Religious Endowment

Motifs in the Nakarattar varalaru that depict superior Nakarattar status support their claims that they are legitimate surrogate kings of Chettinad as a whole. Nakarattars appealed to these motifs to argue that their position in colonial Chettinad society was a legitimate continuation of traditional precedent. The most dramatic Nakarattar expression of this role was large-scale religious endowment of Chettinad temples. Indeed, they were prodigious temple endowers wherever they did business. But their involvement with the temples of Chettinad has many qualities that are of special concern.

At least four kinds of temples were recipients of Nakarattar largess. There were major Saivite temples throughout South India and in important places of pilgrimage in North India as well (e.g., Kasi). Nakarattars not only gave generously to such temples, but also frequently served on their boards of trustees. There were temples in foreign (business station) lands for which, in addition to the just-mentioned activities, Nakarattar bankers met to discuss community matters, set interest rates, and so on (see Chapter 6). There were the nine clan temples of Chettinad, which, in addition to satisfying the above conditions, also housed the administration for gotra -like, exogamous clans (called kovils or "temples" themselves) that legitimized marriages and adoptions and that traditionally settled all kinds of intraclan disputes. Finally, there were temples for village goddesses and guardian gods of Chettinad which were funded largely by Nakarattar funds even though they might have been administered by and served non-Nakarattar communities, collectively called the Nattar, "people of the country."

A. V. Ramanathan Chettiar (1953), a Nakarattar caste historian, provides a cumulative estimate of the locations and amounts of Nakarattar religious endowment throughout India as of the year 1930 (see below).^[3] His calculations indicate that between 1850 and 1930, Nakarattars donated Rs. 106,441,000 in temple endowments, not including their extensive endowments outside of India—a sum roughly equal to their commercial investments in India.

Apart from the information about the size of Nakarattar endowments, one interesting artifact of Ramanathan Chettiar's tabulations stands out. In preparing his tables, Ramanathan classified Nakarattar endowments according to their location in medieval Chola territorial zones. The implication—especially in a publication that represents the Nakarattar traditional history as accurate—is that Nakarattar involvement in Tamil temples reflects a continuation of ancient practice. A further noteworthy feature of Ramanathan's table is that more than half of the reported Nakarattar endowments (the first three categories of the table) are concentrated in their Chettinad homeland: about 10 percent (Rs. 10,500,000) went to their clan temples, 36 percent (Rs. 38,315,000) went to their village temples, and 6 percent (Rs. 6,493,000) went to non-Chettiar temples in Chettinad. In addition, the endowments recorded by Ramanathan include only exceptional donations by relatively elite and wealthy Chettiars. They do not take into account periodic tithes levied by the Chettinad clan and village temples, both on a per capita basis (pulli vari ) and also on the most wealthy members of a clan or village temple's congregation (asti vari ).

The coincidence of reference to medieval territorial boundaries in classifying different temples and the concentration of Chettiar endowment in the temples of Chettinad is no accident. As we have already seen (Chapter 7), religious endowment could be translated into control of specific religious trusts or even into control of the entire financial resources of a temple. The translation operated through processes of redistributive exchange

extending back to medieval times in South India and unaltered by otherwise significant changes in temple organization from 1817 on.^[4]

In general, leaders of donative groups ranging in size from individual families to business corporations, caste associations, and finally chambers of commerce gave endowments (kattalai ) to the deity of a temple in return for ritual honors (maryatai ). Honors, in turn, publically defined various forms of power held both by leaders of local donative groups and by kings or representatives of the state. The nature of honors received depended upon the generosity (vallanmai ) of the donor. Important honors consisted, for example, of the right to receive prasad and holy ash before anybody else in the donative group. Higher honors consisted of control (trusteeship) over all donations designated for a specific ritual trust fund. The highest honor consisted not only of control of the specific endowment in question, but of a position as trustee or karyakkarar ("doer") on the temple's board of trustees.^[5]

This ultimate honor was really a relatively recent development. It is not clear that it was possible for anyone to control an entire temple prior to the nineteenth-century introduction of legal distinctions between public and private interests (see Chapter 7) and the legal definition of large Hindu temples that were the focus of collective pilgrimage and festivals (tiruvila temples) as public temples, subject to control by a board of trustees. Authors of the growing body of temple studies have focused attention on the causes and consequences of colonial redefinition of these temples as public institutions (Appadurai 1981; Breckenridge 1976; Mudaliar 1973).

Less attention has been paid to an accompanying side effect: namely, institutionalization of and legal status for the privately owned temple. In Chettinad, at least, Nakarattars made use of this development to reinforce their claims to traditional kingly status, effectively excluding other castes from trusteeship (and lesser forms of worship) in the largest temples associated with their clans and residential villages. They were so effective in this game of ritual political power that, by 1926 (immediately after the enabling legislation of 1925), they had won legal recognition of private status for clan and village temples and hereditary rights as trustees to these temples for Nakarattar families. In this position, they have continued, in many cases, to direct temple-based ritual, political, and commercial processes up to the present day.

Nakarattars won their legal battles by appealing to their traditional caste history and to other, less prejudicial evidence as proof that specific Nakarattar subdivisions were historically legitimate collective owners of their respective temples.^[6] An illustration is provided by an administrative

report prepared for the Board of Trustees of the Ilayathakudi clan temple in 1939 (Ilayathakudi Devasthanam 1939). In its account of the history of the temple, the report pointed to 1801 articles in the newspaper Hindubhi describing Nakarattar management of the temple and its inam (tax-free, income-earning) villages. The report noted that Nakarattar rights to management were recognized by the Madras Inams Register of 1864. It cited a "poll tax" (pulli vari , see below) in 1877 of all Nakarattar hearthholds (conjugal families, pullis ) in the clan. All of these "proofs" of continuous Nakarattar involvement in the temple were used to validate a 1926 ruling by the Madras High Court in which Nakarattar trustees were confirmed as hereditary officers of the temple.^[7]

Temple trusteeship was an office worth fighting for. Although trustees did not take part in decisions about day-to-day temple operations, they did make all significant policy decisions about uses of temple funds for worship, charity, salaries for temple functionaries, the sale of temple property, the rent of temple lands, and the management of temple funds for investment (often as monetary loans to individuals and business firms).

I have no good estimate for the total assets owned by Nakarattar-controlled temples between 1870 and 1930. But we can begin to speculate about the magnitude of capital involved by considering the cumulative financial power of temples across South India. According to David Washbrook (1976: 183–184),

In 1879, the capital of the temples [in the Madras Presidency] was estimated officially at [Rs. 297,500,000], which yielded an annual income of [Rs. 17,500,000]. But these figures excluded the capital value and income of land which was held on tenures other than inam and whose worth may have been as high as half as much again.... Besides possessing land, major temples drew pilgrims from across the whole of India, whose purchasing power supported entire local economies; they controlled legal monopolies over the sale of many sacred commodities; they organized huge markets and fairs to coincide with their principle festivals. They represented important sources of wealth and political power in themselves.

Washbrook's figures, moreover, apply to the early part of the period under review in this paper, before a major rise in land values and other opportunities for investment that lasted up until the 1920s (Washbrook 1973).

A partial breakdown of the assets and expenditures of a single Nakarattar clan temple illustrates more precisely what was at stake for specifically Nakarattar-owned temples. My information is obtained from an administrative report by the trustees of Ilayathakudi Temple Devastanam in 1939.

The report apparently covers the last eight months of temple operations in 1939, during which time the temple employed over 16,700 workers in various maintenance and construction jobs. Table 13 lists expenditures totaling approximately Rs. 115,500 that were incurred on these different jobs and are described in the report.

The administrative report by no means represents a complete account of all temple assets, investments, or expenditures. In particular—as with the government report cited by Washbrook—the report contains no mention of non-inam landholdings, including probable ownership of urban property within cities in Madras or of deposits kept with Nakarattar firms in Southeast Asia.^[8] Such investments were, nevertheless, an important part of temple income, and their history and future prospects were subject to considerable discussion by temple members, especially the pros and cons of investment strategies pursued by trustees from different temples. Moreover, while the overwhelming concern of a temple congregation was surely the welfare of its temple and temple deity, individual members of the congregation also benefited from temple investment policies. A set of account books for a Nakarattar agency house in Burma, for example, recorded a deposit of Rs. 70,000 from the clan temple of the agency's proprietor (see Chapter 5). In other words, whatever else they were, the temples of Chettinad were capital accumulators and distributors. In the following discussion, I describe how Nakarattar politico-territorial organization, cult membership, and descent group structure provided a framework for understanding and controlling the ritual and financial resources of Chettinad temples.