Competing for the Past, Investing in the Future

A key institutional feature of Nakarattar caste organization is embodied in the role of the Nakarattar parent banker or adathi , a figure standing in the center of clearinghouse operations for financial and commodity flows and a figure of considerable economic and ritual influence throughout the Nakarattar community. Chapter 5 has already indicated the way that all Nakarattars used wealth in the form of deposits in temple trust funds (kovil panam or dharma panam) for maintaining capital reserves in their family businesses. Chapter 7 explored some of the ways that elite Nakarattars, typified in the colonial period by adathis , attracted such deposits (subsequently marked by the special term adathi kadai panam ) and otherwise influenced these and other collective funds by making "charitable" endowments to temples and educational institutions. All of these gifts and endowments represented investments in elite identity and status for individuals within their caste and for Nakarattar identity and status, generally, within South Indian and Southeast Asian society.

Investments in elite status, however, did not simply reproduce a static social order. They also generated social conflict and social change. Temple endowment (kattalai ) and various kinds of more "secular" philanthropy provide a dramatic illustration of the dynamic quality of investment in the symbolic capital of elitehood, the social relationships it creates, and the social changes it effects. I have specifically flagged religious gifting because some authorities, especially Arjun Appadurai (1981a, 1981b), have suggested that the social dynamism to which I refer springs from cultural properties of Tamil deities themselves, rather than from more general processes of conflict and change. This suggestion seems unduly restrictive, and I propose to extend Appadurai's insights about the political dynamic of worship to a wider range of elite activities than temple endowment.

Appadurai's argument is that although they were the explicit beneficiaries of temple endowments, temple gods remained silent as the stones

from which their images were carved. They left the interpretation of their wishes about the disposition of temple trust funds and ritual honors to devotees who were apt to disagree with one another, especially when it came to defining and determining control of scarce ritual and material resources. As a consequence, elite devotees battled one another within the political arena of a god's temple for ritual honors and financial perquisites. They sought to establish historical charters that justified their political goals for contemporary and future control of the temple.

For example, although Chapter 7 did not explore the history of Palani Temple subsequent to Kumarappan's seventeenth-century founding of the Tai Pucam pilgrimage, oral traditions recovered by Manuel Moreno (1981, 1984) suggest that Kumarappan's family eventually lost their exclusive role as dharma karta in the control of Nakarattar ritual at the temple. Arguably, they even lost control of their own identity when a family of Nakarattars from a totally unrelated lineage succeeded in claiming Kumarappan as their ancestor. This new group of "descendants" were not able to claim his position as trustee—an office won by still another family through other battles—but they do, at present, claim a variety of ritual rights as Kumarappan's descendants.^[1] The lesson I draw from this incident is that the history of Palani is no straightforward account of objective facts, but a contested history of history making and manipulation. The enduring battles to create and authenticate a hegemonic history of Palani reveal that temple endowment represents an investment in a specific, culturally constructed past that constitutes a form of symbolic capital, indeed a scarce resource (Appadurai 1981b) over which political factions fight for exclusive rights of definition and access.

Such an Appaduraian interpretation is entirely persuasive. But, as I suggested above, it can be expanded beyond the realm of religious gifting. In particular, as we observed in Chapter 7, secular charitable institutions that emerged in the colonial period performed a role that was equally effective in generating conflict and defining reality. They lacked the devotional focus on a deity that characterized temples. But the purpose of a secular endowment in serving the public interest (particularly the causes of the Tamil Renaissance) was as open to multiple interpretation as were the wishes of any deity. Contenders for titles, honors, and positions of power in secular endowments—like contenders for similar scarce resources in religious endowments—frequently disputed one another's credentials and performance of duties in the political and jural arenas of Madras. Even the twentieth-century case of Annamalai University, described in Chapter 7, was not as clear-cut and conflict-free as my account may have indicated. In fact, at the very time when (then) Rao Bahadur Annamalai Chettiar

offered a matching donation of Rs. 200,000 to the Madras government for the Tamil University at Chidambaram, Kalimuthu Thiagarajan, another elite Nakarattar, offered Rs. 350,000 to establish a University in Madurai. On the face of it, Thiagarajan's offer was superior to Annamalai's on economic grounds. But Annamalai was better positioned politically and won the contest. The outcome resulted in his control of public resources far in excess of the amount of the endowment.

Unlike the battles for ritual honors at Palani Temple, the contest to found the first Tamil university was not about authenticating the past but about defining the present. Annamalai's victory helped define the Justice party as a leader of the movement for Tamil revitalization. It contributed to the party's credibility in labeling the National Congress party as the party of imperialist, North Indian, Brahman "carpetbaggers." But it is interesting to speculate what would have happened if Thiagarajan had won the battle for a Tamil university at Madurai. For, unlike Annamalai and Muthia, Thiagarajan was an early supporter of Congress. Nor was he alone. Other prominent Chettiars such as Sa. Ganesan and Annamalai's own son-in-law, S. Rm. Ct. Chidambaram, also played an active role in the Congress party and, like Thiagarajan, combined a strong commitment to Tamil culture with a strong commitment to Indian nationalism. In the end, they lost. And our historical view of Madras' past was established in the 1920s and 1930s, when Raja Sirs Annamalai and Muthia won their ethnohistorical battle to define Madras' present.

Such "just-so" stories from pasts that might have been illustrate the social potentiality of capitalism, even in its explicitly ritual forms. They remind us that Hindu notions of moral action, in whose service Nakarattars conducted their sacred and secular gifting, do not entail fatalism, but rather provide a framework for seeking this-worldly success as well as a framework for expressing transcendent devotion or service. For the Nakarattars, as for other Hindus, such seeking often took standardized forms, consisting of competitive investments in elite status and position. I will return to issues of Nakarattar elitehood and its implications for Nakarattar values and social structure after considering other issues in the construction of Nakarattar status relationships.