The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India 9780231537506

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T H E PA R I A H P RO B L E M

Cultures of History

CULTURES OF HISTORY Nicholas Dirks, Series Editor The death of history, reported at the end of the twentieth century, was clearly premature. It has become a hotly contested battleground in struggles over identity, citizenship, and claims of recognition and rights. Each new national history proclaims itself as ancient and universal, while the contingent character of its focus raises questions about the universality and objectivity of any historical tradition. Globalization and the American hegemony have created cultural, social, local, and national backlashes. Cultures of History is a new series of books that investigates the forms, understandings, genres, and histories of history, taking history as the primary text of modern life and the foundational basis for state, society, and nation. Shail Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, editors, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700– 1960 Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy

The Pariah Problem Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India

RU PA V I S WA N AT H

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Viswanath, Rupa. The pariah problem : caste, religion, and the social in modern India / Rupa Viswanath. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16306-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53750-6 (ebook) 1. Pariahs—History. 2. Pariahs—Social conditions. 3. Caste—India—History. 4. India—Social conditions. 5. India—History. I. Title. DS432.P25V57 2014 305.5'6880954—dc23 2013047446

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover Photo: © Bridgeman Art Library Cover Design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For the Dalit women, children, and men who were the targets of the official policies and unofficial strategems this book describes, and for their descendants

Mitunter aber verlangt eben dasselbe Leben, das die Vergessenheit braucht, die zeitweilige Vernichtung dieser Vergessenheit; dann soll es eben gerade klar werden, wie ungerecht die Existenz irgend eines Dinges, eines Privilegiums, einer Kaste, einer Dynastie zum Beispiel ist, wie sehr dieses Ding den Untergang verdient. Dann wird seine Vergangenheit kritisch betrachtet. . . . Denn da wird nun einmal die Resultate früherer Geschlechter sind, sind wir auch die Resultate ihrer Verirrungen, Leidenschaften und Irrthümer, ja Verbrechen . . . Sometimes this same life that requires forgetting demands a temporary destruction of this forgetfulness; it wants to be clear as to how unjust the existence of something—a privilege, a caste, a dynasty, for example—is, and how greatly this thing deserves to perish. Then its past is regarded critically. . . . Since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes . . . FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The epigraph is taken from the R. J. Hollingdale translation of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (ed. Daniel Breazeale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76. I have slightly altered the translation.

CONTENTS

PREFACE ON TERMINOLOGY xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii ABBREVIATIONS xvii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Land Tenure or Labor Control? The Agrarian Mise-en-Scène 23 Chapter 2 Conceptualizing Pariah Conversion: Caste, Spirit, Matter, and Penury 40 Chapter 3 The Pariah–Missionary Alliance: Agrarian Contestation and the Local State 71 Chapter 4 The State and the Cēri 91

Chapter 5 Settling Land, Sowing Conflict; or, The Rise and Rise of Religious Neutrality 118 Chapter 6 The Marriage of Sacred and Secular Authority: New Liberalism, Mission–State Relations, and the Birth of Authenticity 144 Chapter 7 Giving the Panchama a Home: Creating “a Friction Where None Exists” 168 Chapter 8 Everyday Warfare: Caste, Class, and the Public 190 Chapter 9 The Depressed Classes, Rights, and the Embrace of the Social 217 Conclusion: The Pariah Problem’s Enduring Legacies 240 GLOSSARY 259 NOTES 261 ARCHIVAL SOURCES 345 BIBLIOGRAPHY 349 INDEX 377

X  C O N T E N T S

P R E FAC E O N T E R M I N O L O G Y

Pariah is a cruel word. For most speakers of English today, only the dimmest memory of what it once meant survives. But for its victims the memory of that cruelty has not been forgotten, in part because it is not just a memory. Casually employed by journalists and others for whom it is just a metaphor—often in reference to a person or state that deserves to be reviled—it is a word that causes the descendants of those it once named to visibly wince. Like nigger it is not just a word. Like nigger it at once references and is itself a part of one of the most dehumanizing social orders the world has ever known. Why would I use such a word in the title of this book and throughout its pages? Because this is a book about that cruelty, and about the joint efforts of native elites and British colonizers to avoid the implications of that cruelty when its victims repeatedly forced it upon them. It is about their efforts to avoid facing the fact that they were themselves the beneficiaries of this cruelty. The phrase “the Pariah Problem” that appears in this book’s title is the name social elites gave to a fact that flew in the face of high caste Hindus’ claim to being the rightful leaders of native society, and of the British to enlightened rule; it is a name that attempted to stifle the historical imagination of those whom it names, who had alternative understandings of their identity. “The Pariah Problem” is the name elites gave, not to an

injustice to be overcome, but to an inconvenient reality that threatened their own carefully cultivated public image, and that therefore had to be judiciously handled and made to disappear. “The Pariah Problem” is not my phrase, but theirs. This book uses a cruel word, it is true, but not in order to be cruel. It uses a cruel word because it is a book about a cruel reality. Not only in the title, but also in its initial chapters this book uses Pariah repeatedly—always in invisible quotation marks—in order to illumine for the reader the oppression under which a subordinated underclass lived. In this way I seek to capture the historical moment before anodyne bureaucratic terms like the “Depressed Classes” or “Scheduled Castes” were invented. It goes without saying that I do not endorse any of these terms; where “Pariah” names a cruelty openly, the others are continuous with an effort to cover it over. I revisit the politics of naming, and explain in more detail why none of these terms are suitable, in the introduction. For now I merely specify that the only term I use in my own voice, a term that becomes increasingly prominent by the end of the book, is Dalit. This is the only general term that was chosen by members of the minority it names, and it is the only term I endorse.

XII  P R E F A C E O N T E R M I N O L O G Y

AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S

As this book took shape, carrying me to far-flung locales from Tutthukudi to New Brunswick and Edinburgh to Vellore, I have relied on the warmth, generosity, and intellectual sustenance provided by fellow travelers. My debt to them cannot be discharged, but it is a pleasure to acknowledge as many of those persons as I can remember, with apologies to anyone who is inadvertently omitted. In New York, during the years when the ideas in this book were first emerging, Jack Hawley was a tireless supporter, engaging with my work at critical junctures and supporting my every intellectual enthusiasm. Talal Asad gently but continually posed intellectual challenges, and I hope I have been able to meet them, however partially. Partha Chatterjee, Val Daniel, Nicholas Dirks, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Rachel McDermott were generous and incisive interlocutors. Gajendran Ayyathurai and Amudha Ganesan shared insight, warmth and encouragement in equal measure. Anne Murphy, Christian Novetzke, Varuni Bhatia, Shana Sippy, Ravindran Sriramachandran, and Rajan Kurai provided lively conversation and friendship. In Chennai, the first person I met with to discuss my research was Prof. P. Dayanandan, professor emeritus at Madras Christian College, and his wife, Anne Dayanandan. Daya proved to be a remarkable human being, effortlessly combining intellectual production across a range of

disciplines with activism. To both Anne and Daya I am deeply grateful for their friendship and inspiring example. A turning point in my research occurred when Daya led me on a guided tour of the “Pariah settlements” of Melrosapuram and Andreyapuram in Chengalpattu. Meeting the presentday inhabitants of these sites, whose history I would come to know so well, powerfully attuned me to the present implications of my research and indelibly shaped the questions this book tries to answer. I was also treated to critical analysis of the connections between past and present by P. Sivakami, former Indian Administrative Services officer, feminist intellectual and writer, and founder of the Tamilnadu political party Samuga Samathuva Padai, and Ravikumar, writer and now General Secretary of the Tamil Dalit Panthers. Fellow scholars and others resident in Chennai who provided the camaraderie necessary to sustain research include S. Anandhi, V. Arasu, S. Anand, V. Chakravarthy and Pritham Chakravarthy, T.  P. Kamalanathan, A.  R. Venkatachalapathy, Vincent Kumaradoss, Mangai, Dr. A. Padmanabhan, M. S. S. Pandian, Punitha Pandyan, Jerome Samraj, Annie Thomas, S. Sivakami, and Prof. M. Thangaraj. The Bishop of Madras Rt. Rev. V. Devasahayam, Mr. Madhavan Nambiar, and Mr. Christodass Gandhi, IAS, all gave assistance at critical junctures, providing me with access to various collections and individuals. In Tirunelveli, the Packiamuthus, Sarojini, and the late David, helped me to understand the specificity of Christianity in that region; and in Vellore, I learned a great deal from Prof. R. Ilangovan’s social analysis and activism. In Tutthukudi, I was fortunate enough to spend time with the wonderful historian Prof. A. Sivasubramaniam. Professor T. Sethupandian of Madurai Kamaraj University and Isaac Kadirvel at the Tamilnadu Theological Seminary made Madurai particularly rewarding. In investigating the legacy of land grants made to Dalits in the colonial period, I have been immeasurably enriched by conversations with Deepan Chakravarti and Fr. L. Yesumarian in Chengalpattu and Fr. Martin and Brindavan Moses in Chennai. While I was in Tamil Nadu, a number of visiting academics, including Whitney Cox, Anand Pandian, Martha Selby, Blake Wentworth, Sarah Hodges, and Steve Hughes, all asked the right questions. In the United Kingdom, Andrew Porter’s masterly command of mission work across the swathe of the British Empire was a wonderful resource. The intellectual engagement and friendship of Sunil Amrith, Sharad Chari, Shabnum Tejani, Eleanor Newbigin, Taylor Sherman, Kriti Kapila, Jacob Copeman, Norbert Peabody, Kaveri Gill, Rohit XIV  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

De, Mitra Sharafi, and Aishwary Kumar made Cambridge and London worthwhile; and David Arnold, Chris Bayly, Anna Abulafia, Chris Fuller, David Washbrook, Susan Bayly, Rosalind O’Hanlon, and David Mosse provided support and encouragement. In more recent years, I have benefited enormously from sharing ideas and arguments with Lucinda Ramberg, Anupama Rao, Katherine Lemons, Arafaat Valiani, Rama Mantena, Karuna Mantena, Barney Bate, Christophe Jaffrelot, Andrew Sartori, Arvind Rajagopal, Thomas Blom Hansen, Ajay Skaria, Narendra Subramaniam, Bart Scott, Peter van der Veer, Tam Ngo, Durba Ghosh, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Nicolas Jaoul, Sanal Mohan, and Teena Purohit. My former colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, including Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Lisa Mitchell, Ram Rawat, Daud Ali, Deven Patel, Kathleen Hall, Lynn Lees, and Kathy Peiss, gave valuable counsel. Several doctoral students at Penn, especially Michael Collins, Ananya Dasgupta, Darakhshan Khan, Katy Hardy, and Sarah Hicks, gave me opportunities to defend my positions. In Göttingen, Ravi Ahuja and Patrick Eisenlohr, Holk Stobbe and Iris Karakus have helped make Germany home. Srirupa Roy and Lalit Vachani have become extended family, intellectual and otherwise. At the eleventh hour, Lisa Mitchell, Ram Rawat, Uday Chandra, Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, S. Anand, Srirupa Roy, and Shana Sippy valiantly stepped up to read final drafts, and I hope to have answered their perspicacious questions; I also thank Liz Hudson for her patient and expert editing. Audiences at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge (especially at Lucy Cavendish College, my home for two years from 2006 to 2008), the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington in St. Louis, Stanford University, Yale University, and the Institute of Historical Research in London provided valuable feedback. I am very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for Columbia University Press who helped push my arguments to greater clarity. I thank Anne Routon, my editor, who carefully tended the manuscript over the course of several years. I was greatly assisted in the archives and libraries I visited. The librarians at the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai and the Maraimalai Adigal Library; Sam the archivist and Rita Wesley the librarian at the Union Theological College Ecclesiastical Archives in Bangalore; Saroja Vincent and Vincent at the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College; Dr. Kevin Greenbank at the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge; the staff at the India Office Library; the archivists at the Methodist Archives at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Rhodes House Library in A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S   xv

Oxford, and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh; Russ Gasero at the Reformed Church of America Archives in New Jersey; the librarian at the Bishop Neill Center in Tirunelveli; and Tamilpavai at the Dalit Resource Center in Madurai went out of their way to make research a pleasure. In Chennai, the staff at the Tamil Nadu State Archives and Library brought out records with patience and diligence for over a year—I must especially thank the commissioner of the archive, as well as S. Neelavannan and S. Ravindran in the archive reading room and M. Sivakumar in the library. Of course none of this research would have been possible without financial support, and I have been generously funded by a Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies; a Traveling Fellowship from Columbia University; a Mellon Fellowship from the Institute of Historical Research, London; an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council; an American Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association for University Women; and a Trustees Council Faculty Research Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania. Of my family, I must first express my deepest gratitude to my parents, Radha and Natarajan Viswanath, who have followed the many unexpected turns their daughter’s life has taken, always ready with love and equanimity. The affection and support of Sri and Teri Viswanath, and my nephew Kingston has been wonderfully abundant. Meena, Vikram, Jo, Ashmika, Anaka, Smita, Ashok and the late Rajagopal Natrajan provided warmth and much-needed advice during the years I spent in Chennai. Margaret and Richard Lincoln and Frederick Roberts have taken me on as a daughter with all the commitment that entails from the very moment I met them. The newest members of my family, my sons Massimo and Milo, probably wish I would spend a little less time writing, and yet it is watching their first brave forays into the world that has inspired me to continue to try to make sense of it. Nate Roberts has read so many drafts and discussed the ideas this books presents with such passion and insight that it is impossible to conceive of it without him. He has unflaggingly reminded me what scholarship is for and what life can promise.

XVI  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

ABBREVIATIONS

BPR BPS CLS CLSA FCOS GOE GOL(G) GOP GOR IOL ISPCK Mis MLCP MNNR NLS RCA

Proceedings of the Board of Revenue of Madras (Land Revenue and Settlement) Proceedings of the Board of Revenue of Madras (Revenue Settlement, Land Records and Agriculture) Christian Literature Society Christian Literature Society Archives, Madras Free Church of Scotland Madras Government Order, Education Department Madras Government Order, Law (General) Department Madras Government Order, Public Department Madras Government Order, Revenue Department India Office Library, London International Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Miscellaneous Series paper Madras Legislative Council Proceedings Madras Native Newspaper Reports National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Reformed Church of America

RCAA RMRL SIMA SIOCU SOAS SPG TNSA USPGA (RHL) UTCEA WMMA (SOAS)

Reformed Church of America Archives, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Jersey Roja Muthiah Research Library South Indian Missionary Association South Indian Oppressed Classes Union School of Oriental and African Studies Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Tamil Nadu State Archives United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives, Rhodes House Library, Oxford United Theological College Ecclesiastical Archives, Bangalore Wesleyan Methodist Mission Archives, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

XVIII  A B B R E V I A T I O N S

T H E PA R I A H P RO B L E M

INTRODUCTION

The “Pariah Problem”: A History of Evasion from Colony to Postcolony The “Pariah Problem,” as it was initially called, irrupted into administrative consciousness and public debate in the Madras Presidency of the early 1890s. What was to be done about the plight of those we today call Dalits, members of the so-called untouchable castes and descendants of unfree agricultural laborers? Among the very first public statements of the problem was an editorial published in the presidency’s leading daily, The Hindu, in June 1891, which proclaimed that the condition of these castes is truly miserable. The Hindus do not recognize them as part of their community and nothing can be more humiliating and intolerable than the treatment that the Pariahs .  .  . receive from the Hindus of higher castes. The Hindu religion has done nothing for them except to prescribe a most abject slavery as the lot for which they alone are fit.1

Later that year, an editorial in the same paper entitled “The Disabilities of the Pariah,” summed up the crux of the problem thus:

That they are the poorest, the most neglected, the most ill-treated class, there can be no doubt whatever. Some Hindus may think that the Pariah has no right to a better condition than he is now in; but that this condition is the most miserable imaginable even the most bigoted Hindu will admit.  .  .  . [Yet] they are too ignorant, too poor and too degraded to be able to help themselves.2

The first government report on the Pariah Problem, written by the Collector of Chingelput, J.  H.  A. Tremenheere in 1891 (and published later, in 1892), argued that the Pariah was specifically the state’s problem. The Pariah Problem, then, marks the recognition, in public debate and in the halls of government, not only of that subpopulation as particularly abject, but also of Pariahs as a group whose improvement was the responsibility of others. For their very condition, to cite The Hindu again, “must be a blot on any civilized society.”3 Since being raised, the Pariah Problem has never ceased to be a matter of public and official concern in India. Although the phrase the “Pariah Problem” has long since dropped out of usage, the moral, economic, and political condition of the subpopulation to which it refers has remained a central fixture of public and administrative discourse and political contest; over time, the very recalcitrance of the problem has been the subject of anxious commentary. In a moment of remarkable candor, for instance, current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh observed that “even after sixty years of constitutional and legal support [provided by the postcolonial Indian state], there is still .  .  . discrimination against Dalits. . . . The only parallel . . . [is] apartheid.”4 Indeed, if anything, the problem has acquired renewed salience in the past two decades with the unanticipated rise of Dalit-led political parties in the 1990s—a revolution nevertheless coterminous with instances of brutal anti-Dalit violence across the subcontinent.5 This book argues that the peculiar recalcitrance of the Pariah Problem can be better understood by studying the first thirty years following the fateful emergence of the problem. It is in this period that key features of current public debate and the languages of nationwide state policy were conceived. These include (1) the idea that caste itself, and caste discrimination, are religious phenomena; (2) the prioritization of the “social” as the realm in which change is to be sought via gradualist reform, rather than through the state’s enforcement of fundamental 2  I N T R O D U C T I O N

rights of equality and access; and (3) the narrow focus on “reservations” (India’s affirmative-action policies) in education and government employment as a substitute for (and not merely a supplement to) structural change. Specifically, the book shows how during the thirty years from roughly 1890 to 1920 these ways of thinking emerged through the concerted efforts of a “caste–state nexus”—a de facto alliance between British and Indian officials and native high-caste employers of Pariah labor—to first elide, and when that was no longer possible, to downplay and avoid, the problem that the Pariah posed. As a consequence of concerted strategies of evasion, the Pariah Problem was only posed and never solved, then as now.

The Trope of Gentle Slavery Much of this book will be devoted to examining why and how the Pariah Problem emerged when it did, and what happened subsequently. But here we must first ask a related but distinct question: Namely, why did it not emerge sooner? No one imagined in the 1890s that the conditions they were describing were anything new. Why had they failed to excite concern earlier? A critical piece of the answer is the colonial state’s complicated relationship with agrarian slavery—as well as with agrarian slave owners. When the British first established themselves in what would become the Madras Presidency, much of the land, especially in the incredibly fertile rice-growing regions, was worked by hereditarily unfree men and women who labored under conditions foreign visitors had no hesitation in describing as slavery. These laborers were also described as slaves (Tamil, aṭimaiyāṭkāḷ) in native discourse. In Madras, as in other parts of India, they belonged to castes considered lower than all others, castes we today call Dalit. The very names of these castes (in the Tamilspeaking regions of Madras, these were Paraiyar, Pallar, and Chakkiliyar) were used by Indians interchangeably with words meaning slave.6 By the 1890s, the caste name Paraiyar was anglicized to Pariah (whence the English term “pariah”) and was used as an inclusive term by officials to refer to all Dalit castes, not just Paraiyars. Pariahs in Madras, throughout the nineteenth century, were kept in miserable conditions, subject to violent physical discipline, often tied to particular plots of land, and I N T R O D U C T I O N   3

actively prevented from absconding or obtaining land of their own, as chapters 1–4 will describe. And their condition was permanent. They were also ideologically construed as outsiders to native society; symbolically degraded; and portrayed as immoral, lacking intelligence, and unfit for anything but manual labor. They were forced to live apart from all others, and even their touch was considered polluting.7 That the British were not so concerned about this in the earlier part of the nineteenth century is hardly surprising. They were heavily involved in the slave trade, and slave-based production played an important role in the American colonies; prior to the rise of the abolition movement in the early 1830s, to call something slavery did not necessarily constitute a moral critique. After the American colonies had rebelled, however, and calls for abolition were becoming a real force across the British world, the demand that slavery in the colonies be abolished began to resound loudly in policy circles. Surely now the Pariah Problem would rush to center stage, especially given how eager the colonial state was to represent India as benighted? Not yet. The colonial state’s foremost commitment was to maximizing tax revenue. Historians are familiar with persistent tensions between the state and landowners on this score. What is often overlooked is that the landowners on whom the state depended for tax revenue were themselves highly dependent on Pariah labor, and so, therefore, was the colonial state. Anything that threatened their control of Pariah laborers was a threat to the entire system of production, the surpluses of which filled colonial coffers, and this control rested on the enforced landlessness and hereditary unfreedom of Pariah families. East India Company officials in India, knowing the foundational role of native labor regimes to their own revenue, far from bringing Pariah servitude to wider attention, sought instead to have India exempted from the empire-wide abolition of slavery that was passed in 1833. To justify this exemption they pioneered an argument that would soon become an article of faith among Company hands, and whose basic form would continue to be echoed in the following decades, down to some present-day writing: the trope of “gentle slavery.”8 According to Company officials, traditional forms of Pariah servitude in India were incomparable with slavery elsewhere in the world and were based on mutualistic and even familial relations between master and servant. In a classic statement of the benevolence of Indian slavery, C. S. Crole, Collector of Chingleput 4  I N T R O D U C T I O N

District in northern Madras, expressed a view that would become utterly conventional by the 1870s: [Madras’s slavery is] slavery under its mildest and most benignant aspect. An institution from which the mind revolts, owing to the horrors and degradation incidental to it in other and modern countries, is here presented so as to contrast favourably with the state of conquered peoples, even when nominally free, elsewhere.9

Crole first foregrounds his own sympathies with abolitionism: slavery is “an institution from which the mind revolts.” But he does this only to insist that the term “slavery” was in truth not applicable to labor in Madras’s countryside; indeed, Madras’s slavery was superior to freedom elsewhere. Other officials would echo this sentiment: so benign were Madras’s masters that bondage was in fact preferable to free labor (see chapters 7 and 8). According to this logic, the poor servant would at least be sheltered during times of hardship such as famine, rather than subject to the cruel tides of supply and demand that could drown the modern laborer. India’s existence in a timeless traditional realm outside history meant that slavery there was not about gain and accumulation but merely the reproduction of accustomed rules in which the inequality between master and slave was mitigated by personal ties. Although company officers managed to delay abolition in the subcontinent by only ten years, until 1843, this portrait of the relations between Pariahs and those for whom they labored proved a lasting success. After that, officers who inadvertently used the term “slave” in official writings could be reprimanded; Indrani Chatterjee has aptly described this, in the context of her work on gender and slavery, as “abolition by denial.”10 The actual conditions of Pariah servitude, however, remained largely unchanged. While ceasing to legally recognize slavery within its territories, the British did nothing to challenge the condition of agrarian unfreedom. In the rare instances when antislavery legislation was actually enforced, it was directed not at the pervasive forms of agrarian slavery but at the relatively small-scale practices of the export and import of slaves in ports and cities.11 In any event, the existence of bondage had never depended on the legislation of the foreign ruler but was based instead on complex forms of local power and state authority that deprived the Pariah of any alternative livelihood. It was held in place, in I N T R O D U C T I O N   5

the last instance, by brute physical force and well-established practices of individual and collective punishment in cases of insubordination. The evidence this book provides thus throws cold water on credulous accounts of a tradition of “mutual obligation” in which Dalit laborers (whether called slaves or, after 1843, “agrestic laborers”) too had “rights.” As I show, using a wide variety of unexamined archival sources, conflict and violence were the norm (see especially chapters 3, 5, and 8). When Pariahs discerned an opportunity to escape from the “protection” of their landed caste masters, they responded with unhesitating swiftness. Nevertheless, as we will see throughout this book, elites and officials would never cease to insist that the relationship between Pariahs and their masters was mutually beneficial, at least as long as the Pariah was kept safe from “outside influences” such as missionaries or, by the early twentieth century, Dalit activists. In 1885, the Collector of Tanjore, J.  B. Pennington, had the following frank opinion on the condition of Dalit laborers in his district and even forgot to hold back the word slave: “It seems not unlikely that slaves who are fairly well-treated by their masters and are paid in kind are really happier (so long as there is no actual failure of crop) than free men struggling for a bare existence in a state of competition.”12 This, nota bene, was some forty years after the legal abolition of slavery.

The Problem Spiritualized, Then Socialized This book tells the story of what happened when Dalits’ efforts to better their condition finally forced the issue of their bondage and inhuman living conditions—the Pariah Problem itself—upon the reluctant attention of the colonial state. Dalits did not do this directly, at least not at first, but via a small group of Protestant missionaries who were brought into direct contact with them through rural preaching tours. Missionaries would remain the primary advocates and spokesmen of the Pariah for only a few decades. But their theological interpretation of the Pariah’s plight—namely, as essentially a matter of spiritual degradation—as well as the arguments landed castes would make to the state to prevent missionary interference in rural practices of caste domination, which they portrayed as a violation of Queen Victoria’s promise of religious neutrality, would shape thereafter the way Dalitness would be understood 6  I N T R O D U C T I O N

(chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5). Such a “spiritualization” of caste, and particularly of the condition of Dalits, would prove to have far-reaching implications, setting the terms for M.  K. Gandhi’s famous “Harijan uplift” campaign in the 1930s and forming the basis of the postcolonial state’s caste policies. In the history of the Pariah Problem, then, from 1890 to the present day, religion played a pivotal role in the rationales underlying administrative policy and practice. The initial definition of the Pariah Problem as religious, furthermore, only proved critical because religion itself had simultaneously been construed as a sui generis realm of human existence beyond legitimate state control.13 While there is a global history, now well known, about the gradual seclusion of “the religious” from other realms of human practice, in India a defining moment was 1858, following a large-scale rebellion by Indian troops.14 Convinced that “hurt religious sentiments” were the cause of the unrest, Queen Victoria announced that she would avoid interfering in the religion of her subjects thenceforth, thereby inaugurating the principle of religious neutrality, which would play a decisive role in attempts to contend with the Pariah Problem.15 And the very strategy of confining the problem to a realm cordoned off from state interference would then be replicated in a new form at a second historical juncture, which is where this book ends. In the 1910s, representative governance was introduced to India, and Dalits themselves served as representatives of their own communities for the first time, which massively altered the political landscape. Henceforth, it was no longer religion alone that would house the Pariah Problem, but a new realm that I call the “national social” (chapter 9). Here the argument proffered by elites and officials was not that the condition of the Dalit was, in principle, beyond the legitimate reach of state intervention. On the contrary, the post-Independence state would make the uplift of Dalits a central feature of its mandate through the official “abolition” of ritual untouchability and a series of progressive measures and special protections for Dalits that were enshrined in the Indian Constitution itself. Nevertheless, the idea was firmly established in the 1920s that there was only so much that could be accomplished through state intervention and that the true solution to Dalits’ problems would have to come from the gradual and voluntary transformation of society itself—now understood as an organic totality wholly distinct from the state that governed it. Thus, we see at once the rise of a new figure on the Indian scene, the elite reformer I N T R O D U C T I O N   7

who is valorized for his relative distance from formal politics and who vows to bring about the salvation of the Dalit. Again, Gandhi is the foremost example of a widespread phenomenon. This style of reformism goes hand in hand with a general climate of complacency on the part of the state to actively enforce the fundamental political rights and equal access granted to Dalits as a matter of law.

The Pariah Problem and the Historiography on Caste To say that the colonial state sought to deny and then minimize the problem of the Pariah will strike many readers as a counterintuitive claim. Caste, as is now widely acknowledged, had by the end of the nineteenth century been firmly established in colonial state governance as a key organizational feature of native society; the colonial state itself systematized and gave administrative priority to what we now think of as caste.16 It has been demonstrated, furthermore, that in some cases, before the development of modern enumerative technologies, caste was a more fluid category than it would later become and was merely one of many determinants of social action.17 In light of these important historiographic developments, the Pariah’s emergence as a problem in the 1890s might seem simply another instance of the reification of caste. But to extrapolate what became of the Pariah specifically from the important historical research on how caste in general was both transformed and fixed at the intersection of Orientalist assumptions and modern enumerative technologies is to rely on an ideological premise that emerged in this very period, namely the view that caste is a system.18 It is only on the basis of such an erroneous assumption that the differences among various castes would be assumed to be of the same basic nature, distinct merely in magnitude. On the contrary, the difference between Dalits and all others—a massive social hiatus rooted fundamentally in the political economy of agrarian production—ought to be called the caste difference and distinguished from other differences between castes. A racialized subpopulation and the descendants of agrarian slaves, Dalits are and were marked linguistically, sociospatially, and ritually as fundamentally outside society proper, a society comprising all other castes.19 The history of their entry into political modernity and the state’s paternal embrace would markedly diverge from a more generalizable account of 8  I N T R O D U C T I O N

the “modernization” or “governmentalization” of caste. Caste in general— understood as an India-wide system of exclusive endogamous groups that determined social interaction—was thrust to the center of administrative practice through well-known mechanisms such as the census. Yet, at the very same time, the qualitatively distinct nature of Dalit difference, which is irreducible to merely an extreme position on a continuum, was tenaciously denied. In the words of one exasperated official who sought to refuse pleas that Pariahs’ improvement be taken up by the state, “The Government has no reason to believe Pariahs . . . are at any disadvantage . . . or that . . . Pariahs qua Pariahs [are] treated . . . with any special disregard.”20

Tracking Evasion: The Implications of Method Unnamed Actors, Cast in Shadow With its goal of illuminating patterns of evasion, Pariahs “themselves” emerge most often only indirectly in this history. The argument presented here cannot and does not attempt to recover the voice of the Pariah as such.21 It would be possible, to be sure, to highlight primarily the achievements of extraordinary Dalit politicians and intellectuals whose actions changed the course of political and social life in south India. A number of recent and soon-to-be published writings will go a long way in making such persons’ works and lives accessible to a wider audience.22 My own commitment, however, is less to illustrating the achievements of extraordinary Dalit agents than to tracking the relentlessness of attempts by officials and others to redirect, redefine, channel, and divert the aims and projects of ordinary Dalit men and women. It is my conviction that this is as necessary to a history of India’s political present as is the recognition of positive gains and remarkable feats of courage. The two projects are not analytically entirely separable of course, but perhaps a signal difference will be that this book’s “makers of history,” insofar as there are any, are less often Dalit leaders who voiced opposition and defiance (although these will emerge at various points) than the many mostly unnamed Dalit men and women who were often willing to risk everything in an ongoing effort to transform the conditions of their I N T R O D U C T I O N   9

existence, much to the displeasure of officials and caste folk. There are no records of these persons “speaking in their own voices,” no forms of unadulterated self-representation. To the contrary, the very search for the “authentic Pariah” is a subject of this book and emerged precisely when Pariahs’ behavior confounded the expectations of elites, whose efforts to sideline Dalit projects often entailed questioning the authenticity of Dalit desires and motives.23 Dalit men and women emerge most often in this book as the intended targets of actions that were taken by caste elites, state officials, missionaries, and, finally, from the late 1910s onward, by Dalit political representatives. These men and women are at once ordinary and remarkable, insofar as they incrementally forced the hand of agents and agencies far more powerful than themselves, startling their opponents, disconcerting those with designs on them, and undeniably altering the dynamics of their social field, with consequences still felt today in Indian society—but, given the sheer scale of the forces ranged against them, without unmitigated and spectacular successes. This book seeks to map and analyze their actions, thereby charting an etiology of bitter conflict and broken promises.

States and Subjects Through the Evangelical Lens This book relies heavily on a large corpus of missionary writings that provide a rich depiction of laboring life in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury south India. These writings come, of course, with characteristic distortions. To cite just one example here, conflicts between landlords and Christian Dalit laborers were often styled by missionaries as examples of “religious persecution,” a trope by which missionaries emplotted themselves and their new converts in an ongoing biblical epic. Yet missionaries’ very meticulousness often provides evidence that tells against their own narratives. In this case, missionary records show clearly that the often violent struggles between Dalits and landed castes involved Christians and non-Christian Dalits alike, thus powerfully undermining missionaries’ own ideological reading of these conflicts as instances of religious violence. And this is just one example of the way in which the detailed quotidian records missionaries kept can be used to extract a story that both exceeds and corrects the one missionaries themselves told.

10  I N T R O D U C T I O N

The incredibly minute record of Pariahs’ lives, of the details of agrarian production, and of Pariahs’ relations with landed castes make the mission archive a unique and heretofore unexamined source for the study of rural caste relations, and one that routinely confutes the view of the colonial state.24 Unlike colonial officials, who spent relatively short periods of time in the countryside (tours of duty at the collectorate level typically ranged from three to five years), missionaries often spent several decades in villages. Where British officers rarely attained more than the most rudimentary knowledge of any native language and had to rely entirely on interpreters, missionaries routinely achieved a level of fluency that would put any modern anthropologist to shame. Officials usually toured native villages on horseback and—like most caste people—would rarely have so much as set foot in a Pariah settlement. As one official admitted when called upon to comment on the rural poor, “It is of course very difficult for Europeans to form any idea as to the condition of the poorer classes of natives.”25 In those matters, officials usually relied on village elites as intermediaries. Missionaries, by contrast, spent the bulk of their time in Pariahs’ cēris, segregated ghettoes set apart from the main village, the ūr. Many missionaries, moreover, took an ethnographic interest in native patterns of livelihood, painstakingly recording information on such topics as cropping techniques, yield, labor regimes, land tenure, irrigation, and food scarcity; these data are therefore an important source against which to read the records of the state on these matters.26 It is only from the letters of Wesleyan Methodist Rev. William Goudie, early and ardent champion of the Pariah and resident of Chingleput District for forty-odd years, that we know, for instance, that in times of severe scarcity, Pariah families would sometimes be forced to subsist entirely on a form of cactus that was normally fed only to cattle. Goudie knew this because the bright red seeds of the cactus remained undigested and were visible in the shit that Goudie painstakingly inspected in order to assess the extent of his congregation’s distress.27 Despite the richness of mission archives and the important contrapuntal role they can play with respect to other kinds of source material, including official records, south Asianist historians whose concern is servitude and agrarian labor in south India (and elsewhere on the subcontinent) have largely overlooked the writings of these most patient documentary observers of nineteenth-century laboring lives.28 Meanwhile,

I N T R O D U C T I O N   11

historians of religion have thus far asked of them a rather limited number of questions.29 Their uses of mission materials remain closely linked to the conscious preoccupations of missionaries themselves: conversion and the production of religious identity are the most favored themes of recent writings on Christian mission activity in colonial south Asia.30 While this has produced ever more sophisticated research on the history of religion in south Asia, and on forms of translation across religions, it confines missions and their activity to the purview of the religious in a manner that ironically accords very much with prevailing currents of nineteenthcentury missiology itself. One of the most important conceptual divisions missionaries helped to evolve and popularize in colonial India was that between the realm of religion and all others, including the “civil” and the “economic.” To put this slightly differently, missionaries inaugurated a form of thinking that has, ironically, penetrated the very practice of contemporary historiography; state and other archives are consulted by historians of “secular” phenomena, while missionary writings, by and large, are employed to address religious questions. The distinction so critical to the history of the Pariahs—the one between their spiritual degradation and their material condition—which missionaries developed in ways this book will explain, is now thoroughly naturalized in the discourses of both the postcolonial state and academic historiography. This book focuses neither on the topics traditional to missionary histories nor on issues such as the religious identity of converts and the relations among missionary societies. Instead it discovers in missionary archives—scattered in cities and small towns in south India, in Scotland, England, and New Jersey—the minutiae of laboring life in late nineteenth-century Madras. In the volumes of annual reports and sheaf upon sheaf of letters penned by these scrupulous writers lies a record of how Pariahs, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, incrementally transformed their own relations with local governance, that series of concatenated relations of domination that inextricably linked agrarian labor regimes and the central bureaus of the state proper. By examining the production of new kinds of relations between the lowest strata of society and local state machineries—relations we can trace in great detail in mission archives but hardly at all in those of the colonial state—we may begin to understand how and why the Pariah Problem emerged as it did.

12  I N T R O D U C T I O N

The Caste–State Nexus and the Official Record The official archive’s numerous inconsistencies, outright contradictions, differences of opinion, misunderstandings, and so on, are impossible to ignore. Careful readers of state archives have never been under the illusion that the state is a unitary phenomenon. And yet, the discrepant and heterogeneous character of the archive is not merely random. Beyond the inevitable randomness of any complex endeavor, it is possible to discern patterns even within inconsistency. By reading the complex and internally discrepant state archive side by side with the picture of rural life derived from mission sources, new sense can be made of the former. In this way it becomes possible to discern in the records of the colonial state something more than simple instances of inconsistency caused by the bureaucrat’s fabled incompetence, or the sheer magnitude of the state apparatus. A brief example will suffice to illustrate this point. In 1888, the subcollector of Chingleput District in the Madras Presidency, C. M. Mullaly, came upon the fact that in village after village landlords listed themselves in village registers as the owners of the sites where Pariah laborers lived. This claim of ownership was flatly illegal; the colonial state had long asserted its own jurisdiction over house sites. Yet control over those sites was prized by landlords, because it allowed labor contumacy to be met by threats of eviction. When Mullaly set about to correct village registers in accordance with official policy, however, he was severely upbraided by his superiors and forced to desist. An attempt to follow the letter of policy, that is to say, was prohibited outright. No one explained to Mullaly what rule he had breached in attempting to implement policy; we must assume therefore that there were tacit rules of governance that experienced officers followed. But we do know that his actions immediately elicited the bitter protests of landlords. The moments when tacit rules were unwittingly broken thus provide an opportunity to map the widely divergent kinds of relations official agents had with different subpopulations and, in particular, with landed castes. Here, we see higher state officials instructing the upstart Mullaly on which rules he ought to follow and which to flout, based on how the implementation of policy impinged on high-caste landlords. Through slippages and disagreements recorded in the archive, as well the overwhelming

I N T R O D U C T I O N   13

evidence in mission writings of what effects consistent “slips” could have on laborers, we can trace precisely how and where the state’s operation critically differed from the letter of official policy. Local caste power was continuous with that of the state in the governance of laboring populations. That is to say, for Pariahs, the state appeared, for all practical purposes, unitary. I call this pragmatic unity the caste–state nexus. The series of relations that obtained among such persons as Pariahs’ employers and other village landlords, munsifs, tahsildars, and collectors—although internally complex and often conflictual— were, in relation to Pariahs themselves, united in their effects. As this book will show, what Timothy Mitchell has called the “state effect”—the manner in which the state, although disjointed and heterogeneous, nevertheless takes on the appearance of unity—varies according to the social location of those subjected to its power.31 Thus, although the state and landed taxpayers were, from one perspective, in conflict, from the perspective of the Pariah they were unified. South Asianist historians such as Robert E. Frykenberg observed long ago that the relations of officials to nonstate agents in colonial India, at the village level, were so interdependent as to make state projects impossible to pursue without the explicit consent and cooperation of local notables.32 While he and others have shown how native elites deployed new state practices and apparatuses to their own advantage, my own focus is on how the operations of the state, whether carried to effect by officials or nonofficials, shaped the lives of the most subordinated elements of native society. Frykenberg’s valuable insight, moreover, was couched in an understanding of the state—one that views it as unified and clearly distinguishable in its functions from the society it governs— that reflects the state’s own ideological self-representation rather than an account of its operation. One of my key arguments is that the very notion of a state–society relation obscures the fact that society is itself crosscut by antagonistic difference and that social elites had particular links to state institutions in ways that systematically worked to control labor.33 In a heated debate over state schemes for Pariah welfare that concerned this very issue of landlord claims over Pariah house sites (and some thirty years after Mullaly had his wrist slapped), one discountenanced landlord, in sheer disbelief that state agents might disagree with his manner of exercising authority over his laborers, exclaimed, “Government and mirasidars [landlords] are co-owners of property.”34 This might 14  I N T R O D U C T I O N

be a puzzling remark were it not for the kinds of records we have been discussing; in this explicit declaration is a statement of the pervasiveness and durability of the caste–state nexus, whose most profound effects redounded on Pariah laborers. This nexus comes into relief through the juxtaposition of state records with those of missions that trod the same ground; by bridging the division between secular and religious record keeping that has until now largely been preserved, it becomes possible to illuminate how both diverse forms of authority worked in hitherto unremarked, close, if sometimes teeth-gritting harmony, to limit, redirect, and safely channel the Pariah Problem.35

Chapter Outline: Containing the Problem The book’s first chapter begins in northern Madras in the late 1890s, with an account of those quotidian forms of subjugation and tacit understandings that defined agrarian labor relations for Madras’s Pariahs. In so doing, it seeks to foreground two features of unfreedom and landlessness in colonial India. In conditions of relative land surplus and frequent labor shortage, control of servile labor was the critical determinant of productive capacity until at least the end of the nineteenth century. The entire system of land tenure and the property regimes of the landed castes was built around the permanent subordination of the landless and, in many cases, the permanent attachment of laboring families to particular parcels of land. Second, I show that being a landless laborer and being a Pariah were essentially, and not accidentally, linked. “Ritual” forms of degradation, the fixing of grain payments, casual slurs, and corporal punishment all functioned together in tense synchronicity, producing and reproducing the labor regime. Likewise, to be a mirasidar, a landed elite, was also to be of high caste. The chapter then shows how new forms of governmental regulation in the latter half of the nineteenth century, intended to curb the rights of mirasidars, were offset by other forms of regulation that indirectly entrenched aspects of the unfree labor regime that silently prevailed in the Tamil countryside, despite the legal abolition of slavery. In the second chapter, I turn to Protestant missionaries and their role in shaping how Pariahs would be received by the colonial state. Beginning in the 1870s, Madras’s Pariahs took Protestant missions by storm, not simply asking but indeed demanding to be converted. The missionary I N T R O D U C T I O N   15

world exploded with discourse on the Pariah, which took place against a wider attempt by missionaries to contend theoretically and practically with caste difference in the church. Scholarly writings are virtually unanimous in depicting caste and Christianity as antithetical and missionaries themselves as staunch opponents of caste and as promoters of an egalitarian ideology, with the most significant exception being the recent work of anthropologist David Mosse.36 I argue that this standard picture of Protestant missionary opposition to caste is largely overdrawn and, moreover, simply mistaken in treating opposition to caste as tantamount to a wholesale plea for social equality.37 Missionaries in fact only wished to oppose what they perceived as the genuinely pernicious face of caste, its “religious” aspect, comprising meaningless ritual, irrational fears of contagion, and the cruelty those beliefs elicited. Opposition to those features of caste was perfectly compatible, however, with a firm commitment on their part to what they viewed as caste’s legitimate “civil” aspect, namely social differentiation, and they encouraged the maintenance of “natural hierarchies” between landed castes and laborers.38 Missionaries’ profound conceptual innovation then was to redefine caste as essentially a matter of religion and in principle, distinct from labor and political economy.39 The third chapter analyzes the concrete effects of Pariahs’ alliances with missionaries in the countryside and thereby reveals key features of the labor relations that would shape the future of the Pariah Problem. Mission records disclose that—quite at odds with the state’s representation of “gentle” relations between Pariahs and their employers—Pariahs’ lives were characterized by unremitting conflict and harassment, a fact to which later Dalit writers would attest. Pariahs were able, in spite of missionaries’ social conservatism, to transform critical aspects of contests with village elites; they could, for instance, make the fullest use of the fact that missionaries ensured Pariahs were treated fairly at the local levels of the state’s administrative structure. In alliance with missionaries, then, Pariahs wrought the transformation of their villages from theaters of oppression to sites of struggle. Finally, the missionary presence would eventually force inconvenient facts about rural bondage to the reluctant attention of British officials. The moment that marks the definitive emergence of the Pariah as a problem for the state is surely the release in 1892 of Collector J.  H.  A. Tremenheere’s “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput.” The fourth chapter charts the series of administrative accidents that led to that document 16  I N T R O D U C T I O N

and the ways in which missionaries intervened at key moments to channel the state in particular directions. Most importantly, this chapter illustrates a repertoire of evasion that would be rehearsed again and again. Tremenheere’s findings were derided as “sensational,” and the specificity of Dalit subordination was altogether denied. In so doing, officials laid the groundwork for a whole series of equivocations that would, as with missionary discourse, make caste a matter of religion alone, inaugurating the long project of dividing religion and political economy. Meanwhile, tacit codes of state practice—often proceeding directly against state policy, which I discern by reading slippages in the official archive—worked in concert with mirasidars and other landed elites to ensure labor control. These tacit forms of cooperation and institutional practice represent the caste–state nexus. Missionaries pioneered the view that Pariahness and religion were essentially linked. In the fifth chapter I train my sights on how this conceptual twinning entered the language of administration with far-reaching consequences in the late 1890s. The efforts of a few missionaries to help Pariahs were dashed on the shoals of religious neutrality, the promise to avoid interference in native religious sensibilities promulgated by Queen Victoria in 1858 in the wake of the 1857 rebellion. In a series of village-level conflicts between Pariahs and their caste masters, in some of which missionaries too were implicated, the meaning and practical implications of neutrality itself were transformed. It was at this time that native elites began to portray a whole range of caste prerogatives, including traditional techniques for perpetuating Pariahs in their servitude, as matters of inalienable religious right. The missionary consensus on the condition of the Pariah—namely, its construal as essentially a religious matter—entered the vocabulary and practices of colonial administration, as well as the language of rural caste elites. Although notionally Pariahs’ protectors, missionaries themselves would thus provide landlords with the conceptual vocabulary to effectively oppose missionary efforts to help the Pariah. At the same time, for practical purposes, officials allowed elites to understand the public spaces and public resources allotted to the village as the preserve of caste people alone. The sixth chapter traces the effects of Britain’s “new liberalism” on the Pariah Problem in Madras. New liberalism, a welfarist ideology that emerged in Britain purporting to resolve a growing number of social questions such as poverty, shaped state policy in the first decade of the twentieth century.40 In colonial Madras, for the first time, the state came I N T R O D U C T I O N   17

to regard the improvement of Panchamas (as Pariahs became known by this time) as not simply a mark of its benevolence but as its own duty, echoing the new liberalism of the metropole.41 Where missionaries and state officials had hitherto come to share only conceptions about Pariahness, now, with the inauguration of welfarism, colonial state officials used missionaries to provide expertise, resources, and pastoral care to test schemes for Panchamas’ improvement. Most important of these was the settlement of Panchamas as tenants on mission-managed farms. While the scale of the scheme was small, it provoked considerable outrage, and an elite discourse protesting the alleged “inauthenticity” of Panchama conversions to Christianity erupted in the public sphere. Prior to this moment no one had been concerned about the religion of Panchamas, let alone what motives guided it. Yet today concerned citizens continue to worry that Dalits are “induced” to convert by wily missionaries’ promises of material betterment. The next phase in the ongoing story of the evasion of the Pariah Problem concerns the development of a policy to grant Panchamas ownership over their house sites, as I describe in chapter 7. House sites, throughout the history of the Pariah Problem, had been matters of contest. Masters claimed to own these sites and threatened laborers with eviction for any sign of insubordination; this was an utterly routine form of intimidation. Yet officials, as they had in the days when slavery was still legal, continued to insist that relations between masters and servants were gentle and mutually beneficial. This chapter shows how insistently evidence to the contrary obtruded into the official archive, corroborating mission records. Moreover, the protests against these state measures, coming not only from employers of Panchama labor but from officials both Indian and British as well, reveal the plasticity and continued utility of the trope, pioneered by British India hands seeking to stave off abolition, that Indian servitude was benign and that laborers, unless mischievously influenced by outside agitators, were perfectly content. Chapter 8 follows the violence that erupted when the house-site scheme, against objections, was implemented in parts of Tanjore District, where a government report had confirmed that masters’ use of house sites to threaten laborers was widespread. Government assured landlords that all they were doing was making laborers more “invested” in their homesteads and therefore (even) less likely to run away. Mirasidars were unconvinced, and state attempts to put the scheme into practice met 18  I N T R O D U C T I O N

with attacks on Dalits and repeated warnings from mirasidars to government that intervention had best not be too intrusive or social upheaval would result. Dalits themselves, meanwhile, in analyzing the conflicts surrounding the house-site issue, refused the idea that caste was a matter of ritual alone and denied that their own poverty was anything but the direct result of the concerted actions of caste folk. But although officials continued to insist that the economic rationalization of agricultural labor regimes was essential to the “public good,” which was now redefined to include the Panchama, they were unwilling to push too hard against the intransigence of native elites. Reforms were thus limited in practice. However, contrary to the expectations of both native elites and British officials, who continued to portray Dalits as content with traditional arrangements, Dalits seized on every possibility provided them to escape the yoke of hereditary bondage. The ninth and final chapter charts how state intervention was transformed as the new system of devolution in governance, dyarchy, was put in place. Beginning in 1918, Dalit representatives entered Madras’s Legislative Council—the first fruits of a governmental design to call upon this subpopulation of Indians to learn to “represent themselves.” Their effort to do so—often by simply insisting that the ameliorative schemes outlined in the previous chapters be properly enacted—was evaded by the invocation of the social. Presented as the salvation of Dalits’ ills by native elites of all political stripes, the idea of a united national social, a realm outside politics and legitimate governmental interference, was now increasingly embraced by British state officialdom as well; social reform was, in the language of the day, a “domestic, not imperial” matter. Yet the concerted and unanimous resistance with which Dalit political claims were met shows clearly that the social was not an organic whole but was constituted by a fundamental and profoundly antagonistic division. Unique evidence of this division is preserved in the colonial archive itself—principally in Tamil petitions from ordinary Dalits who sought out their representatives from across the Presidency—but was never acknowledged by officers of the state or in the discourse of the (nonDalit) native public sphere. In short, new liberal welfarist ideologies had previously seemed to demand state intervention in Pariah welfare. But by the late 1910s and 1920s, responsibility for the social was devolved onto natives by the colonial state, considered to be a matter for natives to work out among themselves. I N T R O D U C T I O N   19

Society, moreover, was a temperamental beast: Dalit politicians were told repeatedly that while society could and would improve itself, rushing the process would prove catastrophic.42 The notion of an autonomous social that cannot and should not be pushed too fast into change or reform continues to inform public discourse in India today and implicitly to justify the nonenforcement of laws and protections for Dalits that were enshrined in the Indian Constitution by its principal author, the great civil-rights leader B. R. Ambedkar.43 The concluding chapter summarizes this and other implications of the book for the present day.

Names and Nomenclators: On “Dalit” and Related Usages Virtually every article or book written on Dalits in the past couple of decades registers their authors’ discomfort with the lack of an entirely suitable term for these populations. As Simon Charsley puts this in his historical account of the term “untouchable,” a writer’s preferred term is interpreted as a sign of his or her “moral and political allegiance. . . . The opposition of perspectives is such that taking sides is almost unavoidable.”44 Indeed. A requisite first step might therefore be to ask on what basis these opposing perspectives claim authority and how in turn their authority is impugned. There are at least three kinds of difficulties to which a term identifying a subpopulation may give rise, and the identification of each depends on a distinct justificatory criterion. Consider “Dalit.” Some scholars have observed, quite rightly, that only a minority among these populations self-identify as Dalit.45 Wishing to conform to the usage of their informants, these scholars adduce what I will call the criterion of self-designation. But a problem arises because there is no single term used by all Dalits. To refer to the all-India category, self-designation is of no help. Therefore some have chosen “untouchable;” although it too is very rarely a self-designation, more than one scholar has justified its use by avowing that it captures the existential plight of the persons so described more evocatively than any other.46 Yet Dalit does happen to be the only term chosen by at least some members of these groups to refer to themselves as an India-wide population, and it is now wellestablished in scholarly usage.

20  I N T R O D U C T I O N

A second difficulty is pointed out by historians, who will note that although it is widely considered by academics and English-language media persons to be most politic today, Dalit is anachronistic when speaking of colonial India; this is the criterion of historical propriety. Names that correspond to specific jātis are very frequently considered by a section of those to whom they refer to be derogatory (Pariah, for instance). Alternatively, as with the Gandhian moniker Harijan, a name loudly announces its allegiance to a specific politics. But these names are nevertheless used, typically with apologies, in order to preserve historical propriety, and their use is further justified as simply a matter of efficiency: the terms and spellings that are most frequently found in sources are used to avoid confusion. A third difficulty is often introduced under the rubric of referential rigor, and it has been most recently articulated by Charsley, specifically in order to persuade scholars to desist entirely from the use of any labels purporting to describe a pan-Indian reality, including untouchable (the historical emergence of which concept he traces) and, eo ipso, Dalit.47 Charsley argues that untouchable ought not be used, because it fails to refer to a group that shares any essential characteristics. But this is not true. The essential characteristic that all those within this group share is that of belonging to castes which, in their own local caste order, fill an identical structural role—that of the morally inferior outsider. The members of such castes are part of a recognized pan-Indian category of person referred to by different names in different regions, as well as by various pan-Indian terms (panchama, avarna, chandala), all of which are treated by native speakers as interchangeable.48 Moreover, a century of practices of mobilization and technologies of rule premised on an allIndia category have imbued it with altogether real political force. The above typology of criteria should suffice to illustrate that the naming of Dalits—in scholarly work as much as in the annals of administration—is embedded in normative expectations about what names should do. These norms are themselves rarely made explicit, let alone debated, and it is variance in these norms that has resulted in the bewildering array of alleged problems to which these names give rise; the problem is less with the names themselves than with competing conceptions of what we use names for. In this book, therefore, I want to make explicit my own expectations at the outset. I use particular names and

I N T R O D U C T I O N   21

analyze their emergence not in order to reveal the self-consciousness of the groups in question, though that may sometimes come through, nor simply to be as efficient in my reference to my sources as possible. Rather it is a central argument of this book that the contexts in which particular terms emerge, are given content, and take hold are critical to understanding what they authorize administratively, politically, and socially. Thus, when speaking in my own voice I generally use “Dalit,” whereas when discussing a particular policy or style of thinking, I often use the terminology of those whose practices or ideas are under consideration. More telling than simple names themselves are the various concepts that are thought to attach to them: whether or not one refers to Dalits as Pariahs, for example, indicates whether their degradation is being theorized as following from their ritual rank within Hinduism (as those who deployed Pariah supposed) or from some more complex configuration of political-economic and cultural forces (as many Dalit activists today would assert). And these conceptual differences have concrete practical entailments, determining the reasons and actions of social actors: It is these conceptual consequences that I wish to capture. It might be useful to recall the original function of the nomenclator. A nomenclator is today used generically to refer to someone who names, but in Roman history the nomenclator was a slave who served his master by remembering names, whispering them in his master’s ear when someone approached so that his master might smoothly offer a greeting and perhaps solicit the visitor’s vote in an upcoming election to public office. The name’s purpose was inseparable from the social-political function of the nomenclator: it was not called upon to refer accurately, to be true to historical provenance, nor to divulge the named person’s sense of himself. Its purpose was to facilitate effective (in this case political) action. In like fashion, this book will trace the emergence and transformation of “Pariah,” where the latter and its successors, such as “Panchama,” “depressed classes,” and “Adi-Dravida,” are not treated as names that can be judged for accuracy in isolation. Rather I will describe their force as concepts whose deployment in a political-administrative field would have consequences for the people to whom it referred, for the style of governing it inaugurated, and not least, for the forms of public life— where well-meaning concern for Dalits coexists with rising resentment and violence—modern Indians today take for granted.49

22  I N T R O D U C T I O N

Chapter 1 L AND TENURE OR L ABOR CONTROL? The Agrarian Mise-en-Scène

Our story of the Pariah Problem must begin as it were, before the beginning, when Pariahs were not yet a problem, but were quite simply slaves, and known as such in official and native sources alike. As the antislavery movement gathered steam in Britain, however, and especially when abolitionists began to push in the 1830s for the banning of not just the slave trade but of all forms of slavery throughout the British Empire, including in India, official discourse in the subcontinent rapidly underwent a process of self-censorship.1 Slavery proceeded more or less as before—certainly legal abolition had no discernable effect on the nature or extent of agrestic slavery—so as to allow landlords to continue to pay high taxes, which in turn depended on the unfree labor of Pariahs. Yet British officials were pressed to maintain appearances in the face of widespread abolitionism. The conditions of life and labor of slaves were therefore discussed hardly at all. When they were, and where previously the term “slavery” would have been used without qualification and would continue to be used interchangeably with Dalit caste names such as Paraiyar and Pallar in native sources well into the twentieth century, British officers rapidly replaced “slave” with such euphemistic terms as “agrestic servant,” “laborer,” or the anodyne technical designation adscripti glebae (“attached to the soil”), terms that occlude both the severity of servitude

as well as its caste character.2 In short, the state’s one-pointed interest in the collection of land revenue meant not only that slavery would be left unchanged by colonial rulers, its management relegated entirely to native landlords, but also that that administrative discourse on agrarian change, the agrarian economy, and agrarian relations was structured entirely around the concepts of landownership and land-related categories. Yet it is primarily from these distorted sources, in conjunction with those from mission archives that chapters 2 and 3 will examine, that we must carefully extract a picture of servitude so as to understand the context from which the Pariah emerged as a problem. While there are indeed important studies of landless labor servitude in the historiographic literature on agrarian society in the various phases of colonial rule in southern India, by far the greater part of it has focused on the nature of “land tenure,” shaped no doubt by the preponderance of official sources on this question.3 This attention to land control, as well as to closely related issues such as assessment and taxation, has produced useful insights into the complicated and shifting relationship between the colonial state and the particular strata of society in which the latter were most interested, namely, landowners.4 But the relative paucity of scholarship on laborers is misleading with respect to the political economy of the region. Given the prevailing land surplus in the Tamil south that persisted through the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the fact that the most profitable crops—primarily rice and, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, cash crops such as cotton5—were highly labor intensive, control over labor was not merely an adjunct to but fundamentally determined the productive capacity of land (a position perhaps challenged only by irrigation).6 Laborers were therefore central to the functioning of the precolonial agrarian economy in southern India, as in much of the subcontinent.7 It is therefore no surprise that rights to laborers were frequently included when valuable land was sold. It is essential, then, to avoid analytically disaggregating south Indian practices of land control from those of labor subordination, treating tenurial arrangements and labor regimes as conceptually distinct. On the contrary, as I will show, they were in fact components of a unified arrangement by which the rural political economy was bound.8 If official sources are relatively silent on the lowest strata of rural society, they also deployed caste-neutral universal economic categories 24  L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?

for analyzing rural relations. In important respects, as this chapter will show, these obscure the caste character and specific intercaste relations that decisively shaped agrarian life, and especially agrarian servitude, in nineteenth-century Madras. Caste position, servitude, and landownership, I will argue, are highly misleading labels when analytically separated, as both colonial officials and recent historians have done. This chapter will tease out, then, from the distorting categorial framework of official sources, a snapshot of the political–economic relations in the countryside in the decades immediately preceding the discursive emergence of the Pariah as a problem in the early 1890s. We will finally consider how new legislation that targeted the agrarian economy, although not explicitly trained on Pariahs themselves, nevertheless entrenched servitude in particular ways and would then come to be problematized when the Pariah first appeared as an object for state intervention in 1892.

Sharing the Village: Mirasidarship, Tenancy, and Servitude Those inhabitants who lived primarily by agriculture in the villages of Tamil southern India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were divided by administrators into three broad strata that reflect the state’s preoccupation with landholding: landowners, tenant farmers, and laborers. Mirasidars (Tamil, kāniyāṭcikkārars) comprised the first group, the landowners, in a large part of the presidency, prevailing in the districts of North Arcot, South Arcot, Chingleput, Tinnevelly, Trichinopoly, Ramnad, and Tanjore (see Figure 1.1).9 These men controlled the village through the allotment of “shares” (Tamil, paṅku), and their system of shareholding became known as mirasi, after mirās, “right”; each share was a right not just to the cultivable lands on which mirasidars had to pay assessment to the state but to the entire produce and resources of the village, which included its servile castes.10 To be a mirasidar, therefore, was to enjoy a large cache of privileges; a typical list, translated and reproduced here, includes the specific mention of laboring Pariahs who would serve the landowner: The soil of the village, the fields, the sources of irrigation [lit. nīr, “water”], backyards, orchards, large wells, small wells, rights of inheritance and tax-free lands following therefrom, fees from oil pressers L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   25

FIGURE 1.1 Madras, c. 1890. Key to Districts: (1) Ganjam; (2) Vizagapatnam; (3) Godavery; (4) Guntur; (5) Kurnool; (6) Kistna; (7) Bellary; (8) Anantapur; (9) Cuddapah; (10) Nellore; (11) Chittoor; (12) Chingleput; (13) North Arcot; (14) Salem; (15) South Arcot; (16) Trichinopoly; (17) Tanjore; (18) Ramnad; (19) Tinnevelly; (20) Madura; (21) Coimbatore; (22) Nilgiris; (23) Malabar; (24) South Kanara. Madras City was also classed as a district. Source: David Arnold, “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India 1918,” Past and Present 84 (Aug 1979): 113. (Reproduced with permission from Oxford University Press.)

and weavers, the Paraiyar settlement [paṟaccēri] as well as Paraiyars in the outlying areas . . . and all other rights [such as special fees from tenants].11

In short, the form of landholding predominant in the Tamil-speaking regions was simultaneously a system for allocating resources and parceling out control over hereditarily unfree laborers. Mirasi shares could be sold, mortgaged, or gifted, but only with the approval of other mirasidars; ownership was therefore at least partially collective. The relationship with supra-village authority was also collective and vested solely in mirasidars—the state’s share of the village crop, or mēlvāram, was settled with the body of mirasidars as a whole. The responsibilities for the cultivation of any particular plot would, in a given year, accrue to a specific mirasidar and his family, but the sanction of the entire community would be upon him were he to fail to carry them out successfully. The community of mirasidars also provided security in the face of unforeseen disasters, because other mirasidars could cover a defaulter’s share of the tax. In any given village, mirasidars were frequently all of the same caste, and as a whole, they primarily belonged to high-ranking castes. Indeed, in a context in which subcaste names were highly localized and in which no single consistent “system” of castes could make sense of local variations, to own land was in fact definitive of high caste status. That is to say, landownership was not an extrinsic factor that merely correlated with high ritual status. It was determinative of such status.12 The majority of mirasidars were Vellalars, and the second largest group Brahmins; there is not even a single recorded case of an “untouchable” mirasidar.13 And in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tamil Vellalars further consolidated their agrarian supremacy and collective identification by successfully promoting the image of the Vellalar as the paradigmatic cultivating caste and cultivation itself as the noblest of professions and the epitome of Tamil civilization14—notwithstanding the irony that as mirasidars who commanded the labor of others, neither Vellalars nor Brahmins ever touched the plough.15 The irony mirrored that perpetuated by the state’s various revenue settlements, which were made with mirasidars and other powerful villagers, and yet whose ideological motto was “a settlement with the direct cultivator” that would make the state landlord. L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   27

Tenants were the most diverse subgroup of agriculturists. A principal division Tamils themselves made among them was between uḷkuṭis (lit. “in-dwellers”) and puṟakuṭis (lit. “out-dwellers”). These terms do not, as might be expected from their literal meanings, mark more and less permanent village residents, although this is how most historians have hitherto understood these terms, no doubt deriving their view from the influential early nineteenth-century official F.  W. Ellis.16 Rather, these were marks of rank in ownership, for the uḷkuṭi had a permanent, heritable, right of cultivation, whereas the puṟakuṭi’s rights were renewed annually. Thus, puṟakuṭis were discursively construed as outsiders whatever the actual length of their residence in the village, which in many cases could stretch back for generations. A rare lucky Pariah who had made some money, say, in a brick factory, might return home to become a tenant farmer, but his caste superiors would only allow him to become a puṟakuṭi. He was not permitted to enjoy the status of an uḷkuṭi and was often made to pay a higher percentage of produce to the landlord than caste tenants.17 Landless agricultural servants comprised two major categories in the period this study covers: the paṭiyāḷ and the paṇṇaiyāḷ. The former was paid a daily wage in kind by the paṭi (a grain measure of approximately 100 cubic centimeters), while the latter, often glossed in English as the “attached farm [paṇṇai] servant” was paid a subsistence involving both cash payments or “gifts,” as well as shares of grain. By the early decades of the twentieth century, it appears that whatever differences might have existed between the two categories became fully blurred, because officials who displayed considerable expertise on laborers otherwise used the terms interchangeably. Laborers were, almost to a number, from the “untouchable” castes in the Tamil regions. In native usage, there was a practical equivalence and interchangeability between specific caste terms, such as Pallar and Paraiyar, and terms for the types of agrestic servants, such as paṭiyāḷ and paṇṇaiyāḷ mentioned above, who could also be called āḷ (lit. “man,” but also “slave,” “worker” or “subject”) or aṭimaiyāḷ, meaning, simply, “slave.”18 Like mirasidarship, therefore, landless agrarian servitude had an indelible caste character.19 As we have seen, mirasi shares sold Pariahs, not laborers who also “happened to be” Pariahs.20 Labor relations, that is, admit of no abstract separation between caste and class: to be a Pariah was to be a laboring servant, and to be a mirasidar was to be of high caste. 28  L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?

The Pariah laborer’s subordination was principally maintained by his landlessness and was frequently formalized by what have often been labeled “debt bonds.” These bonds are better understood, however, as service agreements, whereby a token sum of money received from the landlord sealed a laborer’s promise to work; a written bond, signed by the laborer, added the proviso that should the laborer wish to terminate the agreement the money was to be returned. To call this money a “loan” is misleading, because repayment was not part of the design. The Pariah’s allotment of grain and occasional cash were not such as to allow him, under normal circumstances, to accumulate the savings necessary to repay the loan. As observers in the 1880s recorded, Pariahs appeared to be on the very edge of survival.21 In practice, moreover, these agreements would bind families of laborers to landlords for generations: copies of these bonds reproduced in contemporary official sources reveal their hereditary nature was frequently made explicit, although this was not required for them to function as such.22 The lower law courts were notoriously arenas in which Pariahs’ success against their masters was all but impossible, so the written agreement was indeed a deterrent. But it was only another of the many quotidian obstacles (detailed later in the chapter) that confronted laborers tempted to abscond, rather than a form of loan contract that had binding power in its own right.23 The language of “debt” and “contract” was, however, employed without qualification by missionaries and state officials alike, making for an illfitting description of Pariahs’ relations with their landed caste overlords and unwittingly contributing to the impression, shared by some state officials as well as some modern historians, that these so-called loans were the very source of bondage. The persistence of bondage did not depend on contracts any more than it depended on courts. More common and highly effective tools were in place, such as landowners’ monopoly on the means of production, Pariahs’ lack of alternative employment, and violent disciplining. It is interesting, moreover, that native usage was just as misleading as the etic terminology of debts and contracts. The contemporary Tamil term for the bond was āḷ-aṭaimāṉam, whose literal translation, “man-mortgage,” however grim, was in fact euphemistic. A man’s labor was “mortgaged,” but the mortgage depended on a form of “security” on which foreclosure was impossible, even at death, because the laborer’s heirs had to continue to repay the debt by themselves becoming mortgaged. If this is a mortgage, therefore, it is not in fact a man who L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   29

is mortgaged but his entire line of descendants; as a class of mortgage (aṭaimāṉam), therefore, the man-mortgage was utterly unique. Landlords required laborers to work throughout the year at whatever agricultural tasks they commanded. No slackness was condoned, and efficiency was ensured corporally: as one Tamil proverb has it, “A Paraiya needs a beating [with a stick] twice his size.”24 Moreover, because mirasidars were understood to be the owners of both the lands on which laborers dwelt as well as the small subsistence plots they tended, if the master became displeased with him, a laborer could lose not only employment but his homestead and food crops as well. Given the Pariah’s hand-tomouth existence, this was a brutal effective sanction. The master’s presence in laborers’ lives, furthermore, was by no means limited to the supervision of work. Being a Pariah laborer came with a host of stipulations concerning dress, mobility, and access to resources: untouchable laborers were forbidden the use of village wells, main thoroughfares, and clothing or accessories that conveyed status, such as slippers and umbrellas. The master was also integral to the reproduction of laborers’ families, for he sponsored weddings and other major life cycle rituals. Indeed, in many cases, the acceptance of the landlord’s patronage for the wedding expenses of the tied laborer’s son simultaneously consecrated both the marriage and the formal induction of the son into the labor relation.25 In addition, women and children were usually also employed by the master, although, unlike the male laborers, they could seek employment elsewhere without the master’s permission. But in most cases alternative sources of employment were not widely available.26 The tied laborer’s son was thus almost invariably tied to the master as well.27 In addition to the master’s intimate involvement in the laborer’s domestic life, he and his fellow landlords were also crucially involved in the settlement of disputes between laborers. Thus, in districts such as Chingleput, where laborers were primarily from the Pariah caste, the Pariah headman of a particular village had authority to determine the fate of Pariah orphans, but the resolution of disputes—and expiation or punishment for wrongdoings—was often in the hands of the landlords.28 Edgar Thurston’s Ethnographic Notes on Southern India records some of the corporal punishments village councils inflicted, even “for cases of a trivial nature such as abusive language.”29 Eligibility for certain forms of punishment, furthermore, was specific to “untouchable” laboring castes. Putting in stocks was used only on those castes, a “tradition” in which the 30  L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?

colonial legal apparatus occasionally participated by adjudicating which castes might thus legally be punished.30 And there is evidence that caste superiors considered it their right to punish laborers’ moral violations in addition to their criminal wrongdoings. As late as 1923, Tamil Dalit activists petitioned the state to put a stop to the fines violently imposed upon them by a character known as the “Desayi Chetti,” who traveled from village to village demanding payment from Pariahs to compensate for alleged moral misdemeanors.31 Mode of domination by caste folk thus extended beyond work alone, to encompass family, morality, and everyday practices of comportment. Finally, it must be emphasized that the social hiatus between Pariah laborers and all others was not only rigorously policed but was inscribed into the geography of the village itself. Thus they lived in enforced segregation in settlements known as cēris, and these paṟa- (Paraiyar) or paḷḷa- (Pallar) cēris were set some distance apart from the main village, as they still are today. The most common Tamil word for settlement or village, ūr, therefore, is segmentary in meaning in a manner that has not hitherto been sufficiently acknowledged by scholars. On the one hand, everyone, Pariahs as much as Brahmins and Vellalars, might be said to belong to an ūr, often glossed today in Indian English as “native place.” Yet ūr can also stand in opposition to the cēri, with the ūr understood as the habitation of caste people alone. “The village” was thus in fact two settlements divided by what we might call the “touchability line.” One measure of the impermeability of this line is vividly illustrated in ordinary language: in the nineteenth century, the term tamiḻaṉ, “Tamilian,” referred exclusively to caste Tamils.32 One could be a Tamil or a Pariah— but not both. And ordinary language expressed not only the difference of Pariahs but their derogation as well—the very term paṟaiya was widely understood as an insult. Given the specificity of the conditions of untouchable laborers delineated above, it is surprising that some historians have posited that there is little to distinguish untouchable landless laborers from tenants. Gyan Prakash, for example, has suggested that the category of the landless laborer be “opened up” to make room for poor tenants, who, in respect of the uncertainty of their tenure and what officials would routinely admit was their penury, might be understood as economically continuous with landless laborers.33 While the suggestion has the virtue of recognizing that the holdings of some kinds of tenants, such as puṟakuṭis, were often L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   31

not economic, and that puṟakuṭis therefore had to hire themselves out as laborers, it obscures caste-specific features of the categories puṟakuṭi and laborer. Most laborers in colonial southern India were untouchables, while most puṟakuṭis were not. And even when they did become sharecropping tenants, as noted above, untouchables were made to pay a higher share of the crop. There is a discontinuity between laborers and laboring tenants, therefore, even in narrowly economistic terms; a fortiori, if one seeks to extend analytic capacity beyond a narrow conception of the economic, the alleged continuity is even less meaningful.34 Likewise, because mirasidars granted garden plots to laborers, Dharma Kumar suggests that laborers were not so different from poor tenants, because they were also, in this respect, “landed.”35 The garden plots were part of laborers’ subsistence, however, not land they worked to earn their subsistence, and to natives this was a critical distinction: tenants were sometimes willing to pay higher shares of produce simply to avoid the loss of status that landlessness connoted.36 Tamil deeds too, by labeling these small plots assigned to laborers “backyards” (kollai/piḻakaṭai), as opposed to “fields” (nilam), confirm that they were viewed as distinct from other cultivable lands. While there is no reason to grant unquestioned epistemic authority to Tamil sources—we have seen the obfuscatory nature of a term such as man-mortgage (āḷ-āṭaimāṉam)—here, the distinction in Tamil usage accords with the tremendous difference between the lives and labor of tenants and untouchable laborers, reflected in their spatial isolation, the shares of produce they had to pay, their unique eligibility for certain forms of discipline, and so on.37 The Pariah laborer, in short, occupied a unique social status central to the functioning of agrarian society, which has either been downplayed by means of arguments positing a continuity between tenants and laborers or effectively ignored in protracted discussions about land at the expense of labor.

“Eradicating” Mirasi Rights; or, The Entrenchment of Servitude With this account of labor and agrarian structure as context, I now wish to examine how mirasi rights and other landholder prerogatives were administered, for certain of these rights and prerogatives would come to have profound effects on the Pariah and would also be explicitly problematized in the earliest official depictions of the Pariah Problem. 32  L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?

As the colonial state sought to extend its control over greater and greater areas of the Madras Presidency and to increase its income by expanding and intensifying agrarian production, the existence of mirasidars, a powerful landholding elite with hitherto virtually unchallenged authority over all aspects of local agriculture, proved to be a long-standing problem of governance. In the process of trying to settle the revenues to ensure a reliable tax base through the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, then, the question of whether to allow mirasidars to retain their mirasi rights, and if so, which ones, was endlessly debated within the colonial administration. While government officials did not at first agree regarding the degree to which these rights should be tampered with, there was nevertheless a growing official consensus that mirasi tenure was inefficient and prohibitive of agricultural expansion. Certainly by 1820, the first year of the governorship of Sir Thomas Munro, an outspoken critic of mirasi tenure, it was widely accepted that mirasi rights needed to be eradicated and that in villages where mirasidari opposition to this was very strong, these rights needed to be curtailed. Over several decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, a series of far-reaching new policies was put into place. We will consider here how the implementation of new legislation on mirasi rights transformed the relations between mirasidars and their landless servants. This is not an entirely straightforward task, because the focus of official debate was always landownership, not labor. Early debates within the administration thus turned on such things as whether current mirasidars were in fact descendants of the “ancient designees” of medieval kings, or mere parvenus—that is, whether the antiquity claimed for the mirasi system was genuine—as well as whether mirasi landholding could count as “property.” For instance, the fact that mirasi shares could be sold, mortgaged, or gifted had led the traditionalist, staunch upholder of mirasi rights and influential administrator, F.  W. Ellis to declare in 1814 that they were indeed a species of “real property.”38 While such an interpretation would serve an argument that mirasi rights ought to be respected and preserved, a view that would fall out of favor as the century progressed, interpreting mirās as fundamentally a matter of land— and not labor or other resources—fit exceptionally well with the company state’s desire to settle lands with permanent titles in order to secure a fixed tax base.39 The focus on land would be shared by those who would call for the complete eradication of mirasi rights. And so it came to be L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   33

that no one, whether advocating more or less interference in the mirasi system, doubted that what was at stake was land. Ellis’s views supporting the preservation of mirās, which he buttressed as well with historical documentation, seemed to be particularly pertinent to the areas around Madras city known as “the Jaghire”—the region in which the Pariah was first portrayed as a problem—and in these areas, settlements were made with mirasidars.40 But by the early decades of the nineteenth century, the most commonly espoused official line was that the mirasi system, although indeed ancient, would have to make way for more efficiently administrable forms of tenure. This was largely due to the opposition to Ellis mounted by Munro. Munro scoffed at Ellis’s historical researches that allegedly proved the long history of the existence of mirasi rights, anticipating by over a century recent historiography on the “invention of tradition” in landed relations in colonial India.41 A predecessor of Munro’s, Alexander Read, had settled a large holding of the company known as the Baramahal (later Salem District) under the system known as ryotwari (an anglicization of the Persian raiyatwari, meaning “according to the cultivator”), in 1792, and this was considered a success. This form of settlement was based on the idea that the state would play landlord to the “actual cultivators” of the soil, without greedy intermediaries collecting taxes and then skimming off the top.42 Entirely ignoring mirasi claims, the state indiscriminately gave titles both to those in the Baramahal who had been tenants and to mirasidars. Settlement in the region was considered profitable and efficient, and it served as a model for the ryotwari settlements that were implemented in other parts of the presidency, where no special considerations were given to mirasi rights.43 While Munro himself saw no reason why ryotwari could not be imposed in the Jaghire, his views were ultimately rejected, in large part because of the powerful resistance of local mirasidars, which lasted an entire century from the 1790s to the 1880s, as Eugene Irschick’s astute analysis of a series of conflict in the region demonstrates. Mirasidars in the Jaghire effectively prevented any wholesale denial of mirasi rights, and colonial officials agreed to the recognition of mirasidars as a special kind of landholder with superior rights over tenants.44 But what this recognition precisely would entail was itself not entirely clear in practice. Initially, it amounted to accepting mirasidars’ claims that they were the sole proprietors of the village and that assignments of wasteland to 34  L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?

nonmirasi cultivators required their prior approval. These claims were soon contested by the government for the checks this put on the rapid expansion of cultivation. A critical turning point for our purposes was the abolition in 1855 of the dittam system.45 Under the dittam system, a mirasidar would enter into his yearly settlement account, and thereby be liable to pay tax on, only those lands he chose to cultivate that year; the rest of his holdings would be considered waste and would remain untaxed. With the abolition of dittam, any land that a mirasidar did not pay assessment on, whether he cultivated it or not, would fall permanently to the state so that it might be assigned to nonmirasi cultivators, who would then acquire titles to it. Thus, at a stroke, not only was the mirasidar’s land itself confiscated but so too was the authority by which he and his fellow mirasidars could decide who would be permitted to cultivate which village lands. The abolition of the dittam system threatened to radically upset the political balance between mirasidars and tenants, which drew tenants, mirasidars, and state officials into a three-way struggle that was to last several decades.46 If a tenant failed to properly cultivate the land, the mirasidars’ holdings would revert to the state. Mirasidars, for their part, attempted to cultivate far more land than they could afford to in order to prevent a permanent diminution of their holdings, often pauperizing themselves in the process and inaugurating the decades-long characterization of the mirasidar as “jealous of outsiders in the village” and as exhibiting a distinct “dog in the manger” attitude.47 And yet, with the right over cultivable wastelands now abolished—the state had already denied mirasidars’ rights over mines, quarries, and forests—enthusiastic officials triumphantly declared the mirasi system to be a hollow shell, “a mere name, a disembodied shade, which need frighten no officer.”48 And this indeed is how the history of the mirasi system is usually understood, namely as a system that, although first supported by traditionalists, was gradually but decisively reduced in scope in the vast majority of the presidency. But this is a premature judgment, especially with respect to Pariah laborers, for although attempts to rationalize the mirasi system in the first half of the nineteenth century did somewhat alter relations between mirasidars and tenants by giving the latter real, if limited, room to maneuver, other forms of legislation promulgated in the same period significantly softened these alleged blows to mirasi rights and greatly increased mirasidars’ hold over the landless. Most significantly, the Court L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   35

of Directors of the East India Company instituted rules in 1841 that gave preference to mirasidars’ applications, or darkhasts, for cultivable land in mirasi areas.49 By the preferential darkhast right, whenever cultivable wasteland in the village was to be sold, the body of mirasidars was, as a whole, granted the right of first refusal; only if no mirasidar expressed an interest in the land could it then be offered to nonmirasidars. Nonmirasidars were also ranked: adjacent landholders, other pattadars (holders of titles), and those willing to buy the entirety rather than only a portion of the available plot were next accorded preference.50 But the first-refusal right granted mirasidars a virtually insurmountable advantage in keeping property within their own ranks. And it was to become, moreover, from the last decade of the nineteenth century, a critical piece both in one strand of the official analysis of Pariah servitude and a terrain of struggle between Pariahs and their masters. The first official statement on Pariahs published in 1892 acknowledged the advantages this right of first refusal gave landed elites; historians of land tenure in southern India, however, have not noticed how the orders of preference in the darkhast rules severely undermined any alleged attempts to dismantle the mirasi system. An assumption underlying the colonial state’s recognition of such things as the preferential darkhast right, which accorded privilege especially to mirasidars and secondarily to other titleholders, was the idea that villagers had to be protected from rapacious “outsiders,” whether nouveaux riches or moneylenders.51 The village, it was supposed, was economically autonomous, and its social harmony therefore required protection. The origins of this particular vision of the village have been identified and analyzed.52 Criticisms of this view have rightly shown that villages in precolonial India were not economically isolated.53 Yet a critical aspect of this view for our purposes has received little attention: How and by whom were determinations made regarding who exactly could count as a village resident proper? Recall that the very term tamiḻaṉ, Tamilian, excluded Pariahs. One prevailing native conception of a village outsider was precisely the Pariah, as well as non-Pariah tenants classed as purakuṭis, out-dwellers. Preferential darkhast rules not only conformed, therefore, to a conception of “ancient village republics” in granting the outsider a decidedly inferior position in comparison with “residents.” They also decisively favored landowners as opposed simply to those who were, in literal physical terms at any rate, residents. In this way, landholders successfully maintained their 36  L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?

monopoly control over lands in the village, against the other village residents who were ideologically defined as outsiders and on whom agrarian production in fact depended. Adding complexity to the issue was the further fact that residence, defined as landownership, was determined by taxpayer rolls. Yet it was common knowledge that absentee landlordism was ubiquitous, with the actual result that nonresident landholders received preference over landless residents under regulations framed in the name of preserving the integrity of the village community.54 The protection of “residents” enshrined in the darkhast rules thus fully undermined landless villagers’ efforts to acquire titles to land in their own villages. And to preserve a monopoly in landownership, which entailed marked advantages in labor subordination, those administratively styled as residents strenuously objected whenever the state made noises about settling outsiders on unoccupied wastelands within village boundaries in order to increase the acreage under cultivation. Thus, landed villagers only reinforced the view that villagers were jealous of the sanctity of the village and that harmony and order in the village depended on its isolation. That the village’s impenetrability was a sacred cow of British administration is well known; that villagers, as they were constituted in regulations, comprised only a fraction of any particular villages’ actual inhabitants, is not. In addition to the preferential darkhast right enjoyed by mirasidars, the alleged blows to the mirasidar class were also softened by mirasidars’ successful claim of special authority over so-called communal lands, or puramboke.55 The Tamil lexicon defines puramboke as land required for camutāya naṉmai, the “welfare of society.” These were the lands reserved for purposes other than agriculture—such as for house sites in both ūr and cēri, threshing, the grazing of animals, water tanks, and so on—as well as “immemorial waste,” lands unfit for cultivation from which, say, firewood might be collected. Control over this category of land would, like preferential darkhast rights, become central to both the discursive form of the Pariah Problem, as well as to protracted struggles between Pariahs and landed elites in the ensuing decades, as we shall see later. The government of Madras had, time and again, asserted that puramboke lands were state property and that although they had been placed at the service of its subjects, the government retained the right to appropriate them should they be required for public purposes. Yet the government revealed a distinct ambivalence with respect to its alleged right of appropriation, and when put to the test, generally deferred to mirasidars’ L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   37

claims against its own. Thus, in 1870, for example, in response to the demands of mirasidars of the village of Vyasarpaudy (now in northern Chennai city) that they be compensated for puramboke village lands that had been put to state purposes, the Madras Board of Revenue observed: Former Boards have held the Government right to dispose absolutely of immemorial waste in Mirassi villages to be paramount. .  .  . But in practice the Government have from time to time, and apparently for many years, recognized claims for compensation . . . for immemorial wasteland taken up for public purposes . . . and apparently Law officers have invariably advised Government to pay compensation rather than litigate cases when referred to for an opinion.56

Whatever its explicit proclamations regarding immemorial waste, the government continued to treat it as the property of mirasidars.

The Caste–State Nexus and the Governance of the Pariah Mirasidars and the colonial state were in most contexts at odds, as Eugene Irschick has decisively shown.57 What I have argued here, however, is that they worked in de facto coordination in order to regulate Pariah lives and labor; I call this de facto coordination the caste–state nexus, and its importance will be further highlighted in subsequent chapters. Beyond what policies of the state alone might tell us, how the state operated is key to recognizing the far-reaching effects of this nexus on Pariah laborers. With respect to puramboke lands, for example, we see that state diktats played second fiddle to nineteenth-century officials’ concerns with what we might call economy, in the dual sense of both fiscality and efficiency. The government was thus advised that it would be cheaper to pay compensation to mirasidars than to take them to court to assert the state’s jurisdiction over puramboke lands, and the government agreed. The colonial state’s concern with economy thus understood is, with respect to effects on Pariahs, of far greater significance than express claims made in policy papers. It is only by noticing where and how policy was violated, often recorded not in the printed documents sent to the metropole but in hastily scrawled notes among lower officials of the court and the Revenue Department, that one may grasp the caste–state nexus. 38  L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?

The importance of caution in assessing the effects of particular pieces of legislation, and of perceiving the operation of the statecraft, is thus a sine qua non if one wishes to understand the colonial state’s late nineteenthcentury engagement with Pariah labor. Another example of potentially misleading legislation is the colonial state’s refusal to recognize laborers as one of the forms of property that could be legitimately specified in mirasi title deeds. This aspect of efforts to “rationalize” mirās has been given considerable weight as an agent of change by historians of bondage.58 But this policy did not in itself transform labor relations. Excluding labor from land titles would only have had a transformative effect on labor relations if these relations had originally depended on legal titles. This is well illustrated by the fact that while settlements legally ignoring mirasidars’ claims to laborers were made between the state and mirasidars in the 1820s, mirasi shares were still sold on the market as late as the 1880s in the old form—namely, with the explicit mention of rights over both untouchable laborers’ settlements as well as over the laborers themselves. Or again, there is the stark fact that mirasidars unselfconsciously referred to Pariah laborers as slaves, aṭimai-āḷ, at least as late as 1918, and in the context of an official inquiry.59 These ought not be understood as vestiges of a recalcitrant slavery that would not die, despite noble policies, but as the result of a form of governance that relied on leaving agrestic slavery largely unchanged. The Pariah was governed—that is, his servitude was maintained long after abolition—by a practical accommodation between high-caste landlords and state officials.

L A N D T E N U R E O R L A B O R C O N T R O L ?   39

Chapter 2 C O N C E P T UA L I Z I N G PA R I A H C O N V E R S I O N Caste, Spirit, Matter, and Penury

A remarkable episode in the social history of rural colonial south India was the abrupt and unexpected “mass conversions” to Christianity beginning in the late 1870s.1 These group accessions, primarily to Protestant Christianity, came almost exclusively from the “untouchable” castes, and their scale was unprecedented. In areas where previously a handful of converts had been hard won by decades of dogged evangelism, Pariahs now came unbidden, by the hundreds, often demanding to be converted, with dramatic effects on the basic lineaments of the lives of rural Pariah laborers and on the operation of the caste–state nexus the previous chapter described. In their turn, missionaries were led to make “the Pariah” a matter of public concern, and their voluminous writings would define the terms through which Pariahs and their servitude were understood by a broad spectrum of the population—and, most importantly, by the state itself, setting in motion a series of official welfare measures whose legacies are still felt today. It is the production and dissemination of these definitive ideas of Pariahness and Pariah conversion that this chapter will examine. To appreciate the transformative effect of the “mass movements” on missionaries, one must understand two aspects of the history of Protestant mission activity in south India. First, prior to the occurrence of mass movements, Protestant missionaries in India had had very little interest

in Pariahs. On the contrary, their focus had been almost entirely on highcaste elites, an interest stemming from the widely held presumption that religious change must begin with those at the top of the social order, whose actions would then naturally be imitated by their social inferiors.2 In keeping with this top-down model was an assumption that religious conviction and conversion were best effected by transformations in belief: thus, great sums of money were spent by missions in educating highcaste boys, an effort that produced whole generations of highly educated, English-speaking elites but only a small handful of converts. Second, Indian missions had come to be regarded as a dismal failure in the missionary world. Indeed, by the 1860s, the editor of the popular Indian missionary magazine, The Harvest Field, admitted, the barrenness of the Mission-field in India forms a subject of complaint, common and to some extent just. . . . [On] one side [there are] large sums of money, years of labour, numberless schemes, valuable lives, and on the other, items of result hardly visible amid surrounding masses of heathenism. . . . All success in Indian missions is Exceptional. Results in the field are not so much to be compared as contrasted with the results of Christian toil in other lands.3

The difficult labors of missionaries frequently met with nothing more than what was described as polite indifference on the part of Indians.4 Or, even after accepting the philosophical merits of the missionary’s position on sin or heaven, a native might simply resort to the Hindu truism, “All the paths are one.” So common was such a response, and so frustrating for missionaries, that one Tamil tract popular among Protestant missions was pointedly entitled “Ellām Oṉṟalla”—“All [Paths] Are Not One.”5 But a most frequent obstacle to missionary success, and the most significant for our purposes, was evident in the mechanical regularity of responses such as this: “What you’re saying is good and all, sir, but becoming a Christian means spoiling caste.”6 Pointing even more precisely at what kept many Hindus away, the Christian Muthiah Pillai reported the routine “denunciation [by Hindus] of Christianity as a Pariah religion (paṟaiyamārkkam) and [of even caste] Christians as Paraiyas” for the fact that they broke with caste practices, consorting intimately (so it was assumed) with Pariah Christians and unclean foreigners.7 C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   41

This state of affairs not only disturbed missionaries—contributing to a deep sense of frustration and compounding the loneliness endemic to mission life—it simultaneously ensured that the European public lost interest in India, because Indian souls were not being won with any regularity.8 Missionaries, in their repeated efforts to justify their work before the home audience, would explain their meager results as being a matter of “preparatory success. . . . [Our] Mission is to be workers for the future.  .  .  . We are doing in India what ‘the Baptist’ did in Judea. He lived not to see the fields ‘white to harvest,’ and crowds flocking to the Messiah.”9 But the public, as missionaries often bitterly remarked, equated success entirely with numbers and had no patience for the slow work of “leavening” that a difficult society like India required, with its millstone of ancient tradition, deeply rooted superstition, and above all, caste scruples. “The English Christian people,” the Wesleyan missionary William Goudie privately complained, “have not that breadth and generosity of intelligence that would enable them to understand the first effects of the Gospel on men of alien creeds and ancient civilization.”10 Missionaries’ bitterness, moreover, stemmed not just from having their good work go unappreciated but from the very real threat this represented to their livelihoods: with the loss of public interest came a precipitous drop in lay contributions to Indian missions. Thus, when the Pariah mass movements began to occur in Wesleyan mission fields around Madras in the 1890s, Wesleyan missionary Mackenzie Cobban “threw his hat in the air,” for their numerically dramatic character might once again spark public enthusiasm for the conversion of India.11 Goudie, for his part, was more blunt about what this meant: if the Christian lay public would show an interest only in numbers, he reasoned, missions had no choice but to promote mass movement work in these terms, for their financial outlook was otherwise bleak. We must accept this state of things as we find it, and adapt our methods to it as far as we may. . . . [In] the strong and concerted advocacy of the aims of our work among the low caste races of India, lies the Society’s only hope of appreciably raising the Home Income.12

Thus, Goudie, while home on furlough, threw himself into publicizing the Pariah, speaking at meetings throughout England, and he and others painted a breathtaking picture of the imminent conversion of the Indian masses. Reverend Albert C. Clayton, for instance, authored a series of 42  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

pamphlets between 1892 and 1896 for distribution in the home churches, each of which invoked the thrilling possibility that the 7 million–odd Pariahs of south India would soon fill churches while also flattering their supporters, crediting them with great moral rectitude: What could be more noble than supporting mission work among Pariahs, the most immiserated among the heathen?13 The gathering of the Pariah flock could be portrayed, then, as the very pinnacle both of missionary work and of a grander imperial civilizing mission.14 Missionaries were faced with two exigent circumstances. There were unexpected demands for baptism from a growing number of Pariahs, to whom the movement spread via caste and kinship networks and promised attractive possibilities for altering existing labor regimes, as we shall see. And there was the flagging interest in Indian missions and consequently in funds for which missions sought a solution. Goudie’s letter, cited above, reveals how, from these twin circumstances, Protestant missionaries in Madras in the 1890s were able to fashion a virtue. As Goudie put it, missions should “adjust their methods” to the public’s demand for numbers.15 This chapter will argue that that “adjustment” fundamentally transformed how the Pariahs’ condition would thenceforth be understood by both champions of their cause and by their most bitter adversaries. More immediately, it suggests the poverty of the widespread assumption that Protestant missionary crusaders saved the miserable Pariah, at their own instigation and driven by an uncompromising humanitarianism and opposition to caste. First, I address Protestant missionary theories of caste as the backdrop for how they came to conceive of Pariah servitude and devised ways in which to manage the tremendous influx of Pariah converts. Protestant missionaries are widely considered to have been virulently opposed to caste. As I shall show, that opposition was blunted by a belief that it was most prudent to effect a “slow eradication” of caste in Madras’s churches. More significantly, it was married with a commitment not to the eradication of social difference but to its preservation, whereby it was hoped converts’ heathenish caste sentiments might be transformed into the rational concepts and practices of class hierarchy. Given particular concepts of class and caste, how did missionaries then theorize Pariahs’ servitude and determine the nature of the pastoral programs that would target them? Missionaries needed to justify the fact that the consequences of their interventions into Pariahs’ lives C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   43

were not confined to the realm of the spirit, for they believed that the spiritual realm was their only rightful remit. Closely linked to this justificatory discourse was the concern with Pariah motives for conversion. It was judged likely that Pariahs’ motives were not purely spiritual: Pariahs were poor, hungry, and oppressed, and could not, therefore, be expected to think of much else but how to alleviate those conditions. Furthermore, missionaries largely stressed the need for Pariahs’ spiritual salvation and indeed, identified spiritual degradation as more essential to Pariahs’ hardships than their material privations. With this focus on the Pariah’s spiritual transformation, and with their own commitments to social difference, missionaries sought for Pariahs not so much emancipation from their “practical slavery” but a gentler, less “Oriental” servitude. Finally, compatible with the focus on spiritual, “inner” transformation, was missionaries’ location of the source of the Pariah Problem within the Pariah himself. The missionaries therefore launched a variety of programs geared at self-improvement and the development of new personal habits.

On the Category “Missionaries” Before proceeding, I must first explain what I mean by “missionaries.” Thus far I have spoken of “Protestant missionaries” or even, for short, just “missionaries.” My inquiry, and thus the extent to which I differentiate among mission societies, has been driven entirely by the question of how missionary activity shaped the discourse on the Pariah Problem and the lives of ordinary Dalit men and women. Because Roman Catholics did not become involved in state-sponsored uplift schemes until the early decades of the twentieth century, and because their influence, presence, and interpenetration in the colonial welfare machinery nowhere matched that of British and American Protestant missionaries, they do not figure in my analysis.16 As for the category Protestant missionaries, although theological and missiological differences abound along the lines of such cleavages as the Anglicans and the Nonconformists, these differences largely fell by the wayside in missions’ approach to the Pariah.17 Moreover, where points of contention do emerge between different missionary personalities on matters critical to the management of Pariah converts, these do not map onto denominational differences and were not understood by missionaries in this light. 44  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

On the contrary, with respect to the Pariah and to a great many other issues, Protestant missionaries in south India, especially anglophone missionaries who comprised the largest subgroup, developed their concepts in concert, holding frequent interdenominational conferences and contributing to ecumenical periodicals.18 Missionaries of different societies often acted in concert too, for instance, by petitioning the government regarding the Pariah Problem through interdenominational organizations such as the Madras Missionary Conference as well as the South Indian Missionary Association, an umbrella organization that passed resolutions on pastoral policy to which all member missions were, in theory at least, pledged to adhere.19 Finally, with respect to state schemes for the amelioration of the Pariah, the government of Madras administered missionaries as a body, discussing the legitimacy of one missionary’s involvement in state welfare schemes and using the arrangements made for him as precedents to be followed in the treatment of another; this will become especially clear in chapter 3.

Heathenish Sentiments and Rational Hierarchy: Caste Prerogatives, Caste Christians, and Missionary Tactics of Translation Popular representations and scholarly discourse are nearly unanimous in their depiction of missionaries as staunch opponents of caste and as promoters of an egalitarian ideology.20 Despite making statements indicating a theological opposition to caste, missionaries were, in practice, more often than not at pains to accommodate the “caste scruples” of their nonPariah converts.21 Furthermore, their anticaste statements were never intended as a call for social equality—this latter and importantly distinct idea was one they in fact actively opposed, often reminding Pariah converts of their duty to respect their “social superiors.”

The Religious and Civil Components of Caste In order to trace those features of Protestant missionaries’ conceptions of caste that are most germane to our purposes, we will follow the writings of one particular missionary who was well known in late nineteenth-century C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   45

circles as a redoubtable critic of caste. Reverend J.  A. Sharrock, of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), was arguably the single most radical missionary opponent of caste in south India, a difficult, authoritarian man according to his peers—and even something of a laughingstock for his apparently tireless anticaste crusade.22 His opponents, the vast majority of Protestant missionaries of his time as well as most elite Indian Christians, grounded their objections to positions such as Sharrock’s by arguing that while caste’s religious features could and should surely be rejected, its civil features were not for missionaries to tamper with. In so doing, they introduced the very distinction between the religious and civil realms itself into popular discourse, a distinction that came to play a clinching role in defining the Pariah Problem. That Sharrock’s uncompromising attitude to caste was not at all persuasive to most missionaries is best illustrated by the unhappy fate of the Caste Suppression Society he founded in 1894. Sharrock formulated what he considered a very modest requirement for entry: that Indian Christian lay members no longer keep “caste titles”—a practice prevalent among dominant castes in south India, in which one’s caste name was used as an honorific surname. Missionary members of the society were to enforce the same and to ensure the sharing of communion among all castes in their congregations. But Sharrock’s requirements were evidently not modest enough. In 1898, when writing on the topic of caste in the Indian Church at the behest of the South Indian Missionary Committee, Sharrock remarked, “It is with considerable diffidence that I respond to the Committee’s request. . . . I have so often written and spoken on the subject .  .  . [and] not a few people look on it as a fad of mine.”23 Sure enough, “one clergyman . . . ridiculed [Sharrock for his focus on] . . . that naughty bogey, caste,” and Sharrock was left to remark that not a single person had joined the Caste Suppression Society in the four years since its institution.24 The following year, in 1899, after prolonged debate among members of the influential South Indian Missionary Association, it was decided that the Association could not even officially ratify Sharrock’s Caste Suppression Society “since there is great divergence of opinion amongst missionaries both as to the gravity of the caste evil in the Christian church and as to the best methods of dealing with it.”25 Thus, although there is some truth to the stereotype of a missionary invective against the evils of caste, such statements were far less widespread than is ordinarily supposed and 46  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

were only in the rarest instances matched by any concerted intervention into the caste practices of congregants. Sharrock’s first long article on caste appeared in the Indian Church Quarterly Review of 1893 and usefully distinguishes three leading views on the subject. The piece focuses specifically on the use of caste titles, but in the process of discussing this single issue, the major lineaments of nineteenth-century Protestant missionary debate on caste emerge. The first view that Sharrock describes is one that held that caste was a civil or social distinction and that caste titles were therefore mere honorifics akin to “Sir,” “Madame,” or “Esquire” in English.26 As Sharrock pointed out, such a view only seemed to find favor among Indian Christians, by which he meant caste Christians. By defining caste distinctions as being of a civil or social nature and not of a religious one, this position declared caste to be outside the sphere of missionary authority. Any attempt by missionaries to interfere was illegitimate, and caste Christians could maintain the practices that contributed to their caste status even upon entry into the Christian church. Sharrock is quite accurate in his claim that this view was ubiquitous among caste Christians: numerous examples of the position he identifies can be found in Tamil Christian writings from the same period. Thus, the high-caste Vellala Christian E. Muthiah Pillai held that caste was originally, and essentially, an occupational structure that had been illegitimately linked to religion by the Aryans, from whom Brahmins were thought to descend: “The Hindu tradition of caste amounts to this: the Aryans who colonized this region fabricated a connection between religion [on the one hand] and the differences and customary practices that naturally (iyaṟkaiyāy) occur here [on the other].”27 In other words, what was objectionable was not caste itself but merely the fact that it had been linked to Brahminical Hinduism. The link, however, is portrayed as being entirely inessential to the underlying nature of caste, and there was therefore nothing to prevent a Christian from practicing caste while rejecting its religious overlay. Sharrock, however, by pointing out that the only people promoting the idea that caste was a purely civil distinction were high-caste converts, portrays this view as nothing more than a bid on their part to maintain their superiority over others. Sharrock then discusses a second view: although caste practices are intimately connected with the Hindu religion, caste names are mere honorifics. This view’s supporters were also high-caste Christians, although C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   47

some missionaries also concurred. Reverend Arthur Margöschis, a fellow SPG missionary, argued in support of the position that caste names, like the “heathenish” names of the days of the week, no longer had religious significance.28 In refuting this kind of thinking, Sharrock wryly noted that Pallars and Paraiyars, two major “untouchable” castes, had never been known to advocate the continued use of caste titles: as we saw in chapter 1, Pariah was a term of abuse in Tamil at the time. We can grasp with more precision what was at stake in caste Christians’ insistence upon keeping their caste names by turning once again to their writings. Muthiah Pillai asserted that it was critical to the status of caste people to be addressed with a caste title, for it was common practice to call out to or refer to a Pariah by her given name alone. Thus, calling someone only by their given name, as missionaries proposed to do to all converts, would be to address them in the “extremely disrespectful” manner that was ordinarily reserved for the “coolie” (kūlikkāraṉ) or “bondsman” (kottukkāraṉ); “other than children and servants; no-one is called by their given name.”29 To make caste Christians give up their caste titles would be tantamount to treating them as Pariahs or bondsmen, the two being, in Muthiah’s idiom, synonymous. The arguments thus marshaled for the retention of caste titles— namely, that caste as a whole, or that some aspects of it, were not religious in nature—are significant, because they provide the basic template for virtually every other argument used in defense of caste prerogatives, irrespective of form. The same arguments were produced by caste Christians in support of their common practices of, inter alia, forcing Pariah converts to sit in a separate part of the church, insisting that Pariahs take communion only after high-caste congregants had done so, refusing to allow Pariah Christian mission employees into their homes, demanding that Pariahs be buried in separate cemeteries from caste Christians, and so on; and all of these could be described as “mere” social distinctions having nothing whatsoever to do with religion.30 And the availability of this usually successful argument meant that the practices in question were rampant. In a letter to Rev. J.  M.  N. Schwarz of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Church Council in Tranquebar, the Pariah Christians of Madras recounted their bodily exclusion from a celebration on the basis of social distinction thus: “Imagine Reverend Sir what the feelings of the Pariah Christians . . . would have been to see on Maundy Thursday during the administration of that Solemn Repast three men stationing 48  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

themselves as guards in the passage from the Vestry to the Altar . . . and pushing [the Pariah Christians] back when they began to approach.”31 The caste Christians of this particular church had formed a Caste Christian Association in order to resist any attempt by missionaries to enforce social intercourse between themselves and Pariahs. Their argument? That customs were divisible into the “nonmoral” and the moral (oḻukkam); into the former fell “local practices, tradition, [and] caste observances,” all of which were the “ways of the elders,” harmless practices of kinship (uṟamuṟai) that were “entirely without connection to religion.”32 And while missionary authority was acknowledged with respect to the latter, missionaries had no right whatsoever to interfere with the former. Although we have no direct record of the outcome, indirect evidence suggests that the Caste Christian Association carried the day: nearly thirty years later (in 1910), in this very same church, Pariah Christians were still subject to what they called the “corner system,” by which they were segregated from other parishioners and, despite comprising 75 percent of the congregation, were confined to a small corner of the church throughout the service.33 The success of organizations such as the Caste Christian Association was not, however, a matter of arguments alone. Rather, the fact that caste Christians were permitted more often than not to have their way derived from their ability to threaten the individual missionary with an action that would undo what was, in many cases, his life’s work. By the time of Sharrock’s writing there had already been numerous wellknown instances in which high-caste Christians had defeated missionary attempts to curtail their caste practices by threatening to abandon the mission—for a rival Protestant outfit, or for a Catholic one, or simply by returning to Hinduism.34 While all missionaries would be familiar with the details of such cases, Sharrock’s understanding of how this strategy worked was deeper than most, and he knew well what kind of pressure could be brought to bear on missionaries who did not toe the line. He himself had attempted to stamp out caste practices among the Christian elite and had been made to pay the price for his stubbornness. Conflict between Sharrock and the caste community had come to a head when he attempted to ban the reading of caste names during wedding announcements,35 and such was the outrage that upward of a hundred converts were lost before the Bishop of Madras intervened, forcing Sharrock to reinstate the old practice.36 C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   49

At this point, Sharrock felt he “had no other course but to resign superintendence of [his] three mission districts” and was transferred elsewhere.37 Protests by prominent caste Christians against missionary interference in caste might even acquire a threateningly “nationalistic” tone. Thus, A.  N. Sattampillai, founder of the secessionist Hindu-Christian Church, made skillful use of scripture in a stunning j’accuse directed at the foreign missionary, simultaneously investing his own caste practices with biblical sanction: “You have tainted ‘the sincere milk of the word of God’ (I. Peter 2:2) by mingling with it the poison of your own national traditions . . . (Matt. 23:15). I, therefore, earnestly beg you in the name of the Lord, to correct your unscriptural manners. . . . Time is short. Reform at once (Eph. 5:1–21) ‘that the land spue not you out also—as it spued out the nations that were [once in Palestine]’ (Lev. 18:28).”38 While the Hindu-Christian Church was exceptional in that it involved the creation of an entirely autonomous Christian denomination, the threat of abandonment was not, and missionaries were extremely chary of it. At this juncture it is important to take stock of the exceptions to the broad consensus among Protestants regarding caste, represented by the refusal of the South Indian Missionary Association to ratify the Caste Suppression Society. Sharrock himself, as I have noted, was a rarity both in his own mission and among Protestant missionaries as a whole. But in addition to exceptional individuals, there were also whole societies that, as a rule, put their congregants through more stringent trials than most, as the American Arcot missionary W. I. Chamberlain suggested: “It has seemed to me that the societies from America have been more insistent on the establishment of arbitrary tests and indisputable proofs of the entire renunciation of caste than the English societies.”39 He referred to an agape, or “love feast,” held by one American mission, at which all congregants were required to “partake freely” from common vessels, and “those who failed [were] dropped from the rolls of the Christian congregation. The Mission accepted unfalteringly the results of this test, although it was more than decimated thereby.”40 Yet these exceptions were precisely that: exceptions—as the South Indian Missionary Association’s declaration and the signal failure of missionaries to join the Caste Suppression Society indicate. It is, moreover, difficult to ascribe these exceptions entirely to a firmer ideological commitment to abolishing caste, as opposed to the different circumstances in which these American missions found themselves. It is telling that the missions to which 50  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

Chamberlain referred, the American Arcot Mission, the American Baptist Telugu Mission, and the American Madura Mission, focused primarily on what was called “village evangelism,” which amounted to evangelism in the cēris.41 Thus, especially in the case of the former two, their congregations were composed almost entirely of Pariahs. They did not have many large groups of caste converts so the caste conflicts that attended mixedcaste congregations in towns and cities had little occasion to arise. In those cases in which, on the other hand, caste and outcaste were not thus insulated from one another, threats by caste converts to leave the church were very powerful, and missionaries wished to avoid not just the diminishment of the flock but especially the loss of high-status Christians. Sharrock indicted his fellow missionaries’ anticaste rhetoric for hypocrisy precisely because the hegemonic position on caste ensured that disagreements between missionaries and caste Christians would remain largely theoretical. The mainstream view was that caste was an “evil” but that Indian churches were not yet at the stage at which missionaries could enforce its total abandonment.42 The problem, as Sharrock pointed out, was that this accommodative posture had little chance of achieving its desired object, the gradual eradication of caste. “From a priori considerations, what reasons have we for expecting a diminution of caste? .  .  . From the eldest native priest to the most recent catechumen scarcely one can be found who has absolutely and entirely given up Caste. . . . The whole Church is honeycombed with Caste.”43 Hence Sharrock’s own position: caste practices must be decisively banned and caste titles abandoned by Indian Christians immediately following conversion, because any form of caste practice was invariably connected with the Hindu religion. Sharrock’s 1893 essay, however, offered no special reason for the claim that caste was indeed religious—although in another article five years later we may discern an explanation. Caste must be religious, believed Sharrock, for “if caste is merely a moribund social custom . . . why does it stir up all this fury?”44 In describing Indian caste Christians’ and Protestant missionaries’ views on caste, we have dwelt at some length now on the way Sharrock differed from his peers. In another respect, however, Sharrock was very much a man of his times. Whatever the disagreements among Sharrock, his caste Christian opponents, and the missionary mainstream, all three found common ground in assuming a conceptual opposition between religion and society (or the religious and the civil). That is, they had first C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   51

to conceive of religion and the social as exclusive of one another and could only subsequently disagree about where caste was located. What we have also witnessed is the extent to which missionaries concurred with the views of their Indian Christian interlocutors in disaggregating and categorizing particular social practices as essential and inessential features of caste. This is perhaps a partial explanation for why historians of missions have been so misled regarding the alleged opposition of missionaries to caste: missionaries denounced caste and sought its banishment, but “caste” was often a shorthand for only those features of it deemed genuinely religious, features that not incidentally allowed caste Christians to continue to enact their social privilege. These fundamental axioms of Indian missiological discourse, forged at the interface between European missionaries and their most prized converts, moreover, would increasingly circulate beyond that field and pervade both the language of colonial administration and the broader public sphere.45

Caste System to Class Order Perhaps the logical culmination of a conceptual process by which caste’s inessential features were to be culled was what might be termed missionaries’ complex translational project, a project in which Hindu caste prerogatives and practices were reconceived, reformed, and ultimately reconciled with European notions of class and status. Caste was to be shorn of its heathenish trappings and allowed to flourish among newly converted Indian Christians in its “pure” class form. Reverend Margöschis, in a rejoinder to Sharrock, described the project thus: In India caste had been useful in promoting self-sacrifice, in securing subordination of the individual to an organized body, in restraining vice, in preventing pauperism. Our wisest policy will be to convert caste from a master into a servant, to defeat its evil action, not so much by forcible suppression as by the gradual application of corrective influences; to counteract its false teaching by imparting true ideas of liberty—true principles of political economy, social science and morality.46

How could missionaries achieve this conversion of caste from master to servant? For missionaries, a signal difficulty in eradicating caste was 52  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

precisely how to “determine what the caste spirit [that is to be forbidden] is, as distinguished from the feeling that makes different grades of society in all lands.”47 This “feeling,” unlike the “caste spirit,” was unexceptionable, not specifically heathen, and perfectly legitimate. The Tamil Christian magazine Cattiyatūtaṉ (Messenger of Truth) attempted to explain to its readers the distinction between the two thus: The word jāti [caste] denotes the several levels of society [vakuppu] distinguished by Hindus. Throughout the world people belong to different levels. Other nations call these “class” [antastu, also “status”]. Between the Europeans’ social divisions of “class” and that which the Hindus call “caste” there is a great difference. The difference of class is an ordinary [potu, also “natural”] distinction; [whereas, according to Hindus,] caste was founded and created by the Divine. A man can move from a low class to a high class, but no one can enter one caste from another.48

The problem, therefore, was not with hierarchical social divisions per se, which existed “throughout the world,” but first, that caste was based on a false religion, and second, that individuals were not permitted to change their caste. The lack of individual mobility, however, would prove to be of little real concern to missionaries; their only substantive objection was to natives’ belief in its “heathenish” justification. Without this connection to Hinduism, caste was only rank or status, and observing these differences was both natural and moral; this accorded perfectly with the views of Indian Christian gentry such as Muthiah Pillai, cited above. An authority missionaries could cite in support of such a position was the bishop of Madras, whose 1868 Inquiries Regarding the Removal of Caste Prejudices and Practices in the Native Church of South India included this observation: “[An] encouraging conclusion I have drawn [from these enquiries] is this; that there is an almost unanimous feeling, on the part of Missionaries and native Clergy, as to the importance of extirpating Caste and exchanging its distinctions for those of rank, education and the like.”49 The extirpation of caste did not, that is to say, entail the eradication of all social distinctions within the Indian Church. Rather, the bishop envisioned a day when caste distinctions, with their irrational forms of ritualism, would be traded in for distinctions such as rank. Hence, Rev. Margöschis’s hope that missionaries could “convert caste” by replacing its “false teaching” with the “true principles of political economy, social science, and morality.” C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   53

Given the general currency of arguments such as these, it should come as no surprise that native Christians would have sought to describe caste titles as simple honorifics, marks of social distinction with no religious meaning, which missionaries should not only tolerate but uphold. Thus, Muthiah Pillai had argued that caste was simply rank and wondered why, when ranks within the institution of the church—between junior and senior missionaries, native pastors, catechists, and so on—were jealously preserved, missionaries would attempt the eradication of rank among lay natives.50 In this respect for rank, the foreign missionary and the Indian Christian elite were of utterly like mind. It was not uncommon, moreover, for missionaries to assume that their own efforts to remake caste as class meant returning it to its original form, illustrating a further overlap in thought between the missionary and the native elite.51 Missionaries all too frequently endorsed the Orientalist view that caste had begun as a rational social division of labor and had acquired meaningless religious adornments in the centuries-long decline of Hinduism from its Vedic origins, a view that had numerous Indian proponents.52 Hence, Rev. Margöschis explained, “Many rules and observances of caste have a purely social aspect . . . and it is quite easy to conceive a state of society in which the religious view of caste never obtruded, as indeed was the case in the history of early Hinduism.”53 Likewise, the Wesleyan Rev. James Cooling averred, “The earliest form of caste was not very unlike that of the modern trade guilds. But . . . soon . . . the sanctions of religion were claimed for this arrangement.”54 In so saying, missionaries had the support of learned native gentlemen, both Christians (such as Muthiah Pillai, whose arguments in this vein we have witnessed) and Hindus: a standard trope of caste apologetics was to describe caste as a division of labor that had deteriorated in the long, tumultuous Middle Ages.55 Thus, while for missionaries equality before God was certainly Christian dogma, it did not preclude a belief in the necessity—the practical functionality—of social inequality and its contribution to a wellfunctioning society.56 The missionary rejection of caste was most often only a rejection of what missionaries dubbed “caste pride” and “superstition.” Even where missionaries’ theoretical anticasteism found practical expression—as in the case of the American Arcot Mission’s love feasts— the attacks on caste were on its symbolic, “irrational” features and not on forms of social inequality per se. In this way, caste itself was implicitly redefined as being not a complex set of social practices that included 54  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

agrarian domination but as a set of ritual observances (e.g., noncommensality) that appeared to missionaries to have little basis in reason. They did not, however, reject the view that society was composed of classes whose distinctions of status were based on the habits and talents of members of those classes, and that social harmony was best achieved by the maintenance of those distinctions. One form of missionary behavior illustrates this commitment to social difference in a particularly stark fashion and returns us to the Pariah from these more general features of Protestant missionary conceptions of caste. Missionaries frequently chastised Pariah converts who seemed in danger of straying outside the bounds of class decorum, and in the case of laborers, this meant actually enforcing their obedience to their masters. At the 1879 South Indian Missionary Conference, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, William Burgess, described what he considered to be, along with intemperance, a particular failing of new Pariah congregants: One of the dangers incident to Christian communities, gathered in from the non-caste [i.e., Pariah] populations in the rural districts, is a tendency to indulge in unguarded language and rebel against the heathen landed proprietors who employ them in agricultural labor. This is a kind of reaction—a natural setting in of opposition against those whom they feel to have so long ground them down in a bondage hard to be borne. Proud of the notice taken of them by Europeans, and thinking that their patrons will uphold them, there is a not unnatural, although frequently mischievous desire to kick against the old oppression. There is a danger too that when they wake up to the knowledge of the fact that the secret of their opposition has its root in unjust caste notions, and that differences which God never intended should exist between man and man, in the recoil they may altogether ignore those real social distinctions which must ever exist between employers and employés.57

Concurring with this view, and advocating steps to prevent such untoward behavior, Rev. Jared Scudder of the American Arcot Mission responded in the subsequent discussion that “while on the one hand, I would strenuously resist every attempt on the part of superiors to persecute . . . their inferiors, I would on the other just as strenuously insist that the inferiors not only perform their lawful obligations but also shew due deference and courtesy to their social and official superiors.”58 C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   55

Although missionaries have been frequently portrayed—not least by themselves—as facilitating the spread of economic individualism, we must take care not to take their rhetoric at face value.59 Despite extolling the virtues of modern “political economy,” in which “a man could move from a low class to a high” one, missionaries were often quite explicit that this would not apply to the Pariah. William Goudie, among the Madras Presidency’s most active and influential advocates for the Pariah, expressed a common missionary sentiment when he proclaimed that, given their talents, Pariahs would be best off as servants.60 Goudie’s aspiration for Pariahs, that is to say, was not that they be freed from their bondage but that they become what he called “free servants”—a category quite distinct from that of the free laborer.61 To modern ears, “free servitude” is oxymoronic, but this unusual phrase captures exceptionally well what mission programs would aim to achieve. The transformation missionaries sought was not to be from servitude based on custom to an economic relationship between an employer and a free laborer. Instead the turn was to be from servitude marked by cruelty to servitude marked by kindness and efficiency; gentle servitude, but servitude all the same, as befitted the Indian laborer (whose real needs, as we will see in chapter 4, were widely considered by officials to be far smaller than those of his European counterparts).62 As Goudie judged the situation, shortly after the inception of the Pariah Problem in 1894: “For the great majority [of Pariahs] the step from serf to landholder is too long a stride. . . . For the present we must make them content with the position of servants, always striving to improve the conditions under which they serve.”63 Caste servitude, with its trappings of heathenish oppression, was not to be condoned, but if the servant were treated with patience and taught habits of self-reliance, he would surely embrace his servitude as an opportunity (as Goudie assured his readers) “to seek and regain his lost manhood.”64 By bringing to light Protestant missionaries’ ideal of a harmonious hierarchical social order and revealing how very pivotal this was to their views on caste reform, my analysis goes against what has become a commonplace among historians of Christianity in colonial India, namely, that the missionary promoted egalitarianism and incited Dalits to rebel against high-caste dominance. Not only is a correct understanding of missionary thought prerequisite to making sense of their actions with respect to the Pariah, it further indicates that the standard account of why Pariahs were drawn to missionaries—namely, that they were attracted by their 56  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

egalitarian ideals or their virulent opposition to caste—requires rethinking. It also undermines the official cliché, which figures in historiography and in the contemporary public sphere as well, that Pariah laborers were largely content with their lot and only became antagonistic toward superiors under outside influence: to the contrary, I will show that missionaries were extremely reluctant to take on Pariah converts, especially at first, that they were far from being champions of any social or economic egalitarian agenda, and that Pariahs antagonized their “superiors” not because of, but in spite of, missionaries. To the extent that Pariah Christians can be said to have remade aspects of their social condition, it cannot be missionaries to whom those gains are credited. Protestant missionaries’ concern not to upset the status quo, moreover, cannot be reduced to any “practicality” arising solely from the wish to retain large flocks. After all, any purely practical concern with multiplying their flocks could just as well have induced the missionary to favor the Pariah rather than the high-caste convert in intercaste disputes in the church, since Pariahs joined the church so much more readily and far outnumbered caste folk. Practical considerations by themselves are thus an insufficient explanation for missionaries’ accommodative approach to caste. It was, rather, missionaries’ firm and oft-expressed commitment to social distinction, evidenced in an abiding preference for caste converts, that fundamentally shaped their pastoral policy toward Pariahs, as I will elaborate below. And yet, as far as I am aware, acknowledgment of this commitment is entirely absent in every account of missionary activity in south India.

The Evangelization of Pariahs: Motive, Inducement, and Forms of Training The Dangers and Rewards of Charity When the Great Famine of 1876–1878 struck, missionaries threw themselves into relief work in both nonofficial capacities as well as in cooperation with the colonial state, manning feeding houses, shelters, and famine labor camps; this brought missionaries into close contact with a larger contingent of the rural population.65 They won many Pariah converts through a spate of mass conversions before, during, and after this period.66 These conversions in turn inaugurated a swell of writings, C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   57

which peaked between 1880 and 1905, on the ethical dilemmas of the provision of material aid to potential converts and on the previously neglected issue of low-caste conversion.67 Missionary reflection on Pariah evangelization was animated by the theological concern with defining and delimiting the religious realm in order that they might confine their interventions to it, as we have seen with respect to caste in the church. Simultaneously, missionaries debated the circumstances in which they might legitimately act outside these limits, as they might be accused of doing in the provision of famine relief. Although missionaries differed on a denominational and even individual level as to exactly what sorts of exceptions could be permitted, they were in agreement that intervention outside the religious realm required serious justification. The baseline assumption was expressed by Rev. Goudie when, in the course of offering such a justification, he acknowledged that “[as] a rule, it is no part of a missionary’s duty to improve the material condition of the people.”68 This specific limitation would be put to the test in times of famine, but even more so by the Pariah. Although famines were, by their very nature, exceptional, it was a good bit less clear how to formulate an adequate policy with respect to a class of persons who, even in the best of times, lived under conditions of deprivation that seemed to demand material intervention. These reflections would, in turn, shape the colonial state in several respects. In both formulation and implementation, the colonial state’s welfare schemes for Pariahs depended on missionary involvement from their very inception, and this involvement would only increase with time. As it was for missionaries, the delimitation of the domain of religion was also an imperative for the government of Madras—but for obverse reasons, insofar as it was pledged to avoid religion in compliance with the mandate of religious neutrality. Missionaries and state officials, therefore, worked conjointly in the project of determining how religion would be understood vis-à-vis the Pariah. We have seen how the domain of religion was delimited by missionaries with respect to caste, selectively permitting only certain kinds of intervention. In devising more specific forms of pastoral care targeted to the Pariah, religion would also come to be defined in reference to motive, especially motives for conversion. Missionaries were fastidious examiners of their own motives and viewed the motives of would-be Pariah converts with extreme suspicion, anxious that impoverished Pariah 58  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

adherents might be accepting Christ for merely “temporal” as opposed to “spiritual” reasons—for “loaves and fishes,” as it were. In addition to the demands of their own faith and conscience, there was also the possibility that they might find themselves accused by ever-watchful colleagues of sacrificing principle in pursuit of the worldly success and renown that came with a large flock. Thus it was that missionaries’ efforts to determine the legitimate boundaries of their own intervention, which is to say to define the domain of religion itself in the late-nineteenth-century Madras Presidency, largely depended on the analysis of Pariah motives and the exoneration of their own. At an 1879 missionary conference, missionaries framed their worries regarding the provision of material aid as an aspect of a broader theological anxiety regarding the warrant for missionary involvement in temporal life.69 On the one hand, only activities directly connected to spiritual transformation, such as preaching, were accepted by missionaries as being incontestably within their purview.70 Yet Christian acts of love, such as the provision of charity, might also be accepted as a legitimate, if indirect, means of evangelism under certain circumstances, as for instance, when the receiver of the gift did not have conversion in mind. Thus, Bishop Sargent of the Church Missionary Society (stationed in Tirunelveli) described how he circulated “a direct appeal to parties who had benefited by Christian liberality, contrasting in this respect the influence of Christianity as a religion of love, with the influence of heathenism, and inviting [them] on this ground as one reason to forsake idolatry and become Christians. A good number did so.”71 Sargent emphasizes here that those benefiting from his expression of his “Christian liberality” did not do so with any thoughts of converting. Rather, liberality was only an object lesson that could be spelled out, after the fact, for heathens. And even if charity did attract converts for the wrong reasons, missionaries reasoned that however much such converts were perhaps initially driven to Christ by material considerations, their spiritual transformation could be successfully wrought under suitable tutelage. In short, missionaries faced a dilemma: they ought scrupulously to avoid the danger that they were overstepping the bounds of their spiritual role by undertaking works of charity that “induced” conversion, which thereby might render conversion a species of material transaction. The battle for converts between Roman Catholics and Protestants in south India led to frequent and bitter denunciations of Catholic “sheep-stealing,” assumed C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   59

to be effected by just these sorts of immoral inducements. As Henriette Bugge puts it, “To be labeled a supporter of rice Christians [a derogatory epithet for impoverished Christians assumed to have converted for ‘temporal’ reasons] was . . . one of the harshest criticisms one could raise against a missionary society in south India.”72 But equally, it befitted Protestant missionaries to provide Indians with object lessons in Christian love and charity.73 To reconcile these opposed demands, missionaries made a crucial distinction between material aid, which they defined as aid in the form of money, and other forms of assistance. In delivering a paper entitled “How to Deal with New Converts in Things Temporal,” Rev. Jared Scudder of the American Arcot Mission evokes this distinction between monetary and nonmonetary aid, explaining the peculiar hazards attendant upon giving money thus: It is not difficult to see that .  .  . [the giving of money] must issue in economical evils which are far more easily prevented than cured. . . . The missionary should always . . . lead his Christian adherents to rely for support on their own labour rather than assistance. . . . Indiscriminate . . . almsgiving . . . has and must always have a tendency . . . to undermine both the power and the will to save, thus removing one of the strongest inducements to sobriety and industry, and consequently to happiness.74

Of importance here is the role assigned to the Christian converts’ labor in transforming more than just his material condition. Properly directed labor would promote the habits of thrift and sobriety that Indian conditions (particularly the caste system and the devaluation of manual labor) were thought to discourage.75 The convert was expected to remain a servile laborer, as we have seen, but Rev. Scudder enjoins him to invigorate his labor with a new spirit, a “sobriety” that would lead “consequently to happiness.”

The Pariah as Exception The preoccupations that emerged in missionary discourse during the Great Famine and the first mass movements would remain, apparently unchanged, throughout the 1890s. That they continued to command 60  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

such attention is a clue that some essential problem (or problems) had remained unsolved. These problems emerge exemplarily in a lengthy article by the German Lutheran, Rev. Johannes Kabis, published in 1897 and entitled “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?”76 Kabis’s article is seminal, moreover, not only because of the insights it affords into the problems of Pariah evangelization but because it clearly reveals the forms of thought that would pass into administrative discourse as the joint missionary–state pastoral project of Pariah uplift developed. Kabis began his article by advising his fellow missionaries that monetary help should not be given to poor Pariah converts as an inducement to become Christian. Such “mercantile” transactions of the soul were alleged to be the purview only of the “Romish.” Kabis assumed that such ignoble actions on the part of Catholic missionaries were tantamount to ensuring that converts would have base motives. Kabis insisted that, conversely, no Protestant missionary would intentionally provide inducements, underscoring the Protestant missionary’s innocence in the production of impure motives. The Protestant acted not to induce conversion but was instead compelled to act by the extremity of the Pariah’s plight. The inherent precariousness of the Pariah’s existence, as well as the hardships that conversion itself created (due to opposition from the Pariah’s master often amounting to a threat to the Pariah’s livelihood) forced the missionary to provide aid.77 Sadly, such help could easily be mistaken for inducements of just the sort the Roman Catholics were accused of doling out. But however “discouraging and disheartening” this might be for missionaries, the fact that charity could be misconstrued as inducements to conversion did not obviate the need for its provision.78 Kabis further pleaded for the propriety of material aid to Pariahs by linking his argument to the abiding missiological concern with the boundaries between religious and temporal existence. Indeed, this concern is built into the question in Kabis’s title, “Should legal and financial help be given to Pariahs?,” which would be understood by fellow missionaries as referring to the commonplace that legal and, especially, financial endeavors were undoubtedly beyond the bounds of legitimate missionary activity. Relying on both scriptural and experiential evidence, Kabis sought to undermine the disjunction upon which the very query was based, namely that missionary endeavors could be clearly distinguished as either C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   61

directly relevant to evangelization or utterly superfluous to it. After first acknowledging the validity of the missiological dictum that preaching should predominate a missionary’s time and effort, Kabis contended that the work with Pariahs must be seen as an exception, because their material conditions were themselves exceptional. And this materially extreme condition, moreover, was inherently linked to their spiritual existence, because the very severity of the former made it impossible for Pariahs to have genuine spiritual experiences: the demands of the body would always obtrude. In this way, material circumstances actually determined the very form of the spiritual. In so arguing, Kabis was not alone. When William Goudie remarked, as noted above, that “[as] a rule, it is no part of a missionary’s duty to improve the material condition of the people,” he immediately followed this with a countervailing observation made on the basis of the special nature of the Pariah’s circumstances: “There are cases, and the case of the Pariah is such, where unkindly circumstances have overthrown a man, and put fetters on the hands and feet of his very manhood. . . . If any man thinks that he can deal with the Pariah problem by purely moral methods, he has only to try . . . to find out his mistake.”79 By the 1890s, the exceptional nature of Pariah servitude became a mainstay of Protestant missiological reflection on work in south India.80

Making Motives Moral and Transformation Spiritual Furthermore, Kabis explained, drawing upon more than twenty years of service among the Pariahs of rural south India, that in addition to the material disadvantages of servitude, Pariahs bore the burden of enforced segregation. Forced to live apart from caste villagers, Pariahs “are thus deprived of the moral corrective of men of a better class.”81 Kabis thus moved from the material conditions of Pariah servitude, which were necessary to justify missionary assistance, to an analysis of the Pariah’s moral deprivation, which he contended was even worse than the Pariah’s material circumstances. In so doing, Kabis managed to reaffirm the primacy of spirit over flesh and simultaneously to create a legitimate place for the missionary. Given the failure of the better class of natives to guide and instruct Pariahs, they would be bereft without

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the missionary. In further seeking to emphasize that Pariahs’ material needs were not the sole reason for the missionary’s forays into the cēri, Kabis described the injustice to which Pariahs were subjected as a result of the landed caste domination of village administration. This depiction allowed Kabis to assert that it was not mere poverty but rather maltreatment and injustice that drove Pariahs to the missionary. Thereby, a moral dimension was also introduced into the Pariah’s motives. On the one hand, Pariahs were incapable of truly spiritual motives for conversion, for as we have seen, their poverty prevented their development. Yet the Pariahs’ desire for what Kabis called counsel (they sought, he argued, “a pleader and champion in their pitiable cause”) underscored that Pariahs hoped for “sympathy and mercy” and not, we might infer, only material gain.82 Having argued that the Pariah’s condition was so exceptional as to demand intervention and that Pariahs’ motives were not entirely material, Kabis was aware that this still did not fully justify missionary intervention—after all, the government or the philanthropist would do just as well.83 Kabis met this objection by arguing that whether or not missionaries intended to become involved in social matters, the transformative capacity of Christianity was such that it naturally encountered social and political problems in its wake, despite the fact that “Christ, when asked to head a political movement, answer[ed], ‘My kingdom is not of this world!’ and refuse[d] to do so.”84 Although Christ wished to avoid social and political upheaval, the power of his message was such that it inevitably transformed those domains. That was why, Kabis explained, the Romans had viewed Christianity as a threat, although they had tolerated other cults. Christianity’s influence on the spirit was of such magnitude that it could not but affect extraspiritual realms of society. Like Christ, the missionary would not wish to interfere in society, but the sheer fact of preaching the gospel would have social effects (among which were the reprisals visited upon Pariah converts by their masters), and missionaries ought to contend with this inevitability by embracing it. Kabis ended with a final appeal for missionary intervention by urging the missionary to act, as a Christian, with mercy and compassion. If missionaries were to evince utter disregard for the social worlds of those to whom they preached, the Christian message, with its emphasis on love, would ring hollow. Not only was the Christian enjoined to act compassionately,

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that is to say, but he was also enjoined to both feel such compassion and to display it for the express purpose of influencing others’ perceptions. In this sense, assisting the Pariah required little championing: once the Pariah’s suffering had been identified, the missionary’s alleviation of it could appear to be a moral imperative, because his proper Christian duty required him to be compassionate.85 Kabis elaborated on this suggestion of a moral imperative, tying it to his earlier observations regarding the Pariah’s bodily existence. The gospel’s message of compassion, he asserted, would be lost on the Pariah if his body were not attended to, because in the Pariah, bodily and spiritual misery are so closely connected that they can scarcely be separated. .  .  . [The Pariah] feels his external distress at first much more than his spiritual, and if we wish to help him only in his spiritual need . . . there may be the risk of his turning away from us as merciless hypocrites.86

“Too great poverty,” furthermore, “often creates sin, faint-heartedness, [and] despair and leads to blasphemy and apostasy.”87 In short, having just portrayed a transformation of society as a necessary consequence of a spiritual transformation, Kabis then averred that this spiritual transformation, which was itself the missionary’s principal duty, required the prior exertion of the missionary in the social realm. Or at least this was so in the exceptional case of the Pariah, where poverty and oppression ensured that “bodily and spiritual misery . . . [could] scarcely be separated.” In the process of arguing that the missionary be guided by a moral imperative, Kabis simultaneously provided a new dimension to his analysis of Pariahs’ motives. He had first spoken of a division between the spiritual and the material in the realm of Pariah motives, but he undermined it here by pointing to the ways in which poverty promoted apostasy and sinfulness, and spiritual conversion required the alleviation of extreme poverty as its precondition. Kabis had thus answered his question, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” in the affirmative: the gospel will inevitably transform society, and the missionary should therefore not avoid concrete acts of compassion in the exceptional case of the Pariah. But Kabis stressed once again the delicate balance that the missionary needed to strike in offering help that would not, at the same time, impinge on the 64  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

existing sociopolitical order. Kabis’s depiction of this slippery compromise deserves quotation at length: The specially oppressed class in the early church were the slaves. On them too Christian love had compassion, only not in such wise as to labour for an emancipation of slaves. This .  .  . lay entirely beyond her horizon. . . . As a rule the slave remained a slave even when he became a Christian, and a Christian master kept his slaves as before, but the Christian slave served his master more faithfully .  .  . and the Christian master treated his slave with kindness. . . . But if cases occurred in which the relation of a slave to his heathen master would make it impossible for him to lead a truly Christian life, then the church .  .  . liberated the slave from such a condition.88

Kabis could therefore believe that Christians were not in any way enjoined to “labor for the emancipation of slaves” and yet also hold that conversion produced differences in practices of slavery—thus the disparity between Christian and heathen masters and slaves. Slavery and Christianity were not incompatible in essence; rather, some practices of slavery could be accommodated within Christianity, such as faithful servitude and kind mastery. We may read Kabis here as offering biblical support for the missionary policy, described above, of preserving social class while rejecting caste (or, more properly, the practices the missionaries had defined as caste). Above, in the section entitled “Heathenish Sentiments and Rational Hierarchy: Caste Prerogatives, Caste Christians, and Missionary Tactics of Translation,” we observed that missionaries were committed to upholding, despite their disdain for the heathenism of caste, “those real social distinctions which must ever exist between employers and employés.”89 It was thus not forms of labor and other social relations that Protestant missionaries sought to transform but rather the mental attitudes of those engaged in these relations. The tendency to describe both their accomplishments and their goals as primarily attitudinal was characteristic of missionary discourse. So too with missionary depictions of caste-based domination, which were pictured as matters of irrational prejudice on the part of high castes and moral degradation on the part of Pariahs. Because missionaries conceived of the Pariah’s position as one determined by the mental habits and attitudes of Pariahs and those that despised them, it was the spiritual C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   65

aspect of Pariah servitude that they described as requiring immediate and continuous redress. Kabis thus concluded his argument by insisting once again, “I need scarcely mention .  .  . that spiritual regeneration is the only real and true help for our Pariah Christians,”90—and this despite having lamented that, in case of the Pariah, “bodily and spiritual misery are so closely connected . . . they can scarcely be separated.”

Designing a Pedagogy for the Pariah Missionary programs for the Pariah’s amelioration, in keeping with this focus on the spirit of the Pariah, were most sharply trained on the Pariah’s self, which was, after all, represented as the fons et origo of his degradation. The following depiction by Rev. Albert C. Clayton, a Wesleyan Methodist who worked in and around Madras city and Chingleput District, often in close association with William Goudie, nicely encapsulates this ethos: In this letter I will try to tell you something about this poor degraded man’s enemies. . . . Chief among the Pariah’s enemies is himself. This is not his fault, but it is our greatest difficulty in our dealings with him. On the one hand he is most easily imposed on, and on the other he often tries to gain some end with a sort of low cunning which is deplorably foolish. In many villages the caste-people, the respectable people, knowing this take all sorts of advantage of the Pariah.91

When the Pariah is duped, therefore, it is the result of his own “low cunning” as much as of the naïveté by dint of which he is so “easily imposed on.” The Pariah’s situation is bleak, because he is his own worst enemy; he is not, unlike caste people, “respectable.” His best chance for uplift thus lay in his own self-improvement and in the transformation of his personal habits, for as the quote makes clear, it is in character that he is lacking. As a report of Methodist missionaries in Trichinopoly would attest, however wretched their earthly bondage, Pariahs were undoubtedly also “the slaves of strong immoral propensities.”92 Given the transformation of personal habits the Pariah required, missions put the greatest stake on education in their pastoral programs for Pariahs. This was the form of amelioration that they believed would provide Pariahs with the basic resources by which to transform themselves 66  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

into what Goudie had called “free servants.” The education that the Pariah was to receive, that is, should never be such as to make him unfit for life in the village: it would be disastrous to produce Pariah children who would not be content with rural labor. Thus, secondary education, a field in which Protestant missionary work in India has perhaps been most extensively chronicled by historians, almost exclusively benefited caste people.93 These elite educational institutions were never intended for the Pariah and were, indeed, often explicitly labeled “caste” schools.94 Missionaries engaged with the Pariah Problem wished instead for Pariahs to follow their traditional occupations—but with increased thrift and selfrespect. Reverend Jacob Chamberlain proudly recounted to fellow missionaries at a conference the “testimony” of the priest of a caste temple in a village in which Chamberlain had converted a number of Pariahs: “I see what your Veda [religion] has done for them [i.e., the Pariahs of the village]. Before, they were lazy, and sometimes drank, and lied and cheated . . . Now they are sober and industrious, and well-behaved, and thrifty. . . . Please give me the secret of your religion.”95 The Pariahs had, that is, become exemplary subordinates. With the recognition that forms of education focusing on book learning were inappropriate to Pariah village congregations came an interest among missionaries in industrial and agricultural education. In favor of agricultural training, the Arcot Mission’s report of 1920, reflecting on decades of work with Pariah converts, remarked, “We believe that education must prepare for life. . . . If then our mass education is to fit our [Pariah] boys for life, its motive must be agricultural.”96 Likewise, Rev. J. H. Wyckoff of the American Arcot Mission wrote an article published in a popular pan-Indian missionary periodical describing his mission’s support for industrial schooling for Pariahs. Therein he observed, The Lord has been pleased to give us, not the cultured Brahman, not the thrifty Sudra, but the poor despised Pariah . . . [Hence] it is necessary to [develop] the whole man. . . . [The] development of habits of self-reliance and self-respect; and, above all, the ennobling of labour, so much needed in India, where can these be attained except in the industrial school?97

Here, as in Clayton’s remarks about the Pariah’s “chief enemy,” sympathy for the Pariah’s condition, which was, after all, poor and despised, sits C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   67

happily with the unfavorable comparison of the Pariah with his caste “superiors” and a focus on the Pariah’s individual responsibility for his own uplift, which required the development of new habits through education. This would make him, in the words of the Hindu priest cited by Chamberlain, “sober and industrious, and well-behaved, and thrifty.”

Conclusion Missionary Motive: The Inculcation and Representation of Sympathy As Goudie admitted in a 1918 summary of the results of some fifty years of mass movements of Pariahs in south India, “It came about . . . that while the missionary was labouring and praying to win the Brahmin, God . . . sent the outcaste man to claim his attention and his care.”98 Missionary preference for the Brahmin and other elites stemmed from a top-down plan for the ultimate conversion of Indian society as a whole, but as we have seen, this policy’s lack of results began to be severely criticized by the 1880s, with no small consequences for south Indian missions.99 Given this backdrop of missionaries’ preference for high-caste conversion, as well as their subsequent failure in that project, why, according to missionaries themselves, did they abruptly shift their attention to the Pariahs? Given the paramount importance missionaries placed on motive, they copiously analyzed their own motives for turning to Pariahs, concluding that these arose from compassion and not from a desire for worldly renown; in short, their own motives were affirmed as pure. In an article advocating missionary intervention in Pariah welfare, William Goudie declared, I cannot imagine a good missionary . . . with the poor and the hungry ever at his door, the oppressed ever clutching his feet . . . who will not discover that those very sentiments that made him a missionary impel him to take up the cause of the people and devise means for their deliverance.100

“Those very sentiments” form a thread that runs through the letters of numerous mission societies. Missionaries commonly wrote of their 68  C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N

intense sorrow when faced with the suffering of Pariah converts and of the difficulties of providing care for so many, especially during the fairly regular episodes of famine in the late nineteenth century. They and their wives described engaging in the most tedious and exhausting tasks of ministering to the sick and hungry, often having to contend with a high level of distress that the government would not acknowledge, and all in fulfillment of their call to compassion.101 In 1901, for example, Goudie opened a famine-relief camp in Tiruvallur town in Chingleput with funds from his own pocket, in response to what he considered the criminal neglect of starving laborers on the part of the state. The camp provided work in exchange for “famine wages,” wages far below ordinary levels so as to deter all but the truly desperate. Within a day, and advertised only by word of mouth, hundreds of men, women, and children appeared to work. Goudie communicated these events to the local collector: “I have spent the money to demonstrate to the authorities the extent and severity of the distress, and I will try and see that the lesson is not lost.”102 Virtually every hot season, furthermore, brought cholera, and missionaries patiently nursed—and buried—hundreds of Indians, Christian and non-Christian, in what were usually decades of service; they lost their own spouses and children too, sometimes many at one time, in epidemics. There is certainly no reason to doubt the genuineness of missionaries’ Christian love, as manifested in their tireless service to the poor and sick, or the existence of a powerful commitment on the part of Protestant missions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an ideology of humanitarianism.103 But it would be misleading to ignore the contingent and hitherto unknown historical relations of a fickle public in Britain with Pariahs’ own efforts to alter aspects of their lives by seeking alliances with missionaries (about which more below). This contingent dovetailing gave a fillip to missionaries’ expression of sentiments of compassion. It cannot be that Pariahs’ misery alone made them the object of missionary attention—after all, they had been miserable for a considerable time. Rather, the confluence of the state of mission finances and of the Pariah’s own initiatives, which resulted in mass conversions, impelled missionaries to attend to the Pariah; financial exigencies allowed missionaries and their societies to override what had been a long-standing preference for high-caste converts. In their own discourse, this became an opportunity to manifest Christian compassion.104 C O N C E P T U A L I Z I N G P A R I A H C O N V E R S I O N   69

Furthermore, given the exceptional nature of the Pariah’s condition that the missionaries described, it ought not be difficult—so missionaries often told each other—to summon up the necessary Christian compassion. As Rev. J. F. Burditt of the American Baptist Mission argued when advocating the uplift of the Pariah as a legitimate goal of mission agency, “Who that knows of their ignorance, poverty, sicknesses, oppression, and despair, but must feel his heart yearn within him with desire, to pluck as brands from the burning some of these deluded ones whose whole life is subject to bondage?”105 Any truly Christian missionary would naturally, even ineluctably, be compelled to intervene in the Pariah’s bodily suffering. All that remains to be seen then is what, exactly, this compassionate intervention entailed, as well as the specific effects it had—intentional and otherwise—on the Pariah’s material malaise, which was intimately linked to the agrarian economy, labor relations, and local forms of state power. Mass conversions would entirely transform the scope and purpose of Protestant missionary activity in the Madras Presidency by involving missionaries in a nexus of relations among low-level officials, district courts, and village authorities, and in the ongoing struggles between Pariahs and landed castes, all of which would transform the Pariah’s relationship to the state, as the next chapter will describe.

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Chapter 3 T H E PA R I A H – M I S S I O N A RY A L L I A N C E Agrarian Contestation and the Local State

In order to lay the ground for how missionaries interacted with the throngs of Pariah converts who demanded their attention from the 1870s onward, we have been forced to confront the implausibility of missionaries’ accounts that stress their role as proponents of humanitarianism and opponents of caste who quickened the subdued and quiescent Pariah masses. What then did conversion to Christianity actually entail for Pariahs? To what, in short, do missionaries owe their success in evangelizing the Pariah? The answer to this question lies in the concrete effects of Pariah–missionary alliances on Pariahs’ relations with their masters. These effects are painstakingly recorded in mission records, making these records easily the single richest source on labor regimes in colonial south India. I use them to illustrate alterations in agrarian relations that engaged missionaries, caste villagers, Pariah laborers, and state apparatuses in new and unexpected configurations. As I described in the book’s introduction, missionary records have not been utilized for the purpose of analyzing labor subordination in colonial India, a curious legacy of the bifurcation of the social field into the religious and the civil that missionaries themselves made hegemonic. Yet it is attention to matters of labor that will allow us to understand what social consequences attended conversion.

First, it is important to notice that, although frequently dubbed “mass conversions,” missionaries often referred to these events as “mass movements.” This rhetorical distancing from the language of religious conversion is in keeping with an insight to which missionaries frequently gave voice: “When a missionary book or periodical tells of the admission of (perhaps) four hundred persons into the Christian Church in a single district, that does not mean that there have been four hundred ‘conversions’ in the technical religious sense of that term.”1 The term “conversion” had to be qualified in such cases, for “the village Pariah comes to us with all the darkness of the past centuries of ignorance enshrouding his soul.”2 The Pariah’s soul, after all, had to be considerably prepared before any genuine transformation of the spirit could occur, and thus, one missionary explained, “To the people in our care, spiritual enlightenment comes not with the rush of an Indian sunrise, but lingers through the long twilight of an Arctic morning, when the risen sun must still be far off and low.”3 In this way, missionaries attempted to alert their audiences—each other, as well as lay readers of reports at home—to the fact that “religious conversion” was an inappropriate label for these events, at least insofar as such a label was understood to connote an inward transformation of the kind exemplified in the biblical narrative of Paul’s conversion. While we need not share the missionary’s regret regarding the condition of the Pariah convert’s soul, the point that the term conversion may lack purchase with respect to mass movements is well taken. Yet rather than seeking to expand the definition of conversion, it seems most fruitful to me to adopt an alternative expression, Pariah–missionary alliance, when describing certain events in the Tamil countryside. This phrase, however inelegant, neither precludes nor implies spiritual transformation and simultaneously allows us to refer to cases, by no means infrequent, in which Pariahs did not undergo the rite of baptism but nevertheless acted in concert with a local missionary. To examine the forces that shaped Pariah–missionary alliances, as well as those they would unleash, we will consider how Pariahs’ efforts to harness missionaries’ particular skills and social position transformed labor relations between Pariahs and their masters and impinged as well upon processes of village-level administration. Quite distinct, therefore, from missionary engagement with the centers of provincial power—of which we will see evidence in this and in the following chapter—a number of 72  T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E

Protestant missionaries in rural south India altered the existing practices of local governance, pulled into this arena by Pariahs. Local governance and administrative procedure had long entailed contestation between landed elites, tenants, the East India Company, and later the Crown, as we have seen with respect to land revenue administration in chapter 1. Here we shall consider the repercussions of missionaries’ and Pariahs’ entry into this theater. Although missionaries considered the Pariah problem to be only truly amenable to a spiritual cure, several among them had discovered it difficult to distinguish between bodily and spiritual slavery with any surety. And, indeed, their own depictions of the straits in which Pariahs were caught make it apparent that any entry into Pariahs’ lives had farreaching effects on labor relations in both subtle and dramatic ways. Missionary accounts themselves unwittingly reveal that such things as education (by which they would make the Pariah a self-respecting laborer), the acquisition of new habits in dress and cleanliness, and the development of new practices of morality—a “Christian conscience”— had effects on labor regimes of which missionaries do not always appear aware and which were almost certainly unintended, given missionaries’ respect for social difference. In focusing on these aspects of Pariah– missionary alliances, my analysis will depart from much of the historical writing on Dalit conversion in India. If nineteenth-century missionaries were unusually anxious about motive—both their own and their converts’—perhaps more remarkable is the resilience of “motive” as a theme in contemporary scholarship on Pariah conversion.4 I consider instead the concrete practices of missionary intervention in south Indian agrarian society and, on the basis of my exposition, elucidate the ways in which scholarly attention to motive has impeded adequate historical explanation of “mass conversion.”

Minute Deviations, Total Reversals: Christian Habits and Labor Relations Missionaries’ letters to one another and to their societies, as well as their discussions at conferences, reveal that over the course of several decades from the 1870s onward, Pariahs in the Madras Presidency sought out missionaries with dogged determination. Contra popular perceptions among T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E   73

Indian elites, then as now, Pariah–missionary alliances were initiated by Pariahs themselves, not by missionaries.5 What is more, the majority of Pariahs who approached local missionaries had little, if any, previous personal contact with them: they most often learned of missionaries through friends and kin. W. H. Campbell, for example, reported on the usual way in which Malas (the most numerous Telugu Dalit caste) came to the missionary in Cuddapah District: “Three or four men of the Mala community .  .  . either through the teaching of mission agents, or as is most common, through intercourse with Christian friends and relations .  .  . persuade their friends or neighbours to join them, and when they succeed, the whole or the greater part of the community comes to the missionary.”6 Likewise, Rev. Adam Andrew, a Free Church of Scotland missionary whose work among the Pariahs in Chingleput District became so renowned that he acquired the snide moniker “Pariah Andrew,” describes how credit for the astonishing success of his church in the period between 1889 and 1894 was really due to the efforts of a Pariah leader by the name of Mari Paul.7 Mari Paul had first persuaded his kinsmen to join the church, which then led to his entire cēri converting, after which time his friends and relations from neighboring cēris also came asking to be converted. To give an idea of Mari Paul’s contribution relative to Andrew’s, consider that the Free Church of Scotland’s Madras Mission had one station in Chingleput District, manned by a single European missionary (Rev. Andrew) and several native helpers, whose combined efforts in the eleven years from 1879 to 1890 had netted just 200 converts. From 1890 to 1894, however, as a result of a movement instigated by Mari Paul, the number of converts shot up to 1,500—a sevenfold increase in a scant four years.8 Andrew tells us that when Mari Paul first approached him it was with a demand: that his children be educated in a mission school. In making demands to the missionary, Mari Paul was not alone: “Pariahs . . . present themselves as candidates for baptism with, as a rule, the condition that they will get help to secure land, bullocks and houses, and have schools for their children.”9 In a great many instances, however, as in the case of Mari Paul, education was the sole request. This may appear to be an unusually fortuitous confluence of interests, for as we have seen, education was the form of intervention favored by missionaries. We have examined why education (in particular, primary education with a focus 74  T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E

on industrial and agricultural training) seemed to missionaries an appropriate method of amelioration. What can we discern about why Pariahs, for their part, should have so vociferously demanded that their cēris have a small white schoolhouse? Pariahs were spatially segregated from the caste village, the ūr, dwelling instead in the cēri, and the very word “Tamilian” was construed to exclude them. Among the other means of distinguishing Pariahs from the rest of society and marking them as inferior was a prohibition on marks of status or privilege: these might include such things as wearing shoes or shirts, building a solid house or other structures to live in, and using prescribed forms of address to putative superiors. A built structure was a particular privilege, and in the late nineteenth century a school would be anomalous anywhere—even most caste children did not yet attend school. Thus, a whitewashed schoolhouse or a chapel (one-room and thatch-roofed though they might be) in a cēri of huts built of tatties and twigs dramatically refashioned a landscape otherwise dominated by the built structures of the caste people’s quarters and unsettled a tradition of subordination in which the regulation of space and comportment was paramount. It is thus most striking that conversations between potential converts and missionaries often involved Pariah leaders asking for buildings and for a teacher to live among them.10 These requests were presented, moreover, as conditions upon which Pariahs would accept the missionary’s alliance and therefore often took on a distinctly strategic, even legalistic, quality. In a report on the evangelistic work undertaken in 1898, for instance, Rev. E. C. Scudder of the American Arcot Mission records that “several villages [of Pariahs] have offered to come to Christianity . . . [in exchange for] two buildings and a . . . helper per village. . . . One new village has consented to the terms laid down, and a helper will be sent them next year.”11 These school buildings, and the teachers that came with them, were among the most immediate effects of allying with missionaries. They would be viewed with suspicion, as hotbeds of Pariah radicalism even, by both caste elites and state agents, and as late as the 1930s, many Pariahs were still faced with the threat of violence if they dared to send their children to school.12 There is no gainsaying that education itself was highly valued by Pariah converts and would and often did lead to new and prized avenues for employment, not least within mission institutions themselves. But this cannot be the entire story, for T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E   75

chapels were demanded as well, and contest over the social privilege of pakkā (permanent, as opposed to thatch) buildings was also a feature of Pariah–caste antagonism in situations not concerning missionaries—as indeed continues to be the case today. Like the privilege of certain kinds of buildings, clothing too was both a mark of caste and an object of missionary intervention. In mission schools, Pariah children might be given simple uniforms, and the fortunate graduates of such schools who became “native helpers” of missions would also be provided with clothing. More generally, converts were instructed to bathe frequently, given haircuts, and required to maintain utmost modesty in dress. For missionaries, neat and modest clothing was an outward sign of inner discipline, and the improvements they effected in Pariahs’ dress were described by missionaries only as marking the inculcation of proper personal habits. Yet these were aspects of Pariahs’ lives in which their relation to their caste superiors was enacted. Pariahs’ scanty, usually threadbare clothing was a critical component of their subjugation. Pariah men were expected to wear only a loincloth while working, and, when wearing a waistcloth, it generally had to be worn above the knees; similarly, a Pariah woman’s sari had to be worn high enough to expose her calves and even, sometimes, her knees. High-caste men and women, by contrast, wore waistcloths or saris that fell past the ankles and covered most of their feet.13 We must therefore construe the alacrity with which Pariahs adopted innovations in dress, and even Western fashions, as in fact being of a piece with those other forms of insubordination that missionaries found so alarming. On the one hand, Rev. L.  L. Uhl and others like him frequently worried that an “evil” attendant upon Pariah conversion was “vanity and self-assertion. . . . Impudence to the villagers and to their superiors often possesses them, and they not only omit courtesy but push themselves forward to offensiveness and insult.”14 And yet, on the other hand, missionaries remained unaware of the extent to which new forms of dress were often precisely what had occasioned such offense. So vexing, indeed, was the sight of a Pariah in anything other than a loincloth that even in the early 1920s the nationalist newspaper Swadharma, ostensibly committed to caste reform, could publish a poem ridiculing a Pariah’s attempt to elevate his social status by dressing in the same Western style in which these elite Madras columnists themselves were

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clothed. The poem, entitled “Ramaswamy Becomes Ramsay” reads in part as follows: Ramaswamy drew breath, In a parcherry [paraccēri, Pariah ghetto] of Madras. His father was a third-rate cook, His mother—she cut grass. Ramaswamy guiltless grew of clothes—except—oh yes, He wore an anklet and a rag, But you’d hardly call that dress. A zealous cleric then there came On pariah converts bent, And to his little Mission school was Ramaswamy sent. Then clothed in Christian cap and coat He learned a fair amount; In fact he soon his appa [father] helped To cook his cook’s account. He studied at the Mission School Right up to Failed Matric,15 Then got a writer’s post so felt His costume should be chic. He therefore . . . donned a collar and tie, Then added a waistcoat and a watch with trousers by and by . . . Then came a pair of socks inside his shoes . . . The chrysalis burst, the butterfly Ignored his parcherry set And now, “one Mr. Ramsay” dwells A swell—in Padripet.16

That this scorn would appear in a newspaper that styled itself a leader on issues of social reform (its masthead loudly proclaimed its commitment to “the Labor Movement” and “Social Re-construction”), and which did in fact often write eloquently on the travails of “the poor Pariah,”

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reveals how unselfconsciously Indian elites, even those committed to caste reform, remained rather more committed to a vision of Pariahs as best suited to agrarian servitude, and of missionaries as their corrupters. Yet, while any Pariah in Western dress was, on the one hand, the dupe of a “zealous cleric,” he was equally a dishonest pretender, ignoring the “parcherry set” whence he sprang and using education only for the thievery proper to Pariahs as a caste. While the cultivated urbanite’s response to the dressed-up Pariah might thus be confined to composing a few lines of acerbic verse, reactions could also be far more violent. It was reported in 1910, for instance, in the Tamil newspaper Oru Paica Tamiḻaṉ, founded by the well-known intellectual Iyotheethass Pandithar, that a well-dressed Pariah carrying a parasol was attacked, beaten, and his clothes and umbrella taken from him; when the victim went to report this violation in a court, the native magistrate dismissed it with brutal candor: “Your holding an umbrella, by going against customary practice, is itself a violation: case dismissed.”17 As these acts of insubordination spread across a wider swathe of the Dalit population in Madras in the 1920s, elite reactions of this kind were the norm, as chapter 5 will demonstrate. These were the unforeseen stakes of the occasional one-room schoolhouse or pair of shoes. What were the effects on social life and on labor relations of missionaries’ attempts to inculcate new morals in Pariahs? In describing how to “create a spiritual life” among Pariah congregations, William Goudie recalls, I was sitting in a small village school with a group of simple people about me. They had been as usual relating to me the sorrows and needs of their life, and I was taking great pains to teach them the simple lesson that even to very poor people there was something better and more needful than food. At the close of my address an old gray-haired woman spoke up and said, “Yes sir, what you say is very true, we feel it while you are here talking with us, but to-morrow you will have gone, and we shall be hungry, and then we shall think as we thought before that there is only one thing that we want, and that is food.” These surely were wise and true words. . . . Our trouble is that there is hardly a shadow of kinship between the hearts of the men whom we would teach and the truths we would impart.18

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To the missionary this incident might have been interpreted as an instance of what Kabis had observed, namely that “poverty promotes sinfulness and apostasy.”19 But when Goudie went on to describe how Pariah villagers struggled to comply with the moral teachings of Christianity, this simple equation was complicated: Goudie’s account reveals the serious obstacles in the way of reconciling Christianity’s moral teachings with the demands made upon the Pariah laborer by the master-cum-creditor. Morals, after all, are expressed only in social relations, and the moral code of the missionary could have unforeseen consequences in the social world of the Pariah and her master. Thus, one woman came to Goudie in tears, torn between the opposed expectations of the missionary and an angry creditor: “I cannot enter the Christian church. I cannot keep your law. You forbid lying and we cannot live without lying. We are in debt and we have constantly to promise to pay ‘to-morrow’ when we know we cannot do it.”20 In this dismal scene, Goudie read “the dawn of a new moral sense” in the heart of the recent convert. But if, when lies were expected of an indebted Pariah (“Yes, swami, the money will be in your hands tomorrow”), she chose instead to speak plainly (“In truth, I cannot say when I will repay you”), the transformation wrought by this would not only be the “dawning of a new moral sense” in the woman’s heart but a serious violation of expected patterns of deference.21

“Religious Persecution” and Everyday Domination Words she may once not have dared to utter thus might suddenly spring to a Pariah’s lips if she knew that the missionary would support her insubordination. The missionary, for his part, who preached deference to social superiors, would see in her truth telling nothing more than a courageous act of virtue—and in the master’s fury persecution. Indeed, a recurrent theme in missionary writings is a tendency to interpret everyday forms of domination in the language of religious persecution—at least when directed at the Pariah Christian. A typical case of what missionaries called “persecution” might occur as follows: A poor aged villager who had only recently become a Christian was severely beaten, and his assailant immediately went to the village

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magistrate and with his help made a criminal complaint against the old man for assault with [a] dangerous weapon. . . . The Christian the Village Magistrate refused to even listen to, and the old man was compelled to enter a counter-complaint after he had sufficiently recovered from his wounds to do so. As usual, he had no chance in the court where all are against a Pariah, and especially if he has committed the crime of becoming a Christian. The poor old man mortgaged his land, spent Rs. 60 in trying to defend himself and have his assailant punished, but finally had a fine imposed upon himself for assault.22

Reverend L. R. Scudder’s repeated specification of the man’s new religious designation rhetorically undergirds his assertion that the cause of the aggression is the man’s “becom[ing] a Christian,” and this might even be taken to imply that prior to alliance with a missionary such events would not have occurred.23 Reinforcing such an impression, missionaries frequently reminded lay people at home that those who think it easy for Pariahs to become Christians, and who wonder that they do not embrace the gospel in larger numbers would have their illusion dispelled could they witness a little of the trials that a Pariah community undergoes on abandoning idolatry and accepting Christianity. . . . [You have seen] a few of the difficulties that beset our new converts. Is it a wonder that some of the more timid ones relapse into their old ways?24

As I have argued, new converts tended to insubordination, and furthermore, new habits developed under missionary tutelage in such things as schooling and dress were direct affronts to the mores that governed existing labor relations. Yet the depiction just cited, richly evocative of the trials faced by early Christian martyrs, misleadingly implies that Pariahs never faced trials of this nature before and that “abandoning idolatry” was their proximate cause. In describing these incidents of labor subordination as religious persecution, missionaries lent heroic appeal to accounts of conversion in India and thereby targeted home audiences. As we have seen, laypeople at home had long since grown impatient with the slowness with which India was being won for Christ, and this impatience was reflected in dwindling contributions to Indian missions. Reports of evangelical work written in 80  T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E

this tenor served to justify poor returns on the rolls of new converts (as much as Pariahs swelled those rolls, numbers of Indian converts still compared poorly with numbers from other parts of heathendom) in a more appealing manner than the explanations missionaries usually furnished among themselves, such as the stony impenetrability of that “fortress” Hinduism and Indians’ unshakable loyalty to caste. In depicting these everyday acts of domination as religious persecution, missionaries severed them from their agrarian context, thereby making the relationship between caste person and Pariah seem as if based in irrational prejudice rather than in the control of labor. Yet the meticulous documentation of such tactics within mission records themselves makes it abundantly clear that they were ubiquitous features of the relationship between Pariahs and landed castes and that they had no necessary relation to religious conversion. The retaliatory tactics employed by Pariahs’ masters when Pariahs sought alliances with missionaries were identical to the treatment Pariahs received whenever their relations with their masters were strained. Indeed, such oppressive tactics were just as often the cause of seeking an alliance with the missionary as its result, as canny missionaries themselves would occasionally disclose: “Many .  .  . become Christians because they are poor people suffering injustice and cruelty at the hands of village headmen and their hereditary masters.”25 Missionary accounts and letters confirm that these were everyday techniques of labor control. A great proportion of the rural missionary’s time was spent listening to and advising Pariahs—and not just converts—on how to proceed in the face of their masters’ petty brutality and violent reprisals. Thus, William Goudie warned, “The missionary who embarks on social work [with Pariahs] needs to be constantly on his guard. . . . If he yields, the missionary may spend the whole of his time and strength, and wear his life away in interfering in disputes.”26

The Local State: From Apparatus of Control to Arena of Struggle Missionary records, furthermore, not only minutely chronicle the tactics of labor subordination in colonial south India, they also provide a vivid picture of the concatenated series of relations connecting Pariahs (a category of people who normally fall outside the official historical record) to the state. They comment on the nature of the state, in other words, T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E   81

from a perspective rarely to be found within the state’s own annals, but of profound consequence for our understanding of Pariah subjects. Perhaps the single most significant effect of an alliance with missionaries, and that which altered the balance of power between Pariahs and village elites more than any other, was the manner in which missionary intervention undermined elites’ de facto stronghold on local state apparatuses (what I have referred to in chapter 1 as the caste–state nexus), by which unbroken labor control was guaranteed.27 Indeed, far surpassing other requests, it was for help with the workings of local administration that Pariahs usually approached a missionary for the first time. With the building and deploying of ties with the missionary, which often, although by no means always, involved a commitment on the Pariah’s part to be baptized, the struggles between Pariahs and their masters entered an altogether different arena. In the countless examples of “persecution” preserved in missionary records, the importance of the rural administrative and judicial apparatus in structuring the relationship between landless Pariah laborers and their masters appears again and again. Consider the following compendium of instances of conflict taken from a page of one of Adam Andrew’s annual reports on his work in Chingleput: During the year there were several cases of oppression and injustice on the part of caste villagers. One Christian . . . has been deprived of his pay as Vettiyan.28 . . . He has carried his case before the Revenue authorities repeatedly, and has at last obtained a decree in his favour, but against this an appeal has been made by those opposing him, which will stay proceedings for a considerable time yet. Another of our Christians was partner with the village headman who refused to give him his due share of the produce because he had joined the Christian faith. He raised a civil suit against the village headman and in this way obtained his due share. The most conspicuous case was that of Govindan of Puthupedu. . . . Being the leading man in our congregation and possessed of some landed property, the Brahmin and other caste villagers began to show ill-will toward him. In April last they conspired to assault him. They dragged him out of his house one night, and beat him so badly that he was left for dead. In order to disarm suspicion, they concocted a false case of house-breaking and theft against him.29

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From the Pariah laborer’s position, state machinery—local courts, revenue-collecting practices, the surveying of land, and all the other procedures of land revenue administration that required the participation of local officers—was inextricable from the technically unofficial means by which his master maintained labor control. In the examples cited above, the village magistracy proved essential to the preservation of the labor regime. Other common strategies of labor control that mission records describe included the procurement of falsified documents and police support for illegal taxation, the refusal of access to “public” water supplies, the theft of trees and fruit on lands lent to the laborer for his use, the impounding of a laborer’s cattle, and so on—and all depended upon the operation of official machinery.30 From the position of the Pariah, the power of the master was thoroughly continuous with that of the state, and higher officials did not simply condone but indeed relied on these modes of operation. With the arrival of the missionary, not only did Pariah laborers’ relationships with their masters and with the state undergo a fundamental shift, but so too did the nature of the state itself. What had hitherto been the master’s weapon was now increasingly rendered uncertain; the local court or kaccēri (administrative office) became not a theater of oppression but a site of struggle. Missionaries would frequently be called upon to intervene and would endeavor to ensure that procedures in these arenas followed the letter of administrative regulations. With the advent of the missionary, furthermore, the relationship of Pariahs not only to local revenue administration but also to local courts was also radically altered. Before, a false case foisted upon a Pariah would most likely have made him back down: he would know that the judges and lawyers of the rural court had close relations with village elites and were often landowners themselves. He would also know that such courts practiced untouchability and that Pariahs were made to give testimony from outside their portals. Now, however, these cases might actually reach the courtroom and even go in the Pariah’s favor. Thus, Andrew concluded his recital of disputes involving Pariahs, excerpted above, with the following words: “These cases were tried and thirteen persons were convicted and fined.”31 In another instance, William Goudie described a case in which mirasidars had demanded a far higher swatantram (customary fee) than was legal from Pariahs who had acquired some

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land of their own. Goudie lent them money for court fees and assisted them in hiring an advocate, and the Pariahs successfully challenged the mirasidars in court. Goudie wrote, “Though the judgment was a simple award of justice, I question whether the people could have contested the demand made on them or obtained justice without our advice and support.”32 Indeed, it appears that Pariahs shared this impression, and, in keeping with the strategic quality of Pariahs’ initial dealings with missionaries, the outcome of cases such as these could very well determine whether or not Pariahs chose baptism.33 In addition to the provision of counsel and intervention, one specific effect of the Pariah–missionary alliance was essential to this new operation of state machinery. This was the racial capital and imputed link to higher authorities that missionaries possessed. Whatever the actual relations between any given missionary and European officials, missionaries’ very presence in local governmental arenas often had an immediate and tangible effect, simply because such relations were assumed to exist. And Pariahs, for their part, quickly recognized and sought to capitalize on the advantage that even the appearance of an alliance might afford; mission archives bear witness to instances of Pariahs claiming a connection to missionaries with whom they had had no contact or deliberately conspiring to create the impression of an alliance. In an article for the Harvest Field, Rev. Goudie recalled, “It is a common thing for people to request that if we cannot undertake work among them, I will at least visit their village and pitch my tent in it for a few days.”34 The seriousness with which these new configurations in local administration were taken by landed elites is attested by the fact that missionaries’ presence at the local courthouse in support of a Pariah defendant was indignantly censured in The Hindu, the leading newspaper of Madras’s elite: To those who understand life in the mofussil [the countryside] it will be clear what such a thing means. Weak magistrates . . . get frightened by the appearance of the European missionary in their courts . . . knowing he is on friendly terms with their departmental superiors. The practical effect . . . is that the men against whom the missionaries interest themselves fail to get justice from the officers of Government, who are more careful of their . . . advancement than anxious to be just.35 84  T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E

Colonial racial hierarchies (i.e., missionaries’ association with officials and their membership in the ruling race), specific native labor regimes, and missiological arguments concerning motives and inducements, converged to produce missionary policies that met with remarkable success among Pariahs in rural south India. Pariahs found new means by which to ensure success in contests with their overlords, and missionaries simultaneously filled baptismal registers, while assiduously refraining, for the most part, from providing material inducements—although generously bestowing assistance of other kinds. Education directed at the Pariah’s spirit was, in the material structure of the school building, an architectural index of an altered relation between the ūr, the village proper, and the cēri, the laborer’s ghetto; new forms of dress that were but marks of good grooming to missionaries likewise allowed Pariahs new practices of insubordination. And finally, in some instances at least, the local administrative machinery was pushed in new directions more favorable to laborers, altering the functioning of the caste–state nexus. To conclude this section, I draw attention once again to my rationale for the use of the term “Pariah–missionary alliance” rather than “conversion.” As I have made clear, it is not my intention to deny that “spiritual” ideals may indeed have motivated conversions. A very sympathetic mission worker who wrote several books on preaching to the Pariah insisted that, while newcomers were not likely to “believe in Jesus Christ as the redeemer,” they were nevertheless “groping after something better,” and it is basic to my understanding that issues of dignity and self-respect were critical components of Dalit activity at this time.36 One cannot reduce the complex interactions with missionaries to “mere” material interest. On the contrary, it is the politics and stakes of making these very distinctions that are my field of inquiry, and dignity can be pursued in many forms. I abjure the missionary assumption—based on the fact of Dalits’ poverty alone—that Dalit motives were often “impure.” But nor do I attempt to unearth and more accurately describe motive, because the framing of the question as a matter of motive precludes attention to the features of these alliances I have outlined above. In particular, the very remarkable grasp of their situation that Pariahs displayed in their interactions with missionaries provides a view of the mission field that is a far cry from that which prevails, as I discuss below, in which missionaries are depicted as quickening a heretofore inert and docile Dalit populace. T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E   85

Missionary Advocacy: Publicizing the Pariah Even as these struggles played out in the countryside, missionaries had, at another level, embarked on a concerted campaign to bring the Pariah to the fore as no other category of publicist could. Despite their sometimes tense relations with the colonial government—to say nothing of Indian elites—missionaries were able to exert an influence far surpassing what their small numbers might lead one to expect.37 Although certainly outnumbered by Indians, they were vastly overrepresented in influential public forums in colonial Madras, serving on the Legislative Council, on the Madras University Board, and as chairmen of numerous cultural and social institutions. Adam Andrew, for example, served on the District and Taluk boards for a number of years and was vice president of the Taluk Board of Chingleput in 1909. He was appointed by the government to be an official visitor of the Government Reformatory in Chingleput and was also officially consulted on matters regarding Pariahs in the 1910s, providing information that would have a critical influence on the formulation of state policy, as we shall see in subsequent chapters.38 Although unusual in the sheer extent of his activities, Andrew nevertheless typifies a set of possibilities that were available to the missionary and that countless others of his calling would realize as well, although on a lesser scale. Also typical was Andrew’s movement between insider roles and that of the outside agitator; in addition to instigating the emergence of the Pariah problem itself and helping the state to devise solutions for it, for instance, he was among the cohort of missionaries who published scathing critiques of the administration’s woefully inadequate response to famines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.39 Beyond their visible, public activities, missionaries also provided information to officials through back channels in the late 1880s on the conditions under which laborers lived. As we will see in the following chapter, missionaries were behind some of the findings in collectors’ reports produced in response to the state’s inquiries regarding the “laboring classes” in 1888; indeed, it was Rev. Andrew himself, in a statement in support of the report of Chingleput Collector J. Lee-Warner, that introduced “the Pariah” into administrative language as a synonym for what elsewhere in the report was referred to as the “laboring” or “cooly” class. The most widely circulating and influential native newspaper in Madras, 86  T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E

The Hindu, had one major article commenting on “the Pariah problem” that mainly quoted in extenso from a pamphlet on the topic written and supplied to the paper by Rev. William Goudie. Missionaries, in short, made Pariahs a favored topic of public debate—although we must not forget that they became the Pariahs’ champions only with reluctance and at the instigation of Pariahs themselves. Finally, missionaries engaged in lobbying at the highest levels of state, and Rev. Adam Andrew again played a leading role in, for instance, raising the “Pariah Question” in Parliament. Here is Andrew’s own recollection of how he brought that about: I believe I was the first . . . to [investigate] the “Pariah Question” . . . [When] I went home on furlough .  .  . I went straight up to London, and called on Mr. Samuel Smith [MP], and had a long talk with him on the subject. He thereafter introduced me to Sir John Gorst, UnderSecretary of State for India, with whom I also had a long conversation. He was deeply interested and said, “You are the first man who has . . . [talked] about the depressed classes in India.” . . . He told me he . . . could take no action unless it was referred to in Parliament. So I went to Mr. Smith, who laid the case before Parliament, and Sir John Gorst answered. As a result of this a dispatch was sent from the Secretary of State on this very question calling upon the Government of Madras to do whatever they could for the amelioration of this people. About simultaneously with my action at home, the Madras Missionary Conference sent a memorial on the same subject to the Madras Government.40

While working through formal channels was thus highly effective, Andrew’s efforts were supplemented by his own personal ties to officials in Madras: as Andrew casually mentioned in a letter to the secretary of the Free Church, “I had an interesting conversation with the Chief Secretary to the Government of Madras, during which I urged him to do something for the Pariahs.  .  .  . He said he knew well where the agitation started from—from Chingleput—through a paper I submitted to the Sub-Collector in 1889. . . . The Chief Secretary is a good friend of mine, and is keenly interested in the same subject.”41 Thus, one could state with little exaggeration that the Pariah could not have become a problem in the manner and at the moment he did without the careful promulgation of his condition by missionaries. Due to their T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E   87

seminal role, moreover, missionaries also defined the very terms—the bounds of religion, the issue of motive, the spiritualization of bondage, the need for intervention of a “pedagogical” nature—through which the Pariah problem would be understood.

Conclusion: Ordinary Pariahs, Minor Revolutions—Conversion and Motive in the Historiographic Imagination What I have delineated here is at odds with the otherwise rich historiography of Pariah conversion in south India in the following ways. The critical alterations in the character of statecraft that resulted from the alliance of Pariahs and missionaries have, almost without exception, been omitted altogether or subsumed under the themes prescribed by the mission archive itself: conversion, syncretism, religious identity, interdenominational rivalry, scandals within the church, and so on. Most important to our purposes, the literature remains, despite its many merits, by and large in the thrall of a preoccupation with analyzing and exonerating Dalit motives.42 While this is a defensible concern in an age in which Hindutva ideologues impugn Dalit motives for conversion as part of their attacks on Dalits and religious minorities more generally, it nonetheless leaves out something critical. Even those who would defend Dalit motives—by pointing to their suffering, for example—concede the terms of a normative debate in which motive itself is taken as the most relevant criterion for the evaluation of action. Many scholars have, in this vein, marshaled the ample evidence that Dalits themselves instigated mass movements and pursued missionary alliances even in the face of missionary discouragement and the absence of pecuniary aid, evidence that quite rightly redresses erroneous assumptions on the part of Hindu majoritarians and others that missionaries coerced or “bought” Pariah converts.43 Yet the same evidence of Pariah initiative and their steadfastness in the face of “persecution” are adduced in this literature to support the further claim that Pariahs were attracted to the egalitarian ideology of Christianity. We are told, for example, that the “teachings which stressed the essential equality and brotherhood of man . . . provided the depressed classes with an ideology they could utilize in their opposition to higher-caste Hindus.”44 Such scholarship seeks to assure us that Dalit motives were, after all, pure and furthermore 88  T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E

implies that prior to the gift of a new ideology from missionaries Pariahs acquiesced in their submission.45 But evidence on mass conversions does not support the notion that matters of doctrine were especially significant catalysts of these minor revolutions in the countryside, at least not in the early stages. While it is of course true that many Dalit converts did indeed come to fashion and form commitments to their own varieties of Christianity over time, that does not detract from the point I am making here, which concerns the immediate effects of alliances with missionaries and the actions Pariahs took in making these alliances.46 The set of practices I have described in this chapter involved strategic action on the part of Pariahs and their employers that bears no necessary relation to religious conversion or baptism, suggesting that crucial aspects of the Pariah–missionary alliance are neither comprehensible nor well described by a focus on the analysis and categorization of motives. More important still, missionaries did not in fact uphold an egalitarian ideology, except insofar as that meant equality before God alone. On the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence—ignored in the secondary literature—that missionaries opposed changes that might tamper with distinctions among groups they viewed as social inferiors and superiors and that they sought to found an unequal social order that was nevertheless free of “Oriental” cruelty, as the previous chapter demonstrated. In the case of the Pariah, this meant the transition from harsh, unjust slavery to “free servitude.” Attending to this ubiquitous feature of mission archives makes it impossible to maintain the fiction that missionaries instigated an enervated Pariah population with shining promises of equality. What is interesting, furthermore, is that while missionaries worried over Pariah motives, they themselves never, to my knowledge, adduced anything like a “Christian doctrine of equality” as the reason for Pariah conversion. They spoke of Pariahs seeking “protection,” of a “longing for something better,” and occasionally of their own “kindness” as attracting Pariahs. Yet if it were to Christian doctrines, such as the idea of spiritual equality, that Pariahs were attracted, one would have expected missionaries themselves to proudly publicize this fact. Instead, they often and very publicly admitted with chagrin that the motives of low-caste converts were at best mixed.47 That Pariahs were unlikely to have perceived the missionary as a champion of social equality is also reinforced by the fact that issues of T H E P A R I A H – M I S S I O N A R Y A L L I A N C E   89

church discipline involving Pariahs most often entailed missionaries’ prohibition of what they described as “low” or “degrading” practices, such as the consumption of carrion, as well as of Pariahs’ relatively informal practices of marriage and divorce, which were judged promiscuous by missionaries. Missionaries, that is, condemned Pariahs for the very practices for which they were condemned by caste society. In addition, most missionaries managing mixed-caste congregations did little, as we have seen, to deter caste people from enforcing separate seating and other like practices. And we have also seen how commonplace were remarks that unfavorably compared Pariahs with caste folk. It is thus not at all obvious that Christian Pariahs, at least in their first attempts to ally with a missionary, would have understood the missionary as an opponent of caste per se, even as he might be perceived as a powerful and kind helpmate who would defend them against the oppression of particular masters. As such, this unsupported yet oft-repeated appeal to Christian equality is perhaps the most unfortunate fallout of scholarly concern with motive. It is assumptions such as this that have prevented Pariahs’ insubordination against the strictures placed upon them by both missionaries and their masters, the one “gentle,” the other “Oriental”—the fact that Pariahs chafed under the bonds of what missionaries would allow them, tending to become, as missionaries put it, overly impudent to their superiors—from finding any place at all in the historiography of either Indian Christianity or of agrarian servitude. Equally absent in the historiography is the fact that it was Pariahs’ actions that compelled missionaries to take note of them—quite against missionaries’ initial disinclination to do so—and in turn to direct the state’s gaze to the Pariah. The emergence of the Pariah problem in official circles is only explicable as the concatenated result of the innumerable actions of ordinary Pariahs throughout the presidency, who sought to transform their relations with caste masters. That the historiography has failed to acknowledge this is no small omission.

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Chapter 4 THE STATE AND THE CĒRI

While missionaries and the Dalits with whom they were in alliance began to alter the conditions of rural life and to bring the Pariah to the attention of the colonial state, the state took a different route to the Pariah. If the previous chapter showed how Dalits themselves enlisted missionaries in their own ongoing projects until missionaries were compelled to raise the issue of the Pariahs’ immiseration, this chapter will show the very different route administrators took toward the Pariah, and how missionaries intervened at critical points—a process whose beginning we saw in the previous chapter—so that by the early 1890s the two kinds of authority, sacred and secular, came to share not only the goal of Pariah amelioration but also a specific vision for achieving it. In the late 1880s, for the first time with any regularity or purpose, state officials ventured into the presidency’s cēris. They did this not in order to find the Pariah but because the late nineteenth-century state was alarmed by the frequency and severity of famines in India and the resulting massive losses in revenue. The Madras Presidency in particular, the cash cow on which India as a whole greatly depended, had witnessed very severe famines in that period, especially the Great Famine of 1876–1878, which recast, in official eyes, the mass of rural agriculturists as a populace perpetually on the brink of disaster.1 So, in 1888,

the government of India sent three interrelated directives to the Madras government. The first asked about the existence of overpopulated tracts in the presidency and recommended relief measures; the second called for reports on the “condition of the lower classes of the population”; and the third asked whether the general population during regular nonfamine years had sufficient food.2 The resulting reports on scarcity received from each district, when taken as a whole, make plain with remarkable consistency that laborers and poor cultivators lived hand to mouth and did not have the resources to support themselves in seasons of scarcity. What was at issue was only how to interpret these facts and, in particular, whether state intervention was warranted. The resulting reports illustrate, therefore, the marked disagreement within official circles over what constituted genuinely dangerous (i.e., to the exchequer) poverty and hunger. Correlatively, officials disagreed over whether certain behaviors of the poor were to be read as signs of relative prosperity or its opposite. For instance, the fact that the sale of toddy (a type of country liquor) had greatly increased in Bellary District in the preceding five years—a district particularly hard hit by the Great Famine—was understood by Bellary’s collector to “clearly [show] the existence of a large surplus in the possession of the rural population over what is sufficient to provide for their actual needs.”3 Yet Collector Underwood of Anantapur, another district that had suffered greatly during the famine, observed that “drink is no luxury with [the lowest classes] and is resorted to as a necessary of life after their hard work.”4 Likewise, there was disagreement on what counted as adequate nourishment, as well as on what the specific needs of Indian laborers were, in contrast to their European counterparts. Thus, while the same Collector of Anantapur lamented that laborers did not even have the necessary income to buy “condiments for their curry” and ate cold meals unseasoned, the Collector of Trichinopoly, admitting that two of the laborer’s meals were taken with no condiment but salt, reasoned that the wants of the South Indian labourer are few. . . . He is able to thrive on this simple food and do hard work and is on the whole as least as well off as his representative [i.e., counterpart] in England . . . [Laborers] live from hand to mouth—labourers must in all countries, or they would not be labourers—but the South Indian labourer .  .  . is practically the better off of the two.5 92  T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I

Just as an earlier generation of officials had, with respect to slavery, averred that slaves in India were better off than slaves elsewhere and that tied laborers suffered less than daily wage earners (what I have described as the trope of “gentle slavery”), the Collector of Anantapur spoke with all the accumulated authority of conventional wisdom. As with those before him, he felt no need to supply even the barest empirical evidence for his comparative claims. While almost every collector painted an optimistic picture, averring that on the whole the population was surviving adequately, there were two dissenters. The Collector of North Arcot, Henry Le Fanu, described the “widespread condition of the masses” as one of “grinding poverty,” and the Collector of Chingleput, J. Lee-Warner, observed that the “mass of the people live from hand to mouth, and in adverse seasons are seriously hampered.”6 Lee-Warner proffered as a corroborating witness none other than Rev. Adam Andrew of the Free Church of Scotland, who described those the government had termed the “lowest classes” (Andrew himself called them Pariahs) as being “in a wretched condition and forced to labor by their masters under a system which may be termed semi-slavery,” although he conceded that they were muscular and hardworking.7 The Board of Revenue, as well as its overseer the government of Madras, dismissed these dissenters.8 The Collector of North Arcot’s report was deemed “a burst of rhetoric,” and the government discounted Andrew’s remarks on “semi-slavery” in Chingleput but seized upon Lee-Warner’s and Andrew’s observations that laborers’ appearance was good, declaring that “in matters of this sort ocular evidence carried more weight” than stray accounts of hunger and low wages.9 The Governor in Council therefore concluded that the laboring classes were well off. And the government of India was told that Madras’s condition did not merit the imposition of any serious relief measures such as the encouragement of emigration.10 But amid these indignant denials of food scarcity on the part of official readers of the reports, some doubts were quietly raised. It was admitted by a member of the Board of Revenue, “It is of course very difficult for Europeans to form any idea as to the condition of the poorer classes of natives and still more difficult to ascertain their condition in past years so as to frame any reliable comparison.”11 Although the board member does not explain exactly what caused this particular difficulty for European officials, other sources suggest he meant that European officials had very little direct contact with cēri dwellers and with other members of the T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I   93

rural poor, receiving all their information through intermediaries. Whenever a high-ranking European official such as a collector made inquiries on a topic, he would almost invariably do so through subordinate revenue officials or through the village’s most prominent landlords, who would set themselves up as village spokespersons. Adam Andrew described this state of affairs: How can the higher officials really know the Pariahs in their haunts and ways? A European revenue officer, with the increase in his indoor official duties and his frequent changes from one district to another, has no time to look into the numerous details of village life in the many villages which crowd his district. Nor can he get near the people, clothed as he is with authority derived from the State . . . and [thus] acquire an intimate personal knowledge of them first or second hand. The multifarious duties of his office prevent him from acquiring the former, but he is not a whit better with reference to the latter, as it is extremely difficult for him to arrive at the truth regarding the Pariahs through his subordinate officials.12

Missionaries, as we saw in the previous chapters, were the first Europeans to spend considerable time among the poorer strata of agrarian society, and it is telling that the only two dissenting reports on scarcity, those of Collector Le Fanu of North Arcot and Collector Lee-Warner of Chingleput, had based their accounts on the more detailed information they had obtained from missionaries. Indeed, Le Fanu had only been in the district a short time when called upon to make his report and so had relied on information supplied by two American missionaries, Revs. Conklin and Hekhuis, who told him that in North Arcot there were “many poor people who, although they do not actually starve, go through life on insufficient food.”13 Lee-Warner had relied upon Rev. Adam Andrew. Adam Andrew’s language represents another exception as well in these reports of the late 1880s. Administrative discourse employed vague economic categories, such as “the lower classes” and “the laboring classes.” As yet, little mention had been made of “the Pariah,” and certainly no suggestions were proposed regarding Pariahs and their economic welfare as objects of intervention. The sole aberration came from Andrew who, when the state had inquired specifically about the condition of the “lowest classes,” had understood this to mean Pariahs. And in this way Andrew, 94  T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I

via Lee-Warner, had introduced the Pariah into administrative language as a term for what elsewhere in the report was referred to as the “laboring” or “cooly” class. Yet as we know from previous chapters, Andrew’s use of Pariah derived from the simple fact that laborers in Chingleput were Pariahs and that in native usage their caste position and their laboring status were simultaneously referents of that name. In mirasi share sale deeds, after all, one sold not “laborers” but “Pariahs.” That is, Rev. Andrew, by calling the laboring rural poor around Madras “Pariahs,” was simply recognizing what was obvious to any native, but what official terminology had long served to obscure. This should not be taken to mean that Pariah as a general term for untouchables in Madras had never entered administration: The Pariah had been the focus of discussion for a brief moment while deliberating, for example, whether they ought to be allowed to attend government-funded schools. (It was decided that this would be unfair to the rest of the population, a resolution on which all natives, as well as most of the Europeans who sat on Local Fund boards, agreed. As one Englishman argued, the objections of high-caste parents were no more unreasonable than those an “English gentleman [might have] to send[ing] his son to school with boys of the lower order.”14) The Pariah also quietly figured in such things as provisions for famine relief. Separate Pariah quarters were set up in famine-relief camps in response to the fact that if Pariahs were indiscriminately mixed with the rest of the population no one but they would seek relief—the Madras Famine Code of 1888 provides a diagram of a model poorhouse in which separate dwelling areas and kitchens were plainly labeled “Pariah” or “Caste.”15 But this rather incidental discourse on Pariahs, whose focus was, above all, the need to maintain their social segregation and pointedly not to problematize it, would dramatically change by 1892.

Tremenheere’s Investigations In the wake of the reports on scarcity described above, famine broke out in Chingleput District in 1891. The recent India-wide concern over famine policy caused the government of Madras to take notice when Acting Collector of Chingleput J.  H.  A. Tremenheere reported impending scarcity and crop failures in a number of Chingleput taluks.16 Tremenheere specifically mentioned that it was “the Pariah classes” who were suffering T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I   95

the most, and that there were “easy means” to ameliorate their condition. The government immediately asked him to elaborate. Neither the government of Madras nor the Board of Revenue would like what Tremenheere had to say. Tremenheere produced a preliminary report and then a fuller one entitled “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput,” and we shall consider both in turn. Meanwhile, as we saw, the Pariahs’ plight had entered Parliament in England through the efforts of Rev. Adam Andrew, while he was on furlough; Andrew had in fact used Tremenheere’s remarks on the likelihood of scarcity in Chingleput to press the case that the Pariahs’ sufferings were uniquely deserving of attention.17 To this, however, the under-secretary of state, Sir John Gorst, authoritatively replied, “There is no bar either in law or in practice to low caste people obtaining and cultivating wastelands on the same terms as high caste people.”18 Thus, in his first report, presented to the government in August 1891, Tremenheere began by remarking in this way on the under-secretary’s opinion: There are vast areas of wasteland in the district. Speaking generally, none may be taken up without the consent of the mirasidars of the village; those mirasidars are caste people, and they will consent to the acquisition of land by a stranger, sometimes if he is a caste man, never if he is a Pariah. . . . I do not know how to describe [this] otherwise than by saying that the possession of land is closed to Pariahs.19

Pariahs were therefore landless, or held lands as puṟakuṭis, “outsiders,” on highly insecure subtenures. And their masters, Tremenheere tells us, also claimed rights to Pariahs’ homesteads, although, legally speaking, only the actual inhabitants of a site officially classified as residential, as was the cēri, could be listed as proprietors of it. But landlords successfully claimed cēri sites as their own, supported by village officials who knew well that landlords never dwelt in them. These titles to the cēri could be effectively used to quell insubordination with the threat of eviction. As Tremenheere described it, “The black word slavery, which is so much objected to, can hardly be avoided when for any disobedience the Pariah is turned out of his house on pretence of long occupation by a family which . . . has not, and for caste prejudice could not, come within fifty yards of it.”20 Having made facts such as these bare for the first time,

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Tremenheere then promised to round out his criticisms with positive and feasible suggestions. For the first time, links between servility, landownership, and caste status were being made in the highest levels of provincial administration.21 Tremenheere also made explicit the marked official antipathy to the use of the word “slavery.” Refraining from this word was at once a way to avoid the potential political and economic complications of upsetting rural landlords and masters, as we have seen, but it was also essential in maintaining the public image of the presidency, as well as its relationship with the British Parliament. Tremenheere’s remarks furthermore suggest tense relations between landowners and their laborers—and not the mutually beneficial system of duties and obligations that officials often described—evidenced by the fact that threats of eviction were necessary to secure labor. Thus, also for the first time, a substantial document gave a negative portrayal of labor relations, and Tremenheere would even, as we shall observe, see the state’s hand in their very production.

Tremenheere, Mullaly, and the Persistence of the “Black Word” Tremenheere, in making this initial report, was no doubt aware of a recent controversy in his district that was elicited by another official’s use of that “black word, slavery.”22 We must consider its consequences at this juncture to fully understand the novelty of Tremenheere’s intervention. In 1888, Lee-Warner, the Collector of Chingleput whom we encountered above, had complained to the Board about the “reckless” initiatives of his sub-collector, C.  M. Mullaly, from which he thereby distanced himself. Mullaly had “had his attention drawn to the miserable condition of the lower classes” (in fact, Rev. Adam Andrew had done so) and hoped to provide them house sites that they, rather than their masters, would own.23 He had discovered (or had been directed by Andrew to the fact) that two names were entered against cēri sites in village registers: a particular mirasidar was listed first as owner, followed by a laborer’s name as tenant. Two names, the “owner” and the “tenant,” were thus entered against lands over which the state claimed ultimate jurisdiction and over which mirasidars did not have any legal proprietary right; this illegal practice Mullaly dubbed “the double-entry system.” Mullaly wanted to provide

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new house sites to those laborers dwelling on what masters claimed as their own property, so he attempted to ascertain the amount and location of unoccupied dwelling sites in several Chingleput villages by ordering karaṇams (village accountants) to compile lists with this information. These lists were not to consider who held titles to village sites but were simply to show which were being occupied. When mirasidars across the district got wind of these new government accounts, given that in the ordinary course of things village land registers were “in many cases prepared by [mirasidars] themselves or at their dictation,” they threatened litigation, alleging that this amounted to the government taking away titles to land they owned.24 This was not Mullaly’s intention. He simply sought to identify unoccupied village residential sites (to which, by law, none but the state had title) on which to resettle those laborers who were then living on sites held by their masters. Cases piled up, however, much to the alarm of Collector Lee-Warner, who insisted Mullaly rescind grants of house sites he had already made and refrain from compiling any list of unoccupied house sites. The swiftness of mirasidar reaction comes as no surprise: what Mullaly proposed was a direct affront to their control over Pariah labor. As Tremenheere had discovered, threats of eviction were among the most routinely used means of maintaining mirasidars’ domination. As Mullaly described it, the state had long asserted the right to dispose of puramboke and immemorial waste at its will.25 Yet mere assertion was of little consequence when a system of double-entry prevailed in village registers; this right, as with the state’s rights over wasteland, was never consistently claimed. When Mullaly’s effort to enact the state’s right was revoked by Lee-Warner, a frustrated Mullaly appealed to the Board of Revenue. He asked that the double-entry system be eradicated in Chingleput, for a “widespread belief prevails that the mirasidars are absolute owners of the village [residential] site, and although wrong, the entries in the accounts perpetuate and strengthen this belief, and on the strength of them the grossest acts of oppression are perpetrated.”26 What were these acts? “By means of these double entries, rent or service is exacted for the very land which Government has declared should be exempt from taxation.”27 Mirasidars were able to demand labor from Pariahs (and rent from others) for the occupation of land that legally

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belonged to the state. Mullaly further specified that the particular incidents discussed in his letter (he described a number of cases of eviction and harassment of laborers) were by no means exceptional: A recusant . . . [tenant or laborer] can be ousted, his cattle impounded and his crops removed. The criminal courts are closed to him as a means of redress, the cattle being properly impounded as all the land belongs to mirasidars, and the removal of crop bona fide and the subject only of civil suit!! He is verily reduced to the state of villain [i.e., villein] . . . dependent for everything on the will of his masters. Such is not an exaggerated picture.28

Yet Mullaly’s every attempt to exercise the state’s officially proclaimed right was thwarted by the collector, who readily capitulated in the face of the large number of appeals and court cases issuing from his subcollector’s actions; as Mullaly put it, the collector’s “orders amount to a complete and unreserved recognition of mirasi right. The mirasidars themselves could not ask for more.”29 Mullaly also records the prevalence of laborers’ eagerness to alter labor relations; after visiting several paṟaccēris, where he described his idea for providing them with new sites, Mullaly found himself overwhelmed by applications. Thus, despite the frequency with which it was repeated, the colonial trope of “mutual responsibilities” allegedly binding high-caste masters and low-caste servants in a loyal and harmonious relationship is contradicted by evidence available in the colonial state’s own archive and, as we have seen, amply corroborated by mission archives. By pointing to the exactions made upon laborers enabled by mirasidars’ claims to laborers’ house sites, Mullaly was a transitional figure in the story of the emergence of the Pariah Problem. For his concern was not the Pariah, but the generic laborer.30 At the same time, however, he referred to the sites being appropriated by mirasidars as paṟaccēri, the Pariah ghetto. While overall, his was not, as Tremenheere’s report would be, a far-ranging depiction of an entire subpopulation known as the Pariah, the controversy over the “black word, slavery” rendered Pariah laborers newly visible and also brought to official notice the extent to which their homesteads were a site of contest, a fact that would shape state intervention into Pariahs’ lives for several decades to come.31

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“Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput”: Communal Lands, Preferential Rights, and the Caste–State Nexus Tremenheere’s “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput” marks the definitive emergence of the Pariah in public and administrative discourse.32 The bulk of Tremenheere’s report, like his preliminary study, was concerned with the abuses of Pariahs facilitated by state protection of various mirasi rights. Like Thomas Munro before him, Tremenheere saw the state as at least partially culpable for the difficulties of the present insofar as the mirasi rights that it protected were not authentically indigenous: “We have permitted ancient privileges to survive until they have become anachronisms, and we have created new privileges.” It was this that particularly necessitated state intervention, for “the policy of the State in the past has degraded [Pariahs], and the State must retrieve its mistakes.”33 While, as we saw, Tremenheere was aware of and objected to mirasidars’ arrogation of cēri sites, the “Note” was focused primarily on the preferential darkhast rules, the bidding arrangements by which the state guaranteed mirasidars first refusal to wasteland that was to be assigned for private cultivation, as discussed in chapter 1. In the course of his report, Tremenheere provided numerous examples of how, in order to ensure the terms of their own domination, mirasidars acted in concert to maintain a monopoly over land and to prevent Pariah laborers from becoming independent cultivators. And it is here that the preferential right to apply for titles proved an indispensable tool. When land was put up for sale in a mirasi village, a particular mirasidar would assert his right, often in the absence of any desire to cultivate the land, as evidenced by his ensuing neglect of the plot. When the land went into arrears and was again put up for bidding, it would again be offered to mirasidars first, so that another mirasidar might claim it; this procedure could be repeated indefinitely. Thus, with the express sanction of the state, it was effectively impossible for a Pariah to become a landholder in a mirasi village. Indeed, it was extremely difficult for any nonmirasidar, but, as Tremenheere specified, while occasionally a non-mirasidari caste person might be granted a title to wastelands with the sanction of mirasidars, “Pariahs .  .  . are rigidly excluded.”34 Even when a Pariah might gather up sufficient funds to

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successfully buy a piece of land, his exclusion from the ranks of landholders was no less rigid.35 Thus, [a Pariah’s] son returning from Natal or from the salt factories on the coast will, from his savings, enable his father to buy a small patch of ground. Now chicanery sets to work. The transfer of land from the vendor’s patta [title deed] is refused or delayed: the vendor purposely falls into arrears with the revenue due from other land in the same patta, and by the exercise of a little influence has attachment made upon the very piece he sold. It is put up to auction; he easily outbids the exhausted Pariah; and at a very small cost has both the land and the purchase-money for which he sold it.36

While Tremenheere did not explicitly discuss other districts, what he described regarding preferential rights to apply for title, so-called darkhast rules, would apply to them as well, with mirasidars’ special privileges in Chingleput District being only a particularly heavy addition to an already difficult burden, given that landless Pariahs still fell behind at least two other categories throughout the presidency.37 Furthermore, in a marginal aside, Tremenheere observed that even in villages not legally settled as mirasi, mirasi practices might prevail. Thus, while arguing his case against the preferential darkhast right, Tremenheere explained that the landless could, as a rule, manage to acquire titles to waste more easily in nonmirasi villages but also admitted that there were several exceptions: The chief exception is where there are only one or two pattadars; they can combine and work the pattadar’s preference with as much exclusiveness as though it was mirasi preference. Another important exception is the villages in this district which are only nominally non-mirasi; except to the official world their non-mirasi character is practically unknown.38

In other words, the strategies by which landholders maintained their monopoly over cultivable land were not peculiar to villages legally recognized as mirasi and were not, therefore, specific to Chingleput District.39 This underscores, once again, the extent to which legal titles and rights

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must be examined in the context of their operation; just as the legal nonrecognition of rights over laborers could not be taken to mean servitude no longer existed, so the legal denial of mirās did not necessarily entail that every aspect of mirasi relations, and most especially those pertaining to labor subordination, would vanish. Moreover, this was not the result of the state’s oversight, simply an unfortunate but intended consequence; it was in fact perfectly plain, even to senior officials, and was an intrinsic part of the tacit codes that made governance possible. In addition to darkhast rules, Tremenheere also recommended increased governmental vigilance over the use of puramboke, communal lands. Supplementing the preferential right of application, mirasidars, as we have seen, claimed tradition granted them final authority over puramboke, “public” lands whose object was officially defined as being the “welfare of society as a whole” (camutāya naṉmai). Government had claimed proprietorship over these lands since 1870, and all villagers were assumed to have access to them; in addition, in theory, every family had full rights of occupancy under the law to their dwelling sites. In fact, however, mirasidars were more often than not able to arrogate the rights to Pariah house sites, even, as Mullaly demonstrated, citing themselves as owners of these sites in village registers. Although there was no de jure recognition of mirasi rights over Pariah house sites, and the government asserted its own ultimate jurisdiction over them, mirasidars enjoyed these rights in practice. While technically illegal, no officer could actively or explicitly condemn them: Mullaly, recall, had been severely reprimanded for his attempt to do so. The maintenance of labor subordination with threats of eviction was therefore routine. If we had only Tremenheere to rely on, we might well doubt whether the picture he paints of rural labor relations was widely applicable or indeed even true. But where these are rare moments in the colonial archive of the 1880s and 1890s—and thus in their very exceptional nature appear to provide indirect support for the official trope of gentle servitude— their prevalence is plain in mission writings, where such incidents of what Tremenheere called chicanery appear across American, Scottish, and English records, in both private correspondence among missionaries as well as in reports home. Mission archives in Europe and North America highlight the very same diversity and ubiquity of stratagems

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available to landed elites. The state’s portrait of gentle slavery, which skeptical officials such as Tremenheere and Mullaly before him were scolded for doubting, crumbles entirely before a reading of secular and sacred archives in tandem.

The “Pariah qua Pariah” and the Reading of Archival “Discrepancy” Both the Board of Revenue and the government of Madras proved dismissive of and even hostile to Tremenheere’s bleak depiction of how mirasi rights immiserated Pariahs, describing the report as “highly coloured” and “greatly exaggerated.” Echoing virtually verbatim the reports on food scarcity, the government reasoned that after all, it was to be “borne in mind that the wants of the lowest classes in India are very small.”40 The government therefore concluded only with a promise to provide some means to promote Pariah education but made no commitment whatsoever to change mirasi rights. Tremenheere’s indictment was thus brushed aside in favor of a view that had been around for at least a couple of decades, namely that mirasi rights were the result of a dog-in-the-manger mentality, a bugbear to be sure, but one that would eventually retreat of its own accord.41 Remarking on the allegations of ubiquitous mirasidari chicanery by which Pariahs were kept landless, the Board opined, “It seems impossible .  .  . to believe such frauds .  .  . could long remain unchecked in any district in which the administration is conducted with even moderate efficiency.”42 Thus, they at once denied the truth of Tremenheere’s claims and also shifted the blame onto him as district administrator should they prove to be true. Responses to Tremenheere both from the Board, a lower-level administrative body, and from the government drew on one strand in particular of late nineteenth-century governance in Madras: a deference to custom that was itself the legacy of early administrators, and especially F.  W. Ellis, that great admirer of the mirasi system.43 Further guaranteeing the state’s particular vision of the customs that made up traditional labor relations was the fact, noted above, that information about laborers was invariably carefully filtered through village elites.44 State officials themselves would rarely, if ever, have had any familiarity with the dwelling

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sites of Pariahs, which were situated a good distance from the center of the village, did not permit of easy access, and were regarded by caste people with no small measure of disgust. Thus, those like Mullaly and Tremenheere, who had visited cēris in person, were rare indeed, as many officials frankly admitted.45 And yet none of this prevented the Board of Revenue and the government from confidently asserting that the Pariahs’ condition, while no doubt unenviable, was not especially worsened by their position as Pariahs, a critical rhetorical tactic that would, moreover, be adopted by caste folk in subsequent decades. While admitting it might be possible that Pariahs “compare[d] unfavourably” with caste laborers, officials flatly denied that this was due “to any insufficiency of food or diminution in his earnings”—although they neither indicated the factual basis of their rebuttal nor even hinted of there being one.46 Critical documents such as this one therefore abstracted caste from agrarian political economy such that the caste character of mirasi rights and labor were made to seem not matters of essence but of mere accident. The government concluded its own reaction to Tremenheere in a manner that vividly illustrates this position. Regarding Tremenheere’s accounts of Pariahs’ unfair treatment in local courts, the government insisted it had “no reason to believe Pariahs . . . [were] at any disadvantage . . . or that .  .  . Pariahs qua Pariahs [were] treated .  .  . with any special disregard.”47 With respect to Tremenheere’s specific proposals, the state simply insisted that mirasidars’ preferential right of application could not be repealed. The only concession the government made was to allow that district collectors could assign “bought-in” lands to Pariahs.48 Boughtin lands were those on which revenue payment had been defaulted and which then did not fetch even a minimal price at auction: these were therefore the least desirable lands, mostly unfit for cultivation. The description of mirasi privilege above, moreover, should suffice to underscore how very meaningless this official sop was. It was highly unlikely that economically viable bought-in lands would ever become available in a village of mirasidars, most especially if there were any intimation that the land might be distributed among their own landless laborers. The government also promised to look into settling Pariahs on wastelands in remote areas of the Kurnool and Cuddapah districts.

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As for mirasi arrogation of authority over communal lands, the government simply reasserted its own “ultimate” jurisdiction over them. The state reiterated that it had the right to take over communal lands should they be required for public purposes, but it did nothing that would in practice impinge upon the widespread appropriation of that land by mirasidars. From this refusal of the government to act with respect to communal lands, perhaps the most critical point in the official responses to Tremenheere emerges. Hitherto, I have referred to the Board of Revenue and occasionally to the government in discussing the official administration of revenue in Madras. In fact, these were two distinct administrative bodies, and understanding the nature and significance of what I call archival discrepancy requires that we briefly chart the difference between the two. Because of the sheer size of the domain of revenue administration in colonial Madras, revenue affairs were placed under two sets of authorities: the Revenue Department (a branch of the government of Madras) and the Board of Revenue (a sprawling structure subordinate to the Department, which in the late nineteenth century comprised four voting members and thousands of subordinate, mostly Indian, employees). The graphic record reflects the inequality between the Revenue Department and the Board of Revenue: The government of Madras’s Revenue Department records, by the late nineteenth century, were often printed, and some of those printed were bound and sent to London, excised of marginalia and other graffiti.49 The Board, by contrast, filtered and thereby assigned value and authority to particular kinds of everyday dealings, sending only a tiny percentage of its business to the government’s Revenue Department for consideration. The Board’s own records are almost exclusively handwritten, or later typed, and the files are collections of multiple types of documents (petitions in English and Tamil, maps, reports from local state agents and nonstate agents and experts involved in particular small-scale matters of land administration) and remained in the colony. The bulk of them exist as single copies. And yet, as I have suggested, the Board performed a vital task of discrimination, its four highest officials determining the worth of local information. Through both the extent of its number of employees, as well as its remit of everyday affairs, it maintained the closest and most pervasive links with the population.

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The issue that concerns us here is that there was a major discrepancy between the graphic records of these two strata of administration concerning their respective positions on whether mirasidars did in fact have legal rights over puramboke (communal lands). Examining how and where this discrepancy was recorded and what reaction it provoked will allow us to limn how the state operated with respect to those at the bottom of agrarian society. The board asserted unequivocally that mirasidars indeed had rights over these lands: “It is impossible at the present day to question the rights of the mirasidars.”50 Citing a variety of eminent administrative voices, representing over a century of opinion, the board’s report finally referred to a court case from 1883, in which the judge had awarded compensation to mirasidars for wasteland taken up by the government for public purposes.51 In the board’s view, any ambiguity with respect to this question was decisively settled by this case: “The absolute right of the mirasidars in the wastelands of their villages was finally settled by the courts in 1883.”52 These quotes are indicative of the absolute certainty with which the board held this opinion, a certainty brought into sharp relief by the Department of Revenue’s response to this same issue, mirasidari proprietorship of wastelands. The department gently admonished the board for what it deemed an error in the board’s reading of the archive—that is, the state’s own graphic record of precedent and opinion. In the government’s view, the board had misinterpreted the context of the evidence it provided in support of its position, and particularly that of the court case it cited.53 It had also failed to consider signal official orders that authoritatively affirmed precisely the opposite of what the board had understood to be the case: The Government .  .  . is not prepared to admit the absolute right of the mirasidars in all the wastelands of their village, nor does it agree with the Board in considering that this right was established by the High Court judgment quoted. . . . The judgment does not touch the case of [immemorial waste], nor is it of general application. .  .  . In G.O. [Government Order] dated 1st June 1870, No. 796, which is not alluded to by the Board, the Government held that the State had the right to appropriate immemorial wastelands in mirasi villages . . . and refused to admit the claim of mirasidars. . . . The Government resolves to maintain this position.54 106  T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I

The board’s response, that is, had directly contradicted official state policy on a matter the government considered to have been settled some two decades earlier. This is of enormous consequence. The board was a lower, larger rung of revenue administration, with more direct links to local populations; the opinions expressed in resolutions of the board thus reflect not merely one among many branches of state machinery but that branch that enjoyed the most sustained contact with local administrators and nonstate agents. It was the branch that determined policy on the ground, because routine decisions of revenue administration never reached the government of Madras’s Revenue Department. Officially, then, the government’s Revenue Department was unquestionably the superior authority, but in daily ministrations to the populace—that is, at the point of application of governance—the board’s view was decisive. Representatives of the Board of Revenue, as state agents, thus enforced policies that the provincial government, a higher state authority, explicitly rejected. It might be tempting to read this as an oversight. But such attempts at explanation here would have to overlook the protracted and noisy battles in which the government of Madras, since the 1790s, had attempted to wrest rights from mirasidars in order to rationalize landholding and to augment and regularize the flow to the exchequer, about which we have spoken above. The greatest administrative minds had wrestled with the question of what was to be done about the “mirasi bugbear”; it was therefore by no means a fine point of revenue administration to which little attention was paid and about which simple ignorance can account for differences of opinion. Further tracking in the archive, however, makes the board’s mistaken views much less inexplicable. As we have seen, the government of Madras revealed a distinct ambivalence with respect to its alleged right of appropriation and, in practice, generally upheld mirasidars’ claims against its own. The government, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, treated that category of land as the property of mirasidars. This remained true through the century’s final decades. Thus, while the Board of Revenue and its agents enforced policies a higher state authority explicitly rejected, we are now in a position to see that these same policies were nonetheless tacitly promoted. It is no surprise that when Tremenheere’s report brought this difference of opinion T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I   107

to the surface in 1892, the department simply and tersely corrected the board but evinced no particular alarm, or even interest, in discovering how often the board had ruled against official policy in the recent past. On the contrary, Tremenheere’s act of pointing out that governance was not proceeding according to policy was roundly chastised by the department as “rash,” and his proposals for the Pariah’s amelioration deemed altogether quixotic. This relative nonchalance regarding the board’s misapprehension on a matter of policy of such far-reaching importance derives from a form of statecraft that, as I have argued, had become the norm by the late nineteenth century and is characterized by the state’s distinctive relations to different subpopulations, what I have called the caste–state nexus. This particular instance, the official defense of mirasidari rights in a manner that directly contradicted the letter of state policy, was but a single piece in a large conspectus of what might at first appear to be deviant acts of administration—routine state practices that nevertheless confuted state policy. To these instances might be added a long list of regulations that were simply never enforced by local authorities: one official archly observed, when it was suggested a new regulation be framed, “The Board are perhaps aware that while of the making of [Government O]rders there is no end, the proportion never carried out is considerable.”55 These aspects of the colonial state’s machinery are not slips or occasional aberrations but an intrinsic (and to a large extent conscious) feature of colonial statecraft—and one that was vital to the governance of distinct strata of rural populations, redounding especially on the lowest of those strata. Some state officials had not learned these unspoken principles of governance with sufficient thoroughness. Tremenheere breached etiquette, mistakenly believing that an administrative regulation transparently determined the principles of its own application. It is when these norms were breached that they are rendered legible in the archive, and thus anomalies, discrepant accounts, and apparently contradictory policies can be found, in many instances, to index the concrete effects of the caste– state nexus. The fundamental rationale animating the official response to Tremenheere is summarized well in the following passage authored by the Board of Revenue. The passage also uncannily anticipates the importance religion would soon assume in conflict over the Pariah Problem for it posits 108  T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I

a marriage between the protection of property and the promise of noninterference in religion, glossed here as “caste and custom”: It is quite beside the question of Government action that, in the opinion of certain persons, the caste system of the Hindus is an abomination, or that certain classes . . . have been relegated . . . to certain professions . . . and the result is social degradation. The British Government is pledged to abstain from direct interference with caste and custom, just as it is bound to respect the rights of private property. Yet the proposals presented .  .  . would revolutionize the one and confiscate the other. There is no question here of sympathy with poverty or of the propriety of raising the fallen or degraded into positions of respectability. In India, as in all countries, efforts to ameliorate such unavoidable evils form the proper field of private philanthropy. The State can certainly not intervene with effect.56

The “opinion of certain persons” to which the board referred was no doubt that of missionaries, with their reputation for impolitic criticisms of Hinduism and of Indian society and their predominance among publicists of the Pariah Problem.57 Even as the board denied the salience of opinions on Hinduism to its own deliberations, it nevertheless affirmed a linkage promulgated by missionaries themselves (as described in chapter 2) between caste, Hinduism, and social degradation. Furthermore, the board here expressed a specific relation between the state and the well-being of the population that would undergo a radical transformation in the succeeding two decades. The Malthusian view that poverty was unavoidable led the board to explicitly refuse a role for the government in the administration of both poverty and its correlate, social degradation: they were “certainly not” for the state to remedy and formed the “proper field” only for private philanthropists.58 This position was, moreover, ratified in the particular case of the Pariah by means of two kinds of discursive emphases. First, his material disadvantages, when they were not denied altogether, were disaggregated from his status “qua Pariah.” And second, of all the forms of discrimination practiced by caste people, the attitudinal and ritual—expressions of disgust or attempts to maintain physical distance, for example—were highlighted over such things as the Pariah’s disproportionately low wages. Discrimination suffered was then styled a matter of the attitudes of caste people, (merely) social degradation, according to which “Hindu society [has] treated him as .  .  . beyond the T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I   109

pale of religion and morality.”59 It was, therefore, primarily in the exalted realms of religion and morality that the Pariah’s disabilities lay. And in those realms, officials insisted, “the State can certainly not intervene.”

Implementing Tremenheere Pedagogy as Path of Least Resistance The implementation of the directives contained in the government’s response to Tremenheere did not proceed smoothly.60 In 1894, two years after Tremenheere’s report came out, the secretary of state, in a routine follow-up, wanted to know the extent to which any measures had been taken. The only set of proposals issuing from Tremenheere’s report that fared passably—not surprising because it was the only one government wholeheartedly supported—was the suggestion for the improvement of Pariah education. When the government asked the director of public instruction, D. Duncan, his opinion on whether special schools ought to be opened expressly for Pariahs, Duncan sought out the experts: he sent a circular to missionaries throughout the presidency.61 Based on their suggestions, Duncan promised, inter alia, grants to schools set up by missionaries for Pariahs. Pariah activist Rettamalai Srinivasan, in an 1895 speech reported in his newspaper Paraiyan, had an acute assessment of government-sponsored Pariah education, which also succinctly described the dovetailing of governmental machinery and caste—the caste-state nexus—society we have observed thus far: We know that our Hindu fellow countrymen and even our Government look with misgivings on our advancement; the former as representing, in the main, the land-owning interests, fearing that the elevation of the Pariya as tiller of the soil will interfere with their existing advantages; and the latter, as takers of revenue, anticipating the disruption of the machinery by means of which the revenue is derived; but be this how it may . . . we must educate ourselves; indeed, Government itself recognises its necessity, for even while demurring to some of the claims advanced on our behalf, they are devising a system to further our educational progress.62

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Educational measures did not directly impinge on landed property, that is to say, as measures interfering with miras or other forms of landholders’ rights would.

Skirting Neutrality: Experiments with Pariah Profligacy Thus, measures pertaining to land redistribution—such as the government’s agreement to assign bought-in lands and wastelands in remote parts of the Kurnool and Cuddapah districts to Pariahs—fared poorly.63 Collector J. Thompson of Chingleput, Tremenheere’s successor, who had been assigned to collect applications, observed that “the results have been trivial hitherto. Not a single application has been received . . . [from Pariahs] asking for lands under the Kurnool-Cuddapah canal. The causes are obvious enough; the quarters in which these lands are have long obtained a notoriety for malarial affections and present no attractions to a gregarious people destitute of capital and fearful of the unknown.”64 Pariahs’ lack of capital, that is, made it difficult for them to travel to and settle on new lands. Certainly, when advances were paid to support emigration, as they were by European plantation owners, Pariahs were found who were willing to move. As for bought-in lands, some progress had been made in the district, but the lack of results, as Thompson bluntly put it, was due to the “worthless nature of these bought-in lands,” as well as the fact that “the mirasidars dissuade them from taking up the lands.”65 Indeed, as Thompson reported, “Mirasidars of this district are not hesitating to express themselves strongly . . . regarding the present action of Government as inciting to discontent.”66 The government found Thompson’s report acceptable and informed the secretary of state accordingly that things were proceeding as quickly as was feasible: “Without capital, without self-control or discretion, this unfortunate class cannot all at once be elevated to the position of landholders.”67 It is interesting that the government put things this way in 1894, for the notion that the class would, or ever could, become a class of landholders was one that officials routinely and specifically opposed in the ensuing decades. It was rather on the basis of arguing for their betterment as laborers—and decidedly against the eradication of the laboring class as a whole—that the most radically interventionist policies would

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be mooted. That is, state officials would advocate intensive forms of intervention, even against the wishes of Indian elites, when the anticipated effects of intervention were likely to produce a laboring class imbued with a greater “dignity.” Between later Gandhian hopes for the future of untouchable workers—an improvement in their cleanliness, in their habits, and above all in their dignity, without any accompanying change in their occupation—and those promulgated by the late nineteenth-century colonial state, therefore, there was little divergence, despite the fact that the two are often taken as contraposed expositors of “tradition” and “modernity” (or “Indianization” and “Westernization”), respectively.68 Moreover, while Thompson’s comments about mirasidari opposition were not openly discussed, it is noteworthy that the government’s response nevertheless accommodated this opposition by suggesting that the efforts thus far made were sufficient. And officials also inaugurated here a discourse on Pariah selfhood that would be used repeatedly to deny the feasibility of welfare schemes: thus, we see the attention paid to Pariahs’ lack of “self-control and discretion”—the alleged inevitability and causa sui character, we might say, of their poverty. These depictions of the Pariah would persist for decades, despite being challenged by empirical evidence from within the colonial archive itself. In early 1894, for example, the Collector of Kistna, J.  N. Atkinson, persuaded by Tremenheere’s report, proposed that some of the lands to be newly irrigated in the vast waste tracts of Gudivada Taluk in Kistna be reserved for “Pariahs, poor Muhammadans, and persons belonging to wandering tribes.”69 The government of Madras was chary of “consent[ing] to appropriate funds contributed by the general tax-payer for the benefit of one section of the population.”70 A still graver danger was the Pariahs’ character: “unaccustomed to combination and without the ability to organise . . . they would have no cohesion or inherent vitality.”71 They would, therefore, soon fall victim to the local sowcar (moneylender), and “most of them [would revert] back into the ranks of day labourers.”72 The only preventive would be “philanthropic individuals” who might support the settlers until they were securely on their feet. Atkinson tried to convince the government otherwise with a detailed proposal, and in this regard, he presented some compelling evidence. It emerged that, on his own authority, he had already tried out such a scheme, granting lands to 669 Pariah families in Gudivada Taluk between 1892 and 1893. Highly doubtful that anything would come of it, he found 112  T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I

at the yearly settlement of revenues that only seventy-two of the 669 plots had been sold, mortgaged, or otherwise relinquished. Of these, thirty-nine were mortgaged under conditions he believed were temporary, such that the owners would soon redeem the plots. Thus, he consider[ed] the experiment to [have been] a success. And if persons of these classes have been able to retain their land and stand alone without any capitalist to assist them, how much easier should it be for persons of the same classes to prosper, if Government acts as their banker. [Previously] I expressed doubts as to whether pauper assignees would retain their land. The experiment mentioned above goes a long way to dispel these doubts.73

The evidence presented by Atkinson was quite remarkable given the pervasiveness of ideas about Pariahs’ profligacy, ideas that Atkinson himself held; elsewhere he would speak of Pariahs’ “unbroken tradition, not of thriftiness, but of thoughtless improvidence.”74 Yet he came to change his view. Atkinson’s experiment would, however, do little to lessen the conviction with which notions of Pariah profligacy were held by both government officials and Protestant missionaries. One further feature of Atkinson’s scheme must be considered here, for it echoes the problems we will encounter in the next chapter. Reverend J. E. Padfield of the Church Missionary Society wrote to Collector Atkinson shortly after Tremenheere’s report was published. Padfield wanted to acquire lands in Kistna for Pariah settlers on a settlement that would be owned and managed by the mission society, and in this he echoed the views expressed by the government that such settlements could not possibly thrive without the supervision of philanthropists. Atkinson confessed to “sharing Mr. Padfield’s apprehension that if land be assigned to individual grantees among these poor classes, they will very soon part with it.”75 Yet Atkinson described a greater consideration that weighed against granting land to Rev. Padfield, and it was this that foreshadowed a generation of conflict in the countryside: There is the .  .  . objection that .  .  . Government, in conferring on [a missionary society] this large estate, would be departing from the strict rule of religious neutrality. The real object would of course be a philanthropic or rather politico-economic one, viz., to effect a greater T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I   113

diffusion of wealth. But a charge of partiality is almost equally harmful whether merited or unmerited. . . . If it were possible to constitute a body of trustees free from all possible suspicion of religious or caste partiality .  .  . I should press for [it]. .  .  . The only possible course is, I think, to make it over to the cultivators themselves, and to leave to their advisers, whether spiritual or other, the duty of protecting them from their own ignorance and folly.76

Atkinson’s fear of abrogating religious neutrality was pronounced enough to urge him to support a scheme of settling Pariahs entirely independently, a scheme whose success he considered far from assured. Yet he was to find that his doubts were not warranted: when Pariah cultivators themselves were made titleholders in Kistna they were not as likely to relinquish their lands as officials feared. Indeed, the Pariahs Atkinson settled had no one to “protect them from their own ignorance,” no “spiritual advisors”; yet after two years, their success at cultivation was considerable enough that Atkinson declared, “It may be reasonably inferred . . . that these indigent classes are genuinely anxious to become landholders and are no more likely to part with their lands than other wealthier classes.”77 Atkinson believed that the “real object” of a government-sponsored scheme managed by a mission was “politico-economic,” but “whether merited or unmerited,” the charge of partiality had to be avoided. Exactly what this would mean for the improvement of the Pariah must wait until chapter 5. We must nevertheless record, however, the impasse Atkinson describes: Pariahs were believed to require capital and management to be properly settled, yet there were no “neutral” parties who could provide this. Further, Atkinson’s letter marks the second time that measures for the amelioration of the Pariah would meet the problem of neutrality; the Board of Revenue, recall, had asserted it could not interfere in “caste and custom.” The conception of the Pariah, furthermore, was here one of a “particular” subpopulation that therefore had no special eligibility to access the general pool of taxpayer monies. It was these forms of thought that would transform in the two subsequent decades. Atkinson concluded, “The returns that I have . . . seem to me to afford clear proof that what alienation of land there has been, has been the result not of prodigality or lack of sturdy effort, but simply of misfortune.”78 This observation gains credence from the fact that Atkinson had by no means 114  T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I

relinquished the notion that Pariahs were, as a rule, lacking in the character required to make them independent cultivators. But here he spoke instead of the bad luck that had befallen those who had lost their lands, citing a cyclone that hit the area in 1896 as well as other forms of natural disaster. Not least was the “natural” feeling of the “ryot class [that] energetically oppose[d] all efforts of the field labourers, that is the Panchamas, to emancipate themselves from what was practically serfdom.”79

Conclusion: The Pariah Problem, Not Solved but Dissolved The publication of Tremenheere’s report and the events immediately succeeding it are both index and catalyst of a series of policies and administrative practices that depended upon new conceptual interrelations among labor, caste position, and religion. These interrelations determined—and to a great extent still determine—the very form of permissible solutions to the problem. Examining their historical emergence brings to the fore what I call strategies of evasion, which were less a solution than the thorough dissolution of the problem in its specificity. One such strategy, for example, depended on how the Pariah’s caste status was understood to link to subordination. The official judgment that the subpopulation’s difficulties were not the result of their being “Pariahs qua Pariahs” is the most astonishing of rhetorical innovations to emerge in these decades. This neat formulation illustrates that while it is undeniable that the practices of the colonial state consolidated certain aspects of caste,80 thereby contributing to some features of the modern form of caste politics, it is equally the case that at this period in the history of colonial South India other features of caste, such as the overwhelming evidence showing Pariahness and servitude to be one and the same thing, were massively downplayed when not flatly denied. If Pariahness was defined so as to fully exclude servitude, mirasidars’ privilege was also abstracted entirely from caste. Thus, the government would protect caste privilege, but only in the name of deference to the principle of private property and not as caste privilege. Caste people’s monopoly on landholding would be understood as simply a matter of the rich holding sway over the poor. The empirical association of property rights with caste, in this logic, would be deemed opinion and not fact. What was included in the official conception of Pariahness was, above T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I   115

all, a condition of self-created moral degeneracy, marked especially by profligacy—which evoked the “understandable” disrespect of caste folk. His ritual degradation was thus the unfortunate and most essential feature of being a Pariah. These difficulties could best be mitigated by education, for they were such as to render the Pariah incapable of a dramatic leap to landed proprietorship. At this juncture it is useful to underscore the points of convergence that appear in state and mission discourse. Recall from chapter 2 that Indian caste Christians and the Protestant missionaries methodically segregated putatively religious and civil markers of caste. In discussing the Pariahs’ need, it was decided that their spiritual slavery demanded manumission. Their material malaise? Something altogether less complete, for they could not make the leap to independence, economic or social, in the foreseeable future. In this critical respect the official discourses on servitude and Pariahness we have analyzed in this chapter were not incompatible with these missiological visions: whether due to innate and ineradicable profligacy or to moral debasement and an absence of spiritual life, the Pariah was judged incapable of independent proprietorship. The potential compatibility of the solutions to the Pariah problem offered by the church and the government are of more than academic interest. In the decades to follow, missions and the colonial state would join hands to provide a solution requiring shared manpower, capital, and not least, vision, blurring the distinction between these forms of authority. In the meantime, landed caste opposition, as we will see in the next chapter, would too provide a distinct, but nevertheless compatible picture of caste’s relationship to religion, highlighting ritual features of Pariah casteness—such as distance pollution rather than labor subordination— and thereby rendering caste conflict a matter not of violent contest but of “hurt sentiments” and violated custom. A simultaneous reading of official records and mission writings reveals more than an ideological compatibility, however. Mission archives record, over and over, the same techniques of oppression that Tremenheere and Mullaly, exceptions in their discursive world, brought to light. Mission archives, in short, urge us to look askance at the Board of Revenue’s dismissal of Tremenheere as “sensational,” to read this dismissal as something beyond simple ignorance, and instead as the operation of the caste–state nexus.81 Moreover, in the official records of the events this chapter has described are brief but significant references to the Dalits 116  T H E S T A T E A N D T H E C Ē R I

who sought to make something of the new configurations of state and elite society that the emergence of the Pariah Problem signaled. Against the view that Pariah laborers were content as the result of fair and gentle treatment, Mullaly’s bid to change house titles to their names brought forth a rush of eager applicants, clearly cognizant of how very powerful the threat of eviction was to the operation of the regime under which they labored. This parallels Dalits’ rush to ally with missionaries, even against the latter’s wishes. The everyday actions of ordinary Dalits, recorded only tersely by officials and emplotted in Christian narratives by missionaries, provide within the archives themselves counterevidence for the very claims about Dalits and their condition that officials and missionaries unhesitatingly put forth. It is ordinary Dalits’ concerted and repeated actions that had and would have radical consequences for the official policies that would then be inaugurated to improve them, as subsequent chapters will show. Each archive’s characteristic distortions, therefore, are more readily grasped by triangulation with the other, underscoring the importance of a historiographical rapprochement between sacred and secular authorities. It is only by dint of reading the two in concert that a field of violent social struggle, in which ordinary Pariahs sought out allies and attempted to incrementally alter their lives and livelihoods, emerges in its true historical significance.

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Chapter 5 S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T; OR, THE RISE AND RISE OF RELIGIOUS NEUTRALITY

Reverend Johannes Kabis wrote in 1897 that he had discovered it was difficult to maintain a strict conceptual distinction between spirit and matter with respect to the Pariah. In him, “bodily and spiritual [degradation] are so closely connected that they can scarcely be separated.”1 Other missionaries in Madras came to concur, and this increasingly gave rise to the belief that education alone was insufficient to ensure the Pariah’s salvation. What was in fact required, they began to believe, was a more thorough project of training and supervision that would improve the Pariah not only spiritually, but materially. The method upon which these missionaries would fix entailed founding “Pariah agricultural settlements.” This chapter examines these settlements and the forms of thought that animated their missionary managers, as well how efforts to institute them were aborted by conflict. In the struggle over attempts to provide landless Pariahs with house sites or arable land, the condition of Pariahs qua Pariahs came to be defined ultimately in religious terms. Ideas that had once been confined to missionary discourse took on new forms and consequences and became administrative common sense. Specifically, the governmental promise of religious neutrality was put to a novel use: it now came to

protect all manner of privileges caste folk enjoyed with respect to their Pariah laborers. It is critical to note that this new use of neutrality can only be traced in the lowest (the most insignificant) stratum of the colonial archive. No official regulation or policy proclaimed that the privileges of landed castes over Pariah laborers were henceforth to be protected by the government as a matter of religious right. But such protection was indeed provided with law-like regularity, as a careful tracing of these documents will show. In this chapter we examine three conflicts in detail. These were never officially addressed in the provincial center but were adjudicated entirely by the members of the Board of Revenue, the dispersed administrative body whose purpose it was to enact revenue regulations throughout the vast territory of the Madras Presidency. Conclusions were reached on the basis of reports from local officers that were never selected to be bound and printed. They are recorded only in the “Miscellaneous Series” of the Board of Revenue’s papers.2 And yet their effects can be shown to have been rather widely felt. In analyzing these conflicts I therefore demonstrate that the concept of religious neutrality as it impacted Pariahs was decisively settled not via the grand excesses of colonial law but in numerous minor disputes over small plots of land of rather poor quality. Higher courts sometimes participated in changing legal conceptions of caste and, even less often, of untouchability, but they were only very rarely the arena in which disputes between Pariah laborers and their overlords occurred in colonial India.3 To examine the tacit understanding on which higher court decisions were themselves established, we must look elsewhere—to the quotidian judgments of petty officials that built up a mountain of administrative precedent and common sense. Not unlike a “shadow” legal system, decisions reached in conflicts over administrative regulations—in which local officials were at once “judges” and interested participants—by producing so many “cases” from which to glean “precedent,” gradually congealed into a dense new regime of truth about rural society itself. Minor disputes of the sort I will describe definitively determined how religious neutrality—and untouchability— were practiced and maintained under the aegis of late nineteenth-century statecraft in colonial south India, and as we shall see, the spiritualization of the Pariah’s condition would therefore have long-lasting and serious repercussions.

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Prelude to Conflict: “A Kind of Hold” The Pariah agricultural settlement as it was conceived in the 1890s by Protestant missionaries was decidedly novel, despite an apparent continuity with earlier missionary practices. There had been, for example, sporadic attempts by missions in south India to settle Christian converts— most of whom were Pariahs—on mission-owned land since the early nineteenth century.4 These earlier settlements, however, were not conceptualized as sites of improvement but as a refuge from the wrath of caste Hindu landlords. This wrath was interpreted by missionaries not as an index of soured labor relations but as trials that Christians had borne upon conversion since the very inception of the religion. Just as acts of oppression targeting Pariahs were sometimes described as “religious persecution”—as we saw in the previous chapter—settlements were depicted as a natural response to persecution, and the specificity of Indian Christians’ hardship was eschewed in favor of its inclusion in a long history of Christian martyrdom.5 Thus, the American Arcot Mission’s annual report for 1867 explained that the “Christian village” of Arunodaya was founded to assist “those who, on forsaking their heathen idols and becoming Christians, have been turned out of their homes and driven from their former employment.”6 Converts’ caste was frequently unspecified in this early talk of settlements, although casual references in missionary reports—to the cēri, to converts’ consumption of carrion, to the fact that they had “caste masters,” and so on—make clear the population from which their converts were primarily drawn. By the 1890s in Madras, however, when the amelioration of the Pariah’s condition had become a theme of missionary discourse—when, that is, the Pariah had become a “problem”—settlements were specifically named Pariah or Panchama settlements rather than Christian settlements, and they were described as cogs in an overall machinery of Pariah improvement.7 The concept of Pariah settlements that emerged in the 1890s conceptualized settlements not as spaces providing refuge but as a form of training. And this new pedagogical understanding of the settlement would become intimately tied to programs of the state. The topic of agricultural settlements for Pariahs was taken up most seriously and tried with most success by Rev. Adam Andrew of the Free Church of Scotland, and it was his settlement, named Melrosapuram, that was considered exemplary by both other missionaries and state agents.8 120  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

Andrew, like several other missionaries in Madras at the time, was keenly engaged in problematizing the Pariah and had an extensive knowledge of south Indian agrarian practices. He wrote several treatises on irrigational innovations that might improve south Indian agriculture and carried out a number of experiments for which he won accolades from the government.9 He introduced the Persian wheel into Chingleput in the early 1890s, for example, and the state funded his later experiments in well irrigation, conducted at Melrosapuram with Pariah convert labor.10 How was Melrosapuram conceived by its creator, and what were the mechanics of its foundation? Andrew’s agitation for the Pariah had received acclaim in his native Scotland.11 From there, a Mrs. Melrose donated money, and in 1893 Andrew bought 72 acres in Chingleput from the government, who granted him favorable terms of assessment, namely a “progressive cowle,” a form of tenure in which assessments were initially very low or were forgone altogether, only gradually building up to the standard rate over a period of typically ten years.12 Andrew settled on the land what he described as a “higher class” of landless Pariahs. They were not, that is, paṭiyāḷs, hereditarily bonded farm servants, but only very poor tenants and day laborers. The mission owned the land, and it was rented out on the vāram system of tenure (the most common local variety of tenancy), by which tenants and landowners held a fixed share of the produce, thus ensuring that both parties maintained an interest in increasing agricultural productivity; in this case Andrew claimed a third of the produce, out of which he paid the land tax directly to the government. Moral education was combined with agricultural training in the settlement’s school, and regular services and prayer meetings were held in the local church. In sum, the missionary conception of the Pariah settlement was one in which the perfect balance would be struck between moral regeneration and training in respectable manual labor. This balance could only be achieved by constant supervision, for which it was essential that control of the lands be vested in the mission. In a letter published in the Madras Mail specifying how, based on his own experience, settlements of this kind should make their financial arrangements, Andrew wrote, “The land should be so fixed that it cannot be alienated by those who cultivate it. It should by no means be put into the hands of the settlers.”13 If this would prevent the alienation of the land by thriftless Panchamas, securing them firmly in the settlement, advances of S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   121

money would clinch the arrangement: “Small loans for the purchase of bullocks, etc. may be given for or without interest. I am not overanxious to get such loans paid back as they have the effect of preventing men from asking for other advances till the first is paid, and of giving one a kind of hold on them.”14 Thus, Pariah converts were to be secured in a settlement such that their thrift could easily be monitored and developed, even as a state of indebtedness might be, paradoxically, subtly encouraged. Moral regeneration was assured of a chance to do its slow work by the “hold” of this advance. It is difficult to discern any principled distinction between this form of advance and the Tamil practices of debt-bondage (āḷ-aṭaimāṉam, “man-mortgage,” or āḷ-mutal, “man-advance”) in which, similarly, repayment was discouraged in favor of the maintenance of a “kind of hold”— whose outlawing Andrew championed. The distinction lies, as chapter 2 enabled us to see, in the quality of the bondage proposed: here it would be gentle and just. To make this vision a reality, however, missionaries would need land, which meant that their settlement proposals had to be fashioned in accordance with the Madras government’s own emergent concern for the Pariah. Thus, shortly after Andrew founded Melrosapuram, Rev. E.  C. Scudder of the American Arcot Mission appealed to the government for land in North Arcot with the following argument: “I think [government] must assist [Pariahs] to assist themselves, and that in a way different from and in addition to the ‘Educational’ method. The Revenue Department must, it seems to me, assist the Educational; not in any way that will bemean the man, but by allowing him to obtain . . . good land.”15 The “‘Educational’ method” of uplifting Pariahs for which Scudder professed his approval was the approach preferred both by the government of Madras and by the majority of missionaries, as we saw in previous chapters, whereas settlements, as even Andrew would admit, were risky and their long-term success uncertain. The government of Madras, recall, had only agreed to commit to education and remained skeptical of Collector J. A. Atkinson’s experiments.16 Hence Scudder explained his own purpose as education with the assistance of training in agricultural labor on farm lands obtained from the government, a plan in which Pariahs would be the tenants of mission agencies.

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In its initial response to J. H. A. Tremenheere, the state had agreed only to allow a few extremely poor categories of unused land to be assigned to Pariahs at the discretion of local collectors. What missionaries proposed, however, was something entirely new. As with Andrew’s vision of Melrosapuram, it involved assigning land not simply to the landless, but to missionaries also, and was thus a true symbiosis between state and missions—a sharing of men, capital, and expertise directed toward a common project. At this stage, to be sure, the project in question (an interventionist strategy aimed at transforming the conditions of Pariah servitude) was of interest primarily to Pariahs themselves and to missionaries, despite the state’s tentative nods toward Pariah welfare more broadly construed. But over the course of the next few years, in which concrete arrangements for missionary–state cooperation would be gradually hammered out, what began with missionaries would indeed become a state purpose. The process by which this new rationality took hold, a rationality in which the welfare of the Pariah subpopulation came to be represented as a matter of state interest, can be traced through a series of conflicts over the granting of house sites and arable land to Pariahs and their missionary intercessors.

Settling Conflicts: Religious Neutrality and the Exclusion of Pariahs from “the Public” From the very inception of land-granting schemes for Pariahs, government agents had voiced concerns that the association of missionaries with implementing these grants might appear to contravene religious neutrality and was therefore highly undesirable. Indian elites thus found a receptive audience when, in order to block missionary attempts to found such settlements or to obtain house sites for Pariahs, they began to reframe their arguments, basing them no longer on the importance of their own ability to control Pariah labor but instead on this doctrine. They might, alternatively, invoke neutrality in order to claim that new arrangements for Pariahs made by the state offended their religious sensibilities. In these ways, neutrality was inscribed in a new domain of agrarian contestation. We will study three conflicts that took place in the mid-1890s in the immediate aftermath of Tremenheere’s report and exemplify how

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“religious neutrality” was construed through practical application. Simultaneously, the concept of “the public” will emerge as integral to the way in which religious neutrality was enacted. The particular interpenetration of these two concepts, rooted in ongoing conflict between Pariah laborers and their masters, will in turn prove pivotal in the rise of a new purpose of the state, the project of Pariah welfare.

Pariah Chapels, Caste Temples In January 1896, Rev. Gopala Aiyar of the American Methodist Episcopal Mission asked for about 4 acres of land in Kodambakkam village near Madras city, on which he proposed to erect a school for Pariahs, a parsonage to house a European missionary, a cemetery, and several dwellings for Christian converts. Gopala Aiyar,17 an English-educated urban Brahmin, asked the collector for the grant directly, perhaps aware that he had little chance of securing the land if he applied for it under the usual rules of application, the darkhast rules.18 The collector obliged him, and thus it happened that later that year the reverend and “two of his pariah converts” were spotted on the site. Caste peasants immediately appealed the grant, admonishing the state for attempting to sidestep the rules, which, after all, promised them the right of first refusal.19 The raiyats further claimed that the land was in use as a cattle stand and threshing floor (common uses for wasteland in villages). So intent were they to prevent the assignment that they even offered to pay assessment (i.e., the annual cultivation tax) on the land, despite the fact that it would not be cultivated. Most significantly, however, the raiyats claimed the land was the site of a temple and was needed for ritual cooking on festival occasions. Thus, if the board were not convinced that it was the only available cattle stand, the raiyats urged, they ought at least consider that “on all of [the festival] occasions there are [sic] music, beating of tom-toms and different kinds of noisy drums and tharays [a type of drum] which will affect the feelings of the Reverend and thus there may be a row between the two factions.”20 Europeans were certainly known to complain of the raucous din of Indian festival music, and loud processions of Hindus were often implicated as the proximate cause of Hindu–Muslim riots as well.21 Yet the raiyats’ solicitude for the “feelings” of the reverend simultaneously served as an 124  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

intimation of what the future could hold for him and his flock. Given the tensions between landholders and Pariahs, tensions that an involvement with missionaries exacerbated, as we observed in chapter 2, disruption of Christian worship cannot be separated from other forms of harassment; the petition may therefore be read as a quiet threat. Yet overtly, the petitioners portrayed themselves as likely victims of injustice, claiming that irritable missionaries would charge them unfairly with disturbing Christian worship as they went about their “time-honoured” practices.22 Thus, the state was warned, the award of the land would “disturb the peace” of the village. By way of the Christian reverend’s feelings, the petitioners soon came to the nub of the issue: Hindu sentiments. Aiyar’s proposal to build a church and a cemetery so close to the temple “[would] always be a fruitful source of trouble and ill-feelings.”23 Lest officials miss the point, the petitioners concluded, We respectfully beg to state that Her Majesty the Empress of India when she took charge of the Empire from the East India Company about the year 1858 declared that she will not interfere in the religious matters of the Hindus, and she will protect them, etc. . . . The land is . . . a seat of the village Goddess. . . . Hindu ceremonials and the reverence attached to them are well-known to the Board as inseparable from the Hindu religion.24

This picture of violated religious sentiments was augmented by the following characterization of Rev. Aiyar: “Revd. Mr. Gopala Aiyar [is] a young Brahmin convert of about 30 years of age with no experience of the world but full of the spirit of the modern days [sic] militant Christianity which pervades these spots and not the peaceful messenger of the Gospel.”25 What the landholders saw as militant Christian activity was the new Pariah–missionary alliance emerging in this area and at this time. Aiyar, a modern Brahmin and zealous convert, was, in this portrayal, hoodwinking the government into contravening its own principle of neutrality. Penciled-in marginalia reveal that, privately, members of the Board of Revenue found the petitioners’ claim that their own religious practices would disturb Christian worship, and would thereby render them vulnerable to unfair prosecution, implausible. Board members also noted that S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   125

while Rev. Aiyar had indeed failed to submit a darkhast for the land, as the raiyats charged, this was not in itself a problem, because under certain circumstances, these rules could be legitimately overwritten. The board’s final decision, however, would not publicly reflect these opinions and would simultaneously illustrate the critical role of even the most minor administrative settlements in not simply implementing but determining the colonial state’s policy of religious neutrality. As Aiyar recounted, when the land was first tentatively assigned to him by the Collector, G. S. Forbes, he went with a lower-ranking officer, the tahsildar, to inspect it.26 There was indeed a temple on the site, but it was, according to Aiyar, “very small (10ft × 6ft), [and] apparently in ruins. This temple . . . belonged to the Pariahs, and on certain days in the year they used to keep a single lamp in front of it, and worship there. No pooja [ritual worship] is at all done here, and it is exclusively the property of the low caste people—the Pariahs.”27 It was a temple nevertheless, and the tahsildar therefore assigned only a portion of the land Aiyar had originally requested, leaving aside about an acre on which stood the derelict temple and the abutting metaled road. After Aiyar had numerous interviews with Forbes, as well as with his successor, D.  D. Murdoch, the land was subdivided under the aegis of the government and Aiyar cleared the land and placed marking stones at its borders. Meanwhile, some caste villagers complained about the assignment, so the tahsildar decided to hold the grant in abeyance, giving the villagers two months in which to articulate their grievances. At that point, Aiyar tells us, “Some of the caste villagers then repaired the Pariah temple a little bit, and put up a small pandal [i.e., festive canopy] in front of it. . . . This they did as the Collector was expected to visit the place personally. The fact of a caste Hindu repairing the temple of the low caste Pariah is surely unprecedented in the annals of Kodambakam!”28 Although the caste villagers’ main objection was the proximity of the proposed assignment to the temple, Aiyar continued, “The Pariahs, whose temple [it] is [that lies] near our land, have no objections whatever to the assignment.” In sum, Aiyar argued, “It is not reason which guides them [i.e., the caste villagers], but religious prejudice.”29 Aiyar, in a further effort to convince the board of the rightness of his suit, pointed out that the local Tahsildars, one a Brahmin and the other a Muhammedan, had found the caste raiyats’ objections frivolous, even despite the likelihood that their own “natural prejudices” were 126  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

“not likely to be in sympathy with the cause of Christ.”30 The petitioners, conversely, had failed to subordinate feeling to reason, irrationally pursuing “only one object, namely [their wish] to prevent Christianity from taking a firm root in the soil.”31 While state officials were inclined to agree with Aiyar’s judgment regarding the raiyats, they would also extend the charge of unreason to Aiyar himself, as we shall see. Finally, Aiyar offered to change his mission’s plans by constructing the cemetery and the church, ostensibly the most objectionable features of his proposal, elsewhere or not at all. Moreover, Aiyar countered the petition signed by eighty-six caste Hindus with a petition that had fiftysix Pariah signatories, none of whom were Christian and all of whom insisted that they had no objection to Aiyar building a chapel near their own temple. Collector Murdoch reflected on both petitions in a letter to the board. He noted that the temple was small and that it was therefore unnecessary to reserve the entire plot for it. He added that he could find no evidence either in the settlement accounts or on the land itself for its having been used as a cattle stand or threshing floor. Yet he did think that Aiyar’s request for such a large portion of land—some 3 acres—for converts’ dwellings was unnecessary, given that the present converts already had dwellings in the existing Pariah dwelling area, the paṟaccēri (Pariah ghetto). The collector proposed, then, to reclassify the land from waste to puṟampōkku, communal land, which as we have seen, could be used for such purposes as dwelling sites. Then, should it be required for dwellings in the future, the land could simply be allocated without having to go through the procedures of darkhast from which puramboke was exempt. In July 1897, after carefully reviewing the case, the Board of Revenue upheld Murdoch’s decision in a draft resolution, signed by three of its four members. The fourth board member, however, demurred: I must confess that I do not like the look of this proposal. It is proposed to transfer arbitrarily 4.30 acres of assessed waste . . . to cheri Nattam [Pariah house site, a type of communal land] (although no Pariahs, as is admitted, require houses there), for the avowed purpose of providing room for a Christian school and parsonage on 1 acre of it. The villagers object, and offer to pay the assessment on the whole . . . [plot]. Both sides [hold] strong religious preferences. Please quote authorities for the proposal. There is the making of a grand row in it.32 S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   127

As it would turn out, the three-member majority could not “quote authorities for the proposal,” and a search of the records failed to locate any precedent for assigning communal land to missionaries for building schools. This came as a surprise to the board, and one member even remarked that given how many missionary schools there were, this was most likely some sort of oversight. And yet, precedent was precedent, and if none could be found then Aiyar’s case was significantly weakened. Furthermore, the dissenting member accepted the raiyats’ portrayal of Aiyar as a militant and added his own suspicions that Aiyar was trying to insinuate his way into a village with no real Christian inhabitants. Even if there were a few Christians in the village, the dissenter added, its proximity to St. Thomas’ Mount, a nearby area with numerous mission stations, meant that there was really no need for a resident missionary or for a school in Kodambakkam. Finally, he pointed out, the caste villagers were so desirous of the land that they were even willing to pay the assessment on the entirety of it, which meant that if it were given to Aiyar the state would be losing revenue. On the strength of the dissenting member’s arguments, the board’s draft resolution was abandoned before seeing the light of day, and a final resolution was issued, stating: In view of the objections made by the villagers and also the fact that the number of Christians is not so large as to make the establishment of a school or parsonage a public necessity in the village, the Board is not inclined to accept the Collector’s recommendation to assign the land or any portion of it for the above purposes. The extent . . . in question should either be left as assessed waste or given . . . for cultivation.33

Aiyar could not have known how close he came to being granted his wish. And nor do the records allow us to ascertain what became of Aiyar and the Pariah Christians of Kodambakkam, although Aiyar’s own prediction as to what would happen should the original grant to him be rescinded was most likely not far off the mark. He had closed his petition with the following plea: I must also inform the Board . . . that if any revision is made . . . regarding the assignment of the land which has already been given then we, poor Christians, will be the object of public ridicule in this village, and we must be really ashamed to lift up our heads in this place.34 128  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

The true significance of the case, however, had apparently been lost on the board. In relation to the original draft, for example, one board member had reasoned that, although these villagers might protest, it was obvious that most Hindus were quite grateful for the benefits of missionary schooling. That a member of the board could make such an argument—and that it would not have been questioned by other members—reveals the board’s ignorance of the signal distinction between a missionary school located in the cēri, and thus for the benefit of Pariahs, and the usual missionary school of the sort that caste Hindu elites not only attended but also demanded.35 Such schools did not normally admit Pariahs and operated under the threat of boycott by their mostly caste Hindu pupils should they do so—although a few Pariahs sometimes attended incognito.36 The board’s ignorance is further illustrated by the fact that none of its members (nor, for that matter, any other official) addressed the significance of Aiyar’s point that the temple to which village elites professed such an attachment was not, in reality, the “the seat of the village Goddess” as they claimed. It was not a caste Hindu temple but a Pariah one, as its location made clear.37 In the course of deciding this case, appeals to religious neutrality, to zealotry, and to religious unreason were made by both contending parties, as well as by the putative arbiters, the members of the Board of Revenue, resulting in the board’s acceptance of the notion that the religious feelings of caste villagers would, as they described it, be hurt by the proximity of Christian worship and a Christian cemetery to their temple. And it was this argument that would prove pivotal. Of the raiyats’ objections, only that of hurt sentiment was accepted as being incontestable by the board. Similarly, it had been among the few arguments that the collector had not found frivolous, which is why he immediately reserved a full acre of land surrounding the temple. The notion of religious unreason figured as well in the board’s assessment of the missionary, although in a somewhat different register. Thus the board members fully agreed with the petitioners’ portrayal of missionaries as being unable to bear the music of “what they [i.e., missionaries] call as [sic] heathen festivals.”38 By describing their own festivals as heathen, the caste raiyats played upon missionaries’ reputation for wounding others with their open—and decidedly impolitic—condemnation of Hinduism, thus invoking precisely the missionary tendencies that made officials of the colonial state most uneasy. Aiyar, for his part, invoked standard missionary ideology in portraying S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   129

the raiyats’ objections as ultimately religious (he insisted that they only wished to “prevent Christianity from taking root in the soil”), thereby obscuring entirely the issue of labor control. The board’s ultimate decision, in which religious feeling was deemed the root of the dispute, drew on the tacit consensus between missionaries and caste Hindu landlords who, each for their own reason, sought to portray it in this way and to elide the realities of agrarian class relations. The board’s decision thereby entered the archive of precedents according to which future conflicts would be adjudicated. The special significance of the fact that this would be used as precedent can be grasped if we consider how this decision was arrived at. At the outset, it had looked for a time as if the board’s decision might favor Aiyar. But the final, precedent-making decision was itself precipitated by the fact that a call for precedents had been made during the course of deliberations, causing the members of the board to turn away from their initial response and to grow increasingly uneasy. Had missionaries ever been assigned land for a school in the face of complaints from villagers? When none was found, arguments which the board had previously disregarded could now convince them that the former collector, the present collector, and they themselves in a draft resolution had all been entirely mistaken. Thus the original course of the board’s decision was redirected, and the previously marginal concern—that the assignment might cause a religious “row”— expressed by only one member, became decisive. It was not findings regarding the use of the land that had convinced the board to act against the orders of the previous collector—itself no small matter in administrative procedure—but rather deference to precedent, itself impelled by the fear of abrogating neutrality.39 It is critical to note that while both the missionary and the caste villagers were said to be guided by religious feeling, the board’s solicitude was directed exclusively toward caste Hindus’ feelings. This was not a matter of favoring natives over foreigners, for the pastor and all of his congregation were also natives. Nor was it a matter of favoring non-Christians, as demonstrated by the fact that the board entirely ignored the nonChristian Pariahs who in fact lived closest to the disputed land and who had signed a petition stating that the proximity of Christians would not offend them. What ultimately convinced the board was what remained of the villagers’ petition once the specifics about the use of the plot were stripped away: the simple assertion that the religious sentiments of caste 130  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

Hindus would be wounded and the implicit threat such an assertion contained. Thus the Board of Revenue set a new precedent, deeming it safest to go against an assignment that had already been made by the previous collector, although by their own lights the land in question was not, and had never been, in use for any purpose by the raiyat petitioners. In the many similar cases of conflict that would occur in the wake of this one, certain strategic gambits appear again and again. It would become standard for petitions against land being given for the use of Pariahs, or for Pariahs via missionaries, to claim that the land was required for grazing or for some other public purpose, as would offers to pay cultivation tax on the land—even when it was not going to be cultivated.40 Thus, one of the most important Dalit activists to emerge in the period covered by this book, a man named M. C. Rajah, who will appear in chapter 9, wrote, “Invariably . . . applications [for land from Pariahs] are put down on the irrelevant and frivolous grounds of tankbed-land, water-storage, village common, etc. . . . Another objection is that they are required for grazing purposes,” although, in fact, “these are mere pretexts for reserving these lands for well-to-do Caste Hindus.”41 But such claims were not invariably accepted by government officials. What “went without saying,” however, and what caste raiyats were quick to grasp, was that hurt sentiments could now trump all other forms of law and right—and thus it was that the sensitivity of Hindu feelings became axiomatic.42 Moreover, even as the state would thus find itself forever impugned with allegations of crypto-Christianity, state officials themselves largely agreed with critics who, like the raiyats of Kodambakkam, portrayed missionaries as overzealous and inherently offensive.43 Thus, just as missionary activity in the countryside became overwhelmingly focused on the cēri, missionary zeal and hurt Hindu sentiments became central to the discussion of the Pariah. In what capacity, precisely, did missionary zeal so offend? Or, rather, can the offense to Hindu sentiment in this historical conjuncture in the Madras countryside be separated from the offense to the landowner caused by the insubordinate laborer? Posing such a question ought not imply an “economistic reduction” of Hindu sentiment to political economy. On the contrary. It is only if spheres of human activity are first analytically distinguished that the question of reducing one to the other can even arise.44 The question I pose is not a matter of reducing religion to something else but rather of noticing the abstraction of religion from political economy that was S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   131

perhaps first theorized in south India by Protestant missionaries and, more importantly, was put into practice in a series of conflicts in which native elites, missionaries, and state agents widely misinterpreted and doubted each other but nevertheless converged in portraying religious feeling and zealotry as the source of conflicts over Pariah settlements and of their potential resolution. No mention was made of animosity between Pariah laborers and their masters, or of the significance of control over house sites, a form of control that Aiyar was seeking to wrest from caste raiyats. Instead, missionaries and caste Hindus, bitter contenders in one respect, nevertheless combined to ensure that the language in which they faced off was that of religion. In Aiyar’s view, raiyats’ opposition stemmed from their desire to “prevent Christianity from taking root in the soil.” Aiyar’s judgment is consistent with the trope of religious persecution in missionary accounts of struggles between masters and Pariahs, struggles that, however, missionaries’ own records reveal to have preceded the advent of missionaries. The raiyats, for their part, accused Aiyar of militant, intolerant religiosity, thus confirming the portrayal of the conflict as fundamentally religious. No wonder then that state officials saw both sides as holding strong religious preferences. All parties, moreover, paid scant attention, or altogether ignored, the lone dissenters in this cacophony of accusations of religious bigotry: the non-Christian Pariahs of Kodambakkam, who were not at all troubled by Christianity “taking root in the soil.”

Communal Rights, Public Purposes, and Religious Neutrality in Mannur The abstraction of Hindu sentiment from political economy was all the more thoroughgoing in the events of 1897 in Mannur village, Chingleput District. In late 1896, Rev. Johannes Kabis, whose writings we encountered in chapter 2, appealed to the state for a piece of land classified as puramboke, or communal land, on which to settle Pariah Christians as cultivators. The collector, G.  S. Forbes, granted the land in September 1896 for what he deemed a “public purpose,” by which he meant the settling of Pariahs.45 Forbes’s reason for entrusting this public purpose to a missionary was that, as he explained in a memo, Pariahs could only be settled on lands with any reasonable degree of security by granting the 132  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

actual title deeds to missionaries, for only a missionary would prevent the land from being lost to rapacious creditors. What Forbes described would become, but was not yet, the mainstream position of government: support for a managerial partnership between state and mission agents. At this time, Forbes’s arrangement with Kabis would be overruled by a higher authority. On learning of the assignment, the mirasidars of Mannur successfully petitioned the government to have it revoked. After protracted argument, the Board of Revenue rescinded Forbes’s order in October 1897—just a few months after Kabis had delivered his paper on “helping” the Pariah.46 The petitioners made their arguments on the following grounds: First, the assignment to Kabis could not count as a public purpose of the sort for which the ordinary rules of assignment could be abrogated. It could not count as such, because the land was being assigned for cultivation, whereas public purposes were usually considered to be roads, government buildings, and so on. Second, because Forbes had assigned the land for cultivation, its classification would have to be transferred from the category of uncultivated communal land, or puramboke, to that of cultivable land, in which case the rules of darkhast would come into effect. Third, the petitioners claimed that it was necessary that the land in question remain communal, for it served as an essential source of pasture for their cattle and sheep. And finally, in the midst of this welter of fine points of revenue administration, the mirasidars invoked religious neutrality. The issue of neutrality would serve to obscure Pariah laborers’ deprivations as laborers—their landlessness, for example—instead subordinating these to their religion. As we saw in Kodambakkam, so in Mannur: the root of the conflict was portrayed as a matter of religious rivalry. Specifically, the petitioners alleged that Forbes’s grant favored Christian Pariahs over “Hindu” ones.47 As the petitioners put it, The ostensible object of the Reverend gentleman is to ameliorate the condition of the pariahs, but it need be hardly told [sic] that his real object is evangelization and not amelioration. . . . The Hindu pariahs in our village far outnumber the Christian pariahs. . . . They have put in applications for land in the very same . . . [plot]. Their applications have not been heeded. The Reverend gentleman’s object is to parcel out the lands only to those who would become Christians. Not a single cent of land will be given to the Hindu pariahs.48 Does Government make distinction between the Hindu and the Christian pariahs?49 S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   133

Notice that in addition to accusing Kabis of favoritism, the petitioners had introduced a new element: Kabis’s own motives. In thus impugning Kabis, the petitioners called the state’s own neutrality into question as well. At this point the state had barely committed itself to the goal of Pariah uplift, but we have already seen in chapter 3, even the appearance of a state–missionary connection could transform the operation of local governance in the countryside. Now, however, this appearance would have an altogether different effect, with local elites forcing the state to answer for itself by defending the neutrality of its own motives. Officials of the Board of Revenue largely concurred that Kabis would favor Christians and that this could not be tolerated. In remarking on the petition to his superiors in Madras, D. D. Murdoch, collector of Chingleput, weighed Kabis’s potential for fairness with marked skepticism: The professed object of the Revd. J. Kabis was to establish a settlement of Christian Panchamas. In a subsequent communication he remarks:— “If the land is sufficient not only for Christian settlers, I shall gladly entertain also the requests of the Hindu pariahs then.” It may by presumed, however, that he will not find the land more than sufficient for the Christians. The Mission will have to expend money on the settlement at first, and it will hardly consent to do so for the benefit of non-Christians. That the object, however, of the Revd. J. Kabis is the amelioration of the condition of the pariahs I have no doubt.50

Murdoch himself followed the village elites in emphasizing Kabis’s motives, which, given a scarcity of resources and excessive demand, he assumed would inevitably lead him to discriminate in favor of Christian Pariahs. At this point in the deliberations, the Board of Revenue tentatively resolved to give the land to Kabis, but to also assign some land to Hindu Pariahs not under his supervision. What is critical here is that the board was willing to hand over lands to the “Hindu” Pariahs whom the mirasidars had described in their petition, despite the fact that the members of the board were fairly certain those Pariahs’ applications were the handiwork of the mirasidars themselves. The ruse whereby caste people would file petitions for land in Pariahs’ names was so widespread and well documented that it required no elaborate explanation on Murdoch’s part beyond the simple observation that “after the Revd. J. Kabis had applied for the land, three [applications] 134  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

were presented by Panchamas [an alternative term for Pariah]. The stamps affixed to them were purchased by three Reddies [the caste name of the mirasidars] . . . [and the applications] were no doubt presented at the instance of the Mirassidars.”51 Despite doubting the existence of aggrieved Hindu Pariahs, officials chose to ensure, as they had in Kodambakkam, that they would not give even the appearance of abrogating neutrality. Therefore, rather than digging deeper into the case, they decided that confining Kabis’s authority to those Pariahs already under Christian guidance would be the safest course of action. In the process, however, the board not only enshrined as self-evident the charge that a missionary would not treat Hindus fairly, but—by officially confining Kabis to the aid of Christian Pariahs—in fact forced the missionary to enact the biased role that caste Hindus had assigned him. Whatever his intentions, Kabis could now only aid Christian pariahs. While Kabis himself had maintained that he would begin by aiding Christians, there is no reason to doubt that he would have broken with what had been—until this point—the standard practice among missionaries and which was central to their own sense of legitimacy: providing aid to Pariahs irrespective of religious affiliation and, in the case of non-Christians, irrespective of whether baptism was ever mooted as a possibility. Perhaps more significant still was the fact that, in its efforts to maintain the appearance of neutrality, the state had allowed mirasidars to emphasize as significant not the social division between caste people and Pariahs, but that between Hindus and Christians. A discursive wedge was thus driven through the category Pariah by caste raiyats, who portrayed the difference between Hindu and Christian Pariahs as being as or more significant than that between caste people and Pariahs, while at the same time implying a commonality of (religious) interest between caste Hindus and non-Christian Pariahs.52 Yet the very idea that the religion of caste Hindus and Pariahs was shared was hardly a widely accepted view at this time: it was common for Pariahs to address caste folk as Hindus, a term used in contradistinction to themselves.53 Likewise, caste Hindus often spoke of themselves as Hindus and of Pariahs, of whatever religion, as simply Pariahs.54 Indeed, sometimes the argument was made by them that Pariahs lacked any religion at all.55 The victory of landed castes would turn out to be even more complete, because Forbes’s grant to Kabis was ultimately revoked in accordance S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   135

with another precedent-setting criterion: the objection that dealt the fatal blow to Forbes’s order was the one questioning the collector’s classification of the grant of land to Pariahs as a public purpose. This objection depended upon the ability of different parties to selectively define which practices were recognized as being linked to the interests of specific castes, and by whom. This differential ability is exemplified by the petitioners’ assertion that assigning communal land to landless Dalits could not be considered a public purpose—like the construction of a road, for instance—because it accrued to only one particular (caste) group within the population and not to the public at large. Recall that the government had asserted the right to communal land for state or public purposes, usually understood to be such things as streets, railways, canals, and municipal buildings.56 If Forbes were to appropriate communal land, mirasidars insisted, it ought to be only for a public purpose thus understood. If he were, however, assigning the land for cultivation by particular individuals, which would not fulfill this widely understood definition of a public purpose, then by rights it would have to be reclassified as cultivable land, which meant that mirasidars would have the right of first refusal. The rules of land assignment, however, were unclear, because the notion of public was itself murky. While something that accrued equally to everyone was one accepted definition, another definition, one that was just beginning to gain official ground, held that something could be a matter of public welfare even if it directly targeted only one segment of society, provided its effects would redound upon the rest.57 Neither of these two possible definitions nor their incompatibility was made explicit in official correspondence, but they are attested insofar as it took several months of back-and-forth correspondence among members of the government before a decision was made in favor of the former meaning, such that it was finally agreed that Forbes’s assignment contravened the government’s orders. Specifically, the board determined that the government meant communal land could only be appropriated for “state or public purposes properly so-called.”58 And yet confusion remained: even thereafter, a marginal note on the Board of Revenue’s final decision asked, “Is not the formation of .  .  . [Pariah] settlements a public purpose?” The scrawled query reveals that Forbes was not alone in his “misconstrual” of the government’s orders. A member of the board familiar with the case, however, rejoined in the margins, “I should call it a pariah or a padre purpose.”59 136  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

In chapter 1, I described how the government of Madras treated the relations among caste, bondage, and mirasi rights (for instance, the fact that the vast majority of Pariahs were landless laborers) as a matter of accident rather than of essence. Thus, the Under-Secretary of State’s insistence that “there is no bar either in law or in practice to low caste people obtaining and cultivating wastelands on the same terms as high caste people.”60 The notion of a public purpose on which this particular conflict turns entails similar selectivity with respect to caste, inasmuch as caste was found to inhere in this conflict only in those practices that were understood by officials to be religious and was considered to have nothing to do with how public purposes—and allegedly public resources—were being defined. Missionaries’ prolixity on the ultimately spiritual basis of Pariah servitude was therefore complemented by a steady accretion of government pronouncements on the Pariah that are curiously—even deafeningly—silent on the caste-based exclusionary practices that determined the administrative category “public” (or “communal”). Before the very eyes of all parties involved was a category of resource that benefited only a segment of society but that nevertheless bore the title communal (meaning “of the commons” or “public”).61 This was of course the category of puramboke itself, communal land, which both caste raiyats and administrators treated as the sole domain of landed villagers. The petition from caste villagers is quite explicit in asserting their exclusive claims over communal land, which they and no one else intended to use as pasturage—a fact that remains entirely invisible in the board’s extensive discussions of what could count as properly public. Thus, in reasserting one commonsense definition of public (something that directly benefits everyone), officials and caste villages simultaneously reasserted the equally commonsense exclusion of Pariahs from many of the resources that were ideologically construed as belonging to the general public. We saw in Kodambakkam that raiyats claimed that land to be given to Pariahs was necessary for threshing and as a cattle stand, while here it was claimed necessary for grazing. The frequency of the insistence that land to be assigned to Panchamas was necessary for communal purposes, such as the grazing of raiyats’ cattle, only increased as the years went by and would become the object of perceptive criticism at the hands of the first generation of Dalit activists to become engaged in formal politics in colonial Madras, as noted above. And yet such claims were taken very seriously by officials, even when it was revealed that the claimed needs for S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   137

pasturage were fabrications. In Kodambakkam, the sub-collector himself had gone to inspect the site and had decided that there was no evidence for the veracity of the raiyats’ claims. In Mannur, numerous inspections of the village determined that here too, as in Kodambakkam, the objection was groundless: plenty of pasturage existed, and the site in question had never been in use for such a purpose. Nevertheless, various officials involved in inspection solemnly proclaimed that the provision of communal resources, such as pasturage, was a right due to “all villagers,” despite its being common knowledge that Pariahs were prohibited from the use of communal land and from the use of other so-called communal resources, including tanks, wells, fishing ponds, and many public thoroughfares.62 “Communal” lands were not, properly speaking, communal at all, and officials were well aware of this. Thus, village elites and state legislators tacitly and effectively promulgated the view that what was designated “communal” was in fact the distinct prerogative of, first, the body of mirasidars, second, the other non-Pariah inhabitants of the village, and of Pariahs, not at all. This inscription of caste difference into the category of the communal, shared by state officials and village elites, would in turn frame the expectations of the latter regarding state intervention in rural life. Thus, it is hardly a surprise that village elites could scarcely comprehend how an assignment of land solely benefiting Pariahs—a group hitherto unquestioningly debarred from the privileges of the village commons—could possibly be said to have a public purpose. For they, not Pariahs, were the public. In chapter 1 we examined how, in administrative definitions, village “residents” were simply those with land—and were even, and not infrequently, absentee landlords. The outsider status of Pariahs, integral to both discursive and nondiscursive native practices, remained markedly absent from the discourse of the state, even as it was upheld de facto. The strategy that allowed village elites to threaten religious conflict if the state acted against landed interests—while simultaneously displacing caste antagonism onto an imagined religious cleavage in which “Hindu Pariahs” would appear on the same side as caste people—would have seemed much less plausible had caste not already been erased from definitions of communal land, mirasidarship, and hereditary bondage. But because forms of domination such as exclusive access to village commons were figured not as caste prerogatives but instead as rights equally distributed for the welfare of society (camutāya naṉmai), the appropriation 138  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

of communal land for the express use of Pariahs could be portrayed as a case of communal resources illegitimately being diverted to private interests, rather than as a transfer from one set of private interests to another. And with what was designated as caste firmly sequestered from these and other practices of agrarian domination, caste could all the more readily appear to be purely a matter of religion.

Sentiments and an Exclusionary Public in Sothuperumbadu The third and final case differs from the previous two in that it does not involve missionaries. Yet religious neutrality again became an issue in April 1896, when in an effort to implement one of the minor suggestions made in the government’s response to J. H. A. Tremenheere, the collector of Chingleput reclassified 68 cents of nonarable pasture land as paṟaccēri nattam (a category of communal land reserved for Pariah house sites in the Pariah [paṟa] ghetto [cēri]).63 The extension of the cēri site was usually a routine procedure that met with no objections, most likely because the location of the cēri, strategically important for labor control, was usually retained, with just its borders expanded.64 But here the collector, D. D. Murdoch, had chosen to relocate the paṟaccēri on the border of two villages, Sothuperumbadu and Surappedu, in Ponneri Taluk, Chingleput District. He soon found himself opposed by T. Ranganatha Tawker, the sole mirasidar of Surappedu and one of several mirasidars in Sothuperumbadu. This alone gives us an immediate indication of the extent of his local importance, as does the fact that the petition he sent to government against their proposed assignment was printed in Madras rather than being handwritten—a large expense for what was in fact a dispute over an extremely small plot of uncultivable land. Nevertheless, Tawker objected that “the [assigned] field is just opposite to the Petitioner’s house in the adjoining village of Surappedu, within 40 or 50 yards from it. . . . Besides, the site chosen is on the footpath which leads from one village to the other. . . . This site would be very inconvenient to the general public. . . . The Petitioner therefore begs to appeal against this order of the collector, which unnecessarily violates the religious prejudices of caste inhabitants.”65 We might notice first that those whom Tawker describes as “the general public,” who would be “inconvenienced” by the existence of Pariah houses along the path they would have to walk, are none other than the S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   139

village’s “caste inhabitants,” corroborating our previous observations regarding the widespread exclusion of the Pariah from an understanding of the general public and from access to communal village resources. Second, Tawker is quite explicit in describing the violation of these villagers’ caste prejudice as an offense against their religious rights. Tawker went on to specify that he agreed that Pariahs needed house sites and offered to settle them instead on one of his own fields. Seeing that some Pariahs had already commenced building on the objectionable site, Tawker further offered to pay them for their expenses. Thus, whatever his motives, Tawker’s proposal—to spare his fellow villagers the inconvenience that Murdoch’s plan for the Pariahs would cause them— had the additional advantage of confining those Pariahs to lands belonging to their master. Missionaries, as well as a few government officials such as Chingleput collectors C.  M. Mullaly and J.  H. A Tremenheere, had long observed that the control of house sites was critical to mirasidars’ strategy of labor maintenance.66 What Tawker was proposing, therefore, would preserve this strategic advantage in the face of state officials’ unwitting threat to it during their piecemeal implementation of measures concerned with hygiene and congestion.67 The board, not unexpectedly, found Tawker’s compromise eminently reasonable. As Tawker had put it: In these circumstances the petitioner is sure that the Board will not fail to see the fairness, the obvious justice and the reasonableness of his request. . . . The Petitioner is very anxious to respect the policy of the Government, in granting house sites to Panchamas, and otherwise helping them, and would not have objected . . . but for the fact that it is quite impossible for caste inhabitants and Panchamas to live so close to each other. . . . It is only just and fair that in making such grant to Panchamas the rights and sentiments of other communities . . . should be respected as far as possible.68

Tawker’s confidence that the board could be brought around to his point of view was not misplaced. They canceled the collector’s order, noting that an objection had been made “on caste grounds.” Tawker’s offer of an alternate site was to be accepted, and the Panchamas who had already settled on the site should be told they must vacate immediately. To at least some state agents, therefore, caste grounds were, if not 140  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

reasonable, perfectly persuasive. It was legitimate to maintain Pariahs at a distance and to speak of them as outside the purview of the general public. In this case, the suggestion contained in Tremenheere’s report to improve unsanitary conditions in Pariah ghettoes was accommodated by Tawker’s compromise. That is, the improvement of the living conditions of Pariahs by relieving overcrowding could be reconciled here with the claim to hurt sentiments and to the right, in Tawker’s language, that such sentiments be protected “as far as possible.” These sentiments were figured as natural and, as such, required little explanation: it was simply, in Tawker’s phrase, “quite impossible” for caste and outcaste to dwell in proximity, and both the collector and the Board of Revenue accepted his claim without question. By providing an alternative site, the mirasidar allowed state officials to discharge their own obligation to relieve overcrowding and at once expressed a deep sympathy for the Pariahs and for the government’s efforts on their behalf.

Conclusion: Religion and the “Hindu” Pariah The events in Sothuperumbadu, Kodambakkam, and Mannur disclose how minor conflicts in the countryside reconciled new governmental imperatives with the maintenance of labor subordination. In this process, the colonial state’s vague promise of religious neutrality took shape in the struggles between caste people, Pariah laborers, and their intercessors (be they missionaries or state officials). Religion itself became increasingly understood as a matter of sentiment, including, as we have seen, caste sentiment. The terms of religious identity were also transformed, such that Pariahs were redefined as members of one religion or another. Thus, the raiyats of Mannur, by describing non-Christian Pariahs as “Hindu”—well before it was common to do so—inscribed a claim of identification between Pariahs and caste villagers into the official records of colonial administration. This shared identity was allegedly rooted in sentiment and inherently opposed to its Christian counterparts. Quite removed from the showy public campaigns of the early twentieth century, which sought to incorporate “untouchables” within the ranks of Hindus proper, caste villagers in these conflicts found occasion to demand neutrality in a way that decisively declared and enshrined as precedent a shared religious communion with Pariahs.69 In the same act, the reality S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T   141

of the antagonism between tied laborers and their masters was denied. With respect to the category of “the public,” while allegedly communal resources were not at all public, colonial officials, as well as caste elites, balked at the notion that state action bettering the Pariah’s condition could count as serving a public purpose. A series of tactics, repeated again and again in the course of conflicts, effected these categorial rearrangements. Mirasidars and other landed elements would frequently suggest, or promise to provide, some alternative to the particular site government had chosen, as did T. Ranganatha Tawker.70 The claim that the land to be assigned had a communal purpose—that it was, in other words, necessary for grazing animals, for threshing grain, or as a stand for village bullocks—was another common plaint, as the disputes in Kodambakkam and Mannur attest. This type of objection invoked certain mainstays of the state’s theory of how to maintain agrarian harmony and productivity, such as its role in providing various subsidies to agriculturists, including reserving communal lands for purposes such as those named above.71 In the course of these conflicts, by its repeated iteration, the implicit equation of the public with the totality of landed villagers was expressly reinforced, because communal resources did not accrue to Pariahs. But as we have seen in these cases, such claims, while greatly respected by state agents, were not always successful in countering a local government order. Far more effective was a reference to neutrality. This is not to suggest that any particular objection could be depended upon by any given raiyat in advance: every such conflict was a matter of tactical moves made by a variety of parties, the outcomes of which were unpredictable. Yet they were nevertheless systematic in reinforcing particular notions of neutrality, untouchability, and the Pariahs’ stake in the public. Most petitions opposing specific actions comprised a catalogue of reasons, of which only some were judged valid. Even within the category of claims that neutrality had been abrogated, not all possible variants were equally persuasive to state officials. Thus, the charge that Christians were receiving the special favor of the state, as raiyats in Mannur had alleged, might not be taken as seriously as an avowal like T. Ranganatha Tawker’s. That is, the charge that Hindus were being treated less well than Christians could be refuted or efforts could be made to restore balance. It was therefore open to contestation by missionaries and by state agents. Observations such as Tawker’s, namely that it was simply impossible for 142  S E T T L I N G L A N D , S O W I N G C O N F L I C T

Panchamas and caste folk to reside adjacent to one another were, however, irrefragable. That the need for caste Hindus and Panchamas to be kept apart was a religious right was never questioned, even though its basis in “superstition,” its rootedness in feeling rather than reason, might be derided or mocked. Untouchability therefore became a state-protected right—and not by a proclamation or a statute whose promulgation can be precisely dated but rather by the steady accrual of cases like these. As the net effect of these conflicts, religion emerged as the favored language of contestation, and at the same time, the public was construed as being exclusive of Pariahs.

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Chapter 6 T H E M A R R I AG E O F SAC R E D AND SECUL AR AUTHORIT Y New Liberalism, Mission–State Relations, and the Birth of Authenticity

Religious neutrality emerged as key in conflicts between Pariahs and their masters in the countryside in the 1890s. What we trace in this chapter is a new concern with religion, namely a concern on the part of Indian elites with authentic religious selfhood and “genuine” conversion, which emerged as the settling of Pariahs on their own cultivable lands became a scheme openly pursued under the auspices of government and represented as thoroughly legitimate. A new governmental rationality took hold in the late 1890s, whereby settling the Panchama (as Pariahs came to be known at this time), with the explicit help of missionary manpower and capital, began to acquire the status of a “state purpose.”1 This in turn provoked public criticisms giving rise to a distinctive idiom of authenticity still hegemonic in debates that concern Dalit conversion to this day. On February 1, 1898, a full six years after J.  H.  A. Tremenheere’s report came out, a large interdenominational group of missionaries calling themselves the Madras Missionary Conference petitioned Sir Arthur Elibank Havelock, governor of Madras, delineating the unjust effects of the preferential rules for applications for land (the darkhast rules) on Panchamas and pleading for their revision.2 The petition began conciliatorily, acknowledging the government’s efforts to promote education among Panchamas in Madras but stressing that education alone would

not raise them up. Thus, a view that in the early 1890s had been espoused by only a few particularly keen missionaries, such as Adam Andrew, was now a mainstream position of missionary thought on the Pariah Problem. The result of the missionary petition was, as we shall see, to marry the acquisition of land by Panchamas with the concept of the managed Panchama settlement that they had previously elaborated, for this would allay fears the government had of founding “pauper settlements.” The authors also described their scant success in obtaining lands for the purpose. Missionaries did not restrict their analysis to Chingleput, nor to mirasi areas, but pointed to the presidency-wide salience of the current state of darkhast rules. The rules specified an order of categories of preference according to which applications could be made for cultivable lands that became available in a village. Adjacent landholders were allowed to apply before others, followed by other landed villagers. In mirasi areas such as Chingleput, a further category of applicants (mirasidars) was privileged over and above an already formidable series. Someone would invariably apply to prevent Panchamas or their missionary allies from making an application, and it was thus difficult to acquire lands for settling Panchamas anywhere in Madras. In what would prove to be a critical move, missionaries described how their own role in improving the Panchama could aid in the lucrative expansion of cultivation, hoping to convince the government thereby to alter the rules. In the process, by seeking to redefine “the public,” they portrayed Panchama improvement as if it were a well-established state project even at a time when this was not yet the case. The 1898 petition addressed first the concerns that had been expressed by the government with respect to Collector Atkinson’s “experiment” in Kistna, asserting that missionaries throughout the presidency had found Panchamas more than capable, when started off with the requisite capital, of becoming productive cultivators and that mission agencies were prepared to provide that capital.3 The sole risk—that Panchamas would be forced to abandon lands in seasons of adversity—would be obviated by the trusteeship of missionaries over the land, and thus the only remaining obstacle to the successful improvement of the Panchama was the acquisition of land itself. The Revenue Department received a further petition from the South Indian Missionary Association (SIMA) that seconded the pleas of the Madras Missionary Conference. The large number of signatories (a total of 210 from across Madras and Mysore) is noteworthy T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y   145

and attests to both the province-wide nature of the problem and to the strength of missionary unity on this issue.4 It was known that the government was anxious to bring as much land as possible under cultivation, the petition continued, and there remained a very large category that was yet unassigned, which included valuable fertile plots: but to these the darkhast rules applied. Given the relative ease with which a single small landholder could block an application by Panchamas or by missionaries applying for land on their behalf, the Madras Missionary Conference argued that there was no alternative but an amendment of the rules: “Since the Government has land that may be assigned for cultivation . . . and as your Memorialists find that under the present rules it is exceedingly difficult, indeed almost impossible, for missionaries and philanthropic societies to get land to found . . . [Panchama] settlements, your Memorialists pray that some amendment of the existing rules for the assignment of wastelands shall be made.”5 Missionaries were careful to cite instances in which administrators had made exceptions to the rules in similar circumstances and to specify exactly how this circumstance was comparable to those. The missionaries, that is, understood the importance of the principle of precedent in government administration. And the precedent they cited, furthermore, cut straight to the heart of previous conflicts, as it amounted to a bid at reinterpreting the very notion of the public. According to G.O., dated June 1, 1870, no. 796, the Government has the right to appropriate waste lands in mirasi villages for State purposes, and according to G.O. 1010, Revenue, dated September 30, 1892, para. 11 (f), the Government possesses “indisputable right to assign waste land as public puramboke [i.e., land provided free of assessment to villagers for, inter alia, residential purposes] to provide new sites for paracheris [Pariah residential areas] where wanted” and “will also be prepared to assign to sites for schools.” Hence, in granting wastelands for Panchama peasant settlements, the Government is only extending a principle already recognized. Your Memorialists submit that the attempt to raise the depressed Panchama classes from their present dependent state is most worthy to be considered a State purpose.6

The writers of this petition had, by the words I have italicized, identified what would become the most contentious aspect of the conflicts that 146  T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y

surrounded the state’s efforts to uplift the Panchama, for their recommendation that the darkhast rules be amended was made on the basis of an argument that such an amendment would fulfill a state or public purpose.7 While the beginning of their memorial asserted that Panchama uplift was indeed an interest of the benevolent government and lauded the government for its efforts thus far, the missionaries went further, urging the state to consider that interest as a specific duty of the state. Missionaries thereby identified the crux of the issue: Would the government view Panchama uplift simply as a matter of its own fitfully expressed benevolence, to be attended to only to the extent that missionaries continued to publicize the Panchamas’ deplorable condition? Or was this in fact part of the state’s responsibility for the welfare of its subjects and, indeed, of benefit to governance itself? While the government would not fully accept such a responsibility for a number of years, we may take this memorial as a critical turning point in the development of a new governmental sense regarding the Panchama, which would reach its apogee in the late 1910s. While the odd voice within the annals of the government might continue to insist that the Panchama “work out his own salvation,” the proliferation of state reports, propaganda, and policy implementation indicate that such views were soon to become anachronistic.8 In 1892, Tremenheere had appeared a maverick and revolutionary; a scant decade later, his position would become comfortably mainstream. How had this change come about? Only six years earlier, the Board of Revenue had dismissed Tremenheere’s suggestion that it was incumbent upon the state to intervene in Pariah welfare, declaring, “In India, as in all countries, efforts to ameliorate such unavoidable evils form the proper field of private philanthropy.”9 The Revenue Department’s silence on this point betokens agreement. Now, however, a tectonic shift had taken place, a shift that had transformed District Collector Tremenheere, unpopular author of an embarrassing and highly inconvenient report, into Acting Secretary of State Tremenheere. Nor was Tremenheere a lone apostle: in 1892, the government had dismissed the injustices Tremenheere described as “highly exaggerated,” flatly denying that the darkhast rules could prevent anyone from acquiring land, while now one senior official of the Revenue Department, H. Winterbotham, professed, I have never liked the darkhast rules and regard them in practice as a serious obstacle to the movement of the agricultural population from T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y   147

overcrowded localities to places where wasteland is available. As soon as a stranger applies for land he finds himself excluded by a counterapplication from a pattadar of the village; and as soon as the baffled stranger retires the land can be relinquished again. In practice the rules constantly work hardship and injustice, but they are ancient.10

Apparently Winterbotham was not exceptional, for no one raised a voice against him. While the Revenue Department rejected the missionaries’ plea to amend darkhast rules, its response nevertheless marked a new phase in the administration of the Pariah. Although it was recognized that to amend or deviate from these “ancient” rules altogether would be most impolitic—and there is no gainsaying the state’s continued interest in preserving custom and thereby preserving the form of statecraft that relied so heavily on the nonstate agents whom such customs most benefited, and who were increasingly politically active as well, the board took considerable interest in identifying conditions under which “exceptions” to the rule could be made. Considerations of revenue remained as important as ever—after all, the darkhast rules were said to impede the free growth of cultivation of wastelands. Nor was it the case that the plight of the Panchama was suddenly recognized as a matter of special concern; it was simply that economic growth was now understood as being inseparable from justice and fairness in general, and the general no longer specifically excluded the Panchama. Winterbotham’s point was that the rules “worked hardship and injustice” and were therefore not fair to anyone, not just the Panchama. Nor is it correct to consider Winterbotham’s talk of justice as a mask for a more fundamental venality. Rather, it is that economic productivity and social progress were now seen as inextricably linked in a new governmental vision. One source for this vision may itself be found in a turn from what is often called classical liberalism to “new liberalism,” which was beginning to appear in Britain at this time and which, as we are now in a position to see, missionaries in Madras were critical in introducing into the colony. While new liberalism would reach its apogee only in the early years of the new century in Britain, its effects were clearly being felt in Madras and would become even more pronounced in official circles in the first decade of the twentieth century.11 This new liberalism, whose most wellknown metropolitan theorists included T.  H. Green, J.  A. Hobson, and 148  T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y

L. T. Hobhouse, can be differentiated from the old in three respects that are germane here. First was the view that the social good could sometimes trump individual liberty, insofar as in some instances it might be necessary to reform the social to allow individual liberty to reach its full potential.12 Second, and following from the first, was the view that economic laissez-faire, if left entirely unchecked, produced conditions that made individual self-realization difficult to achieve; this was therefore the basis for arguments in favor of particular kinds of intervention that can be characterized as social reformist.13 Finally, complementing the former two was the understanding that it was indeed the obligation of the state in particular to undertake reforms necessary to ensure what we would today call equality of opportunity. This last feature of the new liberalism was specifically the one being advocated most forcefully by missionaries. Recall that Rev. Johannes Kabis had asked of mission agencies a similar question: In a political culture in which private philanthropy and charity were deemed the rightful purveyors of aid to the poor, why ought mission agencies intervene in the Pariah’s material misery? Kabis’s own answer was of course a theological one about the social transformation that would come from the development of a Christian spirit. Here, several years later, we find missionaries anticipating and answering a similar objection on the part of the state, a natural one to anticipate given the importance, in Victorian liberal thought, of the role of private philanthropy and the corresponding disparagement of state intervention with respect to the poor.14 The transformation from the official response to Tremenheere in 1892 (“In India, as in all countries, efforts to ameliorate such unavoidable evils [as the Pariah’s poverty] form the proper field of private philanthropy. The state can certainly not intervene”15) to the stance of Winterbotham marks the shift in Madras that was simultaneously taking place in Britain. It also underscores how mistaken it would be to read the former as simply the colonial instantiation of the latter, for in Madras it had its own specific historical sources and trajectory. Welfarism in colonial India, a defining mark of political modernity, was profoundly shaped by the Pariah Problem. Its first colonial champions were missionaries, driven to act because their own lives and missiological certainties had been radically disrupted by the Pariahs who had come to command their attention and resources to a far greater extent than they had ever anticipated: recall Rev. William Goudie’s admission that “while the missionary was labouring and praying T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y   149

to win the Brahmin, God . . . sent the outcaste man to claim his attention and his care.”16 The conceptual apparatus of the new liberalism, gaining currency at home, enabled the achievement of a vital task in India. The “ideology of social reform” that emerged in Britain took root, was made to perform under the specific conditions of colonial statecraft we have discussed, and would come to be undone for reasons we must seek in the nexus of conflicts and social cleavages we have been witness to throughout this book.17 Madras’s Governor A.  E. Havelock, upon receiving the Revenue Department’s recommendations, proposed that state agents try a new tack with respect to the darkhast rules. Noting that the rules were “probably very highly valued by the ryot population,” Havelock worried whether “it would be politic, or perhaps even safe, to abrogate them.”18 But he did notice a legal loophole—turning on the distinction between rule and law—that could perhaps be loosened further. For the orders of preference specified in darkhast were not laws of the land; they did not have “the force of law,” he opined, but were instead only “executive rules for general guidance.”19 Although concerns of politics and safety mandated that darkhast rules could not be simply discarded, despite the government’s right to do so, the fact that they were rules rather than law meant that exceptions could be made to them. And, indeed, there already existed a provision in the Board of Revenue’s Standing Order No. 15—the order that specified the preferential rules of darkhast—that the government could make assignments against this order “in special cases, when considerations of equity require it but not otherwise.”20 Havelock explained, “I would not tamper with the rules themselves, but I would expand the conditions under which they may be departed from.”21 In Havelock’s new formulation, the clause in the standing order specifying exceptions would newly read, “in special cases, when considerations of equity require it, or in other cases with the permission of the Board of Revenue.”22 Havelock was thus preserving the rule even as he created an unspecified and indeed potentially inexhaustible range of circumstances in which officials could depart from the rule. The political character of such rules, and the fact that state agents—and not only subjects— were themselves constrained to look for ways in which to maneuver around rules, suggests again how intimate was the link between state

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and nonstate agents. The latter were both politically powerful interlocutors and shared in structures of political-economic authority in which Panchamas had to operate. As Winterbotham’s comment above makes clear, one difficulty in altering the darkhast rules altogether was simply the fact that they respected a tradition that was supposed to have been in effect for a very long time. The authority cited for the alleged antiquity of mirasi claims to wasteland in the discussion among officials of the Revenue Department was Srinivasa Raghavaiyangar’s Memorandum of the Progress of the Madras Presidency During the Last Forty Years of British Administration, which provides a précis of the British government’s reasoning and ultimate decision regarding their right to assign the uncultivated wastelands of mirasi villages at their discretion.23 Yet, as Tremenheere pointed out when this source was adduced, “It should be borne in mind that the writer . . . is [himself ] a large holder of mirasi lands. This may unconsciously colour his views.”24 Whatever their color, Raghavaiyangar’s views had a concrete effect on the state’s administration of rural Madras, for despite Tremenheere’s note of caution, Raghavaiyangar’s conclusions were not questioned. On the basis of evidence of this kind, the clause Havelock had proposed was ultimately judged too risky, although its underlying concept was retained. The standing order was amended with a clause asserting that the government—and not, as Havelock had suggested, the Board of Revenue—could depart from the rules should it consider it in the public interest to do so. Any departure from the rules, therefore, would henceforth require the provincial center’s express sanction and could not proceed as a routine matter of administration. To the public, this would have appeared as a reassuringly conservative move, for in addition to explicitly limiting the Board’s authority to override rules, the decision had done nothing more than reassert a right the government had long claimed but never exercised. But the debate preceding this apparently minor amendment reveals something quite radical. Where any departure from darkhast rules had until recently been officially denounced as “unjust and immoral,”25 highly ranked officials were now unanimous in declaring the rules themselves unjust and expressly called for their abrogation through the device of “the exception.”

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Missions, Empire, Neutrality: Reverend J. A. Sharrock in Jeyamkondacholapuram The board’s response to the 1898 missionary conference memorial thus indexes a sea change in governmental rationality. The new welfarist regime can partly be traced to the emergence of an ideology of social governance in Britain. In British India, social governance was given distinctive shape in the forge of struggles among landed elites, officers at all levels of governance, missionaries, and Panchamas themselves. Nor was the 1898 memorial the first time this struggle had been taken to the highest strata of the provincial state. Just a year before, one particular missionary had been tentatively granted a rather large plot on which to settle Panchamas, in a decision in which the rules had been overlooked. The missionary was Rev. J. A. Sharrock, whom we met in chapter 2 as the most outspoken and determined opponent of caste in the native church, and the decision to sidestep darkhast had been made on the personal recommendation of none other than Lord Havelock. In 1897, Sharrock, like Revs. Johannes Kabis and Gopala Aiyar, was entangled in a series of back and forth communications with the Board of Revenue, but unlike the latter two, he had taken the additional step of appealing directly to Lord Havelock.26 Sharrock explained to Havelock that he had applied for a piece of land for Panchamas from a large plot in Trichinopoly that was being cleared of forest and was soon to be handed over to the Revenue Department to be sold for cultivation. The acting collector had told him that he could not depart from the darkhast rules in order to make the grant, thus rendering it impossible, in Sharrock’s estimation, for Panchamas to acquire it. What is most remarkable about Sharrock’s appeal to Havelock, however, is that it prefigures the one Havelock himself would make in 1899. Not only did Sharrock explain that the Board’s standing order specifying the darkhast rules contained within it scope for acting outside the rules, but he also pointed out that they had been framed long ago and were thus unsuited to the government’s new aim of engaging in Panchama uplift. And Sharrock also explicitly suggested the manner in which these inefficient and unjust rules could be circumvented: by means of an exception already contained within them, which would thereby allow the government to sidestep their difficult and impolitic revision.

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Sharrock furthermore anticipated possible objections that raiyats might put forth to the assignment, drawing on the practical knowledge of fellow missionaries and Panchama converts who had, again and again, been stymied by caste raiyats’ invocation of “religious rights.” Sharrock thus took care to emphasize that the land he sought was “situated at rather more than a mile’s distance from the nearest agraharam [Brahmin settlement], wells would be sunk on the land itself [so that Panchamas would not have to share wells with anyone else] and huts built apart, so that no inconvenience could arise to the Brahmins of the town.”27 The government had already shown its willingness to help raise the Panchama in the matter of education, Sharrock argued, so it should not shrink from his proposed scheme. The Board of Revenue, unaware of Sharrock’s correspondence with Havelock, was reluctant to grant his request, as they were sure that the abrogation of darkhast rules in this case would make the government vulnerable to litigation. One board member, in keeping with the customary deference to precedent, referred to the case of Rev. Kabis in Mannur and suggested that the principles that applied in that instance ought to apply here—namely, that the darkhast rules could not be violated without the issue of public purposes being raised, in which case those who had preferential rights would then insist that Panchama agricultural settlements could not properly be said to constitute a public purpose. The collector of Trichinopoly, R. J. Shipley, however, acting on Sharrock’s behalf, inquired into the particulars of the proposed plot in more detail and found that an extremely large area was to be disafforested, such that even after the assignment to Sharrock, resident raiyats could still apply for some 700 acres of land. He also offered additional reasons in Sharrock’s favor. First, he noted that the loss to the government would be minimal, because even by sale at auction the lands Sharrock sought would not fetch very much; thus the government was not parting with anything of special value. Second, he suggested that Sharrock’s scheme amounted to a “good opportunity for testing the value of these settlements as a means of bettering the Panchama.”28 Finally, he made an argument that took official administrative language at its word even as it flew in the face of precedent. For Panchamas too were residents of the village, Shipley innocently reasoned, and since the lands were being disafforested for the purpose of cultivation by “resident villagers,” there was nothing in Sharrock’s

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proposal that contravened the state’s objective. The Board of Revenue, however, had never treated Panchamas as residents, at least not in the same manner as they did landed raiyats, and they had no intention of doing so now. Nor would they feel any need to address Shipley’s wholly inappropriate challenge, which could be easily brushed off given the perceived inviolability of the darkhast rules: [The] fact on which the Collector lays stress, namely that the land is required for the resident Panchamas and not foreigners does not seems to make much difference if, as is stated, there have been several darkhasts from adjacent landholders, apparently non-panchamas, which would under the darkhast rules necessitate a sale of the lands.  .  .  . [The] Board adheres to the view already expressed, . . . namely that the assignment of the land otherwise than in accordance with the darkhast rules would be specially open to objection.29

The board, however, was not privy to the discussions taking place at higher levels of government (in which Sharrock himself had played an unseen role) and therefore could not have anticipated what would ensue. In 1899, the government of Madras not only overruled the recommendation of the board, assigning the land to Sharrock, but also agreed to exceptionally lenient terms.30 As with Andrew’s Melrosapuram, Sharrock was offered “progressive cowle,” a scheme by which rates of assessment only gradually increased to the standard rates paid by ordinary landholders.31 It remained only for Sharrock to convince the mission at home to sign the lease, for that is what the government of Madras required. The mission had proved reluctant: apart from the practical difficulty of another costly enterprise, there was the very doubt that had once plagued Madras missionaries as well—they simply could not understand how settling people permanently on the land could be construed as missionary work.32 In a 1903 missive to the Standing Committee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), Rev. Frank Penny, a senior missionary and a friend of Sharrock, proffered a remarkable new rationale for Panchama agricultural settlements in an effort to persuade them to grant Sharrock and the Madras Diocesan Committee authority to sign the lease on the society’s behalf.33 Examining how this rationale was presented and what it assumed will allow us to understand the sharing of authority between the state and mission agencies in programs of Panchama uplift 154  T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y

and to begin to discern what effect this would have on the Panchamas who would participate in them. The government, as we saw, had cited Raghavaiyangar’s Memorandum in their deliberations regarding darkhast rules and had Sharrock’s case in mind at the time. Penny cited the same report, assuring the mission of its reliability by averring that it dealt with “many matters in a masterly way and from the highest Brahmin point of view.”34 Yet Penny’s interest in the Memorandum was not in the sections on mirasi right: elsewhere in his text, while describing the slow improvement of the Pariahs, Raghavaiyangar had remarked that, “The best thing that can happen to them is conversion to either the Christian or the Muhammedan religion, for there is no hope for them within the pale of Hinduism.”35 This remark had made the rounds of missionary periodicals, in which it was emphasized that even a Brahmin—allegedly the most zealous protector of Hinduism—was admitting that the Pariah had no future in that religion. Trumpeted as an authoritative admission that Hinduism was flawed, some even dared hope that the tide had turned and the rapid conversion of India was imminent.36 Penny, however, presented Raghavaiyangar’s remark to the standing committee in an entirely different light, pitching it as a high-ranked civil servant’s official recommendation to the government. Raghavaiyangar’s incidental remark about Pariah conversion was portrayed as an official appeal for missionaries to align with the state in the improvement of the Pariah, which as officials had at long last come to recognize, Penny averred, required Panchamas’ conversion to Christianity. The government, as Penny told it, was eager to follow Raghavaiyangar’s “recommendation” that the Pariahs be handed over to missionaries, especially since Raghavaiyangar had assured them that, as Penny put it, “neither Hindus nor Mohamedans cared a jot” whether Panchamas converted.37 This was of course an outright falsehood—and Hindus’ and Muslims’ often violent opposition to missionary work among “their” Panchamas would have been well known to Penny. Indeed, Raghavaiyangar himself had been quite explicit that by conversion he meant a transformation of the soul alone; he stressed that any government aid to Panchamas should be limited to education and should precisely not proceed, as Panchama settlements would, “by procuring benefits to the labouring classes at the expense of the landowning classes which can only have the effect of introducing . . . a spirit of mutual hostility . . . to the injury of both.”38 T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y   155

Thus, while missionaries such as Kabis and Sharrock were urging the government to do something for the Panchama and presenting themselves as potential subcontractors in this worthy purpose, Penny was engaged in a bid to convince the SPG that the scheme was neither solely nor overly temporal in nature. Penny, therefore, represented the settlement of Panchamas as simultaneous with their conversion and the whole package as a state objective in which missionaries had been deputed by the government to participate. And yet, if Penny’s account was misleading with respect to the state’s intentions, and in its highly selective use of Raghavaiyangar as an authority, it was decidedly prescient with respect to envisioning the future of state welfare schemes targeting the Panchama in Madras: The Government . . . [was] determined to try and better their condition in the manner indicated in the Report [i.e., Raghavaiyangar’s Memorandum]. . . . Its plan was to place the Pariahs on the land, to make them cultivators, to lead them to self-respect and to the respect of others through independence and responsible superintendence and practical education. It can easily be realised by those who know India that this could not be done by making grants of land to individuals of the class intended to be benefited. The civil officials already have their hands full. . . . More might be employed, but this would mean a large extra cost to the state. If there was no objection on the part of the Hindus or the Mahommedans or the Panchamas themselves to conversion or the risk of conversion to Christianity, why not make use of the existing missionary bodies and their agents. Tracts of land could be granted to the bodies; superintendence could be committed to the agents; and the philanthropic design of the Government could be carried out without any further cost to the state.39

Penny’s vision of a splendid harmony of intentions could not have been further from the truth at the time that he wrote it, for the government had no such well-formulated scheme, and many officials had expressed a distinct disinclination to such large-scale resettling of Panchamas. Yet what Penny proposed, a close and systematic linkage between missionaries and the government with respect to the administration of the Panchama, in which missionaries would function as de facto state agents,

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with the difficult work of superintendence, as well as the investment of capital, delegated to them, would indeed become state policy. Colonial new liberalism would require a discreet marriage between sacred and secular authorities. Before such a vision could be realized, however, it would be necessary for the state to reconsider its policy of religious neutrality. Using a missionary agency to run government programs could clearly be construed as a violation of the policy, as colonial officials were well aware. In the very first discussion of a Panchama settlement proposed by Collector J. N. Atkinson in 1894, the question of mission involvement—essentially a scheme identical to what Penny had described to the SPG—had been raised, and it was promptly dismissed on the grounds that it fell afoul of neutrality and could not be considered a public purpose. Penny’s depiction, inasmuch as it represents an accurate picture of how settlements such as Sharrock’s would in fact function, reveals that social governance had come to seem sufficiently serious as to sometimes, and with caution, override the policy of neutrality; officials might, as they had with darkhast rules, attempt to find ways to make exceptions. The government, as Penny correctly represented it, now had its own “philanthropic design,” and this allowed neutrality to occasionally be circumvented. Although no doubt confined to the specific conduct of welfare schemes directed at the Panchama, it marked thereby a signal departure from what had been decades of caution toward missionaries on the part of officials and one which historians have hitherto not recognized.40 As with similar cases before it, the decision to grant the plot to Sharrock soon met with protests of local landholders. This time, however, the government’s response was swift and assured. The raiyats of Jeyamkondacholapuram learned of the assignment and, as had Ranganatha Tawker of Sothuperumbadu before them (as described in chapter 5), presented an impressive printed petition to then Governor of Madras, Lord Ampthill, in late 1901.41 Recalling that they had darkhasted for the land prior to Sharrock and had not heard anything from the collector regarding their applications, the petitioners surmised that “the Reverend Gentleman and the Collector are in collusion to defeat the natural rights of memorialists,” one of which was the “right of preemption to the exclusion of a stranger” to which they were especially entitled, because their land adjoined that which was to

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be assigned to Sharrock.42 The petitioners furthermore drew attention to the fact that they were willing to pay a higher price than Sharrock and also to pay full assessment on the land immediately. The collector’s zeal and illegitimate favor toward the missionary was thus incurring loss to the government, and his foolish decision, they warned, was “opposed to existing laws and likely to cause a disturbance of the peace.”43 In a second supplemental petition, presented shortly afterward, the raiyats offered an alternative piece of land for the settlement, a tactic we have seen deployed in the cases described above.44 In this second petition, the petitioners expressed concerns regarding neutrality: “There is reason to suppose that so long as the present Collector remains in the district, the whole taluq of Udaiyarpalaiyam will be soon turned as [sic] a missionary kingdom.”45 This accusation, together with their earlier observations that the collector’s order was “likely to cause a disturbance of the peace,” drew a familiar picture, linking “hurt sentiments” to the potential violence that might spring from them. And, once again, arguments invoking their legal rights as “cultivators” merged with those premised on religious neutrality. In response, the Board of Revenue only noted that a large area in the same locality had recently been assigned on darkhast, and thus, “the Board does not consider that the memorialists privileges have been unduly interfered with. . . . The petitioners have no case.”46 The contention that the collector was acting against the policy of neutrality was ignored entirely, and the raiyats’ claims to their rights of cultivation were considered to have been sufficiently respected by the grant of other lands. Compared with Kabis’s settlement in Mannur, far more land had been assigned to Sharrock, but although the raiyats in this case, as in that one, had bolstered their arguments both with reference to neutrality as well to their “most cherished rights of cultivation,” the board now remained unmoved. Recall, moreover, that in the Mannur case the board, despite finding the raiyats’ factual claims to be fraudulent, had nevertheless felt compelled to rule in the raiyats’ favor when faced with complaints alleging a violation of religious neutrality. It is thus that Frank Penny’s letter to the SPG bears, despite its misrepresentations, a critical kernel of truth: There was indeed a new philanthropic design behind the government’s grant to Sharrock. Specifically, it had devised a detailed set of rules that were to govern the operation of the settlement—rules that would provide the template for all Panchama 158  T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y

settlements to come. I reproduce them in full so that we may properly discern the character of the state–mission welfare agenda: 1. Panchama families would be granted plots of 5 acres each. 2. The mission society would assist Panchamas with the acquisition of building materials for their houses, cattle, and implements of husbandry, as well as maintain them during the time it took before the produce grown could be sold or consumed. 3. The Land Improvement and Agriculturist’s Loan Act could be drawn upon by the mission society to secure advances, with the lands being put up as security.47 4. The Panchama grantees would have no proprietary rights in the land, being considered tenants from year to year. 5. The land could not be alienated in any way—gifted, sold or mortgaged— without the Collector’s permission. If it were, such a transaction would be null and void, and the government would resume the land. They would also resume it if a grantee became indebted and the Courts demanded the land. 6. Finally, the tax would be collected from the mission society and not from the settlers.48 Just as mirasidars were often, and misleadingly, referred to by the government as “actual cultivators,” these schemes, claiming they intended to secure the Panchama as an “independent cultivator,” prevented the possibility of actual ownership by Panchamas from their very inception, so deeply entrenched was the view that alienation of lands would result if a Panchama became a titleholder. They were, that is, still the object of considerable supervision by self-styled “superiors” who made claims over a wide array of their behaviors and activities, as well as their field labor. No amount of thrift and industriousness would secure their independence—for although the landlords were now missionaries, Panchamas would remain bound to them by, in Adam Andrew’s memorable phrase, “a kind of hold.”49 This is not to understate the differences between Panchamas under missionary management and those still bound to caste people. Apart from alterations in dress, in education, in all manner of “ascetic” practices with respect to the consumption of food and drink, and in new requirements to conform with Victorian norms of sexuality, there was T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y   159

the very dramatic difference that bodily assault on Panchama laborers, as well as what Tremenheere described as “chicanery,” were absent in the mission-managed settlements.50 And yet one ought not overlook a certain continuity between old and new, between bondage and the “free servitude” for which William Goudie had expressed hope. That independent proprietorship was explicitly not their intent for Panchamas is amply testified by missionaries themselves. Thus, for example, in a report sent to the SPG by Rev. Herbert Smith, seeking to quell the society’s lingering doubts about the practicability and appropriateness for missions of such settlements, Smith explained what would happen to any profits the settlement made by recounting Sharrock’s response to the same question: The settlers will have . . . responsibilities in the matter of self-support; helping to build their own schools, churches, etc. He [Sharrock] would not propose that the settlers become independent [even if the land should earn a profit]; they might then alienate their land or become drunkards or immoral, so that it is essential that the Mission, represented by the Superintending Missionary, should remain landlords paying the tax and claiming ⅓ of the produce.51

No matter what their behavior, Panchamas would never be entrusted with the titles to the lands they worked and therefore would never be allowed the opportunity to become their own masters. And yet they would finance “their own” churches and schoolhouses by contributing from their share of the harvest, thus becoming the “self-supporting” congregation that was every nineteenth-century Protestant missionary’s fondest wish.52 No matter how well they met their financial obligations to the church, there would be no provision for them to rise to the level of the landed caste person or to that of the missionary himself. The grant to Sharrock, moreover, would serve as both paradigm and precedent for others like it. While some requests for land would still be refused, numerous other settlements were approved, with the grant to Sharrock frequently cited as precedent: for example, a grant of 1,007 acres was made to the Salvation Army in South Arcot in 1913; 250 acres to the French Catholic missionary Fr. Tranier in North Arcot in 1914; a grant to the Bishop of Madras in Kurnool and Cuddapah in 1913; 85 acres to Fr. Marie Louis, S. J., of the Catholic Mission in Trichinopoly in 1914;

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800 acres to the Basel Mission in South Kanara in 1913; and 140 acres to the American Baptist Mission in Guntur in 1917.53 In each instance, and in a number of others, the conditions laid down closely followed those prescribed for the settlement at Jeyamkondacholapuram, which Sharrock christened “Pukalūr” (“refuge”).54 Figures are not available for exactly how much land was thus assigned to missionaries in toto, but the government of Madras clearly had little idea of how much had been done in this respect, estimating about 2,000 acres in a government communiqué on the Depressed Classes published in 1920, a figure that falls far short of even the cases whose files I was able to view.55 Not all files listed in indexes as recording such assignments are extant, so my own data is by no means comprehensive, but I would conservatively estimate that at least 5,000 acres had been so awarded by 1920; in May 1922, officials tabulated how much had thus been assigned since 1918, and the total was 1,943.60 acres.56

Authentic Conversion, “Hindu Society,” and “Ancient Religion” The first intimations of new liberalism in the colony not only provoked ire among village elites but alarmed their ostensibly more cosmopolitan publicists and allies in the provincial capital as well. The problems missionaries posed had already made them an object of concern in the native press, even prior to the decisive shift in the terrain of struggle marked by Sharrock’s successful acquisition of land for a settlement. As we saw in chapter 3, missionaries’ appearance in local courts in support of Panchamas had drawn reproach from newspapermen.57 But the prospect of widespread Panchama settlements put the threat of missionary presence on an altogether more serious plane: villagers in Kodambakkam, faced with such a settlement, recall, had bitterly described the Christianity of “the [sic] modern days” as “militant.” The increasing visibility of Pariah– missionary alliances, that is to say, brought with it novel ways of publicly talking about the religion of Pariahs and their conversion to Christianity. Perhaps the single most important innovation in this regard was the appropriation by Tamil publicists of the Protestant missionary’s own idea that religion should be rooted in an autonomous spiritual realm and that

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conversion was only legitimate when motivated by the spirit. It was in this context that the trope of “authentic spiritual conversion” championed by Gandhi and today apparent in the anticonversion laws I discuss in this book’s conclusion, first assumed the prominence in antimissionary discourse that it still enjoys today.58 Let us first consider how Panchama settlements were discussed in the press prior to the emergence of this new idiom. In 1894, the Hindujanasamskarini, a Madras monthly, commented on the events we witnessed in chapter 4, when Collector Atkinson’s proposal for settling Panchamas was treated with great skepticism by the government of Madras, and when the grant to Rev. Padfield to found a Panchama settlement was also refused, on the grounds that it might appear to abrogate neutrality: [Regarding] the proposal of the Christian missionaries for Pariah colonization and their request to Government to grant large tracts of land in the Chingleput, Kistna and Kurnool districts, and the refusal of Government to accede to their request . . . [we believe] the object of the missionaries is to deprive the high-caste people of their privileges and lower their status and rank and [we regret] to observe that Mr. Atkinson, Mr. Mullaly and Mr. Tremenheere and other such Collectors are aiding them in this matter. [The paper also] warns the highcaste people to be on the alert and watch with jealous attention the attempts of the missionaries.59

While the paper was pleased that the government was not making these grants, it nevertheless cautioned readers as to the dangers of Pariah– missionary alliances. Significantly, there was no talk at this time of Christianity being a menace to Hinduism, only that missionaries were a threat to caste privilege. Caste was here figured as the “privileges,” “status,” and “rank” that high castes enjoyed and that, as we have seen in chapter 2, Panchamas often challenged upon enlisting the missionary’s support. Conversion, religion, and sentiments (as distinct from privileges) had not yet been taken up by urban elites in their remonstrations against missionary activity. But when, beginning with the grant to Sharrock, the state began to pursue the project of founding large Panchama agricultural settlements under missionary management, The Hindu, Madras’s leading daily, 162  T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y

protested in a manner that indicates a significant change. It inveighed against what it described as the shameless “purchase” of converts, the beguilement of Pariahs for whom the offer of land was so tempting that they could not be said to be exercising real choice: “We cannot understand how Government is justified in giving up large tracts of land to Christian missionaries for being used as bait to draw Pariahs into the Christian fold.  .  .  . It is the Christian missionary who gets ownership of the land, and his object is to inveigle the Pariahs into the Christian fold by offering the tempting prize of owning land. . . . [The] Christian missionary dangles before him worldly temptations of a kind he cannot resist.”60 As we saw, it was Pariahs themselves who initiated alliances with the missionaries, and they did so in a manner that suggests not beguilement but careful strategy on their part. Yet, rather like missionaries, The Hindu was very concerned that Pariahs might be “induced” to convert by any help they received. What is therefore most striking about The Hindu’s editorial is that in order to oppose missionaries, it had taken on a theological norm, dear to those missionaries themselves, as if it were a matter of universal concern—namely, that seeking material betterment, on the one hand, and authentic religious conversion on the other were fundamentally incompatible. Also, in accordance with the conceptions of individual autonomy that underwrote those Protestant concerns with true spiritual conversion and motive, The Hindu added that Pariah conversions were illegitimate, because they were compelled “from without” rather than originating authentically from within: “[The] movement [among Pariahs] comes, not as a reform movement from within, but as a social revolt initiated on purpose from without. . . . The Missionary . . . knows that where Christ fails to draw, the temptations of the world can be powerful. . . . [He] thus offers to the hitherto resolute Pariah . . . temptations.”61 In chapter 5 I posed the following question: In this historical conjuncture in the Madras countryside, could the offense to Hindu sentiment—to which caste villagers, in the course of conflicts, laid claim—be analytically separated from the offense to the landowner caused by the insubordinate laborer? The mutual imbrication of the two vividly appears in this article in The Hindu, and the leap from one to the other—from complaints about inauthentic religion to a criticism of Panchama settlements as a threat to stable agriculture—required a bridge. This bridge would come in the form of an argument already perfected by village elites in T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y   163

the course of their many conflicts with missionaries: a criticism of the government’s neutrality: Government professes for all outward seeming, the policy of religious neutrality. But its agricultural policy [i.e., giving lands to missionaries for Panchama settlements] is disastrous to the ancient religion of the country and to its ancient social system. The Hindu caste society has always had below it a casteless population as its dependency. .  .  . Why does [the government] readily comply with the Christian Missionaries’ request for uncultivated land? . . . The Government must . . . be aware that they are thus promoting a great agricultural revolution which will prove ruinous to the country. When the Pariahs break loose from their ancient moorings, that will certainly raise the agricultural wages in the country . . . [which will] bring ruin and disaster upon the land-holding class. . . . The efforts of Christian Missionaries are operating against the Interests of our country, its races and its social system.62

The government’s agreement to give land to missionaries for Panchamas was “disastrous to the ancient religion” and the “ancient social system.” Missionaries were bent on destroying the social system, and this was not only countenanced but even subsidized by a state whose professed religious neutrality The Hindu now denounced as a fraud. A direct connection, therefore, was posited between the ruin of the Hindu social system—“Hindu caste society”—and the ruin of the ancient religion. If the government aided missionaries in destroying the one, this was tantamount to the annihilation of the other; if the government abrogated neutrality, they did not just hurt religious sentiments but destroyed the social system that was at once the ancient religion. The concern that the government was abrogating neutrality by favoring Christians or missionaries, thus upsetting the social order, which had heretofore been expressed in numerous village-level disputes, was now being raised in the most important newspaper of the day, although with the additional claim that such conversions were inauthentic, because they were motivated not by movements of the spirit but were merely of this world. Reverends Adam Andrew and William Goudie both wrote responses to The Hindu’s editorial, and these were published in the missionary-friendly Madras Mail. Andrew and Goudie rebutted the claim that neutrality was

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in any way abrogated, inasmuch as the amount of land allotted to missionaries for the purpose of Panchama settlements was tiny and was given not to induce non-Christian Panchamas but to settle those who were already Christian: “Indeed, it was because the Panchamas had become Christians, and were under our pastoral care, before ever we thought of beginning a Settlement scheme for them, that induced us to do something to improve their condition.”63 Andrew also pointed out that the majority of missionary educational institutions, the costliest of missionary endeavors, in fact primarily benefited caste Hindus. Thus, observed Andrew, “It surely shows a narrow contracting of mind to criticise the little that is being done for the poor depressed classes, when Missionaries are doing so much for the moral and intellectual uplifting of the higher classes of Hindus!”64 In response to the fear of a rise of wages, Andrew noted that the Panchamas who had come over to Christianity were so small in number in comparison to the millions who had not that it was preposterous to suggest that wages would rise. Andrew thus contested every charge The Hindu brought forth save one: while denying that missionaries offered worldly inducements to Panchamas, he admitted that “those who do come over have often mixed motives, no doubt.”65 Not surprisingly then, the rejoinder that appeared in The Hindu concentrated, above all, on the importance of motive to true religious conversion, even as it echoed a judgment we have seen missionaries make, namely that Pariahs’ poverty itself rendered them virtually incapable of the pure spiritual motives required for their conversions to be authentic: We, Hindus, have no prejudice against Christianity, or Christians. . . . Nor do we object to conversions to Christianity when due to intellectual and spiritual conviction. . . . [But the] Pariahs, especially, have not the least chance of knowing what Christianity . . . can really mean for themselves and their future. In most cases, conversions are due simply and solely to worldly motives. . . . We have not asserted—and it is not necessary for our purposes to assert—that Pariahs become Christians only when receiving land. It is doubtless quite true [as Goudie had contended] that, “in the vast majority of cases,” land is given to Pariahs who are or who become Christians. But anyone who knows human nature must know that this will act as a direct temptation and bait for the acceptance of Christianity.66

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The Hindu’s professed objection was not to conversion per se, but to inauthentic conversion. The Pariahs’ alliance with the missionaries did not result from their intellectual conviction; their conversion was “simply” a matter of this world. Authentic conversion thus assumed public importance at precisely the moment that Pariah–missionary alliances threatened landowners in the countryside. Not only did the original editorial specifically say as much, but in his rejoinder to Andrew and Goudie, The Hindu’s editor explicitly harnessed elites’ demands for neutrality to those of the state for revenue by positing an intimate link between the uplift of Panchamas through mission agency and a diminution in labor control—and thus, a consequent threat to stable agricultural production. Elites in Madras city, many of whom were absentee landlords, protested the missionary evangelism of the Panchamas on the basis of a conception of true religious belief as one characterized by the inner conviction of an individual soul. This conception was itself a staple of nineteenth-century Protestant missiology, although perspicuous missionaries in India had begun to question this paradigm of conversion on the basis of their Indian experiences, preferring to hope that Panchamas, eminently docile, could be taught the right motives subsequent to baptism.67 Caste Indians had not hitherto concerned themselves with Panchamas’ motives, let alone with assessing whether Panchamas were sufficiently “spiritual.” Yet in 1903, Madras’s elite became scrupulous inspectors of the inner world of Panchama converts and their apparent lack of spiritual conviction and subsequent vulnerability to worldly temptation. This new expression of concern for motive was not confined to the English-language Hindu. The Telugu Sasilekha (published in Madras city) wrote that “missionaries obtain large tracts of land on darkhasts and distribute them for cultivation only among those who, imbibing their teaching, become converts. . . . [This] will induce Panchamas and others to become converts.”68 And, like The Hindu, it also linked this inducement to a consequent agrarian crisis: “[It] will be difficult to get coolies if all the Panchamas are influenced by missionaries”—thus quite explicitly disclosing their own very worldly motivations for raising the matter. The largest circulating Tamil daily in Madras, Swadesamitran, questioned “the propriety of Government assigning lands on darkhast to European missionaries. . . . [Missionaries] only let them to such of the poor natives as are willing to embrace Christianity, and thus seek to propagate their 166  T H E M A R R I A G E O F S A C R E D A N D S E C U L A R A U T H O R I T Y

own religion in this country.”69 Finally, as had the raiyats in Kodambakkam, the Andhraprakasika warned of a disturbance of the peace: “It is not proper for the government to put missionaries in possession of this power to influence Pariah coolies [by granting them lands]. If Pariahs act under such influence, others will not be able to bear it.”70 While these vernacular accounts did not perhaps have the same urbane fluency as The Hindu in speaking of authentic conversion, the high-minded charge of buying converts had abruptly become a cause célèbre throughout the native press. Missionaries, landed employers of Panchama labor, and elite caste Hindus in Madras had all, after Panchamas themselves, the greatest stakes in the Panchama’s transformation. And they came to share the conviction, despite their differences—and indeed, mutual animosity—that Panchama conversion was rarely “authentic,” and that Panchamas were inordinately vulnerable to worldly temptations. It was but a small step for caste elites to add that tempting Panchamas thus was not only duplicitous but morally reprehensible, for when Christian missionaries beguiled Panchamas they were at once intervening in the ancient religion of the land, and injudiciously imperiling all of Hindu society. While the project for Panchama welfare shared by missions and the colonial regime perhaps alleviated, for some Panchamas, the strictures of particular masters, their newly “irenic” environs, which comprised supervision and training that encompassed the moral, spiritual, and economic registers to an unprecedented degree, foreclosed decisively the possibility of independent proprietorship. At the same time, the very institution of these environs, which of course affected only the smallest minority of Panchamas overall, produced a powerful language of religious authenticity in response, which has been deployed to formulate law and social policy to which all Dalits are subject (as I discuss in the book’s conclusion). As the interventions of new liberalism penetrated deeper, opposition from controllers of Dalit labor grew in scale. In these contests, determining the nature of the “authentic” Dalit and the “traditional” labor regime would become all the more crucial in foreclosing solutions to the Pariah Problem.

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Chapter 7 G I V I N G T H E PA N C H A M A A H O M E Creating “a Friction Where None Exists”

By the 1910s, the colonial regime in Madras would come to perceive that its duties included allowing Panchamas to experience at first hand the “magic of property” by granting them ownership of their house sites and thereby inculcating in them an investment—both affective and economic—in their home. Of singular importance to this book is the range of reactions provoked by the founding of this small scheme (“small,” because like most programs for Panchama welfare, its effects cannot have been felt by any but a tiny minority of that population). Yet the furor occasioned at all levels of society by the institution of the new policy, which we will track in this and in the following chapter, places in bold relief the cleavages that continue to rend Tamil politics and society. Why target the Panchama’s home? As early as 1888, C. M. Mullaly had observed that Panchamas’ house sites were liable to be used as weapons against them; the threat of eviction was a potent means to secure the Panchama’s obedience. J. H. A. Tremenheere had elaborated upon this and had drawn a sordid picture of the filth and congestion of the cēri as well. The government conceded by allowing some cēri sites to be extended. This was carried out piecemeal, although not without occasional bursts of conflict, as we saw in Sothuperumbadu. But the policy to provide house sites that was born in 1917 was novel in its focus and

in its rationale, undeniably heralding the full-fledged emergence of the “philanthropic design,” the commitment to Panchama welfare, that Rev. Frank Penny had imagined. The political context in which this newly interventionist approach to welfare appeared was significantly different from what had preceded it. By the late 1910s, reforms in colonial governance had given Indians a far more prominent place in the corridors of power, however much the strings continued to be held by British superiors; public opinion, represented by these Indian men, had assumed a new, critical importance.1 Thus, whereas conflict over the Pariah had previously remained confined to villages across the presidency, although its effects ramified in the making of precedents, as we observed, now dissension occurred in a range of venues: among high officials, in suits in courts, and in debates in the august chambers of the Legislative Council. Determining the essence of Pariah servitude was once again at the nub of these conflicts. We have witnessed the practices and forms of thought according to which missionaries attempted to disaggregate caste and class, seeking to distill a class order from caste society; with respect to the Pariah’s servitude, caste was divided into an essential spiritual component and an accidental material one. The language of religion would be relatively more muted in disagreements over how to house the Panchama. The problem of identifying the essence of Panchamas’ servile state, however, remained central and hinged upon what would be made of the relation between their caste and their position as laborer. This was only a problem, however, because Pariahness had come to be understood, first by missionaries and then by the state, as a religious status separable from labor. Hence the problem of defining religion was muted, but not absent. In the process of these conceptual determinations, a new definition of “the public” would become regnant. This public was not only an entity to which the state owed succor, the sine qua non of social governance. The conception of the public came to include a special place for the hitherto-excluded Panchama, with particular and far-reaching effects on that subpopulation. In popular discourse and governmental idiom alike, it had always been difficult to disambiguate the “Panchama” from the “member of the laboring classes.” As The Hindu had described matters in 1903, the outcastes were a “dependency” upon caste Hindu society, and their role was to ensure agrarian production; Pariahness and labor were therefore widely G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   169

recognized as being indistinguishable.2 Earlier still, Pariahs were sold with mirasi shares as the labor force essential to working the land. But from this point in the early 1910s onward, Indian elites would increasingly seek to redefine the population newly dubbed Panchamas, abstracting their labor from their existence qua Panchama, and thereby adopting as their own a logic very similar to that of the missionary, insofar as caste and material production would be rendered distinct. Official programs, meanwhile, would be designed to make Panchamas more like paradigmatic laborers. This chapter begins by tracing the outcome of three administrative imperatives concerning the welfare of the population, which culminated in a decision to intervene in Panchamas’ life and labor. Just as missionaries had attempted to render Pariah servitude less Oriental, these new welfarist measures were to extract them from those aspects of their circumstances that appeared most redolent of feudalism. Of these, the manner in which Panchamas were tied by the landlord’s ownership of their house sites was considered most egregious and in need of reform. To make Panchamas better laborers, therefore, it was essential to make them owners of property, albeit in a small way; in this case, the owners of their homesteads. After a brief discussion of the distinct imperatives that gave rise to this policy, I turn to the outcry this policy provoked from mirasidars in Tanjore, the district where the new scheme was first tried. Protests were voiced in petitions, in courts, and in the Legislative Council; these, as well as rebuttals of them by state agents, nicely illustrate the new stakes of defining the Pariah responses.

The Overcrowded “Poor” The suggestion that the government provide a special officer for the extension of house sites was first made in 1915 by an Indian member of the Legislative Council, M. Ramachandra Rao.3 Rao’s appeal to the council focused primarily on problems of sanitation and congestion in the slums of towns and cities, and, insofar as it did refer to rural areas, it did not single out the dwelling sites of Panchamas in particular, apart from noting that these would require free extension, because the inhabitants would most likely be unable to pay. Rao’s proposal was therefore typical of reform-minded gentlemen of the time in its content and nationalist rhetoric: he unfavorably contrasted the new importance given to the 170  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

amelioration of poor housing conditions in England with the lack of such legislation in India and argued that it was the government of India’s duty to diminish this disparity. The intent, that is, was to insist that India be brought up to the standards set by England. Notable for its absence was any discussion, despite the mention of Panchamas, that the site on which Panchamas dwelt was a critical point of conflict—a fact that had been mentioned in other branches of government in the past, by missionaries in reports to the state, and by an emerging crop of “Depressed Classes” activists, particularly the Depressed Classes Elevation Society headed by the Christian Paraiyar Israel Nalappah in Madras city and the Depressed Classes Conference, which appears to have been based in Tanjore District.4 First on these organizations’ lists of demands, which had been issued annually from 1911 onward, was that the state intervene to limit the coercive power of the landowners’ claims to Panchama house sites: As the Depressed Classes Conference’s Resolutions of 1912 put it, “mirasidars’ claims of ownership over house sites [kuṭiyiruppu] was unjust [niyāyamalla], and if the government did not remove this source of great hardship, not only would they [members of the Depressed Classes] lack secure house sites, but would also be subjected to frequent and varied forms of harassment.”5 Yet none of this finds its way into Rao’s rather bland appeal for better sanitation, and we may therefore infer that Rao had not envisioned his suggestion as advancing the activists’ agenda. It is perhaps because Rao’s request did not appear to be in any way linked to controversial matters that the council approved it, appointing Deputy Collector K. S. Srinivasa Achary to begin work in the Kistna District. Kistna, along with South Arcot and Tinnevelly, had been identified, using census data, as being particularly in need of congestion relief. The state began assigning sites strictly on demand. In Kistna, the demand turns out to have come mostly from “low-caste laborers,” whom Achary found were faced with threats of eviction from the raiyats whose lands they worked as coolies or tied farm servants: “They are bound to work for the ryot . . . in all seasons and to obey him implicitly, the penalty for disobedience being eviction.”6 Similarly, when Achary moved on to South Arcot, he found that in the village of Vakkaramarri the Pariahs wished to abandon their site and move to another, a desire that, Achary noted, “The ryots . . . strenuously oppose . . . on the ground probably that the Pariahs will not be as subservient to them as they are now.”7 There are scattered G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   171

hints, then, in Achary’s report, that the extension scheme, whose object had been the relief of congestion, had potentially serious implications for labor relations. Yet records of discussions of his report in the Revenue Department reveal no recognition of this problem. High-placed officials, who would normally have been concerned by such developments, perhaps failed to comment as a result of the reassuring fact that the program had been initiated by M. Ramachandra Rao. For Rao, after all, was a leading member of the political classes that the colonial state sought to nurture in Madras, a fact of which the very composition of the Legislative Council at the time was indicative. In striking contrast to the swiftness of response to Rao’s proposal and the apparent willingness to overlook any difficulties it brought in its wake, repeated pleas in the previous four years by the Depressed Classes Elevation Society and the Depressed Classes Conference for the very same thing, housesite extension, presented in the language of social justice, had been entirely ignored when not privately mocked: in the words of one official, “It is difficult to avoid smiling at the name and at the action of the society which appears to be . . . to bombard the government every year with similar resolutions.”8 The closest anyone came to suggesting that the scheme might step on toes was when one member of the board, the Brahmin C. S. Anantarama Ayyar, made the delicate observation that “great care is necessary .  .  . in the matter of choosing the sites for the extensions. The prejudices of the people have to be understood and allowed for. . . . This is a matter of extreme difficulty. . . . As observed by the deputy collector [Achary], each community will naturally like to have a compact block for itself. It wouldn’t do to put the wealthy Kamma in the same street as . . . the miserable Mala.”9 The prejudices by which “the people” demanded distance were, of course, the same as those of “the general public” for whom mirasidars such as T. Ranganatha Tawker in Sothuperumbadu had expressed such concern.10 Ayyar’s caution proved prescient. For a conflagration would erupt—although not for the reason he feared (that the scheme would place Panchamas and caste people too close to one another). On the contrary, the grounds on which some Tanjore landlords would object, as we will see, had nothing to do with ritual untouchability. Quite simply, they saw the settlement of Panchama laborers by the government as a despotic revocation of their right to maintain their labor force as well as a violation of the protection of private property. 172  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

The Drinking Classes and Productive Investment At the same moment that officials such as Achary were recording the potential for conflict between laborers and masters regarding the housesite scheme, another government official would be led to the Panchama’s house site issue by an altogether different route. In 1916, the collector of Tanjore, R. B. Wood, inspired by calls for temperance recently made at the national level to the Secretary of State to India, began to seek ways of discouraging drinking among the lower classes—the “drinking classes.”11 Identifying Panchamas as the principal drinking class, Collector Wood’s novel proposal was that Panchamas should be encouraged to invest their disposable income, which he believed had increased in recent years, in land, rather than dissipating it on drink. Cooperative societies could be introduced, along the lines of the British Small Holdings Act of 1908 (one of a series of welfare reforms introduced by new liberals in Britain between 1906–1914) in order to inculcate thrift, and monies from such societies could go toward the purchase of housing plots.12 Wood admitted to having never read the Small Holdings Act and was sure it would not be exactly applicable in Tanjore, because that act was “designed to help a very different sort of people.”13 Yet he stated that he had seen the results of the act and that its object was the same as what he intended for Tanjore, namely “raising the status and material welfare of the lowest classes, by giving them something to live for beyond drink.”14 The board admired Wood’s “radical remedy,” which it felt sure would “eventually effect a reduction in the drinking bill of the cooly classes.”15 Wood further suggested that the lands be made inalienable, like those of the mission-managed settlements, a stipulation he based on common assumptions about Panchamas’ irresponsible, thriftless nature. “Panchamas,” Wood opined, “are little more than children; they never think of the future, and whenever they get money they spend it.”16 Wood’s proposal, which he submitted to the Board of Revenue, drew explicitly on examples from missionary practice and mentioned as precedent grants made to missionary societies in past decades. Following Wood’s lead, revenue officials cited the assignment to Sharrock in Jeyamkondacholapuram as the model to be followed, with cooperative building societies run by local boards playing the role that the missions had in the past. One revenue official, F. J. Richards, even suggested that G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   173

missionaries ought to be urged to test cooperative arrangements among Panchamas on missionary-managed settlements in order to see whether such a scheme could be successfully carried out. Thus, even as the state’s own role in Panchama welfare expanded, it continued to depend on the missionary to develop and test welfare methods. Officials also discussed whether new legislation would be required to authorize the assignment of house sites under such a scheme, and it was decided that it would not. Under the Land Acquisition Act, the government could assume control of lands for public purposes. A member of the Executive Council of the Governor of Madras, A. G. Cardew, reasoned that the government’s history of construing what should be meant by a public purpose had been wide. “Government apply the Act if necessary for the purpose of providing for the educational needs of Panchama children . . . [and] I doubt whether they need hesitate to apply it to the purchase of land for the domestic needs of Panchama families.”17 Cardew’s statement was made in disregard, or more likely in ignorance, of the extent to which history belied his confident assumption. Thus, state officials would soon find, just as they had two decades earlier, that native elites would consider the idea that public purposes were served by providing for Panchamas a virtual contradiction in terms. The imminent result of this discussion was a government order that assigned Achary to investigate whether the house-site scheme he had been carrying out in Kistna could work under the specific conditions prevalent in Tanjore. More significantly, however, the government’s willingness to view Pariah uplift as a public purpose, a view that had emerged with the grant to Rev. Sharrock in Jeyamkondacholapuram, was now entering a new phase. Since the time of its grant to Sharrock, the government had been sporadically willing to treat Pariah uplift as a public purpose whenever it made an “exception” to the darkhast rules by granting lands for Pariah settlements, but it had been unwilling to frame rules that positively declared the Pariah’s well-being a matter of public responsibility. Now, however, senior officials were openly avowing the state’s support for the Pariah and even using missionary practice as examples; a new generation of officials, thoroughly schooled in the language of new liberalism, as well as in the historical experience of a decade of welfare reforms in Britain and the rise of the Labour Party, had arrived.18 What remained to be seen was how this language and experience would take shape in Madras and with what particular consequences for the Pariah Problem. 174  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

The Ills of the Panchama: The State and Missionary Expertise In addition to concerns over rural overcrowding and unproductive drinking, the objectification of the Panchama himself prompted the state to examine Panchama house sites. A detailed confidential document on Panchamas appeared in 1916 and was the first of its kind in several respects.19 While J. H. A. Tremenheere’s report of 1892 had concentrated on criticizing mirasi rights and making policy suggestions, this report was a compendium of ethnographic observations on Panchamas and on the conditions of their lives and labor, with specific studies conducted in sixteen villages. The results of this 1916 report catalyzed the government’s commitment to provide house sites, despite the fact that this was an expensive measure, both in terms of the expenditure of state resources and manpower and in the possible political consequences of greatly displeasing different groups of landholders. We have already seen the government’s reliance on the missionary in its discussion of Collector Wood’s proposal, but the missionary had played an even greater role in the 1916 report on Panchamas, for the report’s author was none other than Rev. Adam Andrew. Andrew, whose ameliorative work on behalf of Panchamas was by this time well known, had served on taluk boards and had conducted irrigation experiments on behalf of the government; he was therefore already an important supporter of a number of government schemes.20 The 1916 report signals the new, more specific and explicit acknowledgment of missionaries as valuable sources of information on groups comprising the lower strata of society. As Sir John Nathaniel Atkinson put it, he happened to run into Andrew in person shortly after the issue of a minimum wage was raised in the Legislative Council, and “knowing that he had very considerable knowledge of rural conditions, I asked him if he could give me any definite information on the subject of agricultural wages.”21 We cannot know the exact words that passed between Andrew and Atkinson, but the report that resulted was not a report on agricultural wages in general. It was a report on Panchamas, and we must assume that this terminological shift was in large measure Andrew’s doing. Andrew, with his far more intimate knowledge of agrarian labor relations than any official, did not distinguish between the categories of agricultural laborer and Panchama.22 Twenty-six years earlier, when Andrew had introduced the Pariah into the language of administration in 1890, via the mediation of G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   175

Collector Lee-Warner, his claims were flatly dismissed.23 Now Andrew was a respected figure, and his point that the Panchama and the laborer were essentially one and the same had gained some acceptance, and officials increasingly assumed it in arguments for intervention. Andrew’s report described Panchamas in sixteen villages in the Chingleput District and included a descriptive overview, detailed statistical appendices based on his own empirical investigations, data collected by a team of “educated” natives he had assembled for this purpose, and summations of lengthy interviews with Panchamas of all sixteen villages. Andrew began by noting that the condition of Panchamas had hardly progressed in the preceding quarter of a century and that on the basis of his personal experience, he could think of no reason to suppose the villages in the survey were at all atypical of the district or of much of the presidency.24 He was politic enough to describe the government as sympathetic to the issue, citing the concessions they had made in response to Tremenheere’s report regarding education and the provision of bought-in lands.25 But he declared these measures to have had virtually no effect. Caste Hindus continued to despise Panchamas as Pariahs (i.e., as despised inferiors), the report explained, adding that the wages paid to Panchamas were “in harmony with the spirit that relegates them to that position.”26 Indeed, however bleak their condition in the 1880s and 1890s, the plight of the Panchamas was in some respects “even worse at the present time through the rise in prices.”27 By comparing the prices of food grains in each village to the wages earned by laborers, Andrew revealed that the majority of Panchamas would not have been able to eat more than one meal per day. Anticipating the likely response of the government that slavery was illegal, and that therefore the Panchama had only to assert his freedom through, for example, emigration, Andrew pointed to the extreme difficulty of such a step into the unknown, which would require a destitute man to abandon all that he had known, and wife and children as well.28 Most germane for our purposes is that Andrew’s report corroborates previous observations on the importance of eviction in the repertoire of tactics landowners employed against Panchama laborers. Such threats had been a feature of the Panchama’s subordination throughout the period of this study and also served as stark evidence of the nature of the state’s operation, inasmuch as laws claiming government ownership

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over house sites were most often and quite purposefully not followed, allowing landlords to assume ownership in practice. Andrew pointed out that the Land Act of 1908 had explicitly restated that ownership of village communal land, puramboke, by mirasidars and other categories of landlord was illegal. Yet despite this restatement, in a recent case with which Andrew was familiar, Panchamas who refused to work for a particular landlord were taken to court in order to effect an eviction. Although in this particular instance the case was thrown out, Andrew’s point was that the act was hardly known in rural Madras, least of all by Panchamas, and the mere threat of eviction could be used to ensure the Panchama’s subjection. Andrew also reported that Panchama house sites were often sold, as they had been in this case, along with plots of agricultural land, a practice that was understood to mean the transfer of those Panchamas to the new landowner as well. This practice had been described by C. M. Mullaly some forty years earlier as a vestige of “slavery” and “a disgrace on the administration.”29 Andrew, however, was more tactful, terming the arrangement “practical serfdom.”30 Andrew concluded by asking whether it would not be possible for the state to conduct an “experiment” whereby Panchamas could be settled on good land, provided with a cooperative society that would ensure the required start-up capital, and thereby be taught to take their own initiative. This may have a familiar ring, and indeed, what Andrew is describing is precisely the experiment he had already carried out with considerable success in Melrosapuram since 1894, although here he does not suggest missionary management and capital but cooperative credit societies instead. In keeping with what was identified in chapter 2 as Protestant missionaries’ hope of purifying caste of its “superstitious” and cruel elements to reveal its class essence, Andrew proposed that such experiments would induce landlords to raise wages. This would thereby ensure not only their laborers’ greater happiness but also their efficiency: Harmonious and productive class relations could thus be smelted of impurities. The official notes on Andrew’s report, drawn up by a relatively lowranking officer of the Revenue Department, the deputy registrar, can be said to represent the old guard, displaying a conservative concern with questions of precedent. The notes began with a historical overview of government responses to the conditions of Panchamas, itself heavily

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slanted to reports that provide a rosy picture of Panchama servitude. The deputy registrar quoted at length, for example, from a deputy collector of Tanjore, a Brahmin by the name of Krishnaswami Ayyar, whose opinion in 1885 was that: in the good old times the panniyals (hired labourers) were actual slaves and the porakudies (tenants) more obedient to the mirasidars. But owing to advancement of civilization and litigation, the mirasidars are now-a-days more annoyed by porakudies and panniyals than the latter by the former. The mirasidars are, therefore, now in the habit of taking . . . deeds of rent from [paṇṇaiyāḷs] and . . . porakudies for house sites, as the latter claim ownership thereto by reason of long enjoyment.31

Krishnaswami Ayyar suggests that the claims of mirasidars to Panchamas’ house sites were not anachronistic remnants of the time when they were slaves but were instead the result of what was in fact increasing conflict between themselves and their servants; in the deputy registrar’s analysis, this meant that mirasidars had no choice but to make these claims, in order to ensure the obedience of former halcyon days. The deputy registrar’s note ended by dismissing Andrew’s allegations of landlord oppression out of hand, citing the Board of Revenue’s similar dismissal of Tremenheere’s report, made twenty year earlier, as support. A. G. Cardew, however, reviewing these remarks in his capacity as a senior official, disagreed with the deputy registrar, pointing to Andrew’s long experience, as well as to his own firsthand observations of caste employers’ treatment of Panchamas. And yet official resistance to such messages remained strong. As H. A. Stuart, another board member, put it, “I am not much impressed by the individual cases of hardship which Mr. Andrew has brought to light. . . . Evidence of this kind really proves too much, for if it were true, the labourer could not live.”32 Stuart suggested therefore that an enquiry be made regarding the conditions of Panchama laborers, at which time the officer conducting the enquiry would also verify the wage statistics, which Stuart confidently predicted would soon be revealed to have been grossly underestimated in Andrew’s report. Equally distrustful of Andrew’s conclusions, but not willing even

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to allow a follow-up inquiry, a member of the governor’s executive council, P. S. Sivaswami Ayyar expressed concern thus: The relations between Pariah labourers and their employers are generally smooth and harmonious, and the appointment of a commission [of inquiry] is, I am afraid, only too likely to cause great friction between the classes by creating undue expectations in the minds of one class and undue apprehension in the minds of the other. . . . A low standard of living and . . . insanitary conditions of life are not confined to the Pariah labourer. . . . It would be a great mistake to treat the problem . . . as confined to the Pariah community alone.33

It was Sivaswami Ayyar’s contention that the Pariah’s impoverishment was not connected to his status as Pariah; poverty, rather, was the lot of all the “laboring classes” of India. He was invoking, that is to say, a well-worn official line: the “Pariah qua Pariah,” as the government had phrased it in 1892, did not qualify for special consideration. And this was in part, he averred, invoking the now well-tried trope of gentle slavery, because “relations between Pariah labourers and their employers are generally smooth and harmonious.” Where Andrew’s report stressed that “Pariahs” and “laboring classes” were coextensional terms (i.e., terms that referred to the same empirical entities), Sivaswami Ayyar insisted the former was but a subspecies of the latter and there was nothing in Panchamas’ living conditions that required special government attention.34 In this vein, Sivaswami Ayyar declared that he would support an enquiry into the condition of laboring classes but not into the Pariah’s condition alone. Like Ramachandra Rao, therefore, who had proposed congestion-relieving measures framed in the language of “the poor,” Sivaswami Ayyar voiced his own commitment to improving the poor, but with a special proviso that Panchamas were not specifically targeted for improvement. And it was Sivaswami Ayyar who, in this instance, would carry the day, for an officer was assigned to collect information not only on Panchamas but on other Depressed Classes as well. (The term was often used to refer only to Panchamas but was here used to refer more generally to the poor.35) The officer appointed to conduct the new inquiry, J. Gray, had been presented to the public only as an officer evaluating the method of collecting

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statistics of agricultural wages. Yet as revenue officials anxiously noted in their discussion, the idea that Gray was assigned to enquire into the economic conditions of Panchamas had already been leaked to the native press and was the cause of some uproar. The friction of which Sivaswami Ayyar had warned was now at hand. Indeed, Gray’s inquiry, completed in 1918, became a crucial tool for officials who would argue that Panchamas’ lack of ownership of their house sites was key to their degradation and was a condition specifically requiring state intervention. The Panchama house-site scheme that resulted would, once and for all, not only entrench the Panchama in a governmental regime but would, equally, render his relationship to the category “laborer” a matter of bitter contest. Let us consider then, what Gray found, for the report vividly reflects that contest.36 Gray was required to report on laborers’ wages, but he was also asked to make enquiries regarding three issues that Andrew’s report had identified as critical in the assessment of Panchamas’ welfare: (1) the extent to which laborers’ freedom was curtailed by the system of debt bondage or “manmortgages”; (2) whether landlords routinely used the threat of eviction from house sites to exact labor at low wages; and (3) the frequency with which laborers sought alternative employment in India or abroad. In addition, wage data on the Depressed Classes as a whole was to be collected, no doubt to assuage the members of government who had resisted the utility and informative potential of a study based solely on Panchamas. In assessing the process by which the state had collected the wage data he was expected to analyze, Gray identified major flaws in standard methodology—and all of these flaws happened to skew the data in the same direction. Gray’s corrections pointed to a regime of labor far more exacting than what had widely been officially supposed. “Inexperienced Revenue Inspectors,” Gray explained, were ignorant “of the village customs which govern the relationship of landholders and their labourers and farm servants” and as a consequence, treated the laborer as an individual.37 In fact, wages and payments were often shared by families. This meant, for example, that as many as eight persons might have to survive on one male laborer’s wages.38 Gray therefore wondered whether “the method or scheme of the census [of agricultural wages] is not so inadequate that the final statistics are of very little real value as an index of the economic condition of the labouring classes.”39 More damning still was the fact that in some villages the measure used to pay laborers’ grain 180  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

wages was “slightly less than the measure used for all other purposes.”40 Although “every ryot and labourer in those villages was well aware of this long-standing custom,” many “Revenue Inspectors .  .  . were quite ignorant of [it.]”41 Finally, Gray pointed out that even the tied farm servant was not, pace long-standing assumptions, necessarily provided with employment throughout the year but could be left instead to “shift for himself ” in slack seasons; calculations of economic security that ignored this fact, therefore, would be inaccurate.42 Gray then moved from agricultural wages to the specific consideration of the condition of Panchama agricultural laborers in four districts known for poor labor conditions, namely Chingleput, Tanjore, South Arcot, and Malabar. He first observed that “the majority of field labourers whether daily coolies or farm servants, are Panchamas,” straightaway casting doubt on elite Indian and British official opinion that Panchamas represented only one group of laborers among others.43 (In fact, as we have seen, the difference between Panchamas and others was not limited to the fact that the former represented the majority of laborers: Non-Panchamas were treated differently by landlords, were not subject to the same forms of discipline, and so on.) In Chingleput District, Gray found the overall condition of daily-wage-earning coolies not unacceptable but deemed the condition of paṭiyāḷs (tied servants) particularly unfavorable—this despite the employment they were theoretically entitled to during slack seasons but which was in fact far from regular. This finding thus confutes the hegemonic colonial truism that tied laborers were better off than daily-wage earners, an assumption that appears to have been based on hearsay and which had, until this point, remained entirely untested. In Gray’s estimation, it was “debt” that spelled the ruin of the paṭiyāḷ, for, although most employers stated their paṭiyāḷs could leave them at the end of a year of service if they chose to, simply by repaying the “advance” in full, it was clear to Gray that paṭiyāḷs could rarely hope to amass the necessary amount. Furthermore, it is quite possible that those mirasidars interviewed by Gray only stated the possibility of termination of service because they were well aware of the nature of Gray’s inquiries and of the precarious legal position of the labor relations they imposed. At any rate, in a small but significant number of villages in which Gray conducted interviews (ten out of eighty-eight), the body of mirasidars stated quite plainly that “the padiyals are bound for life and can never leave their [i.e., the mirasidars’] service without permission even if they repay all G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   181

advances.”44 Native landholders’ contextually specific use of terms such as debt or contract were hardly, therefore, a transparent description of labor relations. “In many villages the patiyal is still referred to as an ‘Adimaial’ [‘slave’], while the cloth given to him at Pongal [a harvest festival] is generally known as ‘Sirai Panam’ [‘slave money’].”45 At the time of Gray’s writing, slavery had been abolished in British India for close to three-quarters of a century. On the other hand, Gray added, there were certain villages where the conditions of Panchama bondage did indeed seem to have undergone a transformation, although for reasons unrelated to abolition. Thus, he observed, “It is remarkable how the worst features of the padiyal [paṭiyāḷ] system disappear in villages where the various Mission agencies have been for some time at work in educating the Panchama population.”46 What came as a surprise to Gray, and which he attributed to the effects of education, appears less remarkable in the light of what we have learned from missionary archives; and we have shown that these transformations resulted not so much from education itself as from significant alterations in, inter alia, the pragmatics of local governance. As for the aspect of labor control that most concerns us here, the mirasidar’s illegal claims over cēri sites, Gray recorded that in many places in Chingleput mirasidars openly maintained such claims. And in other villages, where mirasidars denied making such claims (particularly when called to a public interview before an entire assemblage of villagers and several government officials), Gray himself noted that threats of eviction might still have been employed in practice. Gray’s analysis of the conditions of Panchamas in South Arcot, Malabar, and Tanjore was much briefer than his analysis of Chingleput. In regard to Tanjore, Gray described how mirasidars often took a kur chit, what he called a “rental deed,” from their paṭiyāḷs for their house sites and even for their huts, or alternatively, mirasidars included such information in the service agreement. Furthermore, although the government did not legally recognize mirasi rights in Tanjore in the same way it did in Chingleput, there was nevertheless a pervasive “mirasi feeling,” according to which “mirasidars in most villages generally act together in all matters affecting their common interests, more especially in their relationship with their patiyals.”47 Thus, Gray concluded, “The question of free house sites for the depressed classes in Tanjore is an extremely difficult and pressing one.”48 182  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

Creating a “Friction Where None Exists”: Initiating the Scheme for Tanjore While Gray was preparing his report, Collector Wood’s proposal, in which allegedly drink-prone Panchamas would be given land and encouraged to invest, was accepted as sound, and the two would soon be understood as addressing different aspects of the same problem. The Revenue Department, in response to Wood, assigned Deputy Collector K.  S. Srinivasa Achary to assess whether house-site extension was needed in Tanjore and how such a scheme might be received by its residents, both landholders and laborers. Achary, as we saw, was already quite familiar with conflicts over house sites from his work on congestion in Kistna. Describing the situation there, he had written, Often times [the landowner] displays a marked disinclination to part with his land, not because it is directly valuable to him, but on account of the indirect hold that he obtains over the Mala [a Telugu Dalit caste] labourers by reason of possessing a piece of vacant land in close proximity to the Malapalli [cēri]. [It is] an instrument [for] impounding their cattle or killing their fowls on the slightest pretext, whenever they assume an attitude of independence. He thus becomes privileged to command their manual labour at less than the market rates.49

Recall that when Pariahs in a village in South Arcot sought house sites, Achary reported that “The ryots . . . [are] strenuously oppose[d] . . . on the ground probably that the Pariahs will not be as subservient to them as they are now.”50 In other words, the caste Hindu officer Achary’s findings were entirely consistent with Gray’s on the importance of house sites in an ongoing struggle between landed castes and Pariah labor. Yet Achary made those observations while conducting a scheme designed to relieve overcrowding and its attendant unhygienic conditions. In Tanjore, when asked to compile a report specifically in the name of Panchamas, Achary would, in a striking volte-face, go out of his way to deny that the relationship between Panchama and master was in any way antagonistic—save perhaps when Panchamas’ “sentiments had been roused by contact with Christian Missionary influence.”51 Otherwise, Achary explained, the Panchama was “usually content with his lot . . . which is not unhappy G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   183

after all.”52 In Achary’s estimation, it was not necessary to grant house sites in Tanjore, and indeed, it would be “mischievous to interfere and create a friction where none exists.”53 Achary did, however, allow that house sites could be given on a voluntary basis—only, that is, when the desire for them originated from Panchamas themselves. Achary’s opposition to any sort of intervention, as well as his voluntaristic rhetoric, were by no means accidental. In this he echoes what had become the standard line among the Madras elite, which we first encountered in The Hindu’s 1903 editorial, indicting the government for allowing missionaries to run Panchama settlements on the grounds that this induced revolution from without.54 Pariahs ought to improve themselves of their own accord, the paper had insisted, an irony given the fact that this is indeed how Pariah–missionary alliances were initiated and maintained. In addition to arguing that any interference in Tanjore was entirely unnecessary, Achary attempted to dissuade the government from its growing concern with specifically Panchama welfare by harking back to the issues of hygiene and congestion that had first turned official attention to house sites. Pointedly inserted into Achary’s report was the claim that Tanjore’s cēris were not at all overcrowded—as they manifestly were in Kistna and elsewhere, districts thus appropriate for the housesite scheme as originally conceived. Finally, Achary appealed to the government’s concerns for cost-efficiency, wondering why the government ought to take upon itself a responsibility—namely the provision of house sites for laborers—that a class of its subjects, the mirasidars, were at present already fulfilling. Yet Achary’s denials of any tension between Panchamas and their masters in Tanjore are belied by the contents of his own report, which provide considerable evidence of a state of relations far from free of friction—evidence thoroughly consistent with his data on Kistna and South Arcot.55 Moreover, with respect to the specific threat of eviction in Tanjore, Achary’s report admits that “there can be no doubt that it is a real grievance” and that this threat “is enough to keep the Panchamas in subjection and obedience.”56 For Achary then, we may assume that these were simply the ordinary measures of labor control, not extraordinary instances of “friction” that required state intervention. Although labor relations required a great many safeguards to maintain Panchamas’ “subjection and obedience,” to Achary this was not incompatible with 184  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

his estimation that the Panchama was “usually content with his lot . . . which is not unhappy after all.”57 Achary’s insistence on a relative absence of conflict is belied as well by another detail of his report: the landowner’s practice of giving what was known in Tanjore as cuvantai. Cuvantai was a small amount of money, styled as a loan and recorded in official service agreements as such, but whose repayment was never expected. Thus far, this depiction is not unfamiliar; similar practices had been described by Tremenheere in the 1890s and, following him, by others as well. As Achary recorded it, the exchange of money between master and laborer, at the start of service, appeared to be understood by both parties as a kind of retaining fee. Yet Achary’s depiction greatly enriches our understanding of this fee, the effect of which showed itself to be far from simple. Achary reveals that on the exceptional occasion when a laborer was known to have made additional money from labor elsewhere in the low season, or when it was heard he had accumulated savings (conditions, that is to say, that might make it easier for him to “assert his freedom” and either emigrate or simply move elsewhere), the cuvantai’s presence, so unobtrusive and silent in normal times, loudly announced itself. Although “the land-holders rarely expect repayment .  .  . [and] ordinarily the debt remains permanent . . . [at] the moment [the Panchama] earns anything more than a living wage the landholder is down upon him demanding that some portion of the Suwanthai [cuvantai] be paid up.”58 Recent studies of bonded labor contrast a situation of “traditional” fealty to the impersonal, contractual debt bond.59 But the empirical complexity of labor relations in colonial south India calls for more exacting tools of analysis than those provided by this simple bipartite model. In the cuvantai we observe a debt whose status qua debt remained unimportant—up until the moment it could actually be repaid. In speaking of debt as a contractual relationship, the debt normally becomes a focus of contention only when it cannot be repaid, for then the contract for regular repayment is broken. Here, however, it was precisely nonpayment—and therefore perpetual servitude—that was expected. Achary’s discovery of the potential for a shift in the practical effect of the cuvantai—from retaining fee to immediately repayable debt—further completes our picture of a precarious and latently agonistic relation, rather than, as Achary so disarmingly describes it, an absence of friction. G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   185

The incongruity of Achary’s claims was noticed even by contemporaries. J. R. Huggins, the acting collector of Tanjore, for instance, opened his comments on Achary’s report by stating, “I think there is considerably more discontent among the Panchamas regarding the question of house sites than the Deputy Collector thinks. During the jamabandi [annual review of land revenue assessments] of the Shiyali Taluk I had a large number of complaints from Panchamas.”60 Yet officials who acknowledged Panchamas’ discontent with respect to house sites were nevertheless fearful of the “sudden dislocation of the whole economic position of the agricultural classes that this [i.e., the grant of house sites] might effect” and of the conflagration that might follow.61 Thus, the Commissioner of Land Revenue, M. Aziz-ud-Din Khan Bahadur, submitted a formal minute in opposition to the proposed house-site scheme for Tanjore’s Panchamas. He agreed at the outset that the “pannai-al [paṇṇaiyāḷ; tied farm servant] system is almost akin to slavery,” but maintained that without the protection of mirasidars, paṇṇaiyāḷs would suffer much more during times of distress.62 He recounted, for example, that during a recent cyclone in South Arcot, “The pannai-als were protected and fed by the mirasidars and were it not for this protection most of them would have seriously suffered and many of them perished.”63 And while paṇṇaiyāḷ well-being was thus ensured by their masters, dependency was a matter of happy mutuality: “The fact is that the pannai-als are as much required for the mirasidars, as the mirasidars are required for the pannai-als.”64 The conviction that mutual benefits attended the relations between Pariahs and their masters, first appearing in official defenses of Indian slavery in the 1830s, was here invoked by Aziz-ud-Din in 1917 to describe relations between mirasidars and laborers. The idea of a breakdown of traditional harmony, however, was probably somewhat more recent. Recall the words of Deputy Collector of Tanjore Krishnaswami Ayyar, who in 1885 intoned that “in the good old times,” relations between mirasidars and their subordinates were tranquil and only recently had soured.65 Aziz-ud-Din agreed that labor relations were perhaps not ideal at present, but contended that the favors mirasidars bestowed upon their employees sufficiently mitigated the harsher aspects of bondage that might exist; the pannai-al system ought thus be allowed to continue without interference. Yet the case of mirasidar-led cyclone-relief work cited by Aziz-udDin does not appear to have been representative; since Panchamas 186  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

predominated in government relief schemes during periods of famine and epidemic, for instance, we know that such favors were neither reliable nor regular. Indeed, during times of famine, caste raiyats had been known to prevent relief camps from opening in their vicinities in order to force workers to accept extremely low wages. William Goudie, begging the mission for an increase of funds to stanch starvation during a famine in 1898, wrote: Some villages have nothing to call a harvest, and the labouring classes are . . . going hungry. In other villages the harvest is not a total failure, but is scanty, and the caste people who usually employ Pariah labour for harvesting are this year banding together to help each other reap their fields without cost. . . . In other villages again where Pariah labour is in demand the caste people who usually pay in kind are this year taking into account that grain is selling at double the normal rates and are giving accordingly. Let us not be too hasty in blaming them. It is probably what a large number of English employers would do, but again . . . the Pariah labourer[’s] . . . stomach does not, unfortunately, adapt itself to the rise and fall of price levels. [And elsewhere] it is reported to me that the [caste peasants] are using their influence with the petty revenue officials to delay the opening of [famine] relief works until they have completed their harvest labour on especially cheap rates.66

This was the typical state of affairs. Yet Aziz-ud-Din, Achary, Krishnaswami Ayyar, and others would continue to insist on the relative harmony between landholders and tied laborers, just as generations of officials before them insisted on the benevolence of Indian slave owners and the mutually beneficial nature of servitude. These dissenting elites within the government valued stability above all else, whatever means might be used to achieve it and, moreover, appeared to take this stability as evidence of Panchamas’ contentment. The “teeth-gritting harmony” that prevailed was, however, kept in place by myriad safeguards and required stringent oversight.67 And this stability could deteriorate with remarkable rapidity, as during a season of famine or when the Panchama had saved a little money. In light of Achary’s report, the state adopted a cautious stance toward the controversial plans unwittingly set in motion by Collector Wood’s enthusiasm for temperance. Many officials who were initially inclined G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E   187

to favor the scheme became cowed by the thought of social upheaval, whereas others, like Achary himself, as well as the Commissioner of Land Revenue Aziz-ud-Din, maintained their outright opposition to it. The government decided to go ahead with the scheme, although stipulating, on Achary’s insistence, that it would provide house sites only to those who requested them of their own accord—again, the insistence that the Panchama evince authentic discontent. And Panchamas could not simply be given sites, as Wood’s plan had conceived it: it would be better to keep Panchamas as tenants, with the government as landlord. Such a model had already been tested by missionaries, and the familiar concerns over Pariah profligacy bore upon this decision as well.68 It was furthermore suggested that this model was also applicable to Guntur and Kistna districts, areas that had been identified as congested. Although the case of Tanjore was “not directly concerned with congestion but rather with improving the position of the Panchamas,” now schemes directed specifically at Panchamas were providing the template for programs, such as those designed to relieve congestion, directed at the poor.69 Once again, categories such as “the poor,” “the houseless poor,” “laborers,” and “Panchamas,” although treated by some within the government as notionally distinct, remained difficult to disambiguate and were targeted by otherwise identical administrative schemes. While the empirical coincidence of these categories was, in the vast majority of cases, hard to deny, whether or not they were kept distinct determined who would support specific programs, as well as how far that support would extend. The missionary problematic, which not only defined caste and class as distinct but also insisted that they be rendered distinct through programmatic pastoral action, had not only been detached from its origins but had also found new and more powerful champions. On the one hand, Indian elites within and outside government and more conservative British officials denied that any overlap between the categories Panchama and laborer was more than coincidental. Meanwhile, state officials’ new schemes also implicitly denied that such an overlap was thoroughly established, for they sought to create it, by making the Panchama a paradigmatic laborer, as we shall see. There were, therefore, multiple uses to which the missionary schema could be put. The inherently contested relation between concepts of class and caste in the particular case of the Pariah, and the tensions resulting from these contests, would continue to shape state welfare projects.70 188  G I V I N G T H E P A N C H A M A A H O M E

Also critical to the shape of both welfare projects and protests against them was the trope of gentle slavery that now, postabolition, had become what we might call the notion of mutual duties and obligation, closely linked to an unshakable belief in Panchama contentment. Drawing from the earlier antiabolitionist official discourse, these themes were now favorites of Indian elites, both officials and others, who would emphasize again and again that a system of mutual responsibility bound laborers and masters in India and that given the masters’ alleged commitment to caring for their laborers and to providing for their subsistence during slack seasons and in times of shortage, unfree labor in India was a veritable boon to laborers themselves. By this logic, the interference of others in the utopian world of unfree labor was recklessly destructive, creating “a fiction where none exists.”71

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Chapter 8 E V E RY DAY WA R FA R E Caste, Class, and the Public

Protest against the grant of house sites to Panchamas, as expressed in four venues we will now examine—in petitions to government, in the Legislative Council, in district courts, and through violent means in the cēris of Tanjore—would all depend upon not only how caste and class were understood to be related but also on how genuine Panchamas’ bids to transform the conditions of their subordination were judged to be. We saw in chapter 6 that an aspect of missionary debate that found a new venue in elite discourse was the question of Pariah motives. Now the question of motive was linked to another strand of elite talk that also had a long history, namely the view that relations between mirasidars and their laborers were an accord of mutual understanding and reciprocity. Because the commonsense assumption was that labor relations were stable and Panchamas were contented, when faced with counterevidence, Indian and British officials worried about how genuine the expressed discontent was. Elite concerns over whether Panchamas were being instigated to insubordination by government promises of house sites (rather than, as before, by missionary promises of land upon their conversion) were of signal importance in shaping solutions to the Pariah Problem at this time. As evidence of widespread Panchama discontent obtruded, its relevance could be denied on the basis of the alleged lack of authenticity

of that discontent by the very same officials who had collected the data. The actions of ordinary Panchama men and women (such as their insistent appeals for house sites whenever they were visited by government officials) as well as the tactics of subordination required to keep them in line (including threats of eviction and the demand for the return of the retaining fee, the cuvantai, when they might have saved the money required to flee) could be effectively and decisively discounted through the trope of authenticity. As in the public scandal of allegedly “materially induced conversions” described in chapter 6, the search for the real Panchamas’ authentic assessments of the rigor of their own servitude cannot be disentangled from the projects of a variety of authoritative agents—missionaries, landed castes, and government officials—who sought to resolve the Pariah problem.

Māmūl and the New India No sooner had the Tanjore house-site plan been announced than the Revenue Department received a petition from a collective of mirasidars of the district.1 These mirasidars, calling themselves the Association of Landholders of Mayavaram Division (a taluk of Tanjore), entreated the government to recognize the “genius of village autonomy,” whereby cultivable lands as well as residential lands for the “upper, middle and lower classes” were divided up in shares and regularly reassigned. The welltried idea of the traditional village, autonomous and harmonious, which had been central to generations of colonial administrators and which had been encoded in administrative procedures such as the darkhast rules, was now reflected back by Tanjore mirasidars as a long-standing native tradition that deserved the state’s respect. Part of the “genius” of this system, in the mirasidars’ view, was that particular shares in the residential lands of laborers were tied to shares in cultivable lands. Laborers were, after all, “necessary appurtenances to the cultivable lands.”2 Furthermore, “the mirasidar has always attached the highest economic value to these sites as self-interest apart from all other considerations made him realize the extreme importance of maintaining a healthy and thriving class of labourers to be available to him in all seasons.”3 By underscoring the point that it was in the landowner’s best interests to ensure the well-being of his laborers, the petition, like E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   191

Aziz-ud-Din’s minute of dissent, stressed the putative mutuality of dependence, even while restaging it in the language of economic rationality. To further emphasize the concordance between traditional village organization and rationalized labor, the petitioners explained that Panchama laborers lived in housing owned by their employers in a manner identical to many industrial workers: Just as the planter, the mill or factory owner collects the labourers required for his operations [and] settles them in the plantation, in the factory or mill premises so that he may be sure . . . of labour at all times . . . so has the mirasidar . . . settled his farm labourer in the cheri. . . . The manaikats [house sites] in the cheris are to the mirasidar what the coolie-lines are to the planter and to the owner of a mill or factory.4

Mirasidars’ ownership of house sites was therefore only “a rational organization of labour,” akin to factory labor, even when its ancient origins— its heathenish overlay—might obscure that fact. Again, to maintain that the drawbacks of the system were not unique to India, while also asserting that its merits were, the petition noted that every nation, however advanced in civilization, had its downtrodden: “There must be a certain class of people with whom the better sort do not freely associate and the position in the Tanjore District is in no way worse.”5 India too had its poor, and there was nothing of great consequence in that. Along these lines, the petition drew comparisons between the governance of poverty in India and England, calling for parity: If “free labour” in the absolute sense is the aim of Government the move should begin in planter’s lines. Socialism has not made much advance even in England and no flats, tenements and other places where the labouring classes are housed have ever been interfered with to relieve them of the uneasy feeling of not being under their own roof.6

The petition concluded by asserting that the laborer, having been born and bred in his cēri, felt a “comfort” and “sense of safety” there denied to the factory coolie. Indeed, it was only malicious “outside influences” that might make him feel the “precariousness of his tenure” and thereby ignite feuds between himself and his master. The mirasidars’ petition was therefore pointedly directed at what historians have sometimes described 192  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

as the “two faces” of colonial rule: liberal reformism, on the one hand, and respect for custom, on the other—and attempted to win over both sides.7 To achieve this effect, petitioners built on the motifs of class that certain members of the government had already deployed in their own opposition to the house-site scheme. Officials such as P.  S. Sivaswami Ayyar, for example, had asserted that the category “poor laborer” ought not be reduced to that of the Panchama, averring that others also suffered as they did and that their suffering was neither specific to, nor in any way the result of, their caste. The mirasidars, however, took a different approach, accepting that Panchama and laborers were indeed one and the same. But in doing so they provide a neat illustration of the inherent ambiguity of such an argument, for this apparently contradictory tactic had the same rhetorical thrust: to repudiate the specificity of the Panchama’s position. Nothing objectionable, that is, differentiated their Panchama from coolies and factory workers the world round. As with Deputy Collector Srinivasa Achary in Tanjore so too with these mirasidar petitioners.8 The paramount concern was this: as the state itself had argued long before them, there was nothing special about “the Pariah qua Pariah.” Furthermore, as we have now observed with respect to several forms of both state and missionary intervention, mirasidars and other labor controllers fobbed off suggestions of laborer discontent by asserting these to be the result of outside influences. The Panchama himself was not discontent in the portrait painted by mirasidars. But he only remained himself so long as he continued to resist outside influences, influences to which he was also, alas, uniquely susceptible. An uncorrupted Panchama would never even notice “the precariousness of his tenure.” It was only when, under external influences, he was induced to break with the security of tradition, to become obstreperous and claim his house site as his own, that the mirasidar himself was then forced to counter him with his own legal claims to the site. In sum, the mirasidars’ petition asserted that the Panchama paṇṇaiyāḷ was far better off than the “free” or “independent” laborer (terms they themselves put in quotes), especially if one took into consideration all the presents laborers received annually, as well as the fact that labor was made available to them even in slack seasons.9 The mirasidars thus played to the ethnographic imagination of the colonial state using the very arguments that, as discussed in chapter 1, colonial officials themselves had pioneered when downplaying Indian agrestic slavery.10 The petitioners E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   193

were clearly also familiar with the standard tropes of administrative rationality and show evidence of having studied published government orders closely. Following the example of Collector Wood, they foisted the burden of Panchamas’ ills upon Panchamas themselves, denouncing their weakness for the “evil drink.” Having expounded on the gentleness of domination in Tanjore, a claim that had been made by Deputy Collector Srinivasa Achary, the petition further echoed him by pointing out that a house-site scheme in this region was unnecessary. They took care to explain that they agreed overcrowding was a grave enough issue in Kistna and elsewhere, but insisted, following Achary, that no such conditions existed in Tanjore.11 Despite mirasidars’ familiarity with these various administrative considerations, they had made one critical mistake: It was no longer acceptable to speak openly of needing to maintain a “hold” over laborers. Unbeknownst to landowners, a new logic, drawing upon the language of Britain’s new liberalism, had taken hold in the upper strata of the government.12 Highly placed government officials judged the condition of Panchamas to be “practical serfdom”—as others had occasionally done before them—but this they now considered specifically a duty of government to resolve. L. T. Hobhouse, one of the leading exponents of the new liberalism that provided the ideological basis for a variety of “welfare reforms” promulgated in Britain between 1906 and 1914, famously described the new dispensation thus: [It is a] function of the State to secure the conditions upon which mind and character may develop themselves . . . [and] upon which its citizens are able to win by their own efforts all that is necessary to a full civic efficiency. It is not for the State to feed, house, or clothe them. It is for the State to take care that the economic conditions are such that the normal man who is not defective in mind or body or will can by useful labour feed, house, and clothe himself and his family.13

What he was advocating was not socialism, Hobhouse would go on to say, but rather a guarantee that individuals could reach their full potential— this would still require the diligent exertion of their “own efforts”—but which entirely unbridled laissez-faire government made impossible, a fact to which he argued recent history attested.14

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Mirasidars’ claim that Panchamas were “generally well off,” a conceit that had for so long remained integral as well to the rationality of the state, had now outlived its use.15 The Revenue Department’s G. H. Jackson responded that Achary’s own report undermined such a notion, and most importantly, so did Panchamas themselves. Jackson recounted that at a public meeting in Tanjore, Panchamas had “refute[d] the argument” that they “are kindly treated by their masters and enjoy several perquisites besides their usual wages.”16 The concerted effort of nameless Panchamas had thus found its way into the highest echelons of official deliberation. As I remarked at the outset of this book, ordinary Panchamas’ own actions rarely produced spectacular successes given the powers arrayed against them, but they were nevertheless able to incrementally transform the practices and policies of a range of adversaries and benefactors: that their determined expressions of discontent before officials provided one facet of the rationale to pursue this welfare agenda is surely one such remarkable achievement. Yet we cannot discount the ambiguity of this novel agenda. In a critical respect, despite the government’s embrace of a new rationality and the evidence thrust upon them by Panchama laborers, state officials and mirasidars were in fact in perfect agreement. Thus, to mirasidars’ worry that the housesite scheme would make laborers independent, depriving them not only of that labor but also the house sites they would require if they sought to hire other workers, Jackson responded on behalf of the Revenue Department: It is difficult to see how the action of Government will make the labourer independent except in so far as it will relieve him from a condition approximating to serfdom. Government do not propose to provide the labourer with house-sites free of cost. What the government propose to do is to acquire the land and hand it over to the labourer on condition of his agreeing to pay the amount in easy installments. In order to repay the amount, the labourer will have to work hard and save the necessary money. This will make him industrious and thrifty, and as he is dependent for his labour entirely on the mirasidar—the government do not propose to provide labour for the farm servants—it will make him more obedient to his master because if the mirasidar dismisses him, he will not only have no means of livelihood, but no means of repaying the amount advanced by Government for his house-site.17

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Government officials had refused to accept the mirasidars’ suggestion that their own labor regime was already fully rational but nevertheless sought to reassure them that government schemes would result in no real independence for laborers. What the government was proposing, rather, would replace the hold of the practical serfdom with a gentler form of control, similar, in many ways, to the “kind of hold” once envisioned by Adam Andrew. Like the missionaries before them, what government officials envisioned for the Panchama was precisely not independence, nor proprietorship, but a “free servitude” that would be characterized by an improvement in obedience, industry, and thrift. Thus, just a few years later, the Board of Revenue would describe the intended result of its Panchama amelioration projects as being “not to disturb labour, but to increase its efficiency and output.”18 At this point, however, an Indian Member of the Legislative Council, T. Ranga Achariyar—a Brahmin and a mirasidar himself—implored the government to reconsider the course it had embarked upon: I do not know if you have sufficiently realised the gravity of the issues raised. . . . I have been recently traveling through the district and . . . the feeling everywhere is one of serious apprehension as to the future of agricultural industry.  .  .  . Mamul19 [“custom”] reigns supreme in this country. . . . [But now] the happy relations between the mirasidar and the labourer are at an end. Mamul rates of varam [the share of crop claimed by the laboring tenant] are ignored and exorbitant rates demanded. . . . The tension is very strong from all I heard. . . . When once you disturb mamul a state of disorder is bound to result. It must be remembered that we are to deal in such matters with people in the lowest rung of the ladder with tendencies to break loose. Cocoanuts have been plucked and mangoes removed without authority and clandestinely. Threats of breaches of the peace have been held out. The contagion is sure to spread and before the matter assumes a serious proportion, I earnestly implore you to stay your hand in this matter, for some time till the government and the people can pay attention to this question calmly and deliberately when they are not perturbed by the preoccupations due to the great catastrophe threatening the Empire. . . . We require the good-will and co-operation of everyone at this juncture.20

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The threat of anarchy that would ensue if laborers broke loose from their moorings (already heralded by reports of clandestine coconutplucking) was imaginatively linked by the loyal subject to the threat to empire posed by World War I. Notice as well Achariyar’s emphasis on the idea that the function of tradition was to maintain order and stability specifically against the implicit threat of the disorderly lower classes, thereby employing a style of thought with respect to those classes equally widespread in the metropole.21 Achariyar argued for the maintenance of traditional Tamil labor relations, that is, by means of an argument drawing on a distinct tradition of English political discourse concerning the necessity of reforming and restraining the working classes and indigents. In the same breath, Achariyar simultaneously called upon the long-standing commitment of respect for native custom, and we have seen how powerful invoking that promise could be. The official response to Achariyar, and in particular to his appeal to māmūl, “custom,” is important, because it sheds additional light on the distinctive shift in the rationality of statecraft that we are addressing here. In the past, although officials could sometimes deny particular claims to neutrality or custom, the fundamental validity of arguments made on such a basis was never in doubt. Yet now we find A. G. Cardew simply dismissing Achariyar’s appeal to māmūl by ruling it out of court: You are a man who has enjoyed advantages denied to the average mirasidar. You are a man of broader and more liberal views, and it is to you that we all look to guide the opinions of those people [i.e., Achariyar’s fellow mirasidars].  .  .  . The coming epoch will be largely judged by the attitude which the higher classes adopt towards the lower castes. It won’t do any longer to say that mamul reigns supreme. India is turning her back on mamul and is looking forward to a more liberal era. I would appeal to you, as one of the Indian leaders, not to oppose but to support the Government’s efforts on behalf of the labourer class and to prove that new India is not hostile to the advancement of the poor and depressed.22

This uncompromising rejection of māmūl definitively marked the emergence of something quite new, something that would undoubtedly have come as a shock to Achariyar. In rejecting māmūl, Cardew

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also tacitly denied mirasidars’ claims that their Panchama laborers were already the equivalent of factory or mill workers. Yet the more liberal era heralded by Cardew would not require any drastic reorganization of society; laborers were not to become, as G. H. Jackson had emphasized, independent to any significant extent. Agrarian conditions would not be much affected, and it only remained, in Cardew’s words, for “the attitude which the higher classes adopt towards the lower castes” to change. In short, as with the missionaries before them, government ideology now sought to transform caste, which in some respects smacked of serfdom, into rationalized class relations, and this transformation would require little more than a change in attitude.

The Magic of Property: House Sites, Laws, and Regulations Mirasidars were not persuaded by arguments such as those of Cardew, and as soon as the order to grant house sites went into effect in villages in Tanjore, they began filing a series of suits against the government. Insofar as India was indeed “turning her back on mamul,” as Cardew put it, this would entail nothing less than a redefinition of “the public.” In the district courtroom, the notion of the public (and “public goods”), whose centrality to the Pariah problem has already emerged at several junctures, would now be called into question and substantially reformulated, and court munsiffs’ (Indian judges in district-level civil courts) decisions would enunciate, in crystallized form, the new style of thought on which this interventionist appeal to social governance was based. In 1919 three such cases were decided in favor of the government by the District Munsiff ’s Court in Negapatam, Tanjore. The report on these cases contains a précis of the government’s response and the allegations they faced, both of which would be repeated almost verbatim in the great number of cases tried over the next five years.23 The District Munsiff Krishna Ayyar summarized the plaintiffs’ charges thus: The allegations of the plaintiffs in all these suits . . . are that . . . the alleged purpose [of the Panchama house-site scheme] is not a public purpose, that it [therefore] does not come under the purview of section 3 clause (f ) of the Land Acquisition Act, that the proposed action of Government is detrimental to the landowners, that the Acquisition 198  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

Collector is not acting in accordance with the directions and suggestions contained in the GO [Government Order] in question, that under the GO sites can be acquired only for those Panchamas who live on them, are desirous of owning them, and deposit a fraction of the value of the sites required by them, that the special deputy collector is arranging to acquire sites even for persons who . . . do not want to own sites.24

District Munsiff Ayyar’s ruling responded in striking fashion to the allegation that acquiring house sites was not a public purpose: “a purpose of such social benevolence [as the provision of house sites] is by itself a public purpose.”25 As proof of this fact, Ayyar simply noted that the Tanjore Panchamas’ ills had been the subject of numerous newspaper articles and therefore no court ought to doubt that alleviating Panchamas’ grievances would be a matter of the public good. In arguing this, Ayyar effectively tied the concept of the public goods the state was obliged to safeguard to the now politically charged notion of “public opinion.” The latter, moreover, could be relied upon to support the former. The public, Ayyar continued, had of recent years displayed such an increased sentiment of national solidarity that it too largely desired the Panchamas’ uplift. The only issue of doubt, Ayyar explained, was whether providing Panchamas with house sites was indeed a means to that end. At the core of his decision is a remarkable passage, in which Henry Maine’s depiction of the transition from “status to contract,” as well as English philosopher Arthur Young’s pregnant aphorism, “the magic of property turns sand into gold,” are made to converge upon the uplift of the Panchama.26 In the process, Ayyar not only placed the Panchamas’ uplift at the very heart of the state’s role as a liberal government, but also represented the government’s primary duty as securing the betterment of its subjects as a whole. The mirasidar naturally looks upon his right of eviction as a strong weapon in his hands for keeping his servants on his lands and dependent on him. The very grievance of the plaintiffs in these suits is that the Government’s action will deprive them of this weapon and will cause “grave hardship to the landowning community.” Now labourers working under their mirasidars by compulsion, viz., under a perpetual fear of eviction from their ancient sites cannot be said to have very much moved from “status to contract,” for the moment when the idea E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   199

of contract enters into their minds the weapon of eviction is on their heads. Partly for this reason and partly owing to their chronic indebtedness. . . . Panchama labourers in this district . . . have never risen in their status. To provide house sites of their own to Panchamas is thus to abolish one of the chief causes of their present degradation. It would not only make those that are now [the] poor and disinherited of this land feel the magic of property and the possession of some stake in the country but would .  .  . make them free agents to contract, raise their wage earning capacity, consequently improve their efficiency as workers and in the long run bring about a material upliftment of their morality and social status. All this will in turn advance the general interests of the whole community. . . . The question of the housing of the Panchamas is thus a question of far reaching public importance. A modern civilised Government interested in the welfare of all its subjects is bound to deal with the question.27

Scarcely twenty years earlier, the idea that the improvement of the Panchamas could count as a public purpose came up against native understandings and administrative procedures in which the public was defined precisely as excluding the Panchama. Recall the handwritten response to the question of whether the formation of a Pariah settlement constituted a public purpose, posed in the file on the conflict between the raiyats of Mannur and Rev. Johannes Kabis: an anonymous official had quipped, “I should call it a Pariah or a padre purpose.”28 At this juncture, conversely, Panchamas were now construed as an integral component of society, and their “material upliftment” could thus be a means by which society might be advanced as a whole—a possibility explicitly denied, and indeed derided, only a few decades before. District Munsiff Ayyar, having clarified that the public’s welfare depended on the well-being of all of its members, drew his decision to a close by noting that a government scheme that could benefit each and every individual member of the public directly was inconceivable. The operative question, therefore, was whether a particular scheme “is intended to redound and is capable of redounding to Public benefit.”29 And the government, he concluded, had demonstrated precisely such an intention and capacity with respect to the house-site scheme. Notably, Ayyar did not deny the immediate disadvantages to mirasidars and admitted that some minor losses might very well accrue to them. 200  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

But these losses would prove temporary. Once granted ownership, the magic of property would, far from inducing laborers to leave in search of better wages, in fact persuade them to stay, because they would have a new investment—in both the affective and economic senses—in their homesteads. Collector Wood had spoken of providing house sites to Panchamas as an inducement to the productive investment of wages that would otherwise be squandered on drink. Now we find officials arguing that in the realm of the sentiments, too, Panchama must be induced to invest wisely. Thus, Ayyar explained, “There is a greater danger of a Panchama having no stake in the village running away . . . than one who owns a site there and has some inducement to remain there.”30 While Cardew had observed that the Panchamas’ indebtedness to the government and simultaneous lack of alternative employment would bind them to the village and to the mirasidar, Ayyar predicted that a sentimental bond, operating in concert with economic compulsion, might produce a very different kind of “stake in the country.” Thus, mirasidars need not fear that schemes such as this would “loose the Pariah from his moorings” or make him independent. That they had no alternative to working for the mirasidar, the government’s loan for their site, and, in addition, their new subordination to a regime of property would all exert a firm hold on them.

Government and Landholders as “Co-owners of Property” The debate over house sites would eventually be taken up in the lofty chambers of Madras’s Legislative Council. The structure of the government, in the aftermath of the Morley–Minto reforms of 1910, now included a legislative council of considerable political importance, with prominent Indians selected as representatives of various subpopulations— including non-Brahmins, businessmen, landowners, and Muslims—as its members.31 But at this time there were as yet no Panchama members. The landholders who sat on this powerful body demanded that the government order authorizing the acquisition of house sites in Tanjore be stayed. Legislative Council proceedings, furthermore, were taken very seriously at the highest levels of colonial administration, not least because they were published and frequently reproduced verbatim in newspapers. Indeed, the rancorous discussion on staying the house-site scheme was paraphrased and quoted extensively in The Hindu.32 E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   201

In this discussion in the council, the deep-rooted sense among Indian elites that Panchama uplift must in some way amount to an abrogation of the principle of neutrality persisted as an undercurrent. But the radically new rationale on which uplift was based made such arguments difficult to sustain, and religious neutrality was no longer able to command the floor. Thus, when the issue of house sites for Panchamas in Tanjore was first raised in the council, T. Ranga Achariyar demanded to know at whose behest the order was being pushed forth, alleging that missionaries were behind the move.33 The government of Madras responded that it was on the basis of its own concern for the welfare of the Depressed Classes, and not at the insistence of those classes themselves nor Christian missionaries nor any other philanthropic bodies.34 This deceptively simple statement, which might even appear defensive, presents another telling instance of the emergence of the new government of the social that we have been tracking, evidenced by the state’s newly explicit embrace of its responsibilities for Panchama welfare. It is also, of course, misleading in one critical respect. In discussions confined to official circles, the fact that Panchamas themselves demanded redress whenever they met faceto-face with officials was adduced to show up the speciousness of the claim that the house-site problem was really no issue at all; to mirasidars it was presented as a matter of governmental initiative. Achariyar further insisted that the government appoint a committee of both officials and nonofficials to fully investigate the Tanjore house-site scheme before the order was put into effect. At the outset he referred to the fact that he himself was a landowner in the district. He expressed the hope that this would not overly color his judgment but would, at the same time, afford him firsthand knowledge of the situation.35 Achariyar made two significant varieties of criticism. First, he painted Collector Wood, who had mooted the house-site scheme, as flighty and impetuous, honing in on the fact that, by his own admission, Wood’s suggestion that land be given to Panchamas along the lines of England’s Small Holdings Act was made without his even having read the act. If he had, asserted Achariyar, he would have recognized that the agrarian conditions for which that act was prescribed differed dramatically from those in south India. In Tanjore, Trichinopoly, and South Arcot, it was customary for mirasidars to provide house sites to their workers on condition that they remain in their service, and this custom had even been recently recognized in the courts. House sites were, therefore, mirasidars’ property, and it was this wholly unjust 202  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

appropriation of their property to which mirasidars objected. English planters, by contrast, were never expected to house laborers who might go to work on a neighboring estate. Once again, arguments for the preservation of custom were married with arguments that the mirasidars’ relation to labor was in concert with its modern counterparts and even superior to them: mirasidars, for instance, provided paṇṇaiyāḷs with building materials and garden lands on which to cultivate vegetables and other subsistence crops, an illustration that the mirasi system was more enlightened than that prevailing in European-owned plantations in south India—a comparison whose nationalist undertones would not have been lost on either his Indian or his British audiences.36 Moreover, whatever flaws there might be in the mirasi system could not be said to be unique to it. In one final, impassioned outburst along these lines, Achariyar demanded to know, “What is wrong with this system? Is it wrong [for the mirasidar] to build houses for his labourer and insist that so long as he works for him he will live in that house, and the moment [he leaves] he must quit the house? . . . [On] what ground do the government interfere with this relationship?”37 Achariyar’s second objection to the Tanjore house-site scheme, which he raised more than once during the council’s discussions, was that it violated the state’s claims to neutrality. Achariyar had already, as discussed above, accused the government of having been unduly influenced by missionaries in even raising the issue of house sites in the first place, which the government had denied. Now Achariyar cited Achary’s report on Tanjore as proof that Panchamas and their employers enjoyed friendly relations—save in those areas, as Achary had reported, in which they “had been roused by contact with Christian missionary influence.”38 He furthermore alleged that because Special Deputy Collector D. Arulanandam Pillai, who had been assigned to begin house-site operations in Tanjore, was himself an Indian Christian, he (Pillai) had preferred Christian Panchama villages in which to begin his work: “There the missionary influence comes in, there is the danger. Why should the operation begin only in Christian villages? . . . It is likely to lead to a breach of the peace.”39 A.  G. Cardew responded to Achariyar on behalf of the government. Cardew began by calling attention to a lacuna in Achariyar’s account of how the issue had first arisen. Achariyar had not mentioned Andrew’s report, in which the Pariahs of Chingleput were described as being in a miserable condition as the very result of the threats of eviction to which they were perennially subject. It was that report that had led to Gray’s E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   203

definitive inquiries on the matter. Cardew then delineated the working of the paṭiyāḷ system in Tanjore as Gray had reported it, thereby rebutting Achariyar’s claim that the system was benevolent, mutually beneficial, and indeed preferable to many others. Cardew also undercut the idea that the system’s antiquity could be assumed to work in its favor. Ample evidence supported the contention that “until recent times, the labourer in Tanjore was a slave,” and that was certainly not worth preserving.40 Mirasidars’ ownership of house sites was a vestige of an old and undesirable system, Cardew continued, which for that very reason must be eradicated—it was not akin to any modern system of labor subordination (read: unlike class). Echoing Deputy Munsiff Krishna Ayyar, Cardew reasoned that “if the labourers are liable to be turned out of their houses at any moment they cannot of course have any freedom of contract with their employers.”41 Cardew therefore reiterated his previous rejection of māmūl, now even more publicly overturning the caution and even deference the colonial state had until then displayed when dealing with matters of “tradition.” Cardew also noted that laborers continued to labor, apparently without running amok, both outside of Tanjore as well as within it in several villages where house sites were no longer controlled by their employers. The calamitous outcome that mirasidars predicted was thus overdrawn. And the reasons for this are not far to seek. Officials, as we have seen, were well aware that Panchamas’ employment options were effectively limited to laboring for mirasidars. Finally, in response to Achariyar’s accusation of missionary influence, and thus the abrogation of neutrality, Cardew brought his speech to the following conclusion, matching Achariyar’s threats of “breach of peace” (which we saw deployed to effect in the conflicts described in chapter 5) with epigrammatic rhetoric of his own: The Government are only performing a duty . . . which they ought to have performed long ago. I hope my Hon’ble Friend Mr. Ranga Achariyar will not adopt this irreconcilable attitude in regard to this small measure for improving the condition of the . . . Panchama labourers. He criticized a Christian Deputy Collector having taken up work in Christian villages. He [i.e., the Deputy Collector] took that up first because he thought there would be less objection in that place. He is starting

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out in fresh villages. If Honourable Members object to this we should be willing to consider whether he shall be debarred from taking up any Christian village, though I cannot see myself any objection. I think it is a pity that this question has been imported into the matter.42

“This question” was the question of neutrality. But Cardew, while determined to push through house-site measures, was nevertheless willing to consider having the Indian Christian collector refrain from catering to Christian Panchama villages, even though he himself “could see no objection.” When high-caste dominance was threatened, religious neutrality remained just below the surface, a powerful trope to be invoked when statecraft ran up against the newly minted class of landlord-legislators. The new logic of rule did not, therefore, in any way imply that neutrality would disappear as a critical piece in the justificatory schema of empire. On the contrary, even Cardew, who had unflinchingly dismissed māmūl, remained so cowed by neutrality that he was willing to accept measures he could see no reason for—apart from assuring influential natives that the government was not contravening the doctrine of neutrality. The doctrine, by no means a dead letter, had, however, receded to the background in the constellation of governmental imperatives: The state had now to attend to Panchama welfare, a duty that, Cardew opined, “ought to have been performed long ago.”43 Several Indian members of the council responded sympathetically to Cardew, professing their own commitment to the government’s duty to improve the condition of Panchamas.44 Yet they urged the government to reconsider whether this laudable goal was best served by providing Panchamas with house sites. They pointed out, for example, that the mirasidars of Tanjore had asked only that their own house sites be left alone and that they would otherwise even assist the government in acquiring land to house laborers—just as T. Ranganatha Tawker had done in 1897. Moreover, the members drew the government’s attention to how remarkably unjust it appeared to reclaim lands from owners without solid cause rather than acquiring alternative lands for laborers’ use. The implication, of course, was that existing house-site schemes abrogated a principle as sacred as neutrality: private property. As T. Ranga Achariyar belligerently put it, “What is the object of [taking over private land in order to] convert . . . a paracheri into a paracheri?”45 He was referring to

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the fact that the Land Acquisition Act of 1908 allowed the government to acquire private property for the sake of an alternative public purpose, such as the construction of state buildings or transportation facilities. Here, paradoxically, the state proposed to acquire the land but to retain its original purpose, thus—in Achariyar’s view—arbitrarily to transfer ownership by state seizure (although of course the state would pay market value for what it took). Following Cardew and others, Achariyar spoke again. After reiterating that his was not an attempt to interfere with the noble object of government but only with the proposed means for carrying it out, he reiterated that mirasidars ought to be able to house their own laborers as they saw fit. Gray’s report, he added, did not persuade him that a house-site scheme was necessary: “But after all what does [Gray] say? He says that on account of this system the employer makes his coolies work. Which employer does not make his coolie work? Is it a crime to insist on work? He [i.e., the coolie] is a free man to go away when he likes and wherever he likes.”46 The mirasi system, that is, may well depend on coolies being made to work, but this hardly distinguished it from other labor arrangements. Therefore, Achariyar once again denied the particularity of Tanjore. The fact that Panchamas did not own house sites was perhaps an unfortunate circumstance—for them!—but it did not warrant special attention to be focused on the district. Returning to the issue of property and in particular the propertied classes, Achariyar summarized his position by reminding the colonial state of its special relationship with men such as himself, as well as its special obligations to them—a reminder that was vividly illumined by the fact that, as I have already noted, many members of the council were also landlords and all of them were men of means: The matter requires very careful consideration and I dare say government will bestow that consideration, because they are as much interested in the welfare of the agricultural population, whether they be pattadars [landholders] or labourers, because, after all, the Government of this country depends upon these people for their revenue and must be very careful in dealing with these people. All agricultural operations are carried on not only for the benefit of the landholders but for the Government also. Government are co-owners with the landholders

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with reference to the property. You are as much interested in it as the landholders are; and that being so, I ask that this existing mamul should not be disturbed, unless a strong case is made out.47

The caste–state nexus, whose workings I described in previous chapters, fundamentally and intimately linked state and nonstate agents in a single network of authority that extended over Pariah laborers. But the alliance between state and landed castes was, until now, rarely openly admitted, let alone invoked as a matter of established principle. Now that this network appeared under threat, however, Achariyar was forced to rise to the defense of what had heretofore been entirely taken for granted.48 It is only because of the entrenched and hitherto unshakable quality of the caste–state nexus with respect to Panchama laborers that Indian elites could, with remarkable candor, explicitly demand that their status as significant taxpayers and local administrators be heeded.49 Thus, after insinuating a breach of neutrality and invoking the sacred rights of private property, Achariyar arrived at the bottom line, bluntly pointing out that, with reference to mirasi holdings, “Government are co-owners with the landholders.” According to Achariyar, the state and its elite taxpayers were, with respect to the Panchamas whose futures were being reshaped, not two distinct bodies whose interests might occasionally overlap, nor even business partners, but co-owners of property. He thereby asserted a fundamental unity of purpose between the two that would render it virtually superfluous for the state to acquire mirasidari property. Indeed, as we have seen throughout this book, landed elites had enjoyed a unity with the state—or at least a united front—when it came to the Pariah laborer. The state’s administrative apparatus had acceded in conceiving of “village residents” as landed villagers alone; of “communal land” as that which specifically excluded Panchamas; of caste people as “the general public”; and of Panchamas’ welfare as counterposed to the public’s. Now the state’s implicit incorporation of the class of mirasidars was in flux; the essential unity between the state and landholders was being unceremoniously riven—or so it seemed—by a new solicitude for the Panchama. Even more outrageously, officials justified their solicitude by adducing the discontent doggedly expressed by Panchamas themselves. This is what required Achariyar to state out loud what was once a tacit understanding.

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So clinching did Achariyar consider this argument to be that he indeed withdrew his resolution that the order be stayed, certain the government would not proceed without taking his and others’ objections into account. As he put it, “I dare say Government will bestow that consideration . . . [for] they must be very careful in dealing with these people [i.e., the landed elite on whose cooperation the state’s ability to rule depended].”

The Tanjore Panchamas: Economic Rationality and Everyday Warfare Even as he delivered his encomium to property, District Munsiff Krishna Ayyar had opined that Panchamas might not initially react to such a scheme, on the assumption that they were, if not content, then at least resigned. But the government, he urged, ought to press forward anyway, for “even a spirit of healthy discontent is a matter of education and requires time to develop.”50 Ayyar’s view, therefore, was but a variant of what the scheme’s opponents themselves maintained: that without outside influence Panchamas were content in their servitude. Secure in the self-created myth of Panchama contentedness, the government went ahead with the scheme on the assumption that few Panchamas would show any interest. The actual response of Panchamas from villages across Tanjore astonished officials; a flood of petitions for house sites overwhelmed the officers put on special duty to receive them.51 Because officials had been ordered to make assignments only to Panchamas who requested them—in deference to those such as Achary, who were concerned not to create “a friction where none exists”—the circumstances of many of these requests have been recorded in great detail.52 The result, a detailed picture of everyday warfare, is an archival treasure trove that fully confirms what, in an earlier period, the missionary had styled persecution, told now from Panchamas’ own reports to officers.53 In a typical case, which occurred in 1917, Panchamas of Thenperambur village in Tanjore Taluk asked for new house sites because, they said, the river Vettar was in danger of flooding the existing cēri.54 The complaint was judged to be real, and no government-owned lands were found to be available for the acquisition, meaning that land would have to be bought from a local landowner in a suitable location. A piece of land was chosen, and the Panchamas agreed to pay a large part of the full price up 208  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

front and the remainder in installments, as well as to perform the necessary labor to raise the elevation of the land—since it too, like their old homestead, was slightly low-lying. The Pallars (a specific caste of Panchamas predominant in southeastern Madras) were “keen about owning their own house sites,” we are later told, because “the Kallar mirasidars appear to treat them rather harshly.”55 While the danger of flooding was real enough, it was their landlords’ harsh treatment that impelled them to make an official request. The land that the government had selected was owned by forty mirasidars, three of whom failed to respond to the government’s notice of acquisition. The remaining thirty-seven, without exception, refused to part with the land for government compensation but agreed to give it free of cost on condition that their āḷs (servants) continue to perform the required field labor. They explained that they “would otherwise lose all hold on [their panchamas].”56 But the Panchamas in Thenperambur, it seems, remained insistent, explaining that they were willing to pay what for them would have been large sums of capital as down payments on house sites—even when threatened with the loss of employment in a situation in which, as officials regularly confirmed, alternative employment was difficult to come by. Although counterintuitive from the perspective that assumes bonded laborers cling to their bondage for the security it provides above all else, cases such as this were not at all unique. As K. S. Srinivasa Achary, the officer charged with effecting the house-site scheme, explained in his interim report, the Panchamas of Tanjore were in fact “more anxious to secure the ownership of their house sites than to be retained in the employ of their mirasidars.”57 But there was more. With respect to techniques of labor control, it was not only ownership of sites that was critical, but also their location: as Achary had pointed out in his report on Kistna, even without control over the house site itself, ownership of an adjacent site provided employers with the means to harass laborers. In Thenperambur, attesting to the importance of the location of sites, as well as Panchamas’ willingness to assume loss and risk, we are told that there were a few Panchamas who already owned their sites in the old cēri but that in order to live elsewhere they were “willing to relinquish their house sites without any compensation in favour of Government in addition to the moiety of the cost of acquisition [of new sites] which they have agreed to pay.”58 E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   209

In examining these lineaments of everyday warfare in Tanjore, and the tactical considerations with which Panchamas were engaged, we may observe that as the government sought to teach them to live according to the principles of economic rationality, Tanjore Panchamas participated in state schemes only to violate those principles. In order to secure their own house sites from the government, they often acted against their economic interests—that is, at net financial loss to themselves and in the face of threats to their employment. As the government sought to produce conscientious laborers, Panchamas appeared to officials to be “quite cheerful” at risking loss of employment to secure ownership of their house sites.59 Nor were risks financial alone. In a number of cases, petty obstructionism—caste peoples’ refusing to sell land if it might go to Panchamas, for example—gave way to armed violence. Here is one officer’s description of what he called a “typical case of oppression”: In the village of Arivalur . . . the Panchamas held a meeting and decided to collect money for the purchase of additional house sites [via the government scheme]. This roused the mirasidars (Muhammedans). [They] gathered in large numbers armed with spears, clubs, etc. entered the paracheri and attacked the Panchamas, some of whom received very serious injuries as a result of which they had to be in the hospital for nearly a month. . . . The houses were looted and all the Panchamas were driven out of the huts, most of which were demolished. The tiled house .  .  . of the nattamaikaran [Panchama headman] was the object [of special fury]60 . . . and it was nearly wrecked. All the Panchamas thus driven out took shelter . . . in five adjacent villages. As if this was not enough a false case was at once cooked up against some of the Panchamas.61

Just as Panchamas initiated alliances with missionaries in the late nineteenth century, here too their effort to secure their own house sites by allying with state agents was the result of an attempt to gain ground in a relentless war that could transform into weapons what were, as long as Panchamas remained obedient, styled as gifts and privileges. Thus the masters’ provision of shelter in the form of house sites was also a potential threat of eviction, just as the cuvantai, a “retaining fee” whose repayment was never expected, simultaneously enabled masters to seize Panchamas’ small savings when they were in a position to actually repay it or, as was feared, to use them to vote with their feet. We may also 210  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

note here the wrath directed at the tiled house of the Pariah headman, a reminder of the encoding of subordination in the built structures of the village: it was an affront to caste folk that a solid dwelling should stand in the ghetto.62 While Panchamas in villages exploited these new possibilities, albeit in contravention of the economic rationality the government sought to instill in them, a small but significant cohort of Panchama activists and writers were likewise developing their own distinctive understanding of “the economic” and its relationship to Panchama servitude. Thus, as mirasidars sent petition after petition to the government, so too did a group calling itself the South Indian Oppressed Classes Union (SIOCU). The few issues of its magazine, Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ (The Leader) that have survived reveal that Panchama activists were following the situation in Tanjore with close attention. We also know that following a mass meeting of the mirasidars of Tanjore to protest the government order, the SIOCU organized its own meeting to counter the mirasidars’ claims.63 The speeches made at the meeting have not survived, and all that remains is brief but bracing commentary on the issue in the pages of Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ. Let us begin by considering the magazine’s position on the vexed question of the relation between Panchamas’ labor and their caste. Vaḻikkāṭṭuvōṉ’s position on the house-site issue can be more accurately pinpointed by considering several key passages in which caste is analyzed both in terms of social relations and in terms of wealth [aicuvariyam]. In an explanation of how the Union acquired its name, the editor, S.  A.  S. Tangamuttu notes the following: It may be remarked that this Union has been curiously named as “The Oppressed Classes Union.” The names suggested by the Originators, viz., “The South India Panchama Union” and “The South India Depressed Classes Mission” were not welcome to the members as they said that they were not depressed but oppressed by other people even in trifling matters such as the wearing of shoes and holding of umbrellas. . . . The landlords .  .  . oppress them in exacting more work than is conscientiously fixed for coolies in factories and mills. . . . Hence the name . . . is given to suit the desire of the majority of the Depressed Classes.64

Tangamuttu here identified two pivotal aspects of the mirasidars’ position, which elided their own role in socially reproducing the Panchama E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   211

as Panchama. First, he impugned the description of Panchamas as depressed. Such language, as we ourselves have seen, allowed others to depict Panchamas’ poverty as a natural fact, guaranteed by the universal existence of such a class. Recall, for instance, the evocation by mirasidar petitions of a “certain class of people” who exist everywhere—and Tanjore was no exception—with whom the “better sort” do not associate. In contrast, Tangamuttu described Panchamas’ condition as one of oppression, in which the active efforts of mirasidars produced and maintained a very particular form of degradation and even extended the realm of their tyranny to matters of shoes and umbrellas. In the same vein, Tangamuttu denied any similarity, of the kind that mirasidars were so keen to promote, between the factory or mill worker and the paṇṇaiyāḷ. He stressed the unique features of a regime that mirasidars maintained was unexceptional (and thereby universal). And, by means of revealing the particularity and especially the man-made quality of Tanjore’s rural labor relations, he highlighted their relational quality as well: oppressed classes can exist only by virtue of those who so oppress them. In another decisive passage, P. S. Samuel, a cofounder of the SIOCU, explained the centrality of the notion of wealth, aicuvariyam, to the conception of oppressed caste improvement [otukkapaṭukiṟa cātikaḷin virutti] that the SIOCU sought to propagate among its members. A hortatory piece on the importance of careful money management began with the following observation: “With respect to any [powerful] caste in the world, we can observe that wealth alone is the principal basis for their existence as well as their superiority. Money makes all sorts of action possible . . . [and] indeed, as everyone knows, there is no respect in this world for those without it. . . . It is a fact, moreover, that a poor man is thought to be evil and disreputable.”65 It was for this reason that the members of oppressed castes were enjoined to exercise stringent control over their “earnings and expenditure” (varavu celavu). Wealth, for Samuel, was thus the immediate need of the oppressed castes, and its lack was the proximate cause of their condition of oppression. While mirasidars acknowledged Panchamas’ poverty, they were at pains to deny a causal link between monetary status and caste and indeed never tired of repeating that many people were poor, not just Panchamas. Against this common high-caste argument Samuel asserted that caste itself was an effect of worldly power: “wealth alone is the principal basis for . . . [a caste’s] superiority.” 212  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

Similarly, Samuel sought to reconfigure prevalent conceptions of morality. Missionaries, as we have seen, had inaugurated the Pariah Problem with themes of their spiritual slavery. In this style of thinking, Pariahs’ poverty was never in doubt, but their abasement, it was repeatedly declared, was the result of the wretched state of their souls and their poor moral and social habits. Caste people, for their part, had long derided Pariahs’ alleged filth and immoral practices, and indeed, in the view of missionaries and British officials, while the master’s brutality was cruel and unnecessary, his disgust was often regarded by them as understandable. Samuel reversed this order of causation, insisting instead that poverty was primary and that it was this that caused others to disdain them: “A poor man is thought to be evil and disreputable.” Indeed, Tamil aphorisms such as illātavaṉ pollātavaṉ (“Have-nots are wicked”), attest to the cultural resonance Samuel’s observations would have had for readers.66 These conceptions of Panchama servitude underlie the magazine’s response to house sites. Tangamuttu, remarking on the debate on house sites in the Legislative Council, first wondered, “Maybe [the mirasidars] are afraid all the Panchamas [once they own their house sites] will give up agricultural work in order to take up administrative posts [tācil uttiyōkam]? Hardly one in a thousand are trained to do that.”67 This observation—namely, that any change in labor relations brought about by the government order could never involve anything so drastic as Panchamas quitting work, as they quite simply had no other alternatives—was, as we have seen, frequently expressed by state officials as well, and was even used to reassure mirasidars. Tangamuttu’s reference to administrative posts, however, was not simply an innocent choice of one among the many professions closed to Panchamas. It was but a prelude to a scathing and ironic depiction of the Tanjore mirasidars. They were portrayed by Tangamuttu not merely as cruel to their laborers in their perpetuation of aṭimaimuṟai (slavery) but also as indolent men who had, to their own detriment and that of their lands, renounced agriculture for the swagger of the administrator: The maxim, “Grow crops, and eat what you have ploughed” [uḻutuṇ payircey] is only being followed properly in zillahs [districts] other than this one.  .  .  . [Tanjore mirasidars] have taken up high posts [in government administration]. They appear to believe that the noble work of agriculture is something to be despised, and have entrusted E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   213

their wet and dry lands, which could earn them thousands of rupees, to the ignorant, uncultured Panchaman. Then with the very meager income they receive from their lands they lie on their sofas, becoming even lazier than the Panchama!68

Tangamuttu concluded, “When mirasidars of [once] modest means .  .  . today have motorcars to climb into, shouldn’t paṇṇaiyāḷs be able to advance even a little?”69 What Tangamuttu refused, therefore, was the view we have now seen advanced many times, that Tanjore’s conditions were in no way exceptional. They were unique in the degree not only to which mirasidars oppressed workers but also to which they had failed in their obligations to uphold the virtues of agrarian life, and indeed to the state, by failing to exploit the revenue-generating potential of their property. While mirasidars claimed they were struggling against high revenue demands and bad agricultural seasons and were now afraid the house-site scheme would increase laborers’ wages, Tangamuttu maintained that their lack of greater profit sprang from an insufficient industriousness—the very charge everyone, from missionaries to landholders, leveled against Panchamas. Dissolute mirasidars, in thrall to Western luxuries (sofas and motorcars) had forfeited any claim to be able to reap fruit from the land, a claim based on skills possessed by Panchamas alone. The accusation that mirasidars were thereby not showing the respect due to agriculture is a stinging one in Tamil country, where cultivation of the soil is widely exalted as the most virtuous profession and cultivators as the most ennobled class. While some “high” castes styled themselves cultivators and “breakers of the soil” par excellence (most famously, Tamil Vellalars), the lofty title was never granted to Panchamas.70 In depicting Panchamas as the true tillers of the soil, Tangamuttu exposed dominant caste ideology in Tamil country as a fraud and a sham.71 In the process of this argument, Tangamuttu attempted furthermore to effect a division between mirasidars and the government, parties whose apparently selfevident unity T. Ranga Achariyar had invoked in reminding the colonizer that mirasidars, in effect, made governing possible. Tangamuttu argued that mirasidars were not producing their due for the state and that what they did glean from their lands was wholly the work of those he sarcastically dubbed, channeling the disparagement of landlords, “ignorant, uncultured Panchamas.” It was not Panchamas who were thriftless, 214  E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E

that is, but mirasidars. And it was Panchamas who the state should value as revenue-producers.

Conclusion: Social Governance as Divide and Rule? The Complicated Politics of Welfare By the late 1910s, the notion of public opinion had entered into and thereby begun to transform the discussion of public purposes and public goods. Public opinion was both the subject and object of these discussions. On the one hand, District Munsiff Krishna Ayyar had argued that the elevation of the Panchama could constitute a public purpose precisely because the Panchamas’ plight was now the subject of public platforms and had the broad sympathy of patriots everywhere. On the other hand, a spotlight was shone on the government itself at this time as well, making public opinion of the government newly significant. Government actions were closely scrutinized by both nationalist and loyalist political parties, and conversely, the interests and wishes of those parties assumed prominence within the corridors of the administration. In this new era of accountability and public debate, one cannot help but notice that the government’s concern for the Panchama took a sharply interventionist turn at precisely the moment that nationalist mobilizers began concerted efforts in Madras. The recent historiography has unsurprisingly interpreted such government intervention as yet another example of colonial divide et impera. Haruka Yanagisawa, for example, deduces that “the implementation of the policy of amelioration towards the Depressed Classes, particularly after the 1910s, was accelerated by the government’s concern over the expanding nationalist movement and the subsequent need to foster a pro-British mood among the Depressed castes.”72 Certainly Panchama political organizations in Madras, such as the SIOCU, were staunchly loyal to the British government, and no doubt the government appreciated and wished to maintain that loyalty. But the interpretive model of divide and rule implies that the society in question was not already divided by the antagonistic relation between Dalits and caste people and furthermore, ignores the deep roots that the caste–state nexus had sunk into every branch of local governance. That is to say, the government could not very well court Panchamas without antagonizing the castes for whom they labored (some of whom were also extremely E V E R Y D A Y W A R F A R E   215

loyal to the Raj). Given the extent of antagonism between Panchamas and other castes, moreover, the operational difficulties of attempting to put any welfare measures into practice were formidable, as we have seen. When the house-site scheme was extended to Chingleput a few years later, in the early 1920s, Collector H.  A.  B. Vernon grew considerably alarmed at the bitter opposition of non-Brahmin landowners who had hitherto been entirely uninvolved in anticolonial nationalism: At present the landowners of the district, the majority of whom are nonbrahmans are loyal to the backbone and ready to support Government in every possible way. The seeds of non-co-operation have not stuck any root in this district.73 This class is the class which will be principally affected by the rise of the Adidravidas [i.e. Panchamas] to an independent position and it is this class which at present is hostile to the movement. Rightly or wrongly they regard . . . [state ameliorative schemes] as inimical to them and I anticipate that their attitude towards Government may be seriously prejudiced if the present methods are continued.74

The government, therefore, might well have wished to promote Panchama loyalty, but it could only do so at the expense of others’ disloyalty, others who were far more politically important. And even putting things this way—speaking, that is, of the government in this context, as if it lies outside the society that suffers its policies—is misleading, insofar as the very ameliorative schemes with which we are concerned were shaped by administrators who were also caste people and often landowners. No wonder then, that the rationale for intervention developed in the late 1910s was soon countered with another more powerful argument, as the next chapter will describe. Ameliorative programs were never carried out to an appreciable extent, for they could gain ground only against the voices of Indians and Britons, officials and nonofficials, who would solemnly intone that “the Paraiya must learn to work out his own salvation” and not expect it to be the duty of the state, who sought to ensure that the Pariah Problem be considered “domestic, rather than imperial”—and therefore social rather than political.75

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Chapter 9 THE DEPRESSED CL ASSES, RIGHTS, A N D T H E E M B R AC E O F T H E S O C I A L

The strains of antagonism we heard in the preceding chapter came to a crescendo in the late 1910s, as dyarchy was extended in India.1 From 1918 onward, Dalits themselves were included on legislative bodies as representatives of their own communities. These first-generation Dalit representatives brought to center stage the question of routine violations of their own rights as “citizens” (the term by which they referred to themselves), and this in turn elicited a critical response.2 Just as the policy of religious neutrality had once placed matters of Dalit welfare firmly outside the purview of the official state apparatus, at this juncture a new concept of “the social” was enlisted to do the same work. With dyarchy, the Depressed Classes (as Dalits had become known by this time)3 were no longer to be only the object of the state’s liberality and the missionary’s tutelage but were to be enlisted to participate, as specifically political subjects, in the administration of their own well-being.4 To that end, the Madras government nominated several members of the Depressed Classes to the newly reformed Legislative Council of 1919. These men, the most active of whom were L. C. Guruswami, M. C. Rajah, Rettamalai Srinivasan, and R. Veerian, came to occupy vocal positions on the council. Their participation in formal governmental arenas had an important consequence that continues to shape political modernity

in India. These activists sought protections for what they understood as rights guaranteed to them by virtue of their citizenship alone. The virtually unanimous response to these attempts was the conceptualization of a new domain in which reform was supposed to take place and in which the Depressed Classes were advised to seek their salvation, namely, the social. This extragovernmental realm was where Indians—as Indians and without imperial interference—were to conduct the projects of social reform necessary for successful nation-building (whether that nation was construed as Indian or “Dravidian,” about which more will be said in the book’s conclusion). The heightened social-reformist activity of this period, directed toward the modernization of caste and carried out by a wide range of political players, must therefore be read as a response to challenges raised by Dalit representatives.5 The emergence of the social, in other words, marks a further solution directed at the Pariah problem.

Religious Rights Contra Citizens’ Rights; or, The Socialization of the Pariah Problem We begin then, by examining how members of Madras’s first nonBrahminist political party, Justice, Brahmin nationalists, and other elite constituencies (such as both British and Indian businessmen and European missionaries), who represented Madras’s various publics on the Legislative Council, transformed the relation between the notionally distinct spheres of religion and politics in response to Depressed Classes activism. Much of this book has concerned the emergence, redefinition, and transformation of the sphere of religion; now both religion and politics would be set in opposition to a third term, the social. Readers will recall from chapter 5 the mirasidar T. Ranganatha Tawker, sole landlord of the entire village of Sothuperumbadu in Chingleput District, who expressed his disapproval over the government’s suggestion to transfer a few cents of land to his Panchama laborers to relieve overcrowding in the cēri in 1896. Tawker successfully checked the government’s plan when he hit upon the strategy of claiming the need for caste folk to maintain distance from the Pariah as a religious right. To understand the distinctive reactions to Depressed Classes politicians’ activities in the political conjuncture of the later 1910s, we must return briefly to 218  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

that incident and its implications for the ways in which the social world was spatialized. Tawker’s claim of a religious right depended on the view that those he described as the general public, who would be affected by any changes in Panchama habitation in fact comprised only caste inhabitants; likewise, the “public” footpath was one which it ought to be convenient for caste residents in particular to traverse. Tawker relied upon a conception of space in which every territory had specific rightful inhabitants: “publicness” as such, and public space in particular, had not acquired, in Indian rural usage, its classical liberal referent, namely a resource to which every member of the populace, by virtue of citizenship alone, has access.6 It must be remembered, of course, that access to certain kinds of space was at once access to significant resources: spaces forbidden to Dalits included grazing grounds, water resources, sites from which firewood could be collected, and so on. More importantly, in cases such as the one under consideration, access to public thoroughfares and the maintenance of so-called distance pollution were also essential to the preservation of landlord control over house sites, itself a key component of landlords’ ability to enforce labor discipline. House-site lands and other strategic spaces were styled puramboke, “communal” lands belonging to everyone, but despite their name, they were the sole preserve of caste folk. Hence the outrage that ensued when it was suggested that Pariahs too were members of the public.7 We have already observed the way in which the idea of the public good was slowly extended by the government in the late 1910s to include the good of the Panchama. That, however, was a redefinition largely instigated by a new governmental conception of responsibility to the populace. The redefinition of public space attempted by Depressed Classes political actors in the late 1910s and early 1920s, which this chapter describes, was premised on a different conception of space and rights and on a new idea of the subject of rights as a citizen; Depressed Classes representatives now demanded access to public goods in equal measure to their fellow citizens. From the moment of their nomination to the council, Depressed Classes politicians invoked with increasing regularity the right to the use of rural and urban space now conceived of as public in a distinctly modern liberal sense: The benefits of roads and wells paid for by public monies, public buildings, and anything else funded by the public exchequer ought to be, in their view, enjoyed by everyone. Against T H E D E PR E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L   219

the religious or customary “rights” demanded in past decades by caste folk, Depressed Classes activists introduced the concept of citizens’ rights and thus brought to the fore the new subject of rights that dyarchy, in theory, heralded. And to this demand, as we shall see, officials and Indians from across the political spectrum, however superficially at variance, were fundamentally and unanimously opposed. It was no simple matter to fully persuade authorities of new definitions of space and publicness. The Governor of Madras, Lord Willingdon, gave a public audience to a deputation of the Depressed Classes from the district of Malabar, among whose many demands was a plea for unfettered entry into public space. Willingdon’s response is illustrative of the resistance that Depressed Classes representatives would soon encounter, as well as of the new importance of society that elites would begin to invoke: “His Excellency observed that the general question was one which trenched upon religious practices and that the policy of government was non-interference in such matters. Public buildings such as post and telegraph offices were of course free to everyone and no pronouncement would help memorialists there.”8 To His Excellency then, the “disability” was the result of religious practices and was so deeply embedded in the domain of religion that no mere pronouncement of official disapproval would suffice to effect a transformation. Religiosity in Indians, and especially the religiosity upon which caste practices were founded, was construed as being rooted in prerational affect, in sentiment. Understood fundamentally as a principle of consciousness and not of political-economic or social arrangements, the reform of caste was reduced to a matter of voluntary attitude adjustment on the part of elites. A more significant transformation occurred when Dalits themselves began to address this issue on the provincial Legislative Council. A proposal made in 1919 by M. C. Rajah, the Madras government’s first Dalit nominee to the council, elicited the first official debate on the rights of Dalits to space in which Dalits themselves participated. Here, for the first time, what public should mean—and what it had meant de facto—was explicitly addressed, reflecting the growing importance in public debate of abstract rights enjoyed by citizens, as well as the waning legitimacy of religious rights conferred differentially on religious communities. With the publicness of space now linked to universal citizenship, Rajah’s proposal was that the government call upon local administration to actively 220  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

enforce the access of Depressed Classes citizens to this space. To illustrate Rajah’s rationale I quote in extenso: While the higher castes are indulging in transcendental politics and nation-building, we are denied the elementary rights of citizenship [such as walking on] the king’s highway and drawing water from public wells, places to which every man and woman ought to have free access by virtue of their citizenship. . . . I ask that the Government may make it perfectly clear that the depressed classes have a right to use public wells . . . etc. It is not a new right that we ask to be extended to us. We believe that we have the right as citizens of British India to use all . . . [things] constructed and maintained out of public funds to which the depressed classes contribute as ratepayers. What objection can Government have to . . . enforc[ing] the rights which every citizen possesses .  .  . ? .  .  . Are our rights to be sacrificed simply because of .  .  . so-called religious scruples which are really the fetters with which [some] seek to enslave others . . . ? Is the Christian Government that abolished Sati and made the Brahman subject to the penalties of the criminal laws equally with the . . . [Depressed Classes] going to countenance the doctrine of touchpollution which prevents citizens of the British Empire [from enjoying] the common benefits of citizenship?9

Rajah opposes rights, the “common benefits of citizenship,” to “religious scruples,” and in so doing denies the equation between rights and sentiments that we observed in the words of village gentry such as T. Ranganatha Tawker. Rights, Rajah argues, now inhere in the realm of the public, while sentiments, scruples, of a distinctly lower status than rights, must be sacrificed when they impinge upon the realm of public citizenship, a realm whose protection is a matter of supervening concern for the government. Religious rights and the rights that Rajah claimed differed not only in the principle of legitimacy upon which each was founded, namely immemorial custom and universal citizenship. Rather, for the difference between the two to make sense, space had to be reconfigured. Space and the natural resources it contained— water and pastureland, for instance—had to be made public property. What was called public could no longer be the purview of one set of private interests. T H E D E PR E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L   221

How would this attempted redefinition be received? The striking nature of the pattern of response that emerged to this challenge bespeaks a fundamental transformation in the use of the language of rights and with it the newfound centrality of a domain called “the social.” British officials, such as Lord Willingdon, as we have already seen, were moving toward a new understanding of Indian society, wherein certain kinds of problems would now no longer burden the state but would find their solution in society. This, as we shall see, was almost unanimously seconded by Indians in the new arenas of political deliberation: Indian and British officials would readily and sympathetically acknowledge glaring infringements upon what Rajah and others called the rights of citizenship of the Depressed Classes, but they arrived at the conclusion that these infringements were more accurately characterized as disabilities in the sphere of the social.10 This move is starkly evident in the discussion of Rajah’s proposal by the members of the Legislative Council that took place in November 1919. Of the thirteen men who spoke to vet Rajah’s proposal, only one supported it, one N. Subba Rao, who did so on the grounds that it was a matter of justice and thus amenable to state protection. Not only did every other member find fault with Rajah’s proposal—however delicately, and however deep their sympathy with all manner of reform—they all did so on identical grounds. And these were men of diverse political stripe, from a missionary whose mission was famous for its Depressed Classes uplift work in Madras, to a British tradesman who jocularly referred to his own community as equally low caste, from orthodox Brahmins to high-caste Indian Catholics.11 Thus, one M. C. Muttaya Chettiyar pledged his “full sympathy with the object of the resolution,” even as he had to insist that “these matters are beyond the scope of legislative interference.”12 Desika Achariyar elaborated: “There are distinctions prevailing in the country from time immemorial and we cannot, by a stroke of the pen or a resolution in this council, abolish [them].”13 Yet Achariyar wished to affirm his “every sympathy with the spirit of the resolution.”14 Reverend E. M. MacPhail praised the council for its concern with matters pertaining to the elevation of the Depressed Classes but himself felt he could only vote for the resolution if there were any actual “statutory” prohibitions against access; in short, he could not support it, for what prohibitions did exist were not statutory in kind. J. H. Thonger, a

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tradesman, gently admonished Rajah for attempting to “get rid of caste by a resolution. . . . The only way to get it done is . . . by working out your own salvation and not by expecting Government to work it out for you.”15 Virtually all members of the council thus agreed: however much one might loathe the practice of restricting Pariahs’ access to certain spaces, it was not a matter for the government but rather a matter that society would have to take up. Save for a sole dissenter, all unanimously declared that Rajah’s claim to political rights in fact amounted to a plea for the removal of a social disability and was thereby not a matter for government. All vociferously supported the kind of social reform that would produce the results Rajah wanted—thus the repeated avowal of sympathy with Rajah’s “object”—but all were sure that the success of such reforms depended on their being allowed to take their own course. The business proper to the council was to implement politics, not to alter society. Rajah withdrew his resolution. A few years later, in 1923, the Viceroy, Lord Reading, visited Madras and met with representatives of the Depressed Classes, including Rajah. In the Viceroy’s response to grievances put forth by these men was a succinct and authoritative proclamation of the new position on the business of dyarchic government as the facilitator of political progress alone, and the simultaneous assertion that the aims of men such as Rajah lay within the realm of the social. Indicative of the new climate of dyarchy, in which solicitude to the Depressed Classes was recognized as a matter of considerable political moment,16 was his solemn assurance to the representatives that “Government fully realises the great importance of your community.  .  .  . which forms the bulk of the labouring and agricultural element . . . and [has] . . . rendered valuable service to the Empire in the war.  .  .  . [You] are in no danger of being overlooked.”17 For the goal of the self-governing institutions that dyarchy had founded, after all, was “the extension of equal responsibilities and equal privileges to those who are equal in the eyes of the law.”18 This recognition of the political importance of the Depressed Classes and of their political and legal equality with all others was quickly followed, however, by the reclassification of the rights that Rajah had characterized as being founded upon political citizenship: “The disabilities from which you suffer are, as I have shown, not fundamentally political. They partake more of a social nature.”19

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This tautological definition of political equality (that politics was the realm governed by the rule of law, which guaranteed equality; therefore inequality by fiat simply could not be political) meant that inequality needed a new home. The redress of unequal access to space and to publicly funded goods was not a part of politics proper but a problem of the social, and social problems were the problems societies—and in particular colonized societies being trained in the arts of self-government—had to manage for themselves. Such problems were, in the words of another official, “domestic, and not imperial.”20 On this point, the colonial state and high-caste native elites across the political spectrum were in complete agreement. If these manifest inequalities were not to be addressed as matters of political right, and devolved instead onto society, how in fact could transformation occur? The answer: in people’s minds! Consider the deposition of Rajah and Rettamalai Srinivasan, another well-known Depressed Classes politician, before the Royal Commission on Superior Civil Services, in which they alleged that in most courts in the presidency Pariah litigants were forced to remain outside, providing evidence through the medium of peons as they stood before doorways or windows.21 Indian and British officials alike were highly skeptical of these charges. An incredulous C.  P. Ramaswamy Ayyar, the prominent Congressite (who would in fact later distinguish himself as a champion of India’s first Temple Entry Act in 1936) communicated his “astonish[ment] to hear of [this]” and promised to inquire into the matter, although not before asking of Rajah, “Is the honourable Member quite sure about his facts?”22 In private, officials dismissed the allegations as highly implausible if not “perfectly false, except in a few stray cases.”23 Again, however, it should be stressed that this was not an empirical claim but a matter of indisputable logic given that the rule of law was in existence, for, an official of the Law Department averred, “There is no rule preventing the members of depressed classes from entering the Civil Courts. Educated members . . . find no difficulty in the matter. The uneducated among them are behind . . . in making use of the privilege especially on account of their shyness or fear.”24 All that remained to be accomplished once the rule of law had been established was progress in the intangible inner worlds of social actors, and this was not the business of government. If the Depressed Classes would only put their diffidence to rest, equality was there for the taking. (In the same year, the representative, R. Veerian, who exhibited 224  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

no discernable shyness or fear in the council, as we shall see below, was prevented from entering a post office in a village in his home district of Salem because it was on a street inhabited by Brahmins.25) Despite this official reluctance, and on the repeated insistence of Depressed Classes representatives, an official inquiry was eventually completed in Tanjore. First came replies from the district magistrates of Tanjore, the District Judge of West Tanjore, and the members of the Tanjore Bar Association, all of whom denied even the knowledge of any such incidents, let alone their own role in perpetuating them.26 Yet when the Labor Commissioner’s subordinates were prompted to enquire more closely and to interview Dalits themselves, they found that prohibition was the rule, not the stuff of a “stray case,” and the language of the official response to the results of the inquiry is especially noteworthy. George Paddison, Commissioner of Labor, reported that his tahsildars found that the practice of exclusion of the Depressed Classes in two of the three district munsiff ’s courts Veerian had specified was so ubiquitous as to leave no room for doubting Veerian’s charge, although his subordinate’s report was careful to specify that “it is not due to the orthodox[y] on the part of the Presiding Judge but it is the mamool [custom] which the members of the depressed classes adopt, that is the cause of their standing outside.”27 Another deputy tahsildar confirmed that the Depressed Classes could neither enter the courts nor even use the verandahs until they were summoned and had to communicate to their lawyers “through the medium of caste men.”28 Nevertheless, he too maintained that “this treatment is [not] deliberately practised or warranted by the Court and it is apparently the result of .  .  . public opinion and social convention . . . which mass education and time are expected to set right.”29 In this routine correspondence, society once again emerges as a repository of convention and “mamool” (māmūl, here meaning “custom”) that could not be directly administered. No sooner had the Depressed Classes entered the realm of representative politics and begun to employ the languages of citizenship and right against forms of exclusion once claimed as matters of religious right by their caste superiors than these forms of exclusion were once again placed beyond the reach of official amelioration. Access to space, a terrain of contestation, was now cordoned off in society. Like religion, society, this new object of governmental noninterference, was the preserve of the native. But unlike religion, society was not depicted as a remnant of the T H E D E PR E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L   225

past or a place of stasis; to the contrary, in society, the Depressed Classes were assured, progress was imminent. Government was insistent that no legal measures kept the Depressed Classes out of buildings or streets and therefore no legal remedies would alter existing conditions, thus acceding in a slightly more politic idiom to the justificatory analyses presented by subordinate officials cited above.

Persistent Politics and the Archive Within the Archive The Depressed Classes members of the council spent the first few years of their careers, from the late 1910s until 1925, bringing instance after instance of the abrogation of citizens’ right to space to the attention of the council.30 Rajah’s proposal was thus but an opening salvo in a coordinated effort on the part of these men to secure rights of access to public goods, and the dependable implementation of schemes for the acquisition of lands by the Depressed Classes.31 The records of their efforts, in the form of petitions and letters they wrote themselves or more often forwarded to the government on behalf of ordinary Dalit men and women across the presidency, are a veritable archive within the archive. This repository of petitions, in Tamil and in English, coming primarily from small towns and villages, attests to the widespread recognition by Dalits of violations of their rights. Rights talk was not limited to urban Dalits, nor to a small circle of political activists. The sheer size of this cache— several hundred files—displays the zeal of Dalit representatives, whose dogged efforts to communicate with and on behalf of those they represented is simply unmatched by other representatives at the time. Numbers of submissions by Depressed Classes representatives to the Madras Legislative Council in the years between roughly 1920 and 1925 far outweigh queries submitted by other constituencies. The most active in this regard, R. Veerian, for example, alone submitted over a hundred letters or queries to the government in the two-year period between 1924 and 1926. This archive of Dalit activity, hidden in plain sight among official papers, illuminates in painful detail the nature of the social in which Dalits were enjoined to “seek their salvation.” To the verbal contests concerning rights to space that were ongoing in the council, these records must be read as an ironic rejoinder, revealing parallel contests on the

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ground in which Dalits throughout the presidency experienced at first hand the futility of the social solution they were offered. The issue of what happened on a bus in a village in North Arcot, raised in the council by R. Veerian in 1925, usefully exemplifies this genre of document, as well as the effects it could have. The Pachayappan Motor Company owned buses that plied the route between the headquarters of Tiruvannamalai Taluk and the village of Samalpatti. On one occasion, two Adi-Dravidas [as Dalits were sometimes called at this time] who had already purchased their tickets, boarded the bus.32 According to a letter Veerian wrote and sent to be placed before the council, these two individuals were then recognized as Adi-Dravidas, abused with foul language, and driven off the bus by furious fellow passengers. When they asked for their fares back, the caste folk on the bus abused them further—the effrontery of expecting money back when they had already polluted the bus! Such were the bare outlines of the incident. Veerian raised this before the council by asking whether “it is a fact that the Pachayappan Motor Service Company . . . refused utterly to take into the bus on 21st May 1925 even Adi-Dravidas holding tickets .  .  . and .  .  . whether any inquiries were made regarding the matter on a reference being made by me to the Government on 30th May 1925?”33 The official response was that two Adi-Dravidas were indeed asked to leave the bus, although a policeman later secured the return of their money to them. It is telling that Veerian had received written notice of this incident involving two Adi-Dravidas in a relative backwater and had acted upon it within ten days of its occurrence. The incident took place not particularly close to either Madras city or to Coimbatore; the former being the venue of council meetings and the epicenter of politics and the latter the area from which Veerian came and therefore might be expected to have local contacts. We may surmise, from this and from the virtual avalanche of other queries of this type put forth by Veerian and by his fellow Depressed Classes representatives, originating from equally scattered locations, that members of the Depressed Classes across the presidency actively sought their counsel. In this case, Veerian wrote immediately to the officials who oversaw questions that would be raised in the council and indeed, as we shall soon see, to a host of others. In many similar instances, Depressed Classes councilmen would personally visit the localities in question to ascertain facts and to make particular recommendations to government.

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Veerian responded pointedly: Now sir, they were asked to get down even after purchasing the tickets. This is a damage done not only to the particular Adi-Dravidas but . . . to the whole of the Adi-Dravida community. In the rules . . . relating to the Motor Vehicles Amendment Act it is stated that the . . . driver should not act in the manner he did. May I know therefore whether the Government will recommend to the President of the quasi Government for the cancellation of the license?34

The law member of the council to whom this query was directed was the same C.  P. Ramaswami Ayyar who had expressed such incredulity at the suggestion that the Depressed Classes were not permitted into courts of law; he objected, “There is no quasi Government, as far as I am aware.” Veerian: I mean the District Board. Ramaswami Ayyar: I see. The Government view with regret such action. It is quite against the spirit of rules published under the Motor Vehicles Act. . . . Government are perfectly willing to see that licenses are not issued to the managers of those buses who act in this arbitrary and highhanded manner.35 Veerian was not prepared to let the matter go at that. Veerian: I want to know why in this present instance the matter was left alone. Some other members of the council interjected at this point, demanding to know, for example, what the stance of the government would be if twenty caste passengers were lost for the sake of two Adi-Dravida riders. Veerian directed the conversation back again to his query. Veerian: I want to know why now at least the Government cannot come to the rescue of the poor depressed classes by canceling the licence of the bus company so as to teach them a lesson. Ramaswami Ayyar: It is not a question of coming to the rescue. . . . I hope it will be admitted that these things cannot be done all at once. . . . 228  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

Hon. Members cannot expect persons to change their manners and modes of life and of conduct all of a sudden. The Government will take care to see that such things do not recur.36 Veerian doggedly sought to steer the conversation to the question of active law enforcement, but this was met with assurances of the kind we have already observed with respect to M.  C. Rajah’s more general demand for the Depressed Classes’ access to public space and to resources: the promise to try to ensure that the future would be different, with its underlying indulgence toward the present “modes” and “manners” of the people, from whom rapid change could not reasonably be expected. We should also notice Veerian’s invocation of a quasi-Government.37 Here he was referring to the caste–state nexus: because village and smalltown officials were, to a number, caste people who personally opposed the equal citizenship of the Depressed Classes, local administration rendered rights proclaimed in courts and legislature in Madras effectively moot. The local state was, therefore, where Depressed Classes councilmen directed their energies; hence the preponderance, when one analyzes the issues raised by Depressed Classes councilmen, of what might be judged relatively minor events, such as this concerning only two AdiDravidas and a bus in a small country town. In the late 1920s, these Depressed Classes representatives publicly and repeatedly brought the micropolitics of statecraft on the ground to the highest centers of provincial power. (The elite politics of the day, by contrast, were conducted largely in Madras city and rarely displayed any concern with the very local events and injustices that so exercised the attention of Depressed Classes representatives.) It is of particular interest, then, that others rarely bothered to even acknowledge, let alone deny, these assessments of the caste–state nexus to which men such as Veerian frequently gave voice. Save for the odd incredulous request for clarification—“What do you mean by a ‘quasi Government?’”— Depressed Classes representatives’ criticisms of the way the state operated in practice, the routine nonenforcement of law, and the quotidian violations of rights were all quietly ignored by both other council members and by representatives of the government. When a challenge to the status quo could not be effectively ignored, the social was invoked as the proper venue for Dalit political claims. T H E D E PR E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L   229

This refusal to engage with the Depressed Classes politically was of a piece with the general disdain and impatience that characterizes the reactions of others to Depressed Classes representatives and their style of doing politics. The private remarks made by Indian and British officials in response to the Depressed Classes’ claims and demands, contained as well in this archive of Depressed Classes activism, allows us to track the extent of others’ fundamental opposition to the Depressed Classes’ demands for protection by the state. The file that concerns this incident, for example, begins with a letter from Veerian. When he learned about the event (in this case we do not know who Veerian’s sources were, but it is quite likely to have been the schoolmaster Nallappan of the local Adi-Dravida night school, who had purchased the tickets for two of his family members), Veerian sent a detailed report, clearly intended to provide the necessary information for the beginnings of an official investigation. He knew that laws either were or ought to be in place to protect against this sort of event, he knew whose responsibility it was to enforce them, and he made recommendations on how to ensure their enforcement: If the District Board have not yet framed bye-laws for taking the Depressed Classes also into the motor bus, the license should be cancelled. The District Collector has got voice with reference to [i.e., has the authority to effect] cancellation of the license. So also the District Board Engineer. . . . This is a grave matter and the sufferings would only be known to the sufferers and not others. . . . Kindly make a reference to all the authorities involved in the matter.38

Veerian’s aim, therefore, was concrete action that would, as he put it in the council, “teach a lesson” to those who would disobey the law (rather than, as he would be told to do, waiting patiently for persons to follow the law of their own accord). Nor was Veerian content to wait for the law member to whom the letter was addressed to “make a reference to all the authorities involved in the matter.” Instead, he wrote to them—each and every one—himself. Veerian’s approach was a source of considerable irritation to the district magistrate of North Arcot, because it manifestly displayed Veerian’s lack of confidence in the conduct of his office. This was a form of political

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behavior to which officials were not accustomed, and the district magistrate sought to have Veerian officially reprimanded: Mr. Veerian wrote letters to Government, to the Labour Commissioner and to me, as well as to the Sub Inspector of Police on the same day (30th May 1925). In his letter to the Sub Inspector he wrote, “Please let me know whether you have reported the matter to the District Superintendent of Police as well as to the District Collector and the President, District Board for cancellation of the license. . . .” I think this opportunity might be taken to tell Mr. Veerian that he might restrict the scope of his epistolary exuberance. . . . He surely need not write to the whole hierarchy of officials at the same time.39

The district magistrate’s friends in the government concurred, noting that since they had received the magistrate’s report, Veerian had sent another letter. Official impatience with Veerian’s political modus operandi was disguised in a reprimand that only politely asked Veerian “not to submit his letters to subordinate officials where his objects can be attained by writing to Govt.”40 And yet, although explicitly asked to refrain from communicating with subordinates, Veerian continued to do so; neither did the reprimand curb his “epistolary exuberance.” (The bus incident was but one of roughly one hundred similar incidents that Veerian brought to the attention of the council in the period between 1924 and 1926, as noted above.) In addition to Veerian, M. C. Rajah, L. C. Guruswami, Rettamalai Srinivasan, and M. C. Madurai Pillai were all engaged in the same meticulous activity. In response to this relentless political action, officials’ private remarks displayed a deep sympathy for the “mores and manners” of caste people. We find, in short, less politic expressions of the sentiments they expressed when invoking the social as the only proper sphere for caste reform. The Depressed Classes’ claims to space, for example, were frequently described by officials as “very naturally resented.”41 In a discussion of a brutal attack on an Adi-Dravida man for the crime of carrying a parasol, caste people in South Arcot were reasoned to have found it quite “naturally objectionable.”42 These comments were never seen by the Depressed Classes councilmen who were forced to seek justice from these very officials; they received instead bland, officially

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emended responses, offering the social solution. Sometimes these emendations amounted to outright falsehood. When Veerian asked, on many occasions, about the discriminatory treatment of Adi-Dravidas in jails, where they were made to do scavenging work, given lesser forms of clothing than caste folk, and assigned different cooks, government officials conceded behind closed doors the existence of all these practices, as well as the impossibility of changing them, for such provisions were explicitly included in the Jail Manual.43 Veerian had also asked whether untouchability and unapproachability were practiced in jails, to which the Inspector General of Prisons simply answered, in private correspondence with Legislative Council officials, “Yes. This cannot be avoided so long as caste prisoners are confined in Jails.”44 The Inspector General further described the Jail Manual’s specifications for providing different uniforms, cooks, cooking spaces, and utensils to prisoners, which were assigned by categorizing prisoners as Brahmins, Panchamas, and others, or in a bipartite scheme as simply Panchamas and all others. But in the official response, after much deliberation on how to frame it, the technically correct but nevertheless utterly misleading statement made to Veerian was, “The Government are unable to understand the exact meaning of the question. Prisoners are not divided off in work or on parade on caste considerations.”45 Finally, Adi-Dravidas’ own eagerness for state support was often found an inappropriate and regrettable response to the government’s ameliorative schemes and concessions. “The efforts of the [government] are sometimes mistaken by [the Adi-Dravidas] and they think that Government is on their side and they could do whatever they like,” complained one subordinate officer, before going on to testify that “in [his] own presence” the Adi-Dravidas were “defiant and insulting” and “stubborn and determined” in demanding their rights be conferred.46 The Depressed Classes were routinely faulted for “bombard[ing] Government” with petitions, for “getting ideas of rights and equality into their heads,” for becoming more and more “aware of their rights,” and for not allowing “a day [to pass] without a petition received.” And then, as now, representatives of the Depressed Classes were subject to perpetual and petty suspicion on the part of officials and other political elites and frequently accused of acting for their own personal advancement—even as ordinary members of the Depressed Classes were portrayed by suspicious officials as dupes being hoodwinked by their wily representatives.47 232  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

The Price of Persistence; or, The Return of the Ancien Régime It was no doubt this sheer persistence, which continued to make the Pariah problem a well-publicized matter, that prompted the government to finally issue a brief order in late 1924 reasserting that it “intended” public thoroughfares to be at the disposal of all Indians regardless of caste or creed.48 The passing of the order in 1924 was by no means, however, a sotto voce admission that Rajah, Srinivasan, and Veerian had been correct all along in describing access to space as a right. This becomes evident as we trace what happened when, as was more and more frequently the case, the Depressed Classes and others began to invoke the law that promised to protect this right—that is, to test how far their rights would be actively enforced. A landmark among such instances was the carefully orchestrated entry of Ezhavars, a low-ranked caste, into a Brahmin street during a religious festival in Kalpathy village in Malabar in 1924. The effort of the Ezhavars was explicitly influenced by the publication of the order of 1924 mentioned above, attesting to the presidency-wide effects of Depressed Classes councilmen’s activity. The action was led by an Ezhavar lawyer by the name of M. Raghavan, who told officials of his intention in advance, reminding them that the Brahmin street was public insofar as it was maintained by municipal funds and in his own recounting of events, noted that he had “happened to get a copy” of the government order and “began to give the G.O. the widest publicity by handbills and also by tom tom.”49 When the Ezhavars entered the Brahmin street as planned on the first day of an annual festival, Brahmins protested by attacking them with stones. Yet when local authorities quickly attempted to restore order, they did so by preventing the further use of the street by the Ezhavars and by arresting them for disturbing the peace. The case that ensued was discussed throughout the native press in the presidency for a number of weeks. The irony that the Ezhavars were themselves charged escaped neither their leader, Raghavan, nor Depressed Classes council members. Veerian, in a letter to the law member of the council, A. R. Knapp, decried the bias with which rights were defined and defended by the government: The intention of the Depressed Classes to pass through the Kalpathy Public Road is not to create any disturbance or cause any breach of peace, but simply to worship God. . . . It is therefore quite evident from the order of the District Magistrate that he regarded the sentiments T H E D E PR E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L   233

of the non-Depressed Classes alone to the detriment of the Depressed Classes. . . . It would have been better if the Dt. Magistrate had issued an order to the non-Depressed Classes not to molest, or abuse, or misbehave toward, the Depressed Classes when the latter go to the said place in a peaceful and religious manner to worship God.50

Veerian observed here that the right to have one’s “religious sentiments” protected was one that had hitherto been granted to caste people alone. In so doing, he called attention to the peculiarly caste-specific function that religious neutrality had taken on in colonial Madras, as was discussed above in chapter 5. For his part, the Ezhavar leader, Raghavan, in a missive to the government, argued the legal aspects of the case and underscored, too, how by effectively punishing the Ezhavars for the disturbance, the magistrate’s order had made a dead letter of the regulation for which Rajah, Srinivasan, and other council members had long battled. In private correspondence with Srinivasan, Raghavan wrote, “I need not tell you that it is your lookout to ask the Government if their G.O. accepting your Resolution in Council has any value or is only a piece of paper which affects none.”51 Officials, meanwhile, were in a state of confusion. Having passed an order regarding access to public streets, it was “impossible,” one official lamented, to “throw it over and practically declare it meaningless.”52 The flurry of official correspondence that ensued (which included a fevered attempt to portray the streets in question as perhaps not being public after all) culminated in the view that the Ezhavars undeniably had the right to use the street; yet as we have seen, officials were loath to use the state apparatus to enforce that right. The solution to this administrative quandary took the form of a discursive refinement on the part of officials so as to discriminate among rights, to determine exactly how much protection each merited, a refinement that in turn reasserted the priority of the social over the political as the terrain of caste contestation. A. R. Knapp, who lamented that the government could not avoid admitting that the Ezhavars were justified in claiming access, because Kalpathy had now become such a well-known event, gave the following explanation for his reluctance to support the active enforcement of their rights: I do not think that Government is called upon to actively support the lower castes in so far as their claim is merely to an abstract right. Our main concern should be the utilitarian and material side of the 234  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

matter. . . . I think that on the ground that the streets are . . . public we ought to uphold the right of Ezhuvans to use them as a thoroughfare, though I would stop short of any encouragement to them to parade the streets merely for the purpose of asserting an abstract claim.53

Knapp’s concern appears to be that nothing would be achieved by marching on this thoroughfare save for the very act of doing so: it would serve no “utilitarian or material” purpose. Thereby this was also a statement that the most legitimate kind of right was only one whose exercise led to material betterment. Indeed, Knapp reproved Ezhavars for not “concentrat[ing] on removing restrictions which actually cause material detriment.”54 It was a specific historical trajectory, as we have seen, that made it possible to think that the regulation of access to space did not redound in material benefit. We have come full circle: First, the outcome of everyday violent struggle between Pariah laborers and their masters resulted in the successful abstraction of distance pollution from labor control so as to find protection for both in the name of religious rights and sentiments. In chapter 5, for example, the mirasidar Tawker maintained control over his laborers’ house sites by invoking the threat of distance pollution. That artificial abstraction had by this time become so ingrained that access to space was contemptuously referred to as mere assertion, not comparable to any right with material effect. It was not only foreign officials for whom “mere assertion” was a lesser form of rights claim. One council member, a Siva Rao, in response to Rajah’s original resolution made in 1919, revealed his fear that “if a resolution like this is passed .  .  . simply for the sake of an assertion of their rights . . . [the Depressed Classes will] create disturbances and riots and there will be bloodshed.”55 Therefore, at the same time as both the Depressed Classes’ disabilities and their salvation were said to be found in the social, any hard-won attempts on their part to claim access to public goods as a right could be deprecated as having been based on a mere abstraction, which, moreover, could not be allowed to pass into action on the grounds that this would amount to an attack on society itself. A final event will illustrate how assertions by members of the Depressed Classes of their rights were depicted as unworthy of protection because they were “merely abstract.”56 It will also reveal how officials could exploit the ambiguity between the two kinds of rights we have identified as being politically salient in colonial Madras: those based on religion and T H E D E PR E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L   235

those based on modern citizenship. We observed how Depressed Classes councilmen attempted to argue for the legitimacy of the latter alone to dyarchic India; now we will witness the resurgence of “customary rights” in governmental language when a violation of Depressed Classes’ rights of citizenship was brought to official attention. In early 1926, not long after the incident at Kalpathy, the government received a petition through R. Veerian that pleaded for the right of a group of Adi-Dravidas in Conjeevaram District to process through the main streets of their village during the time of a festival they wished to celebrate, which coincided with one put on by caste people. In this particular instance, the police had initially provided them with protection but had, apparently after speaking to prominent caste people in the village, subsequently prevented them from going forward, insisting that they needed a permit for their event. The Adi-Dravidas’ letter to Veerian highlights the absurdity of the situation. First they were told by the Conjeevaram Circle Inspector, “All of you assemble here [on the day of the festival]. I’ll give you police protection [pantōpusttu, “bandobust”] and you can conduct your religious festivities [pajaṉai].”57 The protection was thus expressly meant to allow them to conduct their festival unhindered. Yet when they arrived at the police station to secure that protection, they were confronted by the organizer of the caste people’s festival, Rājarattiṉa Nāyuṭu, who told them that while they might well have an order granting police protection, they needed an additional permit to conduct their own festival. As the writer of the letter protested, “It was precisely because we hadn’t been in the habit of conducting such a festival that we secured police protection [in the first place]! [But] Rājarattiṉa Nāyuṭu kept on arguing in this convoluted way until, acquiescing to his wishes, [the authorities] told us we could not hold our pajaṉai.”58 After visiting the village in person, Veerian demanded an inquiry. When the district magistrate reported on the events to the government, having found that the Depressed Classes had never processed in this manner before, he concluded, “It appears that the [Depressed Classes] attempted for the first time in 1926 to conduct a . . . procession during the festival. . . . It would . . . appear that the . . . [Depressed Classes] are trying to establish a claim which they have never made before, and one which is very naturally resented by the caste people.”59 This a member of the Public Department restated thus: “The present complaint is actuated by a mere desire to assert an abstract right.”60 236  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

The problem was not only that the exercise of the right had no real purpose (because it was abstract) but also that it had no ageless foundation, as did religious rights. It was not only, therefore, that some rights claims were dismissed as having no utilitarian or material result—as being mere abstract assertions. Rather, via a strategic use of the ambiguity between two kinds of right, the language of the ancien régime enjoyed a subterranean existence in debates whose ostensible object was modern citizenship, being skillfully incorporated into the justificatory talk of officials and elite politicos in the heyday of dyarchy. Where once customary rights and statuses (those accruing differentially to subjects understood as members of particular subpopulations) had governed most aspects of substantive law, the onset of gradual devolution meant that public rights talk turned increasingly to notions of universal, abstract, properly liberal rights. The historiography on the manifest tension between these two forms of right has tended to locate its etiology in the existence of two broad imperial-ideological tendencies: Thus, imperialists’ commitment to the putative universality of liberalism resulted in universalistic procedural and institutional forms, whereas the equally abiding notion of Indian difference, especially post-1857, redounded in substantive law that distinguished subjects on the basis of community.61 I accept this picture as a general account of why these two forms of right existed and of their broad periodization. But what is a manifest theoretical incompatibility between custom and liberal rights is hardly so readily visible in practice. Their theoretical irreconcilability is just that: theoretical. Strategic realignments of persons and institutions arrayed in opposition to the Depressed Classes meant that the two kinds of rights could be and were invoked to support one another, in conjunction with the emergence of the social.

Conclusion: The Depressed Classes and the Brittle Promise of Politics In the late 1910s and 1920s, when Dalits embraced a new politics predicated on claiming themselves to be subjects of rights and demanding access to public resources, this gave the lie to the tacit ways in which these concepts had hitherto been deployed. What resulted was a move to silence these claims by means of a thoroughgoing reconfiguration of T H E D E PR E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L   237

what was deemed proper to politics. The nationalization of society, the view that only Indians could address themselves legitimately to problems of Indian social life, placed the Pariah problem firmly within that society and just as firmly denied it political value. The new kind of Indian social that emerged in response to Depressed Classes politics was no longer so much the realm of tradition, the society of old, but the progressive nationalist hearth, where social reform, it was promised, would proceed apace. At the same time, in the concerted move to silence Dalit representatives’ plaints, in the private mockery to which their sustained efforts were subject, in the misreading of the nature of their outrage, in the doubt cast on their authenticity, Dalit efforts to bring pernicious social difference before the law were rendered altogether impossible. The nationalist social emerged, in short, as an amorphous and useful evasion of the political-legal paradoxes brought forth by the Pariah problem. The emergence of the national social as I have described it here also urges us to reconsider our reading of the mass efforts of social reform trained on the Depressed Classes that emerged from all political quarters at this time, usually understood as the rise of nationalist and reformist consciousness, as well as a moment of competition among state officials and the various nationalist and loyalist Madras political parties to win the Depressed Classes electorate’s loyalty. Rather than displaying sympathy or even paternal indulgence toward the oppressed, however, political leaders of India’s nationalist and subnationalist parties in Madras instead expressed their wariness toward the political interests of Dalits. One prominent Congressite newspaper, New India, described their situation vis-à-vis Panchamas thus: We have 50 millions of untouchables. Think of them all becoming our enemies. If 50 millions of people become our enemies, what will be our position? When you find that his education and welfare are being taken care of by foreign agencies, he takes full advantage of the powers of mischief that he possesses. What is the use of local self-government if in our own house there is perpetual war in effecting a reconciliation?62

The loyalist non-Brahmins’ periodical Justice, in a similar vein, admonished its readers, avowing that there was “to both the Brahmins and the other high caste Hindus [i.e., themselves] . . . a danger behind them. If they do not treat the Panchamas as human beings . . . they [the 238  T H E D E P R E S S E D C L A S S E S , R I G H T S , A N D T H E E M B R A C E O F T H E S O C I A L

Panchamas] will assert their rights.”63 If Madras’s elite politicians thus sought to tame a stirring giant, the government, for its part, worried that “if they did not deal adequately with the position of the depressed classes . . . [their discontent] will unquestionably be utilized for political and anti-Government purposes.”64 The invention of the national social was not, therefore, a matter of competing to win Dalits over by offering them genuine gains in rights; if gestures of reconciliation were made, they were only intended to stave off the threat that unleashed Dalit animosity would result in “perpetual war.” The national social represents a consolidation of otherwise opposed forces—diverging political interests and the imperatives of the colonial state—that came together to decisively arrest any talk of rights by Depressed Classes leaders. The promise of the social continues to be held out to Dalits to this day. Consider as a typical example of enlightened public opinion in India Praful Bidwai, activist, journalist, and long-time editor of The Times of India, who recently made an impassioned plea for a return to nationalist-era social reform without any awareness of how particular problems came to be understood as social in the first place. Above and beyond the necessary legal measures that might be taken to stem the rising tide of violence against Dalits, he argued, “India has had a great social reform movement . . . [that] was an integral part of the freedom struggle . . . [and it] must be revived and re-energised . . . to combat . . . [the] evils [that keep Dalits] .  .  . in a state of permanent subjugation.”65 Yet the permanent subjugation of which India’s public citizens ruefully speak is inseparable from the historical conditions under which that subjugation was consigned to the distinct realm of the social, which acquired in those struggles the definition and intelligibility that in large measure it still possesses today.

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CONCLUSION The Pariah Problem’s Enduring Legacies

Politics exists because those not granted the right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation, the contradiction of two worlds in a single world.1

The problem of the “Pariah,” as unfree Dalit laborers were then called, was in the 1890s forced upon the reluctant attention of the colonial state and India’s elite public sphere. Prior to this, the fact that Pariahs had been required to labor for others under conditions of extreme hardship, were confined to ghettoes set well apart from the villages where other Indians lived, and were openly despised by one and all, was well known but failed to register as a matter of general concern. The trope of gentle servitude, first formulated by British officials as an argument to prevent the extension of empire-wide abolition to India, provided a fig leaf of credibility to elite and official views that the existence of a hereditarily unfree laboring class required no particular attention.2 What later became known as the “Pariah Problem” was at once the recognition and misrecognition of this oppression: the admission that a solution was both politically and morally necessary and the means by which any possible solution was evaded. The story of the “Pariah Problem” is thus

the story of its containment. It begins with an account of how the plight of the Dalit came to be construed as primarily a religious disability, and how this allowed discrimination to proceed under the protection of the policy of religious neutrality. It ends with the rise of the now hegemonic view (at least among Indian elites) that Dalitness is ultimately a “social problem” and its resolution does not demand the active enforcement of legal rights, including the vigorous prosecution of violators. Nor does it demand the systematic redistribution of wealth (such as land reform) or the extension of real political power to the excluded. The domination of Dalits came to be understood in the early twentieth century as a problem that society “itself ” would have to work out on its own, gradually and on the basis of mutual goodwill. There was only so much the state could or should do to hasten the process. The story I have told ends in the early 1920s, but the pattern that was established in the four decades I have charted remains deeply embedded in political, scholarly, and legislative responses to the plight of Dalits in the present day.

Gentle Slavery’s Long Shadow: The Specter of “External Influences” and the Idea of Contentment Repeatedly—indeed relentlessly—officials reassured their superiors in Britain that Indian slavery was not to be confused with its Atlantic counterparts, setting the terms for future discourse on servitude. One influential collector described the former as a horror “from which the mind revolts” and the latter as “slavery at its most benign.”3 This rosy depiction of agrestic servitude in India, as I have shown, was initially propounded by men who had no personal knowledge of village labor regimes, as part of an effort to stem the tide of the abolition movement and thereby to assure the flow of revenue into the colonial exchequer. The fight to prevent abolition in India was a losing one, and in 1843, ten years after slavery was abolished elsewhere in the empire, it was officially banned in British India. Yet the discourse on gentle slavery would enjoy a remarkable afterlife. Official accounts of rural life frequently evoked the “mutual duties and obligations” that allegedly characterized relations between Pariahs and their masters, and this vision of mutually beneficial, peaceful relations and—even more—of Pariah contentment, rapidly established itself C O N C L U S I O N   241

as a key trope of colonial discourse. Ignoring the considerable evidence of highly antagonistic labor relations that they themselves unearthed, native officers of the colonial state continued with utter conviction to insist that measures to rationalize Pariah labor would create “a friction where none exists.”4 Likewise, even those with considerable sympathy for the Pariahs’ plight expected that they would have to be taught to desire something other than the status quo and were startled to find otherwise, as I showed in chapters 7 and 8. In post-Independence India, scholars have sometimes sought to deny the very existence of slavery in the subcontinent, to confine it to the Malabar coast, or to suggest that bondage was in fact a recent development caused by colonial rule.5 More recent south Asianist historians have not so much denied slavery as wondered whether the term “slave” is appropriate to the south Asian context.6 While today’s historians do this for different reasons than colonial administrators (scholars today are often driven by an interest in challenging colonial misrepresentations that defame colonized peoples to represent themselves as purveyors of progress), the irony here is that attempts to avoid defaming the victims of colonialism may be complicit in a long history of silencing the victims of those victims. For colonized society was not an undivided whole but was crosscut by antagonistic divisions. As Indrani Chatterjee reminds us, to refuse the term “‘slavery’ is to repeat the acts of dispossession all over again.”7 These mutually reinforcing ideas (the contention that conditions in India do not “really” amount to slavery, the gentleness of Indian servitude, the contentment or at least relative resignation of the Pariah, and the mutually beneficial nature of labor relations) have been passed down as conventional wisdom to the present day. I point out three exemplary incarnations of this picture; the first two are common styles of reasoning found in postcolonial scholarship on unfreedom and Dalit difference, and the last is taken from postcolonial legislation.

“Content—Unless Instigated” The colonial administrator’s vision of laborers and masters bound by mutual responsibilities, such that Pariahs were essentially content in their servitude and even clung to it unless “instigated,” is frequently asserted. Without “external influences,” we are led to believe, the Pariah 242  C O N C L U S I O N

would have remained a faithful and contented underling. I have traced this trope historically in India to the writings of old India hands intent on staving off abolition in India. It may or may not have been present already among landed castes.8 In any case, what is certain is that the roseate picture of agrestic servitude promoted by colonial officers began to appear in the documentary record of native elites by the mid-nineteenth century, and it remains a fixture of elite discourse in India to the present day. Consider the following evocative portrait taken from the pages of postcolonial Tamil Nadu’s leading English-language daily, The Hindu, in which landlords wistfully recall a bygone era: [Landlords] would recall the times when the harvest season went off like a festival, when the workers spent their leisure .  .  . singing and dancing [and] courting would-be brides and eventually celebrating their unions in wedlock. The [landlords] blessed the couples and gave them presents and all were happy. With the change that has come over in the outlook and attitude of the workers towards the landlords, their relationship has been strained, and now, harvest time is an occasion for collective bargaining and continuous confrontation.9

In a wry comment on accounts of this kind, which will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with literature on rural life in India, anthropologist Joan Mencher notes that in her own ethnographic research on agricultural labor in the 1970s, What impressed me greatly in the villages where I worked . . . is that while the former landlords might speak of the security offered to the labourers in the old days, I never heard a villager belonging to one of the traditional labouring castes speak of the security he used to feel or express any preference for being a tied labourer. Nor have I ever heard any speak with affection of the “good old days.”10

The skepticism Mencher expresses here is very much the exception in scholarly writings.11 It is rather the colonial trope of gentle servitude that continues to shape contemporary historical writing, including even that presented as a critique of colonial discourse. Thus the ubiquity of an interpretive axiom that treats evidence of discontent as indicative of outside influence. C O N C L U S I O N   243

The first example of this that is relevant to my own research comes from mission historians’ accounts of the undeniable foment associated with mass conversion, which represent Dalits as quiescent, with Christianity portrayed as the liberating force. As the reading of mission records I have undertaken reveals, however, while missionaries preached equality before God, they preached expressly against social equality and worked hard to suppress Dalit insubordination against caste employers. Dalits approached missionaries, moreover, not because they had been actively evangelized and thus seduced by any putative idea of equality but because they were seeking potential allies in prior and ongoing struggles, much as they would later approach state officials. The significance of this fact is missed in much of the historiography on Indian Christianity, which continues to posit Christianity itself as the active force and Dalits as becoming active only after being “shown the light.” Christianity is supposed to have newly introduced dreams of equality to Dalits who had heretofore been in the thrall of “traditional” Indian conceptions of hierarchy or to Hindu ideologies such as the doctrine of karma, which they are said to have patiently accepted as justification for their low position.12 Others claim, furthermore, that even in converting Dalits were simply following “tradition.” According to this argument, conversions occurred only when their masters failed to fulfill their traditional role in a supposedly mutualistic relationship. Converting Dalits are supposed to have acted in accordance with traditional Indian relations of patron-clientism, simply seeking to replace old masters with new missionary lords.13 Such arguments assume without evidence that Dalit normally saw their masters’ treatment of them as legitimate and only sought escape when “traditional norms” were violated. Evidence certainly abounds that landed castes sought to justify existing relations on the basis of the benefits they claimed to provide to subordinates.14 It is also the case that laborers, of necessity, framed appeals to their masters in this same idiom.15 But given that they lacked any alternative, it is erroneous to infer from that fact that Dalits accepted the claims of that ideology at face value, or regarded it as moral or just. On the contrary, events presented in chapters 3, 8, and 9 show clearly that when presented with the barest chance of altering the terms of the labor relation, Madras’s Dalits leapt at it. The only evidence we have that laborers were content under traditional arrangements comes from state officials and native employers. And when indications to the contrary obtruded, the existence of such a 244  C O N C L U S I O N

system of protections would only be asserted all the more strenuously— confronted with the fact that they were not so well loved after all, peeved Tanjore mirasidars insisted that “their” Pariahs were content in the traditional network unless they were roused by pernicious external influences.16 It is surely a mistake, then, to take discourses on laborers’ rights as straightforwardly reflecting social reality, or as implying contentment. As Dharma Kumar has noted, “talk of a labourer’s ‘rights’” is meaningless unless one describes how rights were recognized and enforced, for “the issue [of the laborer’s rights] would be raised presumably only when there was a failure of crops, and it would be precisely at times like these, when his rights were most needed, that they were most insecure.”17 What about historians of agricultural labor and bondage? Here too one finds a reliance on an untested assumption of Dalits’ contentment, and their lack of interest in altering relations with their employers. Perhaps the most extreme analysis of this sort is offered by Gyan Prakash, who goes further than the content-until-instigated thesis to claim that from the colonial period until the present day, Dalit laborers in Bihar have in fact refused both to participate in “official projects of reform” and to “mount struggles against domination experienced at the point of power’s exercise.”18 “Far from indicating passivity,” Prakash goes on to assure us, their alleged refusal to resist in fact represents an indigenous “critique of the discourse of freedom” instituted by colonial rule.19 That Prakash fails to find disconfirming evidence for Dalits’ apparent “passivity” in the archives does not mean such evidence is lacking. And proof of a very different picture emerges quite clearly from a careful engagement with the state and missionary archives of Madras. Unlike Prakash’s kamias, the Depressed Classes in Tamil country responded to state welfare schemes with an eagerness that thoroughly disarmed state officials and landlords, who apparently believed their own oft-repeated depictions of contented Pariahs.20 While one is sympathetic to Prakash’s wish to avoid “employing a universal notion of slavery .  .  . [that] ends up justifying the economic effects of colonialism as liberating,” an accurate understanding of Pariah servitude and the quotidian forms of struggle against it requires neither a universal notion of slavery nor the justification of colonial economic policies.21 Quite the contrary! To ventriloquize enslaved Dalit laborers as traditionalist critics of modernity, on the other hand, not only overlooks the everyday warfare that this book has documented but ironically embraces one of the central tenets of both colonial discourse and C O N C L U S I O N   245

high-caste apologetics aimed at the redefinition and erasure of more than a century of Dalits’ attempts to make their own subordination visible and eligible for redress.

Divide et Impera There is a third way in which assumptions of Dalit contentment and denials of Dalit–non-Dalit antagonism subtly enter contemporary historiography, and in particular writings on Dalit political and social difference. Postcolonial historians have cast a suspicious eye on the colonial state’s interest in identifying particular subpopulations such as Dalits and subsequently avowing a sense of responsibility for their welfare. Why this solicitude toward Dalits, a solicitude that appears to have gone against the interests of the elite nationalist movement? A ready-made answer is available in the old theory of divide et impera. As one scholar has put this, endeavoring to count Dalits separately from other Hindus was a “blatant act of colonial engineering .  .  . designed to encourage the detachment of the low castes . . . thereby isolating the upper castes who had threatened British power.”22 Outside of scholarly literature, such views are even more widespread; the great civil-rights leader, B. R. Ambedkar, who fought for Dalits to have their own political representatives who would be determined by separate electorates, was until very recently routinely portrayed as a stooge of imperialism.23 Yet this analysis does not square well with the early history of the establishment of the colonial welfare regime that targeted Dalits in colonial Madras. It is true that by the 1930s the colonial state’s encouragement of Dalit self-representation at the national level would sow tensions in the anticolonial movement—and that this was at least partly by design. But as my consideration (especially in chapters 1, 2, and 4) of competing strategic interests in the Madras Presidency in the preceding decades demonstrates, the state did not at first encourage Dalit difference but in fact sought to suppress and contain it. And when under threat by the anticolonial nationalist Congress party in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was much more concerned to shore up the allegiance not of Dalits but of its other, far more powerful allies, the loyalist non-Brahmin Justice Party’s supporters. These latter were the sort of men who were important in the operation of the caste–state 246  C O N C L U S I O N

nexus this book has described. So, while the state did indeed implement a series of policies designed to demonstrate their concern for even the lowliest of its subjects, policy makers were painfully aware that welfare directed at Dalits could antagonize loyalist non-Brahmins by interfering with their ability to control Dalit laborers.24 British officials, furthermore, were clearly quite sympathetic to the existing native power structure, as evidenced by their private remarks discussed in chapter 9, and therefore avoided policies that threatened to undermine it to any substantial extent.25 With respect to Madras in particular, the colonial state’s policies are also blamed for introducing a rift between mostly Brahmin nationalists and their elite non-Brahmin counterparts, which led to the ostensibly anticaste (and loyalist) political tradition of non-Brahminism for which present-day Tamil society is justly famous and which began in the 1910s with the publication of a “Non-Brahmin Manifesto” by a group calling themselves the Justice Party.26 Whether the politicized difference between Brahmins and elite non-Brahmins (who in rural society had been allies27) was deliberately instigated or encouraged by agents of the colonial state is a complex question that cannot be addressed here.28 But the question of whether divide-and-rule policies partially account for political non-Brahminism must be kept distinct from the question of whether the state encouraged Dalit assertion. Culturally, socially, and in political-economic terms, the division between elite non-Brahmin castes and Brahmins bears no comparison with that between landed castes and hereditarily unfree Dalit laborers. Nor is there any parallel between these two divisions with respect to their relationship to the colonial state. Even if one were to ignore the utter dependence of administration on the rural caste–state nexus and assume that the creation of rifts in native society was of paramount importance to policy, the divide-and-rule thesis is misleading in the case of the division between Dalits and caste people. “Divide and rule” implies a prior unity between Dalits and landed castes and also implies that the manifest antagonisms between them came into being only when Dalits were “stirred up” by government. The thesis, in short, turns out to be a version of the old saw that the government was “creating a friction where none exists,” which we examined in chapter 7. Indeed, non-Brahminists in Madras first organized and sought more positions in the Brahmin-dominated ranks of administration not in an C O N C L U S I O N   247

effort to democratize but explicitly on the grounds that their “large material stakes, traditional and inherited interests in the soil and the social prestige that goes with it”—in short, their power in rural society—should be more properly reflected in government services.29 Because caste was most often conceptualized in the Depressed Classes critique of this period in terms of the relation between landed elements and landless Dalit laborers, Dalits could not but view Justicites, who represented exactly these elements, with suspicion, as Eugene Irschick long ago pointed out.30 Moreover, while the elite non-Brahminism of the 1910s would gave way in the later 1920s to an importantly distinct populist movement led by E. V. Ramaswamy and culminating in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progress Party) that came to power in Tamil Nadu in 1967, the fundamental divergence between Dalit political aims and those of non-Brahminists would remain.31 These long-standing tensions cannot be explained away as the result of divide-and-rule policies; as this book has shown, antagonism and sustained opposition to Dalit welfare was common across the elite political spectrum, culminating in united efforts in the 1910s to thwart the demands for civil rights of Madras’s first Dalit political representatives. When, on occasion, public gestures of reconciliation were made, this was only to stave off, as one elite politico put it, the threat that Dalit difference unleashed would result in “perpetual war.”32

Dalit Resignation, Authenticity, and Postcolonial Legislation We saw that in the first decade of the twentieth century, newfound worries over the “authenticity” of Dalit conversions to Christianity emerged in Madras precisely when conversion came to be seen as a threat to the regime of agrarian servitude. Consider the stunningly parallel discourse enshrined in the law today. Anticonversion laws that have been put into effect in several Indian states since the 1960s must be seen as the contingent outcome of the political and conceptual developments this book has illumined.33 Such laws center on clauses that forbid religious conversions deemed “fraudulent” or “forced,” as well as those brought about by worldly “temptation,” identifying the converter, not the convert, as the true culprit.34 This legislation prescribes longer jail terms and higher fines, moreover, for those who attempt to incite the conversions of minors, women, and members of Scheduled Castes or Tribes. As an 248  C O N C L U S I O N

addendum to the law explains, “Bringing in a legislation to prohibit such conversions will act as a deterrent . . . [to those] exploiting the innocent people belonging to depressed classes.”35 The paternalistic attribution of “innocence” and passivity to Dalits by others is a trope with which the reader is now familiar. India’s anticonversion laws echo both missionary and Indian elite conceptions, widely disseminated in the 1890s, of Dalits’ susceptibility to material temptations, as well as the view that when left to themselves Dalits would not conceive of taking steps to transform the conditions of their existence. In targeting the person who does the converting rather than the convert, anticonversion legislation lays the blame for conversion on wily proselytizers who are portrayed as corrupting Dalits. Any rejection of tradition on the part of Dalits is thence explained as the result of external influences. Scholars and activists have been concerned by the challenge to India’s secularism posed by these laws in postcolonial India, for they severely limit missionary activity and thereby violate the understanding of religious freedom, including the freedom to propagate one’s religious beliefs to others, enshrined in the Indian Constitution.36 They very rightly blame Hindu majoritarians for pushing these laws through. But history can tell us something more about them. For the language of these laws and the premises upon which they are based (that only spiritual conversion is legitimate, while the introduction of material motivations amounts to illegitimate inducement) have a far longer history in the Indian context and first emerged in struggles over Pariah servitude.37 It is important to notice that the discourse on Pariah authenticity, whose resilience is matched only by the scantiness of its evidentiary basis, was never in fact merely descriptive. The claims it makes are in reality normative ones. Authenticity talk was not most fundamentally about the motives of empirical Pariahs but about what genuine Pariahs motives were. Pariahs who do not conform to such a picture can thus be dismissed in advance as departures from true Pariah subjectivity—departures that are then (according to a thoroughly circular logic) taken as evidence of outside influences.38 This book has repeatedly shown how, at every new stage at which solutions to the Pariah problem were proposed, the issue of the Dalits’ authentic motives was invoked to impugn Dalit actions that failed to accord with a concept of Dalit contentment.39 From colonial apologias for slavery to the invective of absentee landlord-politicians to the language of postcolonial anticonversion laws, the assumption of Dalit C O N C L U S I O N   249

subjective contentment has recurred over the decades with a regularity that tells us more about the anxieties that Dalit difference provokes in elites than it does about what in fact goes on in the minds of those who provoke it.

Spiritual Slavery, Social Disability: Dalit Subordination and the “Futility” of Political Solutions Dalits in nineteenth-century rural Madras (those unnamed historical actors, without discernable “external influence” and having only the barest hope of an opportunity to escape their condition) themselves initiated contact with missionaries. Faced with new charges, missionaries fell into the role of intercessors, most often in the very small ways charted in chapter 2 but eventually, through the series of contingent events in one rather significant way (described in chapter 3): they made the Pariah a problem for the state. And the fact that it was specifically Protestant missionaries who played this role was to have the very long-lasting effects to which we now turn. In taking their chances with Protestant missionaries, Tamil Dalits thus set off a train of events that led to the highlighting of certain aspects of their existence—and the stunning occlusion of others—resulting in their representation as essentially religious subjects, as chapter 2 described. This spiritualization of Dalitness was ramified in countless struggles over agrarian labor, and as we saw in chapter 5, key aspects of the system by which landed castes controlled Dalit labors, such as the ability to control space and the resources it contained, were defended by landed elites as religious matters eligible for protection by the policy of religious neutrality. The newly spiritualized interpretation of Dalit subordination carried with it a critical practical-administrative consequence: with landowners’ prerogatives over Dalit labor now entwined with religious matters, the argument could now be made, as we saw in chapter 5, that these prerogatives should be protected by the state under the mantle of religious neutrality. In this way Dalits were also, for the first time, actively claimed by caste folk in Madras as fellow Hindus. This history provides a critical missing element in the larger story of the imagining of a Hindu community. That larger story is now a matter a relatively well-established scholarly consensus: radical transformations in statecraft brought about by both the East India Company and Crown 250  C O N C L U S I O N

Raj altered several key components of religious identity, not least by the introduction and newfound importance of the concept of religious identity itself.40 Virtually every religious grouping in south Asia came together as a pan-Indian community in both sociological practice and in self-identification in the past two hundred years.41 It was in this context that efforts were made to include Dalits under the Hindu rubric, especially by the Arya Samajist śuddhi or religious “purification” movement in the early twentieth-century Punjab.42 The movement, which had been under way for several decades by this time, was only extended to “untouchables” when growing demographic anxieties arose among Hindus that their numbers, and hence importance, were declining relative to Muslims—a phenomenon that has been called “the politics of numbers.”43 Yet for it to even make sense for Hindus to attempt to be more inclusive toward Dalits required the prior establishment of the idea that Dalits were in fact, at base, Hindus and not a completely separate element. It is clear, furthermore, that prior to the late nineteenth century, Dalits were neither commonly referred to nor accepted as Hindus, and it was by no means obvious to outside observers that they in fact ought to be counted as such.44 As I have argued, the hiatus that divided Dalits from all others was not merely a matter of “Hindu” religious prejudice against them. Christian missionaries and Indian elites, by defining the Pariah’s degradation as essentially a matter of religion and Pariahs themselves as ritually excluded Hindus, provided the ideological foundation for the political project (pursued not only by the Arya Samaj but most famously by M. K. Gandhi in the 1930s) of “returning” Dalits to the fold and of integrating them within a spiritually rejuvenated Hinduism.45 If such has been the legacy of spiritualizing the Dalit’s plight, its relegation to “the social” has also had profound consequences for the way Dalit claims on the state and for legal redress are managed by those in power. In chapter 9 we saw how, when faced with Dalit demands that the rights they had been granted on paper be actively enforced by the state, elites changed their tactics. Rather than claiming the exclusion of Dalits was a protected religious right, representatives of native society took to arguing that the resolution of the Dalit problem belonged properly to the domain of “society,” an autonomous sphere of native self-governance that ought to be allowed to work out its own problems, at its own pace, without state interference. C O N C L U S I O N   251

This distinct new usage of “society” as a means of containing Dalit aspirations was not invented out of whole cloth but drew on other contemporary usages in colonial India that recent historiography has begun to reveal. Important among these writings, the work of Karuna Mantena has shown the centrality of Henry Sumner Maine in first conceptualizing this domain and in providing the theoretical rationale according to which native society was, and ought to be, governed by its own internal logic.46 According to this new set of ideas, liberal reforms, although justified in the abstract, would backfire if pushed upon a populace that was unwilling or unable to accept them. A state that did not respect the need of society to develop at its own proper pace would undermine not only its own legitimacy but also the self-ordering principles that stood between society and anarchy. Maine’s concept of society was taken up and employed to great effect by Indian nationalists. As Partha Chatterjee has shown, for example, legislation conceived as liberating women from traditional bonds had proceeded apace in British India until nationalist thinkers began to construe the “Woman’s Question” as a matter for native society (read: high-caste Indian men) to organize in its own way. For the colonial state to legislate such matters, nationalists argued, was to intrude into a realm over which it had no legitimate jurisdiction. The domestic sphere, newly construed as an intimate and sacrosanct realm, was thus carved out as a precious cultural inheritance within which the colonized native could continue to exercise sovereignty.47 Mrinalini Sinha builds on this story, providing an analysis that gives the subsumption of women within the sphere of the home a more tragic ring.48 She adduces a brief moment during which it appeared that women might in fact be able to universalize their demands, claiming for themselves the status of rights-bearing subjects. The theoretical maneuvering of male nationalists, in concert with sympathetic state officials, effectively contained universalistic claims within the holding chamber of society. Sinha thus importantly identifies the production of society as a joint venture of state officials and Indian political elites as against the private space carved out of the realm of colonial governance that Chatterjee’s narrative describes. The final chapter of this book described a distinct way the social was invoked by native elites to contain the universalizing aspirations of another subordinated category, Dalits. The production of what I call the “national social” was an endeavor to which state and nonstate agents contributed in equal measure, and it is in this respect similar to the 252  C O N C L U S I O N

dynamic described by Sinha. But the containment of Dalit aspirations differs from Sinha’s story about women in that the treatment of Dalits was built upon a long and specific history of cooperation between state and nonstate agents that began with the denial of slavery, and proceeded via what I have called the caste–state nexus. The understanding of society the “Pariah Problem” enables differs also from the one presented by Mantena (i.e., Henry Maine’s). Under Maine’s influence, society was conceptualized in holistic terms as an integrated totality encompassing fundamentally nonantagonistic parts.49 If society were indeed the consensual and organic whole Maine believed it to be, it would have made sense—both as a practical matter and morally—for those seeking change to go slow. If society is composed of groups that are ultimately “on the same side,” opposition by one to the social and political advancement of another would not be an intrinsic matter or rooted in the former’s very existence, but merely the contingent result of irrational prejudices that could be expected to dissipate with time. The story this book has told should persuade the reader to think twice before accepting Maine’s consensual picture at face value. On this skeptical note, let us conclude by considering some of the ways in which both the spiritualization and the socialization of the Pariah Problem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have continued to structure policy and politics in the decades that followed and to the present day.

Hinduism and the Category “Scheduled Caste” While the ritual dimensions of Dalit subordination, so-called untouchability, have been officially outlawed in independent India, the spiritualization—in effect, the Hinduization—of the Dalit’s plight lives on in the way in which reservations (compensatory discrimination programs first introduced in the late colonial period) are administered.50 These policies ensure that a percentage of seats in legislative bodies, government employment, and education are reserved for certain groups, including some (but not all) Dalits. Since their very inception, these policies have provoked the open resentment and hostility of major subgroups of Indian elites. For our purposes, what is of signal importance are the criteria according to which Dalits qualify for them, and one qualification in C O N C L U S I O N   253

particular: Dalits forfeit their eligibility for these schemes if they convert to Islam or Christianity. The exclusion of these Dalits from compensatory discrimination programs would make sense only if caste were indeed a fundamentally Hindu institution and if Dalits ceased to be discriminated against and excluded upon conversion to another faith. But this is emphatically not the case. On the contrary, not only does conversion not somehow free Dalits from caste, but the Dalit–non-Dalit distinction itself cuts across all religious identities in India. While it is true that Hinduism offers a theological rationale for caste that Christianity and Islam lack, to treat this as primary is to put the cart before the horse. Caste is defined most fundamentally by the practice of endogamy common to all Indians, and the social hiatus between Dalit and non-Dalit is observed by caste people of all religions.51 Nevertheless, the sole forms of redress the postcolonial state offers to Dalits are premised on the Hindu majoritarian doctrine that they are Hindu until they specifically assert otherwise, and the law thereby provides an official disincentive to their doing so.52 Furthermore, since the passage of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Preventions of Atrocities) Act of 1989 (a form of hate-crimes legislation), Dalits who convert to Christianity or Islam also lose the only special protection they have under the law against violent reprisals against them by caste people.53 Scholars of Indian law have not failed to recognize the peculiarity of converts’ disqualification from access to reservations or the fact that it directly contravenes secular India’s promise of religious freedom.54 As Marc Galanter, a leading legal specialist on reservations, has put it, The Constitution is openly and determinedly secular. Freedom of religion is guaranteed. Religious discrimination on the part of the State is forbidden. The courts have been vigilant in invalidating governmental measures framed along religious lines. Nevertheless in some instances religion has been made a qualification for preferential treatment. The President’s 1950 Order specifying Scheduled Castes provided that “no person professing a religion different from Hinduism shall be deemed a member of a Scheduled Caste.”55

Independent India seeks in this way to actively define and retain Dalits as Hindus, and in other ways to shore up and consolidate Hinduism 254  C O N C L U S I O N

in the face of threats to its majority status.56 This is well known among specialists, although not to the wider public. What the preceding chapters add to this scholarship is an account of how untouchability came to be construed as primarily a religious disability in the first place and the circumstances under which Dalits were first claimed as fellow Hindus by landed elites.

The Valorization of Reformism The ways in which Indian elites and officials originally sought to contain the Pariah Problem would also shape the basic framework within which reformers as diverse as the devoutly religious M. K. Gandhi and the atheist E.  V. Ramasamy would henceforth operate. Men such as these were united by their shared acceptance of the idea that Dalits suffered from a religious disability that could not (or should not) be overcome by means of state power. As Gandhi put it plainly, “The removal of untouchability is a . . . spiritual process,” and therefore it “can be abolished only by . . . the strength of love. Reform in matters of religion can be effected only by the reformer suffering voluntarily . . . and in no other way.”57 For Gandhi, then, the Dalit’s salvation could never come about on the basis of law but depended entirely on the autonomous and voluntary activities of society itself—in this case caste Hindu society. Gandhi’s vision for “the Harijan” (or “child of the god Hari” as he called Dalits to emphasize their alleged Hinduness) was a thoroughly spiritualized politics in which well-meaning renunciants such as himself would engage in “social service” on behalf of the poor outcaste.58 Dalits in turn would be persuaded to make themselves more worthy of caste people’s affections by giving up habits deemed “unclean” by the latter, such as smoking, drinking, and eating meat.59 Yet the prioritization of “social reform” as the solution to Dalit oppression, rather than political and legal remedies, has been accepted by widely divergent actors—not only Hindu leaders like Gandhi but equally by the atheist non-Brahmin social reformer E. V. Ramaswamy (or “Periyar”) in the Tamil south. Periyar had no interest in preserving Hinduism. Indeed, for him, Hinduism itself was nothing more than “lies written by Brahmins to maintain their high status and fill their stomachs.”60 He and his followers declared their commitment to social equality and hostility to casteism. But the movement Periyar founded nevertheless mirrored C O N C L U S I O N   255

Gandhi’s in valorizing the social as the appropriate venue for aspirations for change, to the exclusion of legislative politics, and revolved around symbolic attacks on caste and consciousness-raising rather than structural measures such as land reform.61 Even ideologues opposed to Gandhian ideals thus nevertheless participate in the tacit and virtually total consensus in postcolonial India that justifies nonenforcement of laws intended to benefit Dalits as a practical impossibility. The majority position in India (downplaying Dalit difference while simultaneously deeming it outside the realm of state and legal amelioration) is accepted by default and inertia even when not openly proclaimed. But it is not the only position. Dissenting voices, whose only demands are that the state give them a just share of political power and actually enforce its own laws, have tried in vain to make themselves heard since the time that Dalits first entered the Legislative Council in the 1920s. As B.  R. Ambedkar once remarked, “So rigorous is the enforcement of the Social Code against the Depressed Classes that any attempt on [their] part .  .  . to exercise their elementary rights of citizenship only aids in provoking the majority. . . . Society . . . is itself a tyranny.”62 Small wonder then, that for politically active Dalits, from the councilmen I described in 1920s Madras, to Ambedkar, to countless men and women in the present day, hope for the self-directed transformation of society has always seemed a poor second to political participation and the active enforcement of legislation.63 In response to the dogged efforts of Dalits to persuade the state to enforce its own laws, Ambedkar observed, We are often reminded that the problem of the Depressed Classes is a social problem and that its solution lies elsewhere than in politics. We take strong exception to this view. We hold that the problem of the Depressed Classes will never be solved unless they get political power in their own hands.  .  .  . The settlement of our problem must not be left . . . to the shifting sands of sympathy and the good will of the rulers.64

For that reason, even an official policy of equal rights is not, Ambedkar argued, sufficient. “If these declarations of rights are not to be mere pious pronouncements but are to be realities of everyday life, then they should be protected by adequate [legal] penalties from interference in the enjoyment of these declared rights.”65 Rights, he maintained, had to 256  C O N C L U S I O N

be enforced by punishing those who violated them; it was not enough simply to declare that they exist.66 In the course of a heated debated in the Madras Legislative Council in 1923, M. C. Rajah expressed his frustration with the hollowness of rights talk in this way: “We are denied the elementary rights of citizenship [such as walking on] the king’s highway and drawing water from public wells. . . . We believe that we have the right as citizens of British India to use all . . . [things] constructed and maintained out of public funds to which the depressed classes contribute as rate-payers. What objection can Government have to . . . enforce the rights which every citizen possesses . . .?”67 Today a relentless accusation by high-caste critics of the Dalit movement is that it is a form of “identity politics” that is focused on reservations to the exclusion of “substantive change” (which these critics claim they would support).68 Yet if one reads the writings and speeches of India’s Dalit leaders and activists or takes the time to examine their party platforms instead of relying on the clichéd portrayals of them that are a staple of newspaper and television reportage, one finds that Dalit politics today is centered on demands that the laws that exist on paper be actually enforced.69 As Tamil Dalit Panthers leader Thol. Thirumaavalavan has observed in numerous public addresses, rather than fulfilling its mandate to rule democratically, the state actively thwarts the penetration [into society] of new democratic practices, and protects “tradition” and caste strictures. . . . The Government makes no effort whatsoever to prevent caste atrocities [although this is legally mandated]. . . . Even in state institutions where there are Dalit representatives, they are rendered powerless [by caste people], forced to act as mere puppets. They are thoroughly silenced, unable to raise their voices in the name of Dalits’ democratic rights.  .  .  . [At every level] Indian governance is [nothing but] caste governance.70

If anything might change this persistent discrimination on the part of a state that is set up on paper to treat citizens equally, according to Dalit leaders from the 1920s onward, it is allowing Dalits themselves to participate in the state, as something more than “mere puppets.” Dalit inclusion is especially significant, they argue, in bureaucracies charged with the administration of justice, such as the police, where Dalit representation is abysmally low, because quotas for them are routinely unfilled in positions C O N C L U S I O N   257

of authority.71 Ravikumar, intellectual, activist, and former member of the Legislative Assembly in Tamil Nadu, puts the argument thus: A government services position [for oppressed peoples] is not just a job that brings in a salary. It’s directly connected to state power. Ensuring that they have their rightful share of that power should be understood as an essential part of Dalit struggle.  .  .  . Whether or not Dalits realize how critical having administrative positions is, caste oppressors do. That’s why they have smashed to pieces the rights to reservations that Dalits, in the name of Ambedkar . . . struggled so hard to attain. . . . These rights are not generous handouts from some compassionate soul whose heart melted [for us]. They are legal, constitutionally enshrined rights. And they need to be protected.72

This book has shown how ordinary Dalit men and women, despite the obstacles they faced, began the arduous process of putting these rights in place, by making the Pariah a problem to which others had no choice but to respond. Yet as today’s Dalit activists attest, the work of making these rights more than what Ambedkar called “pious pronouncements” appears a formidable goal.

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GLOSSARY

CĒRI A settlement of Dalits, set apart from the main village in which caste people dwell. DARKHAST An application made to the government for a plot of cultivable wasteland. JĀTI A pan-Indian word to which the English usage “caste” most often refers. In very broad terms, jātis are local endogamous groups ranked hierarchically in comparison with other jātis. MĀMŪL Tradition, custom. MIRĀS, MIRĀSIDĀR (anglicized: mirasidar) An agrarian system in which mirasidars, holders of mirās (rights) possess shares in villages that allow them control over laborers, land, irrigational facilities, and other resources (adj. mirāsi). PARACCĒRI, PAḷḷACCĒRI A cēri inhabited by Paṟaiyars or Paḷḷars. Paṟaiyar and Pallar are the most numerous Dalit castes in the Tamil-speaking regions of the erstwhile Madras Presidency. PU Ṛ AKUṬI (lit. “out-dweller”) A tenant without permanent tenancy rights, who renewed his rights yearly. PU Ṛ AMPŌKKU (anglicized: puramboke) A category of land in the villages of Madras reserved for purposes other than cultivation, such as dwelling, grazing animals, threshing. This land was defined as that which benefited society as whole (camutāya naṉmai).

RAIYAT A general term for peasant. U Ḷ KUṬI (lit. “in-dweller”)  A tenant with permanently secured rights; Pariahs could never become uḷkuṭis. VĀRAM The most common system of tenancy in Madras, in which a fixed share of the gross produce is paid by the cultivating tenant to the landlord.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. The Hindu, June 3, 1891, cited in Government Order Revenue (GOR) 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, Tamil Nadu State Archives (TNSA). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Reported in The Guardian, December 28, 2006; available at www.guardian .co.uk/world/2006/dec/28/india.mainsection (accessed October 5, 2012). 5. On Dalit political parties, see Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). For an account of increasing anti-Dalit violence, see Smita Narula, Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). 6. See discussion in Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency During the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 41–45. 7. In some cases, impoverished members of the dominant society were reduced to performing similar kinds of agricultural labor. But they were clearly distinguished from Pariahs both by the fact that they were not treated as ethnic outsiders and by the fact that they were not kept in a permanent and hereditary state of unfreedom.

8. I discuss the persistence of this trope today in the book’s conclusion. 9. Charles S. Crole, The Chingleput, Late Madras, District: A Manual Compiled Under the Orders of the Madras Government (Madras: Lawrence Asylum, 1879), 214; emphasis mine. 10. Indrani Chatterjee, “Abolition by Denial: The South Asian Example,” in Abolition and Its Aftermath in the Indian Ocean, Africa, and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Routledge, 2005), 150–68. There were also other, mostly cosmetic measures put in place: thus, the state could no longer be enlisted to help in the forcible return of absconders, there could be no public slave auctions, and so on. But these had little effect on agrarian servitude. 11. Nancy Gardner Cassels, “Social Legislation Under the Company Raj: The Abolition of Slavery Act of 1843,” South Asia 11, no. 1 (1988): 59–87. 12. As Kumar, Land and Caste in South India, has perspicuously noted, this was whether or not laborers had rights in theory. 13. GOR 1304–1304A, November 23, 1885. 14. There is, of course, a well-known paradox in this, which is not unique to modern India. In order to place one realm of existence—religion—beyond its own regulatory purview, the state must first authoritatively determine what does and does not belong within that realm, properly understood. But in the very act of drawing this line, the secular state is in fact regulating religion. See Marc Galanter, “Hinduism, Secularism, and the Indian Judiciary,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 227–314; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 15. The full text of the proclamation may be found in George Dunbar, A History of India from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 2 vols. (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943), vol. 2, pp. 518–20. 16. See Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialim and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist Among the Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 463–99. An alternative account that locates the initial systematization and extension of a caste “system” in the relations among merchant groups and in newly Brahminical practices of kingship in western India in the eighteenth century, but does not exclude the arguments of Dirks and Cohn for the nineteenth century, can be found in Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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17. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” in Subaltern Studies: Essays in History and Society in South Asia VII, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–39. 18. On the intersection of Orientalism and enumeration, in addition to the references in the previous two notes, see also Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol Appadurai Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 314–39. While caste is not a single India-wide system, it is undeniably the case that in any given local context, castes exist and exert their social power in and through relations with one another. B.  R. Ambedkar makes this point very well in “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development,” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979), 1: 3–22. 19. Much has been made of the fact that Dalits perform various ritual functions for the dominant society, including the removal of unclean substances such as feces and corpses. We might add that their labor produces much of the surplus upon which agrarian civilization is itself constructed. My point is not, however, that Dalits are outside the total social formation but that they are symbolically and bodily excluded and defined by “society proper” as a people apart, as outsiders. 20. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 70, para. 11 d. 21. There is also the methodological problem with recovery, which was convincingly expressed by Rosalind O’Hanlon now almost a quarter of a century ago, when she laid bare the humanist assumptions of resurrectionary history, advocating in its stead “a nuanced focus upon practice alone.” Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 189–224, at 197. 22. For instance, Chinniah Jangam, “Contesting Hinduism: Emergence of Dalit Paradigms in Telugu Country 1900–50” (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2005); the multivolume set of Tamil intellectual Pandit Iyothee Thass’s writings, edited by G. Aloysius, Ayōttitācar Cintanaikaḷ III [Reflections of Iyothee Thassar, vol. III] (Palayamkottai, Tamilnadu: FRRC and St. Xavier’s College, 2003), and Gajendran Ayyathurai’s path-breaking account of Thass’s movement and its present-day adherents in “Foundations of Anti-caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 2010). 23. See chaps. 5 and 6 for an account of how authentic Dalit conversion became a matter of public concern in the late 1890s—a concern that has found

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its way into modern Indian anticonversion legislation, as I discuss in the book’s conclusion. 24. Although historians of missions have repeatedly and persuasively underscored that conflating missions and imperial designs is a mistake, an appreciation for the complexity of the relationship between missions and imperial regimes has still not become a matter of academic common sense for south Asianist historians. For an excellent and comprehensive account of the sometimes tense, sometimes sympathetic relations between British missions and the British Empire, see Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). For one of the few works in south Asian history that illuminates this relationship, see Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). 25. GOR 366, May 27, 1888, p. 11. 26. One noted pastor, the Scotsman Rev. Adam Andrew, spent years of his life experimenting with various technical innovations such as the Persian wheel— which he single-handedly introduced to the region—with the aim of increasing productivity and lightening the Pariah laborer’s load. His outspoken advocacy of the Pariah earned him snide condescension from Indian elites, conveyed in the epithet they coined for him, “Pariah Andrew.” 27. William Goudie, letter to Rev. Findlay, June 20, 1901, WMMS (SOAS), London. 28. Two important exceptions are Gunnel Cederlof ’s Bonds Lost: Subordination, Conflict and Mobilisation in Rural South India, c. 1900–1970. New Delhi: Manohar, 1997 and Indrani Chatterjee’s “Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence,” in Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 287–315, which sensitively chronicles the aporias in the colonial archive through the reading of mission writings. That these are rare instances underscores the ubiquity of the trend I am describing. 29. A further reason for this may be that historians of the colonial world are more accustomed to thinking about the homologies between the civilizing projects of missionaries and European colonial powers. 30. This set of historiographic foci, and how it differs from an earlier generation of often mission-specific histories, is ably discussed in a recent review article by Tanika Sarkar, “Missionaries, Converts and the State in Colonial India,” Studies in History n.s. 18, no. 1 (2002), 121–33. For a broader view of the writing on missions in the colonial world, see the excellent, albeit brief, overview by Norman Etherington: “Missions and Empire,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Robin Winks, vol. 5, Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University 264  N O T E S

Press, 1999), 303–14. With respect to other parts of the colonial world, mission writings have enjoyed wider currency as sources of social history, with the volumes published by John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff being particularly trenchant examples. Their oeuvre is an influential instance of a number of recent works that place missions squarely in their imperial political-economic context; in the Comaroffs’ case, the argument runs that missionaries engendered the changes in the practices and ethics of consumption and production required for colonial capitalism to plant firm roots in South Africa. See Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991–97). 31. Timothy Mitchell introduced this constellation of ideas in “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” Theory and Society 19, no. 5 (1990): 545–77; “The Limits of the State,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 77–96; and “Society, Economy and the State-Effect,” in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). See also Michael Taussig’s The Magic of the State (London: Routledge, 1997). 32. Robert E. Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). The early work of David Washbrook also explored this theme: see The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 33. Recent studies by historians and anthropologists of south Asia have focused on the practices and institutional experiences by virtue of which ordinary citizens come to perceive the state as uniform and at a level of remove from themselves, as well as on how nonstate agents shape and transform state agendas and institutions to an extent greater than was formerly assumed. Literature in this vein includes the influential collection of essays in C. J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, eds., The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: Hurst, 2001); Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); William Gould, “The Dual State: The Unruly ‘Subordinate,’ Caste, Community and Civil Service Recruitment in North India, 1930–55,” Journal of Historical Sociology 20, nos. 1–2 (2007): 13–43; Akhil Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 375–402; David Mosse, “Rule and Representation: Transformations in the Governance of the Water Commons in British South India,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 1 (2006): 61–90. 34. Proceedings of the Legislative Council of Fort St. George, Resolutions on Matters of General Public Interest, August 14, 1918, p. 106. What this Indian official meant was, first, that it was in the state’s and the landlord’s interest to keep the labor regime functioning without interruption and, second, that, N O T E S   265

technically, mirasidars were considered landlords who helped to secure tax from those who actually cultivated under their supervision. 35. The phrase “teeth-gritting harmony” is Louis Althusser’s, who uses it to describe the precarious stability of modern society, ensured by its ideological apparatuses: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 127–86, at 150; in Althusser’s original, the term “harmony,” is given in scare quotes. 36. See David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); this book appeared, unfortunately, too late for me to take his arguments into consideration, although they are very compatible with my own. Many historians of Christianity in India have demonstrated that a favorite target of Protestant missionary invective in the late nineteenth century was caste, and indeed, many missionaries raised their voices to lament what caste prejudice had done to the Pariah. Duncan Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India. Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1980; Graham Houghton, The Impoverishment of Dependency: The History of the Protestant Church in Madras, 1870–1920 (Madras: CLS, 1983); Geoffrey Oddie, Social Protest in India: British Missionaries and Social Reforms, 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), chap. 2. 37. Historian Henriette Bugge sums up this perception nicely when she writes, “From this time on [i.e., the early nineteenth century] Protestant missions .  .  . stressed the importance of deleting caste identities and caste behaviour in their Churches,” in “Christianity and Caste in XIXth Century South India: The Different Social Policies of British and Non-British Missions,” Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 103 (Jul–Sep 1998): 87–97, at 91. See also Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India, 1840–1900 (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1994); Duncan Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1980); Sundararaj Manickam, The Social Setting of Christian Conversion in South India (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1977); and his “Missionary Attitudes Towards Observance of Caste in the Churches of Tamilnad, 1606–1850,” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 22, no. 4 (1983): 60–61; Oddie, Social Protest. 38. Moreover, the mission agents most active in arguing the cause of the Pariah, in designing ameliorative schemes, and then in assisting the state in managing those schemes, shared these critical assumptions about the nature of caste and about what features, exactly, of Pariah servitude required amelioration. This was so despite the theological differences that might have divided Protestant missionaries in other realms of activity. For extended treatment of 266  N O T E S

the question of what differences exist among the different missions I studied, as well as the relevance of those to this book, see chap. 2. In this book, I have allowed the problem of the Pariah and the concrete activity of missionaries in and around Madras city, the seat of provincial power—and therefore primarily in the Chingleput, North Arcot, and South Arcot districts—to determine the missions on which I focus. The most redoubtable architects of a form of evangelization deemed appropriate for the Pariah, as well as those having the closest dealings with the colonial state, emerged from the Wesleyan Methodist Mission, the Dutch Reformed Church of America’s Arcot Mission, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the Free Church of Scotland. 39. Colonial ethnographers too, in concert with missionaries, came to the conclusion that caste was a matter of religion: see Dirks, Castes of Mind, esp. chaps. 7–9, 127–97. 40. On the new liberalism’s career in Madras, see chaps. 6, 7, and 8 of this text. Certain aspects of British new liberalism found particularly fertile ground in colonial Madras. 41. The term Panchama is, like Pariah, a synonym for those today known as Dalits, and the two were used interchangeably in this period. Panchama appeared slightly later than Pariah, around the turn of the nineteenth century, and was supposed to be preferable to Pariah, because the latter was known to be used as a slur. 42. The idea that liberalization that moved too rapidly would be selfdefeating was not in itself new; as Karuna Mantena has shown, it was first worked out and promulgated by Henry Sumner Maine and rose to importance as a keystone of administration following the rebellion of 1857. See Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). But it was only in the late 1910s and 1920s, when Dalit representatives began to demand state intervention to protect and enforce the rights of their community, that this essentially conservative discourse took center stage in ongoing efforts to address and contain the Pariah problem. 43. The definitive account of the development of Ambedkarite politics in Maharashtra is Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 44. Simon Charsley, “‘Untouchable’: What Is in a Name?” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 1 (1996): 1–23. 45. For example, Ramdas Lamb, Rapt in the Name: Ramnamis, Ramnam and Untouchable Religion in Central India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 7; Chad Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 5n7; Charsley, “ ‘Untouchable.’ ” N O T E S   267

46. Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 2–5; Lamb, Rapt in the Name, 7. Ambedkar himself, of course, most commonly used untouchable, but this is rarely the reason given for its scholarly use, with the important exception of Christophe Jaffrelot’s perceptive account of Ambedkar’s thought: Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (London: Hurst, 2005). 47. An earlier argument about the “constructed” nature of the term “Scheduled Caste”—that is, the extent to which the term arbitrarily held together a set of highly variable objects—to which Charsley approvingly refers was made by Marc Galanter in his Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. 119–53. With respect to “Scheduled Caste” in particular, Lelah Dushkin’s work remains path-breaking: “The Policy of the Indian National Congress Toward the Depressed Classes: An Historical Study” (master’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1957). 48. Panchama means “of the fifth,” and therefore outside the fourfold classical system of caste, or varna. Avarna, similarly means those outside the varna system. Chandala is a term referring to “unclean” castes and is used as a slur in many parts of India. 49. For sobering accounts of recent anti-Dalit violence, see Narula, Broken People; and S. Viswanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land: Frontline Reports on AntiDalit Violence in Tamil Nadu, 1995–2004 (Chennai: Navayana, 2005).

1. Land Tenure or Labor Control? 1. Nancy Gardner Cassels, “Social Legislation Under the Company Raj: The Abolition of Slavery Act of 1843,” South Asia 11, no. 1 (1988): 59–87. 2. Adscripti glebae is a Roman legal designation for slaves who were sold or transferred with the land they cultivated. 3. It has, no doubt, been remarked, that the form of landholding predominant in the Tamil-speaking regions, the mirasi or kāṇiyāṭci system, always entailed rights to laborers along with land. Many sources mention this. See, e.g., David Ludden, “The Terms of Ryotwari Practice: Changing Property Relations among Mirasidars in the Tinnevelly District, 1801 to 1885,” in Studies of South India: An Anthology of Recent Research and Scholarship, ed. Robert E. Frykenberg and Pauline Kolenda (Madras: New Era, 1985), 151–69; and S. S. Sivakumar, “Transformation of the Agrarian Economy in Tondaimandalam, 1760–1900,” Social Scientist 6, no. 70 (1978): 18–39. But this is seldom the focus of analysis. 4. For South India, see David Washbrook, “South India, 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 479–516, at 479. 268  N O T E S

Some of the best efforts to synthesize the literature on economic change from an all-India perspective include Neil Charlesworth, British Rule and the Indian Economy, 1800–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1982); and Peter Robb, “British Rule and Indian ‘Improvement,’” Economic History Review, n.s., 34, no. 4 (1981): 507–23. David Ludden’s bibliographic essay organizes the regional literature on agrarian change and is available at www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/bibessay. htm (accessed January 15, 2006); the principal issues of debate—the question of increased social and economic stratification during the period of colonial rule and of “deindustrialization”—are fairly constant across regions of the subcontinent. An important point of debate in this scholarship concerns the applicability of the concept of “ownership” to the pre- and early colonial agrarian regime—a controversy that raged among early colonial state officials as well— leading many scholars to opt for alternate terms such as “land controller.” See, e.g., Dharma Kumar, “A Note on the Term ‘Land Control,’” in Rural India: Land, Power and Society Under British Rule, ed. Peter Robb (London: Curzon, 1983), 59–75; and Burton Stein, “Privileged Landholding: The Concept Stretched to Cover the Case,” in Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia, ed. Robert E. Frykenberg (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1977), 67–77. I concur with Dharma Kumar’s dismissal of the term land controller, but not because it is, as she says, “modish.” Rather, the problem is that the use of land controller for precolonial relations, and owner for later arrangements, takes the colonial state’s own description of social reality as fact, thereby simply assuming what should be a matter of investigation: when, how, and in what respect precolonial forms of control became ownership. 5. On cotton cropping and its role in increasing social stratification, see David Washbrook, “Economic Development and Social Stratification in Rural Madras: The ‘Dry Region,’ 1878–1929,” in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ed. Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (London: Athlone, 1978), 68–82. Bruce Robert challenges this view in “Economic Change and Agrarian Organization in ‘Dry’ South India, 1890–1940: A Reinterpretation,” Modern Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 59–78; Washbrook persuasively rejoins in “The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India: Production, Subsistence, and Reproduction in the ‘Dry South,’ c. 1870–1930,” Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 1 (1994): 129–64. 6. Causal links among slavery, conditions of labor shortage, and land surplus were first observed by Herman Jeremias Nieboer in Slavery as an Industrial System; Ethnological Researches  (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1900); an updated version of this argument is given by Evsey D. Domar in “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 30, no.  1 (March 1, 1970): 18–32. The strongest version of the Nieboer thesis has been decisively rejected by students of comparative slave systems; see Orlando Patterson, N O T E S   269

“The Structural Origins of Slavery: A Critique of the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 12–34. A weak version of Nieboer’s argument, in which enslavement is one solution for landowners faced with labor shortage and land surplus, remains useful. A causal link does not imply that when such conditions are present agrestic slavery (or serfdom) is the inevitable result, let alone that all forms of slavery can be explained by ecological factors. The existence of such factors in the Madras Presidency is useful in helping to make sense of the great investment of landowners in measures designed to foreclose the possibility of unfree Pariah laborers acquiring land of their own (as discussed in the following section). On the importance of irrigation, see David Ludden, “Patronage and Irrigation in Tamil Nadu: A Long-Term View,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 16, no. 3 (1979): 347–65. 7. Indeed, the existence of a large landless laboring class has been dubbed perhaps the most uniquely “Indian” feature of what some have termed “Indian feudalism”; see Utsa Patnaik, “Introduction,” in Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India, ed. Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney (Madras: Sangam, 1985), 1–34, at 2–3. Yet this fact has remained conceptually marginal to most scholarly discussions of Indian feudalism and does not typically feature in the arguments of those who doubt the applicability of the concept of feudalism to South Asian history; see Harbans Mukhia, The Feudalism Debate (New Delhi: Manohar, 1999); and Frank Perlin, “Concepts of Order and Comparison, with a Diversion on Counter-Ideologies and Corporate Institutions in Late Pre-Colonial India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 12, nos. 2–3 (1985): 87–165. Dharma Kumar has persuasively undermined the idea (most vigorously promoted by nationalist historians writing in the 1950s and 1960s, such as S. J. Patel, Agricultural Labourers in Modern India [Bombay: Current Book House, 1952]), that India’s large landless class was the product of colonial rule; see Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Madras Presidency During the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Manohar, 1992). Irfan Habib attests as well to the presence of a large landless class in precolonial India in The Agrarian System of Mughal India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The extent to which the landless class might have been enlarged during colonial rule, however, is not agreed upon; Kumar and J. Krishnamurty have argued for a continuity in the relative percentage of the class, whereas Utsa Patnaik maintains that the class was expanded by an influx of artisans and former petty proprietors—an argument also mooted by colonial officials; see GOR 437–38, April 29, 1882. See J. Krishnamurty, “The Growth of Agricultural Labour in India: A Note,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 9, no. 3 (1972): 327–32; and Patnaik, “Introduction.”

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8. Mihir Shah had a similar concern in mind when he pointed to the absence of attention to labor relations in the debate on modes of production in India: Mihir Shah, “The Kaniatchi Form of Labour,” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 30 (1985): PE65–PE66. That debate’s highlights have been anthologized in Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The “Mode of Production” Debate in India, ed. Utsa Patnaik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 9. For particular accounts of mirās in the several districts named above, see Kathleen Gough, Rural Society in Southeast India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); David Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); P. B. Mayer, “The Penetration of Capitalism in a South Indian District: The First 60 Years of Colonial Rule in Tiruchirapalli,” South Asia 3, no. 2 (1980): 1–24; Mihir Shah, “Capitalist Development and the Transformation of Agrarian Relations in Chingleput District c. 1780–1983” (Ph.D. diss., Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Trivandrum, 1984); Sivakumar, “Transformation of the Agrarian Economy”; Haruka Yanagisawa, A Century of Change (Delhi: Manohar, 1996). Perhaps the fullest treatment of the very complex history of mirasi tenure during the critical period of the initial assumption of power in early colonial Madras is Irschick, Dialogue and History. I will focus here only on pertinent features and on those that have not been properly remarked upon in these other accounts. A classic and rich contemporary source is W. H. Bayley and W. Huddleston, Papers on Mirasi Right Selected from the Records of Government (Madras: Government of Madras, 1862). 10. David Ludden describes how the share, paṅku, was once granted under royal remit, and was communally held, inasmuch as shares rotated periodically among a fixed number of named mirasidars. With increasing possibilities for investment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shares became fixed to particular mirasidars, a process that was brought to completion during the colonial settlements. See Ludden, “The Terms of Ryotwari Practice.” 11. “Nilam, pulam, nīr, kollai, tōppu, turavu, kiṇaṟu, . . . pēṟukāṇi, māṉiyam, cekkumuṭṭai, taṟikaṭṭamai, paraccēri, tiṭaṟpaṟaiyar, piḻakkaṭai maṟṟum eppērppaṭṭa cakala sutantiramum.” From a deed of sale of a mirasi share in the village of Toṇṭaiyārpēṭṭai, in Bayley and Huddleston, Papers on Mirasi Right, app. 4, “The Originals of the Documents Appended to Mr. Ellis’s Answers to the Mirasi Questions,” no. 12, p. xxii. 12. The exception to this usual manner in which local ritual status is determined is the case of the Brahmin, who was of high ritual status by definition and irrespective of worldly wealth. The colonial sociology of caste, which culminated in the work of Louis Dumont, errs in treating the highly exceptional

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case of the Brahmin as definitive of caste as a whole: see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. 13. In Chingleput at the end of the eighteenth century, Vellalars comprised 53 percent of mirasidars, Brahmins 20 percent, and all others the remainder: Irschick, Dialogue and History, 105–6. By 1919, presidency-wide figures paint a similar picture: 15 percent of the wealthiest rural inhabitants—paying land revenue of Rs. 30 or more—were Brahmins, 81 percent were non–Brahmin caste Hindus, while the remaining 4 percent were Dalits, Christians, Muslims, and Europeans: see Christopher J. Baker, The Politics of South India, 1920–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 90. Yet we must note that there were considerable variations in the caste composition of mirasidars among the districts: in South Arcot, for instance, almost all mirasidars were Brahmins, whereas in Chingleput and Tanjore (the “classic” mirasi regions) the vast majority were Vellalars. On these regional variations, see Benedicte Hjelje, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967): 71–126. 14. The most well-developed and influential statement of Vellalar self-perception is to be found in Maṟaimalai Aṭikaḷ, Veḷāḷar Nākarikam (The Culture of Vellalars; Madras: Saiva Siddhanta, 1975). Aṭikaḷ was an icon of the early twentieth-century revivalist Pure Tamil movement: see, for instance, M.  S.  S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). As for the valorization of cultivation, strands of Tamil thought had for a long time carried such themes, most famously in the fifth-century collection of ethical aphorisms, Tirukkural. But their incorporation into a non-Brahminist, Dravidian discourse was an innovation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 15. This was the basis of the ryotwari system of tenure which the government sought to implement in Madras. See discussion later in this chapter. This particular facet of ryotwari ideology, especially as espoused by Thomas Munro, is well described in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (London: Clarendon, 1963). Nor was this irony lost on all British officials. In 1885, with ryotwari well established, the Collector of Tanjore, J. B. Pennington, observed that actual, as opposed to notional, cultivators—i.e., tenants and landless laborers—entirely lacked security in their property and, moreover, had no incentive to improve cultivation (GOR 1304–1304A, November 23, 1885). Pennington’s remarks did not please the Board of Revenue, and in his defense, he explained that because his researches had been undertaken in response to a query from the government of India regarding the economic security of “real cultivators,” he had not realized that he was confined to studying those higher strata of tenants whose rights had already been secured. 272  N O T E S

16. For instance, Raj Shekhar Basu, Nandanar’s Children: The Paraiyans’ Tryst with Destiny (New Delhi: Sage, 2011), 29, 48; and Hjelje, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage,” 78. See also Bayley and Huddleston, Papers on Mirasi Right, 213–14. An important exception is Gyan Prakash, “Introduction,” in Gyan Prakash, ed. The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 40. 17. This practice was still prevalent as late as 1949: V.  V. Sayana, in his Agrarian Problems of Madras Province (Madras: Business Week, 1949), 206, observed a difference of “two to three bags higher” in the grain rents paid by “depressed class” tenants in comparison with the “prevailing rates of rent in a village.” Because these statuses were determined by mirasidars, they were likely objects of bitter political contest in the pre- and early colonial periods, as records reveal they were later on. Tensions between tenants and mirasidars are recorded in, e.g., GOR 1304–1304A, November 23, 1885; and GOR 3594, Confidential, December 9, 1914; and are discussed as well by Irschick, Dialogue and History, chaps. 2 and 3; and Yanagisawa, A Century of Change, chap. 4. 18. The Tamil āḷ, which can mean simply man or person, can also connote a far more servile position than the English expression “these are my men” might. Thus, the verb āḷāku (lit. to become an āḷ) means to submit or to become subordinate. 19. This is not say that all laborers were Pariahs, although virtually all Pariahs were laborers. Of “tied” laborers—i.e., paṇṇaiyāḷs—in Chingleput in 1918, J. Gray recorded that Pariahs were the “vast majority” and that tied laborers in turn comprised between one-half and two-thirds of agricultural “coolies,” i.e., any laborer employed on someone else’s farm (GOR 2941, August 12, 1918). There were, in addition, caste laborers in the nineteenth century and after, most of whom in the Tamil regions were Vanniyars, the erstwhile “Palli” caste. It is often supposed that Brahmins, out of caste considerations, kept only caste laborers such as Vanniyars, whereas untouchables were employed by non-Brahmins. Apart from unsubstantiated assertions in the secondary literature, however, I have found no corroboration for this. And by the late nineteenth century, there is a wealth of counterevidence, in the form of labor disputes between untouchables and their Brahmin masters in even the most “traditional” regions such as Tanjore. Moreover, both non-Brahmins and the Brahmins observed untouchability, and thus neither would have entered cēris—although both would occasionally do so, en masse, for the performance of acts of retribution for alleged insubordination, as happened in a village in Chingleput in 1886; thus, BPR 1547, July 7, 1886, records how mirasidars punished insubordinate Pariahs by entering the cēri, ploughing up much of it, and forcibly ejecting all the inhabitants. Reprisals of this nature continue to occur: see, e.g., Smita Narula, Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). N O T E S   273

20. Gyan Prakash treats the relation between untouchables’ caste status and their labor servitude as merely accidental in Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), for example on 221. 21. GOR 386–87, June 2, 1890. 22. Examples of bonds can be found in Tremenheere’s “Note” in GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892; in GOR 875, Confidential, April 19, 1916; and in GOR 748, Confidential, March 29, 1919. For analyses of forms of debt bondage in other parts of India, see Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); and Prakash, Bonded Histories. 23. The strategies of labor control made possible by such forms of debt are vividly described in, inter alia, GOR 3559, October 11, 1917, and will be discussed in chap. 4. The widespread manipulation of small law courts by village elites has been described by David Washbrook in “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 649–721; and the invocation of the law as a tool deployed specifically against Dalits is attested in much of the missionary literature. Caste-based discriminatory practices—e.g., the refusal to allow Dalit witnesses and even defendants to enter the courts, forcing them to give testimony from outside—were still routine, even in 1924, as revealed in the testimony of two Tamil Dalit political activists, M.  C. Rajah and R. Srinivasan, to the Lee Commission. See Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services, Evidence: Madras, vol. 36, India Office Library; and chap. 5, this volume. 24. My translation is loose; the proverb is cāṇpaṟaikku muḻattaṭi (lit. “For a one-span Paraiya, a cubit beating”). 25. Bundla Ramaswamy Naidu, “Excerpts from Remarks on the Revenue System and Landed Tenures of the Provinces Under the Presidency of Fort St. George,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1834): 300. 26. This began to change, especially in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as avenues for indenture opened up. See, for instance, Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 27. If a woman and her children were purchased, her sons and the offspring of her daughters were considered to belong to her master; Naidu, “Excerpts from Remarks,” 300. 28. The use of high-caste village leaders to settle disputes among untouchable laborers was widespread even in the 1950s, as Kathleen Gough records (Rural Society in Southeast India, esp. 318–38). 29. Edgar Thurston, Ethnographic Notes on Southern India (Delhi: Cosmo, 1975), 2: 408. Far more well known is the use of torture to extract revenue 274  N O T E S

payments, the primary subject of the Madras government inquiry on torture in 1855, from which Thurston derives most of his data. 30. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes, 409–10. Not until 1925, at the behest of Pariah activist and member of the Legislative Council Rettamalai Srinivasan, was this special eligibility of the untouchable laboring castes explicitly corrected in the Village Officer’s Manual, although Pariah activists had brought it specifically to the attention of the government since at least 1914. See BPR 1296, Mis., March 23, 1914; and GOR 31, Mis., January 6, 1925. 31. The Fourth Session of the South India Depressed Classes Elevation Society, headed by the Paraiyar Israel Nalappah, described the depredations of the “Thesathi Chetti,” a hereditary position held by a “Naicken”—here probably a Vanniyar—who would legislate upon the social and religious customs of the “depressed classes” and demand fees for alleged infractions; the society called for the government to put an end to this (BPR 1296, Mis., March 23, 1914). Clearly they did not, because Adi-Dravidas (the name given to “untouchables” by the late 1910s) held a conference in the North Arcot District in 1923 at which they complained that they had been subject to “evils and pecuniary loss” by the Desayi Chettis, declared that they thenceforth wanted to conduct their panchayats caste councils without the intervention of the said Chettis, and hoped that the government would help them (GOL[G] 1980, Mis., December 11, 1923). 32. This meaning of tamiḻaṉ is largely unknown today and, moreover, goes so against the grain of Dravidian political ideology (which asserts that the only caste-based cleavage of significance is that between Brahmins and nonBrahmins) that the Pariah-exclusive definition, contained in the Tamil lexicon published by the University of Madras, has been whited out, by hand, in each copy for sale at the university bookshop. Other sources for this usage are numerous, with perhaps one of the earliest extant being Ananda Ranga Pillai’s eighteenthcentury diaries. See Ananda Ranga Pillai, The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Dubash to Joseph Francois Dupleix, Governor of Pondicherry: A Record of Matters Political, Historical, Social and Personal, from 1736–1761, eds. J. Frederick Price and K. Rangachari (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1984). Missionaries too record this usage in many places; one example appears in a series of transcribed interviews with native Christian mission workers. Numerous catechists identify themselves as Pariahs and speak of their separateness from the “Tamils” both within the church and in social life: Joseph Roberts, ed., Caste, in Its Religious and Civil Character, Opposed to Christianity: Being a Series of Documents by the Right Reverend Bishops Heber, Wilson, Corrie, and Spencer, and by Eminent Ministers of Other Denominations (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1847), esp. 42–62. Almost a century later, in 1921, a Dalit member of the Legislative Council, M.  C. Madurai Pillai, referred to himself as an Adi-Dravida (the term Pariah had by then been rejected as derogatory), N O T E S   275

counterposing himself to caste people referred to as Tamils, in the course of a speech to the council (Proceedings of the Madras Legislative Council, October 12, 1921, p. 1014, IOL). Finally, in addition to the lexicon, the definition of tamiḷaṉ in question appears in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Tamil dictionaries, such as those by Johann Fabricius (A Tamil and English Dictionary [Tarangambadi: Tranquebar Evangelical, 1972]) and Miron Winslow (A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil [Madras: P. R. Hunt, 1862]). 33. Gyan Prakash, “Introduction,” in The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India, ed. Gyan Prakash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–46, at 23. 34. The assertion of economic continuity between the categories is particularly surprising in Prakash’s case, for he professes a wish to refrain from economism, identifying the latter with the misrepresentation of official colonial categories. See Prakash, “Introduction,” esp. 14–15. It is most accurate simply to note that tenancy was highly insecure for a large proportion of tenants. 35. Kumar, Land and Caste, 29. 36. Prakash, “Introduction.” 37. There is significant comparative data to support the point I am making here, namely that the possession by slaves of some economic means, such as garden plots, cannot be taken to indicate the person was “more like” a tenant. Slaves in Jamaica, Brazil, and St. Domingue often had considerable plots, but were never, for that reason, understood as tenants: the land was provided by the owner to allow some measure of self-sufficiency. See Peter Kolchin, “Some Recent Works on Slavery Outside the United States: An American Perspective,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 28, no. 4 (1986): 767–77, at 775. Indeed, the Caribbean system of requiring slaves to grow their own food on garden plots is recognized to have often been more brutal (in terms of the malnutrition it produced) that the slave system of the American south. Orlando Patterson makes this point in his “Slavery as Social Institution,” in International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), 21: 14146–52, at 14149. 38. Cited in Irschick, Dialogue and History, 32. 39. The long history of colonial officials’ denial of the existence of private property in India—and the related notion that Oriental despotism, alleged to prevail in precolonial India, entailed that the sovereign was also landlord—is described in Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1981); Stokes, English Utilitarians; David Washbrook, “India, 1818–60: The Two Faces of Colonialism,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3: 395–421. 40. The Jaghire was the first major acquisition of the East India Company in Madras, gifted to them by the Nawab of Arcot; a jagir was the term for a 276  N O T E S

revenue farm assigned by kings to feudatories. The Jaghire itself was part of a region known in medieval times as Tondaimandalam, a geographic designation describing what became the colonial-era districts of North Arcot, South Arcot, Chingleput, and parts of Nellore and Chittoor. Ellis claimed that Tamil “chronicles” caṭakams describing the history of Tondaimandalam proved the antiquity of mirasidars’ claims: see Irshick, Dialogue and History, 104–14; Naidu, “Excerpts from Remarks,” 292–307. 41. “Extract from Sir Thomas Munro’s Minute . . . dated 31st December 1824,” in W. H. Bayley and W. Huddleston, Papers on Mirasi Right, esp. 430–34. Likewise, in the 1890s, the Collector of Chingleput J.  H.  A. Tremenheere would judge mirasi rights to be a Frankenstein of the colonial state’s devising, a monstrous amalgamation of old and new. 42. Thus, ryotwari revenue collected directly from the “ryot” or cultivator, is usually contrasted to zamindari, in which the zamindars, intermediaries between cultivators and the state, acted as tax collectors on behalf of the government. The historiographical loci classici for the formulation of ryotwari policy are Guha, Rule of Property; Stokes, English Utilitarians; Nilmani Mukherjee, The Ryotwari System in Madras, 1792–1827 (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1962); Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 43. In a moment of retrospection, even an official was led to remark that the “rights of Meerassidars were . . . materially infringed” by the government during the early settlements: “Extract from Draft of a Ryotwar Regulation, The Board of Revenue, May 29, 1817,” in Bayley and Huddleston, Papers on Mirasi Right, 372, cited in Sivakumar, “Transformation of the Agrarian Economy,” 28. 44. Irschick, Dialogue and History, esp. chap. 3. 45. Yanagisawa, A Century of Change, 198. 46. Irschick, Dialogue and History, chap. 3. 47. While it was common to justify state protection of mirasi tenure in this way, what is interesting here is the official plagiarism of the phrase “dog in the manger.” Dharma Kumar has identified official plagiarism as a characteristic feature of colonial documentation in his introduction to the reprint of Land and Caste in South India (xvi). The phrase “dog in the manger” appears to describe mirās, in, inter alia, BPR 588, September 28, 1887; and BPR 2880, October 5, 1874. For those unfamiliar with Aesop’s fables, the phrase refers to a dog who, lying on a haystack in a manger, neither could eat the hay itself nor would it relinquish the hay to an ox that could be fed by the hay. 48. C.  S. Crole in BPR 1415, May 25, 1875, 4345, para. 42; also cited in Irschick, Dialogue and History, 148. Irschick, however, gives a different source for the quote, which may be a result of the fact that Crole was widely cited in official documents. N O T E S   277

49. This originally Persian term was incorporated into the language of administration such that subjects and state agents could also speak of having “darkhasted for” such and such a survey number. The effects of this new legislation on Pariah servitude were first noticed by Collector J. H. A. Tremenheere in his 1892 “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput,” as I have discussed in “Introduction: Reading Tremenheere’s ‘Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput,’” in Panchami Land Rights: Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput, ed. V. Alex (Madurai, Tamil Nadu: Ezhuthu, 2009), xxiii–xxxvi. 50. Board’s Standing Order 15, Standing Orders of the Board of Revenue (Land Revenue, Settlement and Miscellaneous) (Madras: Government Press, 1900), 25–34; the Rules of Preference are in paragraph 8. The additional conditions for Chingleput formulated to accommodate mirasi rights are laid down in appendix 5 (S.O. 15, para. 28, 99–101). 51. A similar set of concerns regarding moneylender rapacity and the vulnerability of peasants to it drove legislation in other parts of colonial India and, perhaps most famously, the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1901. See N. Gerald Barrier, The Punjab Land Alienation Bill (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1966); and his “The Formulation and Enactment of the Punjab Alienation of Land Bill,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 2, no. 2 (1964): 145–65; Ian Talbot, Punjab and the Raj, 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988); M. M. Islam, “The Punjab Land Alienation Act and the Professional Moneylenders,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 2 (1995): 271–91. 52. The origins include Henry Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (New York: Arno, 1974); B.  H. Baden-Powell, The Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India (New York: Johnson, 1970); these are discussed in, e.g., Louis Dumont, “The ‘Village Community’ from Munro to Maine,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 9 (1966): 67–89; and Clive Dewey, “Images of the Village Community,” Modern Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (1972): 291–338. See also Karuna Mantena’s study of the importance of Maine to British rule in India: Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 53. C. J. Fuller, “Misconceiving the Grain Heap: A Critique of the Concept of the Indian Jajmani System,” in Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 33–63; and Frank Perlin, “Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights, and the Problem of Rural Autonomy Under the Old Regime,” Journal of Peasant Studies 5, no. 2 (1978): 172–237. 54. BPR 2880, October 5, 1874, IOL, describes mirasidars in Chingleput as often absentee, having offices in Madras city. Almost forty years later, the Resettlement Report of the Chingleput District averred, “absentee landlords are still very numerous” (GOR 2765, September 16, 1912, TNSA, para. 7). 278  N O T E S

55. “Puramboke” is the anglicized form of the Tamil puṟampōkku. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century administrative usage of “communal” to refer to these lands accords with the widespread meaning of “communal” as an adjective synonymous with “common” and not current Indian English usage, where it refers to specific “communities” in opposition to others, as in the use of the euphemism “communal riot” to refer to interreligious and intercaste conflict. 56. GOR 796, June 1, 1870, encl. nos. 2–4, paras. 5–6. These remarks were made upon review of government responses as well as court judgments in over a dozen civil suits—many of which went through several processes of appeal— regarding mirasi compensation for waste in the Chingleput District between 1859 and 1867. 57. Irschick, Dialogue and History, esp. chap. 3. 58. Shah, “The Kaniatchi Form of Labour”; Prakash, Bonded Histories; and Sivakumar, “Transformation of the Agrarian Economy,” all consider this fact consequential. The exception is Ludden, Peasant History. 59. GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, 30.

2. Conceptualizing Pariah Conversion 1. Mass conversions began in the Madras Presidency in the late 1870s, especially before, during, and after the Great Famine of 1876–1878. But in the districts north of Madras in which the missions to be mentioned here (the Wesleyan Methodists, the Free Church of Scotland, and the American Arcot Mission) worked as major players in publicizing the Pariah Problem, a wave of mass conversions began in 1889 and continued through until about 1895. See Hugald Grafe, History of Christianity in India, vol. 4, part 2: Tamil Nadu in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1990); Sundararaj Manickam, The Social Setting of Christian Conversion in South India (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1977); J. Waskom Pickett, Christian Mass Movements in India: A Study with Recommendations (New York: Abingdon, 1933); John C. B. Webster, The Dalit Christians: A History (Delhi: ISPCK, 1992). 2. This is a theory of conversion commonly associated with Jesuits and was carried to its logical extreme in South India in seventeenth-century Madurai, by Roberto de Nobili, who donned the garb and adopted the habits of local Brahmins. See Vincent Cronin, A Pearl to India: the Life of Roberto de Nobili (New York: Dutton, 1959). 3. “Mission Success in India,” Harvest Field, August 1862, 217. 4. This is not to say that opposition to Christianity was altogether absent. Rather, until the 1890s, opposition in Madras almost always arose when the occasional high-caste schoolboy would convert under the tutelage of his N O T E S   279

teachers at a mission school. This kind of opposition was therefore concentrated in towns and cities, where such elite schools were located. What I am referring to in this chapter is the predominant rural reaction to evangelization, because we are concerned with the backdrop of Pariah conversion, an overwhelmingly rural phenomena. On high-caste urban responses to Christianity in Madras, see G. A. Oddie’s “Constructing Hinduism: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding,” in Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication Since 1500, ed. R. E. Frykenberg and A.M. Lowe (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 155–82, which provides a succinct account. 5. Ellam Oṉṟalla, Tamil Handbill 46 (Madras: Madras Tract and Book Society, 1881). This was also a common theme in the “Answers to Objections” column of the Tamil Christian monthly Cattiyatūtan, published by the Christian Literature Society’s Madras branch in the late 1880s. 6. The rusticity of the retort was recorded with phonetic precision by the Tamil preacher G.  D. Barnabas in a village in North Arcot: “āmāyyā nīṅka colṟatu cari, [āṉā] kiṟistoṅka āyiṭṭāc cāti keṭṭuppōvutē.” Vētiyar Viḷakku: The Tamil Preacher’s Magazine, April 1917, 54. 7. E. Muthiah Pillai, Kiṟistavarkaḷiṉ ācāramum, Kurumār Pōtakamum [The Manners and Customs of Native Christians and the Rules and Regulations of European Missionaries] (Palamcottah, 1894), 13, translation mine. 8. The Wesleyan Rev. W. H. Findlay warned missionaries new to India to be prepared for numerous hardships, foremost among which was intense loneliness: “The Difficulties and Compensations of Indian Missionary Life: A Charge to Young Missionaries,” Harvest Field, January 1891, 241–51. 9. “Mission Success in India,” 218–19. 10. William Goudie to Rev. G. W. Olver, September 3, 1892, WMMA (SOAS). 11. G. Mackenzie Cobban to Mr. Hartley, June 25, 1892, WMMA (SOAS). 12. William Goudie to Rev. G. W. Olver, September 3, 1892, WMMA (SOAS). Such observations were by no means unique. Reverend B. Pratt, for example, a Wesleyan at work in Telugu Country, opened an article entitled “A Plea for Mission Work Among Low-Caste Hindus,” by archly observing that “The plea for such a purpose seems hardly needed in these days, when loud voiced criticism . . . insists on immediate and extensive numerical success” (Harvest Field, September 1890, 81). 13. Rev. Adam Clayton, The Pariah: A Plea and a Challenge, undated pamphlet, WMMA (SOAS). 14. No single footnote can do justice to the vast literature on the justificatory discourses and regulatory institutions founded upon the idea of civilizing the colonized that were instituted most famously by the British and French empires. Important touchstones in the south Asianist literature alone include 280  N O T E S

Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann, eds., Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London: Wimbledon, 2004). 15. Goudie, stationed in Chingleput District, became a legendary champion of the Pariah both at home and in Madras, as we shall see, and also later became general secretary of the Methodist Mission. He served for twenty-five years in India, between 1881 and 1905, and is still remembered and celebrated in the village of Ikkadu, as well in the Chingleput town of Tiruvallur, the mission’s district headquarters; several Church of South India schools are named after him. As James Lewis, Goudie’s biographer, nicely puts it, “the Pariah” was “the great cause to which Goudie gave the whole of his Indian life.” J. Lewis, William Goudie (London: Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 1923), 36. 16. Aspects of Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century South India are addressed in David Mosse, “Caste, Christianity and Hinduism: A Study of Social Organization and Religion in Rural Ramnad” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1985); for the eighteenth century, see Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 17. There were particular individual missionaries who concentrated their efforts on theorizing and working upon the Pariah Problem, and for this reason my research in mission archives focused on the missions to which the majority of these individuals belonged: the American Arcot Mission, the Free Church of Scotland Mission, the Wesleyan Methodist Mission, and the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. These archives are located at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Jersey; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; and the Rhodes House Library, Oxford, respectively. Finally, an excellent source on many missions and for Christian writings in Tamil was the Ecclesiastical Archives of the United Theological College Library, Bangalore. 18. For a useful overview of the reasons for and organizational bases of interdenominational cooperation in south India, see Lionel Caplan, “Class and Christianity in South India: Indigenous Responses to Western Denominationalism,” Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 4 (1980): 645–71; and “Protestants in South India: Mission, Conversion, and the Erosion of Denomination,” in Class and Culture in Urban India: Fundamentalism in a Christian Community (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 32–52. 19. These resolutions included, in 1900, eleven on the “Movement Among the Panchamas [Pariahs].” Resolutions on a number of topics were drawn up, after wider discussion at conferences, by committees of between twelve and twentyfive members representing a variety of missions. Report of the South Indian N O T E S   281

Missionary Conference (Madras: M. E. Publishing House, 1900). Andrew Porter identifies as one impulse to this kind of interdenominational cooperation— evident as well in parts of Africa—the challenge posed to Western authority from native congregations: Andrew Porter, “Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm, and Empire,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 222–46, at 243. Another illustration of the general mood of cooperation in south India is the fact that two of the three missions I focus on most closely, the American Arcot Mission and the Free Church of Scotland, united in 1902 to form, along with the Church of Scotland, the South India United Church. See Charlotte C. Wyckoff, A Hundred Years with Christ in Arcot: A Brief History of the Arcot Mission in India of the Reformed Church in America (Vellore, 1953), 43. The Madras Missionary Conference was an organization of Protestant missionaries from all missions working in the presidency. 20. Such a view may be found, for example, in Duncan Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1980); Manickam, Social Setting of Christian Conversion; Robert E. Frykenberg, “The Impact of Conversion and Social Reform Upon Society in South India During the Late Company Period,” in Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization, c. 1830–1850, ed. C. H. Philips and M. D. Wainwright (London: SOAS, 1976), 187–243; Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India: The London Missionary Society in Southern Travancore in the 19th Century (Delhi: Manohar, 1989); Samuel Jayakumar, Dalit Consciousness and Christian Conversion (Chennai: ISPCK, 2000); Henriette Bugge, “Christianity and Caste in XIXth Century South India: The Different Social Policies of British and Non-British Missions,” Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions 103 (Jul–Sep 1998): 87–97. 21. Forrester (Caste and Christianity) provides an excellent overview of Protestant missionary and Indian Christian views on caste but nevertheless fails to consider how important, widespread, and influential on mission policy were the missionary conceptions of social hierarchy that I discuss in this section. For a rich, contemporary source, see Joseph Roberts, ed., Caste, in Its Religious and Civil Character, Opposed to Christianity: Being a Series of Documents by the Right Reverend Bishops Heber, Wilson, Corrie, and Spencer, and by Eminent Ministers of Other Denominations (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1847). 22. He went on, after his retirement, to support from England the political campaigns of the non-Brahmin movement that began in Tamil Nadu in the late 1910s. See Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–29 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 97–98, 105–6. 282  N O T E S

23. “What Action Should Be Taken with Reference to Cast on the Native Church?” Harvest Field, July 1898, 241–50, at 241. 24. These responses to Sharrock were recorded in Harvest Field, “Notes on the Debate,” July 1898, 250. 25. “South Indian Missionary Association. Notes by the Secretary,” Harvest Field, February 1899, 64–65. 26. Rev. J.  A. Sharrock, “Caste and Christianity,” Indian Church Quarterly Review, January 1893, 50–63, at 56–57, and cf. Rev. Arthur Margöschis, “Christianity and Caste,” Indian Church Quarterly Review, October 1893, 521–54, at 549. 27. “Intumata jātiyācāramāva teṉṉaveṉṟāl, ittēcattilvantu kuṭiyēṟiṉa āryacatiyār iyaṟkaiyāyt tēcattil amaintirunta pētaṅkaḷaiyum, paḻakkavvaḻakka ācaraṅkaḷaiyum matacampantapaṭutti[ṉārkaḷ].” Muthiah Pillai, Kiṟistavarkaḷiṉ ācāramum, 6; emphasis mine, translation mine. 28. Margöschis, Christianity and Caste, 545. 29. Muthiah Pillai, Kiṟistavarkaḷiṉ ācāramum, 13–14; translation mine. 30. For accounts of such practices, see, e.g., Inquiries Made by the Bishop of Madras Regarding the Removal of Caste Prejudices and Practices Within the Native Church of South India; Together with the Replies of the Missionaries and Native Clergy Sent Thereto (Madras: Christian Knowledge Society, 1868); Grafe, History of Christianity in India; Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings. 31. Letter to J. M. N. Schwarz from David Aroolappa Pillay of Mylapore, T. A. Dorasawmy Pillai, T. Davasagayam Pillay, and Cinnacunoo Pillay, Madras, April 6, 1883, Leipzig Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Box 20, UTCEA. 32. Printed Tamil pamphlet published by the members of the Uṟamuṟai (Kinship) Caste Christian Social Association (Madras: Kalanilayam, 1881), 19–20; Leipzig Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Box 20, UTCEA, translation mine. 33. “Letter from Panchamas,” January 13, 1910, with sixteen signatories, Leipzig Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Box 20, UTCEA. 34. Reversions to “heathenism” and defections to Catholicism were very frequently caused by caste conflict, leading to the particularly bitter charge that Catholics were “sheep-stealers” and “accommodators” of caste. Conflicts of this nature rocked virtually every Protestant mission in South India at some point in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Examples include the conflict adumbrated above between high-caste and Pariah Lutherans in Madras city and that between Vellalars and Nadars in Tirunelveli. See, respectively, Leipzig Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Box 20, UTCEA; and D. Dennis Hudson, “Christians and the Question of Caste: The Veḷḷāḷa Protestants of Pāḷayaṅkōṭṭai,” in Images of Man: Religion and Historical Process in South Asia, ed. Fred W. Clothey (Madras: New Era, 1982). See also Robert E. Frykenberg, History of Christianity in India: From the Beginnings to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 206–300. N O T E S   283

35. Tamil marriages are contracted on a subcaste basis, and both the private negotiations and public events surrounding the marital alliance are central to the reproduction of caste society and to the policing of its boundaries. 36. Correspondence regarding Sharrock’s conflict with high-caste congregants is contained in CLR55, CLR56, and CLR57, USPG (RHL). 37. Sharrock, Caste and Christianity, 54n. 38. A. N. Sattampillai, A Brief Sketch of the Hindu Christian Dogmas (Palamcottah, India, 1890). The secession is described in Vincent Kumaradoss, “Negotiating Colonial Christianity: The Hindu Christian Church of Late Nineteenth Century Tirunelveli,” South Indian Studies 1 (1996): 35–53. Curiously, Sattampillai’s “rebellion” is uncritically celebrated by Kumaradoss without any mention of one of its most central motivating factors: the disdain for Pariah Christians that is expressed in A Brief Sketch. Sattampillai was a Nadar, traditionally a “low” caste but one that had acquired considerable prestige in the years preceding the breakaway in Tirunelveli District; Nadar Christians were thus least desirous of shedding newly acquired caste marks and status. On Nadars’ gains in status over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Robert Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnadu: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 39. “The Attitude of Missionaries to Hinduism as a Social System,” Harvest Field, January–December 1897, 5. 40. “The Attitude of Missionaries,” 6. 41. This focus emerges clearly in American Arcot Mission annual reports, 1868–1919, held at UTCEA and RCA, as well as in the writings by missionaries belonging to these missions published in the pages of magazines such as Harvest Field. The very term “village Christian” was used in much of this writing as a synonym for Pariah Christian. 42. Sharrock was not entirely alone in alleging that such a policy had been formed in bad faith. The well-known native Christian pastor Rev. P. Rajahgopal drew a similar picture of the Indian Church as early as 1877 and bluntly judged the missionary attitude to caste a species of hypocrisy: “To speak the plain truth, missionaries, as a body, have chosen to temporize. It is admitted on all hands that caste is anti-Christian, anti-Scriptural, and anti-social. Then let the missionary be loyal to the truth. Let him administer the sacraments only to faithful, worthy subjects . . . Nothing has been so prostituted in this country as the sacraments, especially that of baptism . . . in our impatience to build up churches.” P. Rajahgopal, “Caste in Its Relation to the Church,” Indian Evangelical Review, January 1877, 369. Rajahgopal, the first Indian convert of the Church of Scotland in India, was a high-caste Mudaliyar, converted by John Anderson. See Rajaiah D. Paul, Chosen Vessels: Lives of Ten

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Indian Christian Pastors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Madras: CLS, 1961), 82–111. 43. Rev. J.  A. Sharrock, “Caste and Christianity,” Indian Church Quarterly Review, January 1893, 50–63. 44. Rev. J. A. Sharrock, “What Action Should Be Taken by Missionaries with Reference to Caste in the Native Church?” Kodaikanal Missionary Conference, May 24, 1898; printed in Harvest Field, July 1898, 241–51. 45. See esp. chap. 3–5. 46. Margöschis, “Christianity and Caste,” 533, emphasis in original. It was widely assumed among British Protestant missionaries that the spread both of Christianity and of science would be mutually reinforcing; hence the Madras Christian Literature Society published tracts on hygiene and “animalcules” just as easily as they published ones on themes such as redemption. 47. “Editorial Notices,” Harvest Field, August 1898, 320. 48. “Jāti,” Cattiya Tūtan 4, no. 3 (1891): 10; translation mine. 49. Inquiries Made by the Bishop of Madras, 3, emphasis mine. 50. Muttiah Pillai, Kiṟistavarkaḷiṉ ācāramum, 13. 51. For an overview of upper-caste Hindu-led caste-reformist discourse, see Susan Bayly, “Hindu Modernisers and the ‘Public’ Arena: Indigenous Critiques of Caste in Colonial India,” in Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism, ed. W. Radice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 93–137. It seems likely that this discourse was produced in conversation with Anglophone missionaries, given that members of the social stratum from which reformers were primarily drawn were most often graduates of mission schools. On this point see Oddie, “Constructing ‘Hinduism,’” 155–82. 52. In what has become the standard historical narrative of knowledge production in colonial India, missionary “evangelists” are portrayed as the antitheses of the scholar-administrator “Orientalists,” with respect to their attitudes toward Indian society and religion; see Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar, 1997); a recent revisionist account may be found in Michael Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). This distinction has proven useful in charting a key shift in British policy with respect to Indian “tradition” and law. It is, however, less productive of insight into the various continuities between missionaries, native elites, and the state that persisted despite important shifts in policy, continuities that only become apparent when we shift our focus to the discontinuity between these various elites and Pariahs. 53. Margöschis, “Christianity and Caste,” 530. See also Rev. H. Bower, “Caste in the Native Church,” Indian Evangelical Review 12 (April 1876): 409–17, who

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cites Max Muller as an authority for the contention that Hindus did not “originally” practice caste. 54. And this in an article whose very title, “The Christian Substitute for the Caste System,” well described the missionary project under discussion; by Rev. J. Cooling, Harvest Field, January–December 1898, 51. 55. Cf. Dewan Bahadur Ranganatha Rau, The Aryan System of Caste (Madras, n.d., ca. 1885). Mohandas K. Gandhi also famously held the view that ascriptive divisions of labor were conducive to harmonious societies; for Gandhi it was only the excrescence of unenlightened attitudes regarding labor that required reform. 56. In Protestant ideology, the reconciliation of spiritual equality and earthly inequality can be traced back to Luther himself. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1992). It was also a major feature of Christianity prior to the Reformation. 57. The Missionary Conference: South India and Ceylon, 1879 (Madras: Addison, 1880), vol. 1, 296, emphasis in original. 58. The Missionary Conference, 1879, vol. 1, 315. 59. This line of argument has been taken up by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). My account does not preclude the likelihood that missionaries did indeed play an important role, both intentionally and unintentionally, in effecting such changes. In neither case, however, should this blind us to the ways in which they spoke, and acted, against such changes. Although Eric Stokes rightly notes the importance of the evangelical Clapham sect to the development of liberal economic concepts in the context of building an empire in India, the programmatic call to unite the aims of “Christianity and commerce” was heeded by Anglican missionaries for only a very limited portion of the nineteenth century. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (London: Clarendon, 1963). There is a signal absence in the archives of the two Nonconformist societies I consulted of evidence attesting to the importance of jointly conceiving the two. The relative transience of the concept with respect to the Anglican Church Missionary Society is described in Andrew Porter, “‘Commerce and Christianity’: The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan,” Historical Journal 28, no. 3 (1985): 597–621; this is itself a response to an essay by Brian Stanley propounding the opposite view: Brian Stanley, “‘Commerce and Christianity’: Providence Theory, the Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism of Free Trade,” Historical Journal 26, no. 1 (1985): 71–94.

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60. See note 63, this chapter. 61. William Goudie, letter to the editor, Madras Mail, February 25, 1903. 62. The simplicity of the Pariah laborer’s needs, and his general contentment, were standard tropes of both state and native elite discourse; for the state’s take, see Introduction, chap. 4, and Conclusion, “Gentle Slavery’s Long Shadow”; chaps. 7 and 8 address Indian versions of similar ideas. 63. “The Pariahs and the Land,” Harvest Field, July 1894, 496–97. 64. “The Pariahs and the Land,” 493. 65. For example, BPR 1701, April 16, 1877, TNSA, remarks on the work of Dr. W. Scudder of the American Arcot Mission. 66. It is important to note that any link between famine and mass movements per se is weak. Dick Kooiman convincingly makes this argument, analyzing data from mass movements in close historical proximity to the Great Famine of 1876–1878: Dick Kooiman, “Mass Movement, Famine and Epidemic: A Study in Interrelationship,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 281–301. The important consideration for our purposes is that mass movements in Madras occurred very often in times unaffected by famine or epidemic. 67. These discussions spanned several contexts. Of missionary periodicals, most important was the Harvest Field, a south Indian mission magazine to which members from all prominent Protestant mission societies regularly contributed, although the occasional contribution from north India was also published. Harvest Field not only included articles on themes important to south Indian missions but also reviews of literature, “ethnographic” reports of preaching tours, and excerpts from missions’ annual reports. Editorials would frequently comment on Madras politics, both in its effect on mission work as well as more generally. Also well circulated was the Indian Evangelical Review, a pan-Indian missionary magazine devoted entirely to missiological articles. Other prominent contexts in which the Pariah was discussed were the panIndian and south Indian missionary conferences, both of which published reports containing papers presented, as well as the ensuing discussions. PanIndian missionary conferences took place in 1872, 1882, and 1892, in Calcutta, Allahabad, and Bombay, respectively, and in the latter two, special sessions were held regarding work among “low castes.” The largest south Indian missionary conferences took place in 1858, 1879, and 1900, and again, the topic of evangelizing Pariahs was specifically taken up in the latter two. Finally, the annual reports of the Free Church of Scotland, the Wesleyan Methodist Mission, and the American Arcot Mission for the years between 1880 and ca. 1905 provide a valuable record of the formulation of “Pariah policy.” 68. Rev. William Goudie, “The Missionaries and the Pariah Land Problem,” Harvest Field, July 1893–December 1894, 536.

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69. The Missionary Conference, 1879, vol. 1, 30–67. A panel on the new mass converts, entitled “Accessions to the Christian Church,” included papers by missionaries from the Church Missionary Society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the American Arcot Mission, the Wesleyan Methodist Mission, and the American Baptist Telugu Mission; still other missions were represented in the ensuing discussion, which was so lively that it had to be continued on the following day. The earliest writings to emerge from the Great Famine of 1876–1878 did not problematize “the Pariah” as such, although numerous clues allow the culturally sensitive reader to discern that in most cases the converts were indeed Pariahs or, as they were sometimes labeled, “non-caste.” A terminological ambiguity, present in both English and Tamil, stems from the fact that whereas the phrase “caste people” (jāti makkaḷ) specifically excludes Pariahs, Pariahs are also a caste (jāti) in the sense of being an endogamous descent group. 70. The view that preaching was the most fundamental and direct means of communicating the gospel resulted in heated debates in missionary circles regarding the validity of educational work. The “teaching versus preaching” debate was also at the heart of the “Missionary Controversy” in the Wesleyan Mission; for a concise overview of the latter, see Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 274–78; and, for a more detailed study, see Christi-An C. Bennett, “Seeking the Soul of India: Wesleyan Discussions, 1886–1900,” Journal of Asian Mission 4, no. 2 (2002): 243–66. 71. Rt. Rev. Bishop Sargent, “First Paper: New Converts,” in The Missionary Conference, 1879, vol. 1, 33–34. 72. Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India, 1840–1900 (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1994), 44. 73. It is interesting that Protestant missionaries do indeed seem to have become exemplars for natives in this regard. The first Tamil novel, Piratāpa Mutaliyār Carittiram, written by the Roman Catholic Māyuram Vētanāyakam Piḷḷai in 1896, exhorts Indians to provide relief for the poor during famines as Protestant missionaries do. 74. The Missionary Conference, 1879, 1: 54–58. 75. The caste system and the devaluation of manual labor were, for many missionaries, the cause of India’s economic stagnation—ideas which of course some administrators shared. The Tamil Christian magazine Tēcōpakāri, for example, in an article entitled “Intiyāvil Tarittiram Uṇṭākum Kāraṇaṅkaḷ” “Causes of Poverty in India,” cited “vēlaiyaik kuṟitta tappeṇṇam” (“misconceptions regarding work”) as one important reason, and caste as their basis. Specifically, the author targeted the fact that “kaittoḻil anēkarāl ikaḻappaṭukiṉṟatu” (“many revile manual labour”). Tēcopakāri, June 1882, 105. 288  N O T E S

76. Johannes Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” Harvest Field, October–November 1897, 361–73, 415–22, originally presented at the Madras Missionary Conference, August 1897. As previously noted, Harvest Field was the most widely read Protestant missionary periodical, and the German Lutheran Kabis framed his arguments within the terms of an interdenominational consensus. We have seen, moreover, that Protestant missionaries largely agreed on both practical methods of and theological justification for evangelizing Pariahs. The doctrinal division, therefore, between the allegedly more accommodative position on caste adopted by German Lutherans and the more “aggressive” position of other European, and American, missions was not as serious as it was portrayed to be by missionaries themselves and, following them, by historians, especially in terms of punitive measures taken against congregants who “kept” caste, which virtually all Protestant missionaries avoided. 77. We will examine landlord opposition in the final section of this chapter. 78. Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” 362. 79. Goudie, “The Missionaries and the Pariah Land Problem,” 536. 80. The argument by way of exception, as we shall see in chap. 6, would pass from missionary apologetics to the language of colonial administration, proving pivotal to the establishment of a rationale for a new governmental program entailing a missionary-state joint venture. 81. Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” 366; the idea that social superiors are, by and large, also morally superior was a standard assumption among late nineteenth-century missionaries in Madras. 82. Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” 366. 83. In similar fashion, William Goudie, addressing the issue of missionary involvement in the social uplift of the Pariah, wrote, “Even granting that the work is good in its conception and practicable, it is the kind of service that should fall to laymen rather than ministers.” Goudie, “The Missionaries and the Pariah Land Problem,” 535. 84. Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” 367. 85. Missionary self-representation, and their relationship to their own motives, are discussed under the heading “Conclusion. Missionary Motive: The Inculcation and Representation of Sympathy.” 86. Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” 368. 87. Ibid. 88. Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” 372; emphases mine. 89. Rev. William Burgess, The Missionary Conference: South India and Ceylon, 1879, vol. 1, 296, emphasis in original. Missionaries’ hierarchical vision of society was certainly a reflection of their largely Victorian background, but it N O T E S   289

clearly had a missiological basis as well. To alter social distinctions that did not directly violate Christian principles would be to stray into what Kabis dubbed “sociopolitics,” something missionaries had no mandate to do, and which Jesus himself had refused. Thus, a missiological imperative and a theory of society reinforced one another in producing pastoral programs specific to the Pariah that did not seek to altogether transform his servitude. 90. Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” 418. 91. A.  C. Clayton, A Letter from the Rev. A.  C. Clayton, printed pamphlet dated October 15, 1895. WMMA (SOAS); first emphasis mine, second in original. 92. Annual report excerpted in “Current Mission News: Wesleyan,” Harvest Field, July 1891–June 1892, 228. 93. See, for example, Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). The book does not concern the exclusion of Pariahs from these mission schools. Nor do other sources on missions in South India—perhaps not a surprise, given what I identified earlier as the historiographical silence on missionaries’ commitment to distinctions of social class. For one exceptional example, which describes exclusionary practices at Madras Christian College, see P. Dayanandan, “Dalit Christians of Chengalpattu Area and the Church of Scotland,” in Local Dalit Christian History, ed. John C.  B. Webster and George Oommen (New Delhi: ISPCK, 2002), 18–64. It is unfortunate—and perhaps telling—that Dayanandan, himself a Dalit Christian intellectual and activist, is the only scholar to have noticed this characteristic feature of missionary educational establishments. Although elite education produced so very few converts and therefore led to much debate (for example, the “missionary controversy,” see note 70), elite schooling was never really scaled back, reflecting missions’ undying hope for a windfall of high-caste converts. Moreover, missionaries did not explicitly address the fact that these schools did not serve the vast majority of their converts, who were Pariahs. 94. Such labeling was found, at least by Rev. Sharrock, to savor of “jesuitry,” given the profession of an anticaste sentiment by missionaries. “What Action Should Be Taken by Missionaries with Reference to Caste in the Native Church?” Harvest Field, July 1898, 248. 95. Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference (Bombay: Education Society’s Steam Press, 1893), 1: 47. 96. Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Arcot Mission (Madras: Methodist Publishing House, 1920). 97. Rev. J. H. Wyckoff, American Arcot Mission, “Art. V. The Raison d’Être of Industrial Schools,” Indian Evangelical Review 20 (Oct 1894): 190–96. 98. Rev. William Goudie, “Facts and Features of Mass Movements,” The East and the West, 16 (1918), 312. 290  N O T E S

99. Thus, the focus on “high”-caste education is questioned in F. W. Gostick, “Shall We Educate the Brahmans?” Harvest Field, July 1888–June 1889, 125–28. For an argument that education aimed at elites should still be attended to because it was the quality and not the quantity of converts that mattered, see S. Satthianadhan, “Missionary Work in India, from a Native Christian Point of View,” Harvest Field, July 1888–June 1889, 84–94. See also the editorial “Reckless Criticism,” Harvest Field, June 1889, 381–82, which attempts to answer charges made in the influential Methodist Times against Indian missions’ focus on elite education. Finally, strong evidence for the spread of the view that the call of the moment was village preaching as opposed to education may be seen in the deputation of Rev. Adam Andrew to the Chingleput countryside in the mid-1880s by the Free Church of Scotland, a mission until then renowned for its elite educational focus: see Adam Andrew, “Mission Work Done in a Mofussil District,” Indian Evangelical Review (Jul 1886): 1–14. 100. Goudie, “The Missionaries and the Pariah Land Problem,” Harvest Field, July 1893–December 1894, 536. The reader might recall that Kabis had insisted no Protestant missionary would intentionally provide inducements for conversion: he provided assistance, rather, as Goudie describes it here, out of compassion. 101. As the Local Committee of the Free Church of Scotland in Chingleput remarked to the Mission in a letter pleading for more funds: “The Local Committee would emphatically assert that Government is always notoriously reluctant to admit that famine prevails and does so only when distress is well-established and far advanced.” Handwritten Local Committee Report, June 1898, Letterbook of Free Church of Scotland 1898, UTCEA. 102. William Goudie to Rev. Findlay, June 20, 1901, WMMA (SOAS). 103. Most famously, several generations earlier, Protestant missionaries played an important role in the international movement for the abolition of slavery that culminated in the Slave Trade Act of 1807. None of my sources in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries specifically mention this history. For an overview of humanitarianism in British missions, see Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198–221. On missionaries and the Atlantic slave trade, see Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (London: Routledge, 1990). American missionaries in India would likely have been familiar with the nineteenth-century movement known as the Social Gospel, although none explicitly mention it in the sources I have consulted. This movement certainly influenced the American Baptists in Andhra Pradesh: see John E. Clough’s Social Christianity in the Orient: The Story of a Man, a Mission and a Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1914), which recounts his evangelization of Telugu Dalits. N O T E S   291

104. Without attention to the historical specificity of missionary activity in late nineteenth-century south India, the missionary engagement in the Pariah problem is reduced to being merely another expression of a perennial Protestant humanitarianism. G. A. Oddie’s otherwise important account in British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms, 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), 128–46, appears to take such a position. 105. Rev. J. F. Burditt, “Work Among the Depressed Classes and the Masses: First Paper,” in Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference (Bombay, 1892–93), 1: 5–18, at 6.

3. The Pariah–Missionary Alliance 1. G.  E. Phillips, The Outcaste’s Hope; or Christian Work for the Depressed Classes in India (London: Young People’s Missionary Movement), 45. Likewise, the Report of the Madras Mission of the Free Church of Scotland, 1912–13 (Madras: Methodist Publishing House), observed, “We are so accustomed in the West to regard the religious life of the soul as an individual personal matter that we are apt to consider all those who are participators in such movements . . . as having undergone an experience analogous in some way to what we call ‘conversion’” (11). 2. Report of the Madras Mission of the Free Church of Scotland (11). 3. Rev. James Cooling, “Madras District: Summary for General Report,” April 19, 1892, WMMA (SOAS). 4. See, e.g., Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India, 1840–1900 (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1994); Dick Kooiman, “Mass Movement, Famine and Epidemic: A Study in Interrelationship,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 281–301; Sundararaj Manickam, The Social Setting of Christian Conversion in South India (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1977). 5. This point has been emphasized in the seminal work on Dalit conversion in India, John C.  B. Webster’s The Dalit Christians: A History (Delhi: ISPCK, 2009), 93–157 ff. 6. W.  H. Campbell, London Mission Society, “Work Among the Depressed Classes and the Masses: Second Speech,” in Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference (Bombay: Education Society’s Steam Press, 1893), 1: 39–41, at 40; emphasis mine. 7. Andrew worked in the Chingleput District, just north of Madras city, from 1879 to 1887 and from 1889 to 1914. Andrew describes Mari Paul’s critical role in the movement in a letter home. Pages are missing, so both the recipient and the date are not known, but it was most likely to Rev. Lindsay, around May 292  N O T E S

1891 (MS 7849, NLS). The extraordinary leadership and activism of Pariahs in Chingleput at this time is also perceptively described by P. Dayanandan, in “Dalit Christians of Chengalpattu Area and the Church of Scotland,” in Local Dalit Christian History, ed. John C.  B. Webster and George Oommen (Delhi: ISPCK, 2002), 18–64. 8. In the Madras Presidency as a whole, between 1801 and 1881, the number of Christians grew from 300,000 to about 487,000, whereas between 1881 and 1901 the figure rose to 748,000. Native Christians increased at the rate of 19 percent between 1891 and 1901, as compared with a 7 percent increase of the general population; Roman Catholics increased by 11.3 percent and Protestants by 34.5 percent—more than three times as much. A table on the figures between 1891 and 1901 can be found in Rev. Adam Andrew, The Uneducated Children of the Madras Presidency (Madras: CLS, 1904), app. 3. 9. Rev. W. Walker, Free Church of Scotland Mission Annual Report for 1892 (Madras: Addison, 1893), 11. 10. The presence of a well-educated and well-dressed outsider in the cēri would itself amount to a challenge to the dominant society’s norms. 11. Rev. E. C. Scudder, Report of the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church of America, 1898, 7–8. 12. In GOL(G) 462, February 9, 1923, Collector of Chingleput A. B. Vernon alleged ill feelings between Panchamas and caste people were incited by the Christian Panchama schoolteacher. GOE 740, April 23, 1930, records the intimidation by caste people of Pariah parents wanting to send their children to school. 13. Similar issues regarding caste and dress have been explored in Robert Hardgrave’s, “The Breast-Cloth Controversy,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 5, no. 2 (1968): 171–87. Hardgrave describes missionary efforts to make Nadar women converts in Travancore (now Kerala), who traditionally went topless, cover their breasts, as high-caste women did. There too, Nadars seem to have eagerly taken up the practice, against the violent protestations of castes ranked higher than themselves. 14. Rev. L. L. Uhl, American Lutheran Mission, Guntur District, “The Social Condition of the Lower Classes: Second Paper,” in Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference (1893), 2: 560. See also the citation from Rev. W. Burgess (see chap. 2, “Caste System to Class Order”), as well as Rev. John Craig, Canadian Baptist Mission, “A Great Revolution,” Harvest Field, October 1890, 138, in which Craig recounts an instance of Pariah converts refusing to move to the side of the road to allow a “wealthy Sudra” to pass. 15. “Matric” is a reference to “matriculation,” a comprehensive examination taken in Indian schools both during the colonial period and into the present day at the tenth-grade level. The idea here is that the Pariah pupil would not make N O T E S   293

it past matriculation, but of course, even achieving that standard of education was a rarity in the early twentieth century—and especially so for a Dalit pupil. 16. Swadharma, July 9, 1922, 138. Poem credited to the Madras Times, n.d. “Padripet (lit. “Clerics’ Town”). “Padri” or “padre” was the common Tamil term for European Christian missionaries of any denomination. 17. “Nī vaḻakkattiṟku virōtamākak kuṭaipiṭittucceṉṟatu tappitameṉṟu kēcai t taḷḷiviṭṭārām.” Ayothee Thassar, Oru Paica Tamiḻaṉ, March 23, 1910, reprinted in G. Aloysius, ed., Ayōttitācar Cintanaikaḷ III [Reflections of Ayothee Thassar, vol. III] (Palayamkottai, Tamilnadu: Folklore Resources and Research Center/ St. Xavier’s College, 2003), 28. Oru Paica Tamiḻaṉ was one of a small handful of Pariah-run periodicals that flourished around the turn of the century. 18. Rev. W. Goudie, “The Awakening of Spiritual Life in Infant Village Churches,” Harvest Field, April 1899, 171. 19. Johannes Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” Harvest Field, October–November 1897, 361–73 and 415–22, at 368; originally presented at the Madras Missionary Conference, August 1897. 20. Goudie, “The Awakening of Spiritual Life,” 209. 21. In parts of southern Tamil Nadu, even today, Dalits who do not address their caste employers as swami (lord) face violent reprisals. See, e.g., articles in Dalit Muracu, 2006. 22. Rev. L. R. Scudder, Report of the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church of America, 1899, 11; emphasis mine. 23. The reader may at this point be curious about the profusion of Scudders in the Arcot Mission. The Scudders provided nearly a dozen missionaries to the American Arcot Mission, spread over three generations beginning in the 1860s, and their cumulative years of service well exceeded 100. The Scudders are the subject of several biographies, including Dorothy J. Scudder, A Thousand Years in Thy Sight: The Story of the Scudder Missionaries of India (New York: Vantage, 1984). 24. Rev. J. H. Wyckoff, Report of the American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church of America, 1894, 18–19. 25. Excerpt from the annual report of the American Madura Mission, Harvest Field, May 1894, 421. The existence of widespread injustice against Pariahs, and their wish to be free of it, was also adduced to exonerate Pariah converts from even more unseemly motives, such as the mere desire for financial gain, as we have seen, e.g., in Kabis’s article (“Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?”). 26. Rev. William Goudie, “The Duty of Missionaries in Regard to the Social Advancement and Temporal Improvement of the Lower Classes,” Harvest Field, October 1898, 382. 27. See chap. 1, “The Caste-State Nexus and the Governance of the Pariah.”

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28. A veṭṭiyān is a village office, still in existence and always assigned to Dalits, which includes numerous duties but most importantly the removal and cremation or burial of corpses. 29. “Chingleput District,” in Madras Mission of the Free Church of Scotland: Report for 1894 (Madras: Addison, 1895), 9. 30. Because one had to pay to have impounded bullocks released, this method was used to extort punitive fines from laborers or from tenants who were found misbehaving. 31. “Chingleput District,” 9. 32. Rev. William Goudie, “The Missionaries and the Pariah Land Problem,” Harvest Field, July 1893–December 1894, 531. 33. Thus, e.g., Rev. J. C. Perkins recounts how a successful court case compelled the conversions of a number of previously reluctant Pariahs: “Success Among Low Caste Hindus,” Harvest Field, September 1890, 89–92. And conversely, failed court cases were known to have dissuaded Pariahs from accepting Christianity; see Madras Mission of the Free Church of Scotland: Report for 1895, 17. 34. Goudie, “The Missionaries and the Pariah Land Problem,” 532. 35. The Hindu, 1897, cited in the Harvest Field, 1897, 479. 36. Phillips, The Outcaste’s Hope, 45. This influential book was prescribed by the United Council for Missionary Study as a textbook and was thus individually published beginning in 1912 and in the following three decades, not only by the Young People’s Missionary Movement, the edition I cite, but also by the Baptist Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society, the Church Mission Society, the Church of Scotland Mission, the United Free Church of Scotland Mission, and the Student Volunteer Missionary Union. 37. Tensions between missionaries and the colonial state coalesced around various issues, one of which was famine relief. Missionaries such as Adam Andrew, e.g., were publicly highly critical of the state’s famine-relief policies and also of the official response to Tremenheere’s report to be discussed in the following chapter on Pariahs published in 1892: Adam Andrew, “The Madras Government and the Pariahs,” Harvest Field, July 1893–December 1894, 207–16, 241–54. 38. “The Rev. A. Andrew” in the Madras Mail, October 19, 1909, provides an overview of Andrew’s contribution to civic life in Madras on the occasion of his having completed thirty years of service in the presidency. 39. In the summer of 1905, William Goudie, Rev. W.  B. Simpson (also a Methodist), and other missionaries wrote to the Madras Mail to report severe famine and starvation deaths around Madras and to criticize the government’s roseate report on conditions, at which government officials, in confidential

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correspondence, scoffed, “These Missionaries . . . are carried away by the misrepresentations of their half-educated Panchama Catechists.” GOR 1099 Confidential 112, August 5, 1905, TNSA. 40. Rev. Adam Andrew, Free Church of Scotland, discussion following session entitled “The Social Condition of the Lower Classes,” in Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference (1893), 2: 575. 41. Rev. Adam Andrew to Dr. Lindsay, February 8, 1892, MS 7846, NLS. The sub-collector at the time was C. M. Mullaly, who, as we saw, noticed the “double-entry system” by which Pariahs’ house sites were listed in village registers as the property of their masters. It is likely Andrew learned of this through Pariahs and subsequently alerted Mullaly. 42. This literature includes Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society; Samuel Jayakumar, Dalit Consciousness and Christian Conversion (Chennai: ISPCK, 2000); Manickam, Social Setting of Christian Conversion; Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India: The London Missionary Society in Southern Travancore in the 19th Century (Delhi: Manohar, 1989); Kooiman, “Mass Movement, Famine, and Epidemic”; G. A. Oddie, Hindu and Christian in South-East India (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1991); and Webster, Dalit Christians. 43. For example, Jayakumar, Dalit Consciousness; Manickam, The Social Setting of Christian Conversion; Oddie, Hindu and Christian; Webster, Dalit Christians. 44. Oddie, Hindu and Christian, 161. 45. Indeed, as Sundararaj Manickam describes Dalits prior to their encounter with missionaries, “The doctrine of Karma [had] developed in them a sense of resignation and fatalism” (Social Setting of Christian Conversion, 37). Robert E. Frykenberg, too, depicts missionaries as the heroic saviors of long-suffering, helpless Pariahs: see his “The Impact of Conversion and Social Reform Upon Society in South India During the Late Company Period,” in Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization, c. 1830–1850, ed. C. H. Philips and M. D. Wainwright (London: SOAS, 1976), 187–243. The prevailing assumption of Pariah contentment or stolid resignation is addressed in the conclusion, because it is not specific only to the literature on Indian Christianity. 46. Despite this, by the 1910s and 1920s, urban Dalit leaders and social reformers were explaining the appeal to rural Dalits of Christianity over against Hinduism as largely a matter of doctrine. As we shall see at the close of chap. 5, this reflects the spread of missionary conceptions of motive in Madras’s public sphere. 47. Adam Andrew, letter to the editor, Madras Mail, February 26, 1903.

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4. The State and the Cēri 1. David Washbrook argues that the famine was particularly devastating because land that might have been used for food crops had been diverted to cash-crop agriculture in response to the possibility for large profits to be made following the expansion and integration of markets beginning in the early nineteenth century; this led, he contends, to the depletion of food grain stores. See David Washbrook, “Economic Development and Social Stratification in Rural Madras: The ‘Dry Region,’ 1878–1929,” in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ed. Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (London: Athlone, 1978), 68–82. For the development of colonial famine policy, see S. Ambirajan, “Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy in the Nineteenth Century,” Population Studies 30, no. 1 (1976): 5–14; and Michelle Burge McAlpin, Subject to Famine: Food Crises and Economic Change in Western India, 1860–1920 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). 2. The irony of the third directive is that famines of varying severity were so frequent in the nineteenth century that most years were, in one or another district, either famine years or years spent recovering from famine. These three directives are contained in BPR 84 Mis., January 10, 1889, and GOR 7294, October 12, 1888, enclosed in TNSA with GOR 366, May 27, 1888. 3. GOR 386–87, June 2, 1890, para. 6. 4. GOR 386–87, June 2, 1890, para. 10. 5. GOR 386–87, June 2, 1890, para. 8. 6. Printed report, p. 19, enclosed in GOR 366, May 27, 1888. 7. BPS 49, February 27, 1890, para. 12, cited in GOR 386–87, June 2, 1890. 8. The Board of Revenue was a dispersed administrative body whose purpose was to implement revenue regulations throughout the vast territory of the Madras Presidency. The Revenue Department was the provincial authority to which the Board of Revenue was subject, and were it to encounter difficulties or issues of particular moment, these were directed to the Revenue Department for orders. All routine matters were handled entirely by the Board of Revenue, whose decisions were made by a group of four official members. 9. BPS 49, February 27, 1890, para. 3. 10. GOR 386–87, June 2, 1890. 11. GOR 366, May 27, 1888, p. 11. 12. Rev. Adam Andrew, “The Madras Government and the Pariahs, Part I,” Harvest Field, December 1893, 208–9. 13. Printed report, p. 7, enclosed in GOR 366, May 27, 1888. I have not been able to ascertain the identity of Rev. Conklin, but Rev. Lambertus Heckhuis belonged to the American Arcot Mission, in which he served from 1881, primarily as a medical doctor, until his death in 1888 from hydrophobia. N O T E S   297

14. BPR 1370, July 19, 1872, paras. 2 and 5. 15. The extent to which the segregation of the Pariah practiced by the state took its cue from native preference is attested by the spatial arrangement of villages, discussed above, into ūr and cēri. 16. GOR 212, March 17, 1891. 17. Rev. Adam Andrew, discussion following session entitled “The Social Condition of the Lower Classes,” Third Decennial Missionary Conference, Held at Bombay (Bombay: Education Society’s Steam Press, 1893), 2: 575. 18. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 356, July 7, 1891, 539. 19. BPS 492, August 6, 1891, p. 1, paras. 4–5; emphases in original. 20. BPS 492, August 6, 1891, p. 1, para. 9. 21. As Benedicte Hjelje points out, Ellis made links between areas in which mirasi rights prevailed and those in which laborers were tied. There was no specific focus on the relation among these former two characteristics and servile caste status, however, and, furthermore, Ellis’s observations were made in a different administrative context, one in which intervention aimed at the improvement of specific vulnerable subpopulations was not even entertained. See Benedicte Hjelje, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967): 71–126, at 79–82. 22. BPS 492, August 6, 1891, p. 1, para. 9. 23. It was Rev. Adam Andrew who alerted C. M. Mullaly to their condition and probably to the details of the “double-entry system” to be described below as well. “Adam Andrew,” Madras Mail, October 19, 1909. 24. BPR 617, September 6, 1889, p. 1. 25. Mullaly did not specify, but he was no doubt especially referring to the order published in GOR 796, June 1, 1870, in which it was decided that mirasidars did not have rights of compensation to wastelands taken up for public purposes. 26. BPR 617, September 6, 1889, p. 7. 27. Ibid. 28. BPR 617, September 6, 1889, p. 12, para. 65. 29. Ibid. 30. And Mullaly was also concerned for the poor tenant, at least some of whom were Vanniyars. Vanniyars are a low-ranked caste who were nevertheless included within the ūr and who had both landowners and landless laborers among their ranks. 31. See chap. 7. 32. The report, along with the responses of the Board of Revenue and the government of Madras, as well as the latter’s orders passed on it, are contained in GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892. 298  N O T E S

33. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 25, para. 138; emphasis mine. It is important to specify that Tremenheere did not, radical as he was for his time, demand the abolition of all preference in applications for title; preference was given to adjacent holders and pattadars not only in mirasi villages and not only in Chingleput, but indeed in all of Madras’s districts. And it was not anyone’s desire to eradicate preference in applications, for in official rationales it protected the state against “pauper holdings,” lands acquired by those without sufficient capital to cultivate successfully, acquisitions that resulted in relinquishment for arrears. 34. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 8, para. 25. 35. Cultivable wastelands were allocated according to the rules of preference, but other lands could become available in the village, i.e., those already privately owned. 36. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 8, para. 27. 37. That is, they still fell behind landed villagers and adjacent landholders. 38. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 8, para. 21, marginal note; emphasis mine. 39. Subsequent transformations in labor relations, discussed in chaps. 7 and 8, will overwhelmingly confirm that Tremenheere’s observations applied to a great many areas of the presidency. 40. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 65, para. 2. 41. Such official dismissals of the way in which the state continued de facto to protect mirasi tenure were widespread and had enjoyed prominence since at least the 1870s. See, e.g., BPR 588, September 28, 1887, and BPR 2880, October 5, 1874, as well as BPR 588, September 28, 1887. On the expression “dog in the manger,” see note 47, chap. 1. 42. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 40, para. 19. 43. On the emergence of “custom” as a guiding principle of imperial ideology, see Karuna Mantena’s study of Henry Maine: Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 44. See note 12. 45. Printed report, p. 11, enclosed in GOR 366, May 27, 1888. 46. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 54, para. 43. 47. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 70, para. 11d. 48. This was a minimal gesture, because it was already recognized that bought-in lands could be assigned without following the darkhast rules. The government only added that they might be assigned to Pariahs. Tremenheere had secured this from the government well before the formal publication of the “Note.” See BPR 482, August 12, 1891. 49. Some clarifications concerning the revenue papers are in order. The Revenue Department’s records also contain drafts and marginalia in preprint N O T E S   299

versions, which exist in the Tamil Nadu State Archives, Chennai; the issue here is that most matters of administration first passed through the Board of Revenue before being deemed worthy of the department’s attention. Of these, a portion were selected for printing and binding and were sent to London. The department also dealt with matters it received directly from the government of India. Finally, while even some Board of Revenue papers were printed and sent to London, these represent a far smaller proportion of the files actually generated by the board as compared to the proportion of department records printed. 50. GOR 1010–1010A, pp. 35–36, para. 9. 51. References were primarily to W.  H. Bayley and W. Huddleston, eds., Papers on Mirasi Right Selected from the Records of Government (Madras: Government of Madras, 1862). The editors compiled a collection of official opinion, including writings by the highly influential Madras administrator F.  W. Ellis, depositions containing learned native accounts of miras, and samples of mirasi sale deeds, all of which comprised the precedents considered canonical in adjudicating disputes concerning miras. 52. GOR 1010–1010A, p. 35, para. 8. 53. GOR 1010–1010A, pp. 66–67, para. 4. 54. Ibid. 55. The remark was made by the Collector of Salem H. E. Stokes, when asked whether he thought the government should formulate rules to ensure that raiyats did not encroach upon sites reserved for communal use. BPR 2377, October 19, 1881, p. 298. 56. The administrative and conceptual ambits of the terms “religion” and “caste” with respect to the Pariah will be addressed in chaps. 2 and 3. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 63; emphases mine. 57. Included in the file containing Tremenheere’s “Note” and state responses to it are a memorial from the Madras Missionary Conference and an article in The Hindu, which discussed at length a pamphlet on Pariahs by the Methodist missionary William Goudie that echoed many of Tremenheere’s points (GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, pp. 1, 29). 58. On the influence of Malthus in the economic policy of this period, see Ambirajan, “Malthusian Population Theory,” and his Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), esp. chap. 3, “Economic Ideas and Famine Policy.” 59. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 63; emphases mine. 60. These directives are outlined in GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, pp. 66–68. 61. GOE 68, February 1, 1893, para. 2.

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62. Rettamalai Srinivasan, Pariyan, October 26, 1895, in MNNR, Fortnight Ending November 15, 1895. Rettamalai Srinivasan was nominated to the Madras Legislative Council in the early 1920s and is best known for the fact that he accompanied B.  R. Ambedkar to London as a “Depressed Classes representative” at the Round Table Conference in 1930. Paraiyan probably first ran in 1894. 63. BPR 45, January 25, 1894. 64. BPS 92, February 17, 1894, p. 2, para. 6. 65. Ibid. 66. BPS 92, February 17, 1894, p. 4. 67. Ibid. 68. For a clear, albeit brief, overview of Gandhi’s hopes for the untouchable, see Eleanor Zelliot, “Gandhi and Ambedkar: A Study in Leadership,” in From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1996), 150–83. 69. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, p. 5, para. 2. 70. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, p. 5, para. 3. 71. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, pp. 5–6, para. 5. 72. Ibid. 73. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, p. 2, para. 8. 74. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, p. 5, para. 12. 75. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, p. 7, para. 2. 76. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, pp. 7–8, paras. 7–8. 77. GOR 4756 Mis., November 25, 1895. 78. BPR 232, July 13, 1897, p. 5, para. 13. 79. BPR 232, July 13, 1897, p. 4, para. 8. 80. See Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 463–99; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–29 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Nathaniel Roberts and Rupa Viswanath, “Dravidian,” in Keywords in South Asia, ed. Rachel Dwyer (London: SOAS, forthcoming); David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 81. See chap. 1, “The Governance of the Pariah and the Caste-State Nexus.”

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5. Settling Land, Sowing Conflict; or, The Rise and Rise of Religious Neutrality 1. Johannes Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?” Harvest Field, October–November 1897, 361–73 and 415–22, at 386. 2. “Miscellaneous” papers, unlike the “Press” series, were not selected to be printed and bound. I was the only person to have consulted papers on these conflicts since they were first archived in the 1890s. 3. On this point, see William C. McCormack, “Caste and the British Administration of Hindu Law,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 1, no. 1 (1966): 27–34. 4. Tirunelveli District had the first Christian settlements (among them the now-large town of Nazareth), which were founded in the first two decades of the nineteenth century by the SPG. See, e.g., Rev. Dyron B. Daughrity, “A Brief History of Christian Missions in Tirunelveli (Part One): From the Beginnings to Its Creation as a Diocese in 1896” (paper presented at the International Association for Mission Studies Conference, Port Dickson, Malaysia, July 31–August 7, 2004). The American Arcot Mission founded Gnanodiam in 1866 and Arulnadu in 1867 in South Arcot, and Arunodaya in 1867 near Palmanair in North Arcot; see Annual Report of American Arcot Mission, 1867, 32–35, 40–42; Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church in American: Jubilee Commemoration, 1853–1903 (Madras: SPCK Press, 1905); Charlotte C. Wyckoff, A Hundred Years with Christ in Arcot: A Brief History of the Arcot Mission in India of the Reformed Church in America (Vellore, 1953), 12–13. 5. This mode of narration sometimes finds its counterpart in contemporary historiography: thus, historian Robert E. Frykenberg describes events relating to missionary activity and social conflict in eighteenth-century south India employing the language of persecution and writes, “The position of Christian groups in south India during the early modern period can be compared to that of groups of early believers within an alien and hostile Roman empire.” Robert E. Frykenberg, “The Impact of Conversion and Social Reform Upon Society in South India During the Late Company Period: Questions Concerning HinduChristian Encounters, with Special Reference to Tinnevelly,” in Indian Society and the Beginnings of Modernization, c. 1830–1880, ed. C. H. Phillips and M. D. Wainwright (London: SOAS, 1976), 187–243, at 191. Frykenberg makes similar comparisons in “On the Study of Conversion Movements: A Review Article and a Theoretical Note,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, no. 1 (1980): 121–38. 6. Annual Report of the American Arcot Mission, 1867, 40. 7. The term Panchama came to be used more and more often instead of Pariah by the first decade of the 1900s. See note 1, chap. 6. 302  N O T E S

8. Those who signed Melrosapuram’s visitor’s book included Rev. J.  H. Wyckoff of the American Arcot Mission in 1895, Rev. J.  A. Sharrock in 1896, and Rev. W. D. Osborne of the London Mission Society; all these missions would subsequently found settlements. Many officials were involved with Melrosapuram, and Lord Pentland himself, governor of Madras, paid a visit in 1914 during which he praised the work. See Melrosapuram Visitor’s Book, FCOS, Box 1, UTCEA. In a government communiqué issued in 1920 reviewing all that had been done to improve the Depressed Classes in the Madras Presidency, Melrosapuram was hailed as a most successful Panchama settlement (GOR 559, March 8, 1920). 9. See, e.g., Adam Andrew, Indian Problems Connected with Education, Land Revenue and Agriculture (Madras: Natesan, 1906), a collection of articles he wrote over a number of years in the Madras Mail. Andrew was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind Medal by the government of India, as well as an additional bar for the medal, in recognition of his public service as a popularizer of the Pariah cause and as an adviser on agricultural matters. Frank Ashcroft of the Free Church of Scotland to Andrew, February 25, 1915, MS 7681, NLS. 10. See GOR 320 Mis., February 12, 1902; GOR 633, June 15, 1904; GOR 435 Mis., March 28, 1905; and GOR 917 Mis., July 3, 1905, TNSA. 11. Andrew’s efforts even made the pages of the largest Scottish daily: see The Scotsman, June 1, 1898. Details of Melrosapuram are gleaned from Rev. Adam Andrew, “The Practical Working of Panchama Settlements,” Harvest Field, May 1898, 161–80; Madras Mission of the Free Church of Scotland Reports, 1892 to 1898, UTCEA; and MS 7849, MS 7848, and MS 7845, NLS. 12. Hobson-Jobson lists the meaning of cowle (derived from Arabic Qaul) as any written agreement and mentions that its meaning had become “technical” in administration without further specification. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, ed. William Crooke (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2006; first published in this edited edition in 1903). In late nineteenth-century Madras revenue parlance it has, in my experience, invariably referred to the tenurial arrangement specified above. 13. Madras Mail, August 17, 1897, cutting contained in a letter from Rev. J. A. Sharrock to the SPG, November 17, 1897, CLR 55, USPGA (RHL). 14. Madras Mail, August 17, 1897; emphasis mine. 15. BPR 128, March 28, 1894, TNSA, p. 2. 16. See chap. 4, “Skirting Neutrality: Experiments with Pariah Profligacy.” 17. Apropos the discussion in chap. 2 regarding the use of caste titles by Indian Christians, “Aiyar” is a common Tamil Saiva Brahmin caste name, here sported by an Indian Christian missionary. N O T E S   303

18. This case, as well as subsequent ones, provide confirmation of Tremenheere’s insight into the ways the colonial state’s recognition of darkhast rules was used by mirasidars to defend their prerogatives—not just from the usual sort of outsiders, nouveaux riches and the like, envisioned by state policy— but also from Pariahs, who were “outsiders” in their own villages. Recall that before anyone could cultivate wasteland they were required to submit a formal appeal, known as a darkhast. Elaborate rules of preference governed the procedure of submitting a darkhast, such that the original applicant could only take control of the land after it had been offered to, and was refused by, a series of individuals whose precedence was determined by their own status as landowners and their proximity to the land: from the adjacent mirasidar to other mirasidars, and from there to adjacent landholders and other landholders, and only then to the landless applicant. Standing Orders of the Board of Revenue Land Revenue, Settlement and Miscellaneous (Madras: Government Press, 1900), Standing Order No. 15, pp. 25–34; the rules of preference are in para. 8. The additional conditions for Chingleput formulated to accommodate mirasi rights are laid down in Appendix V: S.O. 15, para. 28, pp. 99–101. These rules are discussed in chap. 1, “Eradicating Mirasi Rights, or The Entrenchment of Servitude.” 19. BPR 3655 Mis., September 28, 1897, TNSA. 20. BPR 3655 Mis., September 28, 1897, TNSA, petition of the mirasidars and inhabitants of Kodambakkam villages, with eighty-six signatories. 21. It was not uncommon for raiyats and city dwellers to invoke Christians’ alleged intolerance for Hindu festival music when protesting land assignments to Christians, especially in Madras city. In one such instance in 1889, inhabitants objected to the plans of the Danish Mission to build a church, because they would have to process past it on numerous occasions and would be forced, they alleged, to refrain from making music as they did so. This, of course, would in turn “wound” the Hindus’ own “religious sentiments,” which the colonial state had been at great pains to avoid doing since 1858. See BPR 6373 Mis., October 19, 1889; BPR 4697 Mis., August 8, 1889; BPR 5827 Mis., September 26, 1889, TNSA. The forces at work in such cases, as well as the stakes, are relatively distinct from incidents involving Hindu music and “communal riots” between Hindus and Muslims, described, inter alia, by C. J. Fuller, “The Vinayaka Chaturthi Festival and Hindutva in Tamil Nadu,” Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 19 (2001): 1607–16; and Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), esp. “A Hindu Community in Maharashtra? Cow Protection, Ganpati Festivals and Music Before Mosques,” 27–75. Yet one common thread is critical: the colonial and postcolonial states’ acceptance of “wounded feelings” as a plausible and sufficient explanation for actual or expected violence. 304  N O T E S

22. BPR 3655 Mis., September 28, 1897, TNSA, petition of the mirasidars and inhabitants of Kodambakkam villages, with eighty-six signatories. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. BPR 3655 Mis., counterpetition of Rev. Gopala Aiyar, American Methodist Episcopal Mission, received March 13, 1897. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. BPR 3655 Mis., resolution dated August 1897, TNSA. 33. Ibid. 34. BPR 3655 Mis., counterpetition of Rev. Gopala Aiyar, American Methodist Episcopal Mission, received March 13, 1897. 35. See G.  A. Oddie, “Anti-Missionary Feeling and Hindu Revivalism in Madras: The Hindu Preaching and Hindu Tract Societies, 1886–91,” in Images of Man: Essays on Religion and Historical Process in South Asia, ed. Fred W. Clothey (Madras: New Era, 1982), 217–43, for an account of caste Hindus being unwilling to give up the potential benefits of English education provided by mission schools, even in the wake of occasional scandals in which high-caste children converted: Boycotts rarely lasted long, for the advantages of an English education far outweighed the risks of a rare conversion. 36. Some missionary schools stood their ground in the face of such threats, but most Protestant missions ran schools explicitly labeled “caste,” thereby debarring Pariahs, despite their professing to oppose caste in principle. See chap. 2, note 93. A deposition by Rettamalai Srinivasan, a Pariah activist and intellectual of the 1910s and 1920s, records what it was like to attend an urban school burdened by the constant fear that his caste would be revealed; see the Lee Commission Report, also known as the Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services, Evidence: Madras, vol. 36, IOL. Srinivasan would go on to become a Member of the Legislative Council in the 1920s. See also Rettamalai Srinivasan, Jīviya Carittira Curukkam [A Brief Autobiography] (n.p., n.d. [c. 1935–40]), esp. 7–8, where he describes his schooling. For threats of boycotting when it was discovered Pariah boys were attending Madras Christian College, see P. Dayanandan, “Dalit Christians of Chengalpattu Area and the Church of Scotland,” in Local Dalit Christian History, ed. John C. B. Webster and George Oommens (Delhi: ISPCK, 2002), 18–64. 37. Although we cannot know for certain, it is very likely that Aiyar was correct, given the temple’s proximity to the cēri; Pariahs were barred from caste N O T E S   305

Hindu temples, and are still usually barred from worship today in temples in the main part of the village, the ūr, as opposed to their own temples in the cēri. 38. BPR 3655 Mis., September 28, 1897, TNSA, petition of the mirasidars and inhabitants of Kodambakkam villages, with eighty-six signatories. 39. The irregularity and potential dangers to governance of overturning orders already passed is discussed at great length in, e.g., BPR 4281 Mis., November 18, 1911, TNSA. The case in question concerned an allegation by an adjacent landholder that a Pariah who was petitioning for a piece of land was simply his master’s cat’s-paw and that, therefore, the land assigned to him by a deputy collector in contravention of the darkhast rules ought to be rescinded by the collector. Despite the fact that officials admitted that the adjacent landholder was likely correct, they were extremely reluctant to overturn the order and debated at great length the circumstances under which rescissions were acceptable. 40. A few cases in which raiyats’ claims to land as grazing ground were thought to have been put forward for the sole purpose of blocking assignments of land to Dalits (even by state officials who tended to be very sympathetic to claims made on communal lands) include: BPR 5052 Mis., August 22, 1889; BPR 2594 Mis., July 22, 1904; BPR 1464 Mis., April 18, 1910; and GOR 2966 Mis., October 9, 1913, TNSA. This suggests that the strategy must have been ubiquitous, as Dalit activists such as Rajah more anecdotally attest; see M. C. Rajah, The Oppressed Hindus (Madras: Huxley, 1925). 41. Rajah, Oppressed Hindus, 10–11. See also Rettamalai Srinivasan’s newspaper, Pariyan, in which a correspondent wrote that land was alleged to be “common property of the village” when a Pariah in Kunnattur village applied for it: MNNR, Fortnight Ending August 31, 1894. The activity of these politicians is examined at length in chap. 9. 42. Marc Galanter, for instance, has observed that “the criminal law in India is extraordinarily solicitious [sic] of religious sentiments. Sec. 298 of the Indian Penal Code provides up to one year imprisonment for deliberately ‘wounding the religious feelings of any person’ by word, sound or gesture. And sec. 295-A provides up to two years imprisonment for maliciously and deliberately insulting ‘the religion or religious beliefs’ of any class of citizens.” Marc Galanter, “Secularism, East and West,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 7, no. 2 (1965): 260n52. 43. For example, articles in MNNR, Fortnight Ending April 15, 1894, complained that missionaries should not be allowed to run hospitals that received government funds and that they were otherwise encouraged by the government. With fair regularity, the existence of the Ecclesiastical Department, which provided Christian clergy for the domiciled European community, was subjected to criticism as well: “[It] is an injustice to charge the people of India with the expense of those who attack the religions of the country.” Jaridah-i-Rozgar, 306  N O T E S

September 12, 1903; MNNR, Week Ending September 26, 1903; cf. Hindujanasamskarini, no. 6, 1887, in MNNR, January 1887. 44. This point is made excellently in different ways by Talal Asad in his “Are There Histories of People Without Europe? A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 3 (1987): 594–607; and by Frank Perlin in a discussion regarding the “articulation” of different modes of production: “Concepts of Order and Comparison, with a Diversion on Counter-Ideologies and Corporate Institutions in Late Pre-Colonial India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 12, nos. 2–3 (1985): 87–165. 45. BPR 3787 Mis., October 8, 1897, TNSA. 46. This was the paper by Kabis, “Should Legal and Financial Help Be Given to Pariahs?,” examined in chap. 2. 47. The ramifications of the choice of the phrase “Hindu Pariah” will be considered later in the chapter. 48. A cent is one-hundredth of an acre. 49. Petition transcribed in BPR 3787 Mis., October 8, 1897, TNSA. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. When land began to be assigned directly to Panchamas in the 1910s under the aegis of amelioration programs, landlords acquired even greater incentives to practice falsification of this kind: cases continually came to light in which employers used Panchama laborers to acquire lands, thus enjoying the benefits of the favorable schemes under which they were offered and particularly the fact that land could be assigned in abrogation of the darkhast rules. That this was the case was often clear, even where no solid proof could be adduced; in a 1911 case, e.g., one petition had the petitioners referring to themselves as “poor pariahs” with suspicious frequency. BPR 4281 Mis., November 18, 1911, TNSA. 52. The high-caste policy of religious divide et impera with respect to Dalits persists to the present day, such that Dalits who renounce Hinduism in favor of either Christianity or Islam are stripped of the special rights and protections accorded to them as “Scheduled Castes” and are also treated as distinct from their Hindu counterparts for electoral purposes, as I discuss in this book’s Conclusion, in the section titled “Hinduism and the Category Scheduled Caste.” . 53. See Conclusion, “Spiritual Slavery, Social Disability: Dalit Subordination and the “Futility” of Political Solutions.” 54. In “The Condition of the Low Castes,” in The Hindu of June 3, 1891, the editor opined, “The condition of these castes is truly miserable. The Hindus do not recognize them as part of their community and nothing can be more humiliating and intolerable than the treatment the Pariahs and other low-caste people receive.” Cited in GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 28, app. D. 55. Protesting against a governor’s bid to introduce bible teaching in elite Madras schools on the argument that this had already been done in Ceylon, N O T E S   307

members of the Madras Native Association reasoned that “the religion . . . of Ceylon is [not] pure Hinduism, but, for the greater part, Buddhism as professed by the Singalese; the Hinduism obtaining there being, with a few exceptions, professed by emigrant Coolies from India of the lowest caste; who, strictly speaking, are without religion; to whom the study of the Bible in the Government Schools is of immaterial consequence, as they have nothing to lose.” Memorial to the Right Honourable Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for India, from the Members of the Madras Native Association . . . on the Subject of Government Interference in Religious Matters (Madras: Hindu Press, 1859), 10. 56. The definitive order regarding state authority to acquire waste for public purposes in mirasi villages was GOR 796, June 1, 1870, although, as we have seen in chap. 4 (“The ‘Pariah qua Pariah’ and the Reading of Archival ‘Discrepancy’”), this by no means meant that courts consistently ruled in accordance with this view, sometimes awarding mirasidars compensation for state acquisition of puramboke. 57. For these definitions of publicness and others, as well as a discussion of the political and philosophical consequences of tensions between them and overlaps among them, see the essays in Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus, eds., The Public and Private in Social Life (London: Croom Helm, 1983), esp. Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus, “Public and Private: Concepts and Action,” 3–27; “The Liberal Conception of the Public and Private,” 31–65; and Gerald F. Gaus, “Public and Private Interests in Liberal Political Economy, Old and New,” 183– 222; Raymond Geuss, Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Jeff Weintraub and Krishnan Kumar, eds. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 58. BPR 3787 Mis., October 8, 1897, TNSA. The phrase I have italicized is underlined in the handwritten original. 59. Here the British official’s derisive use of “padre” to refer to a Protestant missionary should serve as further corroboration of my argument in chap. 2 regarding Pariah–missionary alliances. The relative strength of the latter depended on allusions as much as on actual relations to government agents, for there were certainly officials who viewed missionaries with disdain. 60. Sir John Gorst, House of Commons Question, July 7, 1891, cited in GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 4. 61. The Tamil Lexicon defines puṟampōkku as land required for “camutāya naṉmai” (“the welfare of society”). 62. For raiyats’ exclusive claims to land as grazing ground, see note 32. 63. Sixty-eight cents is about a half an acre. 64. Following J. H. A. Tremenheere’s report, cēris were extended in villages around Madras hundreds of times without incident between 1893 and 1897, 308  N O T E S

thus allowing compliance with the government of India’s directive to relieve congestion; GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 57, para. 49. 65. BPR 4621 Mis., December 2, 1897, petition of T. Ranganatha Tawker, dated September 6, 1897. 66. When, a decade or so later, Panchamas themselves began forming political associations in order to articulate their grievances directly to the government, the demand that the government provide them with house sites of which they would have ownership almost invariably topped the list; petitions of the Depressed Classes Elevation Society may be found in GOP 701, June 12, 1912; GOP 520 Mis., April 24, 1913; and BPR 1303 Mis., March 23, 1914, TNSA. Administrative efforts to effect this are the subject of the following chapter. 67. In fact, what Tawker proposed would consolidate his advantage over the Pariahs, for they would receive land directly from him and not simply as a portion of the lands controlled by mirasidars collectively. His offer to “compensate” them for their expenses, on the other hand, cost him little, as Pariahs did not build homes from purchased materials but from materials they gathered themselves. 68. BPR 4621 Mis., December 2, 1897, petition of T. Ranganatha Tawker, dated September 6, 1897, p. 2. 69. Vijay Prashad describes the Gandhian campaign to incorporate “untouchables” very nicely in Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 112–34. It should also be noted that there were other, less publicly celebrated ways in which Hinduism and Dalits interacted during the period of colonial rule: one exemplary account may be found in Christian Novetzke’s Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 70. For instance, Reddis, a “high” caste, labeled “agricultural” in colonial sociology in Madurantakam, insisted that Wesleyan missionaries use another site for the school they proposed to build for Pariahs on pain of the “great heart-burning” they would suffer (BPR 2699 Mis., August 7, 1905), and mirasidars in Chingleput Taluk suggested an alternative for the land on which Pariahs wanted to build houses (BPR 2258 Mis., April 11, 1889). 71. Evidence for a markedly solicitous attitude to the agricultural sector may be found, e.g., in state schemes such as the Agriculturists’ Loans Act of 1884, which provided credit to raiyats lacking capital to ensure successful farming on the strength of their lands being taken as security. This solicitude appears to have stemmed not only from fears that roguish moneylenders, having no interest in real agricultural improvement, would acquire lands from “poor ryots,” but also from the widespread and long-standing concern that agricultural holdings were being subdivided and farming was thus becoming less and less economically viable due to such things as the laws of succession of the Hindu joint family. N O T E S   309

6. The Marriage of Sacred and Secular Authority 1. “Panchama,” or “person of the fifth caste” refers to the fact that Dalits were outside the fourfold varna system. It is a measure of the importance of public opinion that the term changed, for “Pariah” was considered objectionable by many prominent Dalit leaders at this time, whose political activity we will address in chap. 9. 2. The memorial is filed in GOR 586, September 1, 1899, TNSA. 3. See chap. 4. 4. This memorial is contained in the same file as the Madras Missionary Conference’s memorial: GOR 586, September 1, 1899, TNSA. 5. GOR 586, September 1, 1899, TNSA, Memorial of the Madras Missionary Conference to His Excellency Sir Arthur Elibank Havelock, dated February 1, 1898. 6. Ibid.; emphasis mine. 7. Regarding the equation of state and public purposes: “Liberal theory has long acknowledged the existence of a class of ‘public goods’ which, if supplied at all, must necessarily be supplied to all members of the public; and as the liberal sees it, this provides a rationale for the provision of such goods by the public qua the state.” Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus, “Introduction,” in The Public and the Private in Social Life, ed. Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus (London: Croom Helm), 3–30, at 5; see also Gerald Gaus, “Public and Private Interests in Liberal Political Economy,” in ibid., 183–222. 8. GOR 748 Confidential, March 29, 1919, p. 19. These words were written in 1914 by the then collector of Chingleput, S. P. Rice, upon hearing that frauds were being perpetrated in the matter of assigning bought-in lands to Pariahs, with the benefits most often accruing to caste raiyats. 9. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 63, para. 63. 10. Notes connected with GOR 586, September 1, 1899, p. 6. 11. See chap. 8, “Mamul and the New India.” 12. For accounts of the new liberalism that centered around these figures, a brief selection from a vast literature would include Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael Freeden, ed., Reappraising J. A. Hobson: Humanism and Welfare (London: Routledge, 1990); Avital Simhony, “T. H. Green: The Common Good Society,” History of Political Thought 14, no. 2 (1993): 225–47; Peter Weiler, “The New Liberalism of L. T. Hobhouse,” Victorian Studies 16, no. 2 (1972): 141–61; David Weinstein, “The New Liberalism of L. T. Hobhouse and the Reenvisioning of Nineteenth-Century Utilitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 3 (1996): 487–507.

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13. See note 12, as well as L.  T. Hobhouse’s Liberalism (Teddington: Echo Library, 2009), esp. 59–90. 14. See Robert Bellamy, ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth Century Political Thought and Practice (London: Routledge, 1990); and Robert F. Haggard, The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000). 15. GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, p. 63, cited in chap. 1 “The ‘Pariah qua Pariah’ and the Reading of Archival ‘discrepancy.’” 16. William Goudie, “Facts and Features of Mass Movements,” The East and the West 16 (1918): 310–23, at 312. 17. The phrase is Michael Freeden’s. See The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 18. Notes connected with GOR 586, September 1, 1899, p. 6; emphasis in original. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.; emphasis mine. 22. Ibid. 23. S. Srinivasa Raghavaiyangar, Memorandum of the Progress of the Madras Presidency During the Last Forty Years of British Administration (Madras: Government of Madras, 1893), esp. cclviii–cclxiv. Raghavaiyangar was inspector general of registration when he was asked to write this very influential report. 24. Notes connected with GOR 586, September 1, 1899, p. 7. 25. This was claimed by a board member in the decision to overturn Forbes’s grant to Kabis in Mannur; BPR 3787 Mis., October 8, 1897, TNSA. 26. Petition enclosed in GOR 4367 Mis., August 20, 1897, TNSA. 27. Ibid. It is interesting that Sharrock singles out only Brahmins as those who would object. When objections were made a few years later, they were voiced, as we might expect from all the cases we have thus far encountered, by a range of landed caste people. Sharrock’s preoccupation with Brahmins was based on a specific view of Hinduism as governed by a priestly elite, which drew on tropes perfected in Protestant condemnation of Roman Catholic “popery.” 28. BPR 1067 Mis., April 19, 1898, TNSA. 29. BPR 124 Mis., January 11, 1899, TNSA. 30. GOR 499, July 31, 1899, TNSA. 31. Ibid. 32. In fact, Sharrock had been attempting, unsuccessfully, to gain the SPG’s support for years, providing ample evidence of the success of such settlements, but clearly not persuading them that, success apart, such work was proper to a

N O T E S   311

missionary. Sharrock approached the SPG in 1897 at the same time as he made his initial appeal to the Board of Revenue with a request for funds to start up a Panchama settlement in the Jeyamkondacholapuram, citing Adam Andrew’s success with Melrosapuram in Chingleput, thereby providing evidence that the SPG was missing opportunities of which other missions were taking advantage. Andrew, for his part, wrote a letter to the Madras Mail advocating Sharrock’s plans, and the Panchama agricultural settlement in general, which Sharrock then forwarded to the SPG: Madras Mail, August 17, 1897, cutting contained in a letter from Sharrock to the SPG, November 17, 1897, CLR 55, USPGA (RHL). 33. Frank Penny, “Agricultural Settlements in the Presidency of Madras,” in D146 Letters received, original, 1903, p. 1, USPGA (RHL). Penny was a friend of Sharrock and was otherwise renowned for his three-volume The Church in Madras (London: Smith, Elder, 1904). 34. Penny, “Agricultural Settlements.” 35. Raghavaiyangar, Memorandum, 154; cited in Penny, “Agricultural Settlements,” 2. This was not an isolated remark: The Hindu had expressed much the same opinion on June 3, 1891: “The Hindu religion has done nothing for them except to prescribe a most abject slavery as the lot for which they alone are fit. The Christian missionaries have treated them in an altogether different spirit.” Cited in GOR 1010–1010A, September 30, 1892, app. D, p. 28. The Pariah intellectual Ayothee Thass penned an open letter to Raghavaiyangar, voicing his suspicion that Brahmins would arrogate the right to advise Pariahs on their religion and criticizing Christianity for its preservation of caste, a theme he took up on several occasions. See Ayothee Thass, “Open Letter to the Hon. S. Srinivasa Raghava Aiyangar,” in Scheduled Caste’s Struggle for Emancipation in South India, ed. T. P. Kamalanathan (Madras/Tirupattur: South India Sakkya Buddhist Association/Diocesan Press, 1985); as well as Ayothee Thassar, Ayōttitācar Cintanaikaḷ III [Reflections of Ayothee Thassar, vol. III] (Palayamkottai, Tamilnadu: FRRC and St. Xavier’s College, 2003), 3, 7, 21, and elsewhere. 36. For example, “Editorial Notes,” Harvest Field, June 1892; and William Goudie’s “The Missionaries and the Pariah Land Problem,” Harvest Field, July 1894, 530–40, at 535. 37. Penny, “Agricultural Settlements,” 6. 38. Raghavaiyangar, Memorandum, 155. 39. Penny, “Agricultural Settlements,” 6–7. 40. See chap. 4, “Skirting Neutrality: Experiments with Pariah Profligacy”; as well as BPR 491, November 13, 1894; BPR 269, July 7, 1894. 41. Communications regarding the assignment to Sharrock had to make their way between missionaries in India, the mission society in England, the Board of Revenue, and the government of Madras, hence the four-year gap between Sharrock’s proposal and the first protests against it. 312  N O T E S

42. GOR 204 Mis., January 21, 1902, petition from the ryots of Jeyamkonda Sholapuram received December 19, 1901, TNSA. 43. Ibid. 44. This proposal could keep Panchamas on land owned by their employers and also maintain them in locations most suitable to forms of labor control, such as cutting off water supplies to Panchama family gardens. 45. GOR 204 Mis., supplementary petition received from ryots, dated January 5, 1901. 46. GOR 204 Mis., draft resolution. 47. This was a concessionary scheme designed to promote improvement and investment in agriculture by providing government loans at low rates to cultivators. When Panchamas were granted lands directly, which was done infrequently, beginning in the 1910s, a condition of nonalienation was imposed on the lands to prevent their loss to creditors. This meant, however, that Panchamas could not hypothecate the land and therefore could not furnish it as security and avail themselves of the benefits of this act. Thus, the very attempt to ensure they remained landed nevertheless secured their poverty, until officials noticed this unwanted repercussion some fifteen years later: GOR 1716 Mis., November 6, 1924. 48. Revised Draft Rules, GOR 431 Mis., February 12, 1902. 49. Madras Mail, August 17, 1897, cutting contained in a letter from Rev. J. A. Sharrock to the SPG, November 17, 1897, CLR 55, USPGA (RHL). 50. Missionaries expected Pariah converts to give up the consumption of carrion and to practice temperance. They were also very concerned with the “laxity” of Pariahs’ marriage practices, such as the alleged prevalence of divorce and adultery. These worries over Pariah morality would plague reformist caste Hindus a few years later: see, e.g., G.  A. Natesan, ed., The Depressed Classes (Madras: Natesan, 1912), a collection of important essays on the topic published in the 1900s in The Indian Review, whose authors included the Gaekwar of Baroda, C. F. Andrew, Annie Besant, and Anagarika Dharmapala. 51. Rev. G. Herbert Smith to the secretary of the SPG, dated April 2, 1903, CLR 56, USPGA (RHL). 52. The rise of the view that self-supporting, relatively independent churches would best ensure the future of extra-European Christianity is described in Andrew Porter, “Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm and Empire,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 222–46, at 236–39. Porter cites C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self-Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). With Pariah congregations, this was an ideal that was rarely achieved, although missionaries often expressed their astonishment at the great generosity of Pariah converts despite their poverty. See, e.g., N O T E S   313

Charlotte Wyckoff, A Hundred Years with Christ in Arcot: A Brief History of the Arcot Mission in India of the Reformed Church in America (Vellore, 1953), 13. 53. These grants are ordered, respectively, in GOR 2530, August 22, 1913; BPR 2976 Mis., July 29, 1914; GOR 3706 Mis., December 17, 1913; BPR 1295 Mis., March 23, 1914; and GOR 559, March 8, 1920. 54. In addition, there were at least a few cases in which Christian Panchamas were assigned land titles directly, while their missionary allies assisted in filing darkhasts, contacting officials to enquire about the status of requests, and in general, administering convert-settlers without formally holding titles themselves. For example, Panchama Christians from the London Mission Society received titles to land under the guidance of Rev. D. Downie of the American Baptist Mission in Nellore (BPR 1323 Mis., April 19, 1899). 55. The term “Depressed Classes” was normally used in administrative contexts to referred either to Panchamas alone or to the threefold combination of Panchamas, hill tribes and aboriginals, and criminal tribes. It achieved special importance in Madras with the publication of a lengthy report on these populations in 1918, under orders from the government of India, in which it was used in both of these senses. BPS 60, March 18, 1918. 56. BPR 2952 Mis., December 10, 1924. The first available survey of lands assigned to the Depressed Classes throughout the presidency appeared for the year 1921–1922, but this contains no record of land assigned to Panchamas through missionaries (GOL(G) 148, January 16, 1923). 57. See chap. 3, “The Local State: From Apparatus of Control to Arena of Struggle.” 58. I am referring to postcolonial India’s Anticonversion Laws, on the books in several states, which outlaw conversions motivated by “inducement” or “fraud.” I discuss this further in the book’s conclusion. 59. Hindujanasamskarini, MNNR, Fortnight Ending April 15, 1894. 60. The Hindu, February 23, 1903, cutting in D146, USPGA (RHL). 61. Ibid.; emphasis mine. 62. Ibid.; first emphasis mine; second in original. 63. Adam Andrew, letter to the editor, Madras Mail, February 26, 1903. 64. The Hindu, n.d., most likely between February 27 and March 5, 1903, cutting in D146, USPGA (RHL). 65. Adam Andrew, letter to the editor, Madras Mail, February 26, 1903. 66. The Hindu, n.d., most likely between February 27 and March 5, 1903, cutting in D146, USPGA (RHL); emphasis in original. 67. See chap. 2, esp. the section “The Evangelisation of Pariahs: Motive, Inducement, and Forms of Training.” 68. Sasilekha, February 27, 1903, MNNR, Week Ending March 7, 1903. 69. Swadesamitran, April 2, 1903, MNNR, Week Ending April 11, 1903. 70. Andhraprakasika, March 7, 1903, MNNR, Week Ending March 21, 1903. 314  N O T E S

7. Giving the Panchama a Home 1. See David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), esp. chaps. 4–6; and Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–29 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), chap. 3. David Scott has underscored the importance of legislative councils as centers in which natives were trained in representative democracy and also transmitted “public opinion” to the government. See his “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Fall 1995): 191–220, esp. 208–10. 2. See chap. 6, “Authentic Conversion, ‘Hindu Society’ and ‘Ancient Religion.’” 3. GOR 690, March 17, 1915, TNSA. 4. For an explanation of the term “Depressed Classes,” see chap. 6, note 55 The Depressed Classes Elevation Society and the Depressed Classes Conference should not be confused with the more well-known Depressed Classes Missions that were springing up in several parts of India around this time and were run entirely by caste folk. 5. GOR 585 Mis., February 27, 1913; my translation (from Tamil). Resolutions by Nalappah’s group can also be found in GOP 701, June 12, 1912; GOP 520 Mis., April 24, 1913; BPR 1303 Mis., March 23, 1914, TNSA. 6. GOR 2941, November 10, 1915, p. 3, para. 8, emphasis in original. 7. GOR 2852, December 20, 1915, p. 6, para. 21. 8. Notes to GOR 822 Mis., March 16, 1914. In 1914, the Depressed Classes Elevation Society’s resolution regarding house sites contained in GOP 520 Mis., 1914, included the observation that, “[the] preposterous claims of landholders is [sic] a potent instrument of oppression.  .  .  . [Landholders] eject them [i.e., Depressed Classes laborers] out of their house sites whenever the relations between depressed classes and their masters become strained.” 9. Notes to GOR 219, February 1, 1916, p. 5. “Mala” is the name of the largest Telugu-speaking Dalit caste in the Madras Presidency. 10. See chap. 3, “Sentiments and an Exclusionary Public in Sothuperumbadu.” 11. GOR 3031, December 29, 1916, TNSA. 12. For an overview of these reforms, see J. R. Hay, The Origins of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, 1906–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983); and, for an interesting analysis of their promulgation, see Pat Thane, “The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain, 1880–1914,” Historical Journal 27, no. 4 (1984): 877–900. 13. GOR 3031, December 29, 1916, TNSA, p. 6. 14. Ibid. 15. GOR 3031, December 29, 1916, TNSA, p. 3. This is a citation from GOR 488, July 10, 1915. N O T E S   315

16. GOR 3031, December 29, 1916, TNSA, pp. 5–6. 17. Notes to GOR 3031, December 29, 1916, TNSA, p. 2. 18. Cf. Arthur Marwick, “The Labour Party and the Welfare State in Britain, 1900–48,” American Historical Review 73, no. 2 (1967): 380–403. 19. The report and copious notes on it are filed in GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, TNSA. 20. See chap. 3, “Missionary Advocacy: Publicizing the Pariah.” 21. Notes to GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, p. 1. 22. It is telling that, despite Andrew’s full acceptance of the missionary ideology that saw Pariahness as primarily defined by religion, he did not deny that empirically Pariahness and servitude coincided. 23. BPS 49, February 27, 1890, para. 12, cited in GOR 386–87, June 2, 1890; discussed in the introduction to chap. 4. 24. This was likely, because missionaries such as Andrew were frequent participants in conferences at which notes were exchanged on the management of Panchamas. Andrew was also an active member of the South Indian Missionary Association, giving him access to firsthand accounts of work among Panchamas conducted by missionaries stationed in Madras, Mysore, and Travancore. We have seen as well the wealth of missionary writing on the subject in chap. 2. 25. Bought-in lands were those on which revenue payment had been defaulted and which then did not fetch even a minimal price at auction: these were therefore the least desirable lands, mostly unfit for cultivation. Chap. 1 discusses the minimal response of the government to J. H. A. Tremenheere’s “Report on the Pariahs of Chingleput,” and Adam Andrew’s “The Madras Government and the Pariahs” (Harvest Field, July 1893–December 1894, 207–16, 241–54) presents a sharp critical take on the same. 26. GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, p. 2. 27. Ibid. 28. The accuracy of Andrew’s assessment is supported by the official report on emigration by A.  K.  G. Ahmad Tambi Marakkayar and J. Marjoribanks, which describes in harrowing detail the high rates of mortal illness, suicide driven by loneliness, and homesickness that awaited those brave enough to attempt emigration. See GOH 281 Mis., November 3, 1916. 29. BPR 2258 Mis., April 11, 1889, TNSA. 30. GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, p. 4. 31. Notes to GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, p. 6, citing GOR 1195, October 29, 1885, p. 7. 32. Notes to GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, TNSA, p. 19, para. 4. 33. Notes to GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, TNSA, p. 20. 34. In linguistic philosophy and semantics, a useful distinction is made between a word’s meaning or intension (with an “s”) and its extension or, 316  N O T E S

roughly speaking, the set of empirical objects to which it refers. John Searle, in Intention: A Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), argues for the importance of the analytic distinction between intention (with a “t”), a concept of philosophy of mind, and intension (with an “s”), a concept of logic and semantics. Thus, e.g., two terms may have distinct intensions but share the same extension, as, e.g., “cloven-hoofed animals” and “ruminants.” Or, to the point, Pariah and landless laborer. 35. On the referent of the term “Depressed Classes,” see chap. 6, note 55. Its meaning here was more ambiguous between the specific and the general than it would later become and at this time had to be derived from context. 36. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA. 37. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 21. 38. GOR 875 Confidential, April 19, 1916, TNSA, pp. 3–4. 39. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 15. 40. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 21. 41. In other words, although the measure had the same name, the one used for disbursing wages in kind held less grain than that by which grain was traded, and thus the Pariah’s wages were significantly less than had been reported. Unfortunately, Gray does not tell us exactly the proportional difference. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 21. 42. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 30. 43. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 24. 44. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 28; emphasis mine. See chap. 1, “Sharing the Village: Mirasidarship, Tenancy and Servitude,” for a discussion of how to understand the “man-mortgage” and other forms of “debt” transacted between master and agrestic servant in colonial Madras. 45. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 30. 46. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 31. 47. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 33. 48. BPS 106, May 29, 1918, cited in GOR 2941, August 12, 1918, TNSA, p. 34. 49. GOR 1230, April 27, 1917, citing a report from Achary dated August 26, 1916. 50. GOR 2852, December 20, 1915, p. 6, para. 21. 51. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, TNSA, p. 4. 52. Ibid. 53. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, TNSA, p. 6. 54. See the final section of chap. 6, “Authentic Conversion, ‘Hindu Society’ and ‘Ancient Religion.’” 55. Indeed, Achary reports no difference whatsoever in conditions between Kistna, South Arcot, and Tanjore that can account for his insistence on harmonious N O T E S   317

labor relations in the latter—a judgment that appears all the more surprising when we consider that, contra Achary’s sanguine account, even the most apologetic of government sources generally judged the severity of servile conditions in Tanjore to be second only to Malabar in the entire presidency: see, for instance, Benedicte Hjelje, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967): 79–82. This official consensus, moreover, would be confirmed by the writings of a new crop of politically articulate Panchamas, which we will examine later in this chapter. Finally, the unique severity of labor relations in Tanjore has been attested to in postcolonial ethnographies; see Kathleen Gough, Rural Society in Southeast India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Rural Change in Southeast India, 1950s to 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Joan Mencher, Agriculture and Social Structure in Tamil Nadu: Past Origins, Present Transformations and Future Prospects (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic, 1978). 56. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, TNSA, pp. 2–3. 57. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, TNSA, p. 4. 58. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, p. 5, para. 20. 59. See Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and “Introduction,” in The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 60. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, p. 9. 61. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, p. 10. 62. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, p. 11. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. See above, chap. 7, “The Ills of the Panchama: The State and Missionary Expertise.” 66. Rev. William Goudie to Rev. G.  W. Olver, Tiruvallur, March 3, 1898, pp. 3–4, WMMA (SOAS), London. 67. Other evidence countering an alleged absence of friction appears, as we have seen, in the missionary archives, as well as in Pariah periodicals such as Tamiḻaṉ, 1908–1910, RMRL; Vaḻikkāṭṭuvōṉ, 1918, IOL, which will be discussed in chap. 8; and Paraiyan, available in selected excerpts in MNNR of 1894–1896. 68. This decision was not only based upon the missionary model but also reflects the long and circuitous history of the idea that the state was the sole landowner in “traditional India”; this was used by colonial officials to justify 318  N O T E S

their own assumption of that role. Thus, Thomas Munro’s vision of ryotwari—as a system that would preserve state landlordism at the expense of a free market but to the advantage of what the state considered to be the “direct cultivator”—came to predominate in Madras; the extent to which state landlordism prevented or enabled the development of a free market in land is a matter of considerable debate; see, e.g., Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (London: Clarendon, 1963), esp. chap. 2; and Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 69. Board of Revenue Member A. R. Knapp, “Notes Connected with GO 336,” p. 4, appended to GOR 336, January 25, 1918, TNSA. 70. The contentiousness and delicacy of the inauguration of house-site provision is attested by the fact that this government order had attached to it not only pages of discussion, entitled “Notes to GO 3559,” but in addition a series of conversations entitled “Further Notes to GO 3559,” which concerned precisely the question of whether and what aspects of the discussion could be made public, because a member of the Legislative Council, M. Ramachandra Rao, whom we encountered earlier, asked for a copy of it. Officers speculated that he had known to ask because the government’s order that house sites were to be provided was very quickly leaked to the press, again underscoring the heightened importance of public opinion in this period. As A. G. Cardew put it in “Further Notes to GO 3559” (p. 2), “I am in favour of publishing the whole Government Order including Mr. Aziz-ud-Din’s minute of dissent. The days when this class of paper could be kept confidential are past.” 71. Notes to GOR 3559 Confidential, April 19, 1916, TNSA, p. 20.

8. Everyday Warfare 1. In fact, the state received numerous petitions from mirasidars; the one under discussion here was simply the one considered most complete and therefore worthy of formal response. The petition is filed in GOR 3201 Mis., September 10, 1918, TNSA. The state also received counterpetitions from the South India Oppressed Classes Union (SIOCU); we will discuss this below. 2. GOR 3201 Mis., September 10, 1918, TNSA. 3. Ibid. 4. “Further Notes to Discussion on Matters of General and Public Interest,” p. 3, appended to GOR 3201 Mis., September 10, 1918, TNSA. 5. Ibid. 6. “Further Notes to Discussion on Matters of General and Public Interest,” p. 5. N O T E S   319

7. The phrase “two faces” is David Washbrook’s: “India, 1818–60: The Two Faces of Colonialism,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 395–421. 8. See chap. 7, “Creating a ‘Friction Where None Exists’: Initiating the Scheme for Tanjore.” 9. Yet as we have seen, Gray reported that this was not necessarily guaranteed and was often far from sufficient. 10. The idea of an “ethnographic state” is borrowed from Nicholas Dirks, who uses it to describe the colonial classification of Indian society into, and the subsequent governance of India according to, anthropological types, most commonly castes. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), part 3, 127–227. 11. This despite the fact that the government itself had omitted any reference to congestion in its rationale for the program in Tanjore; at a minimum, this confirms the breadth of mirasidars’ reading of government documents. In addition, we might take it as an attempt to dispute the official narrative by implying that congestion was the only legitimate justification for such a program. 12. The basic features of the new liberalism as they pertained to colonial Madras were discussed in chap. 6, introduction. 13. L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (Teddington: Echo Library, 2009), 68. The socalled liberal welfare reforms included the Small Holdings Act of 1907 referred to above (chap. 7, “The Drinking Classes and Productive Investment”), as well as protections for old age, illness, and childhood: see J. R. Hay, The Origins of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, 1906–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983); for a more detailed study, see Pat Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (London: Longman, 1996). 14. Hobhouse, Liberalism, 68. 15. GOR 3201 Mis., September 10, 1918, TNSA. 16. “Notes Connected with Resolution on Matters of General Public Interest,” in GOR 3201 Mis., September 10, 1918, TNSA, p. 7, para. 7iii. 17. “Notes Connected with Resolution on Matters of General Public Interest,” p. 7, para. 7i; emphasis in original. On this point, see also Haruka Yanagisawa, A Century of Change (Delhi: Manohar, 1996). 18. BPS 60, March 18, 1918, p. 8, para. 15. 19. Māmūl, a word of Arabic origin common to many Indian languages, ranges in meaning from custom and tradition to law. The Tamil Lexicon indicates that it was likely to have been used as a translation of the common colonial administrative phrase “immemorial custom.” In modern Tamil the word often refers to a customary bribe paid to government officials. 20. BPS 60, March 18, 1918, pp. 8–9. 320  N O T E S

21. On attitudes to the poor in the context of state policy in Britain, see Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 1990); and Norman Barry, Welfare (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1990), esp. chaps. 1–2. 22. “Notes Connected with Resolution on Matters of General Public Interest,” p. 7, para. 7i. 23. Most of these took place in the early 1920s as the scheme was implemented in more and more taluks, and all contain charges virtually identical to those to be described here: BPR 506 Mis., February 28, 1923; BPR 1562 Mis., July 16, 1923; BPR 2086, September 19, 1923; BPR 61 Mis., January 10, 1924; and BPR 2223 Mis., September 20, 1924. 24. From the judgment of Original Suit (O.S.) 387, 388, and 389 of 1919, and O. S. 387 of 1918, heard in the District Munsiff ’s Court at Negapatam on March 6, 1919, filed in GOR 1740 Mis., July 25, 1919. 25. GOR 1740 Mis., July 25, 1919; emphasis mine. 26. The phrase “the magic of property turn sand into gold” appears in Arthur Young’s 1793 pamphlet, The Example of France a Warning to England. See G. Mingay, ed., Arthur Young and His Times (London: Macmillan, 1975). 27. See para. 12 of the District Munsiff ’s judgment, GOR 1740 Mis., July 25, 1919, TNSA, p. 7. 28. See notes 51 and 52 in chap. 5. 29. District Munsiff ’s judgment, p. 11, para. 17. 30. District Munsiff ’s judgment, p. 9, para. 13. 31. See Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–29 (Berkeley: University of California Press), especially chaps. 3–4; David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chaps. 4–6; V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Kolkata, India: Samya, 1998). The Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms were in the process of being granted in 1917–1918, focusing an unprecedented degree of public attention on political representation. 32. The Hindu’s reportage, in turn, was reproduced verbatim in the pages of Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ, the monthly magazine of the SIOCU. 33. We have encountered T. Ranga Achariyar already, in his remarks to government officials prior to this major debate in the Legislative Council; see chap. 8, “Mamul and the New India.” 34. These Legislative Council proceedings were reproduced in The Hindu, February 2, 1918. The government’s mention of “philanthropic bodies” was a reference to associations such as the Depressed Classes Mission Society in Madras, founded by Brahmin politicians and modeled on, and in contact with, an eponymous society founded in Maharashtra. Although there are earlier N O T E S   321

references of sporadic attempts by “native gentleman” to engage in uplift work for the Depressed Classes in the Madras Presidency, they were not significant until the mid-1910s. Other non-Christian agencies engaged in uplift work in Madras by this date included the Theosophists, the Arya Samajists, and the Brahmo Samajists, as well as the Tamil Buddhists—the latter being the only outfit actually managed by Panchamas themselves. All these organizations are mentioned in a government report on Panchamas (BPS 60, March 18, 1918). In thus briefly cataloguing these additional uplift efforts, I am not counterposing Christian uplift activity to that of natives; this which would be an utterly misleading contrast, because European missionaries were in fact but a small proportion of Christian mission workers in colonial south India, and we have seen the central importance of Dalits themselves in the spread of mission activity among them. 35. Proceedings of the Legislative Council of Fort St. George, Resolutions on Matters of General Public Interest, August 14, 1918, pp. 98–108. 36. Allegations of the government’s protection of European planters featured regularly in the nationalist press, with complaints, e.g., that in comparison to native business interests, “Government are showing undue partiality to European capitalists.” Swadesamitran, November 17, 1920, MNNR, Week Ending November 27, 1920. 37. Resolutions on Matters of General Public Interest, p. 101. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Resolutions on Matters of General Public Interest, p. 103. 41. Ibid. 42. Resolutions on Matters of General Public Interest, p. 104; emphasis mine. 43. Ibid. 44. These men included E. V. Narasimha Ayyar, A. K. G. Ahmad Tambi Marakkayar, K. Rama Ayyangar, and A. S. Krishna Rao. 45. Resolutions on Matters of General Public Interest, p. 101. 46. Resolutions on Matters of General Public Interest, p. 106. 47. Ibid.; emphasis mine. 48. Paradigmatic in this regard are Robert E. Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); and Washbrook, Emergence of Provincial Politics. There has also, of course, been concerted resistance to the language of collaboration. A celebrated denunciation of historiography that highlights collaboration in colonial Indian governance is Ranajit Guha’s “Dominance Without Hegemony and Its Historiography,” in Subaltern Studies VI, ed. Ranajit Guha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. 295–96.

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49. Compare in this vein the beginnings of Madras’s political non-Brahminism. The Non-Brahmin Manifesto with which their platform was launched calls upon the government of Madras to heed its demands precisely because the non-Brahmins were the most powerful landholders in Madras. See “The Non-Brahmin Manifesto,” printed as an appendix in Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict, 358–67. 50. GOR 1740 Mis., July 25, 1919, para. 34. 51. The reader, however, should not be surprised. Indeed, in chap. 1, we saw the same thing happen in the late 1880s when C.  M. Mullaly found himself besieged with applications when he offered house sites to cēri dwellers. 52. GOR 3559, November 10, 1917, TNSA, p. 6. 53. Foucault has famously used war as a metaphor to characterize relations of power. Although he came to question the applicability of the metaphor to a general theory of power, it is particularly apt at evoking the feints, tactics, and uncertainty that mark the relation between Panchamas and their masters in this period in Madras. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), esp. lectures 1, 2, and 3. Gyan Pandey has produced a sobering account of forms of conflict, allied to those I am discussing here, in contemporary India: Gyan Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). 54. BPR 1256 Mis., September 10, 1918. 55. Ibid. Kallars are a dominant caste in some parts of Tamil Nadu, with members across the state ranging from sharecroppers to kings. Today Kallars are classified among the “Backward Classes” (BCs) for administrative purposes. 56. BPR 1256 Mis., September 10, 1918. 57. Special Deputy Collector D. Arulanandam Pillai’s Progress Report, BPR 347 Mis., March 11, 1919, p. 18, para. 10. 58. BPR 1256 Mis., September 10, 1918. 59. Pillai’s Progress Report, p. 18, para. 10. 60. In this set of brackets, I am making a guess based on what can be deciphered on a torn page. 61. Report on the work in the Tanjore District by the special staff for the acquisition of house sites, etc., in GOL(G) 1846, November 7, 1921, p. 8, para. 11. 62. See chap. 3, “Minute Deviations, Total Reversals: Christian Habits and Labor Relations.” 63. “Notes Connected with Resolution on Matters of General Public Interest,” in GOR 3201 Mis., September 10, 1918, TNSA, p. 7, para. 7iii. 64. Vaḻikaṭṭuvōṉ, January 1918, pp. 2–3; emphasis mine.

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65. P. Samuel, “Teṉintiya Oṭukkappaṭukiṟa Jātikaḷum, Avarkaḷuṭaiya varavucelavukaḷum” [“South Indian Oppressed Castes, Their Income and Their Expenses”], Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ, February 1918, p. 48. 66. Illātavaṉ pollātavaṉ, cited in Herman Jensen, A Classified Collection of Tamil Proverbs (New York: Hippocrene, 1997), 122. 67. Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ, March 1918, published in Negapatam, Tanjore, IOL, p. 62. 68. Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ, March 1918, p. 64. 69. Ibid. 70. On Vellalars’ self-representation, see chap. 1, note 14. 71. Likewise, when a Panchama, M.  C. Rajah, was finally appointed to the Madras Legislative Council, in the context of debate in which the other members, all caste people, argued that there should be no special government agency for the care of the Depressed Classes, he angrily pointed out, “What are called the depressed classes . . . are the real producers of wealth. The mirasidars’ pride is based upon the sweat of the labourer in the fields; the merchant fattens upon the profits earned for him by the despised coolie.” “Discussion on the Budget,” Legislative Council Proceedings, March 8, 1922, pp. 2663–64. Rajah’s comment was directed, it should be pointed out, in opposition to the Justice Party, a party dominated by Vellalars and other high-ranked non-Brahmin agricultural castes, as well as Chettiars, a merchant caste whose leaders had first proposed the measure. 72. Yanagisawa, A Century of Change, 223. 73. Noncooperation, a Congressite political strategy entailing a refusal to participate in concessionary colonial devolutionary schemes in order to force the British to grant full self-government, was only popular in Madras among Brahmins. 74. Letter from Collector H. A. B. Vernon, in GOL(G) 462 Mis., February 9, 1923, para. 13. 75. GOR 748 Confidential, March 29, 1919, TNSA, p. 18.

9. The Depressed Classes, Rights, and the Embrace of the Social 1. The political peculiarities of dyarchy are not germane here; their considerable complexity, moreover, has been addressed only cursorily in recent historiography, with a few exceptions, such as James Chiriyankandath’s “‘Democracy’ Under the Raj: Elections and Separate Representation in British India,” in Democracy in India, ed. Niraja Jayal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 53–81. Several near-contemporary sources may be consulted for the structural rudiments of dyarchy: A. Appadorai, Dyarchy in Practice (London: Longmans, Green, 1937); and K. M. Pannikar, The Working of Dyarchy in India, 1919–1928 (Bombay: Taraporevala, 1928). 324  N O T E S

2. Although in current usage we refer only to the denizens of modern independent nation-states as citizens, in the political rhetoric of Depressed Classes activists in colonial Madras, the “citizen” was whom he aspired to be. 3. The term “Depressed Classes” was used in administrative contexts to refer either to Dalits, also “Panchamas” in contemporary parlance, or to the threefold combination of (1) Panchamas, (2) hill tribes and aboriginals, and (3) criminal tribes. The term achieved special importance in Madras with the publication of a lengthy report on these populations in 1918, under orders from the government of India, in which it was used in both the more exclusive as well as the inclusive of these senses. BPS 60, March 18, 1918. See also chap. 6, note 55. 4. The emphasis of modern states on the self-improvement (including the political “empowerment”) of the poor has been strikingly analyzed in the context of the modern United States in Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). 5. For a useful overview of some nationalist critiques of caste, see Susan Bayly, “Hindu Modernisers and the ‘Public’ Arena: Indigenous Critiques of Caste in Colonial India,” in Swami Vivekananda and the Modernization of Hinduism, ed. William Radice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 93–137; and Caste, Society and Politics in India: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 6. 6. A concise overview of the criteria according to which spaces are deemed public in modern liberal regimes may be found in Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus, eds., The Public and Private in Social Life (London: Croom Helm, 1983), esp. Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus, “The Liberal Conception of the Public and Private,” 31–65; and Gerald F. Gaus, “Public and Private Interests in Liberal Political Economy, Old and New,” 183–222. For a useful analysis of the caste-specific nature of space in early colonial south India, see Robert E. Frykenberg, “On Roads and Riots in Tinnevelly: Radical Change and Ideology in Madras Presidency During the 19th Century,” South Asia 4, no. 2 (1982): 34–52. More recent accounts of south Asian notions of public space include Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze,” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 65–79; and Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices About Space in Calcutta,” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (1997): 83–114. Valerian Rodrigues has very persuasively argued that Chakrabarty’s depiction of Indians’ relation to garbage in public spaces entirely overlooks the social relations that make this possible, namely that only some persons and not others are recognized as responsible for the removal of everyone’s filth; he brings back into view the casted nature of space that I emphasize here: see Valerian Rodrigues, “Untouchability, Filth and the Public Domain,” in Humiliation: N O T E S   325

Claims and Contexts, ed. Gopal Guru (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 108–23. On urban public space, see Will Glover, “Construing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from Punjab,” Journal of Punjab Studies 14, no. 2 (2007): 211–24. 7. See chap. 5, “Settling Conflicts: Religious Neutrality and the Exclusion of Pariahs from ‘the Public.’” 8. GOR 2510 Mis., November 3, 1919, TNSA. 9. MLCP, November 20, 1919, pp. 152–53. 10. Society, as historians and social theorists have explained, appears as a legitimating object for the modern state in the eighteenth century, the paradigmatic object of its intervention. This notion of society was an epistemological precondition for the emergence of modern welfare regimes, for the “socialization,” as it is called, of governance. Of the large corpus of scholarship on the social question I have found the following most pertinent to my own account: Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question (London: Routledge, 2002); Jacques Donzelot, “The Promotion of the Social,” Economy and Society 17, no. 3 (1988): 395–427; Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 1990). Yet the socialization of governance in India, the state’s reformist interventions devised to ameliorate congestion, e.g., required, where they intervened in caste relations, the devolution of these questions onto society itself. 11. Iyengar is the name of one of the two principal Tamil Brahmin subcastes. This was Rev. MacPhail of the Free Church of Scotland, who, in his remarks in the council, even explicitly invoked his fellow missionary Adam Andrew, a crusader publicly acclaimed (and at once derided) in Madras as “Pariah Andrew.” For specifics on the Free Church’s schemes for Pariah improvement, see Rupa Viswanath, “The Pariah Problem: Missionaries, the Administration of ‘Untouchables’ and the Elaboration of Neutrality in Colonial South India, c. 1885–1918” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006), chap. 2. 12. MLCP, November 20, 1919, pp. 159–60; emphasis mine. 13. MLCP, November 20, 1919, p. 155; emphasis mine. 14. Ibid. 15. MLCP, November 20, 1919, p. 154. 16. Thus, a few years later, in the midst of heated discussion on the legitimacy of there being a government department devoted to the amelioration of the Depressed Classes, the department having come under attack from caste people, officials privately recalled that “there was political agitation regarding the amelioration of the depressed classes in [this Presidency so] Government generously took up the question. . . . [The office of ] protector of the depressed classes . . . does not exist anywhere else.” GOL(G) 2443, October 16, 1923, TNSA, typed noted of A. P. Patro. 326  N O T E S

17. The Hindu, December 8, 1923, clipping in GOL(G) 1070 Mis., March 27, 1924, TNSA. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. GOR 748 Confidential, March 29, 1919, TNSA, p. 18. While, more famously, a parallel maneuver rendered women’s space domestic at this time, the differences here are manifold and worth careful consideration. For one, women become interiorized, as it were, following a period of conservative retrenchment after reformist ascendancy. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). No such golden age marks the history of the Pariah in colonial India. Second, elite male concerns with women, whether reformist or otherwise, were trained upon the minute subset of high-caste women within their own social milieux, for whom early marriage, the prohibition of widow remarriage, and so on were social realities. For the bulk of Indian women, these laws would have made no difference whatsoever. I discuss my own understanding of the social in light of this literature in more detail in the conclusion. 21. The exceptions, according to Rajah and Srinivasan, were courts in which a European presided, and for this and other reasons Rajah and Srinivasan strongly opposed the idea of entirely Indianizing the services, to say nothing of their reprobation of self-government by Indians in general. Royal Commission of Superior Civil Services, Minutes of Evidence, Wednesday, January 9, 1924, pp. 1–39. Nationalists and others smarted and ascribed Rajah and Srinivasan’s views to what might be called the “false consciousness” born of colonizers’ dogged efforts to divide and rule. See, e.g., Andhra Patrika, January 10, 1924, in MNNR 1924, pp. 93–94. For skepticism about the applicability of the notion of divide and rule to the analysis of colonial policy toward the Pariah in the 1920s, see Viswanath, “The Pariah Problem,” chap. 4. 22. Royal Commission of Superior Civil Services, Minutes of Evidence, Wednesday, January 9, 1924, pp. 1–39. 23. GOL(G) 1081, March 27, 1925, TNSA. 24. Ibid. 25. GOL(G) 3464 Mis., December 5, 1924, TNSA. The incident most likely took place in early April of that year. 26. GOL(G) 3423 Mis., December 4, 1924, TNSA. 27. GOL(G) 712, March 3, 1925, TNSA, copy of report dated June 30, 1924, from the Special Deputy Tahsildar, Mayavaram, to the District Labor Officer, Tanjore. 28. GOL(G) 712, March 3, 1925, TNSA, copy of report dated July 4, 1924 from the Special Deputy Tahsildar, Tanjore to the District Labor Officer, Tanjore. N O T E S   327

29. Ibid. 30. For example, in addition to the debates in the Legislative Council discussed above, BPR 2668 Mis., November 8, 1924; GOL(G) 3428 Mis., December 8, 1924; GOE 678, May 2, 1925; and GOL(G) 3758 Mis., December 16, 1925. 31. Examples of Depressed Classes activists invoking issues of the assignment of lands to Dalits in villages across the presidency, the settling of local conflicts over darkhast application for land cases and of cases involving petty obstructionism with reference to land acquisition, access to communal lands, and the like, may be found, inter alia, in GOR 503 Mis., March 25, 1924; GOR 1231 Mis., August 9, 1924; GOR 310, February 24, 1925; GOR 1016 Mis., June 24, 1926; BPR 2094 Mis., September 16, 1926; and GOL(G) 728 Mis., March 2, 1926. 32. GOL(G) 3758 Mis., December 16, 1925. 33. “Adi-Dravida” was the name used by many politicized Dalits at this time, to indicate a claim of autochthony, and it was adopted into administrative language at their behest in the early 1920s: “Adi” means “original,” and against the claims of caste people to represent the race of “Dravidians,” some Dalits asserted they were in fact the original inhabitants of the Tamil region. Not all politically active Dalits accepted this term. Rettamalai Srinivasan, for instance, averred only Dalits were really Dravidians, and their rightful designation had been unjustly usurped by caste people: see, e.g., GOL(G) 2693M, 3 November 1922. 34. GOL(G) 3758 Mis., December 16, 1925. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. GOL(G) 3758 Mis., December 16, 1925, extract from R. Veerian’s letter dated May 30, 1925 to the Hon. the Law Member. 38. GOL(G) 3758 Mis., December 16, 1925. 39. GOL(G) 3758 Mis., December 16, 1925, letter from A. G. Leach, District Magistrate, North Arcot, dated August 4, 1925. 40. GOP 500 Mis., May 24, 1925. 41. GOL(G) 3758 Mis., December 16, 1925, letter from A. G. Leach, District Magistrate, North Arcot, dated August 4, 1925. 42. GOL(G) 3126, October 14, 1925. 43. The citation comes from GOL(G) 3482 Mis., December 8, 1924, but Veerian’s questions on the treatment of Adi-Dravidas in jails may also be found in GOL(G) 877 Mis., March 14, 1925; GOL(G) 1244, April 7, 1925; GOL(G) 1884, June 12, 1925; GOL(G) 3654, November 30, 1925; GOL(G) 3755 Mis., December 16, 1925; and GOL(G) 685, March 2, 1926. 44. GOL(G) 3482 Mis., December 8, 1924. 45. Ibid.

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46. GOL(G) 46, January 7, 1925, Report from Revenue Divisional Officer C. Rajam Chetti, dated June 25, 1924, pp. 1–2. 47. In one memorable instance, Dalits in a Trichinopoly village refused to perform demeaning service obligations for the caste people who employed them, and tensions rose high. There had been several Adi-Dravida rallies in the area, which preceded the growth of an Adi-Dravida movement in the district and may have been spearheaded by M. C. Rajah. Officials suspected that Dalits, confused by Rajah’s proper name into believing he represented the wishes of the Raj, believed they were actually acting in compliance with the “Sirkar” government when they refused to obey caste folk. GOP 138M, February 14, 1922. 48. GOLM 2260, September 25, 1924. 49. GOLM 2260, September 25, 1924, printed statement by M. Raghavan. 50. GOP 37, January 9, 1925, handwritten letter from R. Veerian to A.  R. Knapp, dated November 16, 1924. 51. GOP 37, January 9, 1925, response from M. Raghavan, dated November 18, 1924, to a telegram from Rettamalai Srinivasan, and submitted by Srinivasan to the government. 52. GOP 37, January 9, 1925, typed note from A. R. Knapp to Macmichael. 53. Ibid.; emphases mine. 54. Ibid. 55. MLCP, November 20, 1919, p. 155. 56. GOP 500 Mis., May 24, 1926, Tamil petition from V. Ciṉṉacāmi to R. Veerian; translations mine. 57. GOP 37, January 9, 1925, typed note from A. R. Knapp to Macmichael. 58. GOP 500 Mis., May 24, 1926, Tamil petition from V. Ciṉṉacāmi to R. Veerian; translations mine. 59. GOP 500 Mis., May 24, 1926, letter from C. A. Henderson, District Magistrate Chingleput, to the Public Department; emphases mine. 60. GOP 500 Mis., May 24, 1926. 61. See Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36–39; and Jonathon K. Ocko and David Gilmartin, “State, Sovereignty and the People: A Comparison of the ‘Rule of Law’ in India and China,” Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 1 (2009): 55–133, especially 66–70. On the importance of Henry Maine to the post-1857 conception of Indian society as requiring governance by its own culturally specific laws, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 62. Speech of L. A. Govindaraghava Ayyar, MLCP, in New India, October 24, 1916. Cited in GOR 748 Confidential, March 29, 1919, pp. 16–17; emphasis mine.

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63. Justice, March 7, 1918, cited in GOR 748 Confidential, March 29, 1919, p. 17; emphasis mine. 64. A. G. Cardew in Notes to GOR 748 Confidential, p. 9, appended to GOR 748 Confidential, March 29, 1919. 65. Praful Bidwai, “Reality of Dalit Oppression,” Rediff News, October 22, 2002; available at www.rediff.com/news/2002/oct/22bidwai.htm (accessed May 2, 2008).

Conclusion 1. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 27. 2. It is sometimes alleged that the concept of freedom is an outcome of the bourgeois revolution and that to speak of unfree labor (or of slaves) in precolonial India is somehow mistaken. Historically speaking, this is specious. Freedom was first conceptualized as a distinct mode of being in classical Greece, and it was formulated in contradistinction to slavery; slavery preceded the concept of freedom, in other words, not the reverse. See Moses I. Finley, “Slavery,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 14: 307–13. Furthermore, the fact that an abstract concept of freedom depended on that of slavery does mean that there cannot be slavery without a notion of freedom. For a more detailed critical discussion of the idea that there could not have been slaves in precolonial India, see Peter Robb, “Introduction: Meanings of Labour in Indian Social Context,” in Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour, ed. Peter Robb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–67, esp. 26–43. 3. Charles S. Crole, The Chingleput, Late Madras, District: A Manual Compiled Under the Orders of the Madras Government (Madras: Lawrence Asylum, 1879), 214. 4. See chap. 7. 5. Dharma Kumar was for this very reason prompted to write her seminal Land and Caste in South India, which decisively refuted the view that agrestic servitude and landlessness were the result of colonial rule. See especially her “Introduction” and “Conclusion” in Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 3–5, 187–93. Given the copious evidence to the contrary, it is surprising that such a view was ever seriously entertained. Among the best accounts of agrarian labor and slavery with respect to south India, all of which demonstrate the existence of slavery in precolonial India, as well as its persistence thereafter, are Kumar, Land and Caste in South India; Mihir Shah, “Capitalist Development and the Transformation 330  N O T E S

of Agrarian Relations in Chingleput District c. 1780–1983” (Ph.D. diss., Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Trivandrum, 1984); and “The Kaniatchi Form of Labour,” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 30 (1985): PE65–PE78; Benedicte Hjelje, “Slavery and Agricultural Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1–2 (1967): 79–82. For the early post-Independence years, consider how Dev Raj Chanana, the author of the neglected 1960 classic, Slavery in Ancient India as Depicted in Pali and Sanskrit Texts (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1990), described the scholarship of those writing in the three decades prior to his own: “In the majority of studies .  .  . the humane and kind treatment of slaves is emphasised. . . . At least some of [the authors] seem to derive a personal satisfaction from the difference in the treatment of slaves in India and those of the Western countries. . . . Some have tried to deny even the existence of this institution” (5–6). Notable among the authors he cites is P. V. Kane, the well-known author of the multivolume History of Dharmasastra. 6. See Gyan Prakash’s critique of the hegemony of what he calls the “discourse of freedom” in modern accounts of slavery in his Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–12. Kumar, “Introduction,” in Land and Caste in South India, 3–5; and Robb, “Introduction,” in Dalit Movements, 26–57 also express concern about the universal use of the term. A brief but useful entry point into these debates about applicability of the term can be found in Peter Kolchin, “Some Recent Works on Slavery Outside the United States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, no. 4 (Oct 1986): 767–77. Kolchin cautions against the modernist and subtly ethnocentric bias in definitions of slavery that take the North Atlantic phenomenon as paradigmatic. With reference to the use of “slavery” to describe hereditarily unfree caste-based agrestic servitude, I simply note that until abolition became a threat this is how agrarian labor was described in both Tamil and English records, and it continued to be described as such in native discourse, even into the early twentieth century. Apart from the fact that slavery is indeed what unfree Dalit labor was called by contemporaries, one might nevertheless ask whether the term is analytically useful. The precise definition of slavery remains a matter of some debate, but the most commonly accepted stresses that slaves are the property of someone else, either an individual or a collective; their obedience is compelled under the threat of violence; and they are not free to leave. These straightforwardly fit the case of unfree Dalit labor through the late nineteenth century in Madras. Orlando Patterson’s monumental study, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), furthermore stresses that slaves are regarded as ethnic outsiders and that they are systematically dishonored. Both these criteria also fit the case at hand. N O T E S   331

7. Indrani Chatterjee, “Slavery, Semantics and the Sound of Silence,” in Slavery in South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 287–315, at 306. 8. Certainly, an almost identical picture of slaves’ contentedness is a welldocumented feature of the paternalist ideology of slave owners in the American South. But the American slave-owning class was under pressure to justify their “peculiar institution” in ways precolonial landed castes were not. On paternalism in the United States, see, for instance, Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate Over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); Marvin Harris, “The Myth of the Friendly Master,” in ibid., 191–209; Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), chap. 5; Dale Edwyna Smith, “Proslavery Argument, United States,” and Michael Phillips, “Fitzhugh, George (1806–81)” in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ed. Junius P. Rodriguez (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 1997); Joseph Perskey, “Unequal Exchange and Dependency Theory in George Fitzhugh,” History of Political Economy 24, no. 1 (1992): 117–28. 9. The Hindu, 1971, cited in Joan Mencher, “Agricultural Labor Unions: Socioeconomic and Political Considerations,” in The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia, ed. Kenneth David (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), 309–35, at 314. 10. Mencher, “Agricultural Labor Unions,” 314–15. 11. Mencher herself offers another example of the trope, this time from a scholarly account of agricultural labor: “Labourers . . . used to look upon the landlord not in the modern sense of an employer but as their sovereign and benefactor. There was a personal bond of allegiance to the landlord and his family which was passed down in the hereditary manner from one generation to another. The labourers shared in the joys and sorrows of the landlord and his family and vice versa. . . . Liberal advances of money or paddy were given when they ran into difficulties by exhausting their stock of paddy before the next harvest. These commitments bound these families so strongly to their masters that it was difficult for them to extricate themselves from these bonds. Nor was there any desire to do so, as the bonds of personal devotion were so great.” See V. R. Pillai and P. G. K. Panikar, Land Reclamation in Kerala (Bombay: Asian Publishing House, 1965), 120. 12. Thus, Sundararaj Manickam tells us that prior to their encounter with missionaries, “the doctrine of Karma [had] developed in [Dalits] a sense of resignation and fatalism”: Sundararaj Manickam, The Social Setting of Christian Conversion in South India (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1977), 37. Missionaries, as I have argued already at great length, did indeed facilitate desired change, 332  N O T E S

but this should not be taken to mean that they were in the active role and that Dalits were merely passive. G. A. Oddie avers that Christian doctrine explains Dalit insubordination, for its “teachings which stressed the essential equality and brotherhood of man .  .  . provided the depressed classes with an ideology they could utilize in their opposition to higher-caste Hindus.” G. A. Oddie, Hindu and Christian in South-East India (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1991), 161. Prior to this, we are led to assume (that is, in the absence of such an ideology) that Pariahs remained resigned. 13. Henriette Bugge calls this patron-clientism rājadharma, following classical sources. See Henriette Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India, 1840–1900 (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1994), chap. 6; the term rājadharma appears on 175. 14. See chaps. 7 and 8. 15. K. Balagopal powerfully demonstrates how workers continue to deploy the language of their employers in efforts to bargain in his “Drought and TADA in Adilabad,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 24, No. 47 (Nov. 25, 1989), pp. 2587–91. 16. See chap. 8. 17. Kumar, Land and Caste in South India, xxii, 191–92. Indeed, as the evidence I have provided suggests, landlords’ “obligation” to support tied labourers even during the slack seasons was often not forthcoming. See discussion of Gray’s report in chap. 7, “The Ills of the Panchama: State and Missionary Expertise.” 18. Prakash offers only one piece of evidence for this claim: the testimony of a single colonial official (Bonded Histories, 218; see also 184). Given the pervasiveness of this very stereotype among administrators (recall in chap. 8 that District Munsiff Krishna Ayyar described Pariahs as quiescent even while the very case he was adjudicating offered counterevidence to that view), Prakash’s conclusions, taking administrative discourse at face value, stretch credibility. A less extreme version of the thesis may be found in Tanika Sarkar’s otherwise insightful and very nuanced comparative account of bondage across the colonial subcontinent. Sarkar tells us, “With slaves in [South India,] resistance occurred not when they formed a part of the traditional network of relations, but when they were torn from the familiar accustomed structure of exploitation.” Tanika Sarkar, “Bondage in the Colonial Context,” in Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in India, ed. Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney (Madras: Sangam, 1985), 97–126, at 120; S.  S. Sivakumar expresses the same view when he asserts that bondage was “customary” prior to the end of the nineteenth century but “voluntary” afterward. S.  S. Sivakumar, “Transformation of the Agrarian Economy in Tondaimandalam, 1760–1900,” Social Scientist 6, no. 70 (1978): 18–39, at 35. N O T E S   333

19. Prakash, Bonded Histories, 225. 20. Likewise, we have seen the enormous energy with which members of the Depressed Classes initiated contact with their representatives and demanded representation, actively seeking but being denied the freedoms promised by what they called “citizen’s rights.” See chap. 9. 21. Prakash, “Introduction,” in The World of the Rural Labourer in Colonial India, ed. Gyan Prakash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–46, at 17. Although an extended discussion is beyond the scope of this book, it is worth noting that Prakash seems to assume colonialism really did result in substantive abolition, whereas I argue, along with Indrani Chatterjee (see especially her “Slavery, Semantics and the Sound of Silence”) that abolition in colonial India was in critical respects in name only. 22. Pradip K. Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth Century Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24. Haruka Yanagisawa similarly contends that “the implementation of the policy of amelioration towards the Depressed Classes, particularly after the 1910s, was accelerated by the government’s concern over the expanding nationalist movement and the subsequent need to foster a pro-British mood among the Depressed castes.” Haruka Yanagisawa, A Century of Change (Delhi: Manohar, 1996), 223. The locus classicus of this view, G. S. Ghurye’s 1936 Caste and Race in India, avoids openly claiming that the Dalit–non-Dalit division was created or deliberately played up the British, instead maintaining that all of caste was. This review remains popular among Ghurye’s intellectual descendants, high-caste Indian sociologists associated with the Delhi School, whose opposition to reservations policies is discussed by Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 288. 23. It has only been in the past decade or so that the political importance of the Dalit vote has forced Ambedkar’s traditional opponents in Congress and in Hindu nationalist organizations to cease openly demonizing him as antinationalist and instead to seek to appropriate his image in their own electoral propaganda. 24. See chap. 4. 25. See chap. 9, esp. “Religious Rights Contra Citizens’ Rights; or, The Socialization of the Pariah Problem.” 26. Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The NonBrahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–29 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 27. Burton Stein, “Brahman and Peasant in Early South Indian History,” Adyar Library Bulletin 31–32 (1968): 229–69.

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28. See Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict; David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); M.  S.  S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). 29. These rather inculpatory words (at least for the theories of historians and ideologues who vaunt the movement’s alleged democratic origins) in the party’s very charter have garnered no scholarly attention whatsoever. “The Non-Brahmin Manifesto,” The Hindu, December 20, 1916, reproduced as app. 1 in Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict. 30. See chap. 8, “Conclusion: Social Governance as Divide and Rule? The Complicated Politics of Welfare.” As Irschick tells us, as early as 1917 the Justicites’ political proposals for unified non-Brahmin mobilization were flatly rejected by at least one major Dalit political outfit, the Pariah Mahajana Sabha (founded by one of the nominated council members I mentioned above in chap. 9, Rettamalai Srinivasan) on the grounds that while Home Rule might bring a Brahmin Raj, a caste Hindu Raj would also mean ruin for the Dalits (see Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict, 71–72). There are differences, however, over how the nonBrahminism of the 1910s and 1920s in Madras should be evaluated with respect to its inclusiveness and anticasteism. Skeptical voices such as Irschick point out that the elite social groups from which non-Brahminism arose were no better suited than their Brahmin rivals to bringing about any real democratization of politics. See also Washbrook, Emergence of Provincial Politics; and Christopher J. Baker and David Washbrook, eds., South India: Political Institutions and Political Change, 1880–1940 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1975). More recent accounts are far more sympathetic, often acknowledging the elitism of early non-Brahminism but nevertheless locating therein a progressive core of ideas and individuals, who are placed at the start of a narrative of the increasing democratization of the non-Brahmin movement. This telos, and the simultaneous assimilation of Dalit anticaste sentiment to elite non-Brahminism, is nicely expressed in the very title of V. Geetha and S. V. Rajadurai’s Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Kolkata, India: Samya, 1998), in which Iyothee Thass refers to a Dalit leader who preceded non-Brahminism and never used the term, and who was, moreover, closely connected with other Dalit leaders such as Rettamalai Srinivasan, who explicitly rejected early non-Brahminism. This is not to deny that there could have been some early non-Brahminists with genuine commitments to the cause of ameliorating caste inequities, as nonBrahminism’s ideologues will insist, but this does not differentiate them from any other elite political actors at the time. I address some of these issues in “Labour: Episodes in the Administrative-Political Career of a Concept, Madras, 1918–24,” International Review of Social History (forthcoming).

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31. See, for instance, Marguerite Ross Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); and David Washbrook, “Caste, Class and Dominance in Modern Tamil Nadu: NonBrahminism, Dravidianism and Cultural Nationalism,” in Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, ed. Francine R. Frankel and M. S. A. Rao (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1: 204–64. 32. See chap. 9, Conclusion. 33. For instance, the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act (2003), the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Forcible Conversion Ordinance (2002), the proposed Rajasthan Freedom of Religion Bill (2006); the Orissa Freedom of Religion Act (1967; revamped in 2006); the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act (1968); the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act (1978); and the Chhattisgarh Freedom of Religion Act (1968). For criticism, see South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre, “Anti-Conversion Laws: Challenges to Secularism and Fundamental Human Rights,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 2 (2008): 63–73. 34. Tamil Nadu Gazette Extraordinary, no. 659 (Chennai: Government of Tamil Nadu, 2002). 35. “Explanatory Statement,” by A.  N. Krishnankutty Nair, Secretary to Government, Law Department, in Tamil Nadu Gazette Extraordinary, no. 659, 3. The questions raised by the inclusion of women and minors in this ordinance are equally compelling and have not, to my knowledge, been specifically addressed by scholars. 36. An excellent example of this kind of writing is the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre’s “Anti-Conversion Laws.” For review and analysis of arguments concerning conversion in postcolonial India, see Sebastian C. H. Kim, In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Nathaniel Roberts adduces evidence to argue that India’s anticonversion laws are not adequately accounted for in the existing literature, which, focusing on the Hindu majoritarian politics they overtly serve, conceives of these laws as abrogating secular principles. Against this, Roberts demonstrates that these laws in fact rest on arguments that are fundamentally secular in character; see his “Ethnographic Knowledge and the Government of Religion” (paper presented at the University of Virginia, March 20, 2009). 37. Of course, ideas of inwardness and authenticity with respect to conversion have an even longer history in Protestant and secular European thought; see, for instance, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). My own interest here is in how and when, and with respect to whom, authenticity is demanded in the Indian context, as I discuss in further detail in Rupa Viswanath, “The Emergence of Authenticity and the Giving of Accounts: Conversion as Movement of 336  N O T E S

the Soul in South India, c. 1900,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 55, no. 1 (2013): 120–41. 38. Students of informal logic will recognize this as the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. 39. See, e.g., chap. 6, “Authentic Conversion, ‘Hindu Society,’ and ‘Ancient Religion.’” 40. Important touchstones in this now vast terrain include the essays collected in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron, eds., Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (London: Sage, 1995); Robert E. Frykenberg, “Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 523– 50; Kenneth Jones, “Religious Identity and the Indian Census” in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. N. Gerald Barrier (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), 73–101; as well as the following monographs: Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Kenneth Jones, Socio-religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 41. Disagreement appears only over the extent and political importance of communal self-identification prior to the foundation of the colonial regime. Scholars of precolonial India have unearthed important evidence that persuasively undermines proponents of a thesis of radical disjuncture, showing the firm place of communitarian ideologies in precolonial polities. See, for instance, David Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (1999): 630–57; Sheldon Pollock, “Ramayana and the Political Imagination in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (1993): 261–97; Will Sweetman, “Unity and Plurality: Hinduism and the Religions of India in Early European Scholarship,” Religion 31, no. 3 (2001): 209–24; Cynthia Talbot, “Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 4 (1995): 692–722; Phillip Wagoner, “‘Sultan Among Hindu Kings’: Dress, Titles, and the N O T E S   337

Islamicisation of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (1996): 851–80. 42. See Mark Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement Against Untouchability in 20th Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); John C. B. Webster, The Dalit Christians: A History (Delhi: ISPCK, 1992); Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Punjab (New Delhi: Manohar, 1976). Śuddhi refers literally to a purification ceremony, but it functioned (in both concept and practice) as a conversion ceremony in which Muslims, Christians, and (later) Dalits were incorporated into Hinduism. 43. The phrase is Webster’s (Dalit Christians). A strong version of this thesis, in which new enumerative technologies of the colonial state virtually produced demographic majoritarianism single-handedly, is expressed by Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol Appadurai Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 314– 39. For a more skeptical look at the role of modern enumerative technologies in the production of contemporary identities, see Sumit Guha, “The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India, c. 1600–1990,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 1 (2003): 148–67. Jones notes that Arya Samajists were unwilling to perform śuddhi ceremonies on those castes deemed “untouchable” until around 1900 (Arya Dharm, 207, 310), and that it was far from uncontroversial even then. The first case of converting “untouchables” was in 1896 (Jones, Arya Dharm, 203). “Purifying” untouchables remained controversial even as late as 1912 (Jones, Arya Dharm, 213–14, 309–10). 44. It was not Hindus but British census officers who first began to classify Dalits as Hindus. In the first all-India census in 1871, major Dalit communities were not classified as Hindu, and this provoked no reaction or protest from Hindus. In 1881, 1891, and 1901, census officials deemed Dalits should be classified as Hindus but had persistent problems implementing this protocol, because caste Hindu census-takers frequently refused to count them as such; see Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27–28. It was in response to these difficulties that Census Commissioner E. A. Gait proposed to begin classifying Dalits separately in the 1911 census; Gait’s proposal was not, as is often alleged, initially conceived as a bid to undermine Hinduism (pace Datta, Carving Blocs; see note 21). But by the early twentieth century, Hindu leaders, having become acutely conscious of the need to preserve the majority position of their “community” status, began adamantly to insist that Dalits were in fact Hindus after all. An overview of Dalits’ original position as outsiders to, and later within, Hinduism, can be found in Rupa Viswanath, “Dalit/Ex-Untouchable” in Brill Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. Knut 338  N O T E S

Jakobsen (Leiden: E.  J. Brill, 2012), 4: 779–87. For an account of how Dalits’ status as outsiders to Hinduism was recognized in canonical bhakti texts in medieval south India, see Sascha Ebeling, “Another Tomorrow for Nantaṉār: The Continuation and Re-invention of a Medieval South-Indian Untouchable Saint,” in Geschichten und Geschichte: Historiographie und Hagiographie in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Peter Schalk, Max Deeg, Oliver Frieberger, and Christoph Kleine (Uppsala: University of Uppsala Press, 2010), 433–516; for a present-day rejection of the idea that all folk traditions in India should be called “Hindu,” see Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu (Kolkata, India: Samya, 2001). 45. Even today, as the anthropologist Mary Searle-Chatterjee has observed, uses of the term “Hindu” differ by social class and status; for Dalits in the regions of north India that Searle-Chatterjee studied, it seems to come naturally to refer only to caste people (rather than to themselves) as Hindus. This was the case not only, as one might expect, among politicized advocates of an autonomous Dalit politics, but also among even those apparently untouched by mobilization: see Mary Searle-Chatterjee, “Urban ‘Untouchables’ and Hindu Nationalism,” Immigrants and Minorities 13, no. 1 (1994): 12–25; and “Attributing and Rejecting the Label ‘Hindu’ in North India,” in Religion, Language and Power, ed. Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee (London: Routledge, 2008), 186–201. It has recently been argued by Simon Charsley, in “‘Untouchable’: What Is in a Name?” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 1 (1996): 1–23, that the notion of a bipartite social division between Dalits and caste Hindus is itself a product of modernity. There is too much countervailing evidence (both of the kind Searle-Chatterjee invokes, as well as historical evidence that I describe throughout this book) to sustain this claim, although it may well be the case that the specific term “caste Hindu” was newly coined in the twentieth century. Moreover, one could use the very newness of that coinage as counterevidence against Charsley’s overall argument. For one could argue that it only became necessary to specify what kind of Hindu one was talking about in the twentieth century because prior to that time “Hindu” self-evidently meant caste Hindu, just as Tamilan/Tamilian, meant caste Tamil. Hence, Charsley would need to show that Hindu included Dalits prior to the twentieth century for his argument to be persuasive. 46. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). 47. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. chaps. 6 and 7. 48. Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 49. Mantena, Alibis of Empire. N O T E S   339

50. For a comprehensive and insightful account of these schemes, see Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 51. On caste discrimination within Indian Christianity, in addition to what I have described above in chap. 2, there is a large historical and anthropological literature on the topic. See esp., Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society; Gunnel Cederlof, Bonds Lost: Subordination, Conflict and Mobilisation in Rural South India, c. 1900–1970 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997); D. Dennis Hudson, “Christians and the Question of Caste: The Veḷḷāḷa Protestants of Pāḷayaṅkōṭṭai,” in Images of Man: Religion and Historical Process in South Asia, ed. Fred W. Clothey (Madras: New Era, 1982), 244–58; Māṟku, Kiristavattin Tīṅṭāmai [Untouchability in Christianity] (Madurai: Camutāya Cintanai Ceyal āyvu Maiyam, 1994); David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley: University of California, 2012); George Oommen and John C. B. Webster, Local Dalit Christian History (Delhi: ISPCK, 2002). For practices of caste among Indian Muslims, see Imtiaz Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification Among Muslims in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978); Gerald Berreman, “Social Categories and Social Interaction in Urban India,” American Anthropologist 74, no. 3 (1972): 567–86; Yoginder Sikand, Islam, Caste and Dalit-Muslim Relations in India (New Delhi: Global Media, 2004). 52. In practice, compensatory discrimination schemes reach but a tiny minority of Dalits. It is perhaps an indication of how little reservations affect the majority of the Dalit population that so many do indeed convert. On the extremely limited extent of compensatory schemes in practice, see Mendelsohn and Vicziany, The Untouchables, 125–26. 53. As with reservations, the theoretical protections this law provides have thus far been applied only to a very limited extent in practice; on the widespread nonenforcement of the Atrocities Act, see Smita Narula, Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables” (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); on the failure to fill higher-level reserved positions in government employment, see the National Commission for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes for 1994–95 and 1995–96, which shows that Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are represented more or less in accordance with the stipulated percentages, which are meant to reflect their representation in the population as a whole, and hence are 15 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, in the two lower rungs of the public services, namely C- and D-level positions, but far less than their quota in A and B positions, some fifty years after these policies were first put in place. See www.ncsc.nic.in/pages/view/196/195–1994–95-and-1995– 96-vol-1, p. 148 (accessed May 20, 2013). 340  N O T E S

54. See, for instance, Laura Dudley Jenkins, Identity and Identification in India: Defining the Disadvantaged (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003). The Ranganath Mishra Report, a voluminous official commission of inquiry published in 2007, came to the conclusion that there was no rationale for excluding Christian and Muslim Dalits from the category Scheduled Caste, but the report’s recommendations have not yet been put into effect. (See http://www.minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/upload_files/moma/files/pdfs/volume-1.pdf and http:// www.minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/upload_files/moma/files/pdfs/volume-2. pdf, esp. vol. 1, esp. chaps. 8, 9 and 10). The report, of course, does not attempt to explain why this exclusion occurred in the first instance. I discuss features of the report and describe its political salience in Rupa Viswanath, “Is Religion to Difference as Caste Is to Inequality? The Ranganath Mishra Commission Report of 2007” (inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Göttingen, May 2, 2011). 55. Galanter, Competing Equalities, 305; emphasis mine. Galanter is citing Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, para. 3. Reservations have also been extended to Sikh and Buddhist Dalits. These faiths have been coded in Hindu nationalist discourse as “branches” of Hinduism, unlike Christianity or Islam, which continue to be portrayed as “foreign.” 56. Marc Galanter discusses this aspect of Indian law in “Hinduism, Secularism, and the Indian Judiciary,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 227–314. See also Rupa Viswanath, “A Textbook Case of Exclusion,” Indian Express, July 20, 2012; available online at www.indianexpress.com/news/a-textbook-case-of-exclusion/973711/0 (accessed July 20, 2012). 57. The first quote is from Young India, January 6, 1927, 2, and the second from “Speech at Public Meeting, Bhuj, October 22, 1925,” in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), 33: 148–49. 58. See Eleanor Zelliot, “Gandhi and Ambedkar: A Study in Leadership,” in From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (Delhi: Manohar, 1996), 150–83; and Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (London: Hurst, 2005), esp. chap. 4. 59. Had this transformation been initiated by Dalits themselves it would have been a textbook case of what M.  N. Srinivas dubbed “Sanskritization,” that is, a process where groups deemed “low” by the dominant society attempt to raise their status by adopting the habits of Brahminical Hinduism. See M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society Amongst the Coorgs of South India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952). But because it was Gandhi who was attempting to persuade Dalits to take up these practices, a more accurate term for Gandhian social reform would be Hindu evangelism. The idea that giving up ritually polluting practices would N O T E S   341

be sufficient to transforming Dalits’ status without structural transformation or political empowerment is rooted in a conception of caste that sees it as essentially a ritual system in which political-economic realities are merely epiphenomenal. Such a conception continues to inform anthropological writings on caste throughout the twentieth century, with Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus representing the apogee of this conceptual development. See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). A brief but suggestive overview of this tendency in anthropological theory is given in Nathaniel Roberts, “Caste, Anthropology of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. William S. Darity (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008), 461–63. 60. Periyar Ee. Ve. Ra. Cintanaikal [Thoughts of Periyar E.V.R.], vol. 14, ed. V. Anaimuthu, 1813; translation mine. 61. It was Periyar who transformed the political non-Brahminism of the elite Justice Party into a mass movement that has ensured the hegemony of non-Brahminism in south India ever since. The movement, founded in the mid-1920s, was called the Self-Respect Movement. See Geetha and Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium, esp. chaps. 6–8. When political parties claiming to be Periyar’s legatees attained power in the 1960s, they too confined themselves to symbolic attacks on caste and to paternalistic social schemes, while eschewing structural changes that would benefit Dalits; cf. Narendra Subramaniam, Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), John Harriss, “Whatever Happened to Cultural Nationalism in Tamil Nadu? A Reading of Current Events and the Recent Literature on Tamil Politics,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 40, 3 (2002): 97–117; Washbrook, “Caste, Class and Dominance”; Joop de Wit, Poverty, Policy and Politics in Madras Slums: Dynamics of Survival, Gender and Leadership (London: Sage, 1996), chap. 2. These parties have also consistently failed to enforce anti-untouchability laws or in any other way to act proactively to guarantee the legal rights of the Dalit minority— as in every other state in India. See S. Viswanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land (Chennai: Navayana, 2005); Narula, Broken People; Hugo Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratisation in Tamil Nadu (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2005); Nathaniel Roberts, “Language, Violence, and the State: Writing Tamil Dalits,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], January 31, 2010; available at http://samaj.revues.org/2952 (accessed February 14, 2010); Mendelsohn and Vicziany, The Untouchables. 62. Babasaheb Ambedkar (Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches [Maharashtra: Department of Education, 1982], 2: 445–46) cited in S. K. Thorat and Narender Kumar, B. R. Ambedkar: Perspectives on Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 134; emphasis mine. 342  N O T E S

63. Indeed, not just with respect to caste reform, acting within society is deemed both the most authentic expression of aspirational projects in India and the only effective means of achieving desired change—in contrast to the allegedly inauthentic and ineffective realm of the state and law. 64. Babasaheb Ambedkar (“Need for Political Power for Depressed Classes,” Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches [Maharashtra: Department of Education, 1982], 2: 503–9), cited in Thorat and Kumar, B. R. Ambedkar, 134. 65. B.  R. Ambedkar (“A Scheme of Political Safeguards for the Protection of Depressed Classes,” December 31, 1930), cited in Thorat and Kumar, B.  R. Ambedkar, 144. 66. Anupama Rao’s The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) astutely analyzes critical junctures in Dalit politics in the decades succeeding the time when my narrative ends, focusing especially on the early history of the Ambedkarite movement in Maharashtra. 67. Madras Legislative Council Proceedings (MLCP), 20th November 1919, pp. 152–53. 68. See, for instance, Niraja Gopal Jayal, “The Limits of Representative Democracy,” South Asia 32, no. 3 (2009): 326–37; Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “The Quicksand of Caste,” Indian Express, August 28, 2012 (available at www .indianexpress.com/news/the-quicksand-of-caste/994050 [accessed August 28, 2012]); and his “Breaking the Silence: Why We Don’t Talk About Inequality—and How to Start Again,” Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture (October 2012). See also Hugo Gorringe’s analysis of accusations of “selling out” leveled against the Tamil Dalit Panthers when they entered formal politics: Hugo Gorringe, “Taming the Dalit Panthers,” Journal of South Asian Development 2, no. 1 (2007): 51–73. 69. Prominent among these demands are that the perpetrators of hate crimes against them be prosecuted as mandated by law under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989 and that reservations be implemented in full. Such statements can be found, for instance, with reference to present-day Tamil south India, in the speeches and writings of Thol. Thirumaavaḷavan, the leader of the largest Dalit party in Tamil Nadu today, the VCK, and of Ravikumar, an influential intellectual and spokesperson for the party. For a detailed exposition of their platforms, see Roberts, “Language, Violence, and the State.” Two collections of Thirumaavaḷavan’s writing have been translated into English: Talisman: Extreme Emotions of Dalit Liberation, trans. Meena Kandasamy (Kolkata, India: Samya, 2003), and Uproot Hindutva: The Fiery Voice of the Liberation Panthers, trans. Meena Kandasamy (Kolkata, India: Samya, 2004). One collection of Ravikumar’s writings has appeared in translation: Venomous Touch: Notes on Caste, Culture and Politics, trans. R. Azhagarasan (Kolkata: Samya, 2009). N O T E S   343

70. Thol. Thirumaavaḷavan, Atanka Maru [Refuse to Submit] (Chennai: Thaaimann Pathippagam, 2004), 17–18; translation mine. 71. See National Commission for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Annual Report for 1994–95 and 1995–96, www.ncsc.nic.in/pages/view/196/195– 1994–95-and-1995–96-vol-1, p. 148 (accessed October 15, 2013). 72. Ravikumar, Tayman (Motherland), July 2001, 24–26.

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A RC H I VA L S O U RC E S

Tamil Nadu State Archives Unpublished Sources (1) Proceedings of the Board of Revenue of Madras, 1871–1926 (2) Orders of the Government of Madras for the following departments and years: Education, 1880–1911 Judicial, 1882–1908 Law (General), 1921–1926 Public, 1908, 1911 Public Works and Labour, 1926 Revenue, 1875–1926

Published Government Sources (without specific authors) Madras Native Newspaper Reports, 1882–1926 Reports on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency, 1890–1926 Royal Commission on Labour in India, Evidence: Madras, vol. 7, 1931.

Standing Orders of the Board of Revenue (Land Revenue, Settlement and Miscellaneous), 1900.

Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi Periodical Literature Hindustan Review, 1910–1921 Indian Social Reformer, 1890s Indian Review, 1910–1920

Roja Muttiah Research Library, Chennai Periodical Literature Oru Paica Tamiḻaṉ, c. 1908–1911

National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Letters between Missionaries in Madras and the United Free Church of Scotland Mission, 1885–1925: MSS 7846, 7847, 7848, 7849

Archives of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Rhodes House, Oxford Letters between Missionaries in Madras and the SPG, 1885–1915: Files D132a, CLR 54, CLR 55, CLR 56, CLR 57, CLS 38, CLS 39, CLS 40 USPG Annual Reports, 1885–1915

Wesleyan Methodist Mission Archives, SOAS, London (1) Correspondence between Missionaries in Madras and the WMM, 1882–1918 (2) Periodicals Work and Workers in the Mission Field, 1890–1910 346  A R C H I V A L S O U R C E S

Reformed Church of America Archives, New Brunswick, NJ Letters between members of the American Arcot Mission and the RCA, 1862– 1920

India Office Library, London Proceedings of the Revenue Department of the Government of Madras, 1885– 1925 Proceedings of the Board of Revenue of Madras, 1875–1926 Proceedings of the Legislative Council of Fort St. George, 1890–1925 Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services, Evidence: Madras, vol. 36, 1924. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 1891 Periodicals: The Hindu Madras Mail Swadharma, 1921–1923 Valikattuvon (The Leader)

United Theological College Ecclesiastical Archives, Bangalore Unpublished Sources: Boxes of Free Church of Scotland Letterbooks, Pamphlets, and Other Miscellanea, marked FCOS 1–20. Boxes of Leipzig Evangelical Lutheran Mission Correspondence, marked LELM 1–20. Periodicals: Annual Reports of the American Arcot Mission, 1862–1925 The East and the West, 1903–1905 Free Church of Scotland Annual Reports Harvest Field, 1861–1925 Indian Church Quarterly Review, 1893–1896 Indian Evangelical Review, 1880–1890 Madras Diocesan Record, 1893–1896 Reports of All-India Conference of Indian Christians, 1914–1925 Social Reform Advocate, 1914–1916

A R C H I V A L S O U R C E S   347

Conference Proceedings: Proceedings of the South Indian Missionary Conference, 1858 Report of the First Decennial Missionary Conference, Allahabad, 1872 The Missionary Conference: South India and Ceylon, Bangalore, 1879 Report of the Second Decennial Missionary Conference, Calcutta, 1882 Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference, vols. I & II, Bombay, 1892– 1893 Report of the South Indian Missionary Conference, Madras, 1900 Other: Collections of Tamil Tracts

Christian Literature Society Archives, Madras Periodicals: Cattiyatūtan, 1887–1899 Tēcōpakāri, 1879–1886, 1894–1895 Vētiyar Viḷakku, 1917–1919 Other: Bound volume of Tamil Handbills

348  A R C H I V A L S O U R C E S

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INDEX

abolition, of slavery: in British Empire, 23, 182; efforts to prevent, 241, 243; India’s exemption from, 4–5; legislation, 4–6, 291n103; perceived colonial, 245, 334n21 absentee landlords, 37, 278n54 abstraction, of rights, 234, 235, 236 Achariyar, T. Ranga, 196–97, 202–4, 206–8 Achary, K. S. Srinivasa, 171–72, 194, 209; cēris report of, 184, 317n55; Kistna report of, 183; Tanjore report by, 183–89, 203, 317n55 activism, Depressed Classes, 31, 172, 275n31, 315n8; Christian Pariah, 171, 315n4; law enforcement issue, 229; petitions and cases archives on, 226–32 activists, Dalit: Desayi Chetti fines, 31, 275n31; educational activism, 110, 301n62; enforcement concern of, 257, 343n69; most prominent of 1919, 217–18; public purpose focus

of, 137; representation, 7, 19, 238. See also specific activists Adi-Dravidas, 216; bus access denied, 227–31; Desayi Chettis and, 275n31; letter requesting festival street access, 236; name, 328n34; treatment in jails, 231–32; as untouchables, 275n31; use of term, 22; violence against, 231 adscripti glebae, 23–24, 268n2 agrarian mise-en scène, precolonial, 23–25, 268n4, 270n7 agrarian slaves: colonial state and, 3–6; Dalits as descendants of, 8 agrestic servitude. See servitude agricultural labor, 3–4, 261n7; caste-state nexus and, 13–15, 17, 265n14, 265n31, 265n33; missionary archives and, 12; 1970s ethnographic research on, 243; wages, 175, 179–81, 317n41. See also labor relations; servitude

agricultural settlements. See settlements, Panchama agricultural agriculture: Andrew’s innovations in, 121, 303n9, 303n11; loans, 159, 309n71, 313n47; mirasidars as despising, 213–14 Aiyar, Gopala, 124, 303n17; settlement proposal, 124–32, 304n18 alienation, land, 159, 278n51 “All Paths Are Not One” (Ellām Oṉṟalla), 41, 280n5 Althusser, Louis, 15, 266n35 Ambedkar, B. R., 20, 246, 256, 258, 301n62, 334n23, 343n66 American Arcot Mission, 51, 55, 67, 75, 120, 288n69, 303n8 American South, slavery in, 332n8 ancien régime, 236–37 ancient religion, 164 Andrew, Adam (“Pariah Andrew”), 74, 82, 83, 264n26, 292n7, 311n32, 316n24; agricultural innovations of, 121, 303n9, 303n11; civic representation of, 86, 295n38; as dissenter and exception among collectors, 94–95; “kind of hold” view, 122, 159, 196; Melrosapuram settlement founded by, 120–22, 154, 303n8; Mullaly and, 298n23; Pariahness, servitude and laborer understood by, 95, 175–76, 316n22; Pariah Problem raised by, 87; “Pariah” used by, 95; reports on Panchamas, 93, 175–79, 316n28; as respected figure, 176; response to The Hindu editorial, 164–65; slavery description in report of, 177 anticonversion legislation, 162, 248– 49, 314n58, 336n33, 336nn35–36 anti-slavery movement, 23 anti-untouchability legislation, 253, 256, 340n53, 342n61 Appadurai, Arjun, 338n43 archives: Dalit petitions in, 226–32; discrepancy in, 105. See also missionary archives

Arya Samajists, 251, 338n43 Association of Landholders of Mayavaram Division, 191 Atkinson, J. N., 112–15, 145, 157, 175 authenticity: discourse on conversion, 18, 161–67, 248–50, 336n37; search for Pariah, 10 Avarna, 268n48 Ayyar, C. P. Ramaswami, 224, 228 Ayyar, Krishna, 198–201, 208, 215, 333n18 Ayyar, Krishnaswami, 178–80, 186, 317n35 Balagopal, K., 333n15 baptism, 82, 84, 85, 295n33 Baramahal (Salem District), 34 beatings, 30, 274n24 Bidwai, Praful, 239 black word, 99 Board of Revenue, Madras, 38, 93, 96, 279n56, 297n8; Aiyar proposal debate and decisions of, 124–32, 304n18; cēri missionary schools and, 129; on Mannur settlement proposals, 132–39, 153, 158; “Miscellaneous Series” papers of, 119, 302n2; mission archives and, 116–17; response to Tremenheere’s report, 103–4, 108–9; Revenue Department contrasted with, 105–7, 299n49; Sharrock settlement request response of, 153–54, 158–59 bought-in lands, 104, 111; state embracing of Pariah Problem regarding, 310n8 Brahmins, 47, 271n12; mirasidar, 27; missionary preference for converting elites and, 68, 291n99; non-Brahminism, 246–48, 335n30, 342n61; Non-Brahmin Manifesto, 247, 323n49; settlement opposition and, 153, 311n27; untouchability observed by, 273n19 Britain, social ideology in, 152

378  I N D E X

British Empire: agrarian slavery perceptions, 3; Madras Presidency establishment, 3; missionary relations with, 264n24, 264n26; slavery abolition in, 23, 182; slave trade, 4 British Small Holdings Act, 173 Bugge, Henriette, 60, 333n13 Burditt, J. F., 70 Burgess, William, 55 bus incident, 227–31 Campbell, W. H., 74 Cardew, A. G., 178, 197–98, 201, 203–6, 319n70 caste: census on, 9, 262n16, 338n44; Christianity historians on, 266n36; class and, 188; class order transformation of, 52–57, 285n52, 286nn55–56; colonial sociology of, 271n12; conversion and, 41, 49–50, 279n4, 279n6; dress and other marks of, 75, 76, 77–78, 293n13, 293n15; Hinduism and, 53–55, 254; historiography, 8–9; laborer categories and, 28, 273nn18–19; mass conversions problem of, 58, 287n67; mirasidar, 15, 27, 271n12, 272nn13–14; non-Brahminism and, 248; opposition to, 16, 49–50, 266nn36–38; Protestant missionary views of, 43, 45–55, 282n21, 284n38; religion and, 16, 45–52, 143, 266n38, 267n39, 307n55; religious and civil markers of, 45–52, 116; as religious matter, 16, 143, 266n38, 267n39, 307n55; religious rights as specific to, 234; ritual system perception of, 341n59; Scheduled Castes, 253–55, 268n47, 307n52, 341n54, 343n69; settlements as threat to privileges of, 161–62; spiritualization, 7; systematization of, 8, 262n16; tamiḻaṉ references, 31, 275n32; titles, 47–51, 54; wealth and, 212.

See also names, subpopulation; specific castes caste Christians, 47–51 caste discrimination, within Indian Christianity, 340n51 caste Hindus, 339n45; distance from Panchamas as religious right of, 143 caste schools, 67, 129, 290nn93–94, 305n35 caste-state nexus, 82, 108, 116; agricultural labor, state records and, 13–15, 17, 265n14, 265n31, 265n33; citizens’ rights opposition and, 229; Dalit self-representation as threat to, 246–48; definition of, 14; landlords and, 13–15; Pariahs under, 38–39; Tanjore plan bringing attention to, 207 Caste Suppression Society, 46 caste Tamils (tamiḻaṉ), 31, 36, 275n32, 339n45 caste villagers: Pariah shared Hindu identity with, 135, 141, 309n69; settlement opposition of, 161–67. See also raiyats, settlement opposition of Catholic missions, 59–60, 283n34 Cattiyatūtaṉ (Messenger of Truth), 53 Cederlof, Gunnel, 264n28 census, 9, 262n16, 338n44 cēris (segregated ghettoes), 11, 31, 131; Achary’s report on, 184, 317n55; colonial state disagreement and lack of knowledge about, 92–94; missionary schools in, 129; segregation of ūr and, 62, 75, 90; Sothuperumbadu proposal, 139–41, 308n64, 309n67; state officials first entry into, 91, 297n1; titles to, 96. See also settlements, Panchama agricultural; state-cēri relations Chamberlain, Jacob, 67, 68 Chamberlain, W. I., 50–51 Chandala, 268n48

I N D E X   379

chapel-temple conflict, 124–33, 304n18 charity, dangers and rewards of, 57–60, 288n73 Charsley, Simon, 20, 21, 268n47 Chatterjee, Indrani, 5, 242, 262n10, 264n28 Chatterjee, Partha, 252 Chettiars, 324n72 Chettiyar, M. C. Muttaya, 222 child laborers, 30, 274nn26–27 Chingleput District: collectors of, 2, 4–5; sub-collectors of, 13; Tremenheere’s report on, 100–103, 107–11, 123, 299n33, 299n39, 300n57 Christianity: caste Christians, 47–51; Christ as missionary example, 63; doctrinal matters as factor in conversion to, 88–89, 296n46; Hindu Christians, 50, 284n38, 284n42; Madras Hindus’ view of, 41, 279n4; slavery and, 65. See also conversion, to Christianity; Indian Christianity Christian Pariahs, 48–49, 51, 160, 284n41, 313n52; activism of, 171, 315n4; Burgess view on failing of, 55; credit for improved social condition of, 57; divide between Hindu and, 135, 307n52; land titles assigned directly to, 314n54; martyrdom perception of, 120, 302n5; settlement proposals for, 132–39 Christian Vettiyan, 82, 295n28 citizens’ rights: caste-state nexus in opposition to equality of, 229; Dalit representation and, 217–18, 334n20; Depressed Class petitions for, 226–32; enforcement issue, 256–58, 343n63, 343n66, 343n69; historiography on forms and tensions of, 237; religious rights contra, 218–26; religious sentiments and, 221; women’s space and, 327n20. See also religious rights; rights of access; the social

civic representation, Protestant missionary, 86, 295n38 civil components, caste religious and, 45–52, 116 civilizing mission, 42–43, 280n14 class order: aiding Pariahs while preserving, 65, 289n90; caste system transformation to, 52–57, 285n52, 286nn55–56; missionary problematic of caste and, 188; welfare projects and, 188, 319n70 Clayton, Albert C., 66, 67 Cobban, Mackenzie, 42 Collector of Chingleput, 2, 4–5 Collector of Tanjore, 272n15 collectors: Chingleput District sub-, 13; inquiry methods of, 94; laborer perceptions and reports by, 92–94; land redistribution and, 111–15. See also specific collectors colonial state, 7; abolition of slavery perception in, 245, 334n21; agrarian slaves and, 3–6; agricultural labor and, 4; caste sociology of, 271n12; caste systematization by, 8, 262n16; defacto coordination between mirasidars and, 38; Depressed Classes amelioration reasons of, 215–16; disagreement and lack of knowledge of cēris, 92–94; ethnographic, 193, 320n10; famine response of, 86, 295n39; gentle slavery trope and, 3–6, 93, 103, 241–46; government order creation and enforcement issue, 108, 300n55; Hindu classification by, 338n44; house-site examinations ordered by, 174–82, 316n24; landlordism, 319n70; Madras Presidency directives from, 1888, 91–92, 297n2; majoritarianism as produced by, 338n43; mirasi rights issue for, 32–38, 277n43; mirasi rights protected by, 99, 100, 103, 299n41; missionary archives confuting view of, 11; Panchama

380  I N D E X

views change, 147, 310n8; “Pariah” as not used by, 95; Pariah Problem and bought-in lands embraced by, 310n8; private property existence denied by, 33, 276n39; property co-ownership with mirasidars, 206–8, 322n48; religious identity focus of historians on, 264n30; settlement rules and template for state-mission agenda, 158–61, 313n47; state and public purpose in, 147, 148, 310n7; state-mission agenda and authority sharing, 154–59; tensions between missionaries and, 86, 295n37; two faces description of, 192–93, 320n7; untouchability protected by, 142–43, 309n71; wage inquiry by, 179–81, 317n41. See also caste-state nexus; government; policy, colonial state; state-cēri relations Comaroff, Jean, 286n59 Comaroff, John L., 286n59 communal lands (puramboke), 37–38, 102, 279n55; Depressed Classes activism against denied access to, 219–20; discrepancy over mirasi rights to, 106–7; in Mannur settlement decisions, 132–39, 158; public purpose discourse, 136–39, 308nn56–57; raiyats and, 300n55 congestion, house-site, 188, 194, 320n11 Conklin (reverend), 94, 297n13 contentment, discourse of: American South slavery ideology of, 332n8; conversion authenticity narratives tied to, 249–50; divide-andrule theory, 246–48; external influences and, 242–46, 333n18; gentle slavery and, 241–44; labor relations and, 241–46, 333n18; Panchama, 208 conversion, to Christianity: anticonversion laws, 162, 248–49, 314n58, 336n33, 336nn35–36; authenticity

discourse, 18, 161–67, 248–50, 336n37; baptism and laborer persecution factors in, 82, 84, 85, 295n33; caste practices and, 41, 49–50, 279n4, 279n6; Catholic defections and, 283n34; contentment discourse tied to narratives of, 249–50; conversion term qualification, 72, 85; Dalit, 10, 12, 15–16, 263n23, 296n46; doctrine factor in, 88–89, 296n46; “heathenism” reversion and, 283n34; in historiographic imagination, 88–90, 296n42, 296nn45–46; as induced, 59–60, 163, 166, 291n100; labor relations and consequences of, 73–79; martyrdom perception of, 120, 302n5; missionary motives, 68–70, 291n100; missionary preference for Brahmin, 68, 291n99; missionary schools and, 129, 305n35; motives of converted, 62–66, 85, 88, 289n81, 289n83, 289n85, 289n89, 295n36, 296nn45–46; numbers, 43, 74, 293n8; overview of issues in, 71–73, 292n1; Raghavaiyangar’s remark on Hinduism and, 155, 312n35; religion delimitation and, 58–59; as reservations restriction, 254; top-down model of, 41, 68, 279n2, 291n99. See also evangelization, of Pariahs; mass conversions; Pariah-missionary alliance coolies, 206 Cooling, James, 54 cooperative credit societies, 177 corner system, 49 courts: denied access to, 224–25; District Munsiff Court in Tanjore, 198–201, 204, 333n18 cowle, progressive, 121, 154, 303n12 Crole, C. S., 4–5 crops, profitable, 24 cultivators, direct or “real,” 27, 34, 272n15

I N D E X   381

customary rights, 235 cuvantai (loan), 185, 210 cyclone-relief work, 186–87 Dalits: Adi-Dravidas name used by, 328n34; caste historiography and, 8–9; conversion motives portrayed by leaders, 296n46; conversion of, 10, 12, 15–16, 263n23, 296n46; as descendants of agrarian slaves, 8; Hinduism interaction of, 141, 309n69; as Hindus, 250–51, 255, 337n41, 338nn44–45; innocence and passivity attribution to, 249; missionary involvement in lives of, 11; naming issues and criteria, 20–23, 268nn47–48; new writings on political and intellectual, 9, 263n22; political modernity of, 8–9; representation, 7, 19, 201, 217–19, 246, 256–58, 321n31, 324n72, 334n20; revolution, 2; ritual functions of, 8, 263n19; seek salvation advice to, 226; self-representation, 246–48, 256; Singh on condition of, 2. See also activists, Dalit; conversion, to Christianity; Depressed Classes; Pariahs darkhast rules (right of application), 36–37, 100–102, 278n49; exceptions ruling, 148–53; petition to revise, 144–48; settlement opposition invoking, 124, 126, 133, 304n18, 307n51 debt-bonds, 29–30, 122, 180, 274nn22–23 Delhi School, of thought, 334n22 Depressed Classes: activism, 31, 171, 172, 226–32, 275n31, 315n8; Ayyar’s directive to inquire into all members of, 179–80, 317n35; colonial state reasons for amelioration of, 215–16; designation, 22; government department of, 326n16;

land grants to, 160–61, 314n56; Legislative Council representation of, 217–18; petition archives, 226–32; social promise to, 237–39; use of term, 314n55 Depressed Classes Conference, 171, 315n4 Depressed Classes Elevation Society, 171, 172, 315n4, 315n8 Depressed Classes Mission Society, 321n34 Desayi Chetti, 31, 275n31 direct cultivators, 27, 34, 272n15 direct land assignments, 307n51 distance pollution, 116, 219, 235 District Munsiff Court, in Tanjore, 198–201, 204, 333n18 dittam system, 35 divide-and-rule theory, 215–16, 246–48, 334n22 dog-in-the-manger plagiarism, 35, 277n47 domestic space, of women, 327n20 double-entry system, 97–98, 296n41, 298n23 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, 248 dress, as caste marker, 75, 76, 77–78, 293n13, 293n15 drinking classes, 173–74 Dumont, Louis, 271n12 Dushkin, Lelah, 268n47 dyarchy, 19, 217, 223 economics: continuity assertion for tenants and landless laborers, 31–32, 276n34; economic rationality agenda, 210, 211–12; tenantlandless laborer disparity, 28, 32, 276n37 education: focus on elite, 291n99; government-sponsored, 110–11, 301n62; Gray’s credit to, 182; Pariah exclusion from “caste” schools, 67, 290n93; Pariah requests for, 74–75, 293n10;

382  I N D E X

pedagogy design for Pariahs, 66–68; as solution, 118, 122; violent attacks as response to Pariah, 75, 293n12 elites: conversion opposed by, 166; education of, 291n99; Protestant missions and missionaries preference for, 68, 291n99 “Ellām Oṉṟalla” (All Paths Are Not One), 41, 280n5 Ellis, F. W., 28, 33, 103, 298n21; mirasi rights support by, 33–34 emigration, 176, 316n28 enforcement, legislation: citizens’ rights, 256–58, 343n63, 343n66, 343n69; Depressed Classes activism on, 229; government order creation and, 108, 300n55; Rajah’s proposal regarding, 220–23; rights of access, 234 enumerative technologies, 8 ethnographic research, 1970s agricultural labor, 243 ethnographic state, 193, 320n10 European-owned plantations, 203, 322n36 evangelism, 54, 285n52, 287n67; village, 51 evangelization, of Pariahs: charity dangers and rewards, 57–60, 288n73; missionary motives and sympathy in, 68–70, 291n100; moral motives and spiritual transformation, 62–66, 289n81, 289n83, 289n85, 289n89, 295n36, 296nn45–46; Pariah as exception, 60–62, 289n80; pedagogy design for, 66–68 evasion: history of, 1–3; strategies, 115; tracking, 9–10 eviction threats, 98, 99, 102, 176–77; Achary’s report on, 184, 317n55 exemption, from abolition of slavery, 4–5 Ezhavas, 233–36

factory owners, mirasidar comparison with, 192 factory workers, 193, 212 famine: colonial state response to, 86, 295n39; Goudie’s relief camp and request for funds during, 69, 187, 291n101; Great Famine state-cēri relations, 91–92, 297nn1–2; mass conversions and, 57–58, 287n66, 288n69; missionary archives during, 57–61, 288n69; relief delay schemes during, 187; reports on scarcity and, 91–95; segregated relief camps, 95 festivals, Hindu, 124, 129, 304n21; Kalpathy incident, 232–36 feudalism, 270n7 Forbes, G. S., 132, 135–36 Foucault, Michel, 323n53 Free Church of Scotland, 74, 93 Freeden, Michael, 311n17 freedom, concept of, 330n2 free servitude, 56, 89, 196 Frykenberg, Robert E., 14, 265n33, 296n45, 302n5 Galanter, Marc, 254, 268n47, 306n42 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 7, 8, 251, 255–56, 285n55, 341n59 gentle slavery, 3–6, 93, 103, 245–46; contentment idea and, 241–44 Ghurye, G. S., 334n22 Gorst, John, 96 Goudie, William, 11, 42–43, 81, 280n12, 281n15, 295n35, 300n57; aspirations for Pariahs, 56; famine-relief camp and funding request, 69, 187, 291n101; on intervention, 68, 291n100; on laborer persecution, 83–84; on poverty and moral codes, 78–79, 294n21; on Protestant missionary duty, 58, 62, 289n83; response to The Hindu editorial, 164–65

I N D E X   383

government: Depressed Classes department in, 326n16; education sponsored by, 110–11, 301n62; introduction of representative, 7, 19; noninterference stance of, 108–10, 113–14; quasi-, 228, 229; religious sentiments argument, 131, 306n42–43; socialization of, 147, 169, 215–16, 222, 226, 326n10. See also colonial state; legislation; Legislative Council government orders: creation and enforcement issue, 108, 300n55; house-site, 198–99, 201, 211, 213, 319n70; house-site investigation, 174; on immemorial waste, 106; mirasidar petitioners study of, 194; publicizing of, 233, 319n70; on right of access, 232–33 grain, in wage system, 180–81 Gray, J., 179–82, 203–4, 206 grazing land, 131, 306n40 Great Famine: mass conversions and, 57–58, 287n66, 288n69; missionary archives from, 57–61, 288n69; state-cēri relations and, 91–92, 297nn1–2 Green, T. H., 148–49 Guruswami, L. C., 217–18, 231 Habib, Irfan, 270n7 Harijan, 21 The Harvest Field, 41, 84, 287n67, 291n99 Havelock, Arthur Elibank, 144, 152, 153 Hekhuis, Lambertus, 94, 297n13 The Hindu, 1, 2, 84, 86–87, 169, 307n54, 312n35; Andrew and Goudie’s responses to editorial in, 164–65; inauthentic conversion objection of, 165–67; landlords on bygone era, 243; on Panchama agricultural settlements, 162–63, 184; on religious neutrality violation, 164; Tanjore house-site plan discussion in, 201

Hindu Christians, 50, 284n38, 284n42 Hinduism: caste and, 53–55, 254; Dalit acceptance and history as outsiders of, 250–51, 337n41, 338nn44–45; Dalit interaction with, 141, 309n69; decline since Vedic origins, 54; festivals, 124, 129, 232–36, 304n21; Pariah-caste villager shared identity, 141, 309n69; Raghavaiyangar’s remark on Pariah conversion and, 155, 312n35; Scheduled Caste category and, 253–55, 341n54, 343n69; secessionist Hindu church, 50, 284n38. See also caste Hindus Hindu majoritarians, 249 Hindu Pariahs: divide between Christian and Hindu Pariahs, 135, 307n52; raiyat discourse on shared identity with, 135, 141, 309n69 Hindus: caste, 339n45; Christianity viewed by Madras, 41, 279n4; Dalits as, 250–51, 255, 337n41, 338nn44–45; religious rights of caste, 143 historians: of Christianity in India, 266n36; on “Dalit” and naming issues, 21; missionary archives overlooked by, 11–12, 264nn28–29; postcolonial, 246; religious identity focus of colonial, 264n30; religious neutrality policy shift missed by, 157; south Asianist, 11, 14, 242, 265n33, 331n6. See also scholarship historical propriety criterion, for naming, 21 historiography: caste, 8–9; on citizens’ rights, 237; conversion and motive in, 88–90, 296n42, 296nn45–46; on Indian Christianity, 244, 332n12; missionary influence on contemporary, 12; on society concept, 252 Hjelje, Benedicte, 298n21 Hobhouse, L. T., 148–49, 194

384  I N D E X

Hobson, J. A., 148–49 house-site extension programs: Depressed Classes activist pleas for, 172, 315n8; government order, 198–99, 201, 211, 213, 319n70; mirasidar opposition to, 172, 191–96, 319n1; 1915 Legislative Council proposal for, 170–72; Pariah motive questioned in, 190–91; Pariah Problem evaded through, 18–19; protest forms, 190; publicizing issue for, 319n70; public purpose debate, 174, 198–201, 319n70; voluntary basis approach, 184, 188; Wood’s proposal for, 173–74, 183, 188, 202. See also Tanjore house-site scheme house sites: congestion, 188, 194, 320n11; double-entry system, 97–98, 296n41, 298n23; in labor relations, 140, 209; 1917 policy to provide, 168–69; petitions for, 309n66; sale of, 177; state examination of living conditions and, 174–82, 316n24; Thenperambur Panchama requests for, 208–9 Huggins, J. R., 186 humanitarianism, Protestant missionary, 69, 292n104 identity politics, 257 ideology, of social reform, 150, 311n17 immemorial waste, 38, 106, 279n56 India: feudalism in, 270n7; slavery abolition exemption of, 4–5. See also precolonial India; south India Indian Christianity, 266n36; caste discrimination in, 340n51; historiography on, 244, 332n12; Indian Christian missionaries, 124, 303n17 Indian Church Quarterly Review, 47 Indian Evangelical Review, 287n67 inequality, ideology of, 54, 286n56 invention of tradition, 34 Irschick, Eugene, 34, 38, 248, 335n30 Iyengar caste, 326n11

Jackson, G. H., 195, 198 Jaghire region, 34, 276n40 Jail Manual, 232 jails, 231–32 Jeyamkondacholapuram, 152–55, 157–59, 161, 311n27, 311n32, 312n41 Justice, 238 Justice Party, 218, 246–48, 324n72 Kabis, Johannes, 61–66, 118, 149, 289n76, 289n81, 290n90; Mannur settlement case, 132–39, 153, 158; on missionary motive, 291n100 Kaiser-i-Hind Medal, 303n9 Kallar mirasidars, 323n55 Kalpathy incident, 233–36 kāṇiyāṭci system, 268n3 Khan, M. Aziz-ud-Din, 186–88 kind of hold, Andrew’s concept of, 122, 159, 196 Kistna, 112–15, 145, 171, 183 Knapp, A. R., 233–35 Kodambakkam, 124–33, 137–38, 304n18 Kolchin, Peter, 330n6 Kooiman, Dick, 287n66 Krishnamurty, J., 270n7 Kumar, Dharma, 32, 268n4, 270n7; dog-in-the-manger plagiarism, 277n47; on laborer rights, 245; precolonial slavery understood by, 330n5 labor: devaluation of manual, 60, 288n75; land surplus and shortage of, 269n6. See also agricultural labor laborers: alternate employment for, 30, 274n26; Andrew’s understanding of Pariahness, servitude and, 95, 175–76, 316n22; beating of, 30, 274n24; castes and categories of, 28, 273nn18–19; categories of Panchamas and, 175–76, 181, 188; collector perceptions and reports on, 92–94; continuity assertion for

I N D E X   385

laborers (continued) landless, 31–32, 276n34; disputes between, 30, 274n28; landlords presence in lives of, 30, 274n28; Pariahs as coextensional term with laboring class, 179, 316n34; pay refused to Christian Vettiyan, 82, 295n28; persecution of, 81–85, 295n28, 295n33; precolonial, 23–25, 268n4, 270n7; punishment of, 30–31, 274n29, 275n30; scholarship paucity, 24, 271n8; settlement debates ignoring conditions of, 133; state official use of term, 95; tenant-landless laborer disparity, 28, 32, 276n37; women and children, 30, 274nn26–27. See also land tenure, labor control and labor relations: absence of friction view of, 183–89, 317n55, 318nn67– 68; contentment view of, 241–46, 333n18; conversions to Christianity consequences for, 73–79; everyday domination in, 79–81, 294n25; good old days view of, 243; Gray’s report on, 181–82; house-sites and, 140, 209; illegal taxation, 83, 295n30; Kumar on laborer rights, 245; mutual benefits view of, 186, 187; mutual duties accounts of, 6, 241–42; oppression described by government official, 210; patronclientism view of, 244, 333n13, 333n15; war metaphor for, 208, 323n53. See also land tenure, labor control and; mirasi rights land: alienation, 159, 278n51; boughtin, 104, 111, 310n8; collector redistribution of, 111–15; controller, 268n4; grazing, 131, 306n40; landed raiyats, 154; offers of alternate settlement, 158, 313n14; ownership, 23–25, 268n4; Panchama direct assignments of, 307n51; sale, 100; surplus, 24; titles, 96, 314n54. See also communal lands; house sites

Land Acquisition Act, 174, 198–99, 206 Land Act of 1908, 177 land grants, total acreage, 160–61, 314n56 Land Improvement and Agriculturist’s Loan Act, 159, 313n47 landlessness, 96, 100–101, 103; agricultural servant categories, 28, 273nn18–19; mirasidar control over agricultural servants, 35–36; religion and, 133; statemission alliance with continuing Panchama, 160; tenant-landless laborer disparity, 28, 32, 276n37 landlords: absentee, 37, 278n54; bygone era recalled by, 243; caste of, 15, 27, 271n12, 272nn13–14; caste-state nexus between colonial state and, 13–15; kāṇiyāṭci system, 268n3; landlordism, 319n70; presence in laborers’ lives, 30, 274n28. See also caste-state nexus; land tenure, labor control and; mirasidars land redistribution measures, 111–15 land surplus, labor shortage and, 269n6 land tenure, labor control and: alternate employment for laborers, 30, 274n26; continuity assertion for landless laborers, 31–32, 276n34; debt-bonds in, 29–30, 274nn22–23; direct cultivators in, 27, 34, 272n15; Indian feudalism and, 270n7; laborer castes and categories, 28, 273nn18–19; mirasidarship, servitude and, 25–32, 271nn9–11; Pariah struggles and local state apparatus of, 81–85, 295n25, 295n30; practices, 28, 273n17; precolonial agrarian mise-en scène, 23–25, 268n4, 270n7; ryotwari system, 34, 272n15, 277n42; settlement debates as obscuring issue of, 130; state landlordism, 319n70; tenantlandless laborer disparity, 28, 32,

386  I N D E X

276n37; tenant rankings, 28; vāram system of, 121; village settlements and touchability line, 31; widespread application of practices, 299n39. See also darkhast rules; labor relations The Leader (Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ), 211–15 Lee-Warner, J., 93, 98 legislation: anticonversion, 162, 248– 49, 314n58, 336n33, 336nn35–36; anti-slavery, 4–6, 291n103; antiuntouchability, 253, 256, 340n53, 342n61; enforcement issue, 108, 229, 256–58, 300n55, 343n63, 343n66, 343n69; misleading, 39; Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Act of 1989, 254, 340n53, 343n69 Legislative Council, 169, 170, 319n70; Dalit representation in, 217–19, 256–58; Depressed Classes petitions and responses, 226–32; Depressed Classes representation in, 217–18; house-site extension proposal by, 170–72; increased importance of, 201, 321n31; Māmūl discourse of, 196–98, 204, 205, 320n19; Panchama representation in, 324n72; Tanjore house-site plan proceedings of, 196–97, 201–8, 320n19 liberalization. See new liberalism loans: agriculture, 159, 309n71, 313n47; cuvantai, 185, 210 local state, labor relations and control apparatus of, 81–85, 295n28, 295n30 Ludden, David, 268n4 Lutheran Mission Church Council, 48 MacPhail, E. M., 222, 326n11 Madras: Christianity viewed by Hindus in, 41, 279n4; 1890, 26; late 1890s northern, 15; missions, 74, 93. See also Board of Revenue, Madras

Madras Mail, 121, 164–65, 303n9 Madras Missionary Conference, 45, 281n19; petition to revise darkhast rules, 144–48 Madras Presidency: British establishment in, 3; early 1890s, 1–3; during famine, 91–92, 297nn1–2 magic of property, 199 Maine, Henry Sumner, 199, 252, 253 majoritarianism, 249, 338n43 Mala, 172, 183, 315n9 Malibar, Kalpathy festival incident in, 232–36 Malthusian view, poverty in, 109–10 Māmūl (tradition), 196–98, 204, 205, 320n19; social governance and, 225 Manickam, Sundararaj, 296n45, 332n12 man-mortgage, 29–30, 32, 122 Mannur, proposed settlements in, 132–39, 153, 158, 200 Mantena, Karuna, 252, 253 Margöschis, Arthur, 48, 52, 53 Mari Paul, 74 martyrdom, 120, 302n5 mass conversions: beginning of, 40, 279n1; caste and, 58, 287n67; civilizing mission slant on, 42–43, 280n14; Great Famine and, 57–58, 287n66, 288n69; humanitarianism and, 69, 292n104; as mass movements, 72, 88, 292n1; publicizing of Pariahs and, 42–43, 280n14. See also evangelization, of Pariahs Mayavaram, 191 Melrosapuram settlement, 120–22, 154, 303n8 Mencher, Joan, 243, 332n11 Messenger of Truth (Cattiyatūtaṉ), 53 mill workers, 212 mirasidars (landlords): activism against coercive power of, 171, 172, 315n8; agriculture despised by, 213–14; caste of, 15, 27, 271n12, 272nn13–14; cēri extension

I N D E X   387

mirasidars (continued) compromise by, 139–41, 308n64, 309n67; colonial state defacto coordination with, 38; common understanding of, 35; coolies and, 206; District Munsiff Ayyar on Tanjore, 200–201; Europeanowned plantations compared with, 203, 322n36; factory owner comparison of, 192; government order protested by, 211; housesite extension opposition of, 172, 191–96, 319n1; increased control of, 35–36; Kallar, 323n55; kāṇiyāṭci system, 268n3; land redistribution opposition of, 112; Māmūl tradition view of, 196–98, 204, 205, 320n19; missionaries replacing, 159; Mullaly exposure of practices, 97–99, 298n25; petition against Tanjore house-site plan from, 191–96, 319n1; property co-ownership with state, 206–8, 322n48; Revenue Department response to, 195–96; Tangamuttu’s portrayal of, 213; tenancy, servitude and, 25–32, 271nn9–11; Tremenheere’s reports on land possession and, 96. See also labor relations mirasi rights: antiquity view of, 151; colonial state and, 32–38, 277n43; pervasion of, 182; right of first refusal, 36, 100; state policy discrepancies regarding, 106–7; state protection of, 99, 100, 103, 299n41. See also darkhast rules “Miscellaneous Series” papers, 119, 302n2 missionaries: authority sharing of state and, 154–59; caste and class problematic of, 188; caste opposition of, 16, 266nn36–38; category definition for, 44–45; Catholic, 59–60, 283n34; Dalits and, 11; as de facto state agents, 156–57; Indian Christian, 124, 303n17; mirasidars

replaced by, 159; opposition to, 306n43; as padres, 136, 308n59; settlement projects as outside work of, 154, 311n32; Tanjore house-site plan accusation of influence from, 203, 204–5; taxes paid by, 159; tensions between colonial state and, 86, 295n37. See also conversion, to Christianity; Protestant missions and missionaries missionary archives: Board of Revenue and, 116–17; colonial state perceptions confuted by, 11; during Great Famine, 57–61, 288n69; portrayals and, 10–12, 15, 264nn28–29. See also specific missionaries missionary controversy, 59, 288n70 missionary schools: agricultural settlements and, 129, 305nn35–36; boycott threats, 129, 305nn35–36; cēris location distinguished from caste, 129; conversion and, 129, 305n35 missions, Madras, 74, 93 Mitchell, Timothy, 14, 265n31 money, slave, 182 moneylenders, 36, 278n51 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 321n31 morality: moral codes in Pariah-missionary alliance, 78–79, 294n21; moral motives and spiritual transformation, 62–66, 289n81, 289n83, 289n85, 289n89, 295n36, 296nn45–46; moral regeneration discourse, 122 Morley-Minto reforms, 201 Motor Vehicles Amendment Act, 228 Mullaly, C. M., 13, 117, 140, 168, 296n41; Andrew and, 298n23; Tremenheere and, 97–99 Munro, Thomas, 33, 34, 100, 272n15, 318n68 Murdoch, D. D., 127, 134, 139 Muslims, 251

388  I N D E X

names, subpopulation: Adi-Dravidas, 328n34; criteria for, 20–23, 268nn46–47; original name for Pariahs, 3; Panchama, 268n48; Pariah usage, 20–23, 268nn46–47; use and expectations, 21–22 national social, 7, 251 New India, 238 new liberalism, 17–18, 19, 148–50; gradual liberalization notion, 20, 267n42; opposition and native press, 161–67; Tanjore house-site plan and, 194 Nieboer, Herman Jeremias, 269n6 nomenclators, 22 non-Brahminism, 246–48, 335n30, 342n61. See also Justice Party Non-Brahmin Manifesto, 247, 323n49 noncooperation strategy, 216, 324n74 “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput” (Tremenheere), 100–105, 107–11, 123, 299n33, 299n39, 300n57; implementation of measures contained in, 110–11 Oddie, G. A., 332n12 O’Hanlon, Rosalind, 263n21 oppression, 210; oppressed classes union, 211–15 Orientalism, 54, 285n52; intersection of enumerative technologies and, 8 ownership, land, 23–25, 268n4 Padfield, J. E., 113–14 padres, 136, 308n59 Pallars, 209; Paraiyars and, 28 Panchamas: Andrew’s reports on, 93, 175–79, 316n28; categories of laborers and, 175–76, 181, 188; contentedness myth about, 208; continuing landlessness of, 160; definitions and usage of word, 18, 21, 120, 267n41, 268n48, 302n7, 310n1; direct land assignments to, 307n51; as drinking classes, 173– 74; economic rationality agenda

for, 210, 211–12; emigration and, 176, 316n28; financial risks taken by, 210; house-site requests from Thenperambur, 208–9; in Legislative Council, 324n72; in naming of subpopulations, 268n48; nonresident status in settlement cases, 153–54; as revenue-producers, 214–15; sale of house sites including transfer of, 177; self-supporting status of, 160, 313n52; Tangamuttu on oppression of, 212–15. See also Dalits; Pariahs; settlements, Panchama agricultural Pandithar, Ayotheethass, 78 paṇṇaiyāḷ, 28, 186, 212 Paraiyan, 110, 301n62 Paraiyars, 3, 28 Pariah Mahajana Sabha, 335n30 Pariah-missionary alliance, 71–91; caste villagers and native press response to settlements and, 161–67; Christian habits and labor relations consequences of, 73–79; conversion and motive in historiographic imagination, 88–90; moral codes and poverty consequences, 78–79, 294n21; Pariah initiation of, 73–74, 184; religious persecution and everyday domination, 79–81, 294n25; settlement conflict and, 125; unforeseen consequences of moral codes and, 79 Pariah Problem: Andrew’s raising of, 87; containment of, 240–41; as denied political value, 237–39; dissolving of, 115–17; house-site issue in evading, 18–19; missionary role in publicizing, 87, 296n41; Mullaly’s role in publicizing, 99; phrase usage, 2; region of first portrayal of, 34, 276n40; religious role in, 6–7, 262n14; socialization of, 7–8, 218–26; state embracing of bought-in lands issue and, 310n8; welfarism shaped by, 149

I N D E X   389

Pariahs: absence of status-related discourses, 138–39; acts of insubordination by, 78, 85; Andrew’s understanding of servitude, laborers and Pariahness, 95, 175–76, 316n22; class preservation in aiding, 65, 289n90; cunning of, 66; divide between Christian and Hindu, 135, 307n52; education requested by, 74–75, 293n10; as exception in evangelization project, 60–62, 289n80; exclusion from “caste” schools and education, 67, 290n93; factory workers and, 193; Goudie on, 56, 68, 83–84, 291n100; house-site extension motives discourse, 190–91; as laborers, 28, 273n19; laboring classes as coextensional with, 179, 316n34; missionary advocacy for improving conditions of, 6–7, 11, 264n26, 266n38; missionary publicizing of plight and conversion of, 42–43, 280n14; moral motives and spiritual transformation of, 62–66, 289n81, 289n83, 289n85, 289n89, 295n36, 296nn45–46; names and usage for, 20–23, 268nn46–47; original caste name for, 3; profligacy view, 111–16; Protestant missionary view of servitude of, 43–44; raiyat recourse to idea of Hindu, 135, 141, 309n69; as resigned, 332n12; search for authentic, 10; segregation of, 62, 75, 90; simple needs view towards, 56; state official use of “laborers” instead of, 95. See also Adi-Dravidas; Christian Pariahs; conversion, to Christianity; Dalits; Depressed Classes; evangelization, of Pariahs; laborers; Panchamas; specific topics paṭiyāḷ system, 28, 181, 203–4 patron-clientism, 244, 333n13, 333n15 peasants. See raiyats, settlement opposition of

Pennington, J. B., 6, 272n15 Penny, Frank, 154–59 Periyar. See Ramaswamy, E. V. persecution: of laborers, 81–85, 295n28; religious, 79–81, 294n25 petitions: darkhast revision, 144–48; Depressed Classes archive of, 226– 32; against Sharrock’s settlement, 157–58, 312n41; against Tanjore house-site plan, 191–96, 319n1 philanthropy: philanthropic bodies, 202, 321n34; philanthropic design, 168–69; private, 149 Phillips, G. E., 292n1, 295n36 Pillai, E. Muthiah, 47, 48, 53, 231 plantations, European-owned, 203, 322n36 poem, in newspaper, 77–78, 293n15 policy, colonial state: background and context, 2–3; discrepancies over mirasi rights, 106–7; house-site provision in 1917, 168–69; new liberalism trend in, 17–18, 19, 148–50, 161–67, 194; precedent principle in, 130–31, 146, 153, 306n39; reason for Depressed Classes amelioration in, 215–16; reservation programs, 253–54, 340nn52–53, 341n55. See also colonial state; religious neutrality politics, 263n22; Dalit entry into modern, 8–9; identity, 257; of numbers, 251, 338n43; Pariah Problem’s denied value in, 237–39; reason for, 240; social governance in welfare, 215–16; spiritualized, 255 pollution: distance, 116, 219, 235; Gandhian social reform and, 341n59; touch-, 221 post office, access to, 224–25 poverty, 179; inevitability view of, 112; Malthusian view of, 109–10; missionary moral codes and Pariah, 78–79, 294n21; Samuel’s reversal of causation in, 213

390  I N D E X

practical serfdom, 194 Prakash, Gyan, 245, 331n6, 333n18 precedent, principle of, 130–31, 146, 153, 306n39 precolonial India: agrarian mise-en scène, 23–25, 268n4, 270n7; religious identity, 337n41; slavery in, 242, 330n5 preferential right of application. See darkhast rules Prime Minister. See Singh, Manmohan private philanthropy, 149 private property: colonial state denial of existence, 33, 276n39; religious neutrality and, 205–6 progressive cowle, 121, 154, 303n12 property: co-ownership of colonial state and mirasidars, 206–8, 322n48; magic of, 199; private, 33, 205–6, 276n39 Protestant missions and missionaries: advocacy of, 6–7, 11, 87, 264n26, 266n38, 296n41; British Empire relations with, 264n24, 264n26; caste-class transformation goal of, 52–57, 285n52, 286nn55–56; caste opposition of, 16, 49–50, 266nn36–38; caste viewed by, 43, 45–55, 282n21, 284n38; Christ example for, 63; civic representation of, 86, 295n38; conferences and resolutions, 45, 59, 281n19, 287n67; conversion numbers pressure on, 43, 74, 293n8; Dalit lives involvement of, 11; efforts to abolish caste titles, 49–50; free servant goal for Pariahs, 56; Goudie on duty of, 58, 62, 289n83; historiography influenced by, 12; history of south India’s, 40–41; humanitarianism of, 69, 292n104; hypocrisy of, 51; ideology of inequality, 54, 286n56; interdenominational aspects, 44–45, 281nn17–18; loneliness and hardships of, 42, 280n8; motives, 68–70, 291n100;

obstacles to success of, 41–42; Pariah servitude viewed by, 43–44; portrayal of, 56, 286n59; social hierarchy importance to, 46, 282n21; teaching vs. preaching controversy among, 59, 288n70; translational project of, 52. See also conversion, to Christianity; evangelization, of Pariahs; mass conversions; missionary archives; Pariah-missionary alliance public: Pariah exclusion from, 142–43; redefinition of, 146, 198, 319n70; social government redefining, 169 publicizing: government order, 233, 319n70; of mass conversions, 42–43, 280n14; Pariah Problem, 42–43, 87, 99, 280n14, 296n41 public opinion, notion of, 199, 215 public purpose, 153; communal lands (puramboke) and, 136–39, 144, 308nn56–57; house-site debates over, 174, 198–201, 319n70; state and, 147, 148, 310n7 public space, 325n6; attempted redefinition of, 219–26; denied access to courts, 224–25; right of access, 138, 140, 219–36; women and, 327n20 punishment, laborer, 30–31, 274n29, 275n30 Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1901, 278n51 puṟakuṭi, 28, 31–32 puramboke. See communal lands purification (śuddhi), 251, 338nn42–43 quasi-government, 228, 229 Raghavaiyangar, Srinivasa, 151, 155, 311n23, 312n35 Raghavan, M., 233, 234 raiyats, settlement opposition of: bought-in lands argument in, 310n8; changing tactics by, 142;

I N D E X   391

raiyats (continued) communal lands (puramboke) and, 300n55; festival music argument, 304n21; grazing land claims, 131, 306n40; Hindu Pariah shared identity discourse, 135, 141, 309n69; hurt sentiments argument of, 131; Jeyamkondacholapuram, 157, 158; Kodambakkam, 124–33; landed status of, 154; Mannur, 132–39, 153, 158, 200; religious rights invoked by, 153 Rajah, M. C., 131, 217–18, 231, 324; proposal on public access enforcement, 220–23 Rajahgopal, P., 284n42 Ramaswamy, E. V., 248, 255–56, 342n61 “Ramaswamy Becomes Ramsay,” 77–78, 293n15 Ranganath Mishra Report, 341n54 Rao, N. Subba, 222 Rao, Ramachandra, 170–72, 319n70 Ravikumar, 258 Reading (viceroy), 223 referential rigor criterion, for naming subpopulations, 21 religion: ancient, 164; caste and, 16, 45–52, 143, 266n38, 267n39, 307n55; civil and religious markers of caste, 45–52, 116; colonial histories focus on, 264n30; conversion and delimitation of, 58–59; government noninterference and, 109–10, 113–14; landlessness and, 133; Pariah Problem role of, 6–7, 262n14; sentiment and, 131, 220, 221, 306n42–43; settlement decisions based on, 133–35, 164; settlement opposition on threat to ancient, 164; śuddhi (religious purification), 251, 338nn42–43 religious identity: colonial state historians’ focus on, 264n30; in precolonial India, 337n41; the social and, 251

religious neutrality, 119, 164; private property and, 205–6; reconsideration of, 157–59; in settlement opposition, 123–24, 126, 130, 141–43; state-cēri relations and Pariah profligacy, 111–16; Tanjore house-site plan issue of, 205 religious persecution, everyday domination and, 79–81, 294n25 religious rights: anticonversion laws and, 249; caste Hindu distance from Panchamas as, 143; as caste-specific, 234; citizens’ rights contra, 218–26; raiyats invoking, 153; Tawker’s position on, 140, 218–19, 221 representation: Dalit, 7, 19, 201, 217–19, 238, 246, 256–58, 321n31, 324n72, 334n20; self-, 10, 246, 256; silencing of Dalit, 238 research, agricultural labor 1970s ethnographic, 243 reservations, 2–3, 253–54, 340nn52– 53, 341n55 revenue: inspectors, 181; producers of, 214–15 Revenue Department: Board of Revenue contrasted with, 105–7, 299n49; in darkhast revision petition case, 147–48, 150; mirasidar petition answered by, 195–96; Tanjore house-site extension and, 183 revolution, Dalit, 2 right of application. See darkhast rules rights: as abstract, 234, 235, 236; customary, 235; Kumar on laborer, 245. See also citizens’ rights; darkhast rules; mirasi rights; religious rights rights of access, 138, 226; bus incident, 227–31; courts and, 224–25; Dalit representatives demand for, 219; government order on, 232–33; Kalpathy incident, 233–36; non

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enforcement of, 220–23, 234; post office, 224–25; religious rights and, 140 Roberts, Nathaniel, 336n36 Rodrigues, Valerian, 325n6 Roman Catholics, 293n8 Royal Commission on Superior Civil Services, 224 ryotwari system, 34, 272n15, 277n42 sale: of house sites, 177; land, 100; mirasi share, 39 Salem District, 34 Samuel, P. S., 212, 213 Sanskritization, 341n59 Sarkar, Tanika, 333n18 Sasilekha, 166–67 Sattampillai, A. N., 50, 284n38 Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Act of 1989, 254, 340n53, 343n69 Scheduled Castes, 253–55, 268n47, 307n52, 341n54, 343n69 scholarship: on laborers, 24, 271n8; on slavery, 242, 330n5 schools: caste, 67, 129, 290nn93–94, 305n35. See also missionary schools Schwarz, J. M. N., 48 Scudder, E. C., 75, 122 Scudder, Jared, 55, 60 Scudder missionaries, 80, 294n23 Searle-Chatterjee, Mary, 339n45 secessionist Hindu church, 50, 284n38 segregation: famine relief camp, 95; ūr and cēri, 62, 75, 90. See also cēris self-designation criterion, for naming subpopulations, 20 self-representation, 10, 246, 256 self-supporting status, Panchama, 160, 313n52 sentiment, religion and, 131, 220, 221, 306n42–43 servitude: Andrew’s understanding of Pariahness, laboring classes and,

95, 175–76, 316n22; free, 56, 89, 196; increased mirasidar control over landless servants, 35–36; landless agricultural servant categories, 28, 273nn18–19; loan nonpayment as, 185; mirasidarship, tenancy and, 25–32, 271nn9– 11; post-legislation slavery and, 39; Protestant missionary view of Pariah, 43–44; as slavery euphemism, 23–24, 268n2; types, 28. See also gentle slavery; mirasi rights; slavery settlements, Panchama agricultural: alternate land offers, 158, 313n14; ancient religion as threatened by, 164; Brahmin opposition and, 153, 311n27; caste privileges threatened by, 161–62; caste villager opposition to, 161–67; for Christian Pariahs, 132–39; conception and context for, 120–23; darkhast rules cited in opposition to, 124, 126, 133, 304n18, 307n51; first, 120, 302n4; grazing land argument, 131, 306n40; The Hindu editorial on, 162–63, 184; Jeyamkondacholapuram, 152–55, 157–59, 161, 311n27, 311n32, 312n41; Kodambakkam proposed, 124–33, 137–38, 304n18; land control issue obscured by debates in, 130; land grants total acreage, 160–61, 314n56; Mannur, 132–39, 153, 158; martyrdom perception of conversion and, 120, 302n5; Melrosapuram, 120–22, 154, 303n8; missionary schools and, 129, 305nn35–36; mission-managed, 159–60, 182; as outside missionary work, 154, 311n32; Pariah status absent from discourses on, 138–39; petitions against Sharrock’s, 157–58, 312n41; precedent principle in, 130–31, 146, 153, 306n39; public purpose discourse, 136–39, 144, 308nn56–57;

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settlements (continued) religion-based reasonings, 133–35, 164; religious neutrality and, 123– 24, 126, 130, 141–43; religious sentiments argument, 131, 306n42–43; Sothuperumbadu cēri extension, 139–41, 308n64, 309n67; statemission rules for, 158–61, 313n47; temple-chapel narratives in debate over, 124–33, 304n18. See also cēris; house-site extension program; raiyats, settlement opposition of; state-cēri relations Shah, Mihir, 271n8 shares, mirasi, 25, 27, 28, 271nn10–11; market sales of, 39 Sharrock, J. A., 46, 47, 174, 282n22, 284n42, 303n8; caste opposition practices and resignation of, 49–50; Jeyamkondacholapuram settlement appeal, 152–55, 157–59, 161, 311n27, 311n32, 312n41; on missionary hypocrisy, 51; petitions against settlement of, 157–58, 312n41 Shipley, R. J., 153 SIMA. See South Indian Missionary Association Singh, Manmohan, 2 Sinha, Mrinalini, 252 SIOCU. See South Indian Oppressed Classes Union slave money (Sirai Panam), 182 slavery: agrarian, 3–6, 8; in American South, 332n8; Andrew’s description of, 177; as black word, 99; bodily and spiritual, 73; British perceptions of agrarian, 3; Christianity and, 65; definition debates over, 331n6; euphemistic terms used for, 23–24, 268n2; freedom conceptions and, 330n2; gentle, 3–6, 93, 103, 241–46; labor shortage, land surplus and, 269n6; preand -post anti-slavery movement use of term, 23–24; precolonial,

242, 330n5; scholarship on, 242, 330n5; Tanjore, 204. See also abolition, of slavery; servitude slave trade, British involvement in, 4 Slave Trade Act of 1807, 291n103 Small Holdings Act, British, 173, 202 the social: autonomy and, 20, 267n42; citizens’ rights delegated to, 222; Depressed Classes promise of, 237–39; devolution onto natives by colonial state, 19; dyarchy and, 223; national, 251; religious identity and, 251; social reforms and, 217–18; valorization of reform via, 255–58, 341n59 Social Gospel movement, 291n103 socialization, of government, 222, 326n10; public redefined in new, 169; seek own salvation advice as, 147, 226; welfare politics in, 215–16 socialization, of Pariah Problem, 7–8, 218–26 social reform: Gandhian, 341n59; Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, 321n31; Morley-Minto reforms, 201 society: concept of, 252; cooperative credit type of, 177 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), 46, 48, 154, 156, 311n32 Sothuperumbadu, 139–41, 308n64, 309n67 South Arcot, 183 south Asianist historians, 11, 14, 242, 265n33, 331n6 south India, Protestant mission history in, 40–41 South India Depressed Classes Elevation Society, 31, 275n31 South India Depressed Classes Mission, 211 South Indian Missionary Association (SIMA), 45, 46, 50, 281n19, 316n24; darkhast revision petition from, 145–46 South Indian Missionary Committee, 46

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South Indian Missionary Conference, 55 South Indian Oppressed Classes Union (SIOCU), 211–15 SPG. See Society for the Propagation of the Gospel spiritualization: of caste, 7; of politics, 255 spiritual slavery, 73 spiritual transformation, moral motives and, 62–66, 289n81, 289n83, 289n85, 289n89, 295n36, 296nn45–46 Srinivas, M. N., 341n59 Srinivasan, Rettamalai, 110, 217–18, 231, 301n62; on court access, 224 state. See caste-state nexus; colonial state; local state, state-cēri relations, 91–117; during Great Famine, 91–92, 297nn1–2; implementing Tremenheere, 110–11; “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput,” 100–103, 107–11, 299n33, 299n39, 300n57; religious neutrality and Pariah profligacy, 111–16; response to Tremenheere’s report, 103–5; scarcity and famine reports, 91–95; state concessions, 104–5, 299n48; state policy discrepancy over mirasi rights, 106–7; Tremenheere and Mullaly reports and interventions, 97–99 state effect, Mitchell’s, 14, 265n31 Stokes, Eric, 272n15, 286n59 subpopulations, naming, 3, 20–25, 268nn46–48, 328n34 śuddhi (religious purification), 251, 338nn42–43 Swadesamitran, 166–67 tamiḻaṉ (caste Tamils), 31, 36, 275n32, 339n45 Tangamuttu, S. A. S., 211–15 Tanjore: collector of, 272n15; District Munsiff Court in, 198–201, 204, 333n18

Tanjore house-site scheme, 183–89, 317n55, 318n68, 319n70, 333n18; Achary’s report on, 183–89, 203, 317n55; economic rationality and, 210, 211–12; financial risks taken by Panchamas in, 210; land selected for, 209; Legislative Council proceedings on, 196–97, 201–8, 320n19; mirasidar petition against, 191–96, 319n1; missionary influence accusation in, 203, 204–5; public purpose debate over, 198–201, 319n70; religious neutrality issue in debate over, 205; suits over, 198–99, 321n23 Tawker, T. Ranganatha, 139, 142–43, 157, 205, 309n67; distance pollution and, 219, 235; religious rights position of, 140, 218–19, 221 taxation, 33, 131; dittam system, 35; double entry system on land exempt from, 97–98, 296n41, 298n23; illegal, 83, 295n30; missionary, 159 teeth-gritting harmony, 15, 187, 266n35 temple-chapel conflict, 124–33, 304n18 Temple Entry Act, 224 tenant-landless laborer disparity, 32, 276n37; uḷkuṭi, 28 tenure. See land tenure, labor control and Thass, Ayothee, 335n30 Thass, Iyothee, 312n35 Thenperambur, 208–9 Thirumaavaḷavan, Thol., 257 Thompson, J., 111 Thonger, J. H., 222–23 Thurston, Edgar, 30 The Times of India, 239 titles: caste, 47–51, 54; land, 96, 314n54 top-down model, of conversion to Christianity, 41, 68, 279n2, 291n99 touchability line, 31

I N D E X   395

touch-pollution, 221 translational project, 52 Tremenheere, H. A., 2, 16–17, 139, 308n64; implementing suggestions of, 110–11; investigations by, 95–97; Mullaly and, 97–99; “Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput,” 100–105, 107–11, 123, 299n33, 299n39, 300n57; as secretary of state, 147 two-faced colonial rule, 192–93, 320n7 uḷkuṭi, 28 untouchability: anti-untouchability legislation, 253, 256, 340n53, 342n61; Brahmin observation of, 273n19; colonial state protection of, 142–43, 309n71; śuddhi purification ceremonies and, 251, 338n43 untouchables: Adi-Dravidas name given to, 275n31; mirasi system and, 27; naming criteria and, 20 ūr (village), 11, 62, 75, 90 Vaḻikāṭṭuvōṉ (The Leader), 211–15 Vanniyars, 298n30 vāram system, 121 Vedas, 54, 67 Veerian, R., 217–18, 224–32, 234 Vellalars, 27, 272nn13–14, 324n72

Vernon, H. A. B., 216 Vettiyan, 82, 295n28 Victoria (queen), 7, 17 villages: Andrew’s report on Panchama, 176–79; evangelism in, 51; nonmirasi, 101; settlements, 31; ūr, 11, 62, 75, 90 violence, 30, 75, 78, 274n24, 293n12; against Adi-Dravidas, 231 wages, agricultural, 175; families as sharing single laborer’s, 180; state inquiry into, 179–81, 317n41 war metaphor, 208, 323n53 Washbrook, David, 297n1, 320n7 waste, immemorial, 38, 106, 279n56 wasteland, 98, 298n25; allocation of cultivable, 100–101, 299n35. See also darkhast rules wealth: caste and, 212; real producers of, 324n72 welfarism, 149–50, 188, 215–16, 319n70 Willingdon (lord), 220, 222 Winterbotham, H., 147–49, 151 women: domestic space of, 327n20; laborers, 30, 274nn26–27 Wood, R. B., 173–74, 183, 188, 202 Yanagisawa, Haruka, 215, 334n22 Young, Arthur, 199

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