1. Native Officer, On Bribery, 15.

2. Perhaps the work that best epitomizes this activity, aside from that of Henry Sumner Maine, is Baden-Powell, Land Systems.

3. Baden-Powell, Land Systems, 3:121. He writes, “Brahman (and other) proprietors largely employed slaves to cultivate for them: and these slaves were looked upon as glebae adscripti. It is curious that these also called themselves ‘mirasidar.’…‘The Vellala,’ they said, ‘sells his birthright to the Sunar (goldsmith and moneylender); the latter is cajoled.’ ”

4. The citation for Baden-Powell is Crole, Chingleput, 213.

5. P. B. Smollett to BOR, 27 January 1855, CCR, vol. 5836, TNSA. This proposition was sent to the House of Commons by the Madras Native Association in 1854 or 1855. Several members of the Madras Native Association were Mirasidars from the Chingleput district.

6. Ellis, Appendix, quoting Place, 1799 Report.

7. P. B. Smollett to BOR, 27 November 1854, CCR, vol. 5835, TNSA.

8. Crole said that it was “clear as noon-day, from these papers, that the mirassi system and a gross rental are inseparable parts of the system he [Place] exhumed and introduced.” BORP, 25 May 1875, no. 1415, TNSA.

9. Tremenheere, “Note on the Pariahs.”

10. Toṇạa maṇạala sataka urai (Commentary on the Tonda Mandala Sataka) in Citambaram Irāmali;aznka Suvāmikaḷ, Tiru Aruạpā, 3 Viyakiyāṉam pakuti (Song of grace, part 3) (Madras: Arutpa Valakam, 1961), 154. It was originally published by the Ripon Press in Madras (p. 139).

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 156. The quality of sattuvam was goodness or purity, rajas was passion or activity, and tamas was darkness, dullness, or inactivity. See commentary in Franklin Edgerton, trans., The Bhagavad Gita (Harper and Row: New York, 1944), 141.

14. Toḻuvūr Vēlāyuta Mutaliyār, Vēlaṉ Marapiyal [Vellala customs] (Madras: Kudalur Kuppiyappillai, 1880). This was a translation into Tamil of an English petition presented to the Madras municipal commissioners.

15. Maṟaimalaiyaạikaḷ, Velalar Nakarikam, 6–7.

16. The contemporary dictionary meaning of “velanmai” was agriculture.

17. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, “Public Culture,” Items (Winter 1990), 79.

18. Velalar Nakarikam, 3.

19. Ibid., 5.

20. In 1905, Reverend Adam Andrew, a United Free Church of Scotland missionary in Chingleput, invoked the ideas of Kambar, the author of the Tamil Rāmāyaṇam in favor of agriculture. Andrew wrote: “Kambar, the Tamil poet has written beautifully in praise of agriculture. He has said, ‘Even students of the Vedas and in other branches of knowledge must wait at the door of the husbandman. The prosperity of powerful kings depends on the plough share. So who can describe the importance of the agriculturist?’ ” Andrew invoked the writing of Tiruvalluvar, the author of the Tirukural, in favor of the importance of agriculture. Tiruvalluvar, said Andrew, had written:

Howe’er they roam, the world must follow still the plougher’s team;
Though toilsome, culture of the ground as noblest toil esteem.

21. Maraimalaiyatikal, Velalar Nakarikam, 12.

22. Baden-Powell, Land System, 3:111.

23. Ibid., 112–13.

24. Baker, Indian rural economy, 25–26.

25. Dirks, Hollow Crown, 248.

26. Ibid., 205.

27. Padre Manente had brought a group of 351 families from the northern Telugu “circar” of Guntur, where there was a famine in 1787, to the Jagir where those settlements, even in the late nineteenth century, were still intact. Crole, Chingleput, 237; President’s Minute, 17 October, 1786, BORP, vol. 8, TNSA; Minute of the Board of Revenue and enclosures, 20 November 1786, BORP, vol. 5, TNSA.

28. In writing about the visit of some church deputies from Scotland to the area in February 1902, Reverend Andrew said that he had taken them to Melrosapuram. He wrote, “On Saturday they visited the Peasant Settlement of Melrosapuram and saw the land that was jungle in 1893 now converted into a neat and prosperous village inhabited by Christian converts of the mission, where daily services are held morning and evening to meet the spiritual wants of the people. They saw the fine garden that surrounds the prayer hall and walked up the village street which is lined on each side with beautiful coconut palms.” Andrew to Smith, 22 February 1902, UFCSM, MS. 7845, NLS. Melrosapuram was a settlement that had seventy-two acres of land around it near the village of Senkunram, in the Chingleput taluk. It was called Melrosapuram after a certain Mrs. Melrose who had, along with other members of a congregation in Scotland, made a contribution of a hundred pounds for Andrew’s work among the paraiyars in Chingleput.

29. Henry Sumner Maine, Early History of Institutions, new ed. (London: J. Murray, 1890), 70–72.

30. Ci. Eṉ. Aṇṇāturai, Ellōrum iṉ nāṭṭu maṉṉar (Everybody is a king of the country), (Cennai: Tuyarmalar Patippakam, 1961).