PRIVATE VOICES

Chapter Seven
Themes of Individuality in Private and Public Lives
Personal Narratives

If I were interested only in social history, I could end my narrative here—after all, I have now told the story of George Town and its leaders. But my purpose has been more than this; it has been to explore the nature of individuality in Tamil society, and in this endeavor there is more to be done. Until this point in my discussion, I have focused on what is known about the public person—the external manifestations of who a person is, the strivings of leaders, the roles that eminent individuals play in the making of a community. But what of the private self—the personal thoughts and aspirations of an individual, of a man like Bala, or of more ordinary men and women? What does the Tamil individual look like to his or her own mind's eye? Shifting perspective to examine the dialogue between self and society from the vantage of private concerns and inner voices, it is important to bring clearly to mind that the manifested public individual (what is known about an individual), the social being (the fabric of the individual's social ties), and the inner voice are components and dimensions of everyone's individuality. There is an interconnectedness and interaction among all these aspects of the individual that is only revealed when we listen to the stories people tell about their own lives. Each person carries these dimensions of private identity and must work out his or her own orchestration of social and private identification. If we ignore these personal stories, then we ignore the articulation of self, culture, and society that makes each person unique and individuation possible. But we also deny the active agency of the subject

in the making of culture, society, and consciousness (cf. Mines 1990, 1992; Obeyesekere 1992:17).

By this point in my discussion, it should be very clear to the reader that in civic society the individual establishes his or her uniqueness in the context of groups. Everything that distinguishes the person and gives him or her identity as an individual is defined in relationship to others—reputation, eminence, leadership, altruism, ability to command others, role as an agent in society, everything. In Tamil Nadu, civic individuality is distinguished by a person's status within groups, and the greater the person's eminence, the more that person's individuality is stressed and valued by others. And it is also true that the greater a person's notoriety, the more his or her individuality is stressed. Bala's enemy, Kaliraja, is distinguished by his unscrupulous efforts to unseat Bala, at least among Bala and his supporters, who form the social context of Kaliraja's notoriety.

Tamils consider the individuality of different people, therefore, to be of unequal worth, and to judge the individuality of another, a Tamil must know who that other person is within a given social context. This is different from individuality in the United States, where, defined in law and in the dominant ethos that supports individualism, each is valued equally—at least notionally—and where a person need not know an-other to value him. In the United States, a concomitant feature of equality is that each is judged an independent, self-contained agent. There is a uniformity to the idea of the individual.

A dominant American belief is that all persons share a common humanity. By contrast, a Tamil's civic individuality is not an outcome of a sense of common humanity. The value of a Tamil's individuality is a variable thing distinguished by several mutable features: ancestral home, jati , or caste, family reputation, status within groups, age, control and responsibility for others, size of following, and the sense others have of one's character. What is being estimated is the importance and nature of a person and his or her agency. In addition, in Tamil culture, civic individuality is circumscribed by ideas that stress altruism and in effect subordinate the self-interest of individuals to groups. An individual is neither independent nor a self-contained agent, as in the American sense. Yet every Tamil would think it ridiculous to assume that persons are not self-interested. Indeed, it is clear from what I have so far described that civic individuals are understood by their fellows as motivated by self-interest and, as we have seen, are constantly jockeying for position. The successful construction of a civic identity requires, therefore, that a leader

mediate both public and private interests, while seemingly subordinating private interests to those of a superior public good. To successfully pursue private interests, a leader must demonstrate through patronage of others that he puts group interests before self-interest.

In private life, this same juxtaposition and mediation of self and other, of self and group, exists. As in public life, Tamils believe that in private life a person should subordinate self-interest to the collective interests of those groups with which he or she is most intimately involved, those of family and caste. The ideal is to live in harmony with others, to avoid putting oneself first, and to comply with the decisions of elders and superiors. Because of this, a major psychological challenge of private life is to achieve meaningful control over one's own life.

Public and private individuality represent, therefore, different, sometimes conflicted dimensions of the person. Natarajan's telling of his wed-ding, a mixture of triumph and sadness, in chapter 5 is a case in point. Consequently, individuality may be understood from more than one perspective. Thus, if big-man status stresses a person's civic individuality within a community, personal narratives or life stories reveal private ex-pressions of individuality and individuation. But it should also be kept in mind that the two dimensions of an individual's life influence and affect one another. They are the interior and exterior dimensions of a single individuality.

It follows, then, that individuality has multiple aspects, and because it does, there are many ways for an informant to tell his or her life story and many ways for an anthropologist to elicit such a telling. It depends on the focus of one's questions. How do I do it? Usually I begin by asking particularistic questions about age, marriage, number of children, caste, place of birth, and places where the person has lived. These questions help me to understand the framework of the person's life and "prime the pump," so to speak, for the interview that follows. Having done this, I have found it very productive next to ask my Tamil informants, "Think back and describe for me the first personal goal or dream you remember having and what happened."

After a moment's reflection, my Tamil informants begin to explain with animation a history of their lives. The depth and intensity of their responses have surprised me and, as a fieldworker, delighted me. Often in response to this key inquiry, an informant has talked for half an hour or more, and in some instances for well over an hour, before my next question, usually a request for elaboration on something said earlier. Judging by my informants' animation and absorption in their responses,

asking Tamils to talk about their goals reveals a natural way they have of thinking about themselves and of explaining who they are, what they have done, and why. Describing their goals, how these goals have evolved and changed, and the decisions they have made both to achieve and to change them, Tamils explain their sense of responsibility for their lives and something of what their lives have meant to them. They also describe the evolution of their individuality, revealing how their sense of themselves has evolved through the course of their lifetime. They are at pains to show how their view of themselves, their reasons for action, and their sense of what is meaningful to them has so changed with age and experience that they believe that who they are today hinges on key experiences and choices that they have made in the past. They give to their life histories a strong sense of key periods and continuity. What they are less conscious of is that, when their life stories are viewed chronologically, a clear periodicity in their evolution is revealed. The Tamil's sense of self and culture changes with age (Mines 1988). Each person's sense of individuality and culture is age-layered.

But what do personal life stories have to do with Tamil social history? For their tellers, life stories serve multiple purposes. Among these are the tellers' attempts to make sense of experience and to interpret how they affected the direction that their lives have taken. Older persons naturally have more to say about such things than younger persons. By the time they approach age thirty, they begin to describe situations that they feel have compelled them to mediate between their inner senses of themselves, their private interests, their social circumstances, and their sense of cultural dictates. But, as the life tellings presented below reveal, personal stories, like other kinds of stories, are also tales of self-discovery that reveal how the individual assigns meaning to events, how cultural understandings frame the individual's own understandings, and how the individual interprets his or her life in relationship to society. Private ex-pressions are not separated from public life. They are single voices seeking to make sense of the junction between the self, life experiences, culture, and society. Individuals are the makers of micro-history—modifiers of the given order, subtle re-inventors of cultural meanings. Even when they think they are conforming to society and replicating its order, individuals produce metamorphosis. But they are also products of their time, what Tamils sometimes call the flow of circumstance. And their lives are framed by the historical period in which they live.

One must also keep in mind that the private expressions of men and women are in important ways distinct. Their tellings reveal different

problems of being, even while their stories also contain shared under-standings and values. Because society and biology dictate different roles for men and women, the issues and problems that women and men de-scribe receive different emphases. Among my informants, men and children play bigger roles in women's life-tellings than do women and children in the stories of men. So, too, psychological struggles for a sense of control over one's life are central to women's stories, whereas goal achievement and issues of public identity are more prominent in many men's tellings. For men, meaning is closely associated with honor and prestige, with leadership, with public reputation, with service to one's community, and with responsibility. For women, meaning is also associated with attaining responsibility, especially for oneself and for others, but most ordinary Tamil women acquire responsibility in the context of their families. Women are also concerned with the maintenance of affectionate family relationships, especially with their children and grand-children. They are concerned with orchestrating the well-being of their children and of their children's families—the direction of concern follows the descent line. Preoccupied as men are with public identities, men rarely mention affection, children, or the illnesses of their children. These are the concern of women and are of the private realm. It is not that the concerns of women are not valued by men and vice versa—they both are involved in the concerns of the other, affected by each other's worries and desires, gaining from each other's successes and suffering from each other's failures—but that what they imbue with special meaning in their stories reflects sex and gender and the effects of cultural meanings and social order. Pivotal points in the life stories of men and women—the crisis points—are different. And so in this chapter and those that follow both men and women reflect on who they are. Both must tell their tales.

C. Sivakumar

I contacted Sivakumar at the recommendation of a friend of his. I made an appointment to meet him at his office, and it was there that I interviewed him—in English. We were alone, and my memory is that we were not interrupted, even though we talked for over two hours. We must have had coffee, but I don't recall it. We later became friends, and when I left India, he and his mother presented me with special Tamil sweets, made with jaggery—unrefined cane sugar.

Sivakumar is a man of accomplishment, university educated and very intelligent; my field notes indicate that he likes to enter contests. The

director and head of a Tamil Nadu State institution, at forty-eight Sivakumar is professionally a successful man. Yet, when I ask him to tell me about the first goal he remembers having for himself, his manner and words express a deep melancholy. He says, "Life has turned out disappointing for me." He is single and would like to marry, although now the prospects seem slight. When he was younger, he felt vital and life seemed to hold out many exciting possibilities. "The best time of my life was my last two years at school when I was successful in my studies and extracurricular activities. I won awards writing essays and as a debater."

Responding to my question about first goals, he states, "When I was twelve years old, I wanted to get into the IAS [the Indian Administrative Service, India's elite civil service], that's why I stood for the exam when I was twenty-three. I qualified, but didn't get through the interview.

"But at twelve, I was also always thinking about being a writer of short stories—I started at twelve to write poems and stories in English and Telugu for the school magazine. I still write short stories and have published a few ... but mostly not. Because of work, I can't do much."

He remembers his father giving him a sense of possibilities. "My father was a short story writer on the side and published some, and that inspired me. He sent them to England, but he published in India only ... but [he] always had the desire."

Clearly upset by his present situation, Sivakumar, describes his life as "stuck"—stuck in a job in which he feels little interest, but one that is too good to give up, stuck in a profession that has nothing to do with his lifetime aspirations, and stuck in social circumstances that depress him. He knows he could change his circumstances, but does not.

He feels unfulfilled. He tells me that his job provides him with a large bungalow. With a wife to run the household, he says, he could live there. But as it is, he lives with his mother in the family home. Later, explaining how she had asked him to return to Madras City after his father's death, he quietly describes her as "an interfering type," which his deceased father was not. The way he says this, mixing repressed resentment with guilt, expresses a central conflict in his life. He is caught on the one hand blaming his mother, while almost in the same breath denying his resentment because it is an Indian cultural ideal that a son should show first loyalty to his mother and that she has the right to ask to come first in his life. On the other hand, Sivakumar recognizes his own responsibility for how his life has turned out. He has experienced periods when he was able to live in the manner he likes, and he knows that it is within his power to do so again. But although he expresses strong feel-

ings about how he would like to live, he himself recognizes that he denies the validity of these feelings as a basis for action. Instead, he gives priority to criteria that make his life secondary to others, particularly the cultural ideals that place his mother's interests before his own, and as we shall see, his view that professional success comes before his own emotional fulfillment.

He describes a number of opportunities that have arisen in his life, but he says that he was always too diffident. "Now my life is stabilized as director because I got stuck here."

At twenty Sivakumar graduated with a B.Sc. honors degree in chemistry and then at twenty-three took his M.Sc. in chemical engineering. Chemistry had not been his first choice, and he says that he really was not interested in his postgraduate studies. He had wanted to study engineering for his B.Sc. degree, but had only secured admission in engineering at a university in Andhra Pradesh Stare, three hundred miles from his parents' home in Madras City. Guided by a desire to maintain strong family ties, as many south Indians would have been, his mother had thought that too far away. Consequently, as his second choice, he joined the chemistry program in Madras from which he took his degree. It was shortly after his Master's that he failed to win the IAS position that he coveted. Without any real alternative, he took a temporary one-year post at a Madras museum as his first job.

His father was retired, and being the eldest son, Sivakumar had to find a job after his one-year position ended. But jobs were scarce. The one area of employment that looked promising in India at the time was accounting; because of a shortage of accountants, the central government was offering training to qualified candidates. Sivakumar took the opportunity and trained for two and a half years before being posted to Bombay as a central government employee. He was twenty-eight. Again his mother objected to his living so far from home, and hating his job himself, he returned to Madras City and job hunting, this time looking for something closer to chemical engineering.

He tells me that he was still thinking about the possibility of a writing career, and on an off chance he applied for a position as a popular science writer in New Delhi. As luck would have it, he received three job offers, including the New Delhi one. Sivakumar really wanted the job and says that he regrets not following it. The difference in pay was not great, although the pay and status of the job his parents wanted him to take—a civil service job—was marginally better. But his parents were especially against his going so far away, and so he took the job in Madras.

He was thirty-five before a job opportunity arose that was good enough for him to rationalize moving away from his parents. The post was as a chemist in a central government institution in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. He took the job and stayed nearly seven years until his father's death in 1971, when once more his mother called him home. Free of family for so many years, he says he did not want to return to Madras.

He describes his years in Hyderabad with animation. "[It] is a gay place. People are very sociable happy-go-lucky people," he says. "In Hyderabad people move more freely, more openly than Madras, even if they are from different religions or strata."

He had liked debating in college and so joined a speakers' club in Hyderabad. And he won awards as a speaker. "I like to compete and succeed," he says. "I entered slogan contests and did some essay writing." He also says he felt some fulfillment in his work, which he describes as the satisfaction he had of having done a good job.

Sivakumar describes how he and his Hyderabad director began their jobs within four days of one another. Soon a close bond formed between the two. The director was an older man, a diabetic, who needed someone in his house, so Sivakumar stayed with him for a month or two after he first arrived. Sivakumar says the director took to him. He taught him about administration, and gave him a great boost by telling him that he was too diffident. "He told me that you must ask for things. Don't expect things to come to you. I even have trouble now." He describes his mentor as very big and tall, "forbidding and masterful with a terrible temper." But he never directed this at Sivakumar. The director was dynamic and got things done. Even though they were friends, Sivakumar says he never asked for favors, and that was why the director had said that he should ask for things, that he was too diffident. "Even now I think of him as my mentor."

Sivakumar discussed the director near the end of our interview, when I asked him to tell me about anyone he considered his mentor. The director's words gave Sivakumar a sense of justification and moral courage, that it was all right for him to pursue his own interests. The significance that Sivakumar attributes to the director also suggests that it is at this point in his life that he realized his own responsibility for how his life was turning out. He was responsible for himself in Hyderabad, and liked his life there.

He was forty-one when he returned to Madras. He describes the period while he was trying to decide whether to stay in Hyderabad or re-

turn to Madras as the most difficult time of his life. "I thought I would do better there [in Hyderabad] and possibly marry there." This was the first mention of marriage and of his feelings about marriage since his brief comment at the beginning of the interview about the bungalow that came with his directorship. He says that his youngest brother is mentally retarded and lives at home. As a result, his family has been unable to arrange marriages because prospective families shy away when they learn about his brother. Only one brother among five siblings (four brothers and a sister) has managed to marry.

But in Hyderabad, living the single life, Sivakumar says that he had a large circle of friends. "There people are more vivacious." He joined the YMCA and a German cultural society, the Max Müller Bhavan, and through a friendly Bengali, he met others. The Bengali was a Hindu who had made a "love marriage" with a Muslim. Another of his friends had married a woman from a different caste.

In time, encouraged by the examples of his friends, Sivakumar himself considered making a "love marriage" with one of the employees at his YMCA, although she, too, belonged to a different caste from his. Then, when his father died and his mother wanted him to return to Madras, he found himself in anguish. He liked his life in Hyderabad and the fact that he could move freely there. But he also felt it was his responsibility to care for his mother and retarded brother. Nonetheless, his director had helped him learn that he needed to assert himself. Finally, under great stress he told his mother that it was not possible to return to Madras because of his job.

It was then that he learned that he was in line for a directorship in Madras City, a status he knew he would never achieve in Hyderabad. In the balance, setting the personal advantages of Hyderabad against the professional advantages of Madras, he was like a man looking for signs, and this one—the chance of a directorship—told him that career and mother outweighed his own emotional interests.

Telling me about his life, Sivakumar juxtaposes his sense of responsibility for his life with his belief that his studies and career have been governed by circumstance. His role has been to take what others have defined as the correct choices. Only once, when he pursued admission to the IAS, had he done what he really wanted for himself or what was in fact within his ability to do within India's restricted opportunity structure. For all his talk about competitiveness, he has always chosen what has been the safer path, the one that has conformed with the ideals of his culture and his parents' wishes. As a result, he feels trapped and

depressed, and although he knows it is he who is responsible, he judges himself as "too diffident" to assert himself. He told me that when he left Hyderabad, he lost the chance of marrying the woman he had wanted. He said it was impossible because she was employed there.

When I met him again seven years later in 1986, little had changed. He was still director of his institution, still lived with his mother, had never married, and seemed a very unhappy man. In "big-city" south India, although there are many more intercaste marriages than there were twenty years ago, most people still remain critical of them. Electing to comply with tradition, Sivakumar nonetheless clearly laments his lost chance.

The dilemmas of Sivakumar's life, as he explains them, draw into sharp contrast his own sense of his self-interest and his compliance with cultural and social dictates, especially the wishes of his parents and the priority he has given to socially valued "oughts." His emotional dilemmas are culturally conditioned, of course. Tamil culture and values favor the kinds of choices he has made over the self-interested choices he would have liked to have made. But what Sivakumar's story also reveals is that there are great psychological costs, felt as depression, anger, and grief, which stem from his resulting sense of being trapped. Sivakumar is perfectly aware of his own responsibility for his condition, that if he so chose, he could rebel against compliance and pursue his own goals. His mentor and Hyderabad life made that clear to him. But he is unwilling to pay the price of choosing his own way. He fears what others will say of him, and so he conforms and suffers enormously because he does.

One or another variety of this sort of dependence—conforming to the dictates of others—is a common condition of young adulthood in India. Srinivas, for example, writing about father-son relationships in the village Rampura, describes how Swamy, the adult son of a leading villager, hid his smoking from his father for fear that

he would be sent out of the house if his father came to know about it.... He lived in fear of his father. There were hundreds of others like Swamy in Rampura and neighbouring villages, young men who were husbands and fathers, but who had to behave like children before the head of the family. They increasingly resented their dependence. (Srinivas 1976:100)

The life histories I have collected reveal that, unlike Sivakumar, most individuals do reach a point in life when they choose to give their own goals greater priority, in many cases only after great emotional and sometimes social struggle. To gain control of their lives, individuals must either have responsibility thrust on them, as may occur, for example, when

a family head dies or retires and abnegates his or her responsibilities, or they must rebel against their seniors and the values that support compliance, perhaps forcing the partitioning of their family or other jointly owned family enterprise. Indians constantly weigh in their minds the costs of rebellion against those of compliance. Both men and women engage in these calculations and, in the course of adulthood, most describe themselves as coming to recognize that they alone must be responsible for what happens in their lives. It is perhaps no surprise that they often begin adulthood believing just the opposite, that if they comply, then they will be looked after and things will go well for them. But many older informants say that the death of an elder or the misery they felt being controlled by others—either gradually or abruptly, but inevitably—forced them to recognize that they had to take responsibility for themselves. Lakshmi represents a case in point.

S. Lakshmi

If she had known Sivakumar, Lakshmi might have said that he "lacked guts." Lakshmi is a Tamil Brahman woman, who was fifty-two years old when I first recorded her life story. As a daughter-in-law in a large extended household, she had learned through years of emotional suffering that a person must stick up for herself. But it was not easy. "It takes guts."

When I asked Lakshmi to describe what she remembered as her first goal in life, she responded that as a teenager her dream was of marriage. She herself had grown up in a large extended family, one of seven children (five daughters and two sons). Her father was a leading lawyer in Cuddalore City in southern Tamil Nadu. Characterizing her household, she says her parents and especially her grandfather were very orthodox. If, as a small child, she ran into her grandfather's room, then he would bathe to remove the ritual pollution she caused. And if one of the children of the household cried, he would not pick it up unless it had just bathed and was undressed. Children and their clothes carry pollution. But even when she did transgress the old man's ritual codes, he was affectionate and "wouldn't scold."

She remembers her childhood as happy. Her mother and father were also affectionate. They all talked freely with each other, and although they were orthodox, she says everyone was relaxed with the children. She went to an English convent school, took music lessons, and in her own words was very innocent and inexperienced, without any real friends outside her own large household. When she did marry at nine-

teen, marriage brought about a complete change in her life. She says she was totally unprepared. "The sudden change was terrible."

She moved from Cuddalore to Madras City, where in her new status as daughter-in-law she joined the large extended family of her husband. He was the eldest of eight children (six sons, two daughters) and assistant to his father. Like her father, her husband and father-in-law were lawyers, but with that most likenesses stopped. She describes the atmosphere at her in-laws' as very different from that of her childhood.

Her husband, she says, is a quiet person who keeps everything to himself, even his sorrows. "It is hard to find out his opinion on things." Silence was his way of managing life in the extended household. "If he remarked on everything, it would have resulted in conflict." Lakshmi says her father-in-law was a stern old man who kept tight control over all household finances, including all of her husband's earnings. He was strict about money and did not allow indulgences. Lakshmi says that even after she had her children (two daughters and a son), she was afraid to ask her father-in-law for things, even for her children.

For Lakshmi her years in the joint family were years of misery. She says that her father-in-law's house was like a hotel. People were constantly coming and going. Relatives, out-of-town clients, and their wives all came and stayed. "We [the women of the household] looked after their comfort. They came and went as they wanted. Now, no one lives like this."

She says that she had been brought up to be the ideal dutiful daughter-in-law and she tried to be. She believed that if she was a good daughter-in-law, then things would work out well for her. But she was very unhappy. In contrast to her indulged childhood, as daughter-in-law she had time only for household work and was so busy, she says, she did not even have time to think about herself. "I had not even minimum comforts there. My children were sent to schools that were not good." She says her children were given neither proper dress, nor food, nor good medical treatment. When they were sick, she was not even allowed to buy them fruit.

"When I was pregnant, I was sent home only ten days before the birth [rather than at the seventh month, as is normal in Tamil society] and was wanted back by the end of the month because I was hardworking—so I could not give attention to my children." Her eldest daughter was sickly until she was about seven, "but they wouldn't let her go to a doctor. They starved her by putting too much water in her milk. She had a bloated stomach." Her son caught smallpox, but was given no medicine. But then proudly she states, "By the strength of their [her children's] con-

stitutions they survived. I knew better, but couldn't get father-in-law to do anything."

It pleases her that, despite her children's hardships and the poor gram-mar schools they attended, they proved exceptionally intelligent and subsequently achieved top ranks in their classes at university. She says that before her father's death in 1958 she used to send her children to stay with him. "He looked after them and bought them things." It was her way of circumventing her father-in-law's austerity. "Father-in-law didn't mind because [while they were away] he didn't have financial responsibility [for them]."

When she was twenty-nine Lakshmi set herself the goal of getting a degree in Hindi through correspondence courses. In a household that gave little recognition to how she felt, she was looking for a way of doing something for herself. Her father liked the idea, but her parents-in-law were opposed to educated women and did not allow her to study. If she had earned her degree, she says, she could have found a job later, when she and her husband were on their own. That, she says, would have helped them get through the difficult financial times they had when, ten years later, the father-in-law expelled them from the house.

At thirty-one, her sense of being thwarted in her efforts to pursue something of her own direction in life was still strong. At this point, her father died. This, she says, was "the hardest thing that had happened in my life. I was depending so much on him. For the next year I was a nervous wreck. It was only his death that made me realize how much he helped." Following his death, she describes how she found that she was unable to walk without gasping for air. Her in-laws feared that she might have tuberculosis. They sent her to a doctor who found nothing physically wrong with her. It was her despair that caused her to gasp. They gave her some sleeping pills and sent her home to stay with her mother for six months. After that, she says, she was all right again.

In the year following the death, Lakshmi came to realize that her father's help and affection had enabled her to cope with the feeling that at her father-in-law's no one was interested in her or in how she felt about things. No one cared about her life or about what she wanted for her children. She described several times in the course of the interview her frustration at having been unable to buy her children fruit or send them to the schools she wanted, and how her father-in-law had denied them proper medical attention. His strict control of the household and, she was beginning to realize, her own efforts to be dutiful, were denying her control over her life, her basic interests, and her individuality. Her

fusion within the family was psychologically suffocating her. "But for father, everything would have been much worse."

Lakshmi describes that horrible year as the turning point in her life. During it, she came to realize that no one could really help her. She had to be responsible for herself. Yet it was another seven years before she finally managed to get out of the household she disliked so much. Looking back, she considers those twenty years of joint family life the worst of her life.

She and her husband's departure from the joint family was very stressful. The father-in-law had begun to speculate and borrow money, requiring Lakshmi's husband to cosign his loans. Lakshmi feared that the father-in-law was building up such large debts that when he died, debt alone would be all that was left them. How were they going to take care of their own family, educate their children, and arrange their children's marriages? Her husband had complete faith in his father, saying that he would look after them. But by now Lakshmi was certain that her husband's assumption was, as she says, "a miscalculation." She knew this with a certainty that derived from her realization that she alone was responsible for the course of her life.

When at last she persuaded her husband to stop cosigning loans, the father-in-law reacted by abruptly telling his son that he no longer wanted to support him and his family. He told them to move out of the house. Lakshmi's husband, who had always believed in his father, was shattered. "He got the consequences of being too self-sacrificing. He helped his father raise and marry all his children [her husband's younger siblings], and then his father kicked him out."

Lakshmi was thirty-nine. Her husband was forty-one. Financially it was a very difficult time. Her husband could no longer work with his father, and now chose to give up law rather than practice separately. As a lawyer, he would still have had to face his father in court. In fact, he had never really liked law, which had been his father's choice for him. He had a variety of connections from his years as a lawyer and soon found a job with India Cements that paid Rs. 400 per month, a small income for a family. He never again talked to his father or visited his home until his father lay on his death bed. Lakshmi's husband was permanently scarred by his father's rejection. He had expected the old man to care for him in return for his own compliance and assistance. Instead, his father's rejection made his own years of sacrifice meaningless. In contrast, Lakshmi was ready for the move and grew stronger because of it. The whole process was part of her gaining responsibility for herself.

The first few years after their expulsion were hard, but her husband was capable and hardworking and was promoted rapidly. They borrowed to educate their children and to arrange the marriage of their first daughter. They also managed to buy a house with the assistance of a company loan. When her first grandchild, a boy, was born four years later, she says, it was the happiest moment of her life. She loves and is proud of her children and grandchildren. They are the source of her happiness in life now. Looking back to when they separated from her in-laws, she says, "I didn't even dream of such a good lifestyle as I now have."

Lakshmi clearly sees herself as responsible for making her new life. After all, it was she who came to terms with her own responsibility for herself after her father's death; it was she who saw clearly that she and her husband were sacrificing their children's lives as well as their own to their father-in-law; and it was she who persuaded her husband to stop cosigning his father's loans. Her sense of responsibility is now a basic precept in her view of life. "My policy is don't blame others. We are at fault for letting ourselves be cheated. He [her husband] should have protested that he had his own family to look after.... If I had had the guts to get out when I was young, I would have gotten out." Lakshmi feels that her experiences have strengthened her. However, she does regret not having acted sooner in life. If she had, she feels the loans they took to educate and marry their children might not have been necessary and much suffering would have been prevented. Her goal now is to enter retirement free of debt.

At fifty-two, when I first interviewed her, she described herself as leading a contented life. She did not want to put her children in the position of taking care of her and her husband. She told me, "Our son is earning well, but we refused his offer of money because we don't want to spoil his life like father-in-law spoiled ours. My pleasure is helping our children when they need it. We eat well and live simply."

I asked Lakshmi if her experiences were tied to an older way of life, one that a young woman of today would be unlikely to experience. In reply, she told me that one of her daughters lives in a joint family, and is very unhappy with her situation.

Had she given her daughter any advice? She answered that she doesn't stick her nose into her children's business because she knows that it would cause resentment. Each must learn for himself or herself what she has learned. It takes time and is part of life. They must learn it themselves.

Meeting Lakshmi at fifty-nine in 1986, it is easy to see the psychological strength and satisfaction that she has achieved. Her life began to improve

when she finally recognized that, if she was to survive, she had to have the bravery to act on her realization that she alone was responsible for herself. Several other of my life history interviewees expressed very similar views. It is my sense that Lakshmi believes this to be true to a much greater extent than do most Westerners. The strength of this conviction may be partly because Tamil culture emphasizes compliance rather than independence. Consequently, she has had to forge on her own the separation she has needed, a process that has given her a sense of her own strength. It may be also partly due to the belief that how a person acts determines what will happen to him or her in life, for every action has its consequences. In this sense, we are all responsible for what happens to us in life.

When Lakshmi says "[I want] to be in charge of my life without others interfering," she expresses much the same sense of a need for control in life as an American does when speaking of "autonomy." "Being in charge," "having control," and "responsibility" (poruppu ) all convey similar notions of agency and individuality, expressing a desire to control decisions affecting one's life. But there are also subtle differences between the Indian and American notions of control that reflect contrasting perspectives and social orders. For Lakshmi, responsibility for herself involves being in charge not just of herself, but also of how she relates to others, especially her children, grandchildren, and husband. Her father-in-law had prevented her from acting toward her children in the manner that she would have liked. For the American, however, "autonomy" conveys both a sense of "being in charge" and "freedom," stressing more the idea of being independent or separate from others. Indian individuality, therefore, emphasizes being responsible for who one is and what one does within the context of relationships, and thus Lakshmi's individuality is in part defined by her relationships and responsibilities for others. Finally, for the Indian, being in charge implies achieving the status and power to take responsibility for oneself and one's relationships. The individual replaces the authority of seniors with his or her own authority. In Lakshmi's case, taking responsibility pitted her against her father-in-law's control and his responsibility for the household as a whole. Expression of individuality and the adult process of individuation, therefore, are constrained by the authority structure of household relationships.

Although Lakshmi may have wished she had been brave enough to take charge earlier in her life, if she had, she might have not only isolated her-self from her in-laws but also reflected badly on her parents. All would have criticized her for failing to be a dutiful daughter-in-law. After all,

within a joint family everyone is expected to put collective interests before self-interests. Further, as noted before, Indians calculate the "costs" of fission. If she had isolated herself from the joint family too early in life, she might well have had to face alone whatever unexpected contingencies life dealt her, widowhood, for example. When she did force the split, it was at a point in her life when the disadvantages of her father-in-law's debts outweighed the advantages of joint family security. Separation made sense.

C. Viswanathan

Compared to Lakshmi, C. Viswanathan's younger adulthood went smoothly. The most difficult period in his life came much later when he went bankrupt at the age of forty-five. He was still working his way back to financial success when I interviewed him nine years later, in 1979. Before the age of forty-five, Viswanathan's life had been a steady climb to local eminence. During the two years before his bankruptcy, from 1968 to 1970, he was the de facto head of his caste within his village. He was the kaariyakaarar , "the man who got things done." He says that he had not wanted the title because a kaariyakaarar no longer commanded the respect that he once did. In his father's and grandfather's days, when a villager passed the kaariyakaarar's house, he would tie his head cloth or shoulder towel around his waist to show respect. Today, elected officials command the greater respect.

A member of the ancient Tamil weaving caste, the Kaikkoolar or Sengunthar Mudaliyar, Viswanathan lives in Akkamapettai, a small village of weavers, located a mile from Sankaridrug Town and about 8 miles from the inland city of Erode, a major wholesale textile center and railroad junction about 250 miles south of Madras City. When I first visited Akkamapettai in 1967, the clacking of handlooms was a constant background sound. Years later, when I recorded Viswanathan's life history, the roar of small power looms had replaced the rhythmic sound of handlooms. By that time he was operating ten power looms himself and was close to regaining the prosperity he had lost.

Viswanathan was fifty-four when I interviewed him in 1979. Educated to the eighth standard, he had been married thirty-two years and had ten children, five sons and five daughters. All but his three youngest daughters were married and living separately.

At the time of the interview Viswanathan was working for hire, as he said, "for coolie." Master weavers were supplying him with yarn and

designs and paying him a piece rate for the textiles they contracted with him to produce. His master weavers collected and sold wholesale his production in Erode's weekly textile market.

By village standards Viswanathan is once again a reasonably wealthy man, although he is by no means the wealthiest and still lacks the resources to finance his own weaving. His immediate business goal is to be his own master weaver. He believes that his profits would be substantially higher if he were. However, that would take more than Rs. 20,000 a week, he says, and since wholesaling is largely done on account, he feels himself still significantly short of the cash reserves he would need to operate successfully as a master weaver. Viswanathan's ultimate goal at this point in his life is to complete his daughters' marriages and build his business to the point where it will provide his sons with a better life than the wage work they are doing. With three dowries to provide and still faced with debts stemming from his bankruptcy, he feels insecure about his future.

Viswanathan has been involved in the textile trade since his youth. He first learned the textile business from his father, who had operated a small retail enterprise, selling saris in the weekly markets of surrounding towns and villages. All his adult life his father had followed a weekly cycle, travelling each day to a different bazaar with his bundles of saris. On Sundays he sold in the weekly bazaar at Sankaridrug. On Mondays he was in Sengammamuniyappan Koyil Village, then on Tuesdays in Trichengode, and so on throughout the week. Friday was his day off. On the side, his father also did a bit of handloom weaving, involving all the members of his household.

In 1945, Viswanathan's father formed a partnership with two men from Trichengode and opened a permanent shop in Sankaridrug. For two years Viswanathan assisted his father in the shop. But his father and partners were restless for the daily variety of their former bazaar businesses, and in 1947 his father bought out his partners and returned to his old way of doing business, leaving Viswanathan to run the shop. Viswanathan was twenty-two years old, the age at which he also married.

I asked Viswanathan what he remembered as his first goal in life. He said he really had two. One was to visit a foreign country, a goal he accomplished when he toured Sri Lanka in 1966, following his father's death. He said his other aim was "to be generous to others, without quarrel."

Stating this last sentiment, Viswanathan expresses not only an ancient value in Tamil culture and one of the defining characteristics of a good leader, but also the central precept by which he himself has attempted to

lead his life. He has tried to make generosity his public hallmark, and he is known to his supporters in the village and surrounding countryside as a generous man. Less successfully, he has also attempted to project the image of a leader who is above petty factionalism—as he says, a man "without quarrel." But public eminence attracts contention.

Like most successful men, he has his enemies. Viswanathan's bitter rival is a lineage (pangali ) mate, a man who has been in competition with him since his youth. Today, this man has succeeded Viswanathan in several of the public offices that he himself once held. Even so, Viswanathan is seen by his supporters as by far the cleverer man.

Not many years ago his rival learned that Viswanathan had made an offer on a piece of land adjacent to Viswanathan's mother's house. The rival decided to spoil whatever plans Viswanathan had for the land by buying it for himself and building his house on it. He countered Viswanathan's offer with a substantially higher bid. Surprised, Viswanathan upped his offer and was again countered by his rival's even higher bid. Viswanathan knew this piece of land well and was aware that it flooded during heavy rains. He also understood that his rival was looking for a piece of land on which to build his new house. The price was now higher than Viswanathan felt the land was worth, so he withdrew his offer and left his rival to pay the inflated price. The rival, thinking himself the victor, gleefully built his house, but to his horror found himself flooded during the next heavy rains. Being made to look the fool and imagining Viswanathan's delight at outwitting him, the rival's enmity proved enormous. When rains flooded his house in 1978, he attacked and nearly killed Viswanathan with a hoe. Viswanathan responded with a lawsuit for damages.

From 1947 until 1958 Viswanathan managed the cloth shop in Sankaridrug. It was an easy time of life for him. His business grew, and because he was a generous man and a man of his word, his public reputation also grew. During those years, "I was shown much respect. My signature was a trusted one. If I sent a stranger to collect money with my signature, then the money was given without question. I commanded great respect."

Listening to him, his youngest brother comments to me that people still speak highly of him and characterize him as a generous man. However, Viswanathan marks 1958, when, he says, he entered the height of his power, as the beginning of his downfall. It was in that year that he was first elected to public office. Running against his rival, he was elected a member of the town Panchayat, the local governing committee. He

believes his political success gradually led him to miscalculate his business affairs. Believing that his popularity was in part a result of his generosity, he slowly increased the shop sales he made on credit.

In 1962-63, he was made director of the Sankaridrug Cooperative Bank. And in 1962, he was secretary to the House Buildings Society, the local housing board. Then in 1964, he was reelected to a second five-year term on the town Panchayat, again defeating his rival.

During his tenure in office, Viswanathan says he was responsible for a number of village improvements. He brought electricity to the village, installed street lights, dug street gutters and a public well, and built for the village community a temple dedicated to Subramaniyam. He also built a housing colony in the village, "fighting," he says, "with the landowners until they sold land ... V. V. Girl, [at that time] President of India, came for the putting of the foundation." Demand for housing was increasing because of a new cement factory that had been located near the village. It was this factory that had drawn President Giri to the locality, enabling Viswanathan to arrange for him to attend his ceremony.

Finally, Viswanathan also served on the High School Committee for Sankaridrug, collecting money for the high school's expansion. And, as noted, from 1968 to 1970 his caste designated him their big-man, or kaariyakaarar .

Viswanathan himself was a member of the Dravida Munnetra Karagam Party (DMK), the ruling regional party in Tamil Nadu in the late 1960s, and had good ties with one of the party leaders, a state-level minister. In 1968, Viswanathan used his caste and locality ties with the minister to get his youngest brother a government post. Viswanathan reminisces that this was the "happiest time [of my life]. Because of good business I was respected and was powerful with people."

But although he had been generous with his shop customers, they had not been paying him back. Intensely involved in politics, he had let his attention wander from his business finances. One morning in 1970, perhaps with the connivance of his rival, the textile wholesalers from whom he bought cloth for his shop arrived at his house with policemen to arrest him. They had brought a case against him for failure to pay his debts. Viswanathan owed a substantial sum.

"They said that if I paid something against my account, they would drop the case. But at that time I had no money. So I went to a nearby village, to another caste man, a Konar [dairyman], and pledged a [gold] chain of four sovereigns weight for Rs. 500. I gave that to the wholesale merchants, but they wanted me to pledge the house to them [as a guar-

antee, which he did]. Then, within the year, the wholesale merchants were bankrupt. Six months ago [January 1979], they were back, still asking for money." Viswanathan still owes his creditors and says he has promised to pay them back when his business improves.

At forty-five, Viswanathan was forced to close his shop. "I just had the stands from the shop. All textiles were given for credit. I was ashamed to come out of my house and thought of suicide." He says he was without work for three months. His failure had hit him unexpectedly, and he felt his reputation and honor were completely destroyed. As a respected leader in the locality, he had thought that his successes and eminence were unassailable, the rewards of his generosity and integrity. He had misjudged, and it was his own fault.

He considers himself alone responsible for his own actions. "I don't take advice from others—my wife, friends, or others. If I think something is good, I do it and take the consequences." He recounts how both times he was elected to the town Panchayat, he had been offered bribes of Rs. 10,000, plus contracts and other benefits, to support a particular council member for president of the Panchayat. Both times he says he refused and voted for his own candidate. "In this way I developed my reputation for honesty. I didn't misuse my position."

But Viswanathan does feel he miscalculated the nature of life. In 1970, he was again asked to stand for the Panchayat elections, but this time he refused because of his losses. His rival won his seat and has since remained in office. When I interviewed Viswanathan, he was still traumatized by the sudden collapse of his life. His bankruptcy destroyed a fundamental sense of confidence he had had in the relationship between action and consequence. The Tamil world view is that good actions generate a good life; Viswanathan's life had always seemed good to him and he had thought that because he was a generous and trustworthy man, it would go on being good. Now, still clearly anxious about what the future may hold, he believes he was mesmerized by public service and the eminence it provided him when he should have put his business and family first. He is attempting to regain the sense of security that he once took for granted by limiting his affairs only to those of family and business. For Viswanathan the connections that joined his ethic, actions, and success, which once seemed self-evident, now no longer seem to match the uncertainties of reality. He is anxiously trying to look out for himself.

In 1967, Viswanathan applied for an electrical permit to install power looms. The permits were granted in 1970, and three months after his traumatic bankruptcy, he again mortgaged his house for Rs. 2,000 and

bought his first power loom. "All the family worked hard on that loom, and then I bought a second loom, after one year ... [At the end of] the second year, I bought two more looms through further borrowing and from earnings. In the fourth year I also bought two. Fifteen months ago I got a State Bank loan and bought two more looms. Then, borrowing on those looms, I bought two more." Viswanathan has trained and now employs three loom operators to assist him.

At best, weaving is a seasonal business with wide swings between boom and bust. Throughout the interview Viswanathan describes rough cost estimates of his goals, like a man reassuring himself that he will have the resources to meet his expenses. He says that about six months out of the year he has enough work to operate only two or three of his looms. If he were his own master weaver, he calculates he could vary his profit margin to fit the market and would then be able to work year around. He figures he will require about Rs. 10,000 in order to marry each of his unmarried daughters in the manner he wishes. This is a small sum for a man of his stature and is indicative of Viswanathan's financial anxiety. It is unlikely his daughters will be able to marry as well as they might have, if he had been willing to provide larger dowries and more expensive weddings. And he is sacrificing his own prestige as well. He is anxious about his debts and concerned that he be able to leave his sons with a good business. Although he no longer is as powerful and influential as he once was, he again commands the respect of his supporters. It is his public eminence that is no longer what it was. He has traded that for the goal of a more secure financial future. Nevertheless, his youngest brother and ally tells me that Viswanathan is a lot richer than he acts.

If Viswanathan is an example of a man who first achieved public eminence because of his reputation for integrity and generosity, he is also an example of a man who has held to his ethic of generosity throughout the ordeal of public shame and the rebuilding of his economic fortune. It is a Tamil belief that generosity helps nurture a man's wealth, while stinginess destroys it. Reflecting this view, his brother once told me that I should never directly refuse a request for alms because if I did, then I would suffer the loss of my own wealth.

Making clear the responsibility of the actor for his own fortune, the ancient Tamil poet-philosopher Tiruvalluvar writes of such men:

Who lose the flower of wealth, when seasons change, again may bloom; Who lose "benevolence," lose all; nothing can change their doom.—chap. 25, verse 248, The "Sacred" Kurral of Tiruvalluvar (Pope 1980:35)

Despite the vicissitudes of his life, Viswanathan continues to embrace this Tamil ethic as his guide for social action.

In both public and private life individuals are known for what they accomplish. When success, as a feature of individuality, is recognized, individuality is recognized. In Tamil culture, eminent people are not merely distinguished as economically and politically successful within their communities, they are also identified as people who embrace responsibilities for the good of others. Indeed, they achieve eminence in proportion to their responsibilities within their communities. The offices a successful person holds in institutions designed to serve public interests are expressions of public-mindedness. So too is an individual's reputation for generosity. Generosity, responsibility, and eminence all define one's individuality within one's civic community.

M. Tangavelu

At twenty-nine when I interviewed him, M. Tangavelu is one of my younger life history informants. He is an enormously energetic man, a junior officer in a Madras branch of the State Bank of India, and a man who has devoted much of his early adulthood to helping the disadvantaged. Service to others is an ideal for action that fits well the highly personalized nature of Indian communities within which, paradoxically, men and women are honored as individuals in proportion to their altruism.

However, just as Viswanathan found that eminence was no protection against financial disaster, Tangavelu is beginning to realize that his public-mindedness conflicts with the bureaucratic nature of banking and is no shield against the resentment of rivals and less hardworking or able coworkers, whose complacency and seniority he threatens. Just as a "big-man" would, Tangavelu sees his role in banking not as a bureaucrat but as a facilitator; he tries to use his institution to serve a clientele. Banking, he believes, offers opportunities for helping people. Indeed, it was the success of his first bank projects in Erode that earned early promotions for both himself and his bank manager. But reception of his ideas in Madras has been quite different. Rather than expressing approval, his colleagues have criticized him for what they see as at best wasted effort and at worst the misuse of bank funds. Chagrined, he observes, "Somehow people are always trying to pull me down, but I am indefatigable."

He wonders now, at age twenty-nine, whether he is being professionally wise. Should he give up his public-spiritedness because of the

trouble it seems to be causing him? "My colleagues are saying it is foolish to give money on loan to the poor, or to help people in need.... But I don't want to stop. I'll keep doing [such things]. Many of the things I do are what government policies are for and I have the power to grant." He wonders why he should be admonished if the banking policies are there precisely to assist the poor. But what Tangavelu still fails to realize is that his implementation of such policies makes him look dangerous to his seniors, who wish to keep their futures secure by avoiding risks—in effect, by sticking to the normal rules of banking. Although surprised by his seniors' chastisement, he is nonetheless beginning to strategize about how best to protect his own banking career from attacks. He says his ambition is to become a bank executive, so that he will be in a position to influence bank policies in all branches.

Born and reared in Erode in modest circumstances, Tangavelu belongs to the Pandaram caste, a small non-Brahman priestly caste, known officially in government lists as the Jangamars. Traditionally, the men of his family have served as priests at the temples of Maariyamman, a fierce village goddess. His paternal grandfather was a Maariyamman priest, but his maternal grandfather was a teacher. Tangavelu's father and mother are also teachers in Erode, his mother having completed eighth standard and his father his SSLC, a diploma similar to an American high school diploma. Although he comes from a very poor family, Tangavelu says his father "struggled to come up in life." Today he is founder and headmaster of his own small school.

Among the traits that make Tangavelu unusual is that he is one of the few Pandarams with a university education, a B.Sc. degree in math, awarded when he was twenty. His sister also has a university education. After completing his degree, Tangavelu immediately applied for a job with the State Bank of India. He stood for the bank exam, was interviewed, and hired on merit. His first bank posting was in Erode. Although, he says, it usually takes seven to eight years to become a bank officer, he was promoted after five years and, after a second assignment, was posted to Madras in a junior officer position, an assignment he considers a plum. At the time of the interview, he had rented a room and was living a somewhat lonely existence separated for the first time in his life from his family, mentors, and hometown friends. He said that his situation would improve if he were to marry, and he had recently consented to his parents' wish to begin searching for a bride.

Over the last two years Tangavelu has begun to assume the role of head of his joint family. Although his father is living and still active,

Tangavelu had successfully arranged the marriage of his sister the previous year. He says he took over the task from his parents after they twice selected potential grooms whom he thought unsuitable. He wanted his sister's husband to have a good education and "way of living" that would match her own. It took over a year for him to find the alliance he wanted for her. The search, he says, worried him a great deal. He was living alone in Madras City with "no one to share the troubled times with. I went home every week. The whole year was difficult." He felt heavily the responsibility of arranging his sister's life and knew that if he failed, she would be the one to suffer. He worried also because there were few educated men in his caste and, as the months passed without finding a groom to his liking, he was frightened that he might have made a mistake holding out for a university educated groom. "But then a suitable boy turned up, and they were married six months back.... At first they lived in Rajasthan. But now they have been transferred to Madras."

Having gone through what was for him a long period of self-doubt and then having succeeded with his sister's marriage, he reflects, "I feel that if you are sincere and work, then things work out. There may be problems at first, but then things tend to work out." This view has become Tangavelu's philosophy for action.

He says that so far the best period in his life has been from 1970 to 1977, when he was working in Erode. It was during those years that he was first hired and then promoted by his bank. It was also during those years that his brother found a job, and that he successfully arranged the advantageous marriage of his sister. At the Erode bank he found that his manager encouraged his predisposition toward social service. He gave Tangavelu opportunities to develop his own banking projects and considerable freedom to carry them out. The bank also provided opportunities for travel. Together, the travel and successes at the bank, he says, gave him considerable job satisfaction. These were heady years for a young man of very modest background who was a mere bank clerk.

Working for the bank, he says, it is easy to implement projects. "We [bankers] can serve the poor. Take a social worker: he lacks finance. But if you are in a bank and interested in social work, then you also have the funds to achieve your goals.... [Working for the bank] gives me job satisfaction because I see the happiness my work gives people." As an illustration, he describes how he arranged loans in five Harijan colonies for a milk project. The loans were used to buy buffaloes. "The project," he concludes, "was very successful."

While at the Erode hank, Tangavelu's greatest success was implementing a "village adoptions" project. "Village adoptions affect people of all walks of life. Villages lack finance, modern technology, and leadership.... Small farmers must borrow money to plant. The interest they pay may be 30 to 40 percent, so income is low for farmers. Because of debt the poor are like slaves. The rich [farmers] live in cities."

To counter this cycle of debt, Tangavelu says, the idea is for a bank to adopt a village. With local men the bank forms an administrative committee composed of the village headmaster, a few farmers, some village businessmen, plus a few officers from the bank. The committee surveys the economic potential of the village, interviews people from different walks of life to assess needs, forms a cooperative society for the farmers, and makes long-term loans at very low government sponsored rates, about 4 percent for the poor. The idea, he continues, is to help people escape the control of the rich and to enable them to take charge of their own finances. "Often this is all they need to get ahead." Once started, the adoption project is self-administering. The village committee that interviews the borrowers "takes the responsibility to see that the villagers pay their loans back. [They] use social pressure."

At Tangavelu's initiative the bank also helped fund "Agro Service Centres," which teach about tractor uses, and provided loans for school building and "for teachers to buy books for their higher studies." Tangavelu says the bank gave out Rs. 25 lakhs (2,500,000) in agricultural loans alone to its adopted village. The committee decided that sugar cane would be a good cash crop for its village farmers, and the bank lent the money that enabled the villagers to make the crop shift. As a result, Tangavelu says, the farmers were able to greatly increase their profits. "Now the adoption project is so successful that the villagers have had the bank open a branch there." Tangavelu says he also managed to involve the Rotary Club in his schemes, arranging for them to conduct village medical and dental camps.

When he was in high school, Tangavelu says, his desire was to "visit many countries, meet many people, and serve many people." It all started, he says, when he was in school in the fourth standard and became interested in collecting foreign stamps. He wrote to foreign consulates in Madras and, when he had a little money, would order stamps. Over the next several years he had nearly twenty foreign "pen pals." It was during this time that he became interested in service to others. It started with a friend.

"When we saw small boys—many people—unconscious in the street ....we used to help these boys, me and my friend. [We would] get them some money and help them to get home. They were boys who had come to Erode to find jobs. I spent my money on stamps and pen pals. But I had a friend, now dead, who was from a rich family. He gave money to help these starved boys. So this was also a goal which I had during my school days."

He marks joining the bank as the next turning point in his life. In that year he also attempted to join the Rotary Club, "to get pen pals," he says. In south India, both the Rotary and Lions Clubs are elite service-oriented organizations whose members are businessmen and professionals. When Tangavelu approached the Erode Rotary, they suggested that he organize Rotaract, an affiliated club for young men. The idea appealed to Tangavelu because he thought it would fulfill several of his interests. Through the club he would meet new people and, he hoped, have contact with foreigners. Also Rotaract, like Rotary, is a service-oriented club. Finally, organizing Rotaract would put him under the wing of older influential members of the parent Rotary Club. Besides, he adds, "my bank needs these kinds of activities [in order] to [contact] ... more people and to draw [their accounts] into the bank. Rotaract helped me and the bank. I met lots of important people, and they brought their accounts to the bank. I linked the bank and Rotary. 1 got promoted for this."

The relationship between Rotary and the bank was a symbiotic one. Rotary used the bank to fund its service projects, and the bank used the Rotary Club for the community links it provided. Inspired by Tangavelu, his manager and mentor joined Rotary.

After founding the Erode Rotaract, Tangavelu was elected its president for two consecutive terms. During his second term, he organized and became the first governor of Rotaract District 320, covering Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Pondicherry.

Tangavelu was just a bank clerk, but, he says, his contacts were so extensive that people were always coming to the bank and asking for him. So his manager put him in the manager's box. "I was very lucky, because my managers were very supportive and allowed me to make decisions that were beyond my status. The 'village adoptions' [scheme] was all my idea."

Erode was a quiet town with few entertainments. Tangavelu decided he could enliven things. He says as district governor of Rotaract he was in the position to invite attaches of foreign consulates as well as visiting

Rotarians from different countries to Erode. He organized an international exhibition of foreign handicrafts and coins, arranged a visit of young Rotarians from Australia, and "screened foreign documentary films in Erode. This was all new in Erode, and because of my interest in foreign countries."

Through Rotaract, he says, he also did service projects. In Madras, he contacted CARE, which wanted to distribute bread to the poor. "I linked the project to Rotaract. Rotaract received bread and formed centers in slum areas. They distributed bread to 1,800 children. A very laborious job. They did it for four years. [We] needed six people for this. But many days people would fail [to show], so I would have to go. You could see the eradication of malnutrition. Before they had bad eyes. [I] saw lots of improvement in health. [But] now the project is discontinued."

Another of Tangavelu's successful projects involved selecting a group of handicapped persons and helping them to establish egg stalls. The stalls were also made egg-shaped. The bank made the loans the handicapped needed to build the stalls, buy chicks, and raise the poultry that supplied the eggs to the booths. The handicapped sold the eggs, earning Rs. 300 or so per month, he says, once they were started.

Reflecting on the criticism he has received in Madras, Tangavelu says the last two years away from Erode have been difficult. He says he has had lots of problems, that he has not been able to find a suitable place to live, and that Madras banking is different. "People are not sincere or encouraging and [so for me] the atmosphere [at the bank] is not good."

Tangavelu sees himself as at another turning point in his life. His family thinks that it is time for him to marry and are urging him to do so quickly. They think it is getting late for him to marry because the age difference between him and potential brides will appear too great to their families. He says that he also feels ready to marry.

"It is time to get married. Living alone is a big problem for me—food, housing, and feeling lonely. Getting married I can settle my life and solve these problems. ... But I am not keen to marry just to get married. I must find a suitable girl. I would not like getting married unless I find a girl that I like. I would rather remain a bachelor." The problem, he thinks, will be in finding a woman who shares his interests. "Here, girls are interested in movies and a gay life."

Tangavelu is very much aware that his goals in life have been changing. "My travel ambition is still there. But now I have new goals. I never thought I would become a banker. Now I want to rise in banking so that

I can do more for people. Another goal is to become a Rotary governor in the later part of my life. [I also want] to have the opportunity to do much more for the untouchables and downtrodden and the destitute children. Also my spirituality—[I want] to develop my mind to understand God and to feel the spiritual things."

Tangavelu recognizes the predicament of his life:

"Every day I am doing something unusual. Every day! Most people don't do these kinds of things. They get up, work, go home, read a magazine, and sleep. I create projects to back. I go out and get people to deposit. I represent people to [bank] officers to get loans [for them]. I get people coming every day for help.... But people [his colleagues at the bank] often resent these things. I am always helping people in need."

By Tamil standards an unmarried twenty-nine year old man such as Tangavelu is still a boy. Marriage and fatherhood remain important tasks he must complete on his way to full adulthood. His sense of being ready for marriage parallels his maturing awareness that it will not be easy to achieve the goals that he has set for himself. Until now praised and encouraged by elders for his ideals, he has considered his successes merely the rewards of hard work and following the ideals of benevolence that Tamil culture embraces. He has had a childlike sense of being rewarded for behaving in an ideal manner. His experiences in Madras have made him realize that his career ambitions pit him against less idealistic competitors and that his career could easily be destroyed by a naive pursuit of service to others. He intends to calculate his career course with care, believing that if he succeeds in banking, he will be in a better position to serve the less fortunate.

Themes of Individuality in Four Lives

In electing to tell the lives of Sivakumar, Lakshmi, Viswanathan, and Tangavelu, I have made no attempt to represent what in some artificial sense might be considered average persons. All four tell unique stories and in different ways are successful individuals, even when they also describe failures and setbacks. Yet in another sense, the stories that these four tell raise issues and involve relationships, aspirations, and attitudes that are widely familiar to south Indians. Their lives as they tell them—their difficulties, their goals, how they have dealt with events, how they have evolved toward the turning points of their lives, and how they have achieved what they have—are quintessential to contemporary south Indian social experience.

Thus, despite the uniqueness of each individual's story, the reader will recognize that each thinks of his or her public face in terms of widely shared Tamil notions of behavior and status, and that each has a sense of his or her private voice that is closely linked to these public notions. What distinguishes these two senses of individuality—a private, internal sense and a public, civic sense—is that the internal sense involves a psychological awareness and evaluation of self and of the need to achieve some control in life. Lakshmi realized she alone was responsible for how her life turned out, for example. By contrast, civic individuality is what is manifest to others, features of identity and character that distinguish the person in the public's eye.

The eminence and respect that Viswanathan once had are thus characterizing attributes of leaders and of leadership organization in both village and urban south India, even while eminence and respect are also central concerns of Viswanathan's sense of himself. That is why, when he thought he had lost his public honor, he contemplated suicide. A central aspect of his sense of self had been destroyed. So too, Tangavelu's altruism, which is so important to his sense of self, is representative of a social ideal, and Lakshmi's and Sivakumar's shared sense of responsibility and the dilemmas that surround responsibility reflect a south Indian view of causation, agency, and social order that applies to both the private self and public life. Therefore, although the life of each is unique, each is also typical of his or her culture, and each interprets himself or herself in terms of shared cultural ideas.

Three cultural themes, which are central to my informants' telling of their lives, reveal how Tamils in general express and value individuality. These are the themes of responsibility, eminence, and generosity. These three themes compose an ethos of individuality common to Tamils that is associated with a perception of action and causation that assumes that the individual is both the primary architect of his or her own life and the fundamental agent in society. Recognition and appreciation of achievement are central to this view of individual agency.

Let me here also add, as should be obvious, that these three themes by no means characterize all that can be said about the individuality of these four life storytellers. The story of each is much bigger than these themes encompass. For example, there is Lakshmi's heroism and Viswanathan's anxiety, just as there is also Sivakumar's desperation and Tangavelu's activism. Indeed, the tellers describe a rich and complex sense of their own individuality and a clear recognition of their own conscious individuation.

But what is uniquely individual is not my focus here. My concern is with what all Tamils recognize as valued expressions of individuality, aspects of being by which a person is judged and, being judged, singled out. Each of the tellers incorporates their sense of these themes in their description of who they and others are. The individual interprets his or her own individuality, therefore, in terms of a cultural point of view that encompasses these three themes.

The Theme of Responsibility

In my informants' stories, achievement of responsibility distinguishes individuality both in public life and in self-awareness. A Tamil's sense of responsibility encompasses three related notions: (1) agency : the individual is an actor responsible for his or her actions; (2) causation : actions have consequences so that the decisions one makes and the actions one takes are believed in a very direct way the cause of how one's life turns out; and (3) social order : the more senior (and less subordinate) one is, the more control one has over one's own life and the lives of others. When informants describe taking responsibility for their lives, they describe their individuation. A sense of being responsible for who one is and for how one's life turns out is the fundamental theme of a Tamil's understanding of self as separate from others. In civic life, too, responsibility distinguishes a person, and as in the case of the individual's sense of self, responsibility in civic life involves a recognition of the individual as an agent.

Although Tamils express a strong sense of responsibility for their lives, they do not deny unexpected occurrences a role. A person may fall ill or die without warning—run down by a bus, for example—or may have the course of his or her life change from a chance meeting with someone on a train. One of my informants described meeting in this serendipitous manner a man who became his guru. My informant, who was at the time working for a Kerala textile mill, said that he had been thinking about starting his own handloom textile design business and that his chance discussion with the guru, whom he had never met before, was what convinced him to proceed. Within a few years he was operating a highly profitable enterprise.

When events like these occur, Tamils will sometimes say in essence that the event was fated. "It was written on his [fore]head (talai eruttu )," or they may say he was born under a particular star that determined his fate. Generally, however, it has been my experience that Tamils speak

of fate more when they are referring to others than to themselves, the person run down by the bus, for example. If they are the one run down and they survive, they are likely to blame the accident on the bus driver's wild driving or on themselves for not being more alert. Tamils may even combine the two kinds of explanation saying the person's death was fated, "written on his forehead," but that it was also the bus driver's fault. As anyone who has lived in India knows, the reaction of the crowd to the accident will be to blame the driver, and, fearing a beating, drivers run for their lives after such misfortunes. Tamils, therefore, do not obliterate their sense of responsibility for their lives with their sense of fate. Things can be fated, but individuals are still responsible for their actions.

Consider as a final example the brother of one of my assistants. This man was born with a birthmark, indicating that he embodied a malevolent force (drishti ) that would cause his parents-in-law's death when he married. Responding to what was beyond their control, his family made it their responsibility to marry him to an orphaned woman.

Tamils also sense that their lives are affected by the current of events. Older informants will reflect that their lives have "flowed from circumstance," meaning that the direction of their lives has been dictated by events that were beyond their control. However, they do not mean by this that they lack responsibility for how their lives have turned out.

Agency

Although it is especially apparent in Sivakumar's and Lakshmi's telling of their lives, each of this chapter's four main informants describes a strong sense of responsibility for who he or she is and the course his or her life has taken. For example, Viswanathan states that he does not take advice from others. He says that he decides upon what he thinks is a good choice and takes the consequences. In effect, he asserts that the results of his actions are his own responsibility. Tangavelu claims responsibility for who he is and what he does by saying that he is different from others, that he is always doing things, going out and getting people to come to him for help. Doing so, he describes himself as an instrumental figure, a man who gets things done, a viewpoint he shares with Viswanathan. He also expresses his sense of responsibility, qua "agency," when he describes the things that he wants to achieve, the targets of his energy. And finally, he sees himself as responsible for others, his sister, for example, and he is very aware that his responsibilities have consequences for both himself and them. Yet again, Lakshmi sums up her sense of responsibility for herself by saying that each individual

alone is responsible for what happens to him or her in life. Of the four, only Sivakumar describes his disappointment in life, but he does so blaming himself, acknowledging that he is too diffident. Failing to take responsibility for key decisions in his life, he says, life has not at all been what he had anticipated in his youth.

Each of these four, in speaking of responsibility for him or herself, describes a perception of individual agency that would seem to contradict the well-known view that Indian society stresses compliance, that individuals act not as their own agents, but as the agents of groups within which they are subordinate. Lakshmi and Sivakumar, in deferring to their family elders, might be taken as examples of this latter view. But the four life histories reveal that such a characterization represents only half of the picture. In fact, typically a tension exists between group and self; it is an expression of the ubiquitous fusion/separation psychological polarity that Kakar (1981:34) considers characteristic of Indian social life. Thus, rather than mere compliance, the central issue of both Sivakumar's and Lakshmi's lives concerns precisely this tension. Both life histories suggest that assuming responsibility for oneself involves some resolution of the fusion/separation polarity in favor of a sense of control. Blaming his diffidence, even Sivakumar sees himself as the primary agent of his unhappy life.

Causation

When Indians speak of their responsibility for themselves, they assert not only their responsibility for their actions, but also for the consequences. Each of my older life history informants claims responsibility for what has happened to him or her in life. They see their goals, the decisions they have made or avoided, and their consequent actions as the direct causes of their life course, whether those decisions are seen as flowing from circumstances or the result of setting goals. Viswanathan, for example, clearly links his view of causation to his own choice of action: "If I think something is good, I do it and take the consequences." He considers his bankruptcy the product of his own miscalculation. He put public service before business because he thought his eminence made him invulnerable to misfortune, a misjudgment for which he "took the consequences." Lakshmi states it just as bluntly when she admonishes, "My policy is don't blame others. We are at fault for letting ourselves be cheated." Still a young adult, Tangavelu's sense of causation and life direction is at a formative stage, but he too senses his responsibility for what happens in life when, following his sister's marriage, he states, "I feel that if you are sincere and work, then things work out. There may be

problems at first, but then things tend to work out." And when comparing himself to others, he observes that he makes things happen: "Every day I am doing something unusual. Every day! ... I create projects to back ..." Finally, even Sivakumar recognizes that his diffidence and failure to stick up for himself are the causes of his disappointing life.

Social Order

As previously noted, whereas an American might speak of "autonomy" and "freedom" as expressions of agency and individuality, Tamils speak of "responsibility." Thus, Lakshmi sees having responsibility for herself as having control over her life without the interference of others, much as an American might speak of autonomy and freedom. But Lakshmi's sense of control is also distinct from these American perceptions. For the American, autonomy and freedom also imply a sense of equality and separation from others, independence, and the expectation that one has the right to go one's own way. Because relationships limit autonomy and freedom, the American must compromise individuality to establish social relations—for example, to be a wife or husband, father or mother, employee, or friend.

For the Indian, by contrast, responsibility implies not only autonomy in the sense of control over decisions affecting one's life, but also the responsibility the person assumes or seeks to have for others, as Lakshmi suggests when she speaks of her desire to control her relationship with her children without outside interference. The difference here between an American's sense of "autonomy" and a Tamil's sense of "responsibility" is that the Tamil thinks of the self in relation to others, while the American thinks of autonomy as separating self from others. The Indian idea of control assumes a hierarchical social order within which persons take on responsibilities for others as they achieve control over their own lives. Within this order, according to their interests, seniors control the relations of juniors; they have power over them. When Tangavelu speaks of trying to arrange his sister's marriage, he describes his responsibility for her. Doing so, he refers not only to his duty, but also to his power to act on her behalf and so to affect her life for better or worse. The responsibility weighed heavily on him. So too, Viswanathan speaks of his responsibilities for his sons and daughters.

Indians are finely tuned to this hierarchical power structure and acutely aware that their lives are framed by it. They recognize that in order to have control over their own lives, they must be in control of others. They must either achieve positions of relative seniority, for example, by becoming a head of household, or be granted some control over

decisions, as, for example, the management responsibility Viswanathan received when his father left him in charge of the shop. Given circumstances and cultural norms, Indians continuously weigh the costs and benefits of complying with seniors against those of self-direction, much as Lakshmi and Sivakumar have done. Acquiring control over their lives, individuals recreate the hierarchical social order with themselves as seniors, since by their seniority they achieve the power to control their relationships and make their own decisions.

The Theme of Eminence

If in private life individuality is expressed as responsibility for who one is and how one's life turns out, then in public life the individuality of a person is valued when he or she is distinguished by eminence and public responsibilities. As previous chapters have amply demonstrated, eminent persons are considered key instrumental figures in society. They act as agents on behalf of their communities, and they head, and sometimes found, institutions that are designed to serve the public good, or at least the good of those who support them. Eminence also has its smaller aspects. For example, the female and male heads of household are preeminent within its domain, and their headships will be known and their civic identity distinguished by this eminence-on-a-small-scale. The challenge for each person, therefore, is to achieve some degree of eminence and with it the right to make decisions. In civic life, as in the family, hierarchy is a feature of individuality, and when a person's eminence is stressed, his or her individuality is stressed.

Tangavelu is not yet publicly eminent, but if he continues to succeed in banking and his community projects, it is likely he will achieve public eminence one day. Among his kin and caste fellows, however, Tangavelu has already achieved some eminence based on his education and employment. In recognition, his father allowed him to arrange his sister's marriage. Viswanathan achieved local eminence for a time, and at the peak of his prominence held public office, was a member of the managing boards of a number of important public institutions, and was designated the village kaariyakaarar , literally the "agent" of his caste. Within the context of her kin circle, Lakshmi, too, has achieved some degree of eminence and with it control over her life. This she has achieved by becoming the head of her own household and through the accomplishments of her children. In her life story, Lakshmi's children's achievements are more important to her sense of pride than are her husband's, but it is also

clear that her status is dependent in part on her husband, on who he is, and what he has done. Only Sivakumar still lives under the control of a senior kinsperson, his mother, although he has achieved a position of importance and influence in his work. However, without control over his personal life, Sivakumar's achievements are dust in his mouth. Sivakumar recognizes his self-interests but has allowed his mother to choose the course of his life. Subordinating himself, he has never fully individuated.

The Theme of Generosity

Generosity is perceived as an individual act and is a source of eminence and goodwill. When Indians appreciate successful persons, even moderately successful persons, they value them for their generosity, graciousness, and simplicity of life. These are traits that demonstrate that a person values others and does not act merely out of his or her own self-interest. Viswanathan and Tangavelu both seek to be known as generous men. Lakshmi, too, in middle age and as the ranking woman of her family, describes her generosity—she allows her son to keep his salary for himself—while she condemns her father-in-law as being tight-fisted. A generous person is someone who is interested in serving others, and his or her reputation for these traits—service to others, graciousness, generosity—authenticates his or her concern for others. A man builds a following by the benefits he provides, and a woman builds the affectionate relationships on which she depends and that give meaning to her life. A generous individual is also a person open to appeal who is seen as willing to represent the interests of others.

Indian communities always reflect the presence of generous individuals. These are the ones who manage and found the small local libraries, the scholarship funds, charitable organizations such as medical dispensaries, the school building funds, the cooperative societies, the cultural associations such as music societies, the Rotary and Lions Club charitable ventures, and the temple building and renovation societies. Tangavelu's concern for the poor is motivated by this ethos, and Viswanathan bases his claim to prominence on it. When a man acts generously his reputation as a leader grows, and he gradually achieves public eminence and fame (puhar ). Like an eminent man, a generous man, therefore, is defined by a public recognition of individuality and instrumentality that is circumscribed by values that subordinate his liberty to the common good.

In general, generosity appears to be more a theme of men's civic individuality, while for women more commonly it is a feature of their private lives. This is because men's lives are more public, and they control more resources than women. But as I have described in chapter 3, women, too, may acquire a reputation for generosity in the public sphere. Widowed women of means, for example, sometimes are philanthropists, and I know of a few such women among the Beeri Chettiars of George Town. One woman donated a house for a free medical dispensary, and in the past, others gave endowments to the Kandasami temple. These women are praised for being good women, and they have local fame. But as we have seen, among men a reputation for generosity legitimatizes and increases his influence. It is an essential feature of his claim to lead. Outside George Town, there are leading Tamil women, and for them, too, generosity is central to their leadership. But within the Town, the generosity of women lacks this political purpose. In the Town, at least until now, there have been no political women, nor has any built a political constituency in the pattern of men. But the reader should know that as I write this, the chief minister—the highest elected officer—of Tamil Nadu State is a woman, Jayalalita, a former actress, the protégée of the previous chief minister.

Graciousness and simplicity are valued traits that are related to generosity. When individuals act and speak graciously toward others, Tamils believe that these individuals respect their humanity. They demonstrate their commonality with others, which expresses a form of selflessness, even though they may be powerful persons. Finally, by living simply, generous individuals demonstrate that they are not self-indulgent. Their simplicity of style makes their altruism credible.

Eminence based on generosity, graciousness, and simplicity is an ideal, of course. Indians are cynical about the altruism of leaders and others in the day-to-day world. They will say that many pretend to these things, but few are genuinely altruistic. Rather, Tamils presume that public figures are out to gain benefits for themselves. I have often heard wealthy individuals criticized for trying to buy eminence, for example, when they found a charitable society out of the blue. There is, therefore, a paradox built into a valuing of altruism of this sort: it is in the self-interest of individuals who wish to achieve eminence to act altruistically. Reflecting this, the more eminent a person becomes, the more people doubt his altruism. How can someone be selfless who has amassed great influence and achieved a status of increasingly important individuality?

I suspect that some of the criticism that Tangavelu has experienced in Madras is of this sort. After all, he has earned unusually rapid promotion through his charitable activities, and it is only natural that men who see themselves threatened or in competition with him would try to deny him this avenue for promotion. Similarly, walking down the road after interviewing Viswanathan, my assistant commented skeptically that if what Viswanathan said about never abusing his office were true, he must be the only member of his political party who did not. A believable reputation for altruism takes years to achieve, and it is a fragile reputation to maintain.

For all their worldly skepticism, Tamils do nonetheless value generosity highly and see true examples of it as expressions of great moral worth. Generosity is often considered an attribute of small town and village life where Tamil social values, it is believed, still guide behavior. Tangavelu and Viswanathan both come from such places. And, of course, according to karmic beliefs, generosity ultimately generates rewards for its agents. Over the years, I have learned of a number of cases of extraordinary generosity, some told to me by beneficiaries and some by benefactors. The gift of Rs. 60,000 mentioned in chapter I is one example. Tangavelu's unusual efforts represent a second. And the fame of the Kandasami temple, which I have described in previous chapters, is founded on the generosity of individuals, so much so that generosity has become their legend.

Chapter Eight
Locating Individuality within the Collective Context

A story is told in India that once there was a man who, hearing from his guru that God was present in everything, went for a stroll in the jungle.^[1] Suddenly, a huge bull elephant emerged from the undergrowth followed closely by his trainer. The trainer was shouting, "The elephant is mad! Run for your life!" But knowing that God was present in the elephant, the man continued on his path, paying scant heed. The elephant trumpeted and charged. Alarmed, the man reminded himself, "God is present in the elephant." But the elephant kept coming, huge in his vision—blotting out the background. At the last second, the man leapt aside. A narrow escape. The elephant charged on into the jungle. Shaken, the man returned to his guru for an explanation. "I could have been killed on the spot! Was not God in the elephant?" The guru replied, "Yes. But why didn't you think that God was also present in the trainer?"

In this world, life requires that one be able to act on the basis of one's own judgment and initiative, even if, as the story says, God is present in everything.

The lesson of the parable can also be applied to the individual in the context of caste and family, two arenas wherein both social science lore and Indian social values have it that groups control individual behavior. As in the parable, even if caste and family form a part of every Tamil's identity, each must think and act for himself or herself. The private voices of Sivakumar, Lakshmi, Viswanathan, and Tangavelu reveal as much. Each of these persons described a process of individuation set in the context of compelling, if quite ordinary, events. Each told of a struggle to

mediate between their responsibility for their own well being, and Tamil values that told them that if they were selfless, then all would work out well for them. As a result of the struggle, each told of developing a strong sense of self separate from others.

When South Asianists have stressed collective identities, they have paid attention to group identities, but they have overlooked the significance of the struggle that occurs between the person's private interior self and the collective pressures of caste and family life. The struggle is a tipoff that the marriage of group and individual is imperfect, that the relationship between the private self and social order must be mediated. As Sivakumar's and Lakshmi's narratives show, the family is often an important context within which this conflict is played out. Here in this chapter, I examine how the private self is expressed and interacts with collective interests in the context of family and society.

Individuality and Group Identity

In Tamil society, individuality finds expression in the context of others, notably among kin. Consider the balance that exists between a person as an individual and his or her identity as a kinsman. Thinking and acting for oneself requires thinking of others, taking them into account; as we have seen, the person depends on kin, just as they depend on the person. For example, while social trust begins with the individual and depends on one's actions, as the story of Viswanathan shows, social trust also is based on the reputation of one's kin. Tamils refer to such trust as one's family honor or name. It is here among kin that an important crossover point between private individuality and the collective interests that circumscribe civic individuality is made manifest. When individuals through the exercise of their own initiative earn honor and respect, they simultaneously contribute to the family name, and in fact their name (and so their reputation or honor) may become the name by which others related to them identify themselves. Taking a prominent relative's reputation as part of their own, lesser-ranking relatives can use this person's honor to benefit themselves. Recall Bala's admonition that I be careful to whom I showed his genealogy, lest someone use knowledge of it to falsely claim a connection with him.

Interestingly enough, in this patrilineal society a man will often use a family name that refers to persons to whom he is related through women rather than men. When it comes to fame and negotiating advantage, Tamils feel no compulsion to stick to the male line in order to trace their

connections. One's kin are all one's kin, traced through both males and females, through ties of marriage and lines of descent. Bala's ally, K. Sundaram, the retired postal employee whom I describe in chapter 6, was repeatedly mentioned to me with a reference to his maternal grandfather, O. Tanikacalam, the lawyer, judge, and Justice Party leader. This was the man who gave Sundaram his family name. Similarly, Bala's wife's kin group is known as the "Kali Rattina group" after Kali Rattina Chettiar, the man who in 1901 gave the cup of diamonds. Although Bala counts among his kin many prominent figures, it is the reputation of Kali Rattina that lends a special aura to Bala's name.

When a family is respected and judged honorable by those who know it, then the interests of individuals within the family are facilitated because people know that the family will want to protect its name. Family members restrain the behavior of their members because it is in the interest of each to do so. Each benefits from the family's good name. (But beware of strangers because their family and reliability are unknown—unless a big-man or woman With whom you have a lasting relationship recommends them.) Individuality, therefore, finds expression within the context of social groups, including the family, and identity and reputation involve an interaction between the person as a separate individual, responsible for his or her identity and actions, and the identity and reputation of groups, such as the family, which support and benefit its individual members.

By contrast, an individual who behaves in a way that Tamils would describe as "without honor" or that detracts from the family name, is in real danger of being ostracized by kin. Without kin, a person is isolated and vulnerable. Take the case of Saroja, a headstrong woman. Although Saroja thinks for herself, she puts her interests before those of her own family. A neighbor described her to me as a woman without honor, a woman of bad character. I present her story to represent a case that falls at the separation end of the fusion/separation polarity. The isolation she anticipates is the antithesis of the psychological suffocation that Sivakumar describes in his life story. Tamils disparage a life lived only for the self. Hope, they believe, flies from such persons.

Saroja, forty years of age and living in a small ill-kept brick and cement house on the edge of a poor Madras neighborhood, has an overriding fear at the time of our interview that she will be abandoned by her immediate family because of the way she has behaved in the past. She has one son and two daughters. The eldest daughter is engaged, while the other two are approaching marriageable age. When her daughters marry,

they will go to live with their husbands. Her son will soon get a job, but, she feels, he will not take care of her. My assistant, who knows Saroja, whispers to me that Saroja's son is a petty thief. She says that people believe he steals in order to shame his mother because of her behavior.

Saroja tells me that she fears her husband may abandon her because of all the trouble she has caused him, and because when she was thirty she had taken a lover, the executive officer of a nearby temple, who had helped her to arrange the building of her house on temple land. Her husband, she says, is often angry with her and sometimes beats her. He works as an electrical fitter at the Madras Integral Coach Factory, which specializes in the manufacture of railroad cars. She thinks he will take a job in Dubai—he has been talking about it—and that will be the last she will hear of him. She feels particularly vulnerable because she believes there is something wrong with her liver and because her eyesight is failing. She has already had an operation on one eye and has what she describes as a growth on the other. She believes she is going blind and is afraid that it will make her totally dependent. Yet she has no one to depend on because she has antagonized or alienated all who normally would be close to her. Her greatest fear is that, if her husband leaves or forces her to leave, she will have no option but to live the life of a beggar.

Saroja describes herself as rebellious from a young age. She grew up in a village near Salem and claims her father, who is still living, was a prosperous farmer. As per custom, at marriage Saroja went to live with her husband's family, which was at that time a large joint family of thirty members. Like her father, Saroja's in-laws were well-off farmers. She says she had three mothers-in-law, the wives of her father-in-law and his brothers. She recalls bitterly that she was treated like a slave, a status she felt was exacerbated because her husband had a low standing within the family. He is one of two sons by his father's first wife, a woman who had died young. The father had then remarried and had seven children by his second wife. The second wife favored her own children and had seen to it that they were well educated and given primacy in the family arena, while she denied similar opportunities to Saroja's husband. As a result, Saroja says, her husband is uneducated, while one of his step-brothers is a university graduate with a B.Sc. degree. Saroja herself feels she married the lesser man, although she is proud that he neither drinks nor smokes. Nonetheless, she thinks he is a weak, ineffectual person, and she demands that he give her his salary. She is the dominant spouse. She does all the calculating and strategic planning, including arranging her

children's weddings, what her daughters' dowries will be, and she attempts to maintain primary control over what little she and her husband own, her plan being that, should she be abandoned, she would control enough assets to avoid being pauperized.

Saroja says proudly that she bore her son within the first year of her marriage, and by doing so fulfilled one of the functions most desired of a wife. But she says she fought constantly with her in-laws over food, soap, tasks, and her own behavior, which her in-laws felt was grossly inappropriate. Saroja says angrily that they treated her like a village hick, telling her to wash when her legs were muddy, not to stand by the window when she was combing out her hair, and not to sit with her legs and feet sticking straight out before her when pouring milk for her child, all requests for behaviors that are common etiquette. But it is clear from her description of the issues about which she and her in-laws fought that she was both defiant and rude in her behavior. By the end of the first year, her mother-in-law took Saroja back to her family, complained of her behavior, and left her, apparently for so long as it took for her to shape up. Having a daughter returned in this manner disgraces a family. Who would want to arrange marriages with a family where the daughters behaved like Saroja?

In defiance, Saroja wrote her husband that she would never return to her in-laws'. She says she wrote that when he had the courage to establish his own house, she would go with him and would mortgage her jewelry to help them. Fifteen days later, her husband came and got her and they moved to Madras.

In Madras, life was difficult. They lived in rented quarters, but slowly saved money so that over time Saroja was able to buy three cows. Today, she uses the milk they produce in part to meet family needs, but primarily she sells it to her neighbors. But here again neighbors complain that she overcharges them and dilutes the milk excessively with water—beyond, they say, what is considered normal for milk sellers to do. As a result, Saroja's milk business is not doing well. Add her business practices to her son's reputation as a thief, which others take as a mark of her own failure as a mother, and add these to the scandal of her ongoing adulterous love affair, and it is easy to understand the disapproval of nearly all who know her. She is a woman who has isolated herself by her actions.

When my interview with Saroja was nearly over, I asked her whether, looking back on her life, there was anything that she would change.

"Yes," she said. "I would ask not to be born female. Women are treated like slaves, scolded by everyone. If I had been a man, then I could have done everything that I have, and no one would say anything."

As an ethnographer, I have often thought about the simple poignancy of her statement and wondered whether it was true. A male Tamil friend, to whom I related her story, told me that there was truth to what she said. Certainly, her judgment fits some of what I have seen. I have known many men who have taken lovers, for example, without any loss of status. In George Town today, Tamils distinguish between a man's "big house" (periya viidu ), his marriage-centered household, and his "small house" (cinna viidu ), his concubine-centered household, with only mild embarrassment. It is not unusual for wealthy and powerful men to have concubines. But there is more to Saroja's isolation than just a double standard. What comes across from Saroja's telling of her life story is that she is self-centered and puts herself before everyone, traits that would isolate a man as well.

Features and Themes of Individuation

Socially successful Tamils are not those who think only of themselves, nurturing no one, like Saroja, nor those who submit completely to the dictates of others, like Sivakumar. Among the Tamils I interviewed, the majority fell between the extremes these two represent. Tamils were clearly aware of their individual interests and desires and sought to fulfill at least some of these, but they were also aware of their responsibility for their relationships, and, while they chose actions that sometimes ended close ties, they were fully aware that their own honor and success depended on their relationships with others. Their kin and social connections were important to them, brought them happiness as well as grief, and were integral to their sense of who they were, and their ability to negotiate life.

In Tamil society, individuals need their relationships in order to accomplish their own private ends. This requires them to nurture relationships that they consider important to their private interests. For example, while a woman might want to live separately from her in-laws with her husband and children, nonetheless, she also weighs the importance of the joint family to her needs and goals as wife and mother and judges what the cost to her might be of splitting the family. Self-interest, therefore, involves living, working, and identifying with others, and Tamil individuality necessarily finds expression within the context of

such groupings. Individuals end relationships and break away from groups with which they have been closely identified, knowing that they must avoid isolating themselves. Among my informants, in every generation, families partition because it is in the interest of individuals to do so. All it takes is for one of the male coparceners to feel that his advantage ties elsewhere. And, as we have seen in Lakshmi's case, women often play a critical role deciding when that might be.

A distinction needs to be made here between the joint family and the joint household. Today, most Tamils do not live in joint households, a household of economic co-sharers and their wives and children.^[2] Many do, however, continue as members of a "joint family," a property-owning economic unit formed by ties of joint ownership among male co-sharers who live separately. Lakshmi's son, for example, lives in Bombay. She and her husband feel it is their prerogative to control his salary and, with this prerogative in mind, have given him permission to keep all his salary, although he himself has offered to remit a portion home. Similarly, Lakshmi's eldest daughter lives with her husband in Madras in a house owned by her husband's coparceners, who live elsewhere. For all intents and purposes they live an independent home life, except that the house is jointly owned and her husband works in partnership with his father. When Tamils live in separate households within the joint (that is, co-property-owning) family, their struggle to achieve a sense of control in their lives is greatly reduced. Although few of my informants currently live in joint households, all of them have experienced such house-holds at least for a time, for example, as a child, or during the early years of marriage, and in some instances for the greater part of their lives. Joint households feature prominently in their life stories when they describe their own struggles for individuation.

Knowing that private interests at some point run counter to collective interests, Tamils recognize the inevitability of partitioning, as do Indians everywhere. In many cases, dissolutions are friendly, but because property and loyalties are involved, often they are not. For example, one of my informants, Arumugam by name, told me that he and his brothers divided their businesses and filed for separation in 1942, but that it was not until 1979 after a long court battle that the final division was settled.

The motivations underlying family partitioning are, of course, related to issues of control. Comparing life stories, one of the common themes is a desire to have a sense of control over decisions affecting one's life. In the joint family, as in other social groups, control theoretically rests in the hands of its preeminent members: in the case of the family, its

heads, the senior male and his wife. In point of fact, I observed that the most successful joint families (those that stayed together the longest) were headed by men and women who gave their sons and daughters-in-law control over important areas of their lives. Viswanathan's father, who left him in charge of the textile shop when he returned to his itinerant cloth trade, is a case in point. Tensions between father and sons are reduced by such abrogation and division of responsibilities. Another family head, Arumugam, the man mentioned above, who is also a textile merchant and manufacturer, worked out with his seven sons that they each contribute a specific amount to the joint household, but otherwise allowed them complete control over their own earnings and a free hand in the management of part of the family enterprises. They lived together with all their wives and children in a huge house when I interviewed Arumugam, then seventy-six years of age. The sons and their wives liked the system because they did not have to go to the family head when they wanted money for a purpose of their own. Compare their situation with the lack of control over even small details and personal desires in Saroja's and Lakshmi's descriptions of their joint family experiences. Yet, even in a house as liberally managed as Arumugam's, partitioning eventually occurs because individuals wish to control their own resources. In fact, Arumugam's eldest son had declared the Sunday previous to our interview that he wanted to move out of the big-house and separate. Now all of the sons will separate, for this is the pattern of household partitioning. Arumugam was saddened, saying that he wished he had not constructed the big-house, which he had built just four years previously in "hope that the family would not crack." He says he had sufficient land and wishes instead that he had built a number of separate houses in the same compound. The desire to control the decisions that occur within one's own living space is a compelling motivation behind partitioning, as Lakshmi's and Saroja's stories also show. So too is the desire to control other features of one's life. Arumugam empathizes with his son's wish to live separately. But he also blames the government for "sparking the breakup by giving the individual more legal importance than the family." His son's concern about income taxes are a factor in his decision to partition. Here we see the individual weighing his personal interests not as an isolated person but as a member of groups, the joint family and his own elemental family consisting of himself, his wife, and children.

As we have seen, Tamil individuals achieve control over their private lives when they acquire a role of responsibility within their household

and over economic affairs. This may occur in a number of ways. For example, a dependent coparcener, usually a son or brother of the house-hold head, may initiate the division, as in the case of Arumugam's son. Keeping in mind that jointly owned property will be divided and that cultural values emphasize the collective interests of the family over those of the individual, it is easy to understand that such an initiative is emotionally stressful, somewhat analogous to filing for divorce in the U.S. Once separated from the joint family, the partitioner himself becomes the head of his own elemental household. Preeminence gives the partitioner control over decisions affecting his life and responsibility for himself and his dependents.

Alternatively, responsibility may be acquired when a family head delegates responsibilities to his coparceners, sharing out his control and responsibility, as Viswanathan's father did with him and as Arumugam did with his sons. However, such solutions to problems arising from control are temporary because the control that a dependent has over his life is partial, leaving the person to stew over those features of his life that are controlled or affected by the behavior and decisions of his co-sharers. In 1942, it was Arumugam himself who instigated the division among his co-sharers, his brothers, because he judged himself the best businessman among them and disliked the fact that not only did they benefit without effort from his business acumen, but also that he shared their losses, slowing down his own economic progress. Six years earlier, when he had been thirty-two years old, he had borrowed Rs. 250 from his mother-in-law to start his own small wholesale cloth business. It was then that his own personal success had begun to outstrip his brothers', and he saw his wholesale business as rightfully belonging separately to himself. Splitting the family made it possible for him to "go it alone."

Yet a third way a man acquires the status of head is when he has responsibility and control thrust suddenly upon him when his father dies and he realizes that now he is responsible for his household and in control of himself and his dependents. I have heard Tamils describe such a moment in their lives as the point when they became adult. For the first time they see themselves as responsible for their lives and their families.

The point to be made, therefore, is that the way both men and women acquire control over their private lives is by ascending to a position of preeminence within their household. This gives them control over their economic affairs and most decisions of daily life. But the road to preeminence within the family is often a rocky one because life histories indicate that Tamils must learn by trial and error that they are

responsible for themselves. This idea of learning that one is responsible for oneself—indeed, that the individual is the sole agent responsible for his or her life—is a central theme of my informants' descriptions of individuation. Informants describe this realization first in their late twenties or early thirties. But it is among older informants where it finds its strongest expression.

When I interviewed Chinnamuttu, he was about to have his eighty-third birthday. He was a healthy, vital man, with a sharp mind, who lived on the veranda of a large house occupied by one of his sons in the T. Nagar section of Madras City. In old age, he no longer lived with his wife—she lived separately with another son. He had given up his possessions and the wealth and power that he had once earned for himself and now lived simply, with minimal possessions.

He told me that when he was young his only aim was to make a living. He was poor; his father operated a tiny grocery business, and so after marriage at eighteen, he went to work for his father-in-law, who had a small piece-goods textile business. He said that he really had no particular ambition, no vision of how he wanted his life to turn out. Rather, he developed his business goals gradually through contact with friends and in response to changes in his circumstances. He worked for his father-in-law until the latter's death in 1920 and then did his own piece-goods business, gradually developing it, acquiring powerlooms to supply his own needs, and moving into bigger markets, first into Erode, then Madurai, and finally Madras. He prospered during World War II and in 1946 purchased from a French owner a cloth mill in Pondicherry, 90 miles south of Madras City—"because of friends and circumstances only.... When you have more money," he said, "you need to find a place for it. Water flows, you can't stop it." Then, sometime later, he built a second mill, this one in Pudukottai, about 250 miles south of Madras.

Things went well until about 1965, when because of labor problems the central government stepped in to oversee his management and then took over total control in 1974. They took over the mills supposedly "to better them," he said, but "instead worsened them. They heaped up losses. The government has no interest in business. An appointed man is interested in helping himself, not the mills." Chinnamuttu was clearly angered by the injustice and by his inability to do anything about it. He told me, "You can't take the case to court because it's the government."

Assuming that the mill takeover was a period of major difficulty in his life, I asked Chinnamuttu how he dealt with what had happened. In reply, he told me his personal philosophy:

"I was the same with or without the mill, the same person, the same bent of mind. It made no difference in my career.... I never felt those years were hard times. It depends on the mind. If you have the right frame of mind, there are no hard times. No one can inflict harm on me. The wrong done to us is because of ourself. We place ourselves in such a position as to be harmed by other men. This is an idea that I didn't have when I was young, but gradually grew as I got older. How can you understand when young? This is a lesson learned from the world, [an attitude] which you get by moving with wise people."

I asked him whether he had had any mentors in life. "No," he said, "I'm self-found and self-made. I don't follow after anyone. No hero worship. No one can help us or harm us. It is in our hands." A while later, at the conclusion of our interview, he added a final comment: "Ignorance," he said, "is the cause of all misery. Remove ignorance and man is all right."

It is a tradition among sociologists and anthropologists to offer explanations of social history that depict impersonal social forces as the cause of events and circumstances affecting the course of peoples' lives. An economic downturn leads to a person being laid off from work, to household crisis, to divorce, for example. Chinnamuttu's explanation of himself was much more complex. I am struck by the multiple perspectives he employed to tell his story.^[3] Describing his earlier years, Chinnamuttu depicted the events of his life as resulting less from his own efforts to achieve some ultimate goal or set of goals, than from what he considered "the flow of circumstance." Here he seems to mirror the sociological perspective, the individual caught up by events. But having told me that his life course was not all his own making, he also let me know he felt responsible for how he had responded to the events and circumstances that he encountered. From this second perspective, he views himself as an actor. Finally, Chinnamuttu's telling reveals a third perspective. He saw himself as a separate, autonomous individual who was solely responsible for the meaning of his life.

Chinnamuttu's concern was to explain to me his inner view of life, what I would describe as his private individuality as opposed to Bala's civic individuality or Kasi's description of his own public, civic identity, which I related in chapter 2. Look again at the multiple perspectives Chinnamuttu used to tell his story. Several themes, which compose his sense of his private self, are apparent: First is Chinnamuttu's sense of responsibility for who he was and how he had acted. He was as he said, "self-found and self-made." Then, as a responsible actor, he declared

himself independently in charge of the decisions that had affected his life, and he explained the course of his life in terms of an interaction between himself as actor and shifting circumstances over which he lacked control. Finally, he saw himself as separate from others. He had no mentors and, as he said, "didn't follow after anyone." In other words, the out-standing thematic features of his own awareness of himself were his sense of responsibility, agency, independence, and ultimately, his separation from others. "No one," he says, "can help us or harm us. It [life and its meaning] is in our hands."

To summarize, private expressions of individuality, as these emerge in life stories, are closely associated with personal motivations and private interests, wishes, and goals, even while these expressions are always located in collective contexts—the family, the caste community, institutions, the society at large. When my informants describe their lives in terms of these goals and motivations, they focus on issues of control, responsibility, and causation, which, as we have seen in chapter 7, are ex-pressions of a Tamil ethos of individuality. They speak of becoming aware that they are responsible for their own lives and of their struggle to act on that awareness. They describe conflicts, family splits, lawsuits, and the deaths of seniors by which they ascended to positions of preeminence within their households. As household heads, they describe achieving control over decisions affecting their lives, but also how preeminence means that they take responsibility for others, their dependents. And with increasing emphasis as they get older, they speak of their sense that each alone is the primary agent of his or her life. Reflecting a sense of life process, the Tamil's awareness of himself or herself is a developing, changing thing.

Chapter Nine
Conclusions

One day, while writing this book, I asked one of my Tamil friends in Santa Barbara to ask his father how important he thought individuality was in Tamil society. His father, an elderly businessman, lives in a small town near Madurai. The father wrote a few weeks later, stating that he thought individuality—he used the word tanittuvam —was basic. There is no more important thing. In his letter, my friend's father likened life to a building and the individual to its architect. Tamil society was itself the design of great men like Tiruvalluvar, he wrote, referring here to the fifth century author of the Tirukkural , a poetic Tamil text of aphorisms that has enjoyed and continues to enjoy great currency and respect in popular Tamil culture (Cutler 1992, n.d.). I found this reference to the Tirukkural interesting because central among Tiruvalluvar's topics are issues of reputation, judgment, responsibility, and action. Tiruvalluvar's perspective presumes the reality of the person as an effective agent of his or her own life.

Working as an ethnographer in Tamil Nadu, I have often sensed that the Tamil's world view perceives the person concretely, looking out at the world from the perspective of the self, posing two interconnected questions: "What is my social context? How shall I act?" It is a view that presumes the reality of society and of the person as the agent of who he or she is, and it is a view that recognizes the public and private self. This is certainly the way modern Tamils interpret the messages of the Tirukkural . Given birth and circumstances, as a person acts, so the person is, and so should he or she be judged. From an American perspective,

this Tamil view of the contextualized individual lacks an abstract sense of all persons as fundamentally the same. As I have indicated in this book, abstract notions of the individual carry little meaning for Tamils. This creates something of a paradox for the Westerner: Tamils have a strong sense of individuality, but no abstract notion of the individual.

Consequently, despite what my friend's father had written, many Tamils, if asked whether or not the individual is important to a characterization of society, might answer no. The chances are such a response would be because Tamils have no overarching integrated conception of the individual as a skin-bounded indivisible entity, separate from others, of the sort that Marriott (1989) argues characterizes Western notions of the individual. Nor, outside of contemporary Indian constitutional law, do Tamils conceive of the individual as the basic unit of society, as Arumugam's criticism of laws that favor the individual over the family attests. So, too, Tamil values emphasize individual compliance with the interests of seniors, family, and caste, rather than individual freedom or equality, and they are critical of egoism. For a preeminent person, the ideal is to subordinate personal interests to those of community or other constituents.

But if our hypothetical Tamil were instead asked whether who a person is and what he does is important to an understanding of society, then he would answer as my friend's father did: obviously so. Elaborating, he might add that each person is distinct, an aggregate of manifest qualities and has his or her own nature. Each is an agent with his or her own responsibilities and roles, goals, achievements, and reputation; an agent who naturally interacts with and affects society in his or her particular manner.

Consider Bala, Lakshmi, Saroja, Sivakumar, or any of the persons described in this book. Bala is a social architect each of whose institutions is the "lengthened shadow" ^[1] of himself. Attracting his constituents to the institutions that he controls, he organizes a following, making himself the center of his community, even while he also attempts to recreate and maintain a sense of neighborhood cohesiveness among the George Town Beeri Chettiars. Lakshmi's sphere of influence is limited to her kin, but consider how her growing awareness of responsibility for herself affected relationships within her husband's joint household. Ultimately, she was instrumental in its restructuring and her design affected the lives of all concerned.

The manifested individuality of each person is observed and characterized by those who know him or her, and the distribution of those who know a person defines the spatial and social dimensions of the person's

individuality. Knowing who a person is—whether he or she is trust-worthy, for example, or is in a position to help when one needs assistance—is critical to how one interacts with that individual. Tamils base their decisions and interactions with others on their assessment of who each person is, not just on one's character but also on other attributes such as gender, caste, family, education, and positions in life, including eminence, occupation, offices, influence, relationships, and status within one's family.

Given the personalized nature of Tamil society, it is not surprising that institutions are characterized in terms of their leaders, and each is valued or disregarded according to how its leaders act and what access they provide to benefits. The Beeri Chettiars characterize themselves as a caste community in terms of their past and present leaders. Leaders, not caste, are the determinants of social organization; caste itself is conceived as a highly personalized configuration of relationships, created by its leaders. What gives a caste its corporate form are its big-men and their overlapping institutional constituencies.

In this manner, Beeri Chettiar leaders have created in George Town a caste community for themselves, and in their pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige, they have founded the institutions that form the framework for the leadership of the caste. It should be understood that Tamil public individuality is recognized within particular social contexts and is defined spatially by the localities within which a person is known. In the case of a big-man, the distribution of his institutions of leadership and the location of his constituents are spatial expressions of his individuality. Only a man of relatively great importance is known beyond his constituency circles.

In the nineteenth century, Beeri Chettiar leaders organized their identities and caste community around a mandala of religious institutions with overlapping constituencies. This type of highly personal organization was well suited to the levels of social trust that facilitated business at that time. But circumstances change. By the end of the nineteenth century, Beeri Chettiars, demanding more relaxed behavior codes, rebelled against the dictates of caste headmen, seeking to replace personalized trust relationships with bureaucratic standards and regulations. In the twentieth century, this movement away from personalized trust has continued and, as it has, the institutions of leadership that once organized the George Town Beeri Chettiars as a caste community have weakened.

Yet personalized social trust continues to have its place in Madras society and leaders still found or manage institutions to create constituencies

and to establish their reputations. In fact, among the Beeri Chettiars the main locus of community assets used for the benefit of the caste are still housed within caste institutions, the Kandasami temple and the myriad of organizations founded by community leaders such as the Vasantha Mandabam, schools, medical dispensaries, libraries, numerous endowments, lending societies, the caste madam , the Abanatha Dharma Siva Acharya Madam, and the caste funeral shrine and tank.

Nevertheless, it is clear that personalized social trust is not nearly as important to Beeri Chettiars today as it once was. And the changes that the George Town community have experienced over the last one hundred years reflect this trend. Beeri Chettiars have been moving away from George Town, and there is a diminished need for those who still live among their caste fellows to do so. The transition the Beeri Chettiars are acting out is common to contemporary urban life. People have a new freedom, but this freedom has a cost: urban anonymity. In the new city neighborhoods, people lack knowledge of their neighbors. Even in George Town, this trend is evident as new people replace old residents who move away. One consequence of anonymity is rising crime rates. Another is increasing personal autonomy. And yet another is the growing acceptance of intercaste marriages initiated by couples who have met in their workplace or while in school. Rising crime rates and intercaste marriage suggest that urban Madras is becoming a very different kind of city. As bureaucratic means of enforcing reliability have increased, the need to maintain a tightly knit caste and neighborhood community has diminished and the day-to-day importance of keeping tabs on large numbers of people—on individuality (as opposed to an abstract notion of the individual)—is less.

Increasing anonymity and autonomy represent an undermining of the importance of being known for who you are—of individuality—and of the way in which the city is organized. The organization of the city is becoming impersonal. Paradoxically, despite increased autonomy, the importance of individuality is decreasing as personalized relationships and the caste community become less important. Individualism may be on the rise, but the importance of individuality to social life is on the decline. Yet it is easy to exaggerate this trend. Madras City is still a highly personalized society, individuality is still important, and you need to know the right people to get things done. Despite the size of Madras, relationships still seem intimate to me and fear of violent crime almost nonexistent when I compare Madras rates with those of my own university district in California. But the trend is clear. The future will bring

more anonymity and with it less trust, but Madras will also be a more open society than it was.

The implications of the depersonalizing transition for the Madras City of the near future are profound. What some might label the consequences of "modernity" are unravelling the weave of the old personalized order. The new order is impersonal, and its norms are set not locally, but in the arena of law and politics, where standards are still superficial, fluid, and much contested. According to Giddens (1991:2) "modernity" is a global phenomenon

characterised by profound processes of the reorganization of time and space, coupled to the expansion of disembedding mechanisms—mechanisms which prise social relations free from the hold of specific locales, recombining them across wide time-space distances. The reorganization of time and space, plus the disembedding mechanisms, radicalise and globalise preestablished institutional traits of modernity; and they act to transform the content and nature of day-to-day social life.

The pervasiveness of doubt (Giddens 1991:2-3)—of anxiety about society's organization and one's fit in society—is an important expression of this transformation of daily life. In India, if identity specific to localized social relations is taken as characteristic of the old personalized order based on trust, then uncertainty of relations is characteristic of the new order in which standards are highly contested. It remains to be seen how this metamorphosis will be played out in Madras City, but the sense of growing uncertainty is present. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi just outside of Madras City and the machine-gun-carrying body-guards of Tamil Nadu's chief minister express as much.

What I have attempted to do in this book is expose the importance of individuality in all its many features in Tamil society up to the present day. The attempt has been to reveal the dimensions of individuality and its role in Tamil society, to describe how it is valued and expressed. This effort stands in direct opposition to the conceptualization of Indian society proposed by Louis Dumont and in partial opposition to that of McKim Marriott.

As we have seen, these two theorists, for quite different reasons, argue that any approach to understanding Indian society that emphasizes the individual is misconceived. Emphasizing the divisible nature of Indian personhood, Marriott focuses primarily on Hindu textual interpretations of the physical dimension of who a person is and explains motivations in terms of strategies designed to maintain or improve personal substance. Certainly, interpretations of personal substance and concerns

for keeping it in balance and improving it are aspects of how Indians think about personhood. Some Americans also find this Indian way of thinking fascinating. But what of other features of personhood, including the stress Tamils place on individual achievement, personal reputation, eminence, and individuation? Marriott's (1976) conception of the dividual disregards these, and his explanation of motivation is consequently distorted.^[2] Why not add to Marriott's dividualist conception Tamil ways of assessing and valuing individuality, which also view the person as an aggregate? This generates a more complex and complete image of Tamil personhood, as well as a better sense of the concerns and roles of individuals as agents of their own destinies. Such a view has the added advantage of recognizing the role that individuals play in history.

Take, for example, Saroja's story, which I described in chapter 8. In my interview with her, Saroja came across as an unpleasant person: selfish, crude, harsh. But her life breaks the smooth fabric of convention and reveals the tensions that lie beneath because she goes far beyond what Tamils think is appropriate behavior for a woman. She is offensive, but there is also something about her that I admire. She is brave, realistic about how people judge her, and self-reliant. And sometimes it is someone who is judged a bad character who inspires the anthropologist's best insights. Deviance and personal conflict draw attention to what defines the ordinary dimensions that compose a person's individuality.

Saroja's telling of her story reveals a complex sense of self: First she identified herself as a member of a caste and as a native of her father's village, her own village—her sonda uur .^[3] She said she was a Kaikkoolar or weaver, referring here to her caste, who came from a village near Salem. She told me that it was the custom of her caste to tattoo the tip of a woman's tongue with a blue dot when she married. She stuck out her tongue to show me. "They remove the dot of widows," she said, merely smiling when I asked her how they did that. Second, Saroja identified closely with the land of her native village, and she was very proud that she owned two acres of land in her own name given to her by her father.

A third dimension of Saroja's sense of herself was her gender. Saroja believed that her rebelliousness was thought the worse because she was a woman, and she resented the greater autonomy that men enjoyed. In the context of Tamil culture, Saroja's gender made her a dependent. She needed men—her father, her husband, her son—to take care of her. Her efforts at independence, such as taking a lover and running a milk business, were only partially successful as ways of controlling her life because these actions hurt others and attracted criticisms from those who

knew her. Nonetheless, very aware of her dependence, Saroja thought that if she were a man, she could do as she liked. Yet, almost in the same breath, she projected pride in her womanhood. She was clearly pleased with herself when she gave birth to a son. It was also apparent to me, when I asked her how she would have changed her life if she could, that the idea of being a man—she said, "I would ask not to be born female," rather than "I would be born a man"—did not altogether suit her. She was angry with men. She felt men mistreated women and she seemed angry to be dependent on them.

Curiously, Saroja did not mention her mother in her life story. Nor, it will be recalled, did Lakshmi mention her mother in her life-telling, and I would hypothesize that this is common to women's life stories. My sense is that there are complex reasons for this. Primary among these is that in talking about the direction of their lives women are concerned with the life adjustments that they have been forced to make. At marriage, the burden of adjustment falls on women, not men. This is why in India, as Ramanujan (1991) has characterized them, women-centered folktales begin with marriage and then proceed to tell the story of a woman's undeserved tribulations before final achievement of a desired life. As Lakshmi made clear, a mother can do little to prevent or affect the trial of adjustment that a daughter must make as a wife and daughter-in-law. To control her own life, a woman must have the allegiance of her husband and sons; she must have their loyalty. A mother, then, can play a major role in a son's life, but in adulthood mothers have a much less important role in a daughter's.

A fourth dimension of Saroja's individuality is age. At eighteen she married and became the mother of a son. At thirty she took a lover. This was an act of defiance, but also a deal Saroja struck with the executive officer of the little temple in exchange for helping her build a house on temple land. At that age, Saroja described herself as defiant and unafraid. But as an act of independence the deal had its drawbacks. Saroja felt she had to maintain the relationship to keep her house; she was merely trading among different kinds of dependence. At forty, her health deteriorating, Saroja was afraid. She understood her dependence and feared abandonment. Clearly, age affected Saroja's sense of who she was, and who she was and the kinds of concerns she had were different at different ages. Saroja's individuality reveals itself as a changing, evolving thing.

A fifth determinant of Saroja's selfhood involved the balance she had struck between self-interest and her need for others. Saroja was strikingly

independent and placed her interests before those of others. She separated herself from others, defied them, ran from them. She set herself in opposition to others. But interestingly, she was never without relation-ships, and she described herself in terms of a series of relationships as wife, mother, lover, and dependent. In fact, a key feature of how she saw herself was in terms of men—her father, husband, lover, and son. Elsewhere, and at other times, when I interviewed Tamil women, they always described themselves in relationship to men, especially husbands, fathers, and fathers-in-law. But by contrast, when I interviewed men, they rarely described themselves in relationship to a wife. More often a man described his mother, but in many cases women simply played smaller roles in Tamil men's senses of who they were.

A sixth dimension of Saroja's individuality concerns issues of power and control. Who has the power to define who a person is? In society, people use a variety of conventions, values, and statuses to impose definitions on a person, to control and constrain what happens to him or her and what he or she does. The individual must mediate between these dictates of others—his or her society—and those of the self. As I have argued in this book (cf. Kakar 1981), if others have too much control over who a person is, so that the person's sense of agency is tightly constrained, the person suffocates psychologically. But with too much independence, the person suffers isolation.

This psychological polarity was Saroja's dilemma. Her solution was to court isolation rather than suffer suffocation. In her ongoing fight to escape control, we see her making her husband move out of his father's house, hawking her jewelry to pay for a new apartment in Madras, taking a lover, starting her milk business, cheating, and controlling her husband and his paycheck. All of this so that she could control her life. But she went too far. She hurt those who might otherwise have cared for her when she no longer would be able to care for herself. Listening to her, I admired her bravery, but did not envy the fate she had made for herself.

Finally, there is a seventh dimension to Saroja's individuality. This is her sense of herself as an agent or actor. She described herself as doing things and making decisions, and she surmised the outcome of those decisions. She took responsibility for her behavior. Telling her story, Saroja constructed the identity she had made for herself. But Saroja's identity was also defined from the outside, by others. Recall my assistant's whispered asides while I was listening to Saroja to the effect that Saroja was a bad woman. Saroja revealed her clear awareness of this external view and of the interplay between her personal perspective and the views of

others. Saroja knew she had a reputation that was based on a view that held her responsible for her behavior. A person is defined socially in part by what she or he does. Saroja accepted this fact, but even in her illness and fear at forty years of age she remained rebellious.

What do we learn about the nature of Tamil individuality—of who a person is—from Saroja's story? Caste, place, gender, age, the balance she strikes between self-interest and her need for others, her struggle to have some control over her life, and her recognition of herself as a responsible agent of her own life these are dimensions of Saroja's individuality. Of course, manifestations of these dimensions vary for each person; points of view embedded in gender, for example, obviously differ between men and women. It is this variation that produces individuality. Each of the life stories that I collected revealed these dimensions.

But is not this a richer, more complex view of the person than one limited to the "dividual" with its narrow focus on the substance-material nature of who a person is? While a Tamil might agree with the dividualist image if it were explained—for example, that one way of viewing Saroja is as a being whose substance is constantly in flux—this is not the way any of my informants explained themselves. I think, in fact, that Tamils take for granted what Marriott calls their "dividual" qualities. Flux and the transformation of substance is in the nature of things, according to a Tamil world view. Such views frame their lives and affect major areas of behavior: bathing, dining and dietary rules, rules about travel overseas, divisions of labor, and marriage customs. But among my informants, it is issues of caste, gender, age, self-interest, control, agency—the dimensions of self that Saroja's story reveals—that intrigue and concern them, and it is self-interest that has often motivated them to seek social change. In fact, self-interest sometimes runs counter to what a dividualist perspective would lead one to expect: people marry out of caste; sons, daughters-in-law, and wives rebel; some take lovers; members of well-known families convert to Christianity; and caste behavior codes, meant to preserve caste purity, are overthrown. This book has described examples of each of these.

Interestingly, in Marriott's most recent publication (Marriott 1989), he seems to move closer to a multiplex view of person, more in keeping with the one that I have tried to represent in this book. Nonetheless, he still assumes that a Hindu's concept of the person is dividualistic. And his view is still a construction based more on texts than on studies of real persons going about their daily lives. There is something removed and mythical about his conceptual constructions, just as there is in Daniel's

semiotic analysis of Tamil persons (Daniel 1984; cf. Appadurai 1986). The reader is left with a sense of having participated in a fascinating mental game, one concerned more with subtexts than with the thoughts that lie on the surface of peoples' day-to-day concerns: the passions, ambitions, possessions, struggles, choices, and mistakes of private lives.

Marriott argues that as long as Hindus are transactors, they are not individuals, meaning by this that they are not unitary beings. But such nonunitary beings can exist only in the mental realm. Look again at the epigraph with which I began this book. In Malgudi Days , the south Indian writer R. K. Narayan describes south Indian individuality:

The material available to a story writer in India is limitless. Within a broad climate of inherited culture there are endless variations: every individual differs from every other individual, not only economically, but in outlook, habits and day-to-day philosophy.... Under such conditions the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character (and thereby a story).

This observation is as true for the anthropologist as it is for the novelist. Each person has an empirical existence that no one, certainly not Tamils, would deny. Clearly, Tamils see persons as having individuality.

Dumont's rejection of any role for the individual in Indian society is much more extreme than Marriott's. Dumont argues that, except for the empirical fact that each person is physically an individual and for the fact of individualism associated with the religious world-renouncer, there are no social individuals in Indian society. Instead, each person has the holistic collective identity of his or her family and caste. Further, Dumont rejects achievement and the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power as forces of Indian history because he rejects the presence of the economic marketplace wherein he believes these pursuits are found (Dumont 1970a:105-8). Finally, Dumont outrightly rejects any explanation of Indian history that focuses on the individual. For him, the cause of Indian history is the religious notion of hierarchy that generates the Hindu caste system. Dumont, in other words, disregards Indian self-explanations and allows Indians no causal role as agents of their history. If nothing else, this book should demonstrate the falsity of these views.

Whether explaining their private or public selves, whether describing their families, caste, or social institutions, Tamils express a complex set of ideas about the nature of individuality and individual agency. Recognition of individuality lies at the base of how they govern their lives, judge and value others, and organize their society.