April 1918, G.O. no. 1331 Home (Judicial), 5 June 1918, tnsa. Throughout the 1930s police o≈cials increasingly held the requirements of section 10(1)(a) ‘‘in abeyance’’ among registered individuals deemed ‘‘not particularly dangerous or active’’: by 1939, only 399 Kallars throughout the district were actually required to report each night to the nearest police station. G.O. no. 3953 Home, 20 July 1939, tnsa. Mukkulathor Sangham petition to the Governor of Madras, G.O. no. 920 Home, 23 March 1945, tnsa. For a discussion of such organized opposition to the Criminal Tribes Act, see Bose, Forward Bloc. On the act as a ‘‘monstrous’’ and ‘‘inhuman’’ statute, see Legislative Assembly Debates, Second Session of the Second Legislative Assembly, Government of Madras, vol. 5, nos. 1–14, pp. 557–81, tnsa. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, 62 and 86. Tirukkuhral 122, and Parimelalakar’s commentary in Tirukkuhral Uraikkottu: Ahrattup¯alf , 100. For many classical Indian philosophers, the itinerancy of the senses was more than a turn of phrase—each of the sense organs was said to reach out from the body to establish direct contact with objects of perception. See Sinha, Indian Psychology, 1: 1–30, for a discussion of this doctrine of pr¯apyak¯ari. Chennakesavan, Concept of Mind in Indian Philosophy. To control desire in contemporary spoken Tamil is to bind, restrain, or tie it: kafttfupaftuttal. N¯alaftiy¯ar 65. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 199. The opposition between virtue and duty imputed by later scholars to Kant’s writings has been misleadingly overwrought, writes Baxley in ‘‘Kantian Virtue.’’ On the Aristotelian tradition of virtue, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 146–225. See Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India, 69– 102. These distinctions may seem overly schematic and generalizing:

Notes to Chapter Three

265

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

266

after all, there are diverse strands of ethical thought and practice in India that are more or less open in their capacity for realization, more or less oriented toward essential duties, and more or less universal in their scope of action. I nonetheless draw them here for their heuristic value. Tirukkuhral 286. Tirumantiram 2900. Tolk¯appiyam, 630–32. Tirumantiram 2883: p¯arpp¯anh akattil¯e p¯arh pacu aintunf f tu / m¯eypp¯arum inh h ri vehrittut tirivana h / m¯eypp¯arum unf f tay vehriyum afta˙nkin¯ h al / p¯arpp¯anh pacu aintum p¯al¯a coriyum¯e . P¯arpp¯anh here may also mean ‘‘Brahmin.’’ See Varadarajan, A History of Tamil Literature, 99, for an exegesis. G.O. no. 2049 Home (Judicial), 9 December 1907. Foucault, ‘‘The Subject and Power,’’ 222. The Viv¯eka Cint¯amani f was likely compiled in the seventeenth century and circulated by print beginning in the nineteenth century. I am grateful to Bhavani Raman for these historical details. Iswari amm¯a could not read herself, but she had committed such verses to memory as her husband had recited from a text that had been gifted to them by mendicants at a nearby temple. I recorded the following example from several K. G. Patti elders: ‘‘In a corner of the sorghum fields / a pair of pigeons grazing / do not coo if they see someone / those mindless blue rock pigeons.’’ This is the most common euphemism for the struggling poor in the Cumbum Valley. Permissibility here is ultimately underwritten by a sense of divine justice, in contrast to the class-based sense of moral economy and justifiable theft described by J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 265–72. Ramalinga Adigal, Tiruvaruftp¯a 123. Loveluck, ‘‘The Kallar Problem in South India,’’ G.O. no. 596 Law (General), 16 June 1921, tnsa. I am grateful to Tirumalai Pinna Thevar of Dharmathupatti for sharing these records in his possession. Dumont, A South Indian Subcaste, 199. Dumont presents evidence from a number of cases in which those men found guilty of illegitimate unions escaped excommunication by admitting their o√ences and renouncing the liaison, or by securing a collective agreement concerning the relative rank of concerned progeny among their respective lineages (ibid., 293–98). Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, notes the widespread disparagement of monkeys in India as elsewhere, but also the appeal of the monkey as ‘‘a being that challenges boundaries’’ (333). The Indian simian deity HanuNotes to Chapter Three

64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

man in particular has been recuperated in modern times as a middleclass god, Lutgendorf argues, partly as a response to the ‘‘monkeyproblem’’ posed by evolutionary sciences of trans-species kinship. The Sashti Films production debuted two years after My Fair Lady, which itself was an adaptation of the same play for Hollywood. Shaw, ‘‘Pygmalion,’’ 303. In his free time, Higgins tinkers with a universal alphabet and pores over the di√erent ‘‘dialects’’ of India, gesturing toward a global humanism with unmistakably imperial horizons. See, for example, Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva, 68; and Nischyadatta’s tale in The Kath¯a Sarit S¯agara. IV: 2.16 in The Ramayana of Valmiki. See also V: 53.12. My thanks to Bob Goldman, Philip Lutgendorf, and Adheesh Sathaye for valuable discussions concerning these textual legacies. Ramalinga Adigal, Tiruvaruftp¯a 123. See also nos. 107, 111, 116, and 118 in this section of verses. See Kuhruntokai 44 and 342, and Ai˙nkuhrun¯urh u 272 and 274. See Hart’s and Heifetz’s translation (in The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom) of Puhran¯an¯urh u 136 for bandits stealing from the harried subjects of a chieftain-like monkeys. See Ramanujan, The Interior Landscape, for a classic study of these materials and themes. See the well-known first decad of verses by Sambandhar in the Saiva T¯ev¯aram, as well as Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti, and Cutler, Songs of Experience. I am grateful to Sunder Kaali for first directing me to the theme of the stolen heart in bhakti poetry in 2001. Dhavamony, Love of God According to Saiva Siddhanta, 144. Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, discusses Tamil anpu h as a more expansive notion of love encompassing attachments between parents, children, friends, devotees, and divinities, emphasizing here too both its dangers and rewards (91–116). I italicize some of the many English words spoken by these youths to emphasize the braided quality of their language. My italics, used here to underscore the verbal stress. The prominence of Western-style Valentine’s Day commemorations in the cities and towns of India in recent years has prompted many violent protests from numerous Hindu nationalist political outfits, as Prakash himself was well aware. Such protests appear all the more ironic, however, when considered in light of the vernacular idioms of devotion and attentiveness that these youths had mobilized to celebrate an ethics of sincere love. For one recent e√ort to grapple with this problem, see Prasad, Poetics of Conduct. Notes to Chapter Three

267

77.

78.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari stress that becominganimal is a matter of making alliances that are themselves real, rather than a matter of imitating, representing, or identifying with some other kind of preexisting being. They distinguish between rival forms of animal multiplicity that trouble the order of family and state to varying degrees: ‘‘family pets’’ that ‘‘invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation,’’ or ‘‘more demonic animals’’ that ‘‘form, develop, and are transformed by contagion’’ (240–42). For a discussion of their usage of animality, its Nietzschean filiations, and its Foucauldian a≈liations, see Weinstein, ‘‘Traces of the Beast.’’ Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 36–37.

four ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets, Evil Sown Yields Evil’’ 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

268

I have presented an abridged version of the tale here. See Blackburn, ‘‘Coming Out of His Shell,’’ for a discussion of this particular folk genre in India. Their Doctrines of Development discusses an abiding tension between immanent and intentional understandings of developmental progress. I discuss the implications of the materials presented in this chapter for the scholarly literature on development in my ‘‘Devoted to Development.’’ Although these terms may be taken as roughly synonymous, I use toil here because it places greater emphasis on the disposition to work rather than just the act of labor and its e√ects. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 62. Weber found in the caste system of India a social basis for ‘‘lasting devotion to one’s calling’’ (The Religion of India, 122) and in karma ‘‘the most consistent theodicy ever produced by history’’ (ibid., 121). At the same time, however, as Munshi argues (‘‘Max Weber on India,’’ 29), India served Weber as an ‘‘ideal negative type’’ underscoring the distinctive conjuncture of economic rationalism and ascetic Protestantism in the modern West, for its social life remained steeped in ‘‘traditionalism,’’ magic, and an otherworldly prospect of salvation. Mill, History of British India, 1: 333. Thanks to Vinay Gidwani for this reference. Note from Public Works and Labor Department to the Secretary to the Governor, G.O. no. 966 L Public Works and Labor Misc., 6 August 1926, tnsa. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 62. Ayyar to Inspector-General of Police, 13 January 1921, G.O. no. 447 Home (Judicial), 1 March 1921, tnsa. Notes to Chapter Three

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

See Gidwani, ‘‘ ‘Waste’ and the Permanent Settlement in Bengal’’; and Gilmartin, ‘‘Water and Waste.’’ Macpherson, Property, 20. As Drayton observes in Nature’s Government, Locke ‘‘made the zoon oekonomikon, an Adamic volunteer who mixed his labour with nature, into the basis of political society’’ (60). See Bornstein, The Spirit of Development, on Protestant ngos in Zimbabwe. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 80, for a ‘‘nonsecular and phenomenological histor[y] of labor.’’ This chapter also joins in a critique of modernity as a necessarily rationalizing ‘‘disenchantment’’ of the world in Weberian terms. See also McLean, The Event and Its Terrors, for a related argument concerning the Irish famine of the mid-nineteenth century and its haunting of a postcolonial Irish present. Capitalist economic action depends, argued Weber, on an ‘‘expectation’’ of profit, on an ‘‘attitude which seeks profit rationally and systematically’’ (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 17 and 64). Note by Cardew, 7 August 1910, G.O. no. 2683 Revenue, 15 August 1910, tnsa. Thomas Munro in Firminger, A√airs of the East India Company, 449. Hall to Marjoribanks, 17 May 1924, G.O. no. 541 Judicial (Poli), 29 October 1924, tnsa. G.O. no. 966 L, Public Works and Labor Misc., 6 August 1926, and ‘‘Administration Report,’’ G.O. no. 2683 Law (General) Misc., 8 November 1923, tnsa. 1922 Administration Report, G.O. no. 2683 Law (General) Misc., 8 November 1923, tnsa. The former moniker is described by E. P. Holton in a letter to his ‘‘Friends,’’ 21 October 1918, abc 16.1.9, v22, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Records (hereafter abc), Houghton Library (hlh). The latter comparison is drawn from the memories of my interlocutors in the Cumbum Valley. Hall to Marjoribanks, 17 May 1924, G.O. no. 541 Judicial (Poli), 29 October 1924, tnsa. See Gadgil and Guha, This Fissured Land; Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests; Skaria, Hybrid Histories; and Irschick, Dialogue and History. Stuart to Paddison, 16 June 1915, G.O. no. 1649 Judicial, 27 June 1916, tnsa. Clinch, ‘‘Memorandum,’’ G.O. no. 1649 Judicial, 27 June 1916, tnsa. Butterworth to Loftus-Tottenham, 11 June 1910, G.O. no. 2683 Revenue, 15 August 1910, tnsa. Notes to Chapter Four

269

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

270

E. A. Harvey, 3 June 1917, G.O. no. 1725 Home (Judicial), 18 August 1917, tnsa. Singha, A Despotism of Law, 227. See Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History, for an extensive discussion of this strategy and its history. Their management was typically entrusted to Christian missionary organizations on the grounds that those ‘‘who make [reclamation] their main object in life’’ would conduct this work more cheaply and e√ectively than police o≈cers and government servants. See the Note Showing the Progress Made in the Settlement of Criminal Tribes in the Madras Presidency up to January 1925, 1. Note Showing the Progress Made in the Settlement of Criminal Tribes in the Madras Presidency up to September 1916, 4–5 and 18. Paddison, 28 August 1915, G.O. no. 1649 Judicial, 27 June 1916, tnsa. Paddison to Secretary, 27 April 1918, G.O. no. 1331 Home (Judicial), 5 June 1918, tnsa. Blaufuss, Changing Goals of the American Madura Mission in India; and Hutchison, Errand to the World. L. L. Lorbeer, cited by G. J. R. Athistam, ‘‘The Piramalai Kallars,’’ utc, 26. ‘‘Report of Special Committee for Work in the Kallar Country,’’ 27 February 1922, abc 16.1.9, v. 27, abc. G. J. R. Athistam, ‘‘The Piramalai Kallars,’’ utc. Raymond Dudley, ‘‘The Kallars of Madura,’’ 19 February 1923, abc 16.1.9, v. 27. J. P. Jones, ‘‘A Great Opportunity,’’ 29 October 1914, abc 16.1.9, v. 21. See, for example, E. P. and G. S. Holton to Friends, 27 November 1906, abc 16.1.9, v. 17, and E. P. Holton to Friends, 23 April 1918, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. E. P. Holton to N. G. Clark, 25 February 1890, abc 16.1.9, v. 13. Thanks to Joan Hunt of the Holton Family Association for sharing this information from the Holton family genealogy she has been preparing. Holton to Barton, 10 November 1916, abc 16.1.9, v. 22, for example: ‘‘Something may be granted to heredity, but I believe it is customary, in these days, to give a much larger credit to environment.’’ See the account of daily school deeds in E. P. and G. S. Holton to Friends, 31 May 1895, abc 16.1.9, v. 13. E. P. and G. S. Holton to Friends, 22 November 1915, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. Bushnell, ‘‘Christian Nurture.’’ Blaufuss, Changing Goals of the American Madura Mission in India. Liberal theologians hoped to bring people and societies to Christ ‘‘by environmental influences and a kind of spiritual osmosis,’’ observed Hutchison (Errand to the World, 103). Notes to Chapter Four

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

For a historical account of the yeoman agrarian ideal in the United States, see Dixon and Hapke, ‘‘Cultivating Discourse.’’ American Madura Mission Records, utc. Jean Comaro√ and John Comaro√ write that Nonconformist British missionaries in southern Africa also ‘‘relied heavily on horticultural metaphors, evoking the recreation of the spoiled English garden in Africa’s ‘vast moral wastes.’ The countryside, in other words, would be tilled and planted anew—cultivating the heathen workers as they cultivated the soil’’ (Of Revelation and Revolution, 1: 80). Blaufuss, Changing Goals of the American Madura Mission in India, 164– 65 and 188–89. E. P. and G. S. Holton to Friends, 16 May 1904, abc 16.1.9, v. 17; and Madura Mission: Pasumalai promotional pamphlet, abc 78.2, 12:18, which includes photographs labeled ‘‘Boys Harvesting Rice,’’ ‘‘Weeding the Garden,’’ and ‘‘At Work in the Garden.’’ E. P. and G. S. Holton to Friends, 31 May 1895, abc 16.1.9, v. 13. E. P. and G. S. Holton to Friends, 29 May 1905, abc 16.1.9, v. 17. E. P. Holton to J. L. Barton, 30 May 1917, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. E. P. Holton to W. E. Strong, 30 June 1917, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. E. P. Holton to J. L. Barton, 30 May 1917, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. E. P. Holton to Friends, 23 April 1918, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. E. P. Holton to Friends, 21 October 1918, and E. P. Holton to W. E. Strong, 6 July 1918, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. Holton to Madura District Magistrate, 11 April 1918, G.O. no. 1585 Home (Judicial), 6 July 1918, tnsa. Short note on the Kallar Settlement, G.O. no. 2092 Home (Judicial), 12 September 1918, tnsa. Ibid. H. G. Clinch to Madura District Magistrate, 27 November 1916, G.O. no. 735 Home (Judicial), 2 April 1917, tnsa. Holton to Madura District Magistrate, 11 April 1918, G.O. no. 1585 Home (Judicial), 6 July 1918, tnsa. As evidenced by the colonial Poundkeeper’s Register for the village of K. G. Patti, still in the possession of Duraichamy Gounder, the Gounder caste headman of the village. In the years leading up to the settlement the pound was generally empty. Every now and then, a few oxen, bu√alo, horses, and goats would be caught and impounded for illicit grazing on the Forest Department’s lands and on cultivated fields. Several months might pass between each of these seizures. But the register records a startling shift toward the end of September 1917. In 40 separate incidents over the next few months, a total of 232 errant animals were impounded Notes to Chapter Four

271

62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

272

by ‘‘Settlement’’ residents and police o≈cers alone—sometimes on a daily basis. On the fire, see Holton to Madura District Magistrate, 11 April 1918, G.O. no. 1585 Home (Judicial), 6 July 1918, tnsa. Letter from E. P. Holton to W. E. Strong, 30 June 1917, abc 16.1.9, v. 22. Rajamanikkam to Personal Assistant to the Surgeon General, 11 February 1918, G.O. no. 1893 Home (Judicial), 24 August 1918, and Deputy Sanitation Commissioner Coimbatore to Sanitation Commissioner for Madras, 9 September 1919, G.O. no. 2329 Home (Judicial), 18 September 1920, tnsa. The Reverend D. Chellappa, one of the few Christian Kallars whom I did meet, blamed this outcome on an ‘‘evangelical failure’’: they ‘‘did not succeed in creating a true Christian community,’’ he said in a conversation at his home in Thanjavur in 2002. The grandson of a member of the K. G. Patti Kallar panchayat suggested this to me. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 79. On the Hindu devotee both seeing and being seen by the deity, see Eck, Darsan, 6–7. Chari, Fraternal Capital, 226. Chari’s argument here relies on the semiology of C. S. Peirce. Tirukkuhral 595. See also couplets 611–20. V¯enf f ti vinai h cey¯el in Tamil (see this work in N¯ıti N¯ul M¯alai ). This absence perhaps implies that those who exercised certain forms of embodied agrarian labor in medieval India may have been denied the symbolic mantle of the virtuous cultivator. On intersecting distinctions of caste and class in the medieval Tamil countryside, see Ludden, Peasant History in South India. Tiruv¯acakam 496: koftu vinaiy¯ h enh uhlaitt¯al uhruti unf f to¯ . See Pafttf inatt¯ h ar P¯atfalkafl , 84: o¯tfamahr p¯alhuk kuhlaiy¯amal . . . celvan taruv¯ay. Ramalinga Adigal, Tiruvaruftp¯a 606. See Zook, ‘‘Developing the Rural Citizen,’’ 71, on the early twentiethcentury serial Pihlaikkum Vahli. Many poems by twentieth-century Tamil nationalists such as Subramania Bharati and Bharatidasan rely on such usage. On this genre of Tamil literary production, see Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue. See Doniger O’Flaherty, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, especially ‘‘Karma, Apurva and ‘Natural’ Causes’’ by Wilhelm Halbfass in this volume, whose discussion of varying ideas of karma calls attention to ‘‘its perimeter and its limits, its conflicts and its tensions.’’ Sivañ¯ana Siddhi Svapaksa 2: 12, translated by J. M. Nallaswami Pillai.

Notes to Chapter Four

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

Potter, ‘‘The Karma Theory and Its Interpretation in Some Indian Philosophies,’’ 245. Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma, 138. Sivañ¯ana Siddhi Parapaksa 4: 9, translated by J. M. Nallaswami Pillai. Schomerus, Saiva Siddhanta, 253–57. Babb, ‘‘Destiny and Responsibility’’; and Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma, 75–76. Its close resonance with the well-known biblical passage from Galatians —‘‘As you sow, so shall you reap’’—is tantalizing yet remains somewhat obscure to me, as I have been unable to identify the antiquity or provenance of the Tamil proverb. Correlative instances in Tamil and other Indian languages with respect to karma, however, suggest an independent genealogy for the image in India. Kumar, Land and Caste in South India, records the use of paftiy¯afl — literally, a person of, with, or for pafti—as a common name for ‘‘hired farm servant[s] receiving wages in kind’’ in the nineteenth-century countryside around Madras. I found no evidence that the term was used in the Cumbum Valley. See Thompson, ‘‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’’; and J. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant. In similar terms, Mosse, Cultivating Development, discusses a case of Bhils in western India relying on the moral authority of a local goddess cult to challenge the normative premises of a British participatory development project (76–78). Sankari, Periya Pur¯anaf f ttf il Uvamaikafl , 75–76. I borrow the phrase ‘‘strange fruit’’ from Billie Holiday’s famous song, written by Abel Meeropol in 1939. My thanks to Jake Kosek for reminding me of its significance to this chapter. Conditional Assignments Register, Uthamapalayam Taluk O≈ce, Theni District. On the provision of land to Dalits in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, see Irschick, Dialogue and History, 153–90. G.O. no. 1429 Revenue (Misc. Confidential), 7 August 1922, tnsa. I rely upon many conversations with numerous individuals here, but most of all upon the astonishing memory of Periya Ramu Thevar, a nonagenarian farmer in K. G. Patti to whom I remain very grateful. The image itself is a flashback, so to speak, from Auvaiyar’s M¯uturai 4. An assistant at the Village Administrative O≈ce mapped for me the outlines of the vgp plantation. The story that begins the introduction of this book was set on the ruined site of this particular plantation. The English word ‘‘criminal’’ works as a vernacular Tamil euphemism in

Notes to Chapter Four

273

95. 96.

the region for a sharp and cunning intelligence in the region, which is why its use for Sekharan is appropriate here. Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad, 259. The Kongu Gounders profiled in Chari’s Fraternal Capital represent an agrarian history—that of western Tamil Nadu—and a social background di√erent from that of the Okkaliga Gounders who predominate in the Cumbum Valley. While Chari focuses on agrarian toil and its return into an urban industrial milieu, he does not tackle the cosmological and eschatological dimensions of uhlaippu addressed in this chapter.

five ‘‘Let the Water for the Paddy Also Irrigate the Grass’’ 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

274

In her ‘‘Sin and Rain,’’ Ann Gold describes a rural Rajasthani moral ecology in which physical and moral climate are understood to have degenerated together, with selfish and undisciplined individuals in a kingless time of the present angering God and causing him to withhold the rains. Prominent critics of development in India include Claude Alvares, Ashis Nandy, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva, and Shiv Viswanathan. See Sachs, The Development Dictionary, for a synthetic critique of violence exercised in the name of global development in the twentieth century. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 319 and 445. See Forget, ‘‘Evocations of Sympathy’’; and Lawrence, ‘‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment.’’ Rosenwein (‘‘Worrying about Emotions in History’’) argues that Elias relied upon a hydraulic model of psychic flows: ‘‘the emotions are like great liquids within each person, heaving and frothing, eager to be let out.’’ On the ‘‘intimacies of lives that inhabit rivers and of rivers that inhabit lives,’’ see RaΔes, In Amazonia, 180–205. In the conclusion to his classic ethnography of Tamil personhood, E. Valentine Daniel finds on the shimmering surface of a village reservoir ‘‘[a] reticulate of fluid signs’’ mirroring the fluidity of the cultural forms he documents, also taken as ‘‘fluid’’ here insofar as their crystallization into structures is always partial and deferred (Fluid Signs, 301). The present chapter, however, marks both the fluidity and ‘‘solidity’’ of certain Tamil signs of the fluid—their mutability as well as their durable persistence. G.O. no. 966 L, Public Works and Labor Misc., 6 August 1926, tnsa. My italics. As Mullaly reported in his Notes on Criminal Classes of the Madras Presidency of 1892, ‘‘Before the British entered the country they were in constant warfare with their neighbors’’ (82).

Notes to Chapter Four

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

See Chakrabarty, ‘‘Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject,’’ in Provincializing Europe, 117–48. Moir to Rao, 25/29 April 1921, G.O. no. 596 Law (General), 16 June 1921, tnsa. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, esp. III, 3: 25; and Seigel, The Idea of the Self, 139–67. Raphael, The Impartial Spectator (12–20), argues that sympathy for Smith is a faculty of judgment rather than a motive for action, which is why it ought be understood as more pervasive than instances of pity or compassion. See also Rai, Rule of Sympathy, on the aporetic relation between the premise of a universal capacity for sympathy and the ‘‘pedagogy of Christian European civilizing’’ (58) founded on its relative absence. See Ca√entzis, ‘‘On the Scottish Origin of ‘Civilization.’ ’’ Moir to Rao, 25/29 April 1921, G.O. no. 596 Law (General), 16 June 1921, tnsa. Italics mine. See his ‘‘Models of the Hydraulic Environment,’’ ‘‘Imperial Rivers,’’ and ‘‘Scientific Empire and Imperial Science.’’ I am grateful to him for several illuminating exchanges on the subject of colonial irrigation. Gilmartin, ‘‘Imperial Rivers,’’ 99. H. F. Travers Phillips, G.O. no. 2683 Law (General), 8 November 1923, tnsa. Emphasis in original. Dumergue to Chief Secretary, 9 November 1895, G.O. no. 473 Judicial, 31 March 1897, tnsa. ‘‘Kallans in the Madura District,’’ The Hindu, 25 November 1915, reprinted in G.O. no. 2956 Judicial, 2 December 1915, tnsa. Francis, Madura District Gazetteer, 92–93. Parish to Ranee of Ramnad and Zemindar of Shevagungah, 23 July 1807, mcr vol. 1152, pp. 89–91, tnsa. One Captain Caldwell, deputed by Collector Parish to inspect the river and the prospect of turning it, described this as an old plan ‘‘handed down from father to son through many generations.’’ See the ‘‘Report of Mr. Hodgson on the Dindigul District,’’ 28 March 1808, mcr vol. 1255, p. 11, tnsa. Mackenzie, History of the Periyar Project, 63. On productivity as the ‘‘duty’’ of water in colonial irrigation discourse, see Gilmartin, ‘‘Imperial Rivers.’’ Paddison to Secretary, 17 February 1916, G.O. no. 796 Revenue, 6 April 1916, tnsa. Note by Cardew, 7 August 1910, G.O. no. 2683 Revenue, 15 August 1910, tnsa. G.O. no. 85-I, Public Works Department, 22 March 1923, tnsa.

Notes to Chapter Five

275

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

276

Cobbold to Land Revenue and Settlement Board, 6 September 1927, G.O. no. 839-I Public Works, 8 April 1932, tnsa. Emphasis added. Note by Cardew, 7 August 1910, G.O. no. 2683 Revenue, 15 August 1910, tnsa. Paddison to Secretary, 7 March 1919, G.O. no. 2178 Revenue, 19 September 1919, tnsa. See Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture; and Rabinbach, The Human Motor. Gilmartin in ‘‘Models of the Hydraulic Environment’’ argues that the colonial ‘‘hydraulic environment’’ took communities too as part of the natural environment, ‘‘to be ‘controlled and guided, led and regulated,’ like Punjab’s rivers, by ‘scientific’ administration’’ (227). Paddison, ‘‘Memorandum,’’ G.O. no. 1649 Judicial, 27 June 1916, tnsa. Emphasis added. Ibid. Zook, ‘‘Famine in the Landscape.’’ Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts) follows a long line of critics (including Amartya Sen in the twentieth century and nationalist writers such as Dadabhai Naoroji in the nineteenth) who have called attention to state concern for revenue and the free operation of grain markets as a crucial foundation for severe and recurrent famines in colonial India. See Ludden, ‘‘Patronage and Irrigation in Tamil Nadu.’’ On ‘‘protective’’ versus ‘‘productive’’ irrigation works in colonial India, see Whitcombe, ‘‘Irrigation.’’ G.O. no. 1552 Revenue (Misc.), 28 August 1922, tnsa. Petition to K. V. Reddi Naidu, G.O. no. 1025 Revenue (Misc.), 9 May 1921, tnsa. Note dated 22 December 1922, G.O. no. 85-I, Public Works Department, 22 March 1923, tnsa. See, for example, ‘‘Mr. Dowley’s Scheme,’’ G.O. no. 839-I, Public Works Department, 8 April 1932, tnsa. Collector’s Report, 10 April 1950, G.O. no. 4687, Public Works Department Misc., 19 November 1951, tnsa. G.O. no. 4162 Public Works Department Res. Series, 26 November 1954, tnsa. G.O. no. 682 Public Works Department, 9 October 1996, tnsa. The canal, when completed, will be entitled only to surplus flood water when both the Vaigai Reservoir and the Ramnad big tank fill up to capacity. Regional members of the Legislative Assembly and the Society for Integrated Rural Development (sird) were integral to the initiation of this

Notes to Chapter Five

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

plan. My thanks to Mr. Jeeva of sird for sharing this history and relevant documents from the organization’s files with me. Subramanian to Public Works Department Secretary, 12 November 1988, sird files, Madurai. The maximum height of the Periyar Reservoir was lowered from 152 to 136 feet in 1979 in order to complete strengthening works on the dam itself. The state of Kerala, where the dam is located, has since refused to allow the water level to be raised back to its previous height. Agitations on the part of farmers’ associations and political parties in Tamil Nadu took the issue as far as the Supreme Court, which ruled in early 2006 that Kerala would have to bring the water level back up to 142 feet. The government of Kerala remains determined to fight this judgment. There is no mention of such a mode of financing in A. T. Mackenzie’s history of the dam (History of the Periyar Project ). See Thani Nayagam, Landscape and Poetry, 20 and 52. N¯alaftiy¯ar 184 and 185. Cihrupañcam¯ulam 66, in Patine h nf K¯ıhlkkanakku. f Cihrupañcam¯ulam 46, in Patine h nf K¯ıhlkkanakku: f v¯arc¯anh h ra k¯untal varampuyara vaikalum / n¯ırc¯anh h ruyarav¯e nelluyaruñ c¯ırc¯anh h ra / t¯av¯ak kuftiyuyarat t¯an˙ karuñc¯ırk k¯ovuyarum / o¯ v¯a uraikkum ulaku. See Dirks, The Hollow Crown, 19–138. Ludden, ‘‘Patronage and Irrigation in Tamil Nadu.’’ Nelluk kihraittan¯ır v¯aykk¯al vahliy¯otf ip / pullukkum a¯ n˙ k¯e pociyum¯am tollulakil / nall¯a roruvar uflar¯el avarporuft / tell¯arkkum peyyum mahlai run these lines from M¯uturai, in N¯ıti N¯ul M¯alai. Konh h raiv¯entanh 82: v¯anam h curu˙nkinh t¯anam h curu˙nkum, in N¯ıti N¯ul M¯alai. See Mauss, The Gift, and Laidlaw, ‘‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends,’’ on the paradox of the free gift in the work of Mauss but also an institutionalized exception to this principle in the giving of alms to Shvetambar Jain renouncers. The term at stake in Laidlaw’s article, as in the passage from Konh h raiv¯entanh cited above (footnote 50), is dan (or t¯anam h in Tamil). Raheja, The Poison in the Gift, argues that transactional practices of dan distribute the ‘‘poison’’ of misfortune from dominant to client and service castes, underscoring their work in securing a structure of rural sociality. But as Laidlaw notes with respect to dan, ‘‘it is not poisonous for everyone or in all situations’’; among Jain renunciants and lay donors, he argues, dan ‘‘is a transaction which can, if performed correctly’’ remain ‘‘a resolutely free gift . . . free of obligation’’ (631). This is a prospect easily entangled again in social relations, obligations, and debts, Laidlaw concedes—as is of course the water conveyed by royal and elite

Notes to Chapter Five

277

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

278

irrigation works in the Tamil country—and yet it is important in both of these instances to mark the horizon of possibility. Tirukkuhral 211. Mukk¯utfal Paflflu 40. See N¯alaftiy¯ar 269 and Viv¯eka Cint¯amani f 6. On the fate of Tamil tank irrigation systems in the face of colonial o≈cial arguments that these ought to managed through ‘‘customary’’ community institutions alone, see Mosse, The Rule of Water. The colloquial adage closely echoes the language of M¯uturai: nel p¯ayira tanf n¯ f ı pullukkum p¯ayafttfum¯e . The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi remains one of the classic statements of this process of ‘‘disembedding’’ market relations from other forms of sociality. I would also emphasize, however—with Dipesh Chakrabarty (‘‘Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History’’ in Provincializing Europe) and many others—that this is always a variegated and variously incomplete process, and that much of the critical task lies in writing such constitutive di√erences back into the history of its unfolding. The desert in classical Tamil love poetry was a liminal zone, a harsh and unforgiving milieu through which adventuring heroes and eloping lovers had to pass on their way to more hospitable climes. On the savagery of desert inhabitants, see Kalittokai 1.3.1–6, translated by David Shulman in ‘‘On South Indian Bandits and Kings.’’ Contemporary literary and cultural depictions of putatively ‘‘martial’’ castes such as Kallars and Maravars draw from such representations to sketch their distinctive nature. As Raphael has argued, there is therefore no ‘‘Adam Smith problem,’’ that is, no contradiction between the Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Smith of The Wealth of Nations, as sympathy in his work is to be grasped as a fundamental ‘‘constituent of moral judgment’’ as such rather than as a motive for certain acts of altruism. See his ‘‘Ethics and Economics’’ (115–26 in The Impartial Spectator), as well as Seigel, The Idea of the Self (151–59), on Smith’s conception of the moral productivity of commercial society. See, for example, Trawick Egnor, ‘‘Internal Iconicity in Paraiyar ‘Crying Songs’ ’’; and Clark-Deces, No One Cries for the Dead. In what follows, I call these verses ‘‘elegies’’ rather than ‘‘songs’’ or ‘‘dirges,’’ as these two authors do, on account of their poetic structure and the insistence of Kallar women that they are ‘‘said’’ rather than ‘‘sung.’’ See also Seremetakis, The Last Word, and Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels, for other oral traditions of lamenting loss. Notes to Chapter Five

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

Tuttipp¯u m¯alai / n¯anh petta enh makafl¯e / t¯ofliliftum p¯um¯alai / unakku vara tunpam h teriñc¯a / n¯anh petta enh makafl¯e / t¯ukki ehriñcihrupp¯e / tuhravahram a¯yihrupp¯e . Both Trawick Egnor, ‘‘Internal Iconicity in Paraiyar ‘Crying Songs,’ ’’ and Clark-Deces, No One Cries for the Dead, make this point as well. I must disagree here with Clark-Deces, who argues that the lament is not a dialogue intended for an audience (No One Cries for the Dead, 46). This may have been the case among the women with whom she did fieldwork, but the communicative quality of oppu in the setting where I worked was clearly apparent. Among mourning Greek women as well, Seremetakis observes, ‘‘Silence here connotes the absence of witness. ‘Screaming the dead’ counters the isolation of death. It separates the mourner from residual social contexts, yet registers her entry into a social relation with the dead and the rest of the mourners’’ (The Last Word, 101). Clark-Deces, No One Cries for the Dead, 43–45, and 203 n. 20. For this reason, what is at stake here is not only an ‘‘internal’’ iconicity in which language mirrors language, as Trawick Egnor suggests (‘‘Internal Iconicity in Paraiyar ‘Crying Songs’ ’’), but also the possibility of language mirroring the world of experience. As Deleuze writes in his Foucault : ‘‘It is never the other who is a double in the doubling process, it is a self that lives me as the double of the other: I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me’’ (98). K¯arttikai is a month in the Tamil calendar falling between the middle of November and December. Clark-Deces, No One Cries for the Dead, 48. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 196. It is perhaps in this sense that Tamil elegies always speak indirectly of the one who is lost, representing this person at an allegorical remove. Like Butler, I rely here on a reading of Freud’s ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ that refuses the distinction between these two terms of loss. As Eng and Kazanjian write in Loss: ‘‘loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained’’ (2). See Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels, 205–46; and Lloyd, ‘‘The Memory of Hunger’’: ‘‘a nontherapeutic relation to the past, structured around the notion of survival or living on rather than recovery, is what should guide our critique of modernity and ground a di√erent mode of historicization’’ (217). In The Cost of Living, Arundhati Roy estimates that tens of millions of Notes to Chapter Five

279

73. 74. 75.

people have been displaced by the several thousand large dams built in modern India, most of whom are unlikely to have been compensated adequately for their displacement. She challenges Nehru’s famous pronouncement, made in his ‘‘Speech at the Opening of the Nangal Canal’’ in 1954. G.O. no. 4687 Public Works Department Misc., 19 November 1951, tnsa. Das, Life and Words, 40 and 57. See Clark-Deces, No One Cries for the Dead, 10–11, for a discussion of this question.

epilogue 1.

2.

3.

4.

280

‘‘Heritage,’’ E. Valentine Daniel suggests in a discussion of its significance for Sri Lankan Tamils (Charred Lullabies, 28–29), ‘‘is a sign of possibility that needs no actualization to make it real,’’ an orientation to the past through its consciousness rather through its actualization ‘‘in some ‘here and now.’ ’’ In this sense, perhaps, Kannan could imagine bearing this inheritance even at a distance, in his heart. ‘‘Before its birth, the child is . . . always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived,’’ writes Louis Althusser in ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’ (176). In Althusser’s terms, I have insisted as he did that ideological ‘‘interpellation’’ depends indeed upon material actions, practices, and rituals; but also that one may find multiple, overlapping, and cross-cutting forms and domains of such subjection at work in any given circumstance; and that there are certain constitutive openings and slippages that derive from this concatenation of rival fields of power and subjection. One may suspect, in other words, that one is being ‘‘hailed’’ when a policeman shouts ‘‘Hey, you there!’’ as Althusser had famously suggested, but as a subject too of altogether di√erent forms of power, one may also fail to recognize oneself as addressed by this call. See Madan, Non-Renunciation, on closing the gap between ‘‘the desired and the good,’’ such that one may learn ‘‘to act morally as a matter of course—spontaneously’’ (114). As Milton Singer had observed in 1971 in his ‘‘Modernization or Traditionalization?’’ ‘‘Indians are daily becoming more modern without becoming any less Indian.’’ In an interview with David Scott, Talal Asad suggests that ‘‘tradition is a more mobile, time-sensitive, more openended concept than most formulations of culture,’’ one that ‘‘looks not

Notes to Chapter Five

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

just to the past but to the future’’ (‘‘The Trouble of Thinking,’’ 289). I discuss these aspects of moral tradition in my ‘‘Tradition in Fragments.’’ From v¯akkaik kahrrh avanh v¯attiy¯ar, p¯okkaik kahrrh avanh p¯olic¯ar to v¯akkill¯atavanh v¯attiy¯ar, p¯okkill¯atavanh p¯olic¯ar in spoken Tamil. This is a play on the distinction between random-access memory and serial memory in computer hardware. As discussed in Scheper-Hughes, ‘‘Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes,’’ 14. Nehru, The Discovery of India, 24. See the ninth thesis in Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in Illuminations; and Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 217. Chatterjee, ‘‘Our Modernity,’’ 20. This may be taken as one of the constitutive paradoxes of postcolonial enlightenment in particular: not an overcoming of ‘‘self-imposed tutelage,’’ as Immanuel Kant had written in ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ but its persistence instead as the very condition of feeling enlightened. On the ‘‘horizon of expectation’’ and its modern distanciation from the domain of experience—a way of identifying disappointment with the failure to progress in time—see Koselleck, Futures Past, 255–75. ‘‘A tradition is an argument extended through time,’’ Alasdair MacIntyre argues in Whose Justice, Which Rationality (12), a≈rming the importance of conflict among a tradition’s adherents as well as its critics. Here, as always, I take the emergence of that interior terrain as a consequence of such ethical turning against oneself, as further elaborated in my ‘‘Interior Horizons.’’ Such cultivated virtues may also be taken as essential foundations for what Arjun Appadurai has described as ‘‘The Capacity to Aspire.’’ Mukkulathor Sangham petition to Governor of Madras, G.O. no. 920 Home, dated 23 March 1945, tnsa. For a brief discussion of community organizing against the Criminal Tribes Act, see Bose, Forward Bloc, 80–85. These words appear among the famous first lines in Marx, On the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. See Derrida, Specters of Marx, for a reading of such language of haunting in Marx. This epilogue too is a ‘‘hauntology’’ of sorts, drawing to a close what could even be described (with a nod to Donald Moore and to Foucault’s ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’) as a ‘‘critical hauntology of the postcolonial present.’’ I have condensed his narrative of the dream by nearly one-half here in ¯ e [mother] and ayy¯o are colloquial Tamil the interest of readability. Att¯ expressions of surprise and distress. In a valuable investigation of twentieth-century Western theories of

Notes to Epilogue

281

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

282

traumatic recall, Ruth Leys traces the contours of an irresolvable impasse between two opposed paradigms: a ‘‘mimetic’’ theory taking trauma as a kind of ‘‘hypnotic imitation’’ that the victim is fated to act out without her knowledge, and an ‘‘antimimetic theory’’ in which she is understood as the ‘‘spectator’’ of a traumatic scene that can be represented from a distance to herself and others (Trauma, 298–99). My interpretation cuts across this distinction, taking both positions as plausible and evident here. Maurice Halbwachs distinguishes dreams from memories on the grounds that the former are asocial: it is in the dream that ‘‘the mind is most removed from society,’’ an isolated entity turned fully inward (On Collective Memory, 42). But in various strands of Indian thought, dreams are often seen to a√ord a glimpse of the inherited dispositions of other lives, through the passage of what Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty has called ‘‘karmic memory traces.’’ See her Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities, 220. For various accounts of dreams in Indian literature and philosophy that support this possibility, see Chennakesavan, Concept of Mind in Indian Philosophy, 106–12; Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities; and Shulman, ‘‘Dreaming the Self in South India.’’ D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 13 and 2. A ‘‘just’’ person in these terms, that is, may be synonymous with a ‘‘virtuous’’ person as such. See the discussion of ‘‘Aristotle on Justice’’ and subsequent displacements in Western conceptions of this virtue in MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? For a discussion of farmer suicides in relation to recent policies of agricultural liberalization in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, see Vakulabharanam, ‘‘Growth and Distress in a South Indian Peasant Economy During the Era of Economic Liberalization.’’

Notes to Epilogue

Glossary

Agambadiyar: a predominant caste in the southern Tamil country, commonly identified as bearing a warrior heritage along with Kallars and Maravars (the three Mukkulathor) akk¯a : elder sister amm¯a : mother apnnp a¯ : elder brother app¯a : father arram: virtuous conduct as a practice, disposition, and desirable end of worldly life arrivu: wisdom, knowledge, and discrimination, or more generally one among the six faculties of perception (touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing, discrimination) aptakkam: restraint, and the virtue of self-restraint apta˙nk¯amai: a condition of or tendency toward unrestrainedness a¯ tt¯e : literally ‘‘mother,’’ a colloquial Tamil expression of surprise and distress ayy¯o : literally ‘‘father,’’ a colloquial Tamil expression of surprise and distress beedi: a hand-rolled country cigarette c¯ami: a term of respectful address directed by dependent and subordinate beings toward deities, leaders, teachers, employers, and elders capnptiyar : obstinate, indolent, or wicked, as applied to persons and animals c¯aptci: a witness criminal: a vernacular euphemism in the southern Tamil country for a sharp and cunning intelligence capable of disguising intentions and bending rules to attain its ends Cumbum Valley: a predominantly agricultural valley in southwestern Tamil Nadu, located between the Cardamom Hills of Kerala and the High Wavy Hills of Tamil Nadu

Dalit: literally ‘‘broken’’ or ‘‘down-trodden,’’ an explicitly political term of identification for castes once—and often still—deemed ‘‘untouchable’’ in the Hindu caste order ghee: clarified butter; a substance imbued with ritual purity, and identified with the economic condition of prosperity and the moral quality of generosity ¯ıram: moisture, coolness, love, and sympathy, and the natural condition of such hearts jolly: a euphemism for actions undertaken for pleasure or in jest kaplav¯anp i: a thief, or thievish in character kaplavu: theft, deceit, or clandestine conduct, as in the secret a√airs and elopements of young lovers depicted in classical Tamil love poetry kaplpla: thievish, deceitful, fraudulent, or clandestine kaplplarn : a thief, or deceitful person kaplplar : an honorific or plural form of kaflflan Kallar: a predominant caste in the southern Tamil country, commonly identified as bearing a warrior heritage along with Maravars and Agambadiyars (the three Mukkulathor) kaplplarn¯aptu: the arid ‘‘Kallar country’’ west of the city of Madurai, south of the Vaigai River, and east of the Cumbum and Varushanad valleys, dominated numerically, politically, and socially by Piramalai Kallars and organized into ancestral Kallar lineal territories karaptu muraptu: a singsong phrase connoting roughness, ruggedness, and obstinacy, sometimes rendered into the equally mellifluous ‘‘rough and tough’’ in English karmam: karma, that is, a theory of moral consequence taking the nature of embodied life in the present and future as the fruit of past deeds and their moral character k¯atal: romantic love, desire, erotic attachment, and devotion k¯aptptu tarnam: savagery, or literally k¯atfu-ness, the condition of being like the k¯atfu k¯aptu: thick forest, scrub jungle, barren desert, cemetery or burning ground, fallow open ground, or dry upland field, all taken to varying degrees as wild and unruly peripheral zones opposed to the order of settled places k¯aval: guard, watchman, police k¯avalk¯arar : the institution of the rural watchman, charged with protecting the countryside and its resources and inhabitants from thieves and petty plunderers k¯epti: a vernacular Tamil rendering of the policing category K.D. or ‘‘known depredator’’ kirlakku c¯ımai: literally the ‘‘eastern country,’’ or the ancestral kaflflarn¯atfu as 284

Glossary

described and imagined by Piramalai Kallars who have since settled westward in the Cumbum Valley kopnpti kaptptai: a stick dangling between the forelegs of a resistant ox from a wooden block placed around the neck of the animal, discouraging it from running quickly kuli: a measure of land amounting to 0.60 acre kupnam: character, quality, property, or virtue Kurral: an abbreviated form of reference to the Tirukkuhral kurukku varli: literally ‘‘crooked path,’’ that is, illicit means of material gain kupti: citizen, subject, family, house, household, inhabitant, tenant, or peasant kuptiy¯anr avarn : literally, one who is or has become a kufti, identifying cultivators and agrarian laborers as agrarian citizens engaged in a settled life of husbandry and virtuous conduct lungi: a cotton or synthetic printed cloth tied and worn around the waist by men Madras Presidency: the territory of the southern Indian peninsula under direct British rule between 1857 and 1947, including the modern state of Tamil Nadu and parts of what are now Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala Madurai: the courtly seat of classical Tamil literary production, the capital of the medieval Pandya and Telugu Nayak kingdoms, the administrative center of the colonial Madura District, and the largest city today in southern Tamil Nadu malai: mountain, hill, or mountain forest manacu (or manam): the heart or mind as a faculty of desire, feeling, thought, and will; a critical locus of ethical self-engagement that is expected to guide sensual life toward higher ends, but is susceptible itself to wandering in a fickle manner after objects of attachment m¯anr iyam: a royal grant of rent-free land as made by precolonial political institutions mapnvetti: a spade, or literally that which ‘‘cuts’’ the soil mappu: insolence, especially as conveyed by an intoxicated and drunken condition Maravar: a predominant caste in the southern Tamil country, commonly identified as bearing a warrior heritage along with Kallars and Agambadiyars (the three Mukkulathor) Mukkulathor: a political term identifying Kallars, Maravars, and Agambadiyars as three ‘‘families’’ of a common martial and even royal heritage n¯akarikam: civility or civilization, especially as embodied by the manners and customs of urban and courtly elites N¯alaptiy¯ar : a collection of four hundred quatrains on the subjects of virtuous Glossary

285

conduct, wealth, and love, betraying a strong Jain influence and likely compiled in the seventh century C.E. n¯aptu: country, more particularly the settled and cultivated country as opposed to the untilled tracts on its periphery; the term identified local agrarian territories in medieval times, and the space of national Tamil belonging in the twentieth century, as in Tamil N¯ata u Okkaliga Gounder: a caste of Kannada-speaking cultivators predominant in the Cumbum Valley, likely migrants into the southern Tamil country after the fourteenth century oplukkam: the virtue of propriety or proper conduct in relation to prevailing social expectations oppu: resemblance, and an oral tradition of elegaic verse by Tamil women (otherwise known as opp¯ari ) founded upon a poetics of resemblance p¯alai: desert or arid tract, associated in particular with the feeling of separation in the landscape conventions of classical Tamil love poetry p¯aplaiyakk¯arar : petty chieftains or ‘‘little kings’’ who exercised sovereignty over much of the southern Tamil country in the centuries prior to colonial rule Parlamorli N¯an¯urru: literally ‘‘Four Hundred Proverbs,’’ a collection of four hundred moral verses ascribed to the Jain Munrurai Araiyanar and dated to the seventh or eighth century C.E.; each of its verses presents an interpretation of a proverbial utterance, delivered in the form of a lesson to a young man or woman panchayat : the village council as a locus of formal political authority papnptu: a loanword in Tamil, borrowed directly from the English ‘‘fund’’ papti: a standard tin vessel with which grains, pulses, and other foodstu√s are poured out for use and exchange in grocery stores, domestic kitchens, and harvested fields Piramalai Kallar: one of the most numerous endogamous subcastes of the Kallar caste, predominating in the countryside west of Madurai in southern Tamil Nadu as well as in Madurai city and regional towns p¯umi: earth, especially as agrarian land ryot : Anglo-Indian parlance for peasant or tenant cultivator of soil Saiva: pertaining to the deity Siva pta¯ : an informal and sometimes derogatory means of addressing younger and subordinate boys and men Tamil country: the predominantly Tamil-speaking region of southern India, identified today with the eponymous southernmost Indian state of Tamil Nadu tension: a state of but also disposition toward anger, fear, or worry Thevar: an honorific title (literally ‘‘lord’’) taken by Kallar and Maravar men, and used more generally to refer to the people of these castes 286

Glossary

time pass: means of leisure, casual pleasure, and passing the time timiru: arrogance or overweening pride Tirukkurral: a collection of 1,330 couplets on the subjects of virtuous conduct, wealth, and love, ascribed by tradition to Tiruvalluvar and dated to the sixth century C.E. t¯ocai: a savory crepe made of fermented rice and lentil batter urlaippu: hard work and toil, but also hardship and su√ering urlavu: the work of ploughing uplplam: the heart as that which is upl or ‘‘inside’’ v¯arlai apti v¯arlai: literally ‘‘banana under banana,’’ a Tamil colloquial expression for the continuity of tradition through a lineage of descent, echoing the way in which juvenile banana plants grow under the shade of mature plants from a shared rhizomatic subsoil stem Varushanad: a narrow, rugged valley located between the Cumbum Valley and the kafllfarn¯atfu v¯epspti: a white cotton or silk cloth tied and worn around the waist by men, especially on formal or auspicious occasions veptptu: to cut, such as into the bodies of plants, animals, and human beings v¯ıptu: house, household, and domestic or interior space yel¯e : an informal and familiar term of address among men

Glossary

287

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Accident, 26, 69, 91–93, 145, 146, 179– 80, 250 n. 67, 256 n. 12 Adigal, Maraimalai, 254 n. 40 Adigal, Ramalinga, 129, 133–34, 163 Agambadiyar caste, 9, 57, 89, 263 n. 10, 283 Agamben, Giorgio, 249 n. 58, 262 n. 5 Aggression, 36, 252 n. 9, 254 n. 46. See also Masculinity; Savagery Agrarian citizen/kuftiy¯anava h n, h 257 n. 13, 285; anti-Kallar movement and, 66–69, 75, 80–86, 90, 93, 256 n. 8; collective violence and, 65–69; defined, 68, 70; identifying, 69–76; nature of, 40; propriety and, 27, 43, 72. See also Citizenship; Peasants Agrarian ideal, 19–20, 27, 29, 72, 199, 204, 248 n. 49, 271 n. 45 Agrarian intervention, 41, 146, 172, 178, 243 n. 12 Agrarian landscape, 184, 238; development of, 28; natural/moral cultivation and, 3–4, 5–6, 19, 51–57, 166; savagery and, 32; self and, 185, 208, 213–14; work and, 20, 144. See also Earth; Environment; Irrigation Agrarian pedagogy, 146–49, 169, 178 Agrarian practice, 19, 29, 44, 178, 204,

214, 237, 242–43 n. 9; 254 n.40. See also specific agrarian practices Agriculture: civilization and, 41, 47– 48, 186; colonial government and, 20; development and, 8, 148, 169, 172; as fate, 225; as passion, 70; settlement and, 148–49; training in, 152, 155; as unpredictable, 166; as virtuous, 21, 47 Allegory, 29, 44, 117–40, 207, 212–14, 235, 250 n. 68 Althusser, Louis, 280 n. 2 Altruism, 278 n. 59 American Madura Mission, 149, 150– 53, 153, 271 n. 46, 271 n. 48 Ammayappa Kone, 90–91, 92, 95–96 Anbaclagan, S., 59–60, 62 Anger, 13, 36, 62, 286 Animality: becoming-animal, 268 n. 77; criminality and, 103, 105–6, 108, 116; cruelty and, 111; of delinquents, 263 n. 19; government of, 263 n. 9; images of, 117–40; imperial conquest and, 262–63 n. 7; renunciation of, 107; thievishness and, 28. See also specific animals Anthropology: criminal, 107–8; of gift, 200; of life, 262 n. 5; salvage,

Anthropology (continued) 226, 249 n. 60; tradition, of, 247 n. 38 Anti-Kallar movement (1896), 65–66, 67, 69, 75, 80–86, 90, 93, 256 n. 8 Appadurai, Arjun, 257 n. 18, 281 n. 14 Appar, 21 Ahram. See Virtue/ahram Aristotle, 282 n. 23 Ahrivu, 17, 283 Arnold, David, 80, 258 n. 33 Arnold, Edwin, 246 n. 35 Arrogance, 36, 61. See also Insolence Asad, Talal, 247 n. 37, 251 n. 4, 280–81 n. 4 Aspiration, 2, 7, 13, 136, 223–28 Aftakkam. See Restraint/aftakkam, Afta˙nk¯amai. See Unrestrainedness/afta˙nk¯amai Atavism, 107, 263 n. 18 ¯ an, 246 n. 33 Atm¯ ¯ utf i, 41–43, 162, 253 n. 19 Attic¯ Auvaiyar, 41–43, 42, 47, 162, 199–200, 252 n. 17, 253 nn. 19–20, 273 n. 92 Azhagi (film), 136–37 Babb, Lawrence, 165 Backwardness, 5, 9, 31, 35–36, 63, 242 n. 7, 242–43 n. 9 Benjamin, Walter: on allegory, 207; on history, 22, 249 n. 60, 261 n. 89, 281 n. 9; on progress, 227; on translation, 250 n. 68 Bergson, Henri, 250 n. 66 Bhagavad Gita, 14, 252 n. 12 Bharathiraja, 31–32, 181–82, 182 Bharati, Subramania, 272 n. 76 Bhils, 273 n. 86 Biehl, João, 262 n. 5 Biopolitics, 255 n. 1, 262 n. 1, 262 n. 5, 262–63 n. 7. See also Pastoral power Blackburn, Stuart, 258 n. 38 Body: desire and, 2; governing of, 55, 113; morality and, 2, 20, 40, 160; 310

Index

politic, 20; social, 66, 84, 89, 183– 84; soul and, 12 Brahmin caste, 43, 244 n. 21, 259–60 n. 62, 266 n. 51 British rule in India, 8, 14, 20, 67, 77, 104, 110, 185–86, 256 n. 12, 285 Brown, Wendy, 260 n. 73 Bryson, Anna, 245 n. 28, 251 n. 5 Buddhism, 14, 43, 133, 164 Bulls, 117–123. See also Oxen Bushnell, Horace, 151–52 Butler, Judith, 215, 279 n. 69 Canf f tiyar, 120, 283 Cardamom estates, 49, 124, 125–29, 127, 175 Cardew, Andrew, 190–91 Care, 10, 39, 53–54, 147, 151, 198–99, 203–4, 214, 243 Castes: agrarian, 21; alliances among, 9–10, 80–84; arrested development and, 66; backwardness and, 9; colonialism and, 242 n. 4; criminal, 3– 4, 107; cultivating, 9; endogamy, 242 n. 4; hierarchy, 249 n. 61; intercaste relations, 21, 79; martial, 57, 69, 83, 278 n. 58; modernity and, 67; politics, 57–59; soils and, 55–56; work and, 144. See also specific castes C¯enc ai, 222 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 29–30, 145–46, 184, 246 n. 35, 249 n. 59, 251 n. 70, 256 n. 7, 269 n. 12, 278 n. 57 Chance, 10, 91, 145, 160–61, 166, 169, 224 Character, 11, 285; bad, 87; development of, 153; good, 107; instinct and, 16; moral, 84, 114, 151, 208, 219, 244 n. 21, 284; organic power of, 151–52; remaking, 3, 14; sociological, 55; Victorian, 104, 263 n. 16 Chari, Sharad, 162, 179–80, 256–57 n. 13, 272 n. 68, 274 n. 96

Chatterjee, Partha, 227, 255 n. 4, 256 n. 7 Chennakesavan, Sarasvati, 247 n. 39 Children, 8, 11, 31–32, 41, 107, 123, 132, 135, 149, 151, 163; plants as, 203–4 Cholera, 189 Christianity, 19–20, 28, 270 n. 27, 272 n. 64, 275 n. 9; agrarian toil and, 145, 156, 163, 169–70; conversion to, 151–52, 154; savagery and, 33–34. See also Missionaries Cicero, 19 Cilappatik¯aram, 71 Cihrupañcam¯ulam, 198, 277 nn. 45–46 Citizenship, 257 n. 18; biological, 262 n. 5. See also Agrarian citizen Civility: agrarian, 13, 21, 22, 27, 31–35, 40–48, 57; evolution and, 252 n. 14; in history, 252 n. 14; individual ethos as, 251 n. 5; as n¯akar¯ıkam, 242 n. 7; pre-colonial, 34; self-conduct and, 34, 39, 55, 244 n. 19; social practice as, 251 n. 5; as virtue, 4, 15, 19, 26, 33–34, 62. See also N¯akar¯ıkam; Savagery Civilization: agrarian, 34, 45–48, 199; civilizing process and, 251 n. 6; defined, 12; general history of, 12; Indian or Hindu, 24; inner and outer face of, 245 n. 27; instinct and, 12–13; modernity and, 33; pressures of, 2; savagery and, 252 n. 8; self-management and, 219; selfregulation and, 33; self-restraint and, 12–13; in South India, 9, 41– 48; sympathy/sociality and, 187; universality of, 13; urban life of, 254 n. 40 Civilizing process, 33, 47, 183, 245 n. 28, 251 n. 6, 274 n. 3 Clark-Deces, Isabelle, 207, 215, 278 n. 60, 279 nn. 62–64 Cohn, Bernard S., 242 n. 4, 256 n. 12 Colebrook, Edward H., 109, 191

Collini, Stefan, 263 n. 16 Colonialism: agriculture and, 20; development and, 7–8; Europe and, 34, 108, 192; freedom and, 8, 227; morality and, 13; native culture and, 246 n. 34, 261 n. 88; nature and, 20; race and, 260 n. 66; as trauma, 62–63. See also British rule in India, Postcolonial Comaro√, Jean, 271 n. 46 Comaro√, John, 271 n. 46 Community: agrarian, 68–69, 76, 93; advancement and, 67; belonging and, 66; criminality and, 108, 150– 51; Kallar as, 4, 102, 185; Kallar ethics, 14, 234; modernity and, 255 n. 4; moral, 85; social reform in, 130, 179; violence and, 215 Conscience, 12, 218, 223, 235–39, 242– 43 n. 9, 247 n. 39; criminality and, 104, 129; earth as, 235–39; manacc¯atfci as, 236–37; moral, 237, 263–64 n. 20 Country liquor, 22, 59 Cowen, Michael, 143, 244–45 n. 23, 268 n. 2 Criminality: animal nature and, 103, 105–6, 108, 116, 117–40; of bestial heart, 112–16; conscience and, 104, 129; cultivation and, 23; desire and, 28, 236; evolution and, 106–12, 264 n. 21; desire and, 28, 236; environment and, 32, 44, 48, 55, 151, 186; familial pathology and, 264 n. 23; heredity and, 107, 111, 149, 151, 270 n. 40; intelligence and, 273–74 n. 94, 283; irrigation and, 190, 194, 199, 276 n. 28; Melur Kallar caste, 187–88, 190; monkey hearts, 28, 105, 129–40, 267 n. 69; nature and restraint of, 101–6; Piramalai Kallar caste, 4, 8, 14, 22–23, 27, 36, 65, 68– 69, 75, 86, 101–2, 104, 106, 108–11, 228, 259–60 n. 62; ripe field sparIndex

311

Criminality (continued) row, 28, 105, 123–29, 139, 175, 205; social reform and, 129–30; thieving bull, 117–23. See also Thievery Criminal Tribes Act, 13, 24; abolition of, 228; amended, 106; as coercive, 101; colonial state and, 242 n. 6; cruelty of, 216–17; duration, 28; of 1871, 89, 107–8; fingerprints and, 113; of 1911, 106; notification, 263 n. 11, 264 n. 24, 264 n. 28; opposition to, 58, 265 n. 38, 281 n. 15; Piramalai Kallars and, 57–58; reasoning for, 104; reform tactics, 95, 98–99, 107– 11, 147–50; registration and, 120; repealed, 29, 228; resistance and, 122, 146; targets, 89; as unjust, 195, 236; women and, 264 n. 30 Crooked paths, 5, 22, 70, 95, 105, 129, 146, 160, 172, 178, 225, 285 Cruelty, 31, 183, 200, 205, 208; hobbling and, 121; of animals, 111; of nature, 193; of sentences, 217; state o≈cials and, 103 Cultivation: agrarian tradition of moral, 6, 226; criminality and, 23; culture and, 21, 248 n. 48; defined, 3; development and, 7; as ethos, 17– 23; fruit of, 164–65, 167; of good heart, 223; improvement and, 5, 19; life of, 4, 29, 39; modernity and, 3; natural and moral, 3, 19; as panf paftutal, 249 n. 56; power and, 228– 29; self-cultivation, 5, 11–12, 16, 21– 22, 42, 228; virtue of, 4, 5, 9, 11–17, 19, 27, 43, 62, 153, 223, 226, 229 Cultivators: caste expulsion by, 75–76; Dalit, 169–70, 176; displaced, 22; irrigation and, 190, 193–95; irrigators and, 202; Kallars and, 27, 56, 63, 82–85, 88–89, 92, 94–95; labor and, 28, 272 n. 71; land and, 49, 74– 75, 85, 126; moral economy and, 169; moral order and, 71; nature of, 312

Index

40; organized, 67–69, 83, 88, 94; practices of, 9; preeminence of, 46; protection and, 79–80, 92, 125–26; as subjects of development, 22; sympathy and, 4; theft and, 74; toil and, 145; virtue and, 44; wages for, 204; watchmen vs., 27, 74–76 Culture, 19, 21, 46, 47, 248 n. 48 Cumbum Valley, 24, 250 n. 63, 274 n. 96; agrarian intervention, 150–56; agrarian terrain, 7, 48–49, 50, 51– 55; described, 3, 23, 283; languages, 242 n. 5; struggling poor in, 266 n. 56. See also Kullappa Gounden Patti village; Tamil Nadu Cutler, Norman, 254 n. 36 Cutting, 19, 52, 53, 58, 189, 202 Dalit caste, 284; agrarian citizenship and, 72–73, 95; agrarian toil and, 156, 161–62, 172–73, 176–77; colonial land grants to, 172, 176, 273 n. 89; Kallar dominance and, 36, 49, 55, 59, 62 Dan. See Gift Daniel, E. Valentine, 55, 254–55 n. 48, 274 n. 5, 280 n. 1 Darasan, 161 Darwin, Charles, 132, 263–64 n. 20 Darwin, John, 252 n. 14 Das, Veena, 218, 244 n. 22, 250 n. 66, 280 n. 74 Davis, Mike, 276 n. 31 Debt, 177, 200, 204, 209, 227 Deities, 96–97, 128, 161, 166, 167, 168– 69; Krishna, 134; Murugan, 133; Rama, 133. See also Saivism Deleuze, Gilles, 139, 250 n. 66, 268 n. 77, 279 n. 66 Derrida, Jacques, 281 n. 16 Desire: agriculture and, 188; for beef, 176; criminality and, 28, 130, 236; clandestine love, 118; development and, 6, 8, 223–28, 243 n. 9; love and,

90; love of Christ and, 151; love poetry and, 278 n. 58; managing, 19; monkey hearts and, 129–40; nature and, 2, 18; for others’ things, 131; pitfalls of, 224; for possessions, 236; restraint and, 28, 105, 113, 115, 138; sensual, 116, 130; stolen love and, 124, 129; su√ering and, 163; virtue and, 252–53 n. 18; to work, 142, 159, 192 Development: agricultural, 20, 169; critics of, 274 n. 2; cultivation and, 7; desire and, 6, 8, 223–28; global agencies and institutions, 245 n. 24; ideology of, 143, 248 n. 49; intervention, 243 n. 12; moral and material, 5, 8–11, 14–15, 40, 45, 47, 180; soil and, 254–55 n. 48; subjects of, 6–11; toil and, 166; trusteeship and, 10, 143, 244–45 n. 23 Devendran, K., 38, 60–62, 60 Devotion: hymns of, 21, 133–34; religious, 67, 132, 169; literature of, 115, 132–33, 162–63; to loss, 215; love and, 131–35; to work, 144, 268 n. 4 Dharma, 44, 246 n. 31 Dharmar, 51–52, 57, 75 Dirks, Nicholas, 76, 97–98, 199, 241 n. 2, 242 n. 4, 256 n. 12, 258 n. 38, 259 n. 59, 260 n. 66, 261 n. 88 Discipline, 16, 54–56, 59, 104, 119–20, 223, 228 Divine, 10, 142, 160, 161, 165, 167, 169, 213, 237 Divorce, 130 Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy, 260–61 n. 78, 282 nn. 19–20 Drayton, Richard, 248 n. 49, 248 n. 51, 269 n. 10 Dreams: as asocial, 282 n. 19; as cinema, 235; in Indian literature and philosophy, 282 n. 20; and memory, 230–35, 282 n. 19

Du Bois, W. E. B., 33, 251 n. 3 Dumont, Louis: on caste hierarchy, 249 n. 61; on Kallar marriage, 130; on origin stories, 76; on Piramalai Kallars, 23–25, 35–36, 249–50 nn. 61–63; on purity and pollution, 244 n. 21; on savagery, 252 n. 9 Durkheim, Émile, 13, 245 n. 29 Duty: ethics and, 246 n. 31; virtue and, 114, 265 n. 46; of water, 275 n. 20; work as, 144 Earth, 10, 58, 160, 161, 166, 223; as conscience: 237–39 East India Company, 63, 77–78, 269 n. 15 Ecology: moral, 44, 274 n. 1 Education: agrarian, 152–56; Auvaiyar and, 43; elementary, 259 n. 54; moral, 4, 144–45, 150–56, 184; psychic colonization as, 62–63. See also Missionaries; Schools Eighteen Minor Works, 43–44 Elegies. See Funeral elegies Elias, Norbert, 12–13, 33, 47, 183, 245 n. 28, 251 n. 6, 252 n. 11, 274 n. 3–4 Endogamy, 4, 67, 108, 187, 286, 241 n. 2, 242 n. 4 Eng, David, 279 n. 70 Engels, Friedrich, 250 n. 64 Enlightenment, Scottish, 41, 183, 252 nn. 14–15, 274 n. 4 Environment: civilizing, 41; control of, 187; crime and, 194; hydraulic, 187, 276 n. 28; mastery of, 189–90; moral growth and, 3, 20, 151; pedagogic, 20, 44; scarcity and, 148, 191; virtuous, 199 Escobar, Arturo, 243 n. 11, 245 n. 24 Ethics: defined, 13; ethicization of ordinary life, 165–66; evolution and, 111–12; freedom and, 245–46 nn. 29–30; morality vs., 13; politics and, 104–5; restraint, of, 114, 116; Index

313

Ethics (continued) spiritual exercises and, 251 n. 70; as work on self, 16. See also Moral tradition; Virtue Ethnography, 226–27, 242 n. 4, 256 n. 12, 274 n. 5 Ethnohistory, 97 Evil, 19, 148, 151, 159, 162, 166 Evolution: atavism in, 107; civility and, 252 n. 14; in classroom, 132, 137; criminality and, 104, 107, 264 n. 21; Darwinian, 132; ethics and, 111– 12; love and, 137; moral, 111, 140; racial di√erence and, 89; transspecies kinship and, 266–67 n. 63; Victorian, 28, 132 Famine, 49, 79, 125, 188, 190, 193, 269 n. 12, 276 n. 31 Fanon, Frantz, 104, 139–40, 255 n. 51 Fate, 145, 163–66, 171, 216, 224, 228–29 Fear, 73, 74, 88, 185 Feeling, 7, 13, 33, 39, 114, 183, 184, 211, 219, 252 n. 9; fellow-feeling, 186, 212 Ferguson, Adam, 41 Ferguson, James, 245 n. 24 Fertilizing, 53, 70, 118, 203, 235 Field songs, 124, 141 Fingerprinting, 113, 264 n. 22; Criminal Tribes Act and, 113 Forest Department, 59, 121, 174, 271 n. 61 Foresters, 10, 25, 51, 125–26, 225, 229 Forests, 20, 45, 49, 60, 106, 121, 125– 26, 128, 134, 189, 214, 235 Foucault, Michel: on animality, 268 n. 77; on biopolitics, 66, 89, 255 n. 1, 262 n. 5; on freedom and ethical self-conduct, 13, 245–46 n. 30; on genealogy, 250 n. 67; on genocide, 66; on governmentality, 243 n. 10; on modernity, 249 n. 58; on pastoral power, 121, 262 n. 1; on subjection, 242–43 n. 9; on war of races, 89 314

Index

‘‘Four Hundred Proverbs.’’ See Pahlamohli N¯an¯urh u Freitag, Sandria B., 264 n. 24 Freud, Sigmund, 12–13, 215, 245 n. 28, 279 n. 69 Fund boards, 259 n. 54 Funeral elegies, 29, 185, 207–19, 278 n. 60, 279 n. 63, 279 n. 69 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 14, 245 n. 23, 246 n. 35 Ganja, 21, 22, 59, 125, 129, 174, 225, 229–30, 237 Gaonkar, Dilip, 247 n. 36 Gauthaman, Raj, 250 n. 67 Genealogy, 250 n. 67; of civilized conduct, 40; of interiority, 16, 247–48 n. 40; of moral discourses, 43; of postcolonial self, 26 Genocide, 66 Gidwani, Vinay, 144, 268 n. 5 Gift: in anthropology, 200; dan as, 277 n. 51; wages as, 167, 204 Gilmartin, David, 144, 187, 269 n. 9, 274 n. 1, 275 n. 13, 275 n. 20, 276 n. 28 Gold, Ann, 274 n. 1 Good, the, 11, 13, 15, 246 n. 31, 280 n. 3 Gounder, Duraichamy, 271 n. 61 Gounder, Kullappa, 49, 59–60, 94 Gounder caste: defined, 286; identification of, 70; Kallar relations, 73– 74; Kongu, 274 n. 96; kuftiy¯anava h nh and, 256–57 n. 14; Okkaliga, 49, 254 n. 42, 274 n. 96 Government: of body, 55; development and, 7; of humans and animals, 103, 121; of instinct, 107–8; liberal, 185; of nature, 20; of senses, 113. See also Self-government. Governmentality, 243 n. 10. Gramsci, Antonio, 250 n. 66 Gr¯amya, 44 Grazing, 49, 74, 83, 93, 155, 271 n. 61

‘‘Grow More Food’’ campaign, 194–95 Guarding. See Watchmen Guattari, Felix, 139, 268 n. 77 Gudalur village, 82, 94–95, 112, 126, 130, 149 Guha, Ranajit, 14, 246 n. 34, 248 n. 42, 248 n. 45 Guilt, 110, 237 Gupta, Akhil, 21, 242–43 n. 9, 243 n. 13, 244 n. 16, 245 n. 25, 255 n. 48 Habit: bodily, 26, 56; criminal, 4, 8, 14, 80, 84, 89, 104, 107–8, 132, 148–49, 190; desire and, 7; ethics and, 234; moral, 3, 13–14, 21; self-conduct and, 223; social, 72, 107; virtuous, 15, 107, 115, 223 Habitual Criminals Act (1869), 107. See also Criminal Tribes Act Hadot, Pierre, 246 n. 30, 251 n. 70 Halbfass, Wilhelm, 272 n. 77 Halbwachs, Maurice, 282 n. 19 Hall, J. F., 194, 263 n. 10 Hanuman, 133, 266–67 n. 63 Haraway, Donna, 105, 262 n. 1 Hardgrave, Robert, 179–80 Harvesting, 73, 74, 77, 126, 131, 202, 235 Haste, 33, 53, 55, 235, 237 Headmen, 73, 90, 95–96, 130, 188, 271 n. 61 Heart/manacu, 16–19, 21, 105; animality and, 112–16; conscience and, 237; cultivation of, 22, 223; desire and, 17; devoted, 133, 135–38; exemplary, 184; mind and, 247 n. 29; monkey, 129–40; nature of, 19, 21; reflexive critique and, 16, 39; restraint and, 39, 105, 113–17; stolen, 134; sympathetic, 182, 193, 201, 218; thievish, 134–35; in translation, 16 Hegel, G. W. F., 66 Hirschkind, Charles, 247 n. 37, 248 n. 41 Holston, James, 257 n. 18

Holton, Edward Payson, 149–59, 269 n. 19, 270 nn. 37–42, 271 nn. 48–56, 271 n. 61 Hope, 168, 212, 221–22, 224 Humanism, 104, 140, 262 n. 5, 267 n. 65 Human nature, 2, 13, 124, 186; animal nature and, 103, 105, 114; natural world and, 2, 190; of Kallars, 5, 151; models for, 132, 192. See also Animality; Nature Hume, David, 41, 42 Huxley, Thomas H., 107, 111–12 Identity, 55–57; caste, 47, 70, 205; collective, 51, 56, 66, 257 n. 18; cultivators and, 46, 72; postcolonial, 242– 43 n. 9; racial, 89 Imperialism, 20, 244 n. 16, 262–63 n. 7 Impulse. See Instinct Inclination. See Tendency Inden, Ronald, 244 n. 21 Indolence, 20, 144, 145, 156–61, 192. See also Toil Infanticide, 31–32 Injustice, 195, 215, 229–30, 236, 238. See also Justice Insolence, 35–36, 102, 159, 285. See also Arrogance Instinct, 12–13, 16, 51, 84, 89–90, 104, 106–7, 108, 111 Interiority, 246 n. 35, 274 n. 4, 281 n. 14; genealogy of, 16, 247–28 n. 40; and selfhood, 16–17, 33, 113, 213, 228, 237, 247–48 nn. 39–40 ¯Iram. See Moisture/¯ıram Irrigation, 18, 181–85; desire and, 19; fluidity and, 274 n. 5; giving and, 184, 199; hydraulic environment of, 276 n. 28; irrigators and, 202–5; management of, 278 n. 55; morality and, 28–29; penury and, 181, 217– 18; policing and, 188, 190–92, 194; productivity and, 275 n. 20; Index

315

Irrigation (continued) prosperity and, 32, 181; protective vs. productive, 276 n. 32; purposes, 187; sympathy and, 200–201; wages for irrigators, 202. See also Water Jail, 110, 121, 147, 149, 174, 177 Jainism, 43, 46, 277 n. 51, 285, 286 Jallikafttfu, 120 Justice, 10, 29, 228, 234, 236–38, 239, 266 n. 57, 282 nn. 22–23; agrarian, 47, 77, 166; cosmic, 167; divine, 266 n. 57; irrigation and, 193–94; as virtue, 236, 282 nn. 22–23. See also Injustice Kakataliya nyaya, 91–93, 260 n. 78 Kalav¯ani. f See Thieving Kaflavu. See Thieving Kaflflan, 87, 106, 242 n. 3, 284 Kaflflar, 4, 86, 242 n. 3, 284 Kallar caste: 79, 241 n. 2, 242 n. 3, 284. See also Piramalai Kallar subcaste Kallar country, 23–25, 94, 258 n. 33, 260 n. 72, 284; Cumbum Valley and, 24, 182, 205; environment, 148, 182, 191, 205; irrigation of, 185–96; migration from, 49, 78–79, 171; politics in, 57–59; missionaries in, 150–51; sovereignty of, 76–77 Kaflflarn¯atfu. See Kallar country Kallar Reclamation: aims of, 184, 185– 86, 234; irrigation and, 187, 194, 196; language of, 191–92; missionary involvement in, 150; o≈cial strategies for, 25, 28, 110, 147; schools, 5, 184 Kallar Voluntary Settlement, 4, 25, 28, 145, 149, 153–59, 163, 172, 230, 232 Kandasamy, 128–29, 131–32 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 103, 114, 245 n. 29, 246 n. 31, 263 n. 16, 265 nn. 45– 46, 281 n. 11 Karaftu muraftu, 36, 284 316

Index

Karma, 111–12, 163–65, 261 n. 78, 268 n. 4, 272 n. 77, 273 n. 84, 282 n. 19, 284 Karupayi amm¯a, 11–12, 13, 16–17, 39– 40, 62, 141–42, 143, 168–69, 208–11 Karuthamma (film), 31–32 Karuvaruttal, 255 n. 1 K¯atal. See Love Kafttfupp¯atfu, 261 n. 88, 265 n. 43 K¯atftfu tanam. h See Savagery/k¯atftfu tanam. h K¯atfu: danger and, 252 n. 11; described, 34, 40, 45, 56, 252 n. 11, 284; n¯atfu vs., 45–46; as residual terrain, 50; roughness and, 50–57; struggle and, 48; uplands as, 51–52, 55. See also Savagery/k¯atftfu tanam h K¯aval. See Watchmen/k¯aval K¯avalk¯arar. See Watchmen/k¯aval Kaviraj, Sudipta, 246 n. 35, 247 n. 36, 256 n. 7 Kazanjian, David, 279 n. 70 Kerala, 24, 117, 195, 196, 229, 230, 277 n. 41 K¯etf i, 257 n. 19 K. G. Patti. See Kullappa Gounden Patti village Kingship, 45, 58, 76–77, 198–99, 261 n. 88 Kizhakku Chimaiyilee (film), 181–83 Konh h raiv¯entan, h 200, 277 n. 51 Koselleck, Reinhart, 243–44 n. 15, 281 n. 12 Kovilapuram village, 193, 195 Kroeber, Alfred, 226 Kullappa Gounden Patti village, 4, 23, 24, 266 n. 55, 271 n. 61; agrarian terrain, 49–50, 50, 167; castes in, 49; as criminal center, 112; described, 6, 20, 49; development in, 6–11; festival, 120; Kallar settlement in, 25, 139; raiding of fields in, 125; village council election, 59–62, 255 n. 50; youth club, 135. See also Kallar Voluntary Settlement

Kumar, Dharma, 273 n. 85 Kunam. f See Character Kuhral. See Tirukkuhral Kurukku vahli. See Crooked paths Kurumbar caste, 255 n. 1 Kufti, 70–71, 256 n. 13 Kuftiy¯anava h n. h See Agrarian citizen/kuftiy¯anava h nh Labor: body and, 52–56; as calling, 144; chance and, 28, 145, 166, 180; colonies, 110, 148; cooperative, 155; Dalit, 161–62; deities and, 145, 155; forced, 149; fruits of, 142, 149, 155; identity and, 56; land and, 34, 48– 49; market for, 49; as metabolism, 55; moral value of, 144, 149, 153, 159–60, 238; payment for, 168, 204; property and, 146; as right, 204; savagery and, 40; self and, 5, 16, 170–71; social reform and, 146. See also Toil Laidlaw, James, 245 n. 29, 277–78 n. 51 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 111 Landscape, 251–52 n. 7; agrarian, 3–6, 19, 20, 28, 32, 51–57, 184, 238; animals and, 116, 118, 128–129, 139; experience and, 19, 213; of heart, 19, 131; identity and, 55–57; interior, 17, 131, 139; judging inhabitants by, 32– 33, 44, 52, 205–6; of loss, 208, 214, 218; moral quality of cultivated, 44, 47–48, 50, 63, 166; poetic, 213, 286; savagery and, 34, 56; self and, 185, 208, 214 Latour, Bruno, 249 n. 58 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 103 Leys, Ruth, 281–82 n. 18 Li, Tania, 245 n. 25 Liberalization, 238, 282 n. 24 Life: as afterlife, 234–35; agricultural, 70; animal, 101–40; of conscience, 237; domestic, 72; histories of, 180; human, 115; improvement of, 6;

loss of, 215–17; modern, 183; natural and moral, 2–3; ordinary, 138, 165; public, 67, 71; of savagery, 35– 40; of virtue, 11–17, 41–45, 72, 115, 129; worldly, 165 Lloyd, David, 279 n. 71 Locke, John, 104, 144–45, 269 n. 10 Logan, E. R., 196 Lombroso, Cesare, 107, 263 n. 19 Loss, 183, 185, 207–19 Love: as anpu, h 267 n. 73; arranged marriage and, 135; devoted, 133, 137; erotic, 134, 284; illicit, 90, 118, 131; as k¯atal, 134; monkey hearts and, 129– 40; moral quality of, 131; poetry, 51, 124, 134, 278 n. 58, 284, 286; stolen, 124, 129; as thievish, 115, 130–31, 135–37; virtuous, 138 Lowlands, 9, 27, 39, 45, 52, 201, 214. See also Orchards; Uplands Ludden, David, 193, 199, 243 n. 12, 248 n. 42, 272 n. 71 Lutgendorf, Philip, 266–67 n. 63 MacGregor, Rob Roy, 186 MacIntyre, Alasdair: on justice, 282 n. 23; on tradition, 247 n. 37, 281 n. 13; on virtue, 246 n. 31, 265 n. 46 Mackenzie, A. T., 190, 277 n. 42 Madan, T. N., 280 n. 3 Madras Presidency, 285; administration of, 89–90; crime in, 108; Criminal Tribes Act in, 106, 109–10, 216; irrigation in, 190, 193; land tenure in, 20, 83, 146; policing in, 78 Madura District Gazetteer, 188 Madurai, 4, 23, 24, 27, 63, 76, 82, 149, 195, 285 Madurai District, 80–84, 82, 87, 95, 259 n. 62, 285 Madurai Veeran, 255 n. 1, 257 n. 25 Magic, 142, 268 Mahmood, Saba, 148 n. 41, 247 n. 37 Malaria, 155–56, 189 Index

317

Manacc¯ataci. See Conscience Manacu. See Heart/manacu Manam. See Manacu Manam Oru Kurangu (film), 132–33, 133 Mandeville, Bernard, 103 M¯aniyam, h 77–78, 285 Mappu, 36, 254 n. 46, 285. See also Timiru Maravar caste, 9, 49, 57, 76, 88, 89, 263 n. 10, 285; as martial caste, 278 n. 58; in anti-Nadar riots, 256 n. 10 Marriott, McKim, 244 n. 21, 248 n. 40 Martial castes, 57, 69, 83, 278 n. 58 Marx, Karl, 55, 67, 228, 249 nn. 58–59, 250 n. 64, 281 n. 16 Masculinity, 36, 61, 119, 254 n. 46. See also Aggression Mathanampatti village, 82, 97, 98 M t´ata u Pongal festival, 120 Maturity, 8, 11, 137, 159, 169, 201, 202, 204, 244 n. 16 Maudsley, Henry, 107 Mauss, Marcel, 200, 277 n. 51 Mbembe, Achille, 262 n. 7 McLean, Stuart, 269 n. 12 Meadows Taylor, Philip, 264 n. 22 Mehta, Uday, 255 n. 49 Melancholia, 215 Melur, 82, 195 Melur Kallars, 87, 187–88, 190, 241 n. 2 Memory: collective, 130, 282 n. 19; computer, 281 n. 6; dreams and, 282 n. 19; karmic, 282 n. 19; postcolonial, 14, 26, 184; sympathy and, 196–206; as traumatic recall, 281–82 n. 18 Menke, Bettine, 250 n. 68 Metaphor, 248 n. 46. See also Allegory Metonymy, 50–51, 254 n. 45 Mill, James, 144, 268 n. 5 Mines, Diane, 252 n. 11 Missionaries: agricultural intervention and, 152, 169; agricultural settlements and, 4, 20, 28, 148–49; 318

Index

development and, 145, 169–70; education and, 150, 152–53; horticultural metaphors and, 270–71 n. 46; toil and, 159; virtue cultivated by, 145, 152. See also American Madura Mission; Christianity Modernity: caste and, 67; civilization and, 33; community and, 255 n. 4; cultivation and, 3; as disenchantment, 269 n. 12; essential spaces of, 249 n. 58; historical di√erence and, 247 n. 36; Indian, 280 n. 4; indigenous forms of, 256 n. 7; morality and, 33, 84, 138, 224–25; past and, 26, 67, 224–25, 227, 279 n. 71; resistance to, 226; rural, 21, 68; scholarship on, 29, 227; sympathy and, 183; tradition and, 247 n. 36, 250 n. 64; urban, 68; virtue and, 219 Moir, T. E., 185–86, 190 Moisture/¯ıram, 284; care and, 202–4; elegies and, 185, 214–15; self and, 182; sympathy and, 29, 182, 183, 185, 198–201. See also Sympathy Moneylending, 36, 123, 176, 206 Monkeys, 28, 105, 129–40, 266–67 n. 63, 267 n. 69 Monsoon, 188, 201 Montagu, Edwin S., 185–86 Moore, Donald S., 245 n. 25, 248 n. 44, 251–52 n. 7, 260 n. 66, 281 n. 16 Moral ecology, 274 n. 1 Moral economy, 85, 128–29, 169, 199– 200, 273 n. 86 Moral tradition: agrarian, 21; of cultivation, 223; future and, 280–81 n. 4; past and, 14–15, 40, 227, 254 n. 39; present and, 4, 35; as resource, 139, 227–28; state intervention and, 15, 105, 224; Tamil, 13, 29, 162, 184, 200. See also Ethics; Virtue/ahram Mosse, David, 245 n. 24, 273 n. 86, 278 n. 55 Mourning. See Funeral elegies

Mukkulathor, 285 M¯ukkuftal Pafllfu, 200, 278 n. 53 Murattu Kalai (film), 119–20 M¯uturai, 199, 273 n. 92, 278 n. 56 Nadar caste, 179, 256 n. 10 Nagar, 242 n. 7 N¯akar¯ıkam, 242 n. 7, 254 n. 40, 285. See also Civility N¯alaftiy¯ar, 44, 46, 114, 198 Nallatu kefttfatu, 246 n. 31 Nandy, Ashish, 62–63, 274 n. 2 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 276 n. 31 Nationalism: famine relief and, 276 n. 31; Hindu political protests and, 267 n. 75; independence struggle and, 101, 185; in Kallar country, 59; moral reform and, 14, 84; native elites and, 67; rural tradition and, 226–27; sedentarization and, 147; Tamil, 9, 163, 272 n. 76 N¯atfu, 45–46, 286 Nature, 2–3, 40, 189; animal, 103, 108, 114, 116, 119, 140; criminal, 107; cultivation of, 3, 19, 66; evolutionary, 111–12; exterior and interior, 139, 191; generosity of, 200; government of, 20; of heart, 114; justice of, 239; Kallar, 27, 34–36, 69, 84, 95, 106, 182, 205; moral and material, 55; of self, 7, 12, 16, 33, 242–43 n. 9; transformation of, 55, 89; virtue and, 11, 114. See also Animality; Character; Human nature Nehru, Jawaharlal, 217, 226, 279–80 n. 72 Nellore village, 81–82, 82, 96, 96–97 Nelson, J. H., 244 n. 18, 263 n. 12 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on animality, 268 n. 77; on genealogy, 26, 250 n. 67; on interiority, 247–48 n. 40; on metaphor, 248 n. 46; on soul, 251 n. 3 Nonf f ti n¯atfakam, 115

Obedience: of martial castes, 83; morality and, 2, 13; of working oxen, 101 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 164, 165 Obstinacy, 11, 36, 45, 75, 103, 192, 218, 284 Oeconomicus, 19 Okkaliga Gounder. See Gounder Oflukkam. See Propriety/oflukkam Oppu. See Funeral elegies Orchards, 48–50, 53–55, 118, 175, 176 Oxen, 101–2, 102, 117–23, 120, 174, 271 n. 61. See also Ploughing Paddison, G. F., 192, 264 n. 28 Paddy, 35, 42, 44, 49, 50, 52–53, 117, 169–171, 170, 188, 198–205, 207, 214, 222, 229 P¯alaiyakk¯arar, 77, 286 Pahlamohli N¯an¯urh u, 45, 46, 71, 286 Panchayat, 59, 110, 147, 286 Pandolfo, Stefania, 279 n. 71 Pandian, M. S. S., 254 n. 40 Pandian, Vairam, 37–39, 72, 74 Pandya kingdom, 58, 285 Pana a tu, 85, 97 Parimelalakar, 113, 114, 265 n. 41 Pastoral power, 121, 262 n. 1. See also Biopolitics Pafti, 167–69, 286 Patience, 11, 21, 38, 39, 53, 55, 62, 114, 236–37, 250 n. 69 Paftiy¯afl , 273 n. 85 Pafttf i, 242 n. 7 Pafttf ikk¯atfu, 242 n. 7. See also Backwardness Peasants: as agrarian citizens, 68, 71, 79, 82–83; as backward, 249 n. 59; criminality and, 107; culture of, 46; irrigation and, 199; land title to, 20 Pechilis Prentiss, Karen, 249 n. 55 Pedagogy: agrarian, 146–49, 169, 178; animal, 262 n. 4; classroom, 223; moral, 11, 19–21, 28, 44, 225; Index

319

Pedagogy (continued) nationalist, 226–27; sympathy and, 275 n. 9; tradition and, 247 n. 37; youth and, 138. See also Schools Pekkathi Mayandi Thevar, 157–61 Pennycuick, John, 188–89, 196–97 Periya Ramu Thevar, 273 n. 91 Periyar Dam, 23, 24, 188–91, 193, 195– 97, 201, 277 n. 41. Periyar-Vaigai river basin, 195. See also Vaigai River Perungamanallur village, 58 Pesticides, 1, 18–19, 22, 235. See also Weeding Petryna, Adriana, 262 n. 5 Piramalai Kallar subcaste, 241 n. 2, 249 n. 61; aggressiveness of, 36; agrarian civility for, 48; agricultural settlements for, 146–50, 172–77; authority of, 4; criminality of, 4, 8, 14, 22–23, 27, 36, 65, 68–69, 75, 86, 101–2, 104, 106, 108–11, 228, 259–60 n. 62; as criminal tribe, 57–58; di≈cult lives of, 31–32; k¯aval, 68–69; missionaries and, 4, 150–51; morality/ethics of, 13, 249–50 n. 63; movement against, 66, 67, 69, 75, 80–86, 90, 93; political sovereignty of, 4, 76–78, 80; reclamation, 150, 191, 250–51 n. 69; savagery of, 32– 41, 63; schools and education, 242 n. 6; success of, 5, 9, 22, 105; sympathy and, 206, 207–8; terrain of, 23– 24; watchmen, 27, 68–69, 74–80, 79, 84, 258 n. 38. See also Criminal Tribes Act; Kallar caste; Kallar country; Kallar Reclamation; Kallar Voluntary Settlement Plantation bubble, 3, 242 n. 1 Planting, 170–71, 213, 214 Plough: moral authority of, 73, 85 Ploughing, 34, 43, 47–48, 56, 68, 71, 73–74, 84, 85, 102, 119, 121, 259 n. 56. See also Oxen; Tractors 320

Index

Polanyi, Karl, 278 n. 57 Police, 109; anti-Kallar movement and, 93; colonial, 78, 120–22; conduct of, 225; cruelty of, 111, 215–17; fear of, 234; Kallar Reclamation and, 147–49; in Madura District, 108–10; moral authority of, 122; watchmen and, 80, 84; raids, 59, 120; reform and, 112; schools and, 150 Politics: of di√erence, 104; of Kallar sovereignty, 4, 76–78, 80; of political society, 255 n. 4; of restraint, 104–5, 111, 138–39; savagery in, 57– 64. See also Biopolitics Pope, G. U., 46–47 Populism, 243 n. 9, 245 n. 25 Postcolonial: afterlife, 234; colonial and, 8, 63, 104, 172, 196, 242 n. 6; condition, 217; enlightenment, 281 n. 11; freedom, 57, 139–40, 228; India as, 8; memory, 184; present, 8, 14, 26, 228; selfhood, 4, 15, 26, 227; state, 10, 130; subjects, 16; tragedy, 235–36; underdevelopment, 242–43 n. 9 Potter, Karl, 164 Power: agrarian civility as, 47–48, 226–27; colonial, 15, 62–63, 104, 184, 201, 234–35, 261 n. 88; cultivation and, 228; ideologies of, 119; instruments of, 68; Kallar, 88; modern, 66; pastoral, 121, 262 n. 1; subject and, 242–43 n. 9, 280 n. 2 Prakash, Gyan, 243 n. 12, 267 n. 75 Prasad, Leela, 247 n. 38, 267 n. 76 Prayer, 16, 167, 201, 222 Present: critique of, 227; as di≈cult, 22; future and, 146, 164, 179–80, 206; images of, 224; past in, 14–15, 26, 47, 98, 185, 215, 217, 247 n. 37, 250 n. 66; postcolonial, 8, 14, 26, 228 Progress: as collective horizon, 243– 44 n. 15; as desirable, 10; as elusive, 179; sociality and, 186

Property, 74, 79, 83, 84, 102, 127, 128, 145, 146, Propriety/oflukkam: agrarian citizen and, 27, 43, 72; defined, 286; moral belonging and, 27, 64, 72, 98; politics of, 66; purity and, 85–86; security and, 84–88; as virtue, 15, 26, 68 Proverbs, 11, 29–30, 45, 47, 48, 50–56, 73, 74–75, 110, 116, 119, 130, 166, 201, 207, 225, 244 n. 18, 273 n. 84 Pudukottai, 76, 87, 97, 241 n. 2, 261 n. 88 Rabinow, Paul, 262 n. 5 Race, 89; colonial, 260 n. 66 Radhakrishna, Meena, 264 n. 21, 264 n. 30, 270 n. 27 RaΔes, Hugh, 274 n. 5 Raheja, Gloria, 259 n. 56, 277 n. 51 Rai, Amit, 275 n. 9 Raja Ayyar, A. K., 147, 150 Rajam Aiyar, B. R., 259–60 n. 62 R¯ajas, 252 n. 12 Rajayya, John, 205 Ramachandran, M. G., 61, 112, 161, 254 n. 44 Ramanujan, A. K., 51, 248 n. 42, 254 n. 45 Ramaswamy, Cho., 132 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 253 n. 20, 272 n. 76 Ramayana, 133, 267 n. 67 Raphael, D. D., 275 n. 9, 278 n. 59 Reason, 12, 14, 103, 104 Renunciation: of animality, 107; ascetic, 114, 138; su√ering and, 165; of instinct, 12–13 Responsibility, 8, 110, 147, 184, 244–45 n. 43 Restraint/aftakkam: defined, 105, 283; desire and, 28; ethics of, 114, 116; heart and, 39, 113–17; moral politics of, 104–5, 111, 138–39; self-restraint, 13; as virtue, 4, 26, 103–7, 113, 139

Ripe field sparrows. See Sparrows Ritual: advancement and, 223; agricultural, 167; ancestral, 25; appropriating, 67; birth, 222; of cultivating castes, 9, 71; ethical significance of, 16; laments, 29, 211; plough, 73, 85; purity, 47; thievery, 41 Roughness, 36, 51–52 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 103 Roy, Arundhati, 279–80 n. 72 Rusticity, 34, 44, 252 n. 8 Ryots, 20, 68, 75, 83, 86, 90–92, 146, 256 n. 13, 286. See also Cultivators; Peasants Sachs, Wolfgang, 242 n. 8, 245 n. 24, 274 n. 2 Saivism, 21, 46, 115, 119, 133–34, 162– 63, 164–66, 168–69, 267 n. 71 Salvage: anthropology, 226, 249 n. 60; ethnography, 226–27; spirit of, 22, 226–27 Salvation Army, 148–49 Samkhya, 252 n. 12 Sanskritization, 244 n. 21, 256 n. 6 Sattva, 252 n. 12 Savagery/k¯atftfu tanam, h 27, 122, 228, 251 n. 4; agrarian, 31–35, 51; backwardness and, 35–36; Christianity and, 33–34; colonialism and, 34, 63; defined, 252 n. 10, 284; of desert inhabitants, 278 n. 58; discourse of, 37–39; as ethos, 252 n. 9; landscape and, 32–34; language of, 56; of life, 25, 35–40; in politics, 57–64; selfhood and, 33, 35–37, 56, 63; as uncivil, 35–36. See also Aggression; Civility Schools: boarding, 150–52, 184; compulsory, 110, 147; curricula, 132; enrollment, 242 n. 6; Holton and, 151; jails as, 147; Kallar Reclamation and, 5; Kallar Special O≈cer and, 147; police funding and, 150; textIndex

321

Schools (continued) books and, 15; tinnai, 253 n. 20. See also Education; Pedagogy Scott, David, 235–36, 282 n. 21 Scott, James, 169, 266 n. 57, 273 n. 86 Scottish Enlightenment, 41, 183, 252 nn. 14–15, 274 n. 4; Highland clans and, 41, 186 Security. See Watchmen Sekharan, C., 177, 273–74 n. 94 Self and selfhood, 29, 182; agrarian, 19, 21, 159–60; change and, 14; civil, 33, 55; chaotic aspects of, 252 n. 11; criminality and, 112–14, 130, 136, 139; defined, 246 n. 33; developmental, 144; development and, 7, 10–11, 106, 244 n. 19; ethical and moral, 15–16, 33, 35, 36, 62, 105, 114, 129, 139, 159, 181, 224, 226; interiority and, 16–17, 33, 113, 213, 228, 237, 247–48 nn. 39–40; Kallar, 5, 19, 27, 33, 48, 57, 63; landscape and, 185, 208, 214; love and, 136; moisture and, 182; other, and, 185, 208, 213– 15, 279 n. 66; postcolonial, 3–4, 15– 17, 26, 227; savagery and, 33, 35, 39, 48, 55–57, 59, 63; self-critique, 37; self-regulation, 33; selftransformation, 140 Self-government, 8, 11, 57, 77, 85, 185– 86 Sen, Amartya, 276 n. 31 Senses, 13, 113–16, 119, 132, 136, 265 n. 42 Servai, Virappan, 86–88 Sethuraman, N., 58 Shaw, George Bernard, 132, 267 n. 65 Shenton, Robert, 143, 244–45 n. 23 Shils, Edward, 250 n. 64 Shulman, David, 246 n. 33, 258 n. 38, 278 n. 58 Side-burst donkey, 170–71 Singer, Milton, 280 n. 4 Sinha, Judunath, 265 n. 42 322

Index

Skaria, Ajay, 252 n. 8 Smith, Adam, 41, 42, 183, 186, 206, 212, 219, 275 n. 9, 278 n. 59 Sociality: market relations and, 278 n. 57; progressive, 186; rural, 277 n. 51; sympathy and, 183, 187 Social reform, 4, 9, 14, 242 n. 6; agrarian citizenship and, 67–68, 84, 98– 99; agrarian labor and, 145, 146–47; colonialism and, 183–84; criminality and, 129–30; irrigation and, 183–84; savagery and, 33; Victorian, 104; virtue and, 255–56 n. 4 Soil, 19, 44, 56, 148, 205, 254 n. 46, 254–55 n. 48 Songs. See Field songs; Funeral elegies Soul, 12, 19, 115, 152, 247 n. 39, 251 n. 3. See also Self and selfhood South Indian Subcaste, A (Dumont), 242 n. 2, 249–50 nn. 61–63, 257 n. 23, 266 nn. 61–62 Sovereignty, 27, 68, 74–80, 95, 97, 119, 197–201, 261 n. 89 Spade: as metaphor, 17–18, 21, 34, 55– 56; proverbial, 50–51 Sparrows, 28, 105, 123–29, 139, 175, 205 Srinivas, M. N., 244 n. 21, 256 n. 6 Starobinski, Jean, 245 n. 27 Stein, Burton, 46 Stoics, 246 n. 30 Stoler, Ann, 260 n. 66 Stubbornness. See Obstinacy Subject, 280 n. 2; cultivator as, 22; defined, 242–43 n. 9; of development, 6–11, 227; environmental, 248 n. 42; moral, 20, 138, 224 Subjection, 8, 63, 68, 71, 130, 217, 227– 28; political, 26; power and, 242–43 n. 9, 280 n. 2 Su√ering, 145, 163, 165, 167, 183, 218 Suicide, 1–2, 39, 135, 282 n. 24 Surulipatti village, 65 Survival, 62, 217, 232, 279 n. 71

Sympathy: cultivation of, 184, 200– 201; as fellow-feeling, 184, 186, 212; Kallar women and, 206, 207–8; loss and, 207–17; moisture and, 182, 184–85; morality and, 196, 199–200; pedagogy and, 275 n. 9; performance of, 211–12; physiology of, 183; sociality and, 183, 187; value of, 219; as virtue, 4, 26, 28–29, 183, 218 Tagore, Rabindranath, 14, 246 n. 35 T¯ali, 122 Tamil: cultivating practices, 9, 11–12, 19; language, 40–41, 201; moral tradition, 13, 46–47, 162, 181; Sri Lankan, 280 n. 1 Tamil country, 4, 252 n. 11, 277–78 n. 51; castes in, 272 n. 71, 283, 284, 285, 286; defined, 242 n. 5, 286 Tamil Lexicon, 242 n. 3, 254 n. 40, 256–57 n. 13, 259 n. 53 Tamil literature, 34, 85, 115, 134, 162; devotional, 119, 132–34, 165; love poetry, 51, 124, 134, 278 n. 58; moral and ethical, 44, 41–47, 71, 114–15, 181, 198–200, 253–54 n. 35 Tamil Nadu, 3, 5, 24, 43, 49, 160, 162, 179, 225, 229, 230, 241 n. 2, 242 n. 5, 254 n. 42, 263 n. 8, 274 n. 96, 276 n. 32, 277 n. 41, 283, 285, 286; irrigation in, 195–97, 195 Tanjore, 9, 42, 242 n. 2 Taylor, Charles, 247–48 n. 40, 264 n. 22 Tendency, 13, 42, 89, 107, 108, 110, 114, 144, 160, 192 Tengalapatti village, 24 Thangathai, 207, 208, 218 Thevar, 101, 286 Thievery, 6, 28, 51, 86; admiration of, 122; animal, 28, 89, 101–2, 105, 116– 19, 124, 128; as business, 260 n. 62; cattle, 81, 93; Criminal Tribes Act and, 89, 108; cultivating castes and,

89, 101–2; as custom, 41, 65, 89; Dalits and, 176; elusiveness and, 109; extermination of thieves, 66; fear of, 68; as forgivable, 124; guards, thieves as, 74; heroic figures, thieves as, 129; highway robbery, 4, 23, 106, 187; of Kallar immigrants, 75; as Kallar nature, 104; love and, 106, 115, 130–36; moral restraint and, 115; need and, 124, 129; Piramalai Kallar subcaste, 4, 8, 14, 22–23, 27, 36, 65, 68–69, 75, 86, 101–2, 104, 106, 108–11, 228, 259–60 n. 62; police constables as thieves, 122; redemption from, 19, 112; as social tactic, 79; in Tamil, 118; watchmen and, 68, 74–75, 77, 79, 87; will and, 120 Thieving bull. See Bulls Thirudathe (film), 112, 117, 121 Thompson, E. P., 169 Thuggee, 108 Timiru, 36, 254 n. 46, 287. See also Mappu Tirukkuhral, 43, 287; on ahram, 246 n. 31; on cultivation, 43; on dreams, 221; on kufti, 71; as quotable, 254 n. 36; on rain as gift, 200; on restraint, 113; Tamil literature and, 46; on theft, 115; on hard work, 162 Tirumalai Nayakkar, 257 n. 25 Tirumantiram, 115, 119, 266 n. 49, 266 n. 51 Tiruppur, 55, 179, 222 Tiruvalluvar, 287 Toil: agrarian development and, 28, 141–46, 149, 166; Christianity and, 145, 156, 163, 169–70; cosmologies of, 161–71; as indexical sign, 162; Kallar Reclamation and, 144; moral disposition to, 160; moral worth of, 141–46, 144; parable of, 141–42; progress and, 179; su√ering and, 145, 163, 165, 167; use of term, 162– Index

323

Toil (continued) 63, 268 n. 3; virtue, as, 15, 26, 28, 145, 160. See also Uhlaippu Tolk¯appiyam, 115 Tractors, 22, 48, 56, 118, 226. See also Ploughing Tradition: aspiration and, 223–28; conflict and, 281 n. 13; inheritance of, 15, 247 n. 38; modernity and, 247 n. 36, 250 n. 64; pedagogy and, 247 n. 37. See also Moral tradition Tragedy, 29, 219, 235–36 Travancore, 148, 188–90 Trawick, Margaret, 207, 267 n. 73, 278 n. 60, 279 n. 65 Truillot, Michel-Rolph, 251 n. 4 Turnbull, T., 40–41, 242 n. 2 Turtle folk tale, 141–43 Uhlaikkum Kara˙nkafl (film), 161–62 Uhlaippu, 145, 159, 162–63, 274 n. 96, 287. See also Toil Uhlavanh (film), 226 Unrestrainedness/afta˙nk¯amai, 28, 40, 112–13, 122, 283 Uplands, 1, 3, 9, 17, 39, 49–52, 56, 177, 214. See also Lowlands; Orchards Usilampatti, 32, 82, 95, 260 n. 72 Vaigai River, 23, 24, 82, 188–90, 195, 217, 284; Dam, 195, 195, 217–18; Reservoir, 195, 217–218, 276 n. 39 Vairamuthu, 217–18 Vakulabharanam, Vamsi, 282 n. 24 V¯ahlai afti v¯alhai, 287 Valentine’s Day, 138, 267 n. 75 Varushanad valley, 284, 287 Vedars, 255 n. 1 V¯ehla¯ nmai, f 43 Vellaiyan, Chokkar, 120–21 Vellala caste, 9, 45, 48, 72, 244 n. 21 vgp Evergreen Plantations, 1–2, 3, 4, 172, 177, 241 n.1, 273 n. 93 Village councils. See Panchayat 324

Index

Village republics, 67 Virtue/ahram: agrarian, 47, 77, 166; agricultural metaphors for, 21; Aristotelian, 114, 246 n. 31, 265 n. 46; cardinal, 250–51 n. 69; civility as, 4, 15, 19, 26, 33–34, 62; conduct, 13, 43–44; cultivation of, 4, 5, 9, 11– 17, 19, 27, 62, 226, 229; defined, 13, 246 n. 31, 283; desire and, 42, 252– 53 n. 18; duty and, 265 n. 46; justice and, 236, 282 nn. 22–23; modernity and, 219; social reform and, 255–56 n. 4; traditions of, 15, 43–44, 226; See also Ethics; Moral tradition; specific virtues Virumandi Thevar, 52, 69–70 V¯ıtfu, 40, 287 Viv¯eka Cint¯amani, h 123, 266 n. 54, 278 n. 54 Wages: cash/in kind, 167–68, 273 n. 85; of cultivators, 204; daily, 142, 196; of Dalit laborers, 161–62; as gifts, 167, 204; of irrigators, 202; landlords to laborers, 165; for orchard work, 175 Waste, 144, 153, 213 Wastelands, 95, 148 Watchmen/k¯aval, 75, 94, 284; antiKallar movement and, 83–85; authority of, 4, 80, 97; defined, 284; employment of, 49, 76, 78, 91–92; institution of, 77, 80; Koravar, 255 n. 8; land grants to, 77–78; moral impropriety of, 27; Piramalai Kallar, 27, 68–69, 74–80, 84, 258 n. 38; police and, 78; predatory, 74– 75, 78, 80, 258 n. 38; as thievish, 68, 74–75, 77, 79, 87; Valayar, 255 n. 8 Water: as gift, 200; policing and, 191; properties of, 17–18, 181, 215; as virtuous, 181, 183, 198. See also Irrigation

Weber, Max, 144, 160, 249 n. 58, 268 n. 4, 269 nn. 12–13 Weeding, 25, 35, 124, 141, 153 Western Ghats, 3, 23, 24, 125, 188, 195 Wildness, 34, 35, 40, 45, 48–49, 104, 252 n. 8. See also Savagery Will, 108, 117–22, 153, 165, 263 n. 16 Willcocks, William, 187 Williams, Raymond, 248 n. 44, 248 n. 48, 252 n. 10

Wisdom, 17–18, 19, 62, 284 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 244 n. 22 Yoga Vasistha, 260–61 n. 78 Zachariah, Benjamin, 243 n. 12 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomaeus, 253 n. 19 Zook, Darren, 243 n. 12, 272 n. 75 Zvelebil, Kamil, 253–54 n. 35

Index

325

Anand Pandian is an assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is a coeditor of Race, Nature, and the Politics of Di√erence, also by Duke University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pandian, Anand. Crooked stalks : cultivating virtue in South India / Anand Pandian. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4514-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4531-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Agriculture—Moral and ethical aspects—India, South. 2. Agriculture—Economic aspects—India, South. 3. Economic development—Moral and ethical aspects—India, South. 4. India—History—British occupation, 1765–1947. I. Title. bj52.5.p36 2009 306.3%4909548—dc22 2009029297