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