4. From Slaves to the Original Dravidians

In the 1880s and 1890s, the utopian movement among Indian and British commentators became pervasive, forming another key epistemological moment in the dialogic process. Most critically, this utopian urge expressed itself in an effort to “understand” why the poor, whether in India or in Britain, were getting poorer. This movement, in many ways an extension of the Condition of England discussion or the Condition of India movement, was not a naïve activity designed simply to understand the effects of colonialism or industrialization. An increasing amount of evidence suggests that this discussion aimed to define modern society to confine all individuals, especially the poor, to a specific dwelling, to one place. Whether referring to the paraiyar bonded laborers in Chingleput district or the poverty-stricken people of the East End of London, analysts attempted to prevent the poor from moving around. As we will see, in the Tamil area as well, definite precolonial conceptions differentiated nomadic from sedentary populations. The dialogic construction of “the sedentary paraiyar” resulted from both local and British ideas and became a principal focus of discussions in the 1880s and 1890s.

The cultural interrelations presumed to exist between the virtues of a sedentary life and the state’s interests in a prosperous society were so vigorous because a sedentary life represented a basic ingredient in the definition of citizenship. For the British, social commentator Henry Mayhew put this idea most stridently in 1861 in his famous investigation called London Labour and the London Poor:

There are the urban and suburban wanderers, or those who follow some itinerant occupation, in and around the large towns. Such are…the pickpockets—the beggars—the prostitutes—the street sellers—the street performers—the cabmen—the coach-men—the watermen—the sailors and such like. In each of these classes—according as they partake more or less of the purely vagabond, doing nothing whatsoever for their living, but moving from place to place preying upon the earnings of the more industrious portions of the community, so will the attributes of the nomade [sic] tribes be more or less marked in them. [These groups are marked by] their lax ideas of property—for their general improvidence—their repugnance of continuous labour—their love of cruelty—their pugnacity—and their utter want of religion.^[1]

Catherine Gallagher has shown that Mayhew looked on these “itinerant” individuals as people who used up the nutriment that would ordinarily have gone into the bodies of productive workers: “The placement of the valuable, problematic body at the center of social discourse led, through the circular logic just outlined, to the division of the social organism into valuable (weak but productive) and problematic (strong but unproductive) bodies. Around this axis much nineteenth-century [British] social criticism revolves.”^[2] Furthermore, she has written, “Nonproductivity has for its sign ‘nomadic’ movement, and movement has for its sign…a strong body.”^[3] Similarly, by the end of our period, the Madras government could take even the use of alcoholic drink as a sign of a settled, healthy (hence, productive) and economically stable agrarian work force. British assumptions thus joined with complementary local notions to produce the need for “proof” of a sedentarized and “emancipated” or “disciplined” pauper. Not surprisingly, such evidence was eagerly discovered and joyfully discussed.

Categories of Social Dependence and Loyalty

For many years, collectors in Chingleput had been preoccupied with perceived agricultural decay and the need for emancipating the land from the Mirasidars. As we have seen, Crole concluded that since the mirasi system no longer existed, land was free and available to any person who wished to buy it. Mirasidars no longer had a privileged prerogative over the lands they did not cultivate. He looked to the Madras government to state this authoritatively, to shift the monologic narrative to a new construction that aligned free land with fixed individual bodies to form a prosperous state. Crole interested himself in a wide variety of things but primarily in the soil, the productivity, and the tenure of the district. He was therefore part of what we can call an “old” school that could do its work without concerning itself with the social and economic positions of the underprivileged individuals around it. Rather, he considered that the land had been emancipated from the grip of outdated vestiges of an earlier age, and he sought the government’s aid in that project.

In his claims for land that would be emancipated in the future, he did not address the question of social emancipation. Specifically, he did not address himself to the problem of the degraded position of the individuals who had been Pannaiyals or bonded laborers before 1861 and who were largely paraiyars. Thus, his comments about the manner in which proprietary relations operated in the district were in many ways a metaphor for the operation of social and economic relations between the Mirasidars and Padiyals and former Pannaiyals.

At the same time, Crole performed an important historical task by compiling the Chingleput Manual. In it, he referred to a large variety of perceived moral problems, seizing the opportunity to change the signification attached to elements of the society on whom the British depended. Among these groups were low-caste boatmen who operated along the coastal waters up and down the Chingleput district. They were theoretically important for the project to sedentarize agricultural groups because they occupied very different spatial areas than did those who spent their time on land.

The boatmen had long posed a problem. Some years before Crole, Cuniliffe, another collector of the district in 1855, had complained of the “unruly and insubordinate” behavior of the boatmen who carried the salt produced by government salt works. He argued that “when employed at Ennore [to the north of Madras], they strike work on the least provocation and last week on…my declaring that the two boats had put off short handed and had been stranded should not receive their hire they threatened to go off to Madras.…These men give much trouble—we are very much in their hands.”^[4] That is, although the British had become masters of the subcontinent, they remained unable to dominate the boatmen in the Madras area. Boatmen formed part of a large community of low-caste Tamils operating on the sea who performed essential services for the British and others in the region. Crole cited in his manual the historical example of an incident in the wars between the British and the French for the supremacy of the Carnatic. When the French commander Lally held Madras under siege in 1759, the boatmen (of what later became the territory called the Jagir) acted in a way that was considered to be “loyal.” Crole deemed the incident worthy of record because it was a “pleasant exception to the greed and turncoat deception generally displayed by the natives with whom the Europeans had most to do.”^[5] This is the story.

On the night of 2 January 1759, the day when Lally opened fire on Madras, some European women were taken by “masula boats” during the siege of Sadras (slightly south of Madras), seeking the protection of the Dutch, whose settlement it was.^[6] However, in the meantime, Sadras had itself been taken by the French, who also captured the boats and the passengers. In due course, on 8 January the French sent the three masula boats back to Lally and the French army in Blacktown (the “indigenous” or “black” part of Madras), with fifty barrels of gunpowder and other military stores accompanied by a French soldier in each boat. Crole quoted Robert Orme’s description:

At four in the morning when they were opposite the [English] fort [St. George], each of the soldiers had fallen fast asleep, on which the boatmen concerted in their own language [Tamil] with the certainty of not being understood, although overheard; and having first poured water into the firelocks, overpowered and bound the soldiers, and then landed the boats at the [English] sea gate. This uncommon instance of fidelity and spirit in men, who are deemed a mean and outcaste race, was rewarded and encouraged by paying them immediately the full value of the gunpowder and stores.^[7]

Crole concluded his account of the incident by asking, “Does this spirit and fidelity continue as a monopoly of the mean and the outcaste?”^[8] Crole thus used these accounts of the past to help him in the grand historical project of providing a new signification for “slave,” “paraiyar,” and “outcaste” that contained loyalty, trustworthiness, and productivity. At the same time, there appears to have been no real attempt to change the structural position of the boatmen or the paraiyars in the nineteenth century. Rather, Crole’s statements formed part of a general attempt to put those low-caste persons within new categories being produced on a large scale by both Indians and British.

The Description of Poverty and Slavery as a Way to Sedentarize the Poor

Opposed to this set of ideas expressed by Crole, another group—of government servants, journalists, missionaries, and others—became concerned primarily with poverty. Specifically, they became preoccupied with the political and bodily effects of impoverishment. The members of this “new school” claimed that though the government had emancipated former Pannaiyals or debt-bonded men by a series of laws, they structurally still served as slaves. What this suggests is that the question of “emancipation” in the Chingleput district had two meanings to the officers of the government resident there in the 1880s. One sense alluded to the “liberation of the land” from the Mirasidars, providing “land” with a new signification. The other signification referred to the “emancipation of the slaves,” providing “slavery” with a new signification.^[9]

This development is important for our purposes because in Chingleput a direct connection existed between the emancipation of the land from the Mirasidars and the emancipation of the Pannaiyals from their vellala and brahman masters. Specifically, for the project of sedentarizing the peasantry of Chingleput to succeed, the construction of the Tondaimandalam village as immobile and antique had to be linked with an equally new production of “truth,” in which the paraiyars, even though they were the poorest, became constructed as the most loyal and the most sedentary of anybody in the entire population. To effect this linkage, a general cultural project had to be undertaken in which all inhabitants, all voices would participate in creating the knowledge that ensured that all members of the population remained in identifiable places.

In Chapters 2 and 3, we examined the cultural thinking and practical working out of the first task of this historical project, the archaicizing of Tondaimandalam villages as a basis for a future state and society. In this chapter and the Conclusion, we will look at the strategies undertaken to accomplish a second historical task, that of creating a description of the situation of the poor. This attempt showed that the paraiyars of Tondaimandalam were the original settlers of the area in order to give them the right to individual dwellings so that they would not move. This naturally included the development of a separate ethnic identity for the paraiyars as the original Dravidians, who were in fact the original settlers of the area. The project of establishing a sedentary population became directly connected with ethnic singularity. The general movement toward an increasingly settled population in the nineteenth century incited all members of the community to discourse no matter what their location in the social hierarchy. As we know from many other contexts, this involved enormous excitement and pleasure for individuals at all levels of society. It also involved a vast elaboration of the description not only of the poor but of many other elements of the society as well. In a sense, the more social repression there was, the more knowledge was created.

The movement to sedentarize the population of Chingleput was mirrored by other similar developments in many other areas of India. As part of that general intellectual and economic activity, specific attempts were made to speak about what was conceived to be the growing poverty of India under British rule. In many ways, this discussion about the poverty of India became intertwined with and extended the earlier Condition of England debate in Britain. Both discussions had as their goal the continuing classification of the social community. Though much of the debate focused on the poor, the discussion aimed at defining the values of middle-class society and of citizenship generally.

As part of the extended Condition of England debate, a discussion about housing for the poor arose in the 1880s in Britain. This was particularly concerned with the destitute of East London. One of the most influential pamphlets on the subject, The Bitter Cry of Outcaste London, jointly authored by a nonconformist minister named Andrew Mearns and others, appeared in 1883.^[10] As K. S. Inglis has noted, the pamphlet served as “a plea for parliamentary action, especially to provide decent cheap housing” for the poor.^[11] It is also certain that The Bitter Cry was partly based on “a more vivid tract” by G. R. Sims entitled How the Poor Live.^[12] These two publications joined a number of other pamphlets and articles, as well as reviews of the day by Joseph Chamberlain, Richard Cross, and others, and articles published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1883 and later about the housing conditions of England’s poor.

Some authors argue that this spate of publicity simply formed an attempt to disempower the dangerous classes. Anthony Wohl, for instance, has pointed out that Charles Kingsley had written a quarter of a century earlier that “better working-class housing would pay in many ways, especially by ‘gradually absorbing the dangerous classes.’ ”^[13] In the same way, Sims observed that “this mighty mob of famished, diseased, and filthy helots is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically dangerous.” He warned that “its lawless armies may sally forth and give us a taste of the lesson the mob has tried to teach in Paris, when long years of neglect have done their work.”^[14] Therefore, the concern of British middle-class reformers with the housing of the poor and their economic plight, according to Wohl’s analysis, focused on making the poor powerless. What Wohl does not see is that this activity also helped to interactively create categories that defined both the poor and the middle classes in a society in which productivity and living to maturity became increasingly important.

Another work, printed toward the end of the period when the terms and vocabulary of the debate had already been largely set, was “General” William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out. This book appeared in late 1890 after the appearance of Stanley’s In Darkest Africa.^[15] Booth noted in his preface that the strategies traditionally employed by Christian philanthropy were totally inadequate for dealing with the “despairing miseries” of a group of people he called the “outcast classes.”^[16] Booth said, “As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilisation, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors and discover within a stone’s throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?”^[17] Whether it was prostitution in England or slavery in Africa, the problem was the same. “And when once,” he wrote, “the poor girl has consented to buy the right to earn her living by the sacrifice of her virtue, then she is treated as a slave and an outcast by the very men who have ruined her.”^[18] Moreover, Booth asked whether any “African slave system, making allowances for the superior civilisation, and therefore sensitiveness, of the victims, reveals more misery,” saying, “Just as in Darkest Africa it is only a part of the evil and misery that comes from the superior race who invade the forest to enslave and massacre its miserable inhabitants, so with us, much of the misery of those whose lot we are considering arises from their own habits. Drunkenness and all manner of uncleanness, moral and physical, abound.”^[19] Booth felt, as Stanley had indicated, that there was a way out, that change was possible.^[20] In other words, with discipline, planning, and application of the appropriate methods, even poor people could make a social and economic contribution and live a better life.

Invoking the Scientific Method

What is important about the appeal of William Booth and the many social reformers like him is that the debate became bound by a particular vocabulary and an invocation of a particular method.^[21] These ideas formed part of a new category of a normalized and productive society, with a vocabulary that included the words “slavery,” “outcast,” “uncleanness,” “depravity,” “drunkenness,” and “misery.” The method conjured up was the scientific method, with that use of abundant statistics considered to be the mark of many social reports.^[22] Shaped by the desire to “describe the condition of the poor” through the use of collected detail, these reports eschewed sensationalism to make a point seem incontrovertible. As Charles Booth, William’s namesake, said when he introduced his huge study called Life and Labour of the People of London, “The materials for sensational stories lie plentifully in every book of our notes; but, even if I had the skill to use my material in this way—I should not wish to use it here.”^[23] More important was the creation of an impression of great precision to communicate a perception of disinterestedness, completeness, and authority. By these devices, social reformers and their supporters sought to demonstrate the extent of the “problem” and the “solution” of the Condition of England. Even William Booth, who was both florid and sensational in his oral style, wrote that with the help of other writers he was appealing “neither to hysterical emotionalists nor headlong enthusiasts.” Rather, he said, he sought to “understate” the problem in a spirit of “scientific investigation.”^[24] He also called himself “a practical man” who wanted to deal “with sternly prosaic facts.”^[25]

Conceptions of the scientific method helped to set the terms of the category of “normalized poor” in England. This is well illustrated by William Booth’s focus on what he called the “submerged tenth,” a total of three million poor, most of whom lived in London. He wanted to examine the living conditions of “the Lost,…the Outcast,…the Disinherited of the world.” This group of people, “by their utmost exertions are unable to attain the regulation allowance of food which the law prescribes as indispensable even for the worst criminals in our gaols.”^[26] Booth also proposed that this group of people should be treated at least as well as a London cab horse. Naturally, it was presumed that like prisoners and domestic animals the poor should not only be given a decent diet but should also be trained, watched, and cared for—and enclosed. In this analysis, the condition of prisoners and household animals therefore became the standard for which aid was to be sought for this “outcast” population.

These arguments are important for our purposes because they applied not only to India in general but specifically to the Parakkudis or tenants-at-will and the Padiyals in the Chingleput district, many of whom were paraiyars or untouchable. Individuals, drawn from all levels of society, whether British or Indian, used these and other ideas to develop even further their utopian visions of progress and history.

Did the British Pauperize India?

The Condition of England debate also set the terms in which many Indians and British looked at the Condition of India. As in the case of the discussion about England, the debate in India was concerned with the impact of modern civilization, and particularly the administration of the British, on the poverty of India. Whether true or not, the sense among many Indians and British that the moral and economic condition of India had declined gave much urgency to the controversy. This debate extended for half a century from the 1870s onward. One individual influential in this dispute was Dadabhai Naoroji, “an older Parsi merchant who lived in London and acted as an informal ambassador for the nationalist cause for half a century.”^[27] Naoroji had argued that though the British made a solemn promise to bring wealth and contentment to India, they had gone back on their word. In an essay entitled “The Poverty of India,” he demonstrated that the extent of poverty in India under the British had increased rather than decreased.^[28]

Ideas about the decay of Indian economic and moral life were naturally reflected in the discussions on the Chingleput district. Both British officials and members of the local population in Chingleput had claimed that the area had been in a decayed condition since the end of the eighteenth century. However, not until 1871 did Dadabhai Naoroji, using statistics taken from government sources, concern himself with the problem, arguing that the problem involved the “continuous impoverishment and exhaustion of the country.” During that time, then, local debates in Chingleput became specifically articulated with national and international controversies.^[29] Indeed, the Chingleput discourse rested on Naoroji’s demonstration in 1871 that the average annual per capita income of Indians was rupees 20 a year.^[30]

Both in 1866 and in 1876–78, serious famines struck South India; the Bellary famine of 1866 and the famine of 1876–78 were both widely documented by photographers. William Digby, a journalist who had edited the Madras Times, also attempted to illustrate the growing pauperization of India through his book entitled India for the Indians—and for England.^[31] Another author named Seymour Keay wrote a series of articles in Nineteenth Century entitled “The Spoliation of India.”^[32] Partly in reaction to the work of Digby and Keay, Samuel Smith, a liberal MP from Lancashire and friend of Naoroji, wrote a series of articles in the Contemporary Review following his second trip to India.^[33]

Smith’s ideas, like those of Keay and Naoroji, helped to focus awareness on the fact that some educated Indians felt that Britain had pillaged India and continued to drain it of its resources. This thought contrasted dramatically with the presumption in Britain that India was “immensely indebted” to the British, who had converted a “land of anarchy and misrule into one of peace and contentment, that poverty is giving place to plenty, and a low, corrupt civilization to one immensely higher.” Smith went on to shock Englishmen with the discovery that “instead of contentment one finds in many places great dissatisfaction, and a widespread belief that India is getting poorer and less happy.”^[34] Moreover, he argued that the poverty in India “is extreme and more acute than what we witness in Europe.”^[35] British culture and the government desire for excise income were “rapidly spreading drunkenness among the people of Bengal in order to supply revenue to the Government.”^[36] Smith also identified “not a little friction” between “native opinion” and official views. The Indians, said Smith, “think that the English officials stand between them and their just rights and claims.”^[37] However, he noted that “no such complaint” had been lodged against “the British Nation” as such. There was, he stated, “a strong belief in their justice and good faith, and the constant desire of the Indian people is to get access to them, in order to lay their complaints before that august tribunal. They fully believe that if the British Parliament and people were made acquainted with their grievances they would remedy them. It is almost touching to see the simplicity of their faith.”^[38] In other words, the British middle-class ideals of justice and good faith had also been consensually supported and created in India by British and Indians from all levels of society. At the same time, however, some British and Indians blamed England for the impoverished state of India. The “loyalty” invoked by both Smith and Naoroji formed part of the same project, the same invocation to which Crole referred in his account of the low-caste boatmen in the fight against the French in the middle of the eighteenth century. Fervent belief in these ideals by Indian writers and thinkers made British policy in India seem particularly galling.

The tension between the two approaches was critical to the claims made by both British commentators like Keay and many Indians and led to great participation in the project to create a kind of “truth” regarding what had been pursued by the British rulers and others since the last decade of the eighteenth century. As part of the same enterprise to which Smith subscribed, Naoroji himself wrote in the Contemporary Review a year later:

Now, I have no complaint whatever against the British Nation or British rule. On the contrary, we have every reason to be thankful that of all the nations in the world it has been our good fortune to be placed under the British nation—a nation noble and great in its instincts; among the most advanced, if not the most advanced, in civilization; foremost in the advancement of humanity in all its varied wants and circumstances; the sources and fountainhead of true liberty and of political progress in the world; in short, a nation in which all that is just, generous and truly free is most happily combined.^[39]

Gauri Viswanathan has recently argued that the introduction of literary study in place of religion by the British operated a veiled mechanism of social control to keep Indian society governable without the use of violence.^[40] Viswanathan, however, describes this as a willed activity by a state that was fragile and therefore unusually vulnerable. By the end of the nineteenth century, she argues that this kind of literary study became used as a way to show Indians their subservient and appropriate social role in the colonial society established by the British. Viswanathan quotes essays written by two Bengali students in Calcutta in 1843 to show that British strategies of social control had effectively subdued and overpowered them and that therefore the policy of the government was effective. However, the process of creating a discourse involves both the rulers and the ruled. For example, in one of the passages quoted from an essay by Nobichunder Dass, a student at Hooghly College in Calcutta, a principal object of this education in India is identified as the creation of knowledge about future society, a project in which many Indians from all social levels also eagerly participated. Whether in the countryside or in urban environments, the general project to create a modern state incited people to discourse. As one of those participants, Nobichunder wrote

The English are to us what the Romans were to the English; and as the English are the children of modern times, and command more resources and power than the Romans, we derive great advantage. The facility afforded to communication by the use of steam has enabled the English to govern our country with great prudence and vigilance, they do not appear to be at any time at risk of forbearing in the glorious work which they had commenced, of improving the native mind and condition, but prosecute it with honour to themselves and favour to their subjects, till they are styled the regenerators of India.

It may be argued that this one-way, top-down kind of social control and creation of knowledge through British education provoked Naoroji to say what he did. In reality, it formed another case of multiauthorship among many millions of Indians, Europeans, and others. There is much evidence to show other Indian writers acting and writing along the same lines at this time as part of this general dialogic project. Social values and policy reinforced one another in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In the late 1890s, when the two serious famines in South India “cast serious doubts on official estimates of increasing prosperity” in India, the value of British ideals—of justice, humanity, and fairness—suddenly became problematized, helping to fuel the debate over the impoverishment of India to an even greater extent.^[41] W. S. Caine, an MP speaking on the Indian Famine Commission Report in 1902, referred to this fact when he spoke of the “evidence of the horrible poverty of the agricultural people of India, the evidence of recurring famine with ever-increasing intensity.”^[42] During that time, a substantial discussion in the press and in government circles questioned whether India was becoming poorer as a result of its connection with Britain (and by inference from its association with modern civilization generally). It is partly in this connection that Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote his utopianist booklet entitled Hind Swaraj in 1908.^[43] William Digby, an editor of the Madras Times who had penned an account of the famine in 1876–78, also said that “Lord Macaulay, Mr. Grant Duff, and others believe that when the English tongue alone is spoken, and the Christian religion is generally professed, the difficult problems which are characteristic of European countries will be encountered in India.”^[44] Digby also noted that one unnamed individual had pointed out that “if India becomes Christianised, if all the people become converted to what the missionaries teach, a Poor Law will be a necessary consequence.” This was true, he said, because in Europe all the poor were supported by the state while in India the poor were taken care of by the people themselves.^[45] He thus pointed to the great disadvantages in bringing western modes of government and social organization to India, particularly the notion of the state’s responsibility for the poor. However, in an address in 1900, in terms very similar to the debate between the anti-abolitionists and the factory reformers in early nineteenth-century England, Naoroji observed that “Indian Natives were mere helots. They were worse than American slaves, for the latter were at least taken care of by their masters, whose property they were.”^[46] Even W. W. Hunter, director general of statistics to the government of India, in his book England’s Work in India, wrote that “forty millions of the people of India habitually go through life on insufficient food.”^[47]

The comparative nature of these assessments of Indian poverty helped to raise the stakes in the debate. Statements by intellectuals and writers of comparative wealth in India and elsewhere also produced much oversensitivity among government officers.^[48] The debate involved a considerable number of individuals, ranging across a diverse spectrum including W. H. Moreland, whose India at the Death of Akbar did not appear until 1920, and S. Srinivasa Raghavaiyangar, whose Memorandum on the Progress of the Madras Presidency during the Last Forty Years of British Administration, commissioned by Lord Connemara, the governor of Madras, appeared in 1893.^[49]

Many officials in the Indo-British administration sought to defend the government’s policies in the face of attacks by individuals such as Naoroji. For instance, the former governor of Madras Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff wrote articles in 1886 to that effect, answering the views of Samuel Smith.^[50] Grant-Duff’s articles were answered in turn by Naoroji himself.^[51]

Grant-Duff and others sought to discount the legitimacy of Indian complaints. Grant-Duff, for instance, argued that Smith had depended unnecessarily on the “pushing talkers of the big towns, full of the last new ‘cleverisms,’ just sharp enough to repeat the parrot cries of European mischief-makers, and to be ingeniously wrong on most subjects.”^[52] Grant-Duff admitted that “there is in many parts of India frightful poverty, but is there not the same and even worse, in our own country?”^[53] For Grant-Duff, the question was not so much whether India was getting poorer but rather who was making those claims and what their unstated goals were. “What the pert scribblers in the native press, and the intriguers of the Presidency towns” wanted were “increased opportunities for themselves—Government employment and political changes, which may increase their personal importance.”^[54] “The only possible question,” he said, related to the relative benefit obtained “between the rule of the Englishman and of the Brahmin, the Aryan of the West and the Aryan of the East.” Grant-Duff wondered whether Samuel Smith would “do a good turn to the 254 millions of natives if he were to hand them over to a much greater extent to Brahmin domination?”^[55] Much better to have rule by the British than rule by even the most educated Indians.

Could these Indians know anything about either India or Britain? Grant-Duff wondered how any Indians to whom Smith had spoken and who “made no complaint” about the “British nation” could even know what that “British Nation” represented:

A very few of them [Indians] have been able to cross the seas without ensuring their own damnation, have been received in England as strange and interesting creatures, petted, and made cub lions of.…Every English-speaking ‘native’ who finds his way to London is as interesting to the home-keeping Briton as is a mango in Pall Mall. In Bombay or Madras a mango is a mango.^[56]

Grant-Duff argued that British rule had brought wealth and food to a needy India. He nevertheless admitted that “there is in many parts of India frightful poverty.”^[57] Grant-Duff also wrote, “The question worth answering is: Do the Indian masses obtain, one year after another, a larger or smaller amount of material well-being than the peasantry of Western Europe? Speaking of the huge province of Madras…and I have visited every district in it—I think they do.”^[58]

According to the critics of this opinion, the main problem related to British intentions. In the first of his rebuttals to Grant-Duff, Naoroji claimed that in 1833 and again in 1858 the British had pledged to make India prosperous.^[59] He also claimed that they had not fulfilled those promises. Part of this controversy had occurred fifteen years earlier. In 1870, Grant-Duff as a member of the Commons had asked another member, Sir Wilfred Lawson, in the debate on opium, “Would it be tolerable to enforce a view of morality that was not theirs, which had never indeed been accepted by any large portion of the human race, we should grind an already poor population to the very dust with new taxation?”^[60]

A year later in 1871, Grant-Duff, who had been the under secretary for India, focused on the contrast between the per capita annual income of a person in Britain (thirty pounds) with that of India (two pounds). Grant-Duff had concluded at that time that “even our comparative wealth will be looked back upon by future ages as a state of semi-barbarism. But what are we to say of the state of India? How many generations must pass away before that country has arrived at even the comparative wealth of this?”^[61] Grant-Duff’s estimates were also accepted by the viceroy Lord Mayo, who said, “We are perfectly cognizant of the relative poverty of this country as compared with European States.”^[62]

So long as they felt that they could set the terms of the debate on the Condition of India, British administrators were not defensive. However, when these critical statements were made by educated Indians, the accusations became intolerable. Naoroji had calculated that the average annual per capita income of Indians was rupees 20 and that in Madras it was a mere rupees 18.^[63] Naoroji in his 1887 article on “Views about India” wrote that according to Sir George Campbell the bulk of the people of the Madras presidency were paupers. Naoroji also quoted the views of W. R. Robertson, agricultural reporter to the government of Madras, who called the condition of the agricultural laborer “a disgrace to any country [and that] the condition of the agricultural population of Ireland is vastly superior to the condition of the similar classes in this country.”^[64] These comments and ideas appear to have sensitized officers of the Madras government, particularly a subcollector named Mullaly in the Chingleput district.

What most offended the officials of the British government in India was Naoroji’s comparisons of India with other parts of what we would now call the developed world: “The question at present is, Why, under the management of the most highly paid services in the world, India cannot produce as much even as the worst governed countries of Europe. I do not mean to blame the individuals of the Indian service. It is the policy, the perversion of the pledges, that is at the bottom of our misfortunes.”^[65] What is important in this debate is that Naoroji sought to invoke the value prized by administrators as the essential ingredient in the claims that the British had gone back on their word. Thus, the dialogue leveled two accusations against the British: they had impoverished India, and they had done so in direct contravention of their own pledges.

Had the British Impoverished Chingleput District?

Against this background, and specifically against this Naoroji’s rebuttal, Subcollector Mullaly of the Chingleput district sought to show that in that area of India, the Mirasidars’ agricultural Padiyals were being deprived of rights that the British had pledged to them. Moreover, Mullaly believed that the mandate of the government assured these Padiyals of a right to their houses. Let us look at the strategies that Mullaly and others followed to recreate the villages of Chingleput through the same sort of utopian urge that had characterized not only Place but also the Mirasidars, the tenants, and the Padiyals of the district.

Some time in 1888, the government of India sought to address what it defined as the problem of overpopulated tracts, apparently in response to a suggestion made by W. W. Hunter. As a result, the Indian government sent a resolution to all provincial governments asking them to review the measures taken for relief in these areas. This inquiry, said Hunter, encompassed some 250 districts in British India.^[66] Then on 19 October 1888, the government of India sent a resolution to all provincial governments requesting a report on the condition of what it defined as the lower classes of the population and on relief operations in these overpopulated tracts. This formed part of the inquiry set in motion by Lord Dufferin, the viceroy of India, on “the condition of the lower classes of the population.”

The inquiry resulted in a government of India resolution stating that the condition of “the lower classes of the agricultural population is not one which need cause any great anxiety at present.”^[67] This assertion could be maintained only with difficulty. For instance, one of the reports to the Madras government’s inquiries had argued that the Chingleput district was in a bad state. To this report by Collector Lee Warner the Madras government took exception. They argued that “the condition of the people [of the Chingleput district]…had markedly improved within the past ten years” since the time of the decision to recognize the swatantrams of the Mirasidars and carry out the tax reassessment. Lee Warner had forwarded two documents, including one from Reverend Adam Andrew, a missionary of the United Free Church of Scotland Mission in Chingleput town, reporting the results of inquiries into living conditions and wages of the paraiyar Padiyals in Chingleput.^[68] Lee Warner pointed out that the “wages ordinarily earned by the people are extremely low and that a large proportion of the population lives from hand to mouth, is badly housed, ill clothed, and compelled to be satisfied with a nutriment far below the sufficiency diet agreed upon by doctors as a necessity for life.” Lee Warner’s references to “scientific standards” for health and poverty emerged from the Condition of India discussion, which referred to the need for state intervention to protect the health of the poor. In rebuttal, the Board of Revenue in Madras agreed that the condition of the lower classes in the Chingleput district may not have been very satisfactory but said that “ this is mainly due to the general poverty of the soil.”^[69] The Board did not feel that anything that Lee Warner had written or submitted had shown that “any large proportion of the population suffers from a daily insufficiency of food.”^[70]

According to the governments of both India and Madras, Britain had restored order to India and had “emancipated” the “slaves.” Therefore “slavery” could no longer exist. Through the work of the emancipation laws and the working of British culture, the bad aspects of the master-slave relationship had been removed and the good qualities of a landlord-laborer association had been retained. This individual and unilateral attempt aimed somehow to ban the “slave” category in favor of a category and terminology that used by turns “panchama,” “depressed classes,” “Harijan,” “scheduled classes,” and “Adi Dravida” or original Dravidian.

Indians and British during this period thus pursued a grand project to create knowledge about both “Indian” and “British” values. That project involved converting the Tamil paraiyars into ancient inhabitants of India by eliminating the “slave/paraiyar” signification and implanting a new signification of the paraiyars as the original Dravidians of India. As the “slavery category” was obliterated, the “Adi Dravida” or “Original Dravidian” category was summoned up in its stead.^[71] This complex procedure of eradicating the “slave” sign and transforming it into “the original Dravidians” is a process still underway. The result of actions taken by both Europeans and Indians, this activity and documentation helped to create knowledge about those considered to be the ancient inhabitants of South India. It continued work initiated by a wide variety of forces already at work in the land before the westerners arrived. These ideas had been argued by Ellis even in the early part of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the sensitivity of Christian missionaries had in the nineteenth century recruited converts from a variety of subcastes such as paraiyars and other “panchamas.” A sensitivity began developing among Hindu intellectuals, who wrote in the press about the difficulties of the paraiyars. Paraiyar leaders, largely Christian, used a journal called The Paraiyan to state how they perceived their present and past conditions. A significant number of British officers of the government also documented the positions of various populations of India in ancient times. British writers to the London press also contributed to this process.^[72]

What appears to have united these disparate efforts at this historical point in time was the new susceptibility of the government of India and the provincial governments to assure both the world and themselves that India was not poor or disorderly and that no slaves remained there. Within this context, the discussions that had been proceeding in the Chingleput district over the previous century formed the basis of much new knowledge created about the way the past helped create future society.

Fixing the Paraiyars in Their Houses

Much of the activity attempting to eliminate the signification of “slave/paraiyar” took place during the final two decades of the nineteenth century. To an unusual degree, this also became focused on the district of Chingleput. In August 1889, for example, Chingleput Collector Warner submitted an account of activities by his own subcollector, Mullaly, to his superiors, the Board of Revenue. This report concerned Mullaly’s attempt to get free house sites for the paraiyar Padiyals or day laborers in the Chingleput district.^[73] He noted that Mullaly had begun a process of trying to disprove the validity of the Mirasidars’ claims to the house sites of the paraiyar Padiyals. Warner also said that Mullaly was very vexed by “my interfering with his well-meant schemes for the improvement of the condition of the labouring poor, [and had] brought these hundreds of applications for [paraiyar and palli] dwelling sites on himself.” Significantly, though Warner and Mullaly occupied opposite sides of these reformistic impulses, both shared the goal of changing the “slave/paraiyar” signification.

Warner felt that it was best to let the people “settle such matters for themselves, merely watching the interest of Government that the total area allowed free of assessment is not excessive.” Warner forced Mullaly to put the names of the Mirasidars back on the cultivation accounts as the owners of the house sites from which “they had been struck without an inquiry, and to advise Mr. Mullaly to be more careful about not disturbing the relations between the two classes, viz. the Mirasidars and their sub-tenants [tenants-at-will or Parakkudis, many of whom were paraiyars], in the future.” Though many revenue officers looked on the entries in the old aḍangal or village cultivation accounts on cadjan or palm leaf forms as valueless, the courts referred to them as authoritative.

For his part, Mullaly had written in his report of 1889 that the problem of providing house sites for the paraiyar Padiyals had come to his attention four years previously, specifically in response to some allegations made by Dadabhai Naoroji.^[74] Numerous cases occurred in which assignments of puṟambōkku or wasteland had to be made for Parakkudi house sites since the existing village site was claimed by others or was simply insufficient. He took his examples from the cheri (Tamil “cēri”) or paraiyar settlement of Olalur, a village in the Chingleput taluk, using it as one of the many illustrations of “the determined opposition of the Mirasidars to any improvement in the condition of the laboring classes.” On 21 March 1888, Mullaly reported that the condition of the poverty-stricken subtenants or Parakkudi Payirkkaris provided “an apt illustration of his [Dadabhai Naoroji’s] statements and should be brought to the notice of the Government of India.” Mullaly suggested that the present poor living conditions of the Parakkudis of the Chingleput district, who were partly paraiyars, should be communicated to the government of India as part of the general debate on the poverty of the poorer classes of India.

Mullaly said that the Padiyals received bare subsistence wages and could not get proper housing accommodations. He gave figures to show how little they were paid and how crowded were the cheris in which they lived. For example, the cheri or paraiyar settlement at Tirukkalukkunram in the present-day Chingleput taluk covered only 3.46 acres but had thirty-four houses in which sixty-five families lived. The total population living in that area was 333 individuals for an average of ten persons per house: “To form a proper conception, it must be remembered that each house consists of only one room 12 feet by 8 feet. It reminds one of the penny low East End lodging houses in London where several families—men, women and children—are huddled together in one room. There it is due to dense population and dire poverty, here it is due to a particular tenure and system of registry.” This comparison illustrates his participation in a general discussion about the condition of India and the problems of what William Booth came to call the “submerged tenth.” The way the poor lived in London’s East End provided one of the bases for a discussion of the paraiyars of the Chingleput district, using all the definitions and categories employed by those who wrote in the London press of the period.

Paraiyar living conditions were too disorderly, too slavelike, and too threatening to be acceptable to Mullaly’s definition of British-Indian culture. Mullaly responded much as William Booth would have, declaring that “I determined to improve the miserable and overcrowded condition of their houses.” The fact that the paraiyars could not get land “renders these unfortunates nothing more than the slaves of the mirasidars who exact from them labor for nothing or at a much lower rate than the market rates.”^[75]

Perceived Disorder of Paraiyar Settlements

From Mullaly’s perspective, the claim by Mirasidars to housing they did not inhabit reflected perhaps the most disorderly aspect of these paraiyar settlements. In some villages, the paraiyars would do nothing to alter the situation because the Mirasidars threatened to throw them out. He described in his diary entry for 7 July 1888 the situation in Paler village, in what is today the Madurantakam taluk:

The village [of Paler] is in a disgracefully dirty state when I visited it on the 13th. I was nearly sick three times by the stench. The Revenue Inspector was ordered to go to the village to allot sites for the Pariahs this morning. I find that most of the Paracheri [paraiyar cheri or paraiyar living area] lands are entered in the names of the Mudaliars [vellala Mirasidars] and that they threaten to evict them [the paraiyar] if they don’t work gratis or very cheaply for them.…This is a regular instance of slavery.…Of the Local Fund allotment of Rs. 200/, Rs. 41 have been sanctioned for removal of prickly pear and a further allotment will be made for it if it is very badly required.

One important element in this sense of chaos was the existence of prickly pear, one of the common cactuses in the South Indian environment. During the period of Tamil cultural and political history shortly after the time of Christ, certain cactus plants were considered to be typical of the pālai tinai or wasteland territorial category.^[76] Eaten in the New World and Europe, prickly pear originally came to India from America but became naturalized all over the South Asian subcontinent and many parts of Europe. Since it had thorns, it was used for hedges and boundaries in India; Tipu Sultan used prickly pear around his fortifications, for example. However, for Europeans it came to have an entirely different signification in the South Asian environment. Yule and Burnell, the authors of Hobson-Jobson, point out that prickly pear was “objectionable, from harbouring dirt and reptiles.”^[77] They also cited the author Hugh Cleghorn, a nineteenth-century conservator of forests in Madras, who wrote that the use of prickly pear for hedges was “unsightly”; he commented that “the use of prickly pear [for hedges] I strongly deprecate; although impenetrable and inexpensive, it conveys an idea of sterility, and is rapidly becoming a nuisance in this country.”^[78] In the Madras Manual of Administration, the compiler C. D. Macleane noted that Tamils called the plant nāgatāḷi and valued it as a cure for whooping cough and asthma. Macleane also noted that many attempts had been made either to get rid of it or use it for “industrial purposes.” He said that “it has a distinct preference for waste arid soils that will grow nothing else, and it does not flourish freely on rich well-cultivated land.…As hedge plant prickly-pear is both impenetrable and uninflammable; the unrestrained growth of the plant around villages which generally arises from its employment is however very inimical to sanitation.”^[79]

British officers of the government therefore looked on prickly pear as outside cultivation and outside habitation. Considered as a threat to order, it appeared chaotic from this British perspective. An account from suggests the extent of this characterization. Editor William Digby compared prickly pear to the criticisms of the Madras government by a visiting MP named W. S. Caine, who criticized government antitemperance policies:

Prickly pear is the enemy which the Board of Revenue in Madras has to contend with, next to Mr. Caine. If Mr. Caine does not succeed in planting himself as a thorn in the side of the Board [of Revenue], the other enemy succeeds, but too well, and establishes itself as a veritable thorn in highways and byways and, unlike Mr. Caine, is present here, there and everywhere throughout the country. The Collector of Trichinopoly waged a particular war, successful as far as it went against this omnipresent enemy last year.^[80]

The prickly pear compounded the dirt and overcrowding found by Mullaly; together they epitomized disorder in the Chingleput environment.^[81]

Redefining "Slavery" to Sedentarize the Paraiyar

Beyond physical conditions, the mention of “slavery” suggested moral disorder. To eliminate the appearance of the anomaly of “slavery” meant recording the paraiyars’ houses as their own property and removing the prickly pear as well. Both strategies aimed at one goal. Wrote Mullaly of Paler village in Madurantakam taluk: “A new street of comparatively large and new houses [was] built. The village was considerably improved when I visited it again this year on 25 June 1889 and more houses are going to be built. On my first visit in 1888, the Pariahs were loud in their complaints, but on my last visit they seemed well contented.” Mullaly sought to satisfy his own hopes for order based on a dialogically constructed conception of the function of the “prickly pear” and a desire to house the poor “properly.” He also tried to list all the houses in the cultivation accounts in the names of the paraiyar Padiyals and other subtenants or Parakkudis themselves, since he believed that entries in the names of the Mirasidars indicated the existence of what he considered to be slavery.

As a result of Mullaly’s actions, many paraiyars petitioned him to undertake similar changes in other parts of the district. Mullaly wrote that he “was determined that they should be disposed of in spite of the strenuous opposition raised” by the Mirasidars. “All I wanted,” he wrote, “was an account showing occupied and vacant sites in order to dispose of the 222 Chingleput applications” from subtenants or Parakkudis. However, the karnams or village accountants rebelled against his orders and themselves complained directly to Mullaly’s superior, Collector Warner, who in turn ordered that only present occupation should be recorded and that “old occupation must not be interfered with arbitrarily.” Mullaly then had an account made only of present occupation and vacant housing sites. “I was not going to let all the petitions slide simply on account of the difficulty raised,” he wrote.

Mullaly realized that he could easily reject the applications for house-sites of the subtenants by telling the petitioners to settle the matter themselves.^[82] He felt that “to adopt this course would be to deny justice and to aggravate the wretched condition of a numerous class.” Mullaly and some others in the British bureaucracy here decided to confront what they called “the opposition.” All these cases cast the Mirasidars as enemies of the welfare of the people represented by “the poor,” the tenants, and particularly the paraiyar Padiyals. These were the “submerged tenth” of William Booth. For Mullaly, identifying the paraiyar Padiyals and subtenants accomplished both a personal and ultimately a larger historical task, as well as a transformative one. In lodging an appeal to a former time and former place, Mullaly’s ambitions sought to overcome all obstacles and to ameliorate the living conditions of the paraiyar Padiyals. He appears also to have used all the legal and administrative options available to him to create what he felt was a new world. Probably unaware that in “fixing” the houses of the paraiyar tenants he helped to contain them, Mullaly not only prevented them from moving about but also helped the state and the population to cast their gaze over them, define them, and ultimately reform them. He probably also did not realize that his activities and thinking would in many cases be taken up excitedly by the paraiyars themselves. They became part of this dialogic, creative process, for the very act of being “fixed” in their dwellings helped them to become embedded and enmeshed in the society.

In the end, Mullaly decided to assign what he considered vacant land for paraiyar Padiyal and Parakkudi houses. He employed one or another of these alternatives according to the nature of each particular case. By far the largest measure of Mullaly’s attention focused on the registration of village sites. He believed that a proper system of registration of house sites in the village should show the existing recognized rights of each palli or paraiyar Padiyal or subtenant occupying it rather than the presumed rights claimed by the Mirasidars. This constituted a “distinct assertion of the proprietary right of Government over village sites.”

Already in 1886 the Board of Revenue had decided that the mirasi claim over the absolute right of the village site was “anachronistic and inconsistent with the welfare of government and its subjects and have refused to recognise it.”^[83] The problem was that registration of these house sites in the names of the Mirasidars threatened the assertion that slavery did not exist in the area. For instance, the Tamil expression“iṉṉar maṉnai” in the cultivation accounts meant “the plot of such and such a person.” This corresponded to mirasi pretensions of ownership of the paraiyar settlement itself:

A widespread belief prevails that the mirassidars are absolute owners of the village site, and although wrong, the entries in the account perpetuate and strengthen this belief, and on the strength of them the grossest acts of oppression are perpetuated. The abuses are not rare but of almost daily occurrence, and it was impossible for me to remain inactive with such a stain on the administration. It seemed as if there was a direct official recognition of villainage [sic].

What is important here is that Mullaly understood the symbolic and pragmatic function of categories of oppression as categories perpetuated through state collusion. Second, Mullaly looked on certain categories and activities as a “stain on the administration,” suggesting that the government had a mandate to eliminate these. Of necessity then, Mullaly felt obliged to eradicate all marks of what he believed was slavery wherever they existed. He understood this as a task partly to “free the slaves” but partly to save the prestige of the state and Britain, in whose name these actions were ultimately undertaken. The discussion over the tenants and over the paraiyar Padiyals and Parakkudis therefore may have been started mainly as a way to explicate British ideals of justice and fairness rather than any attempt to change the structural position of the poor and the weak per se. According to Mullaly, the social system in the Chingleput district had been unjust, but what needed to be confronted was that it continued to be unjust. That is, the kinds of information and movement within the bureaucracy and elsewhere had as much to do with what the individuals felt about definition of their own values as with the unjust social system that they were describing. Thus, the kind of social description that emerged from this discussion was as oriented to British requirements as to the system of social hierarchy and degradation operating in the Chingleput area.

The dialogic interaction often substantiated Mullaly’s interpretation. As the result of what Mullaly did in a village named Oragadem in the present-day Sriperumbadur taluk, a Mirasidar told a paraiyar Parakkudi to leave his house or pay the costs of a civil suit against him. The house site had been entered as Kandadu Rangachari “Innar Manai” (property owner) and Parasuraman as “Kuḍiyiruppu” (resident). Following the general instructions issued by Mullaly, the first entry was omitted by the village accountant. After the Mirasidar appealed to the collector, Warner ordered the restoration of the old double entry. Immediately, Rangachari, the Mirasidar, served a lawyer’s notice on Sivanda Natan, a relative of Parasuraman, to “remove the house in 8 days and to pay up to Rs. 10, the value of the chilies grown in the backyard, on pain of having to incur the cost of a civil suit.…Thus on the strength of an entry ‘innar manai’ in some old accounts, a threat is made to evict one whose family has been occupying a site for years.”^[84]

Mullaly also found in these old accounts Tamil entries in the form puṟamaṉai iṉṉar āḷ, or “the person who was the possession of the man who owned the land.” These entries were “relics of the time when the Pariahs were ascripti glebae or villains [villeins] attached to and transferred with mirasi shares.” If title deeds were given to all paraiyars or tenants for the houses they occupied, “this would cause a great improvement in most villages; in place of ruined walls and sites overgrown with prickly pear, brushwood, etc., we would have neat houses and properly kept backyards.”^[85] In other words, his actions introduced a process of renewal aimed at bringing to light his own idea of middle-class British order out of local chaos and misery.

Mullaly requested that, if Warner were unable to change his mind and support him, his account be sent to the Board of Revenue for a decision. The Board indicated that the Mirasidars should be resisted over the question of house sites in Chingleput. However, the fluid heteroglot nature of the discourse around Chingleput emerged in this decision as well. Mullaly, according to the Board, “should not have used the term slavery, a term which does not describe their condition accurately.”^[86] At the same time, the note went on, Mullaly had shown that “the wages earned by the labouring class [Padiyals] barely amount to subsistence wages, that they are compelled to live in overcrowded miserable huts, that they often have to pay rent when the Government intend them to live rent free, and that they are compelled to give their labour for little or nothing at the order of the mirasidars.” However, it said that Mullaly had not exhibited sufficient caution in dealing with “what he ought to have known was the great difficulty of the Chingleput district.” Yet another Board member wrote that Mullaly had shown “the condition of the non-Mirasidars in some villages at all events…[to be] almost that of slavery, and worse than slavery in some respects because in this case there is none of the feeling of responsibility which at all events in many cases attaches to the master in countries where real slavery exists.” The fourth member of the Board, W. S. White, said that Mullaly used “exaggerated expressions that ought not to appear in official correspondence unless supported by the strongest evidence. One of these is the application of the word ‘slavery’ to the condition of the low caste cultivators of Chingleput.”^[87]

The Decay of the District and the Paraiyar Position

During the rainy season of 1890–91, the rains failed almost entirely in the area around Madras. As a result, during the year 1891 considerable scarcity emerged in the Chingleput region. In December 1890, the editor of the Madras Times announced that in both the Chingleput and Tinnevelly districts a new movement of resistance by groups below the caste system had begun. These people were the “multitude of people who are practically slaves in British India.”^[88] He continued, “To all intents and purposes he [the paraiyar Padiyal in Chingleput] is as much in the hands of the caste people of this country as the villeins and serfs of the west were in the hands of the Barons 800 or 900 years ago, under the old Feudal system of the Anglo-Norman kings.” Under the “power and protection of English law…within fifty miles of the seat of government,” wrote the editor, there were people in Chingleput who were

practically the property of others. How is it to be expected that India can be other than poor so far as the masses of her people are concerned, when idle land-holders live luxuriously on the spoils they take by means of a cowardly sweating system, and forced labour, for which they give in return perhaps two meagre meals a day; when the old inspiration of the labourers, is the fear for his oppressors. Let the Pariahs be emancipated!^[89]

In the middle of 1891, the editor again noted that under the old Pannaiyal system the paraiyars received kindnesses, but when they were granted their “freedom” they experienced much greater vulnerability. The Mirasidars could be pitiless, but the government was to blame. The government had loosened the bond and had relieved the Mirasidars. It had “separated the Pariah and left him helpless, only it has told him that he is free.”^[90] Many of the paraiyar Padiyals in the Chingleput district existed in a state “little removed from actual slavery; bound to their caste masters by a species of serfdom similar to that which formerly obtained in Russia.” Yet Tiruvaḷḷuvar, the Tamil author of the Tirukuṟal, the great Tamil poetess Auvaiyār, and the architect of the classical city of Hastinapur had all been paraiyars. This, he believed, showed that in former times the paraiyars occupied a much higher position than they did later. “What a striking contrast there is between these men [the paraiyars] and the lazy but important Brahman who will condescend to anything to get a salary so long as it does not include hard work.” The English should therefore be much more sympathetic to the paraiyars even though they were illiterate.^[91]

The vulnerable situation of the paraiyars formed the focus of formal government concern in the district as well. In March 1891, the collector of Chingleput J. H. A. Tremenheere described the sixty or seventy paraiyars in Senneri village in the present-day Chingleput taluk. Their condition, he wrote, would have moved a “heart of stone.”^[92] Their state was

not appreciably lower than usual; a large proportion of them are always badly nourished, clad if at all in the vilest of rags, eaten up with leprosy or other horrible diseases, hutted like pigs, untaught, uncared for and unpitied. I must apologise to the Board [of Revenue] and Government for picturing the position, which is indeed already known, but the day cannot be far distant when the public conscience of England, if not of India, will wake up to the condition of these unhappy wretches and to the easy way of ameliorating it. [Someone has written in pencil, “What is the easy means?”]^[93]

He also noted that “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 pretext of long occupation by a family which for generations, or perhaps, for centuries, has not, and from caste prejudice, could not come within 50 yards of it.”^[94] The scarcity in the district underscored Tremenheere’s comments and sharpened the epistemological moment for signifying the paraiyar. However, such comments also provoked government officers and others to contribute to a new definition of the paraiyar. As a result of this movement within the bureaucracy, in October 1891 Tremenheere submitted a long report on the paraiyars of Chingleput district. In that report, he noted that it was “easy to picture Chingleput. We have a district with a fair rainfall; with a soil excellently adapted to wells; traversed by a canal and two railways, tapped by a harbour; with an enormous market at its centre; and with a land tax so moderate that an acre of irrigable land is taxed only 3.5 rupees against a presidency average of 4.5 rupees. This should be an Indian paradise.”^[95] However, the district was not a paradise. Rather, as the under secretary of state for India had described it, Chingleput district was, “owing to its infertile soil and to certain accidents of tenure,…among the most backward parts of Madras Presidency.”^[96] In another context, Tremenheere wrote,

From Chingleput take the train further south, or leave the railway at Chingleput or Vandalur and strike eastwards to the coast. On either hand you can shoot partridges over miles of useless bush which in an ordinary district would be waving with grain, feeding and employing thousands of people.…There is at present in the mirasi villages 73,912 acres of unoccupied arable land, crying out for tillage like the fields in the fairy tale. The annual loss of revenue to Government is Rs. 99,887. The mirasidars will not take this up, and will not let it be taken up by the non-mirasi residents of the village; while neither class would for a moment think of waving [sic] its privileges in favour of a despised and rejected Pariah.^[97]

The wasteland of the district had become an epistemic site of moral decay.

But why was Chingleput district so underdeveloped? To understand how this situation arose during the nineteenth century, we should summarize the way in which the Mirasidars and the state operated in that period. Under the rules instituted by the ryotwari proprietary system after 1818—a system of taxation that abandoned settlement with the entire village and instead made agreements with each individual Mirasidar or landowner—the Indo-British administration claimed that it had the right to take any unoccupied wasteland away from Mirasidars and give it to other persons who could improve and cultivate it. However, the Mirasidars again resisted what they considered an attempt to invade their traditional rights. Ellis supported the Mirasidars in this position, but it was hotly disputed by Thomas Munro in 1824. By 1841, Ellis’s ideas had become accepted as authoritative and momentarily monologic. In the years after mid-century, the Mirasidars of the district sought again to resist state attempts to bring in tenants to unoccupied land. They did this by assuming more land than they could cultivate or pay taxes on. As a result, they impoverished themselves as well as the state. Some irrigable land went out of cultivation.

Creating a New Pannaiyal System Out of the Old One

Naturally, this system produced enormous disparities of wealth. Tremenheere said:

The divorce of the Pariahs from the land and the insecurity of their homes…place the agricultural labourer under the heel of the large landholder. In the result the district shows worse farming, has fewer resident landlords, is fuller of sub-tenants and bond-labourers, and altogether produces more striking contrasts of wealth and poverty than any of which I have had experience.^[98]

Specifically, the system allowed effective debt bondage and much of the relationship implicit in the Pannaiyal system to remain. He showed that “in the Southern States of America, before the Civil War, it would have been accounted madness to suggest that the Negroes should be enabled to take up land on their own account. Prejudice and fear of a free labour market would have stood in the way. In Chingleput, though legal slavery has been abolished there is a similar prejudice and a similar fear.”^[99]

The “laws of emancipation” in Madras (3 and 4 William IV, 5 George IV of 1843, and Act XLV of 1860) prohibited the Mirasidars from using violence against the Pannaiyals. But, he said, “the serfs [Pannaiyals] continued to work for their old masters and their descendants continue so today under the name Padiyals [laborers who worked for paḍis (‘measures’ of about 100 cubic inches each) of rice or payment in kind].” This was due, in part, to the operation of the Breach of Contract Act of 1859, which made it hard for a Padiyal to escape the control of a master. To prove his point, Tremenheere quoted a series of fourteen deeds of men who gave their brothers, themselves, or their sons as security for loans of rupees 10 to 15 after the “emancipation laws.” “Aḍimai,” the Tamil word for slave, was still used in the deed texts. According to these deeds, the debt-bonded individual said that he would work gratis instead of paying the interest on a loan undertaken to pay off an old debt or for a marriage.…“Such bondage [notes were simply]…specimens of the thousands that exist. One single man having been known to produce 150. They are more common in this district than elsewhere, but have been brought to the notice of Govt…from other districts.”^[100] He also pointed to the fact that though these deeds of debt bondage could not be legally enforced the bonded individuals were not aware of this. Instead, the Mirasidars constantly threatened the laborers with lawsuits. Tremenheere believed that as long as the terminology and ideology existed alongside the mechanisms that prevented any true emancipation, “slavery” was bound to continue in the Chingleput district.

He buttressed this agreement with his own historical construction. When the British took over the Chingleput district, he said, “the mirasi system was discovered in a more or less disintegrated form.” Three causes had contributed to arrest the progress of decay, including “the conservative effects of the decisions in the Mayor’s Court” during the latter half of the eighteenth century, “the researches of Collector Mr. Place,” and the fact that the ryotwari system had been introduced into the district by “Mr. F. W. Ellis, a distinguished and fond student of ancient tenures, and author of a treatise upon mirasi.”^[101] Moreover, although the courts had depended on Ellis and his assistant Shankarayya for interpretations of mirasi, “perhaps enough weight has not been given to the consideration that for different reasons the antiquarian Ellis and the Brahman [Sankarayya] were both extremists.”^[102] In other words, both Ellis and Shankarayya had strong investments in making claims about the antiquity of mirasi, but their great cultural and personal interests in these claims were quite different from one another’s and even possibly contradictory. This illustrated in a clear way that the historical requirements of the times had led both Ellis and Shankarayya to enter the dialogue, to create knowledge, and to find answers to their questions from different epochs and different cultural realms.

In building his case, Tremenheere rejected the argument proffered by some of his contemporaries that the mirasi system would die of its own weight. He felt that this idea

does not harmonize with the view expressed at the same time, that the [mirasi] privilege is still highly prized by its owners and that a non-recognition would undoubtedly meet with strong opposition. It is neither probable that a privilege should be falling into disuse, when the growing wealth of the country makes it everyday more valuable; nor does history support this view. We have seen that it was not thoroughly established till 1842, and I know of little that has since occurred to weaken it.

Tremenheere argued that the state had degraded the position of the lower castes in the past and had made their niche in society more vulnerable. He urged that “the state must retrieve its mistakes. We have permitted privileges to survive until they have become anachronisms, we have created new privileges.”^[103] He argued that, in the complex mechanisms surrounding the rise of an increasingly nonmobile society, the Padiyals and debt-bonded laborers and Parakkudis or tenants-at-will had been left without state support.^[104] The recognition of what he considered “new privileges” such as the swatantrams, which had been made part of the tax reassessment provisions in 1877–78, had further exaggerated the social and economic distance between groups. He believed that since the state was responsible for creating these inequities it should rectify them. Finally, he argued the anachronism of the entire construction of the mirasi system because it perpetuated serious social and economic disabilities. Finally, Tremenheere invoked the Africa-England resonances of Stanley and William Booth. “Indeed,” he wrote, “when one inspects the residents of a Chingleput or Madurantakam paracheri—poor objects, some of them look as if they had been brought from Central Africa to exhibit the depths of human debasement—one of the saddest thoughts is that there is no one to care for them.”^[105]

The New Definition of the Paraiyars as the "Disinherited Children of the Soil"

In his long statement, Tremenheere also argued, seeking to recreate a former age, that “the Pariahs were not always in their present condition of degradation. The most popular poem,” he wrote, “ever produced in the Tamil country, the Kural, was written by a Pariah named Tiruvalluvar ‘the divine Pariah’ as he has been called.” In undertaking these tasks, Tremenheere was simply one of thousands of individuals who wanted to eliminate the previous “dishonest” and “inappropriate” signification of the paraiyars:

Nor is the Pariah of the present day by any means destitute of sense and good qualities. He shakes of his folly with his degradation and exhibits remarkable acuteness in a European household, and in the Colonies. As for devotion to his master in danger or in sickness, no part of our Eastern possessions, however wild or deadly, but can bear witness; While his courage has made the reputation of our finest regiment.^[106]

In another context, a Wesleyan missionary named William Goudie working in Ikkadu near Tiruvallur just west of Madras wrote in 1894 that the paraiyars were “the disinherited children of the soil, and to give them again some small possession in it is only to restore them to a position which their fathers held with honour long ago when their race saw better days.”^[107] “There are people,” he wrote, “who have a kindly feeling for decayed aristocracies: to such I would suggest that the Pariahs are amongst the most ancient of that class in this country and for that reason alone should find a place in their generous sentiments.”^[108] Ellis also pointed to the fact that the paraiyars were fiercely proud of their own mirasis or hereditary rights to land. He had written that the paraiyars of Tondaimandalam

affect to consider themselves as the real proprietors of the soil; the vellalar, they say, sells his birth right to the śānar, the latter is cajoled out of it by the Brahmans, and he is swept away before the fury of a Mahommedan invasion; but no one removes or molests the Pareiyar, whoever may be the nominal owner or whatever the circumstances of the times, they are safe in this insignificance, and continue and will forever continue, to till the ground their ancestors tilled before them. The villeins [paraiyar Pannaiyals] possess established rights and privileges of which they cannot be deprived, which constitute their mirasi and which are prized by them as much and maintained ostentatiously as the more valuable privileges of the higher orders.^[109]

These constituted part of the large-scale dialogic project to construct the paraiyars as the autochthons of South India, the “original Dravidians.”

Up until his time, Tremenheere noted, the battle had been between the Mirasidars and the “caste non-Mirasidars” or Payirkkaris (tenants-at-will). Only very recently had the British collectors and the paraiyars themselves realized that it might be possible for the paraiyar Parakkudis to obtain land, thus shifting the stakes that would incite participation by new contributors to the dialogic process. Tremenheere wrote that “the one question that can bring a smile to their care-worn faces is why they [paraiyars] did not apply for land.” He reported that the paraiyars of Kaniver village in the Tiruvallur taluk replied, “But what is the good…of applying for this [land]? The Mirasidars will take it up merely to keep us out.” “Well,” replied Tremenheere, “at least you will have the satisfaction of forcing them to pay the assessment. Make an attempt and see.” Tremenheere and other individuals like him, on the other hand, sought to get rid of an oppressive and artificially produced structure. Nevertheless, by opposing the Mirasidars they assisted in creating a new mirasi system. These paraiyar Padiyals and Payirkkaris thus became as involved as the British or the Mirasidars in helping to construct “truth” about the mirasi system and hierarchy in general. Their immediate goals, however, appear to have been very different. By placing pressure on the Mirasidars to take on more land than they could possibly cultivate and pay taxes on, the paraiyars helped to oppose the Mirasidars but support the mirasi system.^[110] In the process, paraiyars aided in the grand historical task of sedentarizing the Tamil population. This process included the enhancement of agriculture as a superior expression of economy and culture. It kept people from moving around as had been the case in the eighteenth century and before. As a result of these activities, the paraiyar voice, however low in status, played an important heteroglot function in creating meaning and participating in important historical tasks. Margaret Trawick has used the ideas of Bakhtin to understand heteroglot expressions in paraiyar songs of the Chingleput district in the twentieth century concerning authority, love relationships, and agency. Her data shows how “the distinction between voices is sometimes very vague” and that the voices in these songs are “united by strategies of ambiguity.” In one song, Trawick notes, “between the two voices, there is no strict turn-taking, so that we can only know who is saying what on the basis of the content of what is said.” In another context, she notes that “one experiences the very powerful illusion that not one person is speaking, but two, because the single voice one hears is so responsive to the silent other.” Her point is that there is always a merging of the “author’s voice” and the “other’s voice.” She concludes that in her work the paraiyars “see themselves as comprised of multiple and independent voices, which may speak to each other in dreams or in trance or in songs.”^[111]

According to Tremenheere, there were of course many reasons for the paraiyar being excluded from the land.^[112] Tremenheere’s appeals to a former time shared similarities with the appeals of Place, Ellis, White, Hastings, Shankarayya, Place’s Telugu and Tamil informants, and many other individuals of both low and high status. They simply constituted additional ways by which the interactive construction of knowledge continued.

The New Paraiyar Body

Tremenheere had said too much in his report on the paraiyars. His contentions had to be addressed by the government in a direct way. As a result, his superiors on the Board of Revenue tried not only to discount everything that Tremenheere had said but also to identify the redeeming aspects of the current paraiyar social situation. However, to do this, they had to prove above all that the village system in the district was not as oppressive as Tremenheere had pictured it. They had to establish the fact that over the previous century British cultural mechanisms and the state had usefully translated the situation from slavery to benevolence, from oppression to kindness. In sum, the alternative position had to demonstrate the inaccuracy of the analysis put forward by Tremenheere and others.

In its counteranalysis of Chingleput rural social relations, the Board pointed to the fact that even when Pannaiyals and debt bondage had existed, many beneficent aspects to those relations could be identified. For instance, they quoted Place’s century-old account of ritual reversal between the Mirasidars and their paraiyar Padiyals and Pannaiyals. Place had written:

There is a peculiarity in the mutual conduct of cultivators [Mirasidars] and their servants [Padiyals] partaking with regard to the latter both of bondage and freedom…the servant [Padiyal] engages in the service of a cultivator [Mirasidar] at the beginning of the year, on the customary terms of the village to which he is conciliated, and binds himself by the acceptance of betel, unless in those cases which I before noticed as inducing one party to demand and the other to grant exorbitant terms, and his servitude expires with the year, during which it seldom happens that he is guilty of desertion if those terms are faithfully observed towards him. Many from good treatment acquire an attachment to their masters whom none almost could prevail with them to desert; yet the ceremony of withdrawing themselves at the end of the year and recontracting for their labour is invariably renewed; for the disposition of each party towards the other is so well understood, that this retirement is never further than the adjoining village, and if, under such disposition, one should not allow a reasonable time or the other refrain to offer a renewal of the contract within that time, the complaint would be equally heavy; the long residence creates attachment and a kind of inherent right, which it is for the interest of both not to violate and in fact perpetuates a servitude which is reconciled to the bare forms of freedom with but few of its privileges. There are some servants [Pannaiyals] who are considered altogether slaves attached to the soil and are transferred with it from one purchaser to another, entitled however to all the privileges of the former class.^[113]

It then quoted a description of this same ritual written by Ellis in 1814. At the close of the Tamil month of Ani (mid-June to mid-July) when the revenue year ended and just before cultivation began,

The whole of the slaves [paraiyar Padiyals] strike work, collect in bodies outside of the villages and so remain until their masters [Mirasidars] by promising to continue their privileges, by solicitation, presents of betel [a nut offered to show honor] and other gentle means, induce them to return. The slaves [Padiyals] on these occasions, however well treated they may have been, complain of various grievances, real and imaginary and threaten a general desertion. The threat, however, they never carry into execution, but after the usual time everything having been conducted according to mamul [custom], return quietly to their labour.^[114]

Then the Board proceeded to quote from the Chingleput Manual in which Crole commented on the passage by Ellis just quoted:

The above is a description of slavery under its mildest and most benignant aspect. An institution from which the mind revolts, owing to the horrors and degradation incident to it in other modern countries is here presented so as to contrast favourably with the state of conquered peoples, even when normally free, elsewhere. It is not astonishing therefore that without any formal act of emancipation, the British administration has been able to work a silent revolution, which, while it has left the proper relations between the cultivating class and their farm servants undisturbed, has made the latter as free as any of Her Majesty’s subjects.^[115]

Crole thus sought to show how much better was the situation of bonded men and farm laborers in Chingleput than in other places where slavery existed in the modern world. Crole also wanted to demonstrate that even though hierarchic Mirasidar-Pannaiyal relations in effect still existed in Chingleput, these relations remained the basis for a later peaceful and benevolent transformation that had been effected by the British. This evolution had made it possible to retain the benign aspects of these relations, to leave them “undisturbed,” while at the same time emancipating the debt-bonded Pannaiyals by a “silent revolution” so that they were as free as anybody in the British Empire. In essence, Crole argued that the relations between Pannaiyals and Mirasidars differed from the relations ordinarily at work between individuals in that kind of situation “elsewhere, even when normally free.” In other words, such unusual relations could form the basis of a transformation that did not require any government measures to ameliorate them.

However, the Board also suggested another way to look at the paraiyars in their economic position. They could also be seen as consumers of liquor. Tremenheere had noted that the paraiyars, “whether from the proximity of salt factories or from other causes,” sometimes got paid well. But, he said, the state allowed an “excess of public-houses” to exist. This policy encouraged paraiyars to spend this new money on drink.^[116] The Madras Board of Revenue used the excise statistics to prove that each paraiyar man drank rupees 5 worth of liquor a year. This consumption enabled the Board to measure “a substantial surplus of income over expenditure and [thus] disprove…the existence of any widespread destitution.” Tremenheere had looked on drink as an indication not of wealth but of paraiyar poverty and dissipation; the Board, by contrast, believed that in the Chingleput district no relationship between drink and crime could be established as had been done for Great Britain:

Drunkenness does not obtrude itself. On the contrary, drink is to a great extent consumed as part of or as a supplement to, food, by certain classes to which it is not forbidden by custom, dating long before British rule. It is, for instance, a matter of common observation that during the palmyra toddy season, the physical condition of the lower orders all over the country undergoes unmistakable improvement. It is mere toying with a serious subject to suggest that, if a Pariah drinks in moderation, it is a cause of moral degradation, and is evidence of general poverty, and not of a measure of prosperity. Even the Reverend Mr. Andrew [missionary of the Free Church of Scotland in Chingleput town] describes the pariah community in Chingleput as “hard-working and muscular.” This is totally incompatible with besotted excess in strong drink, or with a condition of chronic starvation.^[117]

Here the Board had decided that the paraiyars were more productive because they drank liquor, that they had the money to indulge their fancy, that they were certainly not paupers, that liquor enabled them to remain strong, healthy, and active, and that they drank only in moderation and along with food. The only conclusion to be drawn was that the paraiyars were not poverty-stricken but well off and healthy. Paraiyar drinking thus proved to be good for society. The main goal was to focus on the productive bodies of the paraiyars. Ironically, both those who thought that the paraiyars were healthy and had enough to eat and those who did not helped to formulate conceptions regarding the nature of the useful paraiyar body.

In another context, the Board argued that since the Padiyals who had previously been Pannaiyals had access to British legal institutions and a labor market in Madras, they enjoyed important protection:

Long before the Negroes of America were emancipated the Pariah was freed from his bondage [through the “emancipation laws”], and he could carry his labour wherever he chose. With a free and good labour market (at the Presidency town) almost at his very door, and with numerous courts to redress his wrongs, there is no reason whatever for him to submit to “iniquitous contracts” or to work “for a rack rent or for starvation wages.”^[118]

“Emancipated” Pannaiyals of the Tondai country could not therefore be considered disadvantaged.

To strengthen their position still further, the Board of Revenue invoked Place’s reasons from another cultural realm for not trying to change the position of the paraiyars. To do this, they quoted his “evidence” that the paraiyar Pannaiyals and Padiyals benefited from various contributions in grain throughout the year, and particularly at harvest time:

But there are other advantages, which the families of these labourers [Pannaiyals and Padiyals] derive from extra services, which they contribute to the village, and for which they receive, although a regulated hire, yet a requital which satisfies them; and it is often their only support, from the dissipation of their head.…For this reason, I have doubted whether it would be politic to attempt, because not clearly possible to effect, an improvement in the situation of the cultivator’s servants [the paraiyar Padiyals and Pannaiyals] since it would only tend to weaken the government of themselves; and leave their families, who now excite, and benefit by, the compassion of the inhabitants, utterly destitute.^[119]

In other words, social forces united and made the paraiyar groups cohere and formed the basis of their survival. If they received government assistance to better their position, this social solidarity would vanish. They could no longer attract the sympathy of other people. Therefore, it was inappropriate to change the social position of the paraiyars. The Board had quoted Place’s report, they said, because he had “devoted his special attention to this subject.” The Board considered that the situation of the paraiyar family and the conditions under which it worked had not altered in a century. The Board sought to create an essentialist world in which the relations between state and society had not changed in a hundred years, or perhaps a millennium. Data on the contemporary situation of the paraiyars was as good for the 1790s as for the 1890s. The Board quoted Place because he said what they themselves wanted to say. In the operation of heteroglossia, they chose a meaning out of the past to perform a task both for the present and the future, a task whose meaning and requirements had altogether changed. Therefore, Place’s authorship of these ideas was itself put at risk because the historical construction had grappled with totally different kinds of historical imperatives. Now, not only did the past have to be transfigured but past transfigurations had to be used to see future social usefulness. By invoking dialogically produced ideas from Place and Ellis, the Board sought to bring the paraiyars into a larger productive community whose requirements for full competence could exclude no one. Similarly, although Tremenheere and the missionary Goudie approached the paraiyars not by citing Ellis and Place but by invoking local ideas about their present decayed condition and their former greatness, they attempted to promote the same general project. Their initiative concerned the need to make all elements of the society reach physical maturity and be productive.

In this dialogic interaction, then, the Board discounted statistically Tremenheere’s contentions about paraiyar debasement. It also claimed that this social project should not be the state’s responsibility but should rely primarily on private philanthropy. For this purpose, it employed not only the contemporary accounts and data provided by its own staff members but also those of Place from the previous century. The Board said that “very strong assertions are made, but every statistical fact and all the information at the Board’s disposal tell the other way.” However, the Board had still other more basic objections to Tremenheere’s suggestions:

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 of the population have been relegated, under the custom of the country, for ages, to certain professions or employments and that 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 in land. Yet the proposals presented for acceptance of Government 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, at least not in the way of creating a social revolution and confiscating private property; yet, these are the measures proposed; for Government is asked to make landholders out of farm servants [the word “slaves” is not used], who are already too few, partly at least by making over to the Pariahs land over which their masters have undoubted legal rights. In regard to Sub-Tenants [Parakkudis], in the same way, it is proposed to deprive the mirasidars of the ownership of the soil in every case in which a Pariah has paid rent for twelve years. It is, likewise, proposed to repudiate the undoubted rights of the mirasidar in the waste. Mr. Tremenheere correctly anticipates that his proposals will be spoken of as revolutionary. It is hard to imagine how they can be otherwise characterised.^[120]

In this expression, the Board invoked a strategy of noninterference that had evolved over several decades after the Great Rebellion of 1857. However, this conservatism did not just result from the desire to preserve political stability; it also shows that the Board thought that the responsibility for a person’s bodily condition was no longer the responsibility of the state but of missionary and other charitable organizations. It admitted that the state no longer exercised control over a person’s body. Rather, it asserted that this responsibility had been placed in the hands of nongovernmental agencies.

Structurally, this admission indicated an important step in the withdrawal of the state not only from violence and control of the body but over immediate control of the individual in general in modern society. That is, we may trace significant movement over a century’s time: the dialogic construction of religious culture and the temple in the nineteenth century had also increasingly involved the dissipation of the sacred into the bodies of each individual. The comments of the Board of Revenue about its “noninterference” in the lives of the poor formed another phase in this structural dissipation of the sacred, leading to the increasing responsibility of individuals themselves and agencies outside of the state for people’s bodies. In a sense, the state was withdrawing from local interference.

Thus, according to the government of Madras (the governor, his council, and the superiors of the Board of Revenue), Tremenheere’s report had “greatly exaggerated” the conditions in Chingleput, and it was “questionable whether there is anything like as much misery among the poorest classes in India as there is in any large European city.” On the contrary, they felt that though the poorest could make a living in India, this was not true in Europe. Moreover, Tremenheere’s “highly colored description of the Pariah of Senneri [the subject of a question in Parliament about the village in the Chingleput taluk] would apply with equal truth…to the lowest classes in European countries.”^[121] Other individuals used some of these same materials to claim the benign nature of the Mirasidar-Padiyal relationship. Baden-Powell, in his Land Systems of British India, published in 1892, argued that these “villeins” “worked for the mirasidars in rotation.…They got a house and yard free, also certain dues in grain (kalavasam, etc.), and presents in clothes, grain, and money, at stated festivals. The ‘slavery’ was therefore not a very hard bondage.”^[122]

Ultimately, whether the paraiyars were considered besotted and poverty-stricken or not proved unimportant in the emerging discursive production. Instead, the main historical task focused on eliminating the unproductive signification of slavery and creating another that bore an entirely different meaning, whether it was one of honesty, loyalty, productivity, or legitimacy as the original Dravidians of the Tondaimandalam area. The newly created paraiyars formed part of a general discussion of what the poor ate and drank and where they lived, both in India and in Europe—whether that was the British urban “submerged tenth” or the Chingleput rural paraiyars who made up one quarter of the population. In effect, therefore, the elimination of the “slavery” signification helped to create another, more useful identity, which gradually claimed the paraiyars as the most fixed inhabitants of the entire population. The idea of being riveted to Tondaimandalam was not new. According to Place and his local Tamil informants, the story about the vellalas indicated that the Chola king had fixed their affections on the soil of the Tondai country “so strongly” that they could not even harbor a wish to leave.^[123] The process of eliminating the “slave” signification for the paraiyar therefore became an attempt to transfigure the past in order to deal with contemporary “peasantizing” historical requirements. In this case, the future offered the possibility of a society in which individuals would be more and more able to transfer their labor and be individually responsible for their own bodies.

Notes