The Decline of the Beeri Chettiars’ George Town Community

In order to understand the role and nature of civic individuality in George Town today, it is necessary to understand how the community has changed. Although, as described in chapter 4, the nineteenth-century lawsuits mark the end of headman leadership among the George Town Beeri Chettiars, the caste community remained strong and gumbu subdivisions, which headmen had controlled, continued as an important feature of social identity and community organization. Beeri Chettiar informants say that it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when inter-gumbu marriages started to be common in the Town, that gumbu distinctions finally and precipitously begin to lose their social importance. Among the Town Beeri Chettiars, therefore, transgressions of endogamous cluster distinctions were unusual until seventy years after rivals had successfully challenged the dictatorial powers of the Beeri Chettiar headmen in the High Court lawsuits of the 1880s. Today, while informants can still recall gumbu names, and a few elderly people still use the initial of their gumbu as part of their name, most people agree that memory of them is fading and that they are no longer socially very important. Why, then, did gumbuhal persist for so long after the demise of their headmen and of the Periyagramam council, their collegial body? And what finally brings gumbu endogamy to an end? The answers to these questions help explain the decline of the Muthialpet-Park Town Beeri Chettiar community at the end of the 1950s and the changing importance of individuality in the Town and city. In hindsight, the answers also reveal the historic relationship between caste organization and agency among the Beeri Chettiars. A caste is a mutable association, reflecting symbiotic interaction between leaders and members, whose organization reflects the purposes to which it is put.

One reason the Beeri Chettiar gumbuhal persisted is that the economic and social value of gumbu membership continued unabated in the George Town Beeri Chettiar community until the late 1950s, long after the disappearance of the Periyagramam council and headman offices. It is easy to understand why this was true. For one thing, the Muthialpet-Park

Town Beeri Chettiars were still predominantly a business community operating on connections and trust. Each headed by its own big-man, a gumbu was a small, tightly knit grouping composed largely of interrelated business families. The strong sense of gumbu identification and the need to maintain one's good name helped to create the high levels of public trust that elder informants still talk about. The nineteenth century lawsuits had left this linkage between family and business unaffected. Continuing gumbu -locality endogamy ensured, therefore, that relationships among families were enduring and that the trust and connections that facilitated the conduct of business were maintained.

The son of Natesa Chettiar (Natesa Chettiar [b. 1890 - d. 1964]; Kandasami temple trustee 1918-24, head trustee 1931-36), himself a descendant of Ramsami and Ratnavelu, two of the progressive big-men of the nineteenth-century lawsuits, told me that until the late 1950s Beeri Chettiars married street to street, with no intermarriage between Park Town and Muthialpet, even when families belonged to the same gumbu . People liked to marry people they knew intimately and with whom they had enduring relations. Known to one another, these were families that would have something to lose if they were to act dishonorably, namely, their reputations and the trust of others, losses that would carry high costs in business and social networking.

Informants also describe a strong desire for the families linked to them by marriage to share their interests and lifestyles. But the Town Beeri Chettiars were a heterogeneous community. In the twentieth century, Park Town had the highest concentration of prominent business families. Muthialpet also included business families but was occupationally and socially more diverse, counting among its numbers families in prominent service with the English in business and government as well as increasing numbers of new professionals. Complicating marriage matters, in Muthialpet, several prominent families were also considered to have traces of English blood, the result of generations of close association with the British. In the eyes of many, this tinged their eminence with a strong sense of ambiguity, and Park Town's elite avoided intermarrying with such families. Some members of these families are said to have had blue eyes and light skin, and, as several informants remarked, they preferred tea to coffee, as their descendants do now—"just like the English." It is also true that some of the most prominent families counted Christians among their kin, as the nineteenth-century lawsuits, my genealogies, and public knowledge of family histories bear witness. Descendants from among these families continue to be among today's most prominent big-men, nonetheless.

The hereditary family priest serving the Muthialpet Beeri Chettiars once remarked to me that the meaning of "gumbu" was a group doing a single type of business. Although an exaggeration, the families of each gumbu did tend to specialize in particular businesses—a matter of fathers teaching sons their line of work, Bala told me. For example, the Poonamallee and Salem gumbuhal were known as dealers in iron and steel and as wholesalers and retailers of betel nut. But they were also coconut, provision, and rice merchants in Kothawal Chavadi, the city's wholesale produce market, and wholesale and retail textile merchants. Kasukaarar gumbu families were known as close associates of the British and, as I have noted, were distinguished as cashiers and bullion dealers, although they too counted families engaged in a variety of businesses. Similarly, the leitmotif of "Tobacco" (Pangaiyalai) gumbu families was tobacco, while nonferrous metals were the specialty of the "Tin-sheet" gumbu , the Tagararkaarar Chetti gumbu . Again, families belonging to both these gumbuhal pursued other enterprises as well.

Another reason for the preservation of the Beeri Chettiar gumbuhal and the Muthialpet-Park Town community was that under British colonial rule, Madras City was the capital of Madras Presidency, and George Town was located at the center of business, finance, education, and government. Situated at the Town's southern edge, the High Court of the Presidency was literally just across the road from Muthialpet (see map 2), which was a short walk from the Secretariat in Fort St. George. Next to the court was the Law College. Across from it and also in the Town were Christian College (founded 1837), and later Pachaiyappa's College, although subsequently both moved to less crowded quarters.^[4] These three colleges played important roles in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century creation of a Western educated Indian elite in the Presidency.

The listing of a few names illustrates the growing presence in the twentieth century of Beeri Chettiar big-men among this educated elite. The purohit^[5] of the Muthialpet Beeri Chettiars says that in pre-Independence Madras, Soma Chettiar (Kasukaarar gumbu ), who was head trustee of the Mallegeeswarar temple on Thambu Chetti Street (see map 2), was also a president of Pachaiyappa's College as well as a "director" of Binny and Co., one of the major English companies. The priest says Soma Chettiar was a descendant of the Thambu Chetti family. His grandson still lives in Muthialpet today, although he is an ordinary person without claims to big-man status. Soma Chetti's sister's husband was the hereditary trustee (suroodiriyamtaar ) of the Tiruvotriyur temple to the north of George Town. His sister's son is the head trustee and suroodiriyamtaar today. Another family, well known prior to Independence, was that of

O. (for Ottakadu gumbu ) Tanikacalam Chettiar, descendant of Lingi Chetti. O. Tanikacalam was for a time a small-causes court judge, a Madras Legislative Council member, and president of the Madras City Corporation. One of his brothers, O. Kandasamy Chettiar, was a student of Dr. William Miller, the highly respected founding principal of Christian College. O. Kandasamy Chettiar himself became a well-known teacher in the college. His daughter, O. Jeevarathanam Ammal, B.Litt., was the first non-Brahman woman graduate in the Town. Other members of the family were advocates, doctors, engineers, military officers, and bank officers. V. Chakra Chettiar was yet another prominent graduate. He was the brother of Venkal Sundara Ramanujam Chettiar, a trustee of the Kandasami temple from 1930 to 1935. According to the purohit , V. Chakra Chettiar was an advocate, a well-known labor leader in Madras, and for a time its mayor. He was also a convert to Christianity. In addition to the Kandasami trusteeship, his brother was the president of the Beeri Chettiar caste madam and founder of the Muthialpet Benefit Fund, a charity serving the community's poor. In 1910, Natesa Chettiar, the grandson of Ramasami Chettiar—the man whose outcasting led to the nineteenth-century lawsuits—became the first Poonamallee gumbu college graduate. His gumbu was and still is the dominant business gumbu among the Beeri Chettiars in Park Town. To this day his house is known to old residents as "B. A. House" ("B. A. Viidu"). Later Natesa was a trustee of the Kandasami temple between 1931 and 1936, and an adjunct professor of physics at Pachaiyappa's College. What is apparent from this listing of prominent Beeri Chettiar names is that George Town was a center of new opportunities, and, consequently, big-man institutional leadership, achievement of Western-style education, and eminence in enterprise had all become intertwined.

The big British and Indian banks were also located in George Town, and Beeri Chettiar leaders were prominently associated with these. The elder sister of one of my retired informants married P. Cittaraman, who became the head cashier of the Mercantile Bank (now the Hong Kong Bank). His father before him had also been a cashier in the bank, while his father's brother was the cashier of Binny and Co. Marambuttasamy Chettiar, the grandfather of another informant, was an agent of the M.C.T. Bank, an Indian bank run by Nattakottai Chettiars on Coral Merchant Street. Nattakottai Chettiars were the premier Indian bankers of south India (see, e.g., Rudner 1989). Beeri Chettiars, especially those belonging to the Kasukaarar gumbu , were prominent cashiers in other banks, offices, and important British businesses as well: the Imperial

Bank (now the State Bank of India), the National Bank of India (now Grindlay's Bank), government offices (the tahsildar office and the Collectorate),^[6] and in Wilson and Co., Shaw Wallace, Best and Co., Parry and Co., Burma Shell, and Binny. Positions were often passed from father to son, because, as my informants explained, families had established traditions of "trust and heredity" with these companies. What they meant by this was that so long as a cashier served his company honorably, his son could succeed him. As we have seen in chapter 4, this reflected employment practices dating back to the early days of British East India Company rule.

We see, therefore, that individual Beeri Chettiars were influential leaders in their community and often close associates of the British, employed in government, banking, and business, right up to Independence. If it is remembered that personal reputations, relationships of personalized trust, and "connections" with people of influence were important determinants of how things were done and of how relationships were established in business and government, then it is clear that maintaining community ties would have proved valuable in this special urban environment, especially for Beeri Chettiars, who were members of a caste that was not only wealthy and well connected, but also the dominant caste of the Muthialpet and Park Town sections. In short, George Town was and continued to be a place where people of influence lived. If, in towns outlying Madras, people left their localities seeking to achieve influence and wealth, then Madras City was where the most ambitious were likely to go. The George Town Beeri Chettiars were at the center of things in Madras Presidency.

Nonetheless, there were significant changes in the organization of the Beeri Chettiars after the nineteenth-century lawsuits. True, the eighteen gumbuhal that composed the Beeri Chettiar caste in George Town continued to divide the caste into leader-centered constituencies. But these leaders lacked the authority of headmen and, Bala tells me, were now called perundanakaarar (syn. of periyadanakaarar ) rather than ejamaanan , headmen. Further, the Periyagramam, which had been composed of headmen and had given the caste its administrative unity, was now defunct, as was the post of caste guru. The failure to replace the caste guru, the guardian of the caste's ritual identity and behavioral rules, who had gone off in the midst of the nineteenth-century disputes, is also a clear indication that leaders remained divided among themselves and that, internally divided, they were never again able to establish their collective authority.

But the perundanakaarar still had an important role to play, which was similar to that of headmen, even if they no longer administered the caste locality as a unit. As headmen had done before them, these leaders used caste institutions—especially the three big caste temples, the Kandasami, Kachaleeswarar, and Mallegeeswarar temples—as institutions of leadership. Genealogies indicate that some of these preeminent men were former headmen, their descendants, or the offspring of marriage alliances with descendants of headmen. Indeed, as noted, Natesa Chettiar was one such leader, and Bala's father-in-law's father-in-law was Natesa's kinsman, Kali Rattina, the "diamond-giver." In the last years of the nineteenth century, probably most temple trustees and preeminent gumbu leaders were either ex-headmen, kin to them, or their close allies.

Kaattavur Subramaniam Chettiar (hereafter, K.S.) was such a twentieth-century big-man. A wealthy iron and steel merchant and the recognized perundanakaarar of Salem gumbu , he was a man of humble origins who came to Madras to work for a Salem gumbu big-man family and, proving his worth, ended up marrying the boss's daughter. Later, he started the South India Corporation with Raja Annamalai Chettiar, a company that subsequently grew very large under Raja Annamalai's direction. K.S. was the head trustee of the Kandasami temple for three consecutive terms, from 1941 to 1958. In addition, he was trustee of the Mallegeeswarar temple and of the caste madam , and, with four other big-men, served as a trustee and member of the caste funeral shrine and tank (the Attipattam Kulam) building committee. An elderly informant^[7] told me that K.S. was among the last big-men to hold regular gumbu community meetings. He called his meetings at the caste madam , sending meeting notices to Salem gumbu families living in Muthialpet, Park Town, and Chintadripet.

Another big-man and contemporary of K.S. was Maangadu Ellappa Chettiar (Maangadu gumbu ), prominent member of a low-ranking gumbu that counted a number of wealthy families among its members. Although not the preeminent leader of his gumbu , Ellappa worked hard to establish his status as a wealthy and eminent businessman. He built temple cars for both the Mallegeeswarar temple and for the Tiruvotriyur temple located in north Madras. He also built a choultry in his name at the Tiruvotriyur temple, and he built the Mallegeeswarar gopuram . With K.S. he served as a trustee of the caste burial shrine and tank and renovated the burial shrine building. These two men may be taken as examples from a lengthy list of twentieth-century gumbu leaders residing in

Muthialpet-Park Town prior to the 1960s. Their generation was the last before the breakup of the George Town Beeri Chettiar community.

Thus, although headmen and their Periyagramam council had ceased to function, eminent men, including ex-headmen, continued to play big-man roles. Asserting their generosity and altruism, some of them made spectacular endowments to community temples, as my now familiar example of the cup of diamonds that Kali Rattina gave to the Kandasami temple in 1901 illustrates. But where previously the Periyagramam had appointed the trustees of community institutions from among their number, now trustees were elected. Then again, big-men acted as brokers and arbiters of social trust on behalf of their gumbu constituents, just as headmen had done, but without the overarching authority of the Periyagramam. In other words, gumbus persisted in George Town because endogamy did not stand in the way of new paths to success, and because, even without the office of headman, gumbuhal continued as groupings of social identity and prestige, constituting important contexts within which individuals organized action, manipulated connections, achieved reputations, and managed personalized trust outside the law courts.

But despite the persistence of gumbuhal and the importance of the Muthialpet-Park Town caste domain, the Beeri Chettiar's nineteenth-century lawsuits do pinpoint the period of transition from headman rule and corporate community to what might be described as a more informal period of big-man influence, when the caste was no longer corporate, but still retained a strong community identity. Not surprisingly, this transition also marks the period when the integrity of the Town Beeri Chettiar community began to unravel. And unravel it most certainly did. Today, under Bala's headship, the Kandasami temple complex and its endowments are the only institutional aggregate left that still provides a base for castewide big-man leadership. And as we have seen, only a fraction of the Beeri Chettiar families that used to live in George Town still do.

What happened that would explain this near-collapse of what was once one of Madras City's most powerful caste communities by the end of the 1950s? The answer is that with few exceptions gumbu leadership simply failed to reproduce itself. This was not for the lack of sons, but because for several reasons the locale had lost its importance as the locus of interests and influence among caste members. In part, this was a result of Independence, which removed the British, with whom Beeri Chettiars had for so long maintained symbiotic ties, from a major role in the area. And in part, it was a consequence of the declining role

business played in the lives of caste members. My genealogies show that the sons and daughters of prominent families were attending school and, in most cases, university, but sons were not returning to run the family businesses or to take over roles in George Town-based enterprises. Instead, they were taking jobs in government service or in professions which offered secure employment but lacked significant centers of influence in George Town. As a result, families no longer felt compelled to live in their old neighborhoods, and in increasing numbers, when brothers partitioned, they sold their ancestral homes in the Town and, each taking his share, moved separately to what each considered more desirable, less crowded, less expensive residential areas of the city. The role of the Town's remaining big-men was diminished by this process and their hold over their constituencies weakened. Elder Beeri Chettiars explained to me that educated caste members often felt little compulsion to subordinate themselves to gumbu leadership. Why should they? Their successes depended on education and were no longer embedded within the caste community. The community's decline was a result, therefore, of the changing manner in which Beeri Chettiars made a living. While business was potentially far more lucrative than bureaucratic employment, it was also much riskier.

In 1939, emerging from the world Depression, secure employment was new and novel, and jobs that Beeri Chettiars would consider not very desirable today seemed wonderful opportunities. When K. Sundaram (b. 1921), a retired General Post and Telegraph officer and scion of a once influential family, told me his own story, he laughed good-naturedly at what he clearly saw as the irony of his own career choice. Sundaram comes from a prominent Kasukaarar family that counts caste leaders among its members and once had close ties with the British. I have already mentioned his maternal grandfather, O. Tanikacalam (d. 1929), who was a lawyer and judge of the Madras Small-Causes Court, as well as a Justice Party^[8] leader. Sundaram is an only son, but reflecting the family's prominence, one of his sisters is married to an advocate who practices before the High Court, while another is the widow of a former appointed trustee of the Kandasami temple, P. Seetharama Chettiar, M.A. (trustee 1964-1969; 1969-1977), who was cashier of the Mercantile Bank prior to his death.

Sundaram told me that he graduated in 1939 with a B.Sc. degree in chemistry. After graduation, without giving it much thought, he applied to medical school and was accepted. In those days, he says, it was relatively easy to gain admission. Now, of course, medicine and engineering

are regarded by most south Indians as among the most desirable professions one can pursue. But in 1939 that was not the case. He discussed his options with his family and with them decided that instead of pursuing medicine he should take a job with the postal service, which he did in 1940. He says being an only son married to a woman who was an only child factored into the family decision. His father and in-laws wanted him to lead a "quiet life," one that would keep him near.

Sundaram told me with a chuckle that, given the prestige and earnings associated with medicine today, it is hard to imagine that the postal service could have actually appeared the better choice. But in those days many still considered medicine an unclean profession, and government service was desirable and secure work. He says his starting salary was Rs. 40 per month. In 1940, you could get a meal for 20 p., a small fraction of a rupee. "Now you cannot get an egg shell." When he retired in 1977 after thirty-eight years of service, he had risen to assistant director of the General Post and Telegraph Office in Madras. A good position, but one that has no constituency within the Beeri Chettiar community.

Retired and receiving a pension of Rs. 850 per month when I interviewed him, Sundaram is an ordinary man, well liked, but without the wealth and connections that he could call on to make himself an important leader among Beeri Chettiars. Yet, for all his ordinariness, in a neighborhood emptied of Beeri Chettiars, he holds a number of positions that once would have marked him as an important and influential big-man: he is a trustee and treasurer of the caste madam located in the Kachaleeswarar agraharam off Armenian Street and the locality representative to two other madams in which the Beeri Chettiars have interests, one in Tiruvaalangadu, some twenty-plus miles from Madras, and the other in Nerinjipet near Bhavani to the south (see map 1). In addition, from 1962 until 1985, he was first the joint secretary and then general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Ayira Vaishya Sangam, the statewide association with which Beeri Chettiars are affiliated. And he is a lieutenant and ally of Bala's. Nonetheless, despite his offices, Sundaram is a minor leader with limited influence. None of the institutions in which he holds offices attracts much interest from George Town Beeri Chettiars today and none of his offices gives him control over significant assets. In other words, his offices are "hollow crowns"—markers of status that lack substance.

Sundaram's story points up the relative absence of preeminent big-men in George Town today. The big-man form of organization had been well adapted to the high levels of personalized trust that facilitated business,

but for university-educated professionals and government employees big-man leadership is unnecessarily restrictive and personal. Elder residents in George Town explained to me that by the 1950s big-men were finding that the community was no longer willing to give them the respect they needed to carry out their leadership roles. There were still community giants in the 1920s, 1930s, and even 1940s, but by the late 1950s, the link between claims to eminence and strong community constituencies had weakened to the point where conflict between contenders was rampant.

This was especially true with regard to temple trusteeships, the institutions that gave leaders communitywide recognition. Unlike Sundaram's offices, temple trusteeships were not hollow crowns. Education, occupational diversification, and the dispersal of Beeri Chettiar families meant that too few men had constituencies large enough or cohesive enough to enable them to claim the preeminence needed to defeat or discourage contenders in competition for control of the caste's denominational temples. Seen from the perspective of leaders, the fabric of community had become thin. Looked at the other way around, Beeri Chettiars no longer felt a compelling need to support caste leaders, since big-men now played a much less important role in their lives. When, in the late 1950s, heated squabbling over control of caste temples erupted among Beeri Chettiar residents, the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE) Department, a state agency, stepped in to fill the leadership vacuum, first taking direct charge of the management of the Mallegeeswarar and Kachaleeswarar^[9] temples.

By the early 1960s, trouble was also brewing over management of the Kandasami temple. Symptomatically, in 1962, the man whose symbolic role it was to call temple elections, the man who would have been the head of caste in the nineteenth century, the head trustee of the caste madam , resigned his madam position. I suspect he did so because, although there were vacancies on the Kandasami temple board that should have resulted in a call for elections, the two temple trustees remaining in office, P. A. Ragava Chetty and K. Venugopal Chetty, instead entered into an agreement with the HRCE Department wherein the department was given the right to appoint the temple's board, with the stipulation that appointees should be drawn only from the Beeri Chettiar community. Why they made this agreement is not completely clear today, but it appears that they may have done so as a bid to maintain Beeri Chettiar involvement in the management of the temple. Because of temple leadership disputes, the HRCE Department had been at the time actively

considering taking over management of the temple. The result of the deal they made was that for a time it looked as if the Beeri Chettiars, while they would remain temple trustees, nonetheless would lose direct control of the last remaining important institution of big-man leadership in George Town. With this loss, the crucial social roles that Beeri Chettiar big-men had for so long played as the organizers of their caste corporate community within the city seemed at an end.