Crooked Stalks Cultivating Virtue in South India
Anand Pandian's anthropological writing on Piramalai Kallars comes as a fresh breeze fifty years after the publication of Louis Dumont's classical ethnographic work on the same group in "A South Indian Sub-caste". While Dumont's study had a focus on Piramalai Kallars as part of a wider Indian social context and on his central hypothesis that "Each person has his being outside of himself", Pandian's central theme in this book is a more intimate inquiry "How do people live as they ought to live". With this meaning ingrained question as the prominent theme, the book in a series of connected essays attempts to bring out an answer. Since the question itself veers toward the ontological, there cannot be any definite answers but only probes which can open doors for further revelation. When i read through the book I was stuck with the easy intimacy that Pandian strikes with his interlocutors in their quotidian space and realm. This makes him a natural to explore a more intimate topic like the theme that he has chosen. To understand this sea of difference, one has to read "A Remembered Village"by M.N Srinivas or Beteille's "Sripuram : A Village in Tanjore" where the sociologist in spite of all their attempts to fit in are never able to move away from a position of aloofness and distance. This comfortableness probably has to do with the fact that Pandian comes from a subaltern caste just like his subjects even though he belongs to the different Nadar caste, something which he revealed in "Ayya's account", his moving memoir about his grandfather.
The book is also interesting for a modern reader in the Indian context, because the ethnic group which has been selected has had a hoary history of being labelled as a "Crimnal Tribe" by the colonial authorities. Their very names "Kallars" an inheritance from a much older precolonial past translates literally as thieves. This being an assignment made by the dominant ethos and language of the agricultural citizen, the "Kutiyanavan" of the Tamil countryside. For readers like me, the interest is not just academical as an anthropological understanding of a "Community in Change". There is also a deeper personal interest that in being citizens of a common democratic state teetering in the precipice of disorder and lawlessness, an understanding this book attempts to bring about is invaluable.
The book as i mentioned before is a collection of essays.The essays set on contemporary
events, interviews, anecdotes and understandings within the background of a historical context and setting do not always achieve a clear demarcation.Anand Pandian starts with the contention that the urgency of how one "ought" to live is a moral sense that develops in the shadows of particular histories of experience. With this proposition, he traces through the historical past experiences of the Kallars from medieval times. He writes of the "Criminal Tribes Act" and the brutal policing of subjects under this act. This is still a living memory that is commemorated and regaled as stories by the Kallar people. He writes of a Tamil moral tradition that celebrates the cultural ethos of the upstanding agrarian citizen in which "Kallars" are excluded as living beyond the pale of civilized human habitation, to the metonymically named "Katu". This moral tradition which is exemplified by didactic verses from the Tamil literary canon that spans from the later centuries of the first millennium to the medieval period includes some of the more popular works like the "Kural" and "Athichudi" which continue to exercise the popular imagination. As Pandian mentions, they continue to circulate in contemporary moral discourse as proverbs and maxims, "Old Sayings" and folk verities stripped of their historical referents and carrying with them nothing more than the concrete scenes of the agrarian livelihood they invoke. These two streams of moralising traditions, one from the precolonial past and the other from the pedagogical attempts of colonial authorities continue to influence contemporary Kallar moral selves.
With this historical background in mind, Pandian attempts to identify the virtues and the lack of them that mark out and separate Kallar selves from the supposedly more civilized others. These recognized in markedly oppositional terms forms the crux of each one of his essays. Savagery versus Civility, Propriety versus Impropriety, Restraint versus Thievishness.
Savagery, Pandian writes in his first essay with the experience of one who has lived amongst the Kallars, is not only the opinion others hold but also what the Kallars themselves hold about themselves. Culture and civility the very antithesis of savagery is associated in both Western history and Sanskritic verses with cities, courts and other urban social formations, but in the Tamil country a pre-colonial civility that has its roots in a moral cultivation practised in an agricultural milieu has been able to take a preeminent role.For the Piramalai Kallars settled in the Cumbum Valley as agriculturalists in recent times, this moral standard of civility is the one against which they hold themselves and their neighbours into account. According to Pandian, Piramalai Kallars by continuing to invoke the spectre of savagery incite themselves and others to reform. Here Pandian mentions with experiences and anecdotes that the practises of cultivation are not only a means of material development but also a means of transformation of their supposedly savage selves. Turning to the virtue of Propriety, Pandian traces the tenuous links that hold Piramalai Kallars in Cumbum Valley to being proper agrarian citizens, the Tamil "Kutiyanavan" inspite of being predominantly involved in agriculture both as tenants and landlords. In his numerous interviews with his individual Kallar interlocutors he finds overwhelmingly that they refuse to identify themselves as "Kutiyanavan". This feeling leads him to an exploration of the historical antagonism caused by rival forms of political sovereignty exercised by Kallars in the form of "Kallar Kaval". "Kallar Kaval" in Southern Tamilnadu involved bands of Kallars stealing produce and livestock from villages finally forcing villagers to employ the same Kallars as watchmen to protect themselves from their predation. This form of Sovereignty which never had much moral legitimacy was exacerbated under British rule with both the practise and the practitioners being labelled as Criminal. During the later part of the 19th century, agricultural citizens banded together to force Kallars altogether out of villages that they inhabited. Thousands of homes were burned and dozens killed in this Anti-Kallar movement. The reverberation of this historical antagonism continues to this day in the conception of Kallar selves as somehow alien to the natural agrarian psychical milieu.
Pandian in his next essay reflects on the nature of restraint and its relation to criminality. He discusses the intellectual milieu in Europe that gave rise to the idea of a Criminal man. The outcome of this understanding being the implementation of "Criminal Tribe Act" of 1918. He traces the common denominator in both Western and Tamil thought of looking at the unrestrained mind as bestial or animal-like. Moving to contemporary times, an often remarked statement by other communities is that Kallars rose from penury to prosperous householders because they alone were willing to follow every " Crooked Path".This sets him on an exploration of how Kallars make sense of their wayward trajectories. Interviews with individual Kallars reveal how animal metonyms from Tamil cultural life help them in identifying the nature of these impulses, setting boundaries of acceptability and generally explaining them.
Pandian in his penultimate two essays writes on two virtues that inhabit an ambivalent place in Kallar imagination, toil and sympathy. Tracing the history of the idea that agricultural toil as suffering from medieval tamil didactic verses, the British attempt to reform Kallars by settling them as agricultural cultivators to the current day experience of cultivators for whom agricultural production is a gamble, which is in Pandian's words a work "whose rythms are set from far off". He narrates of the historical antecedents which steered Kallars to the path of agricultural toil, the damming of the Periyar river to irrigate the Cumbum valley, the missionary and police efforts to reformation with the setting up of Kallar Voluntary Settlement (an agricultural workers colony)
and the distribution of land grants in the Cumbum valley to penniless migrants. But the moral value of hard work is deeply ambiguous because as Pandian says its appeal is questioned by the easy wealth of those who do not toil that much at all. Qualities such as cleverness and cunning, the ability to navigate the simplest and most convenient route through complicated social and economic terrain, regardless of how crooked that path may be seems to net appreciable returns than the patient forecasts and deliberate acts of a life of toil. Lastly the unpredictable workings of accident, chance and fortune amplified by technological developments as well as the neo-liberal political order question the very faith in time upon which toil depends, the sense that acts in the present may be expected to yield predictably in the future.
This book is a different genre of sociological writing which I found very illuminating coming as I'm from Kanyakumari district which as part of South Travancore is culturally distinct from the lowland Tamil country referenced in this book. The essays with their soaring academic rhetoric weave together images and arguments from vernacular films and poetry to European philosophy that evokes a language of grandeur and beauty. But in a very few parts of the book I had the nagging feeling that these magnificently crafted arguments do not advance but rather conclusions are exaggeratedly tied to them.But this should not distract from the very central themes that run through the book, that in the Tamil countryside the act of cultivation as a practice of moral development,the Kallars uneasy fit into an agricultural world that has their moral selves constantly under judgement both by themselves and others around them, the ambivalence present in the practice of the virtues of agrarian civility in the modern world and the tension in which it exists. From my own experience, now that I live in Chennai where Tamils from everywhere live in an urban environment, the readings from this book often strike me as revelatory in their explanation.
But as i mentioned in the start of my review, my interest in this book is not just purely sociological but also my own anxiety if the moral imagination, discourses and practices that developed over a millennia in what the historian Burton Stein called "One of the most durable peasant culture areas in history" could help in the sustainment of a liberal democratic political culture in present day Tamilnadu.
Some 200 miles north east of Cumbum valley in Tiruchengode, young Gokul Raj was kidnapped and murdered in a gruesome manner by a caste outfit gang belonging to the dominant agriculturalists of that area. The crime that he was accused of was being friendly with a girl belonging to the dominant Gounder caste.In the days that the prime accused Yuvraj was absconding, the earnest young dalit lady officer who was assigned to track the case committed suicide. The ostensible reason for her act being the unreasonable pressure exerted by her senior officers. When finally Yuvraj surrendered to the magistrate it was on his own terms with hundreds of lay, ordinary Gounders cheering him with a heroic welcome.But what was most ominous in this theatre of the diabolic was that none of the major political parties in the state condoled the young man's death nor condemned this act of murder in a serious and meaningful manner. This barbarism and its cheering by the Kongu Gounders, the dominant agriculturalists of Western Tamilnadu who as heirs and proud inheritors of this tradition of agrarian civility and culture should seem incongruous. When viewed superfluously, could this be a common state of all civilization immortalized by Yeats famous verse of "Things falling apart and the blood dimmed tide being loosed". Contrarily, is there some thing faulty in the virtues as it is interpreted and practised that do not preclude such diabolic lawlessness. Is it as Pandian mentions in his introduction, the supple adaptiveness of the virtues to the contradictions and dilemmas of modern life because of it multiplicituous nature that proves to be its undoing. Is it a fundamental short coming caused by its lack of acknowledgement of a larger community and its shared vision. It is with these thoughts that I would like to end my review with the final essay of the book where Pandian meditates on the final virtue of sympathy. According to Pandian, sympathy in South India is best understood as the compassionate consequence of an uncalculating inner nature oriented towards the bonds of the past and the needs of the present rather than directed towards the foreseeable attainment of a desirable future. It is in this practise and cultivation of sympathy with all its ambivalences in the modern age do we see the slight glimmer of hope. This is a hope expressed subtly throughout the book, a hope for " a peaceful future".
The book is also interesting for a modern reader in the Indian context, because the ethnic group which has been selected has had a hoary history of being labelled as a "Crimnal Tribe" by the colonial authorities. Their very names "Kallars" an inheritance from a much older precolonial past translates literally as thieves. This being an assignment made by the dominant ethos and language of the agricultural citizen, the "Kutiyanavan" of the Tamil countryside. For readers like me, the interest is not just academical as an anthropological understanding of a "Community in Change". There is also a deeper personal interest that in being citizens of a common democratic state teetering in the precipice of disorder and lawlessness, an understanding this book attempts to bring about is invaluable.
The book as i mentioned before is a collection of essays.The essays set on contemporary
events, interviews, anecdotes and understandings within the background of a historical context and setting do not always achieve a clear demarcation.Anand Pandian starts with the contention that the urgency of how one "ought" to live is a moral sense that develops in the shadows of particular histories of experience. With this proposition, he traces through the historical past experiences of the Kallars from medieval times. He writes of the "Criminal Tribes Act" and the brutal policing of subjects under this act. This is still a living memory that is commemorated and regaled as stories by the Kallar people. He writes of a Tamil moral tradition that celebrates the cultural ethos of the upstanding agrarian citizen in which "Kallars" are excluded as living beyond the pale of civilized human habitation, to the metonymically named "Katu". This moral tradition which is exemplified by didactic verses from the Tamil literary canon that spans from the later centuries of the first millennium to the medieval period includes some of the more popular works like the "Kural" and "Athichudi" which continue to exercise the popular imagination. As Pandian mentions, they continue to circulate in contemporary moral discourse as proverbs and maxims, "Old Sayings" and folk verities stripped of their historical referents and carrying with them nothing more than the concrete scenes of the agrarian livelihood they invoke. These two streams of moralising traditions, one from the precolonial past and the other from the pedagogical attempts of colonial authorities continue to influence contemporary Kallar moral selves.
With this historical background in mind, Pandian attempts to identify the virtues and the lack of them that mark out and separate Kallar selves from the supposedly more civilized others. These recognized in markedly oppositional terms forms the crux of each one of his essays. Savagery versus Civility, Propriety versus Impropriety, Restraint versus Thievishness.
Savagery, Pandian writes in his first essay with the experience of one who has lived amongst the Kallars, is not only the opinion others hold but also what the Kallars themselves hold about themselves. Culture and civility the very antithesis of savagery is associated in both Western history and Sanskritic verses with cities, courts and other urban social formations, but in the Tamil country a pre-colonial civility that has its roots in a moral cultivation practised in an agricultural milieu has been able to take a preeminent role.For the Piramalai Kallars settled in the Cumbum Valley as agriculturalists in recent times, this moral standard of civility is the one against which they hold themselves and their neighbours into account. According to Pandian, Piramalai Kallars by continuing to invoke the spectre of savagery incite themselves and others to reform. Here Pandian mentions with experiences and anecdotes that the practises of cultivation are not only a means of material development but also a means of transformation of their supposedly savage selves. Turning to the virtue of Propriety, Pandian traces the tenuous links that hold Piramalai Kallars in Cumbum Valley to being proper agrarian citizens, the Tamil "Kutiyanavan" inspite of being predominantly involved in agriculture both as tenants and landlords. In his numerous interviews with his individual Kallar interlocutors he finds overwhelmingly that they refuse to identify themselves as "Kutiyanavan". This feeling leads him to an exploration of the historical antagonism caused by rival forms of political sovereignty exercised by Kallars in the form of "Kallar Kaval". "Kallar Kaval" in Southern Tamilnadu involved bands of Kallars stealing produce and livestock from villages finally forcing villagers to employ the same Kallars as watchmen to protect themselves from their predation. This form of Sovereignty which never had much moral legitimacy was exacerbated under British rule with both the practise and the practitioners being labelled as Criminal. During the later part of the 19th century, agricultural citizens banded together to force Kallars altogether out of villages that they inhabited. Thousands of homes were burned and dozens killed in this Anti-Kallar movement. The reverberation of this historical antagonism continues to this day in the conception of Kallar selves as somehow alien to the natural agrarian psychical milieu.
Pandian in his next essay reflects on the nature of restraint and its relation to criminality. He discusses the intellectual milieu in Europe that gave rise to the idea of a Criminal man. The outcome of this understanding being the implementation of "Criminal Tribe Act" of 1918. He traces the common denominator in both Western and Tamil thought of looking at the unrestrained mind as bestial or animal-like. Moving to contemporary times, an often remarked statement by other communities is that Kallars rose from penury to prosperous householders because they alone were willing to follow every " Crooked Path".This sets him on an exploration of how Kallars make sense of their wayward trajectories. Interviews with individual Kallars reveal how animal metonyms from Tamil cultural life help them in identifying the nature of these impulses, setting boundaries of acceptability and generally explaining them.
Pandian in his penultimate two essays writes on two virtues that inhabit an ambivalent place in Kallar imagination, toil and sympathy. Tracing the history of the idea that agricultural toil as suffering from medieval tamil didactic verses, the British attempt to reform Kallars by settling them as agricultural cultivators to the current day experience of cultivators for whom agricultural production is a gamble, which is in Pandian's words a work "whose rythms are set from far off". He narrates of the historical antecedents which steered Kallars to the path of agricultural toil, the damming of the Periyar river to irrigate the Cumbum valley, the missionary and police efforts to reformation with the setting up of Kallar Voluntary Settlement (an agricultural workers colony)
and the distribution of land grants in the Cumbum valley to penniless migrants. But the moral value of hard work is deeply ambiguous because as Pandian says its appeal is questioned by the easy wealth of those who do not toil that much at all. Qualities such as cleverness and cunning, the ability to navigate the simplest and most convenient route through complicated social and economic terrain, regardless of how crooked that path may be seems to net appreciable returns than the patient forecasts and deliberate acts of a life of toil. Lastly the unpredictable workings of accident, chance and fortune amplified by technological developments as well as the neo-liberal political order question the very faith in time upon which toil depends, the sense that acts in the present may be expected to yield predictably in the future.
This book is a different genre of sociological writing which I found very illuminating coming as I'm from Kanyakumari district which as part of South Travancore is culturally distinct from the lowland Tamil country referenced in this book. The essays with their soaring academic rhetoric weave together images and arguments from vernacular films and poetry to European philosophy that evokes a language of grandeur and beauty. But in a very few parts of the book I had the nagging feeling that these magnificently crafted arguments do not advance but rather conclusions are exaggeratedly tied to them.But this should not distract from the very central themes that run through the book, that in the Tamil countryside the act of cultivation as a practice of moral development,the Kallars uneasy fit into an agricultural world that has their moral selves constantly under judgement both by themselves and others around them, the ambivalence present in the practice of the virtues of agrarian civility in the modern world and the tension in which it exists. From my own experience, now that I live in Chennai where Tamils from everywhere live in an urban environment, the readings from this book often strike me as revelatory in their explanation.
But as i mentioned in the start of my review, my interest in this book is not just purely sociological but also my own anxiety if the moral imagination, discourses and practices that developed over a millennia in what the historian Burton Stein called "One of the most durable peasant culture areas in history" could help in the sustainment of a liberal democratic political culture in present day Tamilnadu.
Some 200 miles north east of Cumbum valley in Tiruchengode, young Gokul Raj was kidnapped and murdered in a gruesome manner by a caste outfit gang belonging to the dominant agriculturalists of that area. The crime that he was accused of was being friendly with a girl belonging to the dominant Gounder caste.In the days that the prime accused Yuvraj was absconding, the earnest young dalit lady officer who was assigned to track the case committed suicide. The ostensible reason for her act being the unreasonable pressure exerted by her senior officers. When finally Yuvraj surrendered to the magistrate it was on his own terms with hundreds of lay, ordinary Gounders cheering him with a heroic welcome.But what was most ominous in this theatre of the diabolic was that none of the major political parties in the state condoled the young man's death nor condemned this act of murder in a serious and meaningful manner. This barbarism and its cheering by the Kongu Gounders, the dominant agriculturalists of Western Tamilnadu who as heirs and proud inheritors of this tradition of agrarian civility and culture should seem incongruous. When viewed superfluously, could this be a common state of all civilization immortalized by Yeats famous verse of "Things falling apart and the blood dimmed tide being loosed". Contrarily, is there some thing faulty in the virtues as it is interpreted and practised that do not preclude such diabolic lawlessness. Is it as Pandian mentions in his introduction, the supple adaptiveness of the virtues to the contradictions and dilemmas of modern life because of it multiplicituous nature that proves to be its undoing. Is it a fundamental short coming caused by its lack of acknowledgement of a larger community and its shared vision. It is with these thoughts that I would like to end my review with the final essay of the book where Pandian meditates on the final virtue of sympathy. According to Pandian, sympathy in South India is best understood as the compassionate consequence of an uncalculating inner nature oriented towards the bonds of the past and the needs of the present rather than directed towards the foreseeable attainment of a desirable future. It is in this practise and cultivation of sympathy with all its ambivalences in the modern age do we see the slight glimmer of hope. This is a hope expressed subtly throughout the book, a hope for " a peaceful future".
Labels: Review of Sociology
posted by Deepak @ 02:51
0 Comments
