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Tamil Brahmans
The Making of a Middle-Class Caste
By C. J. Fuller, Haripriya Narasimhan The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-15288-2
CHAPTER 1
The Village
CASTE, LAND, AND EMIGRATION TO THE CITY
The delta of the river Kaveri in central Tamilnadu (see map 2) is one of the state's most fertile and beautiful regions. The Kaveri and its subsidiary the Kollidam, as well as numerous smaller rivers, streams, and irrigation channels, flow through the flat terrain of the delta and provide the water for its crops, of which the most important is rice. Much of the delta's beauty comes from its extensive patchwork of paddy fields, coconut groves, banana plantations, and shady trees, which ensure that even in hot, rainless months the land retains a greenness that disappears from Tamilnadu's extensive dry plains. The natural charm is enhanced by an architectural heritage that includes some of India's biggest, oldest, and most elegant temples, notably those built by the Cholas, whose great kingdom dominated the region from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Of course, there is plenty of ugliness and pollution too, especially in the fast-growing towns, but in the countryside the delta's attractiveness remains largely unspoilt.
Most of the Kaveri delta lies in the old Tanjore District, which is now divided into Thanjavur, Thiruvarur, and Nagapattinam Districts, although it stretches upriver westward to Tiruchirappalli (Trichinopoly; Tiruchi or Trichy, colloquially) and beyond. Mainly owing to its fertility, the delta's population density has always been high; the region has also long been characterized by extremes of inequality, especially between the landed rich and landless poor and members of the highest and lowest castes. According to the 1871 census, Brahmans comprised 6.4 percent of the old Tanjore District's population, more than double their proportion in the Tamil region as a whole and higher than in any other district.
A report on Tanjore in 1805 stated that 28 percent of its 62,048 mirasidars or landowners were Brahmans; these figures may not be entirely reliable, but they are roughly consistent with data from the early twentieth century showing that 38 percent of the wealthiest mirasidars in the district were Brahmans. At that time, according to David Washbrook, "the mirasidar elite [in Tanjore] ruled its agrarian dependents with a rod of iron and established a great social distance between itself and them." As we shall see, that distance had been reduced, but had still not disappeared in the early post-Independence years.
The Kaveri delta's terrain is closely covered in villages, which can be divided into two main categories, according to whether Brahmans or non-Brahmans were the main landowners enjoying economic and political dominance. In "Brahman villages" there is an agraharam, a street or quarter that is or was exclusively inhabited by Brahmans. The agraharam stands apart from the main settlement area occupied by non- Brahman castes. In non-Brahman villages, of course, there is no agraharam and usually no Brahman residents except, perhaps, for one or two families of priests. Separated from both Brahman and non-Brahman settlement areas are the ceris ("cheri"), the "colonies" exclusively inhabited by untouchable Adi Dravidas or Dalits. In some Brahman villages, the ceris are near the main village and are in practice part of it; in others, they are a considerable distance away and are regarded as distinct settlements with their own names. Apart from the Kaveri delta, Tamilnadu's principal wet-zone regions are the smaller Palar valley (mostly in modern Kanchipuram District) in the north, and the Vaigai valley (in Madurai, Sivaganga, and Ramanathapuram Districts) and the Tambraparni valley (in Tirunelveli District) in the south. In these last three valleys, Brahmans were less numerous, rich, and powerful than in the Kaveri delta, but they were similarly dominant in their own Brahman villages, also partitioned into agraharams, non-Brahman residential areas, and Dalit colonies.
Although the great majority of Tamil Brahmans used to live in the countryside, there were always considerable numbers in urban areas. The ancient temple city of Madurai, for instance, the political and cultural capital of the southern Tamil country, has had a strong Brahman presence for centuries and many Brahmans formerly lived in agraharams near the Minakshi (Minak?i) temple in the city center or beside the river Vaigai. In all the older towns and cities, however, including small market towns like Tindivanam where Satyamurti lived before he migrated to Madras, as described in the introduction, there were agraharams and settled Brahman communities.
The Tamilized Sanskrit word agraharam is one of several terms that referred to villages and land donated to Brahmans by Hindu kings between the medieval and late precolonial periods; the most widely used of these terms was probably brahmadeya. Early British reports on land rights refer to agraharams as villages granted to Brahmans; by the mid-nineteenth century, H. H. Wilson's glossary of revenue terms defined an agraharam as a village occupied by Brahmans held rent-free or at a reduced assessment rate. By the early twentieth century, however, the term agraharam appears to have acquired its modern dictionary meaning as an exclusively Brahman street or residential quarter.
Agraharams also exist in coastal Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala. In Andhra, only "orthodox" Vaidika (Vedic) Telugu Brahmans have lived in agraharams, like the two in the Godavari delta where David Knipe did research in 1980–95. "Secular" Niyogi Brahmans, by contrast, did not have their ownagraharams and in the Godavari District in the early 1900s they "[did] not mind dwelling side by side with [non-Brahmans] and [did] not always have their own distinct streets." F. R. Hemingway, who also wrote the Tanjore gazetteer, noted that these Telugu Brahmans did not "hold themselves as severely aloof" from non-Brahmans as Tamil Brahmans further south. An agraharam in disarray in Karnataka is the setting for U. R. Anantha Murthy's famous novel Samskara, but data about agraharams in this region are very thin. In Kerala, Palghat Brahmans—who migrated from the Tamil country centuries ago—lived in agraharams in parts of Cochin and Malabar, as did Tamil Brahmans settled in southern Travancore, which only became part of Tamilnadu after Independence.
Colonial reports on land rights and revenue from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as census reports and gazetteers, sometimes mention Brahman village streets and agraharams in Tamilnadu and elsewhere in south India, but never with much ethnographic detail. Dusi and Gangaikondan, in the Palar and Tambraparni valleys, respectively, were the first two Brahman villages in Tamilnadu to be investigated sociologically, originally in 1916–17 and again in 1936–37, but not much detailed information about their agraharams was collected. Quite possibly, "the separatist practices of Brahmans"—including residential segregation in agraharams—were strengthened considerably when colonial rule consolidated the caste system and reinforced the Brahmans' secular power in the Tamil country. By the early twentieth century, agraharams were a contentious issue for the growing non-Brahman movement, which strongly objected to restrictions on public access and sought to "de-sacralize agraharam space." Most probably, though, very similar agraharams had existed for a long time, even though we cannot take it for granted that the same "traditional" rules and restrictions described by anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century had always been in place.
Brahman Villages in the Mid-Twentieth Century
The most detailed ethnographies of Brahman villages in the mid-twentieth century were written by Kathleen Gough and André Béteille, whose material provides an important baseline for the evaluation of later change. Gough carried out fieldwork in Kumbapettai, northeast of Thanjavur, in 1951–52 and returned there in 1976. Béteille studied Sripuram, northwest of Thanjavur, in 1961–62.
The majority of the Brahmans in Kumbapettai in the 1950s were Brahacharanam Smartas (Aiyars) belonging to a particular local subcaste. Compared with some mirasidars in the Kaveri delta, the Kumbapettai Brahmans were not particularly wealthy. In 1952, their agraharam, which was originally built in the 1780s, consisted of one street lined on both sides by rows of interconnected houses; by local standards, these houses were spacious and comfortable. The agraharam contained thirty-five occupied and fourteen unoccupied houses, with a total population of 174 people. (One Telugu Brahman priestly family lived outside the agraharam.) A temple dedicated to Rama (Vishnu) stands at one end of the agraharam, farthest from its entrance and the main road; near the other end, there is a Shiva temple. Kumbapettai's non-Brahman area, across the main road from the agraharam, was inhabited by 285 people belonging to eighteen separate castes, and 354 Pallars lived in its outlying ceri. When the village lands were surveyed in 1827, Brahmans owned virtually all of them, although individual family shares varied greatly. By the early twentieth century, although some Brahman families had prospered, most had not and as a whole the community had lost wealth and land, so that by 1952 several households owned no land. In 1871, 412 Brahmans lived in Kumbapettai and made up almost half its population. They began to emigrate to urban areas before 1900, so that the agraharam's population started to decline. In 1952, Gough found that many of Kumbapettai's Brahmans had left to take up salaried employment, although quite a lot of them still owned some village land that they rented out to non-Brahman tenants.
Sripuram's agraharam, which was established in the mid-nineteenth century, consists of one street parallel to the main road; on the other side of the road runs the river Kaveri. The agraharam street is longer than Kumbapettai's and the houses, also arranged in rows on each side, are mostly bigger; in 1961–62, there were ninety-eight houses, of which ninety-two were occupied by 341 Brahmans. Vadagalai Sri Vaishnavas (Aiyangars) made up over half the population, with the rest belonging to range of mainly Smarta subcastes, including Telugu Brahmans. A Vishnu temple stands at one end of the agraharam; not far away, but beyond the Brahman street, are an impressive, ancient Shiva temple beside the main road and the village goddess's temple. Behind the agraharam, away from the road, lies the non-Brahman area, where 688 people from twenty-six separate castes and subcastes lived, and beyond it are the ceris inhabited by 332 Pallars and thirty-nine others from three separate Adi Dravida castes. In the past, Sripuram's Brahmans—together with one family related to the former Maratha rulers of Tanjore—owned almost all the land and some of them had been very wealthy mirasidars. By the 1960s, many Brahmans had emigrated to towns and cities; some landowners rented out their land to non-Brahman tenants, but many sold it.
The Hierarchy of Caste and Class
On Tamil New Year's Day in mid-April 1952, Gough watched the celebrations to mark the beginning of the agricultural year in Kumbapettai. In the evening, all the Brahman mirasidars assembled in front of Rama's temple at the end of the agraharam street. The ritual in the temple was paid for each year in turn by one Brahman family group, whose members were all expected to be present, along with their non-Brahman tenants and laborers, who had to stand outside the temple gates. No Adi Dravidas were invited because they were not allowed to enter the agraharam. A Brahman temple priest performed worship for Rama and his consort Sita before images of the god and goddess were taken in procession up and down the agraharam. When they had returned to the temple, the most senior domestic priest, who was also a landlord, read out the almanac for the new year in Sanskrit and Tamil, and concluded by worshipping Vinayaka (Ganesa), the god of beginnings and obstacles. Later in the evening, another ritual took place at the temple beside the main road dedicated to the village goddess, Uridaichiyamman (Uritaicciyamman), who looks after Kumbapettai and its people. This ritual, which had been started seven years earlier by the Brahman president of the local council or panchayat, was paid for by the non-Brahman village headman. The temple's non-Brahman priest performed worship for the goddess and various minor deities, and then waved before them a flaming candelabra, brought from Rama's temple by his priest. Some of the village's most prominent Brahmans, with their wives and children, sat next to the goddess's shrine, while leading non-Brahmans and their families stood at the back. When the ritual had finished, the headman distributed food, first to the Brahmans who got most of it and afterward to the non-Brahmans. Once again, Adi Dravidas were not invited.
The rituals of New Year's Day were fairly minor events in Kumbapettai's annual round. Yet they displayed with a special clarity the principal axis of its social structure, namely, the tripartite distinction between the Brahman landlords who placed themselves closest to the deities in both temples, the non-Brahman tenants and laborers who stood behind them, and the Adi Dravida laborers who were absent. Accordingly, the ritual at Rama's temple, sponsored by a Brahman and performed by a Brahman priest, preceded the one at the goddess's temple, sponsored by a non-Brahman and performed by a non-Brahman priest, although Brahmans were actually closer to the deities on both occasions. Through these rituals, which expressed the hierarchical norms of their society, Brahman and non-Brahman villagers sought the blessings of their deities—but they did not think it necessary to invite the untouchable Adi Dravidas or worship their deities.
The Brahmans' alleged superiority depended on their status as mirasidars, as well as their high rank in the caste system. Brahman landlords never worked in their fields and, if they did not rent out their land to tenants, they confined themselves to managing and supervising cultivation. Manual work, as we discuss below, was and is consistently seen as demeaning. Agricultural labor, therefore, was all carried out by the lower castes and the hierarchy of caste-cum-agrarian class was repeatedly made visible in one of the Brahman villages' most characteristic scenes. In Kumbapettai, writes Gough, "in each agricultural season one could see Pallars or Non-Brahmans toiling in the fields, the men stripped naked except for a narrow loin cloth, the women in old, looped saris with bare arms and legs. Standing on bunds beside the paddy fields or sitting on rope beds, benches, or chairs under shady trees, would be several Brahmans wearing white shawls and long lower white cloths.... [These] landlords would stand at intervals each near his own field, prompting and supervising." Even more strikingly, when the transplanting of paddy seedlings began—a job that was (and still is) done only by women—a landlord stood near the fields and before starting work each Pallar woman laborer "approached him with a small bundle of seedlings in each hand and bowed three times, touching the ground with her seedlings about six feet away from him." In just this little interaction between a Brahman landlord dressed in white, standing in the shade, and his female Untouchable laborer in a worn-out sari, about to toil under the sun, the extreme inequality of caste and class, and gender too, that prevailed in Tamilnadu's Brahman villages in the 1950s was starkly displayed.
In Brahman villages, the agraharam's exclusiveness, and the caste hierarchy more generally, were expressed and reinforced by codes of ritual purity and pollution. In 1952, all residents of Kumbapettai's agraharam were Brahmans and any attempt to sell one of the houses to a non-Brahman would have been strenuously resisted. The purity and pollution rules observed in the village meant that people were normally prohibited from touching or even closely approaching those belonging to a higher caste, and these rules particularly applied to contact between Brahmans and members of the lowest castes. "Clean," higher-ranking non-Brahmans could enter Brahman houses, but not their kitchens, and since the 1920s some Brahmans had employed non-Brahman women as servants. "Polluting," lower-ranking non-Brahmans could walk along the agraharam street, but not enter the houses; Adi Dravidas were forbidden to enter the street and came to the back door of Brahman houses to collect their wages or get instructions from their masters. When in the agraharam, non-Brahmans hitched up their ankle-length cloths to leave their lower legs bare and they could not wear footwear, although in 1952 some non-Brahmans were challenging these rules by walking to the post office located inside the agraharam, dressed in shirts and with their legs covered; a couple of assertive students had even dared to wear shoes. Adi Dravidas, of course, could not enter the Rama and Shiva temples and they did not, even after they were legally permitted to do so by temple-entry legislation in the 1940s. It is unclear whether non-Brahmans could freely enter the two temples, but some probably went to Shiva's more accessible temple and next to none to Rama's inside the agraharam.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tamil Brahmans by C. J. Fuller, Haripriya Narasimhan. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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