PART THREE
RITUAL AND KINSHIP

7
The Magic of Capitalism and the Mercantile Elite

Magical Capitalism

Most efforts to describe Nakarattar business point to Nakarattars' ascetic life style and their total commitment to business, in short, to a Hindu version of Weber's Protestant ethic (Day 1972; Mahadevan 1976; Siegelman 1962; Thurston 1909). Mention is made in passing of their massive religious endowment, of their construction of lavish houses in their homeland of Chettinad, and of their extravagant dowries. But such apparently nonbusiness, nonprofit activities are not integrated with the otherwise totalistic Nakarattar business ethic. Indeed the question of how these activities are integrated is scarcely treated.

The most important exception to this generalization is provided indirectly by Milton Singer's (1972) effort to develop a non-Weberian interpretation of Hindu industrialists in 1960s Madras. Yet even here, despite trenchant criticism of many of Weber's arguments and a powerful analysis of the positive role of joint families in industrial organization, Singer ultimately offers a Weberian apologia for the coexistence of Hindu ritual and capitalist practice. Along with Weber, Singer apparently assumes that ritual and business are inconsistent and suggests that Hindu businessmen compartmentalize their religious life from their business life, conducting worship in their homes and temples in as minimal fashion as possible. Moreover, he suggests that religious endowments and other ritual gifts represent compensatory devices by which businessmen pay other people to worship for them. He labels this rather Catholic interpretation of Hindu religious gifting as vicarious ritualization .

To my knowledge, no one has taken issue with Singer on this interpretation. Yet it depends crucially on three problematic assumptions. They involve, respectively, a mistake about historical fact, an ethnocentric view of religion, and a failure to appreciate the radical but incomplete transformation of Hindu religious endowments under colonial and postcolonial rule.

Historical issues arise in Singer's implicit assumption that religious endowment, as a form of vicarious ritualization, is a novel ritual response to a novel business climate. Yet it is clear from published South Indian cases of religious gifting in eleventh-century Chidambaram (Hall 1980; Spencer 1968), fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tirupati (Stein 1960), seventeenth-century Palani (Rudner 1987 and this chapter, below), and nineteenth-century Madurai and Ramnad (Breckenridge 1976; Price 1979) that this assumption is wrong. In each of these cases, various forms of religious gifting constituted mechanisms by which merchants and mercantile communities entered a new locality, created viable social identities, and gained authoritative entitlement for their commercial enterprises. It is also quite clear that temples which received merchant endowments acted as capital-accumulating institutions, that mercantile leaders were frequently able to exercise control over temple expenditure and investment, and that this control included reinvestment in the business enterprises of the merchants themselves. In other words, religious endowment has been a central component in Hindu business practice since long before the age of instant communication, rapid transportation, and capital-intensive industry.

Moreover, the problem with interpreting religious endowment as vicarious ritualization goes far beyond incompatibility with historical fact. At its core, such an interpretation relies on an ethnocentric assumption that religion is, by definition, other-worldly and that it interferes with secular, this-worldly business concerns. Conversely, such an interpretation implies that mundane goals such as profit making interfere with genuinely religious ends such as attaining or proving salvation. From this broadly Weberian perspective—and Singer must be included among the Weberians in this regard—just such a dichotomy between secular and transcendental realms was the stimulus to Protestant ascetic individualism, in which all this-worldly profits were directed toward the public good so as not to interfere with the other-worldly goals of the individual. But it does not follow from this argument that in religions where ritual action is magical , in the sense that it is directed toward this-worldly ends, it is incompatible with personal asceticism or even individualism.

This chapter examines crucial connections between this-worldly Nakarattar ritual—both religious and secular—and more "formal" Nakarattar commercial activities in two historical periods separated by

three centuries. In addition, it illustrates the continuing role of the Nakarattar elite in South India's political economy. The exercise will demonstrate that in both historical periods, members of the Nakarattar elite made rational use of economically "irrational" ritual in their capacity as central links in a collectively oriented, political economy, whose participants included the Nakarattar caste as a whole, noncaste investors, religious and educational institutions, and political authorities.

Nakarattar Worship and Trade in Seventeenth-Century Palani

Palm-leaf manuscripts (olais ) maintained at Palani Temple in Madurai District make it possible to reconstruct the way the Nakarattar caste carried out its business and participated generally in seventeenth-century South Indian society. These manuscripts, which constitute the Nakarattar Arappattayankal (The Six Nakarattar Deeds of Gift),^[1] confirm Nakarattar oral tradition that the caste was primarily involved in the trade of salt. In addition, the records provide important information about the mechanics of trade and particularly about the crucial connections that existed between trade and religion.^[2]

The "deeds" (pattayams ) tell a story, beginning in 1600, of the initiation and growth of Nakarattar trade in the pilgrimage/market town of Palani and of the concomitant growth in Nakarattar ritual involvement and religious gifting to Palani Temple. The story begins with the arrival in Palani of Kumarappan, a Nakarattar salt trader from Chettinad, "The Land of the Chettis." The manuscripts describe his first contact with a Palani Temple priest, his initial worship (puja ) of the temple deity, the growth of his commercial activities in the temple market, and his endowment of the temple and subsequent installation as a trustee (dharma karta ) of the endowment.

According to these texts, Kumarappan was the first Nakarattar to establish trade in the salt-deficient region of Palani. He stayed in the house of the Palani Temple priest and operated his business in the street outside the priest's house. From the beginning, he marked up his margin of profit by one-eighth and gave the markup as an offering and tithe (makimai ) to the deity of Palani Temple, Lord Velayuda (a manifestation of Murugan). Food paid for by Kumarappan's makimai was prepared by the priest's wife and offered to the deity by the priest. Afterwards it was distributed as sacramental food (prasad ), first to the priest and then to Kumarappan, his employees, and local mendicants (paradesis ). In addition, Kumarappan paid the priest and his wife each a small sum of money (two panams ).

In other words, even at this early stage, commerce entailed much more than simply opening up a shop in the local marketplace and setting prices for goods according to local conditions of supply and demand. In particular, it involved establishing a relationship with the deity of Palani, mediated by the deity's priest. Kumarappan satisfied this condition by undertaking regular acts of individual worship (arccanai ) on a monthly basis each time he returned to Palani to trade.

Kumarappan not only expanded his own salt trade in Palani during the next few years but also, in the fourth year, was instrumental in bringing five additional Nakarattar salt traders into the community. Kumarappan arranged for each of them to emulate his lead and mark up their profit for makimai given as part of individual worship of the Palani deity conducted by the temple priest. In the first deed of gift, Kumarappan attests,

"The gift of food has been on the increase since I first came here. My profit goes on increasing from the time Parvati [the priest's wife] started cooking for us. Until now the funds that accrued by way of profit markup for the Lord were eighty-five rupees. This time I got forty-two panams through profit markup. Thus there is a total of rupees 96-4-0 for the Lord." So thought Kumarappan. This way the Lord made a profit and the sons of Chettis also made a profit. The Nakarattars came to know of this. Some of them started working for wages for the Lord and some for Kumarappan of Nemam. Four for the Lord and two for him. This way they came selling salt, stayed in Pandaram's house, and ate what Parvati cooked for five or six years. Through markup and straight profit the Lord gained one hundred to one hundred and twenty varakans [one varakan = Rs. 3.5].^[3]

News of the successful Nakarattar business venture reached a local chief in political control of Palani (the Nayak of Vijayagiri) and the Pandyan king of Madurai (Tirumali Nayak), who was sovereign over the Tamil kingdom encompassing Chettinad and Palani. News of Nakarattar

trade also reached the Saivite sectarian leader, Isaniya Sivacariya, whose monastery was located in Piranmalai at the western edge of Chettinad. The sectarian leader was guru both to the Pandyan king and to all male Nakarattars. He proposed that Kumarappan should arrange for an annual pilgrimage, sanctioned by the Pandyan king, to celebrate the deity's wedding on a date in the Tamil month of Tai (corresponding to January–February in the Roman calendar).

The collective worship of the pilgrimage and marriage festival was significantly different from the individual worship in which Kumarappan and the other Nakarattars initially engaged. Individual worship (arccanai ) established a more or less private relationship between trader and deity, mediated by the priest. But the pilgrimage established a collective festival (tiruvila ) and generated a system of ritual transactions between all the notables of the Palani community: not only traders, priests, and deity, but local chiefs, paramount kings, and sectarian leaders. By participating in the annual festival, each of these notables recognized and ritually sanctioned the social identity of all of the others.

For Kumarappan, the annual pilgrimage took on significance far beyond what it offered to his fellow Nakarattar salt traders. Kumarappan was the founder and organizer of Nakarattar trade and worship in Palani. He was the person to whom the sectarian leader went in order to establish the pilgrimage for the first time. He was the person who made preparations for lodging, transportation, food, and worship for all of the pilgrims. He even conveyed the Palani priest to the sectarian leader's monastery for the beginning of the pilgrimage. Finally, and significantly, Kumarappan was entrusted with collecting and managing all funds donated by the pilgrims as regular fees at recurring rituals of monetary gifting during the pilgrimage, and ultimately with managing an endowment (kattalai ) initiated by Kumarappan to maintain the pilgrimage in perpetuity.

As manager of the endowment, Kumarappan was not only the master of ritual ceremonies, but also the chief executive of what amounted to a joint business venture with the deity of Palani. His managerial position carried, in addition to ritual honors, the responsibility of investing all funds endowed for worship of the deity. There was no specification or limit as to how these investments should be made. His appointment as dharma karta —the executor of important collective rituals—was recognized by kings, sectarian leaders, and priests, but his actions were sanctioned only by the deity himself. Kumarappan shared some honors with other notables who were similarly generous in contributing to temple endowments. But his special status reflected not only his generosity (vallanmai ) but also, and perhaps more importantly, his fiduciary trustworthiness

(nanayam ) and his commitment and effectiveness as a businessman. The honors he received did not simply recognize his worship of the deity (in either private or collective forms). Nor were they given in recognition of his personal offerings to the deity as a part of worship (in makimai or kattalai ). Rather, Kumarappan's honors recognized his special role in stimulating and managing the worship and donations of other Nakarattars. In effect, the collective worship at Palani constituted Kumarappan as a leader of the Nakarattars, and empowered him to act as trustee of all funds donated to the deity. His honors were the emblems of his office.

Temples as Political Institutions in the Seventeenth Century

The preceding interpretation of Nakarattar religious gifting at Palani fits within recent historiographic interpretations of South Indian temples as not simply architectural structures but also institutions that carried out two important social functions in South Indian society: (1) a group formation function, as the focus for collective acts of capital accumulation and redistribution; and (2) an integrative function, as political arenas for corporate groups formed by collective redistributive action. Although little attention has been paid to the role of individual gifts (arccanai ) in this regard, the operation of collective gifts (kattalai ) has become increasingly clear.

In a definitive paper on the ritual and political operation of South Indian temples, Appadurai and Breckenridge (1976) address the group formation function of temples. They integrate anthropological insights about the association of political chieftainship and economic redistribution with case studies of temple donors and their identity as leaders of various corporate groups, including families, castes, guilds, kingdoms, and even business corporations. Interpreting endowment to a temple as a form of collective gift, the researchers summarize their findings about endowment as follows:

(1) an endowment represents the mobilization, organization and pooling of resources (i.e., capital, land, labor, etc.);

(2) an endowment generates one or more ritual contexts in which to distribute and to receive honors;

(3) an endowment permits the entry and incorporation of corporate units into the temple (i.e., families, castes, monasteries or matam -s, sects, kings, etc.) either as temple servants (stanikar -s, managers, priests, assistants, drummers, pipers, etc.) or as donors;

(4) an endowment supports, however partially and however incompletely, the reigning deity. But, because the reigning deity

is limited since it is made of stone, authority with respect to endowment resources and ritual remains in the hands of the donor or an agent appointed by him or her. (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976: 201)

In other words, an endowment entails collective action, ritual designation of a leader, allocation to that leader of authoritative control over collective resources, and recognition of the group as a corporate entity represented by the distinctive role of its leader on various occasions of worship to the deity. Appadurai and Breckenridge, however, draw their conclusions about the group formation function of endowment primarily from research on practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My interpretation of the seventeenth-century deeds of gift from Palani builds on their interpretation and demonstrates that such processes were also in play at least two hundred years earlier.

Complementing these findings about the role of temple endowment in group formation, studies on the overall political role of temples in South Indian society during the Vijayanagar period (1300–1700) make it clear that temples served a second political function (Appadurai 1981a; Mahalingam 1967; Stein 1977, 1980). Specifically, temples played an integrative role in regional politics by providing an important interactional arena for extralocal sovereigns, leaders of local corporate groups of various kinds, and religious sectarian leaders. Appadurai's (1981) work on Vaish-navite sectarian movements offers an especially useful takeoff point for the present study. It develops a model of mutual recognition and legitimization between extralocal sovereigns and local sectarian leaders mediated by temples in the seventeenth century. According to Appadurai,

Warrior-kings bartered the control of agrarian resources gained by military prowess for access to the redistributive processes of the temples, which were controlled by sectarian leaders. Conversely, in their own struggles with each other, and their own local and regional efforts to consolidate their control over temples, sectarian leaders found the support of these warrior-kings timely and profitable. (1981: 74)

Such political interpretations of worship have recently been subject to criticism by C. J. Fuller, who argues that they are based on an interpretation of puja (worship) as an asymmetric exchange between god and devotee that ultimately reduces puja entirely to politics (1992: 81). Fuller disagrees with this premise, arguing that devotees exchange nothing with their gods in acts of worship. Instead, they express devotion with various offertory actions (upacharas ) which the gods find pleasing. In Fuller's view, the gods never actually either consume or alienate these offerings.

As a consequence, the gods are under no obligation to reciprocate by making any counterprestation to their devotees. Yet, out of pleasure with their devotee's devotion, they bless the offering--which the devotees, not the gods, subsequently consume.^[4]

Fuller recognizes that temple rituals include a distribution of divinely transvalued offerings (prasad ) and honors (maryatai ). But, contrary to many standard analyses (e.g., Babb 1975), he insists that these sacralized offerings should not be confused with tangible leftover substances (jutha ) from divine consumption (Fuller 1992: 77). Further, he insists that the ritual distribution of prasad and maryatai is completely separable from the performance of the various upacharas, the offertory rituals which Fuller designates exclusively as worship (puja ). Finally, he insists that, unlike the distribution of prasad, the offering of an upachara is free from the taint of politics. For Fuller, the root Hindu metaphor for understanding puja reflects not the political relationship between king and subject but the domestic relationship between husband and wife, exemplified by the wife's preparation of meals and her consumption of leftovers (1992: 78–79).

Fuller, it seems to me, goes too far in separating the political aspects of ritual located in the distribution of prasad and maryatai from the domestic aspects of devotional offerings in puja . To begin with, his appeal to the relationship between husband and wife as a root metaphor for understanding upachara calls the whole issue into question since, as he recognizes himself, the wife does consume her husband's leftovers. Secondly, the redistributive model proposed by Appadurai and Breckenridge is not limited to interactions between priests and deities. On the contrary, whatever goes on between priest and deity, the Appadurai-Breckenridge model is primarily concerned with a system of indirect exchanges between devotees. (Indeed, it could be argued that the Appadurai-Breckenridge model is problematic because it leaves priests, as mediators with gods, entirely out of the picture!) According to Appadurai and Breckenridge, the system is initiated by a donative group which pools its resources and presents an offering to its leader. This leader, in turn, presents the collective offering to a priest, who (not to beg the issue) does something which sacralizes the offering in a ritual interaction with the deity. The priest then returns the sacralized offering to the leader of the donative group, who then distributes it to his followers. Fuller addresses neither the obvious questions that arise about his interpretation of husband-wife relations as lacking exchange or the irrelevance of the mechanics of sacralization for the exchange processes that concern the Appadurai-Breckenridge model. As a consequence, his rejection of a model of exchange between devotee and

deity and his refusal to identify prasad and maryatai with jutha must remain controversial for the time being.

Fortunately, the precise status of upachara rituals does not affect the general arguments I have made about the entire redistributive sequence of temple rituals, of which upacharas form only one part. Upacharas , after all, represent the liminal offertory phase of a long ritual sequence, which begins with purificatory acts that remove devotees from everyday life in preparation for interaction with the gods and which ends with the asymmetric distribution of prasad and maryatai that reconstitutes society. No one would disagree that it is possible to isolate phases of separation, liminality, and incorporation in any ritual sequence (van Gennep 1909; Turner 1977 [1969]). It is not clear, however, that any such phase should be viewed as exclusively either political or domestic. Moreover, if the entire sequence of rituals is taken into account—and it is the entire sequence that concerns us in interpreting both arccanai and tiruvila forms of worship—then it is impossible not to observe the pattern of collective pooling and redistribution that lies at the heart of the Appadurai-Breckenridge model.

I agree with Fuller that this model is overly dominated by a political perspective. Appadurai's analysis, in particular, focuses precisely on the role of kings and sectarian leaders in society—an emphasis which, in its concern with kingship, reflects a resurgent theme in South Indian studies that has disinterred the work of A. M. Hocart (1950) on Indic society as a kingship-centered ritual polity (see also Breckenridge 1977; Dirks 1988; Price 1979). The correction, however, lies not in denying any role for politics in religious ritual but in seeing how politics participates in ritual. Puja involves a variety of actors in Indian society. By taking them into account, in their variety, it becomes possible to explore nonpolitical dimensions of puja without rejecting the role of politics.^[5] In the present context, my analysis of events at Palani demonstrates how an actor who is neither king nor sectarian leader, but an itinerant trader, used both integrative and group formation properties of collective rituals, and also the less-encompassing rites of individual gifting and worship, to enter the local polities and market towns of South India. Given the political bias of the Appadurai-Breckenridge model and given Fuller's misgivings that it is blind to Hindu devotionalism, it is important to emphasize that neither the political perspective represented in Appadurai's work nor the economic perspective represented here denies or excludes the more soteriological concerns that have traditionally defined Western understandings of religion. On the contrary, my central argument continues to emphasize the inseparability of religion, politics, and economics.

Purity, Protection, Trust, and Mercantile Elites

Kumarappan, who led his mercantile castemates into the ritual/market center of Palani, displayed the markers of leadership worn by leaders of any group in caste society. He was the yajaman: the sacrifier (Hubert and Mauss 1964) who collected his group's pooled resources, offered these resources in his capacity as the group's ritual representative at the court of a godlike king or kinglike god, and then received and redistributed the resources (sanctified by contact with king or god) back to his group. The ritual process constituted Kumarappan as the group's leader and, indeed, constituted and reconstituted both the leader and the group itself on every occasion of its performance.

This Hocartian model is extremely useful, but extremely general. Caste society is portrayed as a segmentary society bound together by rituals of religious gifting in which all take an equal part. Viewed from its perspective, the leaders of any group are identically sacrifiers: replicas of one another and ultimately replicas of the king who is sacrifier for all of society. But this very generality raises a crucial question. If the ritual representatives of any group in society are equally sacrifiers for their groups and, in this respect, replicas of each other, what distinguishes their ritual roles and the ritual roles of the groups they represent?

Answers to this question that are available in the literature are partial at best. The most prominent one concerns just the ritual role of priests and no other ritual specialty. The answer, alluded to by Hocart himself (1950) and developed in some detail by Hubert and Mauss (1964), distinguishes priests from sacrifiers on the basis of their role as sacrificers —that is, as ritual specialists whose specific function is to convey the offering from sacrifier to king or deity. Ethnographic studies exploring the role of the priest in Indian society have focused most often on Brahman priests (Appadurai 1983; Babb 1975; Fuller 1979; Harper 1964), although a few have focused on non-Brahman priests (Claus 1978; Dumont 1957a; Inglis 1985; Parry 1982). In either case, the analyst's attention has been drawn to aspects of the priest's identity that qualify him for this special role: his ritual purity in the case of Brahmans, and his impurity in the case of non-Brahmans.^[6]

Such studies lead in turn (it seems inevitably) to a Dumontian conception of caste society as structured by principles of hierarchy—narrowly construed as group ranking along a status dimension of relative purity (Dumont 1980 [1970]). Yet the fact of the matter is that ritual purity primarily concerns only a single ritual identity: that of the sacrificial or mediatory priest.^[7] Hindu values of relative purity are largely irrelevant to

other identities involved in the processes of religious gifting—including, notably, processes of endowment to Hindu temples. Purity or impurity may qualify an individual to act as a priest. It may even provide sufficient ground for denying entrance of an entire group to the donative and redistributive processes that constitute a temple community (for case studies, see Breckenridge 1977; Hardgrave 1969). But once a group is recognized as a legitimate participant in a temple's transactional network, relative purity is not necessarily relevant for assessing its ritual relationship to other groups (Appadurai 1981b). We are again left with the question of what distinguishes the ritual roles of different groups and their representatives in the court of king or deity and in society as a whole.

As we have seen, a Hocartian alternative to the focus on priests and purity focuses on the identity of the king as royal donor. In Hindu contexts, gifting—especially endowment—operates to integrate any actor into the moral community of a temple. Generosity (vallanmai ) is the moral obligation (dharma ) of any wealthy man. Accordingly, it is necessary to identify the particular quality that sets the king apart from other sacrifiers. Case studies of South Indian kingdoms suggest that the quality that distinguishes kings from other donors is their additional status as royal protector (paripalakkar: Breckenridge 1977). The Nayak of Vijayagiri embodies this role in the history of Palani.

Taken together, the Dumontian and Hocartian approaches identify and distinguish the ritual identities of two separate transactors in networks of religious gifting. But even in combination, they provide definitions only of the identities of kings and priests. In my analysis of Nakarattar entry into Palani, I have provided an analysis of the ritual identity of still one more transactor in a temple's ritual network, the elite merchant: an identity that has received remarkably little attention, given its importance for temples and for South Indian society generally. Kumarappan's identity in the network of interacting identities that made up a seventeenth-century temple was that of endowment manager. His salient status in this capacity (and, in later times, the salient status of temple managers and trustees) was evaluated along a dimension neither of relative purity nor of kingly protection, but of fiduciary trustworthiness. In his capacity as trustee, Kumarappan transacted with the deity and with other members of the temple community. In return he received a rightful and tangible share of the endowment that he managed. In the history recorded by the Palani manuscripts, this share took form of the temple's reinvestment of Kumarappan's and others' donations back into Kumarappan's business. This, in turn, led to further endowments to the temple and increased Nakarattar involvement in the Palani economy.

Worship and Commerce

In sum, the history of Nakarattar religious gifting at Palani temple exemplifies Nakarattars' involvement with temples throughout precolonial South India. Religious gifts performed not only religious and political functions but also distinctive economic functions, including the acquisition and reinvestment of funds in mercantile enterprises. Just as there was no separation of religion and politics—indeed, in many ways, worship was politics—so, too, there was no separation of religion and economics. The Nakarattar caste and other castes of itinerant traders engaged in worship as a way of trade, and they engaged in trade by worshiping the deities of their customers. The system as a whole constituted a profit-generating "circuit of capital" in which the circulating capital comprised a culturally defined world of religious-cum-economic goods. Nakarattars "invested" profits from their salt trade in religious gifts. Religious gifts were transformed and redistributed as honors. Honors were the currency of trust. And trustworthiness gained Nakarattars access to the market for salt. Elite Nakarattars acted as intermediaries between the various institutions that controlled production and access to salt, money, gifts, and honors.

As commerce expanded in the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, so did the demand for and supply of money. The Nakarattar caste, already specialized around activities of money accumulation and investment, was preadapted to take advantage of this commercial expansion. Its territorial isolation placed it at a temporary disadvantage relative to coastal castes that first established links with the growing international trade, especially the trade in textiles. But Nakarattars' ritual techniques for penetrating new markets, pooling capital, and transmitting money would very quickly overcome the early geographic advantages of their competitors.

The Emergence of Provincial Politics

From the Nakarattars' seventeenth-century entrance into Palani, I now want to shift attention to their twentieth-century entrance into the city of Madras. The database for the later period is naturally much richer, and the picture of Nakarattar activities much more complicated. Before attempting to sketch this picture, I provide some background information about overall trends in colonial politics. During the last few years, a number of influential historians have called attention to an evolutionary dimension in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial Indian politics. The evolution they describe reflects a decentralization of British power and the development of representational forms of Indian government.^[8] The trend was officially initiated by passage of the Ripon reforms in 1884 and 1892. But

it is generally agreed that Indian colonial government resisted the spirit of the Ripon proposals until passage of the Morley-Minto Act of 1909, the Montague-Chelmsford reforms of 1921, and the Government of India Act of 1935.

The details of these government acts need not detain us. Their cumulative effect was to provide for Indian nominations and elections to municipal, district, and provincial governing bodies, with local and district boards electing members of the provincial legislative assembly, and the legislative assembly and chief minister nominating members to local boards. These institutional changes, in turn, encouraged participation of local elites in the provincial government in order to retain and, in some cases, increase political power in their home districts and municipalities.

From the British point of view, the changes represented a decentralization and sharing of power with indigenous elites. From the Indian point of view, however, the changes are more accurately viewed as a move toward centralization. Rural elites, whose bases of power had been focused on villages, towns, small administrative units called taluks , or the kingdomlike (or chiefdomlike) landed estates called zamins , began to participate (directly or indirectly) in integrated political action in the provincial capitol of Madras City.

This is not to say that precolonial local polities were unintegrated in regional and pan-regional networks. But our understanding of precolonial political integration remains tentative at best.^[9] Consequently, it is difficult to tease apart features of the evolutionary model of colonial decentralization and "Indianization" that concern genuine integration of imperial/ provincial politics and local politics from features of the model that merely reflect a British style of integration. In particular, it remains remarkably difficult to compare the degree of integration maintained by colonial governments, in both their centralized and decentralized phases, with the degree of integration maintained by an enormously varied assortment of indigenous temples, religious sects, and chiefs and kings ruling over pre-British chiefdoms and empires.

The Creation of "the Public" and the Question of Privilege

In the present context, the comparative issue arises in attempting to evaluate the changing role of mercantile elites in commerce, worship, and politics. In what follows, I examine some notable ruptures and an important continuity in the political style of elite Nakarattar merchants between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, particularly with regard to elite religious gifting and its nineteenth- and twentieth-century secular counter-

parts. As we have just seen, religious endowment (kattalai ) in the seventeenth century was meaningful as an offering in a collective act of worship (tiruvila ). It represented one component in a paradigm of religious gifting and should be understood, in part, in opposition to merchant tithes (makimais ) offered in individual acts of worship (arccanai ). A temple manager (dharma karta ) who managed endowments in the interests of the deity did so by virtue of his own business acumen and wealth. As the deity prospered, so did the temple manager; as the temple manager prospered, so did the deity. There was no necessary separation in the interests of the two. On the contrary, deity and temple manager were mutually dependent.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, as the British consolidated and centralized their power, all institutions that played an important role in the apparatus of government underwent a transformation, including temples.^[10] Initially, early nineteenth-century district collectors, the primary agents and directors of British rule, acted as kingly donors and protectors of Hindu temples, supporting and even acting as dharma kartas . Gradually, under a series of reform-minded government acts, the collectors acceded to missionary pressure and attempted to withdraw from governmental involvement in Hindu worship. But the more they struggled to free themselves from participating in temple politics, the more entangled they became: withdrawal entailed finding suitable native trustees to oversee endowments for which the British collectors had held responsibility; finding suitable trustees entailed setting standards for suitability; and setting standards entailed defining the role of the trustee, of the trust, and ultimately of the deity itself.

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, temples became encompassed in Anglo-Indian law under the general category of religious and charitable institutions.^[11] The social meaning of endowment took on British values, focused around ideals about secular philanthropy and Christian religion. Religious gifting came to be considered, by extension from British norms, as transcendental or other-worldly in orientation—a development with particularly dramatic implications for the evolving colonial conception of a deity and its chief devotee, the dharma karta . On the one hand, the deity itself came to be viewed as a kind of public property; access to it, as a public right; endowments to it, as public trusts. On the other hand, the dharma karta came to be defined, in the first instance, as the trustee of a public fund, with fiduciary responsibility for the deity. From this new perspective, if religious gifting had (by definition) the "nonreligious" side effect of creating an investable fund of capital, such a fund was considered a public resource, not the karmic property of private shareholders in a venture undertaken by deity and devotees. Under law, a

trustee might receive a fee for services or expenses, but under no circumstances should he receive a share of the trust fund over which he had control, for this would have involved him in a conflict of interest with the deity and with the public good.

In sum, the colonial reinterpretation of religious endowment as a form of philanthropy separated the interests of deity and trustee and gave an entirely new meaning to religious gifting. Worship in the colonial period was interpreted by law as either private or public —a significant difference from the precolonial distinction between individual and collective worship. It does not follow from this change, however, that precolonial values no longer played a role in colonial (or postcolonial) society. In what follows, I will suggest that they simply disappeared from view. Moreover, although officially banned from large-scale, "public" temples, precolonial values continued to operate in the myriad "private" temples that fill the Indian landscape. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that these values are still operating invisibly—albeit illegally—in institutions officially classified as public including public institutions that are secular rather than religious. This, at least, is the view that underlies my interpretation of the following account of Nakarattar gifting, religious and secular, in the twentieth-century port city of Madras.

The Case of Raja Sir Muthia and the Politics of Madras, 1928–1969

Nakarattars' commercial interests in Southeast Asia involved them in such Tamil port cities as Tuticorin and Dhanuskodi from at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. But they played no significant role in Madras City until the construction of a modern harbor in 1896. Accordingly, and justifiably, accounts of Madras City politics before their arrival make no mention of them. Less justifiably, Nakarattars are also largely absent, or underappreciated, in twentieth-century studies. The absence seems attributable to an overwhelming historiographic bias toward questions about the Indian nationalist movement. And even studies that focus on the loyalist Dravidian Renaissance and anti-Brahman movements (which I touch on, below) do not address the issue of specifically mercantile political interests.

Nevertheless, once the Nakarattars had been lured into Madras by the newly built harbor, they began to participate in city politics in a major way: for example, by forming a caste association with special representation on the legislative council and port trust, and by establishing and dominating an Indian Chamber of Commerce, which also had representation in government administration. Nakarattars are thereby distinguished

from mercantile elites in preceding eras, who seem to have been eclipsed not only by Nakarattars, but also by rising administrative and professional elites (Suntharalingam 1974). Nakarattars are also distinct from the rural elites with whom they shared the Justice party in the 1920s and 1930s. In this respect, the Nakarattars represent a kind of hybrid elite, combining properties attributed to both the emerging bourgeoisie and the traditional rural magnate.

Of all the members of the Nakarattar elite,^[12] the best known, most politically active individuals belonged to the S. Rm. descent line (kuttikkira pankali ). Its most famous branch came to prominence through the business, political, and philanthropic acumen of S. Rm. A. M. Annamalai, who was ultimately recognized by the colonial government with the title "Raja Sir." The notoriety he won for his family and the hereditary title itself are often misconceived as indicating that the house of S. Rm. A. M. constituted a royal Nakarattar dynasty. In fact, the title is a relatively recent British creation. It was not granted to Annamalai until the middle of the twentieth century, and it pertains to his "rule" only over the newly formed village of Chettinad, not over the Nakarattar residential homeland as a whole. There were many other Nakarattar families with equal or greater economic wealth, if not the same political clout—both other branches of S. Rm. and families from totally different descent lines as well. Nevertheless, the history of the S. Rm. A. M. lineage, and especially the careers of Raja Sir Annamalai and his son, Raja Sir Muthia, illustrate both changes and continuities in the role of a South Indian mercantile elite.^[13]

On their own behalf and as managing agents for many client Nakarattars, the S. Rm. A. M. lineage controlled businesses in Tamil Nadu, Ceylon, and Burma since at least the middle of the nineteenth century and had offices in Madras City before the advent of the twentieth century. In 1908, Annamalai—with a group of primarily Nakarattar bankers—founded (and took control of) the Indian Bank as a joint stock company in Madras, taking over the niche left after the failure of the British Arbuthnot's Bank.^[14] They were involved in the grain, cotton, and salt trade of Madras during the first half of the nineteenth century,^[15] and during the twentieth century they further expanded their commercial activities into new areas, including formal, Western-style banking; insurance; textile spinning and weaving; and construction. They operated a powerful agency in nineteenth-century Columbo which became a base for their later involvement in the twentieth-century Ceylonese cement and construction industries (Weersooria 1973). They were among the first Nakarattars to establish a banking agency in nineteenth-century Burma, where they became one of

the largest Nakarattar firms, with many branch offices outside Rangoon, in the Burmese interior. In the twentieth century they have made enormous profits in Burmese timber and oil.

Not surprisingly, members of the S. Rm. A. M. lineage took a keen interest in the political opportunities offered by evolving colonial institutions in Madras. Frequently, these involved profound changes, not just in location (i.e., the establishment of a major agency house and palatial residence in Madras City), but also in political instrumentality. The politics of gifting continued from the seventeenth century on. So did a politics of litigation, which became a central feature of Indian life in the nineteenth century (cf. Breckenridge 1977). In the twentieth century, both of these activities were encompassed by the politics of colonial government.

S. Rm. A. M. Annamalai was among the first Nakarattars—and indeed among the first Indians—to take advantage of the new opportunities. From 1909 to 1912 he was mayor of the municipality of Karaikudi. In 1913, he was elected for the first time to the Madras Legislative Council. I do not have a full record of the total number of terms Annamalai spent as a member of the legislature. In 1920, he served in the Council of State in New Delhi as one of four representatives from Madras Presidency. And in 1923, he may be found winning reelection to the Madras Legislative Council.^[16]

From 1920, Annamalai was on the board for the Imperial Bank. At some point in his career he was given the title Rao Bahadur, and later received the title Raja Sir for his political role and financial support in creating a Tamil University at Chidambaram, fittingly named Annamalai University. He was also deeply involved in the Tamil Icai movement: he founded the Raja Annamalai Music College in Chidambaram in 1929, placed it under control of Annamalai University in 1932, and endowed prizes for writing textbooks on Tamil music (Arooran 1980). All of these public and business positions indicate but do not exhaust the extent of his influence in the Madras Presidency, which grew even more powerful after the carefully orchestrated political debut of his son, Muthia.

In 1928, Muthia was appointed to the Madras Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee at the age of 23. From 1929 on, he was a council member in the corporation of Madras. In 1931, the council voted him its president and repeated its choice in 1932. During this period, I am told, Annamalai brought pressure to bear upon the Legislative Council to alter the charter of Madras from corporation to municipality and concomitantly to alter its leadership from a relatively weak council president to a powerful city mayor. This does not seem unlikely because 1933 witnessed Madras City's first mayoralty election. The elections were postponed six months,

until after Muthia's twenty-fifth birthday; the minimal age required of the municipal mayor was twenty-five. Muthia was elected.^[17]

Throughout his career, Muthia was active in party politics. He served as Chief Whip and Chairman of the Justice party, where he became known as an independent, pragmatic political moderate. Publicly, he was a staunch Dravidianist and provided strong support for the pro-Tamil movement, both politically and also through endowment and guidance of Annamalai University (Arooran 1980). Behind the scenes, he served his own interests and protected his power base without too much concern for party loyalty or for public canons of political ethics. During the 1934 Legislative Assembly election, Muthia withheld support from Justice party candidates R. K. Shanmugam Chetty (not a Nakarattar) and A. Ramaswami Mudalier. The Justicites lost and the Justice leader, the Raja of Bobbili (the owner of a large, multivillage estate), dismissed Muthia from his position as party Whip. Four months later, Muthia sought revenge: he filed a motion of no confidence in his own party's ministry. Lord Erskine, Governor of Madras, describes what happened next in correspondence to the Governor General of India, Lord Willingdon:

If he were to use ordinary political methods ... nobody could object, but he has set about getting his revenge by what can only be described as mass bribery.... He is reputed to have spent Rs. 30,000 up to now and to be quite prepared to spend another 30,000 as well.... I must say that I thought I knew something about playing funny politics but I must take off my hat to these Indians. They are past masters at the art. The last few days have been an orgy of corruption and intrigue.^[18]

Muthia's no-confidence motion failed despite his efforts at "mass bribery." But the setback was only temporary. By 1936, Bobbili needed his support in the face of threats from still other Justice factions and made the redoubtable Muthia a minister in his government.

The effectiveness of the S. Rm. A. M. family's political power is also indicated by the history of protests from dissident Nakarattar factions. For example, in 1937 a Nakarattar meeting in Ramnad denounced the S. Rm. A. M.—controlled, Justicite Nakarattar Association as unrepresentative and pledged support for the increasingly powerful Congress party, the party of Mahatma Gandhi (Hindu , Feb. 2, 1939, cited in Baker 1976: 301). By 1938, the Justice party was out of power and the Congress party had formed its own ministry, but Muthia still had considerable influence. As leader of the Legislative Assembly, he was said to have made a deal with the Congress party government over taxes (peshkash ) on his large landed estates and was censured by the Self Respect Conferences held in Tanjavur and Madurai in 1938.^[19]

Such an apparent blow as the 1934 dismissal or the 1938 censure might have weakened the political influence of another man. But, as his political longevity suggests, public office and party position were only two features of Muthia's strength. For changes in the institutional structures of colonial government had not replaced precolonial ritual politics, but blended with them, transforming and being transformed in a complex and mutually adaptive process. In particular, Indian leaders still depended on cultural processes of legitimization to sanction their political authority.

Junctures and Disjunctures in the Culture of Elite Endowment

In keeping with the pattern of the mercantile elites that had operated three hundred years earlier in Palani, Annamalai and Muthia were massive donors to their clan and village temples and to temples serving the local community wherever they did business. But, in addition to these acts of religious gifting, they adopted British notions of public service and philanthropy, involving themselves, from the 1920s onward, in educational projects and works of municipal improvement. At the same time, they transformed the basically European values underlying these activities and harnessed them to a regionally and linguistically based movement of Tamil separatism and revitalization.

It would be a mistake to view the wedding of Tamil and British values as an effect of British policy on a totally reactive Indian population or to isolate that wedding from other processes in Madras society with which it was deeply involved. On the contrary, the roots of the movement for Tamil revitalization can be found in battles fought by early nineteenth-century elites who embraced the British cause of secular education, in part as a weapon in their religious fight against Christian missionaries (Suntharalingam 1974).

As early as 1839, the Governor of Madras, Lord Elphinstone, had promulgated a "Minute on Education," in which he stated, "The great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India.... All funds appropriated [for educational projects] would be best employed on English education alone" (cited in Suntharalingam 1974: 59). The Madras elite who endorsed these goals were largely composed of mercantile families who had maintained a long history of involvement with the British in Madras City. Throughout their history, they had participated in religious and philanthropic activities that combined the responsibilities of trustee described in the case of Kumarappan at Palani with the responsibilities of kingly protector represented by the Palani chief, the Nayak of Vijayagiri.^[20] In per-

forming this dual role they fought against Christian missionary efforts to influence colonial policies about Hindu religious practices, and they supported colonial aspirations to separate government policy from religious dogma and controversy. Ironically, as part of their support, they began to channel some of their endowment activity away from Hindu institutions and into secular, British-style schools and colleges (Basu 1984).

In the twentieth century, the battle against Christianity became irrelevant, and members of the mercantile elite (including Nakarattar notables) forged an alliance with members of the provincial landed elite, transforming the educational movement for use in their political war against the nationalist Congress party. The chief architect of this political strategy was Raja Sir Annamalai.^[21] Like many other members of the Madras elite, Annamalai participated in new colonial forms of endowment in addition to more traditional forms of religious gifting. By 1912, Annamalai's brother Ramaswamy had founded a secondary school and had built roads and sewage facilities in the important Hindu religious center of Chidambaram. In 1920, Annamalai used the secondary school as the basis for founding Sri Minakshi College.

Annamalai never lost his admiration for British education. But it was at just this time that elite Tamil values concerning education took on a noticeably different orientation. Early British policies designed to provide an education entirely in English were overthrown by growing regional and linguistic separatism as Indian politicians began to build and move into the emerging arena of provincial politics (Arooran 1980; Baker 1976; Irschick 1969). During the 1920s and 1930s, Tamil separatism and revitalization—the Tamil Renaissance as it came to be called—formed the ideological basis for the Justice party (in which Raja Sir Muthia played a central role) by portraying the rising National Congress party as a bunch of North Indian Brahmans, who would impose their regional interests, their Sanscritic culture, and—worst of all—their Hindi language on the out-numbered Tamils of South India. The Justice party preferred British rule to the threat of Congress party rule. The British, for their part, had other priorities than English education for Tamils. But they were happy to find loyalist allies and willing to help the cause of Tamil culture, especially when their help could be channeled through institutions such as colleges and universities that embodied British values, even without the English language.

The Tamil Renaissance was strengthened by the 1921 Montague-Chelmsford Reforms, which gave the increasingly Indianized provincial governments more legislative and revenue powers (Baker 1976; Seal 1973; Washbrook 1976). In 1927, the Madras ministry, under leadership of

Annamalai's political ally, Chief Minister P. Subbarayan, formed a committee to "investigate the need" for a Tamil university (Madras Mail , February 1, 1927, cited in Arooran 1980: 48). One week later, the Chief Minister spoke at the anniversary of Minakshi College, asserting, "When the time comes for founding a Tamil University, Sir Annamalai Nakarattar [he had not yet received the title "Raja"] will, I hope, develop ... a real residential unitary University. I hope that the Sri Minakshi College will develop not only as a college but also into a Sri Minakshi University at Chidambaram" (Madras Mail , February 8, 1927, quoted in Arooran 1980: 50). In 1928, the committee submitted a unanimous recommendation for establishing a Tamil university outside Madras City, with centers located at Madurai, Tirunelveli, Tiruchirappalli, Coimbatore, Kumbakonam, and Chidambaram (Madras Mail, March 31 and April 5, 1928, cited in Arooran 1980: 132–133). Simultaneously, Annamalai offered an endowment of Rs. 200,000 "in furtherance of the scheme of a unitary and residential University at Chidambaram" (Madras Mail , March 30, 1928, cited in Arooran 1980: 133). In August 1928, the Madras Legislative Council introduced a bill to establish a single teaching and residential university at Chidambaram (Government of Madras, G.O. 365, August 24, 1928). In the following December, the bill was passed in the Council and received assent from the Governor of Madras and the Viceroy of India (Government of Madras, G.O. 605, December 21, 1928). As passed, the bill matched Annamalai's endowment of Rs. 200,000 and promised a recurring annual grant of Rs. 15,000. The government later raised its initial grant with an additional contribution of Rs. 70,000 for the University's endowment (Government of Madras, Education Proceedings 1928–29: 39).

Annamalai's role in founding the university at Chidambaram paralleled exactly Kumarappan's role in founding the Palani pilgrimage, and he received the identical reward. The university itself was named Annamalai University in his honor. He was appointed Pro-Chancellor with overall managerial responsibilities for the university's considerable endowment. Ultimately, he received the coveted title "Raja Sir" for his role in the university's creation.

Economic Power, Elite Endowment, and Political Authority

It is difficult to uncover the complex dynamic between economic power, elite endowment, and political authority, for elite manipulations of political office—either in government or in religious and charitable institutions —are not normally part of the public record. Despite this difficulty, the private uses to which Raja Sirs Annamalai and Muthia put their power

and authority are very much alive in the rumors and reminiscences of South Indians living in Madras today, in some cases sixty years after the event. The following discussion, then, is based on hearsay.^[22] But the events it describes were common knowledge among the political cognoscenti when I did my fieldwork, and I am reasonably confident about the truth of the following account. At the very least, it accurately reflects a general Nakarattar perception and, more importantly, a general Nakarattar attitude toward elite members of the caste.

To begin with, the underlying basis of the S. Rm. A. M. family's power in Madras was the control of major sources for large-scale credit in the city, the Presidency, and throughout South and Southeast Asia, and Annamalai's and Muthia's influence extended to the Indian Bank, the Imperial Bank, the Reserve Bank of India, and, in short, to most of the major sources for credit and financial exchange available to Indian businessmen. In fact, the S. Rm. A. M. family's control of these banks stimulated two non — S. Rm. A. M. Nakarattar families, Sr. M. Ct. Chidambaram and Kalimuthu Thiagarajan, to found the India Overseas Bank and the Bank of Madurai, respectively. In any case, and particularly in the case of the Indian Bank, controlled by the S. Rm. A. M. family from 1908 to 1969 (when it was nationalized), every loan made by the bank is said to have cost the borrower a clandestine 2 percent fee. The fee was paid to Raja Sir Muthia, either directly, in the form of "black money," or indirectly, in the form of "white money" donated to philanthropic endeavors associated with the family name and under the influence of family members serving on their boards of trustees.

One of my informants offered the following example of the way in which Annamalai and Muthia could use philanthropy to benefit from a "white money" donation to public charity. The Maharajah of Tranvancore was one of the first persons (if not the first) to open temples to harijans in 1936. In 1938, Rajagopalacharia, head of Congress and Chief Minister of the Madras Presidency, unveiled a statue of the Maharajah in the High Court compound in Madras City. Raja Annamalai wanted to build an even bigger statue of himself opposite the Maharajah's statue. He built or caused to be built a music academy, Raja Annamalai Mandram, as a contribution to the renaissance of Tamil culture. After his death, according to his wishes, Muthia erected Annamalai's statue in front of the Mandram. It is twice as tall as the Maharajah of Travancore's statue, which it faces. It is built on government land, leased to the Tamil Music Association for 99 years from 1942 for one rupee per year. It was built by donations from the general public, although a large portion of these were actually from other Nakarattars. Rumor has it that the donations constituted a portion of Muthia's

clandestine 2 percent fee on loans made in Madras between 1936 and 1942. The academy is rented to the public for musical events and other large functions for Rs. 1,000–2,000 per day. My impression is that the profits (gross income less maintenance costs) are controlled by Muthia.

Another example is provided by the operation of Annamalai University.^[23] During the course of my fieldwork in 1981, I asked a Nakarattar, who had been employed by the institution, why Annamalai University was so frequently subject to strikes by faculty and students. He responded with what I first took to be an irrelevant story about its dental school. Apparently, government funds for all university construction projects were deposited in the Indian Bank. The dental school was no exception. Although construction funds were deposited in the Indian bank, they were not disbursed until new funds for another large project were received. Meanwhile, of course, the bank, owned by the S. Rm. A. M. family, made use of the dental school funds. In the context of my question, my informant's story implied that Raja Sir Muthia, as Pro-Chancellor of the University, had deliberately adopted policies that would anger the students and instigate the strike. The strike slowed down the process of construction and hence the process of disbursements. As with many of these stories, it is difficult to judge the truth of the allegation and impossible to prove. But it is undeniable that Muthia's positions in the university, the Indian Bank, and other governmental bodies were fraught with potential conflicts of interest.

If the exercise of philanthropy to and political authority over public institutions produced economic profits, it is also the case that economic power contributed, in return, to the exercise of political influence. In 1909, Annamalai formed the Southern India Chamber of Commerce—a lobbying organization that represented the rising interests of Indian businessmen in Madras. He and his family have controlled the chamber ever since. In this regard, it is significant to observe that it is members of the S. Rm. A. M. family who have actually headed the chamber for the longest periods of its history, and that it is Annamalai and Muthia who have headed the chamber during its celebrations of Silver and Golden Jubilee years.^[24] By controlling the chamber, the S. Rm. A. M. family gained not only direct influence on the Madras Legislative Council, by control of the chamber's reserved seat, but also indirect influence, by control of other institutions that also had input on the Legislative Council and that directly affected every aspect of the economic life of Madras. Indeed, to this day, the Chamber—dominated by Raja Sir Muthia until his death in 1984—has representatives in the railroad, port trusts, Telephone Advisory Committee, universities, and various consumer advocacy bodies.

Control of the private social clubs of Madras City's elite was a further bulwark for S. Rm. A. M. family political and economic power. The institutions included the Madras Race Club, the Cricket Club of India, the Indian Hockey Federation, the Cosmopolitan Club, and the Gymkhana Club. In each of these sodalities, Annamalai and Muthia exercised control over membership. I gathered no information about the exact mechanisms of this control or about the kinds of social pressure that this control brought to bear upon the notables of Madras. But since these institutions largely constituted the interactional arena for Madras elite society, I assume the influence was considerable.

There were also direct benefits to be gained. For example, in the early 1930s, Muthia (who was then Mayor of Madras City) opened the Lady Willingdon Club, a recreational club for the one hundred elite ladies of the city (Willingdon had been Governor of Madras and was later Viceroy of India). Membership in the club was determined by a nominating committee controlled by the S. Rm. A. M. family. Annamalai and Muthia donated fifty acres of land to the club. The land, however, was half of one hundred acres of city land that Muthia, as mayor, had leased jointly to himself and his father at one rupee per year for ninety-nine years. Under the circumstances, and in the worthy cause of a social club named after his wife, Governor Willingdon naturally went along. Muthia retained control of the land until his death.

It is interesting to note that although the Lady Willingdon Club presently appears rather run-down, the other fifty acres are quite nicely kept up and contain various institutions, all ostensibly flowing from S. Rm. A. M. family largess. They include the Rani Meiyamma Club (named after Annamalai's wife), the Raja Annamalai building, housing offices for Air India and Indian Airways (since 1980), and an institute for research into Tamil, Sanskrit, and other Indian languages. As with Annamalai University and the Madras music academy, the Annamalai Mandram, one payoff of S. Rm. A. M. family philanthropy was an enhanced public image derived from naming public buildings after Raja Sir Annamalai. In addition, or so it was suggested to me, the S. Rm. A. M. family may have received other payoffs. In particular, it is questionable how much of the contributions for other developments on the leased one hundred acres came from S. Rm. A. M. family pockets, and how much came through skillful manipulation of still other public institutions. For example, in the case of the Raja Annamalai Building, two years' rent for the airline companies was taken in advance from the Government of India and deposited in the Indian Bank controlled by the S. Rm. A. M. family since the early decades of this century, on whose board Raja Sir Muthia sat until

1969, and over which he was rumored to have considerable influence until his death. The actual funds for construction came from an interest-paying loan from the Indian Bank. The advance rent given by the government was used as security. The total sum (roughly ten times the advance rent) was then paid to the raja's own contracting company, South India Corporation (one of the largest contractors in South India), which then built the Raja Annamalai Building.

The case of the Sanskrit Institute is more complicated yet. Beginning in 1966, in honor of Madras Governor K. K. Shah's interest in Sanskrit studies, Raja Sir Muthia manipulated various endowments over which he had influence to provide Rs. 500,000 as seed money to build the institute. Rumor has it that Muthia's payoff came in the form of government contracts by the grateful Shah to companies of Muthia's choice, especially his own Chettinad Cements. Muthia more than made back his philanthropic investment, which, in any case, had been carried out with ostensibly public money. As in the previous example, the essential point is the control of public resources (at local, provincial, and national levels) for private gain, and the use of social ties with political authorities over long periods of time (from Governor Lord Willingdon, who initially acquiesced in and sanctioned the leasing of city land, to Governor K. K. Shaw, who acquiesced in and sanctioned construction of the Sanskrit Institute).

The Historical Continuity of South Indian Mercantile Elites

Whatever the truth of these popular if (perhaps) apocryphal stories, they raise a number of questions about historical continuity in the commercial role of religious gifting and secular philanthropy. There is no denying the major changes that took place between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries with respect to the social organization of political institutions and the cultural construction of political values. Yet dramatic disjunctures in South Indian politics mask an underlying continuity in South Indian commerce, particularly in the role of elite merchants, which integrates both domains of social action. Kumarappan, in the seventeenth century, and Raja Sirs Annamalai and Muthia, in the twentieth century, epitomize this continuing role of the mercantile elite over very long periods of South Indian history.

I do not mean to imply that all South Indian mercantile elites operated identically at all times and in all places. In the precolonial period, elite merchants acquired titles and offices such as "Salt Chetti." During the colonial period, they acquired titles and offices including Rao Bahadur, Zamindar, Raja, Mayor, and Minister. Other periods offered different

titles and offices. In addition, different historical periods provided alternative opportunities for participating in commercial, political, and religious institutions. There were different local and extralocal political forces subject to brokerage, different extralocal financial resources available for local use, and different extralocal markets for local producers. Finally, the resources and organization of an elite merchant's caste varied considerably, depending upon his identity as Nakarattar, Komati Chetti, Brahman, Mudaliar, Nadar, or Kaikkolar. Nevertheless, although the specific mix of ingredients for elitehood varied, the underlying structure of recognized leadership within caste or kin groups, political control of business-oriented local polities, powerful economic brokerage between local polities and extralocal authorities, and large-scale religious and charitable endowment remained constant.^[25] Taken together, these qualities constituted structural prerequisites for trust (marravan nampikkai ) and trustworthiness (nanayam ), and these in turn constituted the moral basis of credit on which all mercantile activities were based. Indeed, the relationship between mercantile trustworthiness and economic power was reciprocal and functional. Religious gifting and secular philanthropy—far from constituting irrational expenditures for other-worldly ends—were investments in the conditions that made worldly commerce possible.

Plates

The plates in this book range from images of people to images of houses and temples to images of life-cycle ceremonies. They are drawn from a variety of sources, including Nakarattar publications and other documents of the colonial period as well as photographs of contemporary architecture and rituals.

The Public Image

Nakarattars were known to colonial society as archetypal merchant-bankers. Plate 1 portrays a Nakarattar banker in Colombo, a visage known by Nakarattar clients throughout India and Southeast Asia. Plates 2 and 3 show S. Rm. A. Muthia Chettiar, the most visible representative of the Nakarattar community to the colonial government, in two of his most prominent roles: in Plate 2 as Mayor of Madras (1932) and in Plate 3 as Minister for Education, Health and Local Administration (1936–37). See Chapter 7.

Plate 1.
A Nakarattar banker in Colombo (1925).
Reprinted from Weerasooria (1973)
by permission of Tisara Prakasakayo Ltd.

Plate 2.
Raja Sir Muthia as first Mayor of Madras (1932).
Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Plate 3.
Raja Sir Muthia as Minister for Education,
Health and Local Administration (1936).
Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Political Constituencies of Raja Sir Muthia

As with Plates 2 and 3, Plates 4 through 8 are reproduced from the commemorative volume published for Raja Sir Muthia's sixtieth birthday celebration (shastiaptapurti kalyanam ), and date from the period before he received his knighthood and the title "Raja Sir." The photographs illustrate many of the Raja's political connections, discussed in Chapter 7: the Banking Enquiry Committee on which he served in 1929 (Plate 4), the Justice party upon his election as Chief Whip and Chairman in 1930 (Plate 5), prominent supporters from Karaikudi on the occasion of his election as Mayor of Madras in 1932 (Plate 6), members of the South India Chamber of Commerce in Madras, likewise posing with him at a reception in celebration of his election in 1932 (Plate 7), and finally, his father, Raja Sir Annamalai Chettiar, with members of the Indo-Burma Chamber of Commerce in 1935 (Plate 8).

Plate 4.
Banking Enquiry Committee (1929); Raja Sir Muthia second from right.
Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Plate 5.
South India League Federation (Justice Party) on Muthia's election as
Chief Whip and Chairman (1930). Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Plate 6.
Supporters from Karaikudi Municipality on Muthia's election as Mayor
of Madras (1932). Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Plate 7.
Supporters from South India Chamber of Commerce on Muthia's election
as Mayor of Madras (1932). Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Plate 8.
Raja Sir Annamalai Chettiar (seated, right) in England with members
of the Indo-Burma Chamber of Commerce (1935). Reprinted from Annamalai
University (1965).

Houses

The hybrid Anglo-Indian political style reflected in colonial dress and title are also reflected in the magnificent vernacular architecture of Chettinad. This style is illustrated in the increasingly elaborate Nakarattar versions of the Anglo-Indian bungalow, aptly described as "country forts" (nattukottai ). Chapter 6 draws attention to the valavu (the central courtyard, surrounding corridor, and double rooms for pullis or conjugal families) from which many Nakarattars derive the name for their joint families. A floor plan for a relatively simple Nakarattar house (Plate 9) illustrates this feature along with an outside veranda for guests in the front of the house, a small courtyard in back for cooking, and a separate room for women "polluted" by various life-cycle crises.

All Nakarattar houses share this division into a front "male" section, a central ceremonial section, and a rear "female" section. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century on, however, Nakarattars elaborated on this common theme, adding on extra rooms around the central core and incorporating a variety of colonial architectural motifs, ranging from Mughal-inspired towers to niches with sculptures of Queen Victoria. Such elaborations are depicted in the floor plan of a more elaborated Nakarattar house (Plate 10) and in the following four photographs of Nakarattar houses. Plate 11 captures the facade from a relatively simple Nakarattar house in Attankudi. Plate 12 shows the daily activity of Nakarattar women drawing a kolam (auspicious design) in the street before the front entrance to their house. Plate 13 is reproduced from Raja Sir Muthia's sixtieth birthday celebration commemorative volume and shows his highly elaborate Chettinad "Palace." Plate 14 captures a detail from a gateway to the palace in which the demon devotees of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, have been replaced by British soldiers. Plate 15 shows the central courtyard in the Chettinad Palace's elaborate two-storied variant of the Nakarattar house. Further analysis and photographs of Nakarattar houses may be found in Palaniappan (1989) and Thiagarajan (1983, 1992).

Front (Male) Section of House

1. Veranda.

Central, Ceremonial Section of House

2. Hal vitu or vitu: first courtyard; literally, "hall house."

3. Tontu: columns.

4. Melpati, tinnai: a raised platform on which people sit, usually under the veranda or on either side of the door of the house.

5. Valavu: aisle or corridor surrounding central courtyard; central section of house including central courtyard, aisle, and inner and outer rooms; entire house.

6. Ull arai: pulli's inner room for puja and storage of dowry items.

7. Veli arai: pulli's outer, "conjugal" room.

Kirpati: raised sitting platforms in front of each arai (not shown).

Back (Female) Section of House

8. Kattu: second courtyard, women's courtyard; where grains are dried, foods are prepared, and water is stored.

9. Samayal arai: kitchen.

10. Kutchin: a small room for women during their menses and for girls during their coming-of-age ceremony.

11. Veranda.

12. Pin kattu: open garden space with or without well.

Tottam: garden (not shown).

Kenru, keni: well (not shown).

Plate 9.
Plan of ground floor of a "simple" Nakarattar house.
Source : Thiagarajan (1983).

Front (Male) Section of House

1. Munn arai: front room.

2. Murram: courtyard.

3. Talvaram: corridor.

Central, Ceremonial Section of House

4. Kalyana kottakai: marriage hall.

5. Patakasalai, tinnai: the "public" room in a house.

6. Bhojana salai: dining hall.

7. Veliarai: outer room.

8. Ullarai: inner room.

9. Irantam maiya arai: second central hall.

10. Murram: courtyard, roofed or covered with grill work.

Back (Female) Section of House

11. Murram: courtyard, roofed or covered with grill work.

12. Talvaram: corridor.

13. Kalanjiyam: store room.

14. Samaiyal arai: kitchen ("cooking room").

15. Pin kattu: backyard.

16. Keni: well.

Plate 10.
Plan of ground floor of an "elaborate" Nakarattar house.
Source: Palaniappan (1989).

Plate 11.
Nakarattar house, Athankudi. Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Plate 12.
Women drawing kolam (auspicious design) in front of Nakarattar house.
Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Plate 13.
Raja Sir Muthia's "Palace" in Chettinad. Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Plate 14.
Detail of gateway to Chettinad Palace, showing Lakshmi and British "Guardians."
Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Plate 15.
Interior courtyard of Chettinad Palace. Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Temples and Charitable Endowments

Nakarattar house construction in Chettinad shares much in common with house construction in other parts of South India (see, e.g., Daniel 1984, Moore 1990) and indeed with other architectural forms—most notably, temples. All such forms are influenced in varying degrees by a complex set of iconic architectural principles based on Hindu religious ideas about cosmic creation, sacrifice, and regeneration (cf. Beck 1976b; Daniel 1984; Kramrisch 1946; Meister 1983, 1986; Michell 1988; Moore 1990; Varahamihira 1869–74: Chs. 53, 56). The central idea is that properly designed buildings (kattitam: literally, "bounded spaces") represent an image of the personified Hindu universe in microcosm: creation spreading outward toward the eight cardinal directions from a central point where formless divinity is manifest, worshiped, and celebrated in ritual. The center/periphery contrast already noted for Nakarattar houses constitutes only a specific version of this core theme, which is expressed most dramatically in the relationship between the sanctum of the temple (Sk: garbagrihya , Tm: karpakkirikam: literally, "womb room") and its outer walls (cf. Meister 1986).

The floor plan for Ilayathakudi Temple (Plate 16) illustrates the relationship between central sanctum and peripheral shrines. In addition, it also reflects an architectural concern for locational significance defined along both a front-back axis and a right-left axis. The front-back orientation, already remarked in the case of houses, is reflected in Ilayathakudi Temple by the outward and easterly gaze of the temple's principal deity, Kailasanatasvami (Siva) and the inward, westerly, devotional gaze of devotees as they enter the temple through the pillared hall (muna mantapam ) and towered gateway (koparam ). The right-left orientation, expressed in Nakarattar houses by the placement of the kitchen (samayalarai ) and of the room for the seclusion of women, is expressed in temples by the location of the kitchen (matappalli ) and of a shrine for demon devotees (yakasalai ). In both the house and the temple, relatively pure entities and activities are positioned on the right-hand side of the divine center, and relatively impure entities and activities on the left-hand side.

The multiplicity of shrines to secondary deities in Ilayathakudi Temple is obvious (their names are given a Tamil transcription in the floor plan, Plate 16). Invisible is the division of honors (maryatai ) in the yearly round of rituals among different "shareholders" in the temple (kovil pankalis ). Also invisible is the rotation of rights (murai ) to sit on the temple board of trustees and the political interplay among trustees and other prominent members of the temple clan concerning any allocation of temple resources or conduct of ritual practices. See Chapter 7 for discussion.

Their apparent architectural invisibility notwithstanding, many of these political properties of the temple influence the construction of secondary shrines and the performance of rituals at all shrines—including, for example, the allocation of separate shrines to Ganesh (Tm: Kanapati —the elephant-headed son of Siva) to temple members from Peramaratur, Perasantur, and Sirusettur. A local historical reading of Ilayathakudi Temple is beyond the scope of the present study, but evidence suggests that temple architecture should be seen not only as reflecting general cosmo-logical principles, but also as reflecting and constituting locally specific political processes. Photographs of Iraniyur Temple (Plates 17 and 18) provide a glimpse of the material consequences of Chettinad ritual politics. A parallel secular manifestation is illustrated by the Raja Annamalai Mandram (music academy) in Madras (Plate 19; again, see Chapter 7 for discussion).

Plate 16.
Floor plan of Ilayathakudi Temple. Based on a drawing by V. Thennappan, Devakottai, July 5, 1981.

Plate 17.
Iraniyur Temple (exterior). Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Plate 18.
Iraniyur Temple (interior of mandapam). Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Plate 19.
Raja Annamalai Mandram (music academy and auditorium).
Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Life-Cycle Ceremonies

Ancestor worship forms part of a continuum of religious practice that mixes seamlessly with the worship of village and Sanskritic deities (see Chapter 10). Photographs of a family's founders are often displayed over the front entrance to the central courtyard of a Nakarattar house, alongside notable members of Indian society. In many houses these photographs might also be interspersed with paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses. Plate 20 shows a family priest (purohit ) making daily puja offerings at the family shrine (sami arai ). Similar devotions figure into life-cycle ceremonies that play important roles in both the reproduction and the transformation of Nakarattar culture (See Chapter 9). Plates 21 through 23 illustrate scenes from the renewal of a marriage alliance between two families at a second wedding ceremony performed for the couple on the occasion of the groom's sixtieth birthday (his shastiaptapurti kalyanam ).

Plate 20.
Priest performing puja in family shrine (sami arai ). Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Plate 21.
Shastiaptapurti kalyanam (sixtieth birthday celebration): Priests performing
ceremonies in central courtyard with guests in surrounding corridor.
Photo by Peter Nabokov.

Plate 22.
Shastiaptapurti kalyanam: The second "wedding" of Raja Sir Muthia
and his wife. Reprinted from Annamalai University (1965).

Plate 23.
Shastiaptapurti kalyanam: Male guests at "wedding" meal. Photo by
Peter Nabokov.

8
Marriage Alliance

Introduction

We return repeatedly to the role of trust in the conduct of commerce and to the commercial transaction as an index of trust. Besides building and signaling trust through elite endowments, Nakarattars also built and signaled trust through various kinds of nonelite transactions, especially nonelite transactions between relatives. The items exchanged in these transactions ranged from gifts, deposits, and loans to payments, goods, and services; every exchange was carefully entered in the appropriate ledgers of Nakarattar family firms. Some of these transactions appear, from an economic point of view, to be trusting to the point of irrationality—at least, until one looks beyond the short-term payoff. Yet it is clear that low-interest, long-term loans and deposits to relatives—like nonvicarious ritual gifting by elites—had substantial financial rewards.

There is a danger here. Such a formulation makes it sound as though successful Nakarattar business was prescribed by codes of conduct for kin, by recipes for relatives. Such thinking obscures the freedom with which Nakarattars could manipulate kinship ties to minimize risk in financial transactions, and it completely hides the way that Nakarattars used financial transactions to create the framework of kinship itself. But once we remind ourselves of the dangers of reification, what is important to realize is that in kinship, as in finance, trust was the essential ingredient. Its presence was required for transactions to take place; its absence was enough to sever a kin relationship.

The present chapter begins by providing a brief overview of trust between relatives, measured (quite literally) by Nakarattar terms for kin-

ship. Its nine subsequent sections then focus upon and analyze various transactions between affinal kin, or "in-laws." The preliminary section of definitions describes the overall range of Nakarattar kin relations as designated by terms for different groupings of kin. The second section identifies characteristic relations of affinity and marriage alliance that hold between members of these groups. The third section explores some of the pragmatic considerations that affected marriage alliance formation and the complex alliance structures that sometimes resulted. I give special attention to the intersection of marriage alliance and territorial segmentation in Chettinad and to additional complicating factors that arose in the wake of Nakarattar business activities in different parts of Southeast Asia. The fourth section provides an illustrative case of an alliance in operation. The fifth section describes the ceremonial prestations that symbolized Nakarattar marriage alliances, contrasting them with those that symbolized non-Nakarattar castes. The sixth through ninth sections examine the implications of Nakarattar marriage alliance for standard theories about kinship terminology, marriage rules, and affinal prestations among South Indian castes generally, and especially for the theories of Louis Dumont (1983). The conclusion looks forward to Chapter 10 where I consider why Nakarattar marriage alliance differs from the pattern predicted by standard theories of Dravidian kinship, relating the Nakarattar pattern to Marriott's (1976) theory of Hindu transactions, and viewing the Nakarattar pattern as a specific adaptation to the caste's occupational niche as merchant-bankers.

My information about Nakarattar kinship was collected primarily from directed and undirected interviews carried out during my field work in Tamil Nadu in 1981. Some data were obtained by observing contemporary weddings. But many of the practices described below are no longer performed and are only dimly remembered by some of the older Nakarattars. Accordingly, my description of Nakarattar marriage alliance is offered as a reconstruction of customs before 1930. I believe these customs were in force during the primary focal period of this book, 1870–1930, and I present my description in the past tense.

Preliminary Definitions: Terms for Kin Groups

Nakarattar terms for kin groups segmented the caste into contrasting categories that provided an index to three levels of social distance: (a) structured kinship (including relations between in-laws), (b) diffuse kinship, and (c) common membership in the Nakarattar caste, but no kinship ties. These levels are depicted in Figure 13. At its most diffuse level, Nakarattar kinship terms distinguished caste members who were kin (contakkarar ) from those who were not (contam illai ). Kin included all of one's

Figure 13.
Levels of social distance in Nakarattar kin relations.

agnatic relations, collectively referred to as pankali: that is, members of a person's clan (kovil pankali ) as well as members of one's lineage (kuttikkira pankali ).^[1] Kin also included members of a one's spouse's lineage, all of whom were referred to as campantippuram ("in-laws"). Once kinship relations were established between two sets of kuttikkira pankali through marriage, they lingered on even after the paired descent groups had terminated jural obligations contracted at the time of the marriage. Affinal relations between kin groups did not extend to members of a spouse's temple clan outside his or her lineage.

Nakarattars employed the terms tayapillai and tayati (plurals tayappillaikal and tayatikal ), in both a broad and a narrow sense. In the broad

sense the terms referred to members of descent groups with whom Nakarattars had once established a marriage alliance, even if they no longer maintained the alliance as such. The terms indicated that marriages had previously occurred between female tayatis and male pankalis . In this sense, tayati designated a more diffuse relationship of kinship than a campantippuram relationship, that is, a relationship between descent groups observing an ongoing marriage alliance. Relationships within this diffuse body of affines were recognized, and they might be activated by persons seeking favors, much as were the ties between otherwise unrelated members of the same temple-clan. There did not, however, exist any institutionalized set of rights and obligations for tayatis such as those incurred by two lineages actively allied by marriage.

Nakarattars viewed all of the husband's agnatic relatives as the basic unit of reference for the wife as well as the husband. They constituted an enormously extended family into which the wife had married and were referred to by the focal couple and its offspring simply as "our pankali ." Active campantippuram members who belonged to the wife's uterine descent groups, however, were marked by a narrow use of the term tayati , signaled in discussion by reference to specific moral obligations.

Marriage Alliance, Affinal Kindreds, and Tayatis

Exactly what was a Nakarattar marriage alliance? Minimally, it was a negotiated agreement between two sets of descent groups related to the husband and wife of a married couple. The primary groups involved were the joint family (valavu )^[2] and the encompassing lineage segment (kuttikkira pankali ) of each individual. The linked groups in a Nakarattar marriage alliance created an affinal kindred defined by consanguineal relationship to one or the other spouse of a married couple.

Membership in Nakarattar affinal kindreds was not reckoned by a criterion of genealogical distance from a specific individual,^[3] and for this reason some anthropologists may be tempted to conceive of the group formed by a marriage alliance as a kind of compound descent group, comprising the husband's clan and the wife's lineage.^[4] But conceiving the affinal kindred in this fashion, underestimates important differences between descent groups and kindreds that have been all too infrequently acknowledged.^[5] In the first place, an affinal kindred was not defined by descent from a common ancestor and, on the basis of this substantive consideration, should not be confused with any kind of descent group.^[6] Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, structural relationships between members of an affinal kindred—including relationships marked by important financial transactions—were marked by relations of reciprocity. In this, they

differed notably from the redistributive relations that mark Nakarattar descent groups. As we shall see in Chapter 9, descent groups were organized around temple cults that—like the multicaste temple cults described in Chapter 7—provided a focus for the collective pooling and redistribution of resources to their members. These cults, whether constituted of a clan, a multivillage lineage, or the multicaste inhabitants of a Chettinad village, formed corporate units that reproduced themselves from generation to generation. By contrast, affinal kindreds were marked, with one exception, by a set of prestations between two sets of allied descent groups. These affinal prestations generated, in Sahlins' (1966) words, a "between-group relationship" rather than a "within-group relationship." Moreover, among the Nakarattars, the relationship between parties of an affinal kindred was not inherently reproductive.

Affinal kindreds could be initiated by a marriage between two joint families or two larger lineage segments without any previous participation in a marriage alliance. They lasted for at least two generations, during which time their members bore rights and responsibilities to each other. But, counter to most models of marriage alliance in Dravidian kinship, Nakarattar marriage alliances were not automatically renewed. At most, affinal kindreds might, under appropriate conditions, be renewed indefinitely by successive two-generation alliances.

Some researchers studying Dravidian marriage have found it useful to distinguish between, on the one hand, an alliance relationship , formed by the first marriage between families of extended lineages, and, on the other hand, an alliance , where the relationship is perpetuated (Burkhart 1978). In the former case, the alliance seems oriented primarily toward the respective joint families of the married couple. In the latter case, the couple's total affinal kindred is implicated, with ramifications that may extend to a core group of repeatedly intermarried families in a marriage circle (Burkhart 1978). On the assumption that Dravidian kinship terminology necessarily entails perpetual alliance, scholars such as Dumont (1957b) reserve the term alliance for the recursive, self-generating form. In the following discussion, I differ from this usage and employ alliance and alliance relationship interchangeably, for both perpetual and "one-shot" alliances. I qualify my usage with appropriate adjectives as needed to indicate whether the alliance is regenerative or terminated after a finite period.

Members of Nakarattar affinal kindreds cooperated in a variety of ways. They were tied together, in part, by a recurring sequence of ceremonies and rituals that provided opportunities to exchange information and lobby one another for assistance in various enterprises, of both a business and a nonbusiness nature. These same cyclic and singular ceremonies

constituted occasions on which resources were accumulated and deposited to form a trust fund in the bride's name, over which she maintained nominal control. In effect, the deposits—referred to as accimar panam (married woman's money)—constituted a bequest, insofar as they were normally intended for the benefit of descendants of the newly married couple, and especially for any daughters that might be born to the couple. Since a share of the bride's natal family's estate was set aside for her and her descendants (especially her daughters) through the mechanism of the dowry, it is accurate to view the formation of these trusts as reflecting a secondary line of inheritance through the female line. If the bride died before bearing any children, all monies deposited as accimar panam trusts traditionally reverted to the bride's natal family.

A considerable length of time could pass before the bride's children were old enough to benefit from or control their mother's accimar panam in any direct way. Normally, it was not spent until they incurred educational or marriage expenses. In some cases, the fund or some portion of it even remained indefinitely as a kind of communal property under control of the husband's joint family. In the meantime, the accumulated resources provided financial reserves on which all the different joint families of the alliance kindred could make various claims (see Chapter 5).

This is not to say that affinally allied joint families and other descent groups made equal contributions or had equal claims on the accumulated resources. On the contrary, the status of a married person's respective descent groups varied according to the rights, duties, and privileges each spouse possessed with respect to his or her hearthhold (pulli ), joint family (valavu ), or lineage (kuttikkira pankali ). These claims varied widely according to the individual circumstances of the family group involved. In principle, as already noted, the resources in question belonged to the bride. The major part was given by her father (amman, mamakkarar ) or brother (attan, maittunan ) in the form of cir tanam ("dowry") and in related gifts.^[7] However, since she was largely subject to control by her husband, and he was normally subject to control by the senior male in his joint family (see Chapter 6), her rights were largely nominal. On the other hand, the lack of direct control over decisions allocating the use of funds in the trust did not eliminate all privilege of access for the wife's natal joint family or other joint family among the couple's tayatis . In some cases, the long process of negotiation leading up to the marriage could result in an agreement that some portion of the fund be deposited in the business enterprises of the tayatis .

In general, Nakarattar families felt some aversion to investing an affinal trust in businesses owned by either family in a marriage alliance. One

of my informants went so far as to say that such funds were never invested in family business since "it was risky to put all the eggs in one basket." Accordingly, affinal gifts were frequently deposited in the business of third parties, either in interest-bearing accounts or in the form of special, interest-bearing hundis . Although these hundis were technically discountable on sight, they were used as long-term certificates of deposit and were rarely cashed without considerable advance warning (see Chapter 5). In some situations, an independent banking business might be established in the bride's name. This was especially the case in situations where a son-in-law had no financial assets of his own and could not expect to inherit any. In all of these cases, however, the effect was to open up a line of credit nominally to the bride, but in effect to the various members of the kindred according to their specific claims in the alliance.

Some of the factors contributing to the formation of a marriage alliance have already been examined from the point of view of a family's choice of grooms for its daughters (Chapter 6). A candidate was normally selected after he had already completed his first three-year term as the agent for a Nakarattar banking firm. Accordingly, his future potential as a businessman was subject to knowledgeable evaluation in the marriage-arranging season that followed his return to Chettinad. In fact, although I have no statistical data, it is my impression that a young man was often groomed for the part of son-in-law by a prospective affine, who first hired the young man as an agent for his business firm. If the young man proved himself abroad and relations remained cordial between agent and principal, the family could then propose a long-term alliance through marriage with a daughter.

Selection of the bride for a family's son proceeded along a different route. For example, more emphasis was placed on a bride's physical beauty than on a groom's. Another difference was that a bride's potential capital contributions to an alliance were not evaluated on the basis of expected inheritance or demonstrated business acumen. In fact, until 1947, Hindu women had no rights of inheritance, and there was no way to test in advance the potential contribution a wife's council might eventually make to her family's decision making. Nevertheless, a bride generally did make a substantial contribution to her husband's family business. The bride's counterpart to a groom's inheritance was her dowry along with other affinal prestations that resulted from a marriage alliance between two families.

The size of a dowry was determined by delicate negotiations between families. If the groom's family was seen as too greedy or the bride's as too stingy, a wedding could be called off, although blame would be placed else-

where—for example, on the sudden discovery of a previously unnoticed misalignment of horoscopes or a previously unknown "parallel cousin" common to both families.^[8] Other affinal prestations were not subject to explicit agreement, but a general understanding and set of expectations would be generated and generally followed.

Vattakais and Territorial Endogamy

Nakarattar marriage alliances reflected and influenced principles of territorial organization. The major territorial factor affecting them was a system of prohibitions that circumscribed bounded, endogamous territories called vattakais . In these vattakais , Nakarattars established panchayats (councils of influential elders) for making certain kinds of collective decisions and for resolving certain kinds of conflict. That is, the Nakarattar caste encompassed what amounted to incipient subcastes or microcastes governed by the external sanctions of judicial bodies. They did not, however, form marriage circles by adherence to normative obligations of reciprocal marriage exchange. Accordingly, their social organization did not reflect any strictly "elementary structure of kinship" (Lévi-Strauss 1969).

The pre-1930s system of Nakarattar vattakai -bound microcastes survives today only in fossilized form, as a statistical pattern among contemporary alliances and in the memory of a handful of Nakarattar historians who have taken an interest in their own past. Thus, the evidence for reconstructing colonial structures of Nakarattar marriage is meager and difficult to come by. Such as it is, I am encouraged by its fit with other components of Nakarattar caste organization during the colonial period. However, the organization and functional implications of vattakai endogamy did not become apparent to me until after I had left Tamil Nadu, and I did not pursue a systematic inquiry as part of my field investigation.

My first clue to the historical operation of the system came, typically, while discussing another topic with an informant. I had been trying to ascertain whether any Nakarattar employed the Tamil term nakaram or the English phrase "marriage circle" in reference to exogamous Nakarattar clans (Chapter 9)—a usage reported by various non-Nakarattar writers on the topic.^[9] (Chandrasekhar 1980; Price 1979). My informant at the time—a knowledgeable man in his seventies with a long history as an industrialist, a regional politician, and a man active in the internal politics of the Nakarattars—agreed with other informants that the usage was unheard of. But he wondered whether the writers in question were referring to a territorial division of Chettinad into "West Circle," "East Circle,"

and "South Circle." On further questioning he referred to these circles as vattakais ,^[10] and offered the information that these vattakais were traditionally endogamous, although vattakai endogamy was now breaking down. According to this man, the cultural principle underlying endogamy was simply a preference for geographical proximity: "No family wanted to send its daughter too far away."

Although I am confident that this rationalization accurately reports Nakarattars' sentiment about their daughters, it cannot account for vattakai endogamy. In a relatively uniform topographic terrain such as Chettinad, such a preference would result in an evenly distributed network of marriage alliances, not the tripartite system of bounded endogamous segments that existed. I continued to enquire about Nakarattar vattakais with all of my informants. But during the course of my field work I found only three or four other Nakarattars who had heard the term vattakai , and none of them were able to describe the whereabouts of vattakai boundaries or identify the sets of Chettinad villages that were members of the different vattakais .

I received no further clues until I returned to America and began to go closely over some of the Tamil documents I had collected during my stay in Tamil Nadu. At this time, I noticed a significant reference in the book Chettinadum Tamilum (Chettinad and Tamil) written by my principal informant, Lakshmanan Chettiar, known as Somalay (1953: 12): "In Chettinad, Chettiars still hold their community meetings on the pattern of Chola village assemblies. The sub-divisions, vattakai and karai are still mentioned." An appendix to Somalay's book contains a table of seven territorial divisions including three vattakais (for a version of this table, reordered according to the Latin alphabet, see the key to Map 4; see also Maps 3 and 4).

A tabulation of 91 sample marriages that occurred in 1980–1981, taken from the marriage register of Neman clan temple, indicated that 64 of the marriages (70%) were endogamous within these clusters even today. Moreover, 10 of the 27 mixed vattakai marriages (37%) occurred within Melappattur and Mela Vattakais, and another 12 within Pathinattur Vattakai, Kila Vattakai, and Kilappattur (44%). My speculation is that the seven-way territorial division represents a post-seventeenth-century fission of an earlier three-way division, and that these two large clusters of interterritory marriage actually maintain an underlying vattakai endogamy. But even if this theory is incorrect, there remains a considerable nonrandom clustering of territorially bounded marriage zones (see Table 10).

I wrote Lakshmanan Chettiar asking about the function and organization of vattakais . He returned the following reply:

A cluster of villages, in Chettiar terminology, is called vattakai . There are three major vattakais and three minor ones. Till fifty years ago, there used to be held vattakai conferences of Nagarathars [Nakarattars]. No such meet has since met. Representatives from the village temples (of the Nakarathars) in each vattakai still meet on rare occasion to decide austerity measures in marriages, etc.

Till say 1939, there were not many roads in Chettinad. Transport was few and far between. For marriage and vevu ceremonies, death rituals, etc., the Pangalis [pankalis: members of local lineage segments] used to march on foot. Therefore, it was the custom to contract matrimonial alliances within a ten-mile radius. In those days, it was possible to have first-hand knowledge of the families only within such short distance. If a boy (groom) could not get a suitable match within the vattakai or if a girl could not be given away within this territorial jurisdiction, it was considered as a stigma to that family.

Adoption was not confined to the vattakai .

Since 1939, things have changed vastly. Even now 2/3 of all Chettiar marriages take place within the vattakai . But marriage within the vattakai is no longer the rule. All villages are connected by road, by public transport and by telephone. To check up anyone's credentials or verify family background is very easy. During World War II, families which stayed on in Malaysia and Singapore contracted marriages among themselves without reference to vattakai and this has caught on. In [one of the Chettinad villages] for instance, people have contracted marriages with almost every village in Chettinad. [A textile industrialist residing in the village] set the ball rolling by

effecting marriage alliances with all textile mill-owner families in Chettinad. In Devakottai, it was the tradition to finalize marriages with families within the town. There are 2,000 families and so it was not a problem to find a suitable match. But, in Devakottai too, people are slowly and in increasing numbers effecting marriages elsewhere. If two families are in business in Salem or say in Coimbatore and are sufficiently acquainted with each other over the years, the vattakai ceases to be a bar. I can speak of at least a thousand instances where the vattakai system has been given the go-by. (Lakshmanan Chettiar, personal communication, March 1981)

In this letter, Lakshmanan Chettiar subscribes to the notion that preferences for affinal proximity explain the formation of vattakai . The explanation is no more satisfactory coming from him than from my previous informant. But his further amplification, along with the comments in his book, suggest some of the reasons for the preference and some of the reasons why it should now be breaking down. Apparently, vattakais at one point constituted regional assemblies built upon ancient political assemblies operating in the Chettinad region of Pandyanadu.^[11] As such, they must have provided a crosscutting organizational framework that complemented those of lineage, clan, and business station described in Chapters 6 and 9. As we shall see more clearly in Chapter 9, the village temple provided a framework for political coordination within a single village. The clan temples provided an institution capable of sanctioning the behavior of dispersed clan members from multiple villages. The vattakai panchayat apparently provided a coordinating institution for Nakarattars belonging both to different villages and to different clans. Thus, it must have operated in Chettinad like vitutis or caste associations operated in Nakarattar business stations (see Chapter 6). Significantly, the most prominent feature in my informants' descriptions of vattakai deterioration concerned the substitution of principles of business association for residential proximity in determining suitability for marriage alliance. This substitution most likely took place because, both in the case of Nakarattars sharing common business stations and in the case of Nakarattars sharing a common industry, business-related sodalities provided alternatives to vattakais as institutions for distributing information and resolving disputes among segments of dispersed clans and localized lineages. The vattakai system declined with the creation of the new colonial political framework—especially with the creation of the system of electoral district boards in 1936. By the end of this period, vattakais retained (significantly in this context) only some coordinative functions in setting limits on the cost of a dowry.

Affinal Gifts as Interest-Earning Trusts: An Illustration

In 1980–81, most of my informants complained about the high cost of a dowry which, they felt, had grown out of control during the last fifty years (see Table 11). It is difficult to judge the accuracy of this nostalgic vision of times gone by. Memories of low-cost dowry do not fit well with the prominent role given to dowry deposits (accimar panam ) in turn-of-the-century banking practice (Chapter 5). Unfortunately, in the absence of pre-1930s documentation for dowry expenses, it is necessary to consider a modern example. Given my contemporary informants' nostalgia, one must be cautious in taking the magnitude of money involved as a basis for historical projection. I am more confident about continuity in the structure of affinal prestations and in the social and financial ties they created.

I illustrate the kinds of financial claims that affinal allies may place on each other—especially the claims that a married couple (pulli ) may place on members of the wife's natal family (tayatis , in the narrow sense)—by presenting a brief account of a relatively extended case. The story begins with a marriage that occurred in the late 1930s. It continues with the marriages of this initial couple's children. As an analysis of a single case, it should not be regarded as typical. It will be apparent that I collected more information about the marriages of my informant's daughters than about his own marriage forty years before. Nevertheless, similarities between the two generations of marriages suggest that no significant change had taken place.

My informant described both families in the 1930s as upper middle-class. The groom's family business was located primarily in Burma. Its income was estimated at about Rs. 40,000; its assets at about Rs. 500,000–600,000. The business interests of the bride's family were located in Ceylon and Malaysia. The income of her family was about Rs. 50,000–60,000, with assets of about Rs. 300,000–400,000. Their natal villages were located within six kilometers of each other. There had been no previous mar-

riage alliance between their respective families. My informant summarized the arrangements for the marriage ceremony in the following words.

Wedding expenses (kalyanaccelavu ) were shared by both families. The bride's family contributed about Rs. 5,000; the groom's, Rs. 4,000. Normally, the groom's family would only have spent about Rs. 2,000. But my father spent an extra Rs. 1,500 for special musical performances.

My wife's dowry (cir tanam ) was Rs. 5,000, a high figure at that time.

We received wedding gifts (cir varicai ) worth about Rs. 25,000.

Some gifts (mamiyar caman —i.e., from the bride's mother's brother) were also given to the groom's mother including saris, jewelry, utensils, etc. Their value was less than Rs. 2,000. No money gifts were given to the groom's mother before 1941. (Interview with Lakshmanan Chettiar, May 1981)

The marriage produced four daughters, born between 1940 and 1960. They were married at ages that ranged from sixteen to twenty-three (the later they were born, the older they were married).^[12] Table 12 itemizes the various expenses incurred on the occasion of their weddings, along with my informant's explanatory comments.

Based on this information, it is possible to make a few observations about the financial investment that marriages represented to this Nakarattar family. It is also possible to indicate something of the kinds of financial cooperation that occurred within the affinal kindred established at the time of the initial marriage alliance. To begin with, there is a discrepancy in the kind of information collected for the father's and the children's weddings. In the former case, we have information both about the expenses of marrying one's daughter, and also about the income and assets of the intermarrying families (notice, it is my informant's wife's natal family who bore the brunt of the expenses). But we do not know what other kinds of expenses these families faced—especially what expenses other than my informant's wedding were borne by his wife's natal family. Nevertheless, it is possible to observe that the total cost of the wedding to her natal family of Rs. 37,000 represented about 10 percent of its assets and about 60 percent of one year's income.

In the case of the children's generation, we do not know the assets and income of the allied families. But we do know that my informant's family acted as in-laws under similar obligations for the weddings of at least his four daughters. We are also able to estimate the relationship that each wedding bore to the others as a proportion of the expenses incurred by all the weddings. I note, further, that my informant had only one son, his

youngest child. This proportion of daughters to sons and especially the absolute number of daughters represents a piece of financial misfortune for Nakarattars and for Tamil families generally, as indicated by the common blessing "May you have a hundred sons," and also by the Tamil proverb "Five daughters will ruin the wealthiest man." Accordingly, this potential source of bias should be kept in mind if generalizations are drawn from my illustrative case.

Finally, my informant indicated that his family had lost most of their money when the majority of Nakarattars left Burma in 1941, never to receive compensation for their substantial landholdings and other Burmese assets. This is confirmed by information he provided me about the amount of dowry appropriate for Nakarattars falling into different economic classes. I present his estimates in Table 11. They demonstrate clearly that he views his family's fortunes as having declined from upper middle-class to lower middle-class and perhaps even to "poor" status. They also give some indication of trends in dowry payments during the last fifty years.

All of these considerations indicate that my informant could be regarded as something of a hardship case. Nevertheless, my impression is that the means he employed for financing the enormous expenditures required by the marriages of his daughters are typical of Nakarattars generally and cast considerable light on economic transactions between Nakarattar kin groups within affinal kindreds. The sources of marriage funds are presented below.

The important lesson here is that 45 percent of the considerable expenses incurred by my informant in marrying off his daughters were borne in turn by his wife's uterine family. The process by which these funds were accumulated reflects even more deeply the ongoing operation of a Nakarattar marriage alliance. My informant's second daughter was

named after her maternal grandmother. In recognition of their special relationship, this grandmother gave her granddaughter Rs. 1,001 one week after she was born. The amount was kept in deposit as accimar panam in a firm of tanners in Dindigul. Every year, the principal plus interest was redeposited. Occasionally, the grandmother took the opportunity to round off the amount when the deposit reached an "odd" figure.^[13] Periodic festivals such as Deepavali also marked occasions for new contributions to the fund. Assuming that these gifts made up the bulk of the funds donated by the family comprising my informant's in-laws for the marriage of his second daughter, and accepting the figure of 30 percent as accurately reflecting their contribution to the cost of her wedding, the trust established in her name must finally have reached perhaps Rs. 16,500. It is a sum that reflects a substantial credit line directly linking the recipient firm of tanners and my informant's joint family and indirectly available to other joint families among my informant's affinal kindred.

The Ritual Construction of Nakarattar Marriage Alliances

The ritual construction of a Nakarattar marriage alliance provided a detailed picture of many normative relationships between members of affinal kindreds.^[14] In the following analysis, I focus on Nakarattar ceremonial transactions commencing with prenuptial rituals and continuing long after the wedding celebration, for the life of a marriage alliance.^[15] Such transactions were carefully recorded by Nakarattars in special notebooks that, as we shall see, formed a thoroughgoing bookkeeping system for tracking relations of trust and cooperation between kin. My point of departure is Dumont's (1957b) analysis of a similar chain of the prestations and counterprestations that symbolize marriage alliances among non-Nakarattar castes—specifically, in a Vellalar ("farmer") caste of Tirunelveli and some Kallar and Maravar ("warrior") castes of Chettinad and neighboring regions.

If I correctly understand Dumont, these affinal prestations fall into essentially two categories. Dumont describes the first category of prestations as external prestations —called cir or curul —which are presented back and forth between families allied by the marriage of their son and daughter.

[W]ith the ceremony proper [the couple] begins the series of visits to and stays with F [the wife's family], the couple being every time accompanied by a number of baskets [cir ] containing foodstuffs and other articles for consumption, from M [the husband's family] to F, increased back from F to M. Prestations from F dominate more and

more as time goes on until finally—it may be two or three years after the marriage ceremony—the young couple establish a separate household near M, and receive the necessary pots and pans from F without any return gift. This is the "cir of going apart." (1957b: 30)

Dumont describes the second category of prestations as "internal prestations" — called moi:

During the marriage ceremony, in both houses, money is collected among the bridegroom's relatives on the one hand and the bride's relatives on the other. This is called moi; its effect is to make the relatives contribute to the expenses of the family. (1957b: 30)

Dumont notes that moi takes various forms among the different groups he studied: among the Mudukkulattur Maravar, moi is absent at weddings but present at funerals and female puberty rites; among the Nangudi Vellalar, moi is replaced by collections where the two groups of pankali pool their gifts in a common fund rather than contributing to two separate funds; similarly, among the Paganeri Kallar, all who attend the feast contribute moi , which consists of a small contribution of rice and also a collection of money, called revei , which is accompanied by a gift of thanks in return.

These variations in the composition of moi -giving groups cast doubt on the generality of Dumont's contrast of cir and moi as a difference between external and internal gifts—that is, between gifts given between the bride's and groom's pankalis and gifts given within each pankali . But Dumont never elaborates on the significance of this distinction, even among those castes where it does seem to hold. I will offer some speculative thoughts on the issue after examining the kinds of prestations found among the Nakarattar.

Cir

Nakarattar affinal prestations took a variety of forms, some of which overlap with those described by Dumont. To begin with, Nakarattars applied the term cir in compound terms referring to two kinds of gifts: cir tanam (dowry) and cir varicai (gifts to the couple on the occasion of the wedding). As is partially the case in the groups studied by Dumont, both of these varieties of cir can be viewed as forms of prestation by the bride's family to the groom's family, or to the new pulli formed on the occasion of the marriage and assimilated into the groom's family. Nevertheless, there are some important aspects of Nakarattar varieties of cir that deserve special notice. Most importantly, unlike the prestations of cir described by Dumont, neither cir tanam nor cir varicai was reciprocated by the groom's

family. Nor was there any continuing cycle of cir exchange through the years, although the dowry was sometimes paid in installments. This is not to say that there were no continuing prestations between the families. But these were referred to by different terms, described below.

Cir tanam consisted of a large sum of money which technically remained the property of the bride. In practice, it was deposited in the business belonging to the groom's valavu or was used to open up a long-term, interest-paying deposit account (accimar panam ) in another Nakarattar family's business. In either case, the groom's valavu exercised considerable control over its use. However, if the bride died without giving birth to any children, the sum was returned to her family.

A similar arrangement was made concerning cir varicai . In this context, the bride's and the groom's families both maintained lists of the bridal gifts, called kalyanattukku caman vaitta vivaram . If the bride died without any issue, the gifts were returned to the bride's family. Prestations of cir varicai (varicai = "row on row") were quite similar to prestations of cir among the groups described by Dumont. They constituted a variety of items, including those for use by the bride, items for use by future children (including items reserved for the cir varicai of any daughters that might be born), and items for use by the groom (which would not be returned to the bride's family in the event of the childless death of the bride). The difference was that among the Nakarattar, cir varicai was given all at once on the occasion of the wedding itself.

Moi

Nakarattar applied the term moi to gifts given by any person attending a wedding. As with the Nangudi Vellalar, but unlike among the Kallar, Nakarattar moi were not confined to internal prestations, within the bride's and groom's respective pankalis . It was the case that these groups were ritually marked in the presentation of moi . But the marking was a complicated affair involving a variety of groups both inside and outside the couple's affinal kindred. Nakarattar moi did not represent any complementary gifting to the married couple, let alone a reciprocal exchange between the two separate sets of pankalis comprising affinal kindred. Nor was moi directed primarily toward providing the young couple with a substantial sum of money for use in establishing their pulli . Instead, moi generally took the form of symbolic tokens: a single rupee or the gift of a small amount of copper. These gifts were recorded in an account book (moippana etu ).

The order in which gifts of moi were entered reflected an internal segmentation of Nakarattar affinal kindred into five categories. The first

entry was that of the deceased father of the groom's oldest living patrilineal relative in direct line of descent (e.g., the groom's deceased FFF if his FF was still living). In this way the groom's valavu —the joint family or minimal lineage segment, which was midway between his kuttikkira pankali and his pulli —was given special recognition. The gift, however, was normally only one rupee and thus was symbolic rather than substantial.

After this entry, the names of all members of the groom's kuttikkira pankali were listed in genealogical order, whether or not they attended. Each attending pankali gave a small amount of copper—another symbolic gift—and a mark was placed by his name. By marking off the names of the attending pankalis from a comprehensive list in the moippana etu , Nakarattars maintained a record of the current state of solidarity and cooperation among different segments of their lineage.

The bride's uterine pankalis were listed after the groom's attending pankalis , as were relatives of the bride through her mother's line. In short, the couple's tayatis comprised the next group listed in the moippana etu . Nakarattars recognized lineal distinctions between the couple's tayatis by the order in which each was listed. The wife's father (amman or mamakkarar ), who was first on the list of tayatis , gave a substantial amount (I did not collect information about standards for judging its substantiality). Other tayatis of the couple gave symbolic tokens.

The fourth group in the moippana etu were termed catunkukkarar (ceremony doers). They consisted of the groom's sisters (nattanars ), who were entitled to certain rights, duties, and ceremonies during the wedding ceremony and for whom the groom and his sons acted (or would eventually act) as tayatis , observing cir -giving and murai -giving obligations for the nattanars' pulli .

Finally, there was a residual category of moi -givers that consisted of anybody else who attended the wedding. This group could even include friends or employees who did not belong to the Nakarattar caste.

Murai

Murai constituted customary and continuing external gifts from the wife's family to the husband's family. They partially corresponded to Dumont's description of cir among non-Nakarattar groups, and complemented Nakarattar cir tanam and cir varicai . However, they continued beyond the immediate occasion of the wedding. Like the two Nakarattar cir prestations, murai constituted asymmetrical prestations from the wife's family to the husband's. The primary kin groups involved were her murai -giving uterine valavu and her murai -receiving affinal pulli (i.e., the wife's father's pulli and the pulli formed by her marriage to her hus-

band). The groups of kuttikkira pankalis and tayatis to which these smaller kin groups belonged were indirectly allied through the alliance of their children. Their token moi prestations and their optional presence on the occasion of murai prestations ritually distinguished their status from the directly allied valavus and pullis .

Occasions for giving murai included seasonal festivals such as those occurring on the Hindu holidays of Pongal or Deepavali. Nakarattars also gave murai on the occasion of the wife's father's sixtieth birthday (shastiaptapurti santi kalyanam ), by which time he should have determined the eventual division of his properties (if he had not already divided them) and should have satisfied all dowry obligations for any other daughters. Finally, Nakarattars presented murai to the husband's family on the occasion of any other marriage occurring in their families.

The obligation to give murai on these occasions was taken seriously. Even if there was a quarrel, say, between a woman and her brother, such that he refused to attend her husband's sixtieth birthday celebration, he was still obligated to send murai through an intermediary and to cover the cost of a new gold marriage pendant (tali ) and sari for his sister, a veshti for her husband, and garlands and other auspicious articles for the ceremony.

The limits of murai obligations were especially significant for indicating the duration of a marriage alliance. Murai obligations between a woman's uterine valavu and her affinal pulli held force for the life of the married couple and of their unmarried children. Initially, murais were given by a married woman's father (her husband's amman or mamakkarar ). But even after her father's death, murai continued to be given by her brothers (her husband's attan or maittunan ). If she died before her husband and children, her father or her brothers continued to present murai on appropriate occasions. Finally, even if both husband and wife died, surviving members of the wife's uterine pulli continued to present murai to her surviving children until they married and formed a new pulli .

When a woman's sons married, her father and sons performed a modest ceremonial role at the wedding. But the major cir -giving and murai -giving responsibilities were assumed by the new bride's father's pulli . In principle, it was possible for a woman's son to marry her brother's daughter. In this case, the original marriage alliance between her uterine family and her husband's family was renewed, and the flow of prestations continued unaltered. But there was no requirement to renew an alliance in this way, and it happened infrequently. My informants felt that perhaps 90 to 95 percent of the time, marriages took place with families who were not already in-laws (campantippuram ). When a woman's daughters married,

her husband and sons assumed murai obligations for their in-laws. But a major portion of their obligations was absorbed by the mother's own cir tanam and murai , deposited for the purpose in an accimar panam trust. She and her husband and sons made use of the bulk of this money to cover the cost of her daughters' cir and murai .

A marriage alliance between descent groups—at least in the sense in which it was symbolized by murai prestations—thus had a kind of developmental cycle of its own, which lasted about two generations. Longer-term alliances between Nakarattar descent groups were possible, in principle, and were effected by arranging for marriage between first cross-cousins (i.e., FZD=MBS or MBD=FZS). But the incidence of such renewals was quite scarce. I consider the implications of the infrequent exercise of this option to renew marriage alliances between valavus (i.e., marriage of first cross-cousins) in subsequent sections of this chapter.

Vevu

Vevu constituted prestations of special ceremonial murai given by all pankalis on important life-cycle ceremonies for family members including the initial wedding, the birth of a first child (wealthy families gave vevu for the first boy and the first girl), the first menses of the first daughter, and the sixtieth birthday of the father. The difference between vevu and murai was that occasions for giving vevu required the physical presence of pankalis and tayatis (not just a representative or messenger of the wife's father or brother). In addition, vevu was given on exceptional ceremonial occasions. In contrast, murai were given on a periodic and continuous basis and could be sent by an intermediary.

Finally, Nakarattar tayatis were also responsible for a special form of funerary vevu called pirantu itattukkoti "bringing unbleached (ceremonial) cloth from the house of birth (of the wife)." When a man or woman died, the wife's father or brothers, accompanied by their pankalis , brought appropriate funeral garb for the deceased, along with sandalwood and other items required for the funeral pyre. They also supplied baskets of rice and vegetables to feed the mourners.

Summary of Affinal Prestations

The preceding observations highlight significant differences between Nakarattar and non-Nakarattar expressions of marriage alliance, especially with regard to the Pramalai Kallar described by Dumont. In the case of the Kallar, external prestations (all termed cir ) were initially symmetrical between husband's and wife's pankalis . Over the course of time, they became increasingly asymmetric until, in the end, the bride's family bore

an enormously disproportionate share of the burden (1957b: 32). Yet Kallar marriage alliances made a symbolic show of reciprocity through the initial exchange of cir . Thus, even though subsequent prestations tilted in favor of the husband's family, members of a Kallar marriage alliance could still point out that cir had been exchanged on both sides.

Among the Nakarattar, cir tanam, cir varicai, murai, vevu , and the funerary prestations of pirantu ituttukkoti together corresponded to the single category of Kallar external prestations. Two differences stand out. Firstly, Nakarattar external prestations exhibited greater qualitative variety, marked by an elaborated terminological system. Secondly, this variety was associated with a pronounced asymmetry in the direction of prestations. The uniform matrilateral asymmetry of Nakarattar prestations and the nonuniformity and variety of their classification combined to produce a mirror image of the Kallar pattern. Nakarattar alliances were not balanced by even initial reciprocal prestations of cir . All of their different external prestations flowed asymmetrically from the wife's family to the groom's.^[16]

Nakarattar and Kallar castes also differed with respect to what Dumont called "internal prestations," or at least with respect to prestations termed moi . In the case of the Kallar, moi defined two separate groups. Prestations were made within ("internal" to) lineage segments, each of which made substantial contributions to the member family whose son or daughter was married. In the case of the Nakarattar, individuals from different descent groups of the entire affinal kindred all gave token moi directly to the newly married couple. The different subgroupings of donors were distinguished by the order and classification of names on the moippanu etu . But all of them coalesced as a single group, allied by the common focus of its members on the married couple. The symbolic differentiation of status between categories of moi -givers reflected degrees of social distance between the couple's kin (see Figure 13) and corresponded to differences in access to credit generated by a woman's accimar panam deposits. But this single graded structure was markedly different from the bifurcated structure generated by moi -giving practices among the Kallar segments, each of which made substantial contributions to the member family whose son or daughter was married.

Positive Marriage Rules and Virtual Affinity

According to Dumont (passim ), all intermarrying descent groups in South Indian castes classify one another as either marriageable (affines ) or as nonmarriageable (kin). In addition, affines are themselves classified into two subcategories: (a) perfect affines , whose affinity is expressed by an

existing bond of marriage between their respective descent groups, and (2) virtual affines , whose affinity is expressed only by their terminological classification (1957b: 25, 27). Perfect affinity exists only when there is an ongoing alliance between two descent groups. Virtual affinity exists when there is no such alliance. Virtual affinity may even exist when there has never been an alliance. In such cases, Dravidians employ (and when queried, agree that they employ) a recursive algorithm: "Kin of my kin are kin; affines of my kin are affines; affines of my affines are kin." Dumont's distinction corresponds to the Nakarattar classification of, on one hand, campantippuram (in-laws) and, on the other hand, both tayatis (in the broad sense, meaning members of previously allied descent groups) and also all marriageable non-kin (see Figure 13).

The distinction between perfect and virtual affines is parallel to Leach's (1961) distinction between local descent groups and descent lines . Both distinctions follow from careful analyses of the social organization of specific kinship systems and contain a lesson worth reviewing in the context of any subsequent analysis: namely, that it is important to distinguish between a system of classification and a set of social groups. In Leach's words,

The notion of a local line is to be distinguished from the parallel concept of a descent line (line of descent) which has frequently been used by Radcliffe-Brown and his pupils. Descent lines have nothing whatever to do with local grouping, they are merely a diagrammatic device for displaying the categories of the kinship system in relation to a central individual called Ego. The number of basic descent lines in such a diagram depends merely upon how many different kinds of relative are recognized in the grandfather's generation. It has nothing to do with the number of local descent groups existing in the society. (1961: 57).

After forty years, anthropologists continue to have difficulty maintaining these distinctions.^[17] And it has proven especially difficult to maintain them in the context of analyses of affinal relationships.^[18] The biggest difficulty arises due to a misconception about the operation of prescriptive marriage rules, such as the putative Dravidian marriage rule "Thy children must marry affines." According to Dumont, for example,

The regulation causes marriage to be transmitted much as membership in the descent group is transmitted. With it, marriage acquires a diachronic dimension, it becomes an institution enduring from generation to generation, which I therefore call "marriage alliance" or simply "alliance."

... [In South India], sons of affines are ipso facto affines, at least in a virtual or rather a general sense, before or without becoming so individually.

I submit that, in societies where there are (positive) marriage regulations: (1) marriage should be considered as part of a marriage alliance institution running through generations; (2) the concept of affinity should be extended so as to include not only immediate, individual relationships (affines in the ordinary sense) but also the people who inherit such a relationship from their parents, those who share it as siblings of the individual affines, etc.; (3) there is likely to be an affinal content in terms which are generally considered to connote consanguinity or "genealogical" relationships (such as mother's brother, etc.). (1957b: 25)

In this passage, Dumont talks first of the transmission of marriage, not affinity. He then asserts that relationships of affinity apply to ("should be extended to") not only perfect affines, who have actually established a marriage alliance, but also virtual affines, who are not married, who may never marry, and who are, in fact, only marriageable. In so doing, Dumont sacrifices the distinction between perfect and virtual affines in order to argue the central theme of his essay, that affinity is an important principle of Dravidian kinship. Yet, granting that affinity is an independent principle, in what does it consist? Apparently, all that is truly common to perfect and virtual affines is the marriageability of their children. They share none of the other relationships or obligations that hold between families allied together by marriage as affinal kindred.

If this is the case, it raises a serious problem for Dumont's thesis, since marriageability—even terminologically marked marriageability—is not a consequence of any positive marriage rule. To see this, consider the case of Dumont's Pramalai Kallar, who, unlike the Nakarattar, do seem to subscribe (at least partially) to a rule prescribing marriage of the eldest son with the mother's brother's daughter (MBD), and not just with any woman also designated by the same term (Dumont 1957b: 14). When the rule is followed, marriage alliances are established between distinct Kallar descent groups that persist from generation to generation. Are similar alliance relationships established between the descent groups of virtual affines? No. The defining feature of virtual affinity is precisely its lack of a real alliance. Virtual affinity establishes no relationship between specific groups, but only the potential for a relationship.

Positive marriage rules only make sense in the case of perfect affines—that is, between bounded descent groups which maintain a perpetual relationship of alliance between them. What would it mean to say that there

is a positive marriage rule requiring marriage with a marriageable category whose "virtually married" members number hundreds or even thousands of different descent groups? Virtually nothing. No enduring relationship need be generated between any two groups of virtual affines from marriage to marriage because there is no marriage.

There is only one common feature besides marriageability that is shared by Dravidian kin whom Dumont classifies as perfect or virtual affines. This additional feature is nothing less than the misinterpreted formal aspect of marriageability: that is, its terminological marking by identical kinship terms. But it is a non sequitur to argue that applicability of a common term, signifying marriageability, eliminates any distinction between the two otherwise separate categories.

Marriage alliance between perfect affines may follow from adherence to a positive marriage rule. But it may also result from a variety of pragmatic considerations. The Pramalai Kallars illustrate the former case. Nakarattars illustrate the latter: they do not maintain any positive marriage rule for allied perfect affines. In neither caste is there either rule or alliance between virtual affines.

I suspect that the temptation to conflate perfect and virtual affines actually arises from a conflation of semantic and jural rules. The former classify kin categories in a semantic domain defined by descent and marriage. The latter stipulate rules for behavior between members of actively allied kin groups. The two sets of rules are quite distinct and independent. Thus, Nakarattars share the terminological marking of affines (both perfect and virtual) with Kallars. But they do not stipulate rules for perpetuating marriage alliance, even among perfect affines.

Ironically, it should be easier to recognize the distinction between semantic and jural rules among the Kallar than among the Nakarattar. Kallars maintain two sets of jural rules that apply differentially to the terminologically unmarked categories of perfect and virtual affines. The composite category of Kallar affines is subject to rules stipulating jural marriageability. But only (apparently unmarked) perfect affines are subject to normative rights and duties—termed uravin murai —that perpetuate marriage alliance between pairs of descent groups.

In-Laws, Murai , and Terminological Marking

In fact, among many South Indian castes, including the Nakarattar, perfect affines were distinguished from virtual affines in discussing ceremonial occasions where the affine was a male in-law with obligations to give gifts of cir or murai to the married couple (see above). In these cases, the normal kin term designating the kinsperson's relation to the groom as a virtual

affine was modified or replaced by an alternative term that indicated his change of status from a virtual affine to a perfect affine. The Nakarattar, for example, exhibited the following usages: amman versus mamakkarar (for MB vs. WF) and attan versus maittunan (for MBS vs. ZH). I address aspects of the precise import of this status marking immediately below. In the present context, however, all that matters is that a terminological marker for perfect affines with cir -giving or murai -giving obligations designated a discrete social identity subject to positive jural rules.^[19]

Among the Nakarattar, the marked status of a cir - or murai -giving, perfect affine did not carry any additional obligation to renew the marriage alliance as stipulated by a positive marriage rule. That is, although perfect and virtual affines were distinguished by the presence of murai obligations among the former, they were similar in the absence of any positive marriage rule. This property of the Nakarattar variant of Dravidian kinship raises two further questions in regard to Dumont's theories. In the first place, did the restriction of terminological markers in these contexts just to perfect affines with murai -giving obligations indicate that virtual affines who did not give murai were therefore not affines in any sense? The question is implied by Dumont himself, whose argument that affinity and marriage alliance are synonymous is designed to combat any doubts, either about the "affinity" of virtual affines or about the "independence" of affinity from consanguinity. But this argument is both dubious and unwarranted. Not only were relationships of marriageability between kin independent of consanguineal and alliance ties, but the only times when there was no incidental overlapping of consanguineal and affinal categories were precisely those cases where no real marriage had occurred—that is, precisely in cases of virtual affinity between consanguineously unrelated members of the same endogamous caste. Conversely, marriage ceremonies performed precisely the functions of conferring consanguineal status on otherwise nonconsanguineal affines and conferring perfect affinal status on otherwise merely virtual affines, regardless of their prior status as kin.

The Maternal Uncle, the Wife's Father, and Murai

A second question arises in consideration of an obscure component of the elaborate ceremonies performed at a Nakarattar wedding.^[20] According to one of my informants, the wife's father (amman, mamakkarar ) enacted a distinctive role in these ceremonies that seems to have expressed the right of his family (the couple's tayatis ) to renew the alliance by marrying future children in their family to any subsequent children born in the groom's pulli . That is, according to this informant, murai obligations were

morally linked to the murai -giver's right to enforce an alliance-renewing marriage rule.

During a wedding, the mamakkarar stands in attendance throughout the marriage and is within early reach. He wears a ceremonial uniform with a gold-laced shawl in reddish color around his waist or belly. From the moment the bride groom leaves his home for the marriage celebrations to the bride's place and until the bridal couple's ceremonial setting foot at their new home, the mamakkarar leads the bride or the bridegroom at every step. He has to lead the way, to guide the bride or groom, to help the groom to mount up and dismount from the horse, to direct him to the prayers of the temple and to assist the Brahman priest in the rituals. If the mamakkarar family has a child of the opposite sex and suitable in age, to match the sister's child, marriage is contracted amongst them. If for any reason such a marriage is not consummated, the parties may agree to disagree. It is only as proof of this "no objection certificate" that the presence of the mamakkarar is insisted on throughout. In other words, a mamakkarar has the right of first refusal.

Here, apparently, is concrete evidence of a positive marriage rule operating in association with a rule about murai prestations. Both rules apply to two specific kin categories, WF and HF. The marriage rule, in particular, apparently generates the WF's right to renew a marriage alliance between two families in a way that is similar to marriage rules called uravin murai among Kallars, Nadars, and other South Indian castes. In the face of such a cogent and forceful opinion, it is important to note that this was the only expression even resembling uravin murai rules that I discovered among the Nakarattar. I heard no reports, for example, of sanction-free rights to "kidnap" a bride by tayati groups, as was reported about some Kallar groups. Nor did Nakarattars refer to their MBD as urimai pen (rightful woman) as was the case among representatives of Nadar and Kallar groups from whom I gathered information. It is the case that my informant successfully established a claim on the son of his in-laws' family as a groom for his second daughter (see comments in Table 12). But I have no indication that this alliance might be renewed in any subsequent generation. Moreover, as already noted, the incidence of multigenerational alliances was extremely low among all Nakarattars, and it may be that my informant (who could be an extremely persuasive negotiator) had managed to create a nonstandard "right" in the process of arranging the marriage (see Linda May, 1985). This lone exception aside, it had not occurred to any of my other Nakarattar informants that their caste maintained uravin murai . On the contrary, even those familiar with its operation denied that it operated among the Nakarattar.

This is significant. Positive rules enjoining asymmetrical, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage seem to have played a role in the social organization of nonmercantile castes such as the Kallars. The implication of my informant's claims is that his exercise of uravin murai rights represented an expression of a positive marriage rule among Nakarattars, although one that compelled symmetrical, bilateral cross-cousin marriage. If my informant was accurate about present-day Nakarattars, then it would not be unreasonable to assume that their ancestors also subscribed to such a rule. But in this case my informant's opinion is suspect. Whatever may be the case among non-Nakarattar castes, the Nakarattar expression of the rule—if expressed at all—is so feeble as to have no discernible effect, either manifest or latent.

The issue of possible linkage between murai obligations and marriage rules lies at the core of Dumont's argument about the self-renewing or perpetual character of Dravidian marriage alliance. According to Dumont, obligations to give external gifts such as cir or murai between allied descent groups symbolize the operation of a positive marriage rule. He provides no explicit rationale for this assertion. But he does offer several examples in which a mother's brother is replaced in his role as gift-giver by his sons or other agnates (1957b: 89–90). The implication is that uravin murai rights to renew the alliance are associated with obligations to give gifts; since the latter, at least, seem to be inherited by subsequent generations, so must be the former.

As with Dumont's non-Nakarattar groups, Nakarattars also engaged in a continuing series of external prestations from tayatis representatives to their daughter's (or sister's) pulli . Moreover, as with Dumont's non-Nakarattar groups, Nakarattar murai -givers replaced one another as representatives of the obligated tayatis . In the Nakarattar case, however, gifts and personnel replacements did not extend beyond the second generation. They had a distinct termination point, marked by the wedding of the final child born to the pulli that initiated the alliance. Either party had an option to renew the alliance. But they were not obligated to do so. Indeed, perhaps 95 percent of the time, the alliance was relinquished, and a different group established tayati obligations. In other words, although Nakarattar marriage alliance had what Dumont calls a diachronic quality, it was not therefore perpetual and self-renewing.^[21]

A Note on Ethnographic Reports of Nakarattar Marriage Rules

If (contrary to my informant) Nakarattars did not subscribe to a positive marriage rule enjoining symmetrical cross-cousin marriage, did they

subscribe to any other positive marriage rule? According to Thurston (1909 V: 265), Nakarattars did follow a positive rule for asymmetrical, patrilateral cross-cousin marriage. In the ideal exemplification, a man married his father's sister's daughter (FZD), a perfect affine in the Dravidian system. That is, an initial alliance in one generation stimulated a second alliance in the succeeding generation. Compliance with this rule would have precluded both bilateral cross-cousin marriage and matrilateral cross-cousin marriage.

Thurston's report seems to be confirmed by similar observations that contrast matrilateral cross-cousin marriage among landholding castes and patrilateral cross-cousin marriages among mercantile castes in the Kongu region of Coimbatore, located northwest of Chettinad. According to Brenda Beck (1972), who provided this report, the contrast is associated with the presence of status hierarchy among descent groups within landholding castes and the absence of descent groups (and hence, the absence of hierarchical relations between descent groups) within mercantile castes. The issue is somewhat complicated by an additional, associated contrast between the kinship term systems of these groups. But, in the end, Beck interprets the various differences with reference to Lévi-Straussian theories about the elementary structures of kinship.

The [landholding] sub-castes make no distinction between the terms for mother's brother and father's sister's husband, nor between terms for matrilateral and patrilateral cousins. The [mercantile] sub-castes, by contrast, use slightly inferior terms for matrilateral uncles and cousins, while they reserve slightly superior terms for their patrilateral equivalents. This tendency to distinguish between wife-givers and wife-takers is associated with their special emphasis on dowry and their determination that the receiver of the bride be superior. This does not contradict their patrilateral cross-cousin marriage preference when it exists, however; for the superior-inferior distinction is easily reversed in succeeding generations. This is so because among the mercantile sub-castes, clan lines are weak. The hierarchy of individual givers and takers rather than that of whole descent groups is considered of prime importance. (Beck 1972: 13)

Having read Thurston and Beck before arriving in India, I was looking forward to analyzing the functional consequences of Nakarattar patrilateral marriage rules, a kin term system that marked wife-givers and wife-receivers, and an absence of clanlike descent groups. Surely, I thought, Beck is correct. This is a mercantile transformation of Dravidian kinship, which must have some practical consequences for Nakarattar commercial organization.

As we shall see in the following chapter, there is evidence in Nakarattar descent and territorial organization of an absence of hierarchy. But I am now quite convinced that, whatever situation obtains in Kongu, the Nakarattar differed from Beck's description of mercantile castes. Nakarattars maintained a nested organization of descent groups including clans (although these were territorially dispersed, and this dispersal, I suspect, is what Beck was really talking about). I am also convinced that Thurston was misinformed about the presence of a marriage rule prescribing patrilateral cross-cousin marriage. There was some kind of status marking going on in their kinship term system. But it was a marking that designated murai obligations, not a lateral preference for marriage.^[22] Finally, there is no evidence that Nakarattars were constrained by any marriage rule, not even a rule applicable just to perfect affines and requiring marriage only to a "real" FZD. Although active marriage alliances between Nakarattar descent groups (campatippuram relations) were occasionally renewed by the marriage of first cross-cousins, my impression is that there was a slight preference for MBD marriage over FZD marriage. Moreover, when gently queried, when asked overtly leading questions, when chivied, harassed, and pursued beyond the bounds of civility (for I was determined to prove the existence of a FZD marriage rule), my Nakarattar informants insisted that the whole idea was silly.

Final Comment

In this chapter, we have examined the operation of Nakarattar affinity and marriage alliance. I noted that the inclusive or nested relationships of Nakarattar descent groups (ranging from hearthhold to joint family to local lineage segment to clan) generated a correspondingly multiplex set of affinal ties. But these affinal ties exemplified characteristic structural properties unlike those exemplified by non-Nakarattar castes. In particular, they contributed functionally to the organization of Nakarattar commerce by providing mechanisms for accumulating liquid resources, for undertaking cooperative ventures with limited liability, and for participating in numerous occasions for the exchange of commercial information. In the following chapter, we shall see that Nakarattar descent organization, like Nakarattar affinal organization, exemplified a characteristic mercantile adaptation. In particular, we shall see that the Nakarattars lacked the trappings of hierarchy associated with kinship organization in nonmercantile castes: namely, relations of blood purity, territorial precedence, or royal honors. We shall also see that the Nakarattar descent organization differed from that of non-Nakarattar castes with respect to a pattern of crosscutting agnatic relationships that tied together Nakarattar residential villages throughout Chettinad.

9
Temple Control and Cross-Cut Segmentation in Chettinad

Introduction

The importance of Nakarattar kinship, residence, and temple affiliation for Nakarattar banking organization has already been suggested by our analysis of the account books and ledgers from a Nakarattar agency in Burma (Chapter 5). Those books and ledgers revealed substantial deposit accounts invested by the proprietor's kin groups and temples located in Chettinad. Similar practices extend back in time to twelfth-century merchant guilds, who also staged wide-ranging commercial activities from narrowly circumscribed residential bases (Abraham 1988; Hall 1980). Itinerant Nakarattar salt traders had adopted the practice by the seventeenth century (Chapter 7). Nakarattar banking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries only continued this pattern.

By the twentieth century—the earliest period for which we can form estimates of Nakarattar business volume—Nakarattars' investments in Chettinad made up only a small percentage of their total assets: less than 1 percent. But these investments served as a kind of monetary reserve, complementing the loans available to elite Nakarattar adathis through the Imperial Bank and European banks. When the Asian economy was inflationary, Nakarattars remitted huge amounts of money back to their homeland and invested it in relatively nonliquid assets: temples, houses, jewelry, and the like. When money was tight overseas, a portion of these assets was used to maintain the liquid capital required to continue with business as usual. By the 1930s, however, the world economy had become so bad that the reserve ratio of liquid Nakarattar investments in Chettinad to overseas investments was simply inadequate to meet the demand for cash.

In country after country, Nakarattar bankers found it necessary to stop lending money, to refuse further loan extensions, and to foreclose on mortgages and other securities. Even the relatively few Nakarattars whose assets remained liquid and ample in the wake of the depression cut back substantially on their money-lending activities and invested their money in industries, mines, and plantations. Yet, prior to this time and (largely as a reflex) afterwards, the Chettinad deposits—however small relative to total Nakarattar assets—were jealously guarded and carefully controlled by a tightly knit form of caste organization specifically adapted to the needs of accumulating capital and controlling the supply of investment funds to its members. Not surprisingly, Chettinad holds a special importance for Nakarattars that far transcends its status as a residential territory. This chapter looks at two key institutions in the control of economic and political resources in Chettinad: (1) the Hindu temple, whose role in commerce and politics outside of Chettinad we have already explored (Chapter 7), and (2) the Nakarattar caste itself, considered as a network of kinship relationships that tied control of temples in Chettinad by individual kin groups into a single, segmentary system.

Nakarattar Settlement and Dominance in Chettinad: The Historical Charter

Traditional caste histories published from 1895 up to the present portray the Nakarattar as useful and valued (if sometimes victimized) citizens of their society and as possessing a special political status in the traditional, medieval kingdoms of Tamil Nadu.^[1] Nakarattars employed these histories to justify what, for them, was a continuation of their special role during the colonial period, not just as bankers and merchants, but as essential supporters of legitimate government and even as a branch of the government itself. In one special context, however—namely, in their Chettinad homeland—Nakarattars used their histories to define themselves as legitimate governmental authority.

The story of Nakarattar settlement in Chettinad has it that a Pandyan king invited 502 Nakarattars, belonging to seven families, to migrate to his own kingdom in order to carry out trading activities vital to the health of his realm. As an inducement and, it is implied in the histories, as their right, he gave them collectively the land of Chettinad, and he gave each of nine subgroups derived from the seven families a centrally located temple.^[2] The descendants of these nine groups are said to form the exogamous dispersed clans of the Nakarattar jati that can be documented from the seventeenth century to the present.

By asserting that the Pandyan king gave them the temples and lands of Chettinad, the Nakarattars claim that they should be regarded as the king's surrogate protectors and rulers in Chettinad—or, simply, as local kings of Chettinad. Paraphrasing Neale's (1969) formulation, "To be given ownership is to rule." And indeed Nakarattars wielded authority and justified political action in Chettinad by reference to their historical charter. They acted as kings by seeking and attaining political authority as trustees for the kingdomlike territories that colonial authorities designated as zamins , by obtaining title to zamins in their own right, and, as the colonial system evolved, by gaining seats on governmental bodies such as municipal and district boards. In these capacities, they conducted themselves as kings by overseeing the majority of endowment and managerial tasks for temples, roads, markets, and other public facilities.

Religious Endowment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Descent and the Temple Cults of Chettinad

From the Nakarattar point of view, superior political authorities granted and confirmed their rights of ownership over Chettinad lands and temples,

both in their legendary past and in the recent colonial period. Nakarattars renewed these ritual and political rights over the centuries by their faithful discharge of kingly responsibilities for temple endowment, maintenance, management, and protection. Beyond this, however, Nakarattars believed that recruitment into temple-centered cults, collective (but segmented) ownership of temples, and succession to the office of temple trustee were all based primarily on rules of agnatic transmission across generations. They drew on their beliefs about agnatic descent, inheritance, and succession when using their traditional history as a charter to guide and justify behavior.^[9]

Few Nakarattar businessmen had studied systematic Hindu theories of descent and heritability. Moreover, Nakarattars employed a non-

Brahmanic, nontextual vocabulary for naming their descent groups. But, in spite of terminological differences from Vedic texts and Brahmanical teachings, Nakarattar beliefs generally coincided with classical textual doctrine about substantive and moral inheritance. In particular, Nakarattars employed ideas about descent through the male line to assign membership in four distinct kin groups, and membership in each group carried with it a set of moral rights and obligations. These groups—referred to as pullis, valavus, pirivus, kuttikkira pankalis , and kovils (see Chapter 8)—formed a nested taxonomy corresponding roughly to Brahmanic groups identified in the Dharmasastras as parivara, kula , and gotra . They also corresponded to anthropological analytic concepts of conjugal family, joint family or minimal lineage segment, localized lineage segment, maximal lineage segment, and nonlocalized clan (see Figure 14).^[10]

The important property that all of these kin groups shared was that characteristic rights and duties at each level of Nakarattar kinship structure were transmitted through the male line, even if the group in question was not defined solely in terms of a descent group (e.g., the pulli or the village-based lineage segment). To be a Nakarattar, then, was to inherit the substantive and moral qualities of the kin groups to which one belonged. In the context of these beliefs, the initial Pandyan grant of the rights and obligations of Chettinad rulership to immigrant Nakarattar ancestors constituted a heritable moral code that devolved upon subsequent generations of Nakarattars.^[11]

The issue is not straightforward. There exist apparent discrepancies between Nakarattar social organization as depicted in traditional caste histories and Nakarattar social organization as seen during the colonial period. It is true that both legendary and colonial Nakarattars were segmented into nine descent groups that were indexed by membership in an identical set of temple cults. But temple cult membership among ancestral descent groups was determined by village residence. By contrast, few colonial Nakarattars resided in the villages of their nine clan temples. In fact, the majority dwelt in ninety-six (now seventy-eight) Nakarattar residential villages throughout Chettinad.^[12] More fundamentally, settlement in a residential village during the colonial past and membership in the cult of that village's temple did not require Nakarattars to relinquish membership in the clan temple from which they ultimately were descended. On the contrary, Nakarattars during the colonial period exhibited what can be idealized as a two-tier organization, in which every individual was simultaneously a member in the temple cults of both his clan and his village.

The two kinds of temples shared many similarities and a few notable differences beyond those already indicated. Both generated income by

Figure 14.
Nakarattar descent-based cults.

attracting endowments from their members, by tithing their members annually with a nominal head tax per family (pulli vari ), and by tithing their richest members with occasional taxes called asti vari . Both kinds of temples received additional income from productive devastanam property such as the tax-free agricultural estates called inams . The largest clan temples had huge memberships that extended throughout the villages of Chettinad. All but one of the clan temples spread its congregation among from fifteen to fifty-four villages (see Figure 15). Conversely, village temple memberships were confined, by definition, to a single village. In the larger towns such as Devakottai or Karaikudi, there might be more than one residential temple; the congregation of each temple corresponded to a section or neighborhood of the town.

There were qualitative and quantitative differences in the kinds of worship that occurred in clan and village temples. Clan temples celebrated one or two collective festivals each year and played a ceremonial role in the marriages of their members. But they were not the primary focus of wor-

Figure 15.
Representation of Nakarattar temple clans in Chettinad villages, ca. 1930.
Source: Temple census in Ramanathan Chettiar (1953).

ship for rites concerning the welfare of the village, as was the village Siva temple. Consequently, they were not a frequent focus of worship for their members. In contrast, village temples staged six or seven seasonal festivals that also served as occasions for celebrating their members' life-cycle ceremonies.^[13] In other words, village temples were more intimately bound up in the lives of their members than were clan temples.

Despite these differences, and despite my characterization of clan temples and village temples as two distinct institutions, they are best viewed as distinct only on an idealized or structural level. From a processual or diachronic point of view, they emerge as extreme ends on a continuum of descent-based cults that reflect an inverse relationship between the genealogical depth of a descent group and the presence or absence of common residence as criteria for participation. These processes can be observed in examples of the evolution of such cults from their beginnings as family rites of ghost propitiation and ancestor worship.

Among the Nakarattar, women seem particularly prone to processes of deification. If they die before their husbands, and especially if they die before giving birth to children, their ghosts (peys ) are regarded as potential sources of both supernatural danger and supernatural blessings. In the case of one family whom I came to know, my informant's father's sister had died thirty days after her wedding at the age of twelve. The family now refer to her as their kula teyvam (family deity) and address her as teyvata (goddess), not pey (ghost). Following her death, she appeared nightly to her natal family in their dreams and asked for homage in return for protection. As part of the cult of their kula teyvam , the family maintains a special box containing saris, jewels, or other articles that once

belonged to the dead girl or that were subsequently given to her spirit (avi ).^[14] For example, my informant's father promised his sister's spirit a diamond necklace in return for a son. When my informant was born, his father kept his word. The box for the family's kula teyvam is kept in a special room called a sami arai ("god room" or shrine) belonging to my informant's father's hearthhold (pulli ) in the house of his joint family (valavu ). The family worships their kula teyvam in a ceremonial rite called a pataippu at least once a year and sometimes as frequently as four times a year. Pataippus are not performed on any regularly marked occasion, but are carried out as part of important life-cycle ceremonies undergone by members of the family (e.g., on the birth of a son or the marriage of a daughter). Paitaippus may also be performed before any family member undertakes a major business venture or travels abroad. When a pataippu is performed, the kula teyvam's possessions are cleaned and displayed before her portrait in the sami arai . New gifts are offered and foods including kanji (a ground rice porridge), fruit, and betel are given. Afterwards, prasad (the sacramental food and betel) is distributed to the assembled family and invited relatives, who consume it.

In another case, four dead women of previous generations are worshipped collectively in a pataippu ceremony by the lineage segment into which the women had married. This lineage segment included several valavus comprising all of the lineage members in a single village (pirivu ). It did not include members from valavus residing in other villages, who nevertheless shared membership in their maximal lineage segment, the kuttikkira pankali . The separate identities of the deceased women are largely fused in the minds of their descendants, whose offerings are made simply to a single kula teyvam referred to, again, as teyvata . In still other cases, family kula teyvams have entirely lost their identities as ancestors and are worshipped in discrete shrines or at their own temples as local village goddesses. Finally, in another case (described below), a large kuttikkira pankali had segmented into several subdivisions (pirivus ) distributed among three different villages. Each subdivision worships the deity of its residential village. But members of all the subdivisions celebrate their common descent once a year by returning to their ancestral village for collective worship of their kula teyvam .

Taken together, these cases illustrate a general process by which rites of ancestor worship have evolved into regional cults of major deities. Pulli -based ancestor cults grew organically with their pulli as the husband claimed his inheritance, partitioned the valavu into which he had been born, and formed an independent valavu with himself as senior male. Where such valavus were influential and wealthy members of their resi-

dential village, they often endowed a shrine in a local temple or endowed a completely new temple to house the cult of their ancestor and to serve as a place for its worship. In some cases, other villagers (both Nakarattar and non-Nakarattar) took an increasingly large part in rites of worship, especially if the deity gained a reputation for granting boons and causing or averting suffering. If valavus from the village moved to a new residential village, they retained ties with their ancestral village by continued participation in major rites at the temple of their kula teyvam . Meanwhile, as descendants of the founding family, they retained a special position in the management of the temple's endowment (kattalai ) and in the offering of continuing gifts to the deity and receipt of honors from the deity. Eventually, the ancestral ghost of many families assumed the trappings of a non-Brahmanic village deity: a guardian god or goddess.^[15] Ultimately, what was once a private deity might become "sanskritized" (Srinivas 1952), assuming more and more of the traits associated with Brahmanical deities.

As cults underwent this gradual evolutionary process, their membership also changed, from the single pulli that began the cult as a rite of ancestor worship, to all the valavu of a single village who propitiated the ancestor of one of their members as a village deity, to, finally, a multivillage cult whose members saw the efficacy of their worship as confirmation that their kula teyvam was a high Hindu deity to which they had particular claim as an hereditary right. The difference between the cult's early stages and its later stages lies in the number of families that recognized the deity as their kula teyvam , and in the multiplication of residential villages to which these families had migrated.

This scenario represents an admittedly speculative account. But it is based on processes that have been observed in Chettinad during the last hundred years. I offer it as a plausible theory for the formation of clan and village cults observable throughout Nakarattar history and as a link between Nakarattar social organization during the colonial period and Nakarattar social organization as depicted in the story of their migration to Chettinad. If I am correct, it should be possible to identify transitional cults between the clan and village cults that characterize Nakarattar two-tier social structure.^[16]

This is precisely what we do find in Chettinad. On one hand, the cults of widely dispersed Nakarattar clans are constituted of very old descent groups, whose constituent lineage groups live in multiple villages, who no longer maintain memories of consanguineal connections, and who do not collectively observe the rituals that would therefore apply. On the other hand, members of cults for Nakarattar village deities are constituted of younger descent groups, whose members reside in the same village and

who maintain consanguineal relationships through the observance of ritual obligations tied to village residence and to mutual observance of each other's life-cycle ceremonies. In addition, however, it is possible to find descent-based cults that fall structurally midway between clan and village temples. Their members reside in multiple villages, but their subdivisions retain consanguineal relationships and some common ritual observances in the village of their apical ancestor. In other words, the two-tier idealization of Nakarattar social structure marks the polar ends of a culturally recognized continuum of descent-based cults of worship that vary along the inverted axes of genealogical depth and residential requirements for membership. The following two sections of this chapter explore in more detail differences in the membership, organization, and management of each of these two types of cults and their intermediate variants.

Clan Temples and Temple-Clans

Nakarattars referred both to their clan temples and to the clans themselves as "nakarakkovils ." For the sake of clarity, I shall diverge slightly from this usage and distinguish between temple-clans and clan temples. During the colonial period, the temple-clan was a set of otherwise unrelated lineage segments (kuttikkira pankali , see below) who shared hereditary cult membership in a common clan temple. Membership of individual Nakarattars in a temple-clan was determined agnatically but indirectly by membership in a lineage segment that belonged to the clan. Although every lineage segment of a Nakarattar temple-clan claimed descent from the founders of the clan's temple, and although consanguinity was presumed and intermarriage prohibited, different lineage segments from the same temple-clan did not, in general, exhibit demonstrable consanguineal ties. In other words, colonial Nakarattar clans were quite similar to the better-known clan groups represented by Brahmanic gotras (Khare 1970; Madan 1962). The substantive difference is that, whereas Nakarattar temple-clans trace their descent from ancestral members of specific temple cults, Brahman gotras trace their membership from ancestral disciples of mythical gurus called rishis .

The temple-clans varied in size (see Figure 16 for 1930 estimates), and some were divided into subclans (see Table 14). These two traits—their uneven population distribution and their differential segmentation—suggest a long-term historical process of sequential fission and migration, thereby lending support to the sequence described in their caste history (if not its telescoped time frame, cf. Rudner 1985). But this is a topic that requires further investigation.

Nakarattar clan temples were owned jointly by their clan members,

Figure 16.
Nakarattar temple clans by population, ca. 1930.
Source: Temple census in Ramanathan Chettiar (1953). Population
figures were calculated as five times the number of pullis in a clan.

who were called kovil pankalis "temple shareholders". Representatives from each clan made up the executive officers and boards of trustees (karyakkarars ) for their respective clan temple. They directed the construction and operation of the temple. They also allocated expenditures and investment of considerable sums of money. In the colonial period, the businesses of kovil pankalis were the primary beneficiaries of temple investments. For example, kovil panam deposits from a clan temple made up almost half the liabilities of a major banking agency in Burma during the colonial period from 1912 to 1915 (see Chapter 5). In addition, as illustrated earlier in this chapter by the case of Ilayathakudi Temple, temple funds were frequently spent on devastanam properties or on local civic improvements, such as roads or tanks for the villages of Chettinad.

Nakarattar clans supported their temples by a variety of means. Every Nakarattar household or pulli was tithed a nominal amount each year in a tax called a pulli vari . In addition, a wealth tax or asti vari was charged on exceptional occasions, as temple needs demanded. These contributions were taken seriously (though less so today), and individuals and their kin could be excommunicated from the community for failing to meet their contributions. This was an important sanction, for clan temples legitimized Nakarattar marriages, and without clan temple sanction no marriage could occur. Finally, clan temples received a major portion of their funding through endowments of land or money or both. Only Nakarattars belonging to the temple clan were permitted to endow the clan temple.^[17]

(table continued on next page)

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Clan temples served local political functions by integrating the Nakarattar community with other individuals and groups who participated in temple rites of worship, including members from non-Nakarattar jatis residing in Chettinad. Like any village temple, inhabitants from the surrounding villages might worship there as part of the regular round of daily worship (naivettiyam ) maintained at any Siva temple; they might worship on an occasional basis (arccanai ) to satisfy a vow (nerttikkatan ) or to ask a boon and make a promise in return (ventutal ), or they might take part in one of the few yearly rituals (utsavam ) staged by a Nakarattar clan temple. In the last case, Nakarattars received first honors before any other caste, even Brahmans.

Members from non-Nakarattar castes also served special roles in temple rituals, including rituals peculiar to Nakarattar clan temples. In particular, clan temple vairavis , or "temple messengers," were traditionally drawn from the Pandaram caste. Their special role concerned rites of Nakarattar marriages and funerals pertaining to the clan temple. At marriages, vairavis brought a garland to the bride's house, signifying her official transfer to her husband's clan. At funerals they brought a large torch to the top of the temple tower (kopuram ) to guide the dead person's spirit (avi ). Vairavis also invited Nakarattar and non-Nakarattar notables to important temple functions. Besides these official duties, however, vairavis also acted in an unofficial capacity as a kind of middleman employment service between Nakarattars and non-Nakarattar employees. If labor (skilled or unskilled) was needed for constructing a house, if cooks or gardeners were required, if a new maidservant had to be found, very often it was the temple vairavi who learned of the need while carrying out his official duties and who brought together the potential employees and employers. In this way, activities oriented around the rituals of Nakarattar clan temples extended to and tied together people from all over Chettinad, not just those who dwelled in the immediate temple neighborhood.

For all of these reasons, Nakarattar clan temples were—with village temples—one of the primary instruments of political integration for the people of Chettinad generally, and for the Nakarattar caste in particular. This is less true today than it was before the colonial creation of novel institutions of government following the Morley-Minto and Chelmsford reforms of 1909 and 1919 and the District Board elections of 1937. During the colonial and precolonial periods, the Nakarattar village and clan temples must have played a very important role, indeed, and the Nakarattar system of decision making within clan temples tells us a good deal about their political organization.

As already noted, trustees were recruited on a hereditary basis. But, over the course of time, many Nakarattar families made substantial endowments to their clan temples, and the descendants of these families all had claims to the honors and obligations of trusteeship. In principle, Nakarattars dealt with the plethora of candidates having claims to trusteeship by rotating the office in a regular fashion between selected small groups of prominent families from throughout Chettinad (Periakarrapan 1976).

Village Temples and Dominant Lineage Segments

Almost every village of Chettinad housed a variety of temples, including a major Siva temple, a goddess temple, a village guardian temple, and a secondary goddess temple for an associated hamlet of untouchables. Members of non-Nakarattar castes such as Kallars or Konars managed the guardian god's temple (normally a temple for Ayyanar). Nakarattars referred to members of all such castes as the Nattar , the "people of the country." Only they had the right to open up the hundial (a special strongbox) into which devotees put contributions for festivals held to worship the deity of the temple. Management of the goddess temple varied. In some cases she was considered a manifestation of Parvati (the wife of Siva), and her temple was managed by Nakarattars. In other cases, she was considered as one or another amman (a goddess such as Mariamman). In this case, her temple was more likely managed by important members of the local Nattar community. The untouchable castes managed their own temples. Nakarattars contributed heavily to the financial costs of all of the temples in their village, but normally exercised managerial control only over the main Siva temple, which they considered their own property. In the following discussion, the phrase village temple refers just to these Nakarattar-controlled Siva temples.

Nakarattar village temples contrasted with clan temples in that membership in their cults was determined by the intersection of principles of descent and residence, not by descent alone. A Nakarattar was a temple cult member of the village, where a localized lineage segment—into which he had been born or adopted—maintained a common house and participated in a local temple cult. As a consequence, village temple membership was not confined to a single lineage or even a single clan, but extended to members from different lineages of different clans who shared common residence in their natal village.

Traditionally, Nakarattars lived in the same village as other members of a common lineage segment. Both male and female members of these village-bounded descent groups visited other villages in Chettinad for cere-

monial purposes or made an occasional pilgrimage to a major temple outside of Chettinad. Only Nakarattar men ventured forth widely on business trips. In more recent times, Nakarattars have held their residence outside their lineage village and even outside Chettinad. But they maintained their membership in the village temple cult so long as they continued to participate in the ceremonial life of their ancestral house and the village temple.

An important variation on this theme is exemplified by the relatively large lineage segments of some of the Nakarattars whom I came to know during my field work. In one case, a Nakarattar joint family (valavu ) had moved their residence from their ancestral village of Kattupattu to Athekkur before the turn of the century. Nevertheless, they maintained their participation in the cult of the deity in Kattupattu. They also participated in the cult of the village deity in Athekkur, along with other branches of their lineage who had moved with them. But the entire set of lineage members—those in Kattupattu, those in Athekkur, and those in still other villages and towns—retained the solidarity of the lineage by participation in the cult at Kattupattu. In another case, a set of thirty-five different families maintained records of descent from a common ancestor who lived over two hundred years ago. The thirty-five families were split into five branches, with four residing in one town, and one residing in another town. No descendants of the original ancestor lived in the tiny hamlet of his birth (which, I understand, had been abandoned).

The Nakarattar term for all of these essentially cult-based, sometimes coresidential lineage segments was kuttikkira pankali , "shareholders who come together" (i.e., to perform ritual ceremonies). They were constituted by members of a lineage segment whose ancestors had partitioned the common estate once held by their deceased (fore)fathers, but who retained responsibility for attending and conducting all important life-cycle rituals of their members. Their size was variable and depended on how long ago the first partition had taken place. The largest such groups that I came across resided in Devakottai. They numbered their families in the hundreds and subdivided them into segments termed vattakais (circles) and pirivus (divisions).

Tension between different subdivisions of kuttikkira pankali could arise after difficult and bitter partitions or in the event of political competition between previously partitioned lines.^[18] In such cases, the feuding pankalis might express the tension between them by refusing to attend certain ceremonies, especially marriages that established affinal alliances at the expense of collateral cooperation. However, all pankalis tried to attend the funerals of respected elders, thus signifying their common line of descent. Many kuttikkira pankali maintained a common share in an

ancestral house in their respective residential villages (urs ) in Chettinad. There they retreated to perform their own life-cycle rituals. Alternatively, component joint families (valavus ) maintained their own houses, but these houses remained in the native village, often side by side on the same street. Despite occasional strains, kuttikkira pankalis normally combined to assert their solidarity, especially in establishing dominance within their residential village.

For example, in one (not atypical) Chettinad village, six families were regarded as wealthy and important inhabitants. Individually, each family had assets of between one and two million rupees. But three families together formed a kuttikkira pankali worth about four million rupees and exercised their influence by heavily endowing the village temple and serving as its hereditary trustees. The wealthiest of these families had paid for a kumpapisekam (temple renewal festival) as recently as the early 1960s.

Up until 1948 and the Zamindari Abolition Act, the temple had been entitled to 50 percent of the melvaram of the village (literally, the "upper share"—that is, the king's or government's share—roughly 30 to 45 percent of the gross produce of the village). During the time of my field work it was almost totally dependent on Nakarattars, who contributed perhaps 75 percent to the cost of new construction, renovations, and special events. My principal informant, Lakshmanan Chettiar, provided me with a remarkably clear general description of the contemporary system of contributions to village temples:

The contribution is a fixed amount of rice plus cash in each village. It varies according to the requirements of the temple and the size of the Nakarattar population in the village. After 1945, many villages have revised the rates. In Devakottai and some other places, no contribution is collected. The expenses of the temple are met just from the donation [asti vari ] of the well-to-do. In some other villages, the levy [pulli vari ] is a nominal one of 25 paise [1/4 rupee] or so and is paid by all Nakarattar. In about a third of the villages, the levy varies from five to 10 rupees of cash contributions and one to seven measures [kalams ] of rice. If any family is unable to pay either rice or cash, the entire amount may be paid either in cash or kind at rates fixed by the temple trustees each year [i.e., the amount is debited to the pulli's account with the temple, and interest is charged]. The rice is used to cook offering of food to the Deities. Later the cooked food is distributed to temple staff.

Many young Nakarattars have no idea of the amount of the levy. Either they do not pay regularly or they confuse it with the levy they must pay to their clan temple.... In case the earning member of the family is dead, the widow, together with her unmarried sons

constitute a half-pulli and are entitled to a 50% concession. As and when each son gets married, a new pulli comes into being and the temple gains a new assessee. After all the sons are married, the widow is not assessable.

For some reason or other, some families pay the dues irregularly. They may pay the arrears too. During the twenty or thirty years, regular collections have not been possible in many villages. The arrears are debited to each family in the books of the temple on the last day of the Tamil year and the outstandings are liable for payment or such interest as the general body may decide. Also, it happens that some rich person offers to deposit their moneys with the temple or to advance loans to the temple when it is in distress. Thus in each village, a few families have considerable moneys to their credit in local temples. Such families can, if they so desire, offset their annual cash dues by book adjustment. But, the rice must be delivered or paid for in cash.

You ask what happens to poor or indigent people who owe money to the temple. A marriage takes place in that family. Or, unfortunately, someone in the family is dead. At once, the general body or its committee meet and decide the amount to be collected from the family on that day. All factors are taken into sympathetic consideration and a liberal decision is made. Only after such clearance by the Temple Authority, the other Nakarattars of the village can attend the marriage or funeral. This system is still in vogue. (Personal communication, March 1981)

In addition to the pulli vari levies described above, village temples also collected an asti vari , or wealth tax, from the wealthiest members of the village. According to Lakshmanan Chettiar, the traditional method for arriving at asti vari assessments was as follows:

First the temple board of trustees would determine that funds from other sources were not adequate for planned expenses. Then the vairavi [temple messenger] would send out notices to every pulli in the village to attend a nakarakkutomb [a Nakarattar meeting, nakarakkutam ]. The people would nominate about 15 representatives from a cross-section of pankalis [here, local lineage groups] and kovils [temple clans] to form an asti vari kutomb [wealth tax meeting, asti vari kuttam ]. This group would then meet and decide the general principles for assessment, the specific individuals who would be taxed, the wealth of these individuals and the amount of asti vari each would be charged.

The sanctions operating on wealthy villagers to pay their asti vari were similar to those operating on temple clan members. In one case from the

1930s, the richest man in a village refused to pay his asti vari assessment, claiming that everyone else had conspired against him. The rest of his kuttikkira pankali supported him and also refused to pay. The entire group was boycotted by the village temple committee. The act of withholding their tithe from the village temple did not affect the group's status in their clan temple. They were still entitled to receive a garland to sanctify any marriage that might take place within their families. But they were prevented from performing those parts of the marriage ceremony that required blessings from the deity of the village temple. Nor were they permitted to enjoy the services of nakaswaram musicians, who were temple servants and who had personal inams carved out of the village temple's inam property. In the end, the rich man and his pankali paid their asti vari , after several years had passed, along with a charge for the accumulated interest.

As far as I could determine, the practice of assessing an asti vari has diminished or died out during the last forty years. As Lakshmanan Chettiar noted, the asti vari kuttams had made their assessments on the basis of community knowledge of individual wealth. As Nakarattars increasingly shifted their residences outside of Chettinad and their occupations to nonbanking jobs that did not require public knowledge of their personal wealth, it became extremely difficult to arrive at fair assessments. Moreover, Nakarattars are no longer so committed to orthodox ritual observances, and consequently they are less open to communal sanction. Thus, with asti vari gone as a source of income, with income from a general pulli vari similarly in decline, and with income from temple inam lands largely abolished by law, temples must rely more than ever on endowments from the wealthiest members of their villages. It is not clear if this change has brought any alteration to the politics of temple control. But Nakarattars have so far resisted every effort by non-Nakarattars to endow the major Siva temples in their residential villages, and in some cases the temple has been closed down as a result of litigation between Nakarattar and non-Nakarattar factions.

In the village with six wealthy families described above, temple control has been vested in the dominant family of the dominant lineage of the village, who have jealously guarded their trusteeship as an hereditary right since at least the turn of the century. However, as the incident concerning disputed asti vari assessments indicated, not all Chettinad villages were unambiguously controlled by a single dominant lineage or a family within that lineage. Where power was divided, so was temple control. In some cases, both factions were harmoniously represented on the temple's board of trustees. In other cases, conflict erupted, leading to a stoppage of

temple functions. In still other cases—and this was especially likely in the largest towns, such as Devakottai or Karaikudi—the different factions constructed and maintained separate temples, effectively splitting the village into subvillages, each with its own descent-based cult. But in no case were any of these simultaneously descent-cum-residential-cum-cult groups in any way ranked above any other such group. Individuals within each group—particularly those who served as hereditary trustees—might be ritually recognized by the receipt of special honors. But in principle any group of persons had the option in harmonious situations to endow the village temple and obtain rights to their own special honors in return, or even, perhaps, to obtain a hereditary trusteeship for their representative. In nonharmonious situations, they could effectively close the temple so that nobody had any special status, they could build their own temples, or they could move and try their luck elsewhere.

As we have seen, this structural equality was also evident in the organization of the nine Nakarattar clan temples. There, as with the village temples, trustees were recruited on a hereditary basis. Among clan temples (especially the largest), however, the possibilities for conflict between major Nakarattar families were multiplied. The Nakarattars minimized the potential for conflict and maintained equality among structurally equivalent groups by rotating the trusteeship in a regular fashion between selected prominent families from throughout Chettinad. In the concluding chapter, I will compare the two-tier political organization manifest in Nakarattar control of both village and clan temples with forms of political organization exhibited by dominant nonmercantile castes in South India.

10
Conclusion: Social Structure as Social Investment

Reflecting on various approaches to the study of Indian society, Chapter 2 of this book suggested that India must be recognized as a caste society. It also suggested, however, that caste must be reconceived, not as a unitary phenomenon, but as an umbrella concept, covering categories of people who are potential candidates for different kinds of practical and moral linkage. The suggestion derived from historiographic interpretations for the rise of Western-style, politically oriented caste associations in early twentieth-century India. But it need not and, I argued, should not be limited just to this context. On the contrary, the notion that people invest in caste identities of different sorts in order to accomplish different ends can be usefully employed for understanding various caste formations, ranging from dominant agrarian castes mobilized for non-Western forms of political organization such as the Pudukottai Kallar, to castes specialized around artisanal production and marketing such as the Kaikkolar, to castes organized around both banking and territorial dominance such as the Nakarattar. Caste, in short, represents a differentiated form of "symbolic capital" (Bourdieu 1977), available for different uses by members of different castes. In a less euphonious Bourdieuvian phrase, castes constitute "structured structuring structures," shaped by the activities of their members, constraining those activities, and offering distinct possibilities and payoffs for different actions.

The present chapter summarizes my findings about the symbolic capital of Nakarattar caste identity, defined by component investments in elite status, marriage alliance, descent group, and temple cult. I argue that all these "social investments" contrast in interesting ways with social investments by nonmercantile castes. In particular, I argue that the respective

"social portfolios" of different castes reflect a differential specialization and diversification in liquid or fixed forms of symbolic capital. The lesson I draw is twofold: First, the Nakarattars and, arguably, other mercantile castes exhibit forms of social organization that fall outside most standard views of caste social organization. They require, as a consequence, that these standard views be modified and enlarged. Second, I argue that a fiduciary perspective on variation in caste structure suggests that castes be treated not so much as legal corporations, enduring timelessly through history, but rather as social investments, structured by and structuring human action over time.

Competing for the Past, Investing in the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marriage and Minimization

Elitehood was generated, in part, by investments in temples and universities. It was indexed by ritual prerogative and denoted by title. The trust and respect in which Nakarattars held elites was further reflected in special long-term deposits (adathi kadai panam ) that helped to maintain cash reserves for Nakarattar firms and which were, themselves, indexes to

long-term relations between two families. But, as important as they were, relations between adathis and their clients constituted only one component of Nakarattar capitalist organization. Another component was marriage alliance.

Just as relationships between an adathi and another Nakarattar family firm were indexed by special deposits listed in the client firm's account books, so relations of marriage alliance were specially marked in accounts called accimar panam , or "women's deposits." Chapter 8 illustrated the way such long-term deposits were established as trusts for women by families into which they had married. They came with a woman as part of her dowry, as cir: that which brings fame or glory. But, although they belonged to the woman in name, they were actually controlled by the woman's in-laws until her daughters required dowry.

Aside from the amounts given as dowry, Nakarattars were not unusual in these respects. In other regards, however, they were quite remarkable. As we saw in Chapter 8, they maintained no positive marriage rule, nor did they exhibit any of the elementary structures of kinship that anthropologists claim is entailed for people who employ a Dravidian kinship terminology. Nakarattar marriage alliances did embody normative rules that distinguished them from relations of mere marriageability between terminological affines. But the normative content of these rules applied to various murai (gift-giving obligations) within the alliance, not to obligations to renew an alliance between allies.^[2]

When I first began to investigate marriage practices among the Nakarattars, I thought to confirm the received view that contrasted marriage rules among mercantile castes with those among nonmercantile castes. I expected to demonstrate that this contrast could be explained as a functional adaptation to, respectively, mercantile and agrarian lifestyles. The following argument summarizes the theory I had formulated to account for variability in patterns of marriage alliance among different castes. First, I adopted a standard anthropological view of marriage as a transaction of women between male-controlled descent groups. Second, I accepted Brenda Beck's (1972) suggestion that the contrasting strategies of affinal transactions affected the size of affinally allied clusters of descent groups (marriage circles) tied to each other by marriage. Third, I related this variable of marriage-circle size to Marriott's (1976) theories about Hindu transactions by speculating (contra Marriott) that "minimizing" groups do not avoid transactions of gross substances (ritual food, wives, etc.) so much as they restrict the size of the group with which they engage in such transactions. Fourth, and as a lemma to the preceding argument, I also speculated that "minimizers"—at least in the case of the Nakarattar—try to maximize the

size of the group with which they engage in transactions of subtle, nonpolluting substances (money, credit, market commodities, etc.). Finally, I explained the restrictive scope of transactions in gross substances and the expansive policy of transactions in subtle substances by interpreting these transactions as expressions of a moral commitment to, respectively, long-term and short-term maintenance of the relationships. That is, I viewed transactions in different media of exchange as both symbols of and symbols for a difference in the duration of commitment to a social relationship. I anticipated that, by following marriage rules restricting the size of their marriage circles (and of other groups with whom they engaged in transactions of gross substances), Nakarattars effectively limited their liability for the welfare of a large number of kin (and other clients). They thereby freed up capital resources for "subtle" financial investments in trade, finance, and industry. By contrast, agrarian "maximizers" committed capital reserves to a large group of people in return for mutual cooperation and liability in coordinated agrarian ventures. Maximizers "capitalized" a relatively large proportion of their resources for investment in such fixed assets as military manpower, farm labor, and irrigation works. Minimizers maintained a pool of relatively liquid assets backed by a small reserve of long-term deposits such as accimar panam , established by gifts of cir .

In other words, I viewed transactional strategies of minimizers—including institutionalized rules for patrilateral marriage alliance—not as efforts to avoid every kind of transaction, but as efforts to minimize the number of long-term moral relationships and maximize the number of short-term moral relationships. I viewed maximizers in the opposite way. I interpreted the difference between the two as functional, not merely formal. And I explained the specialization of different groups in different strategies as adaptive specializations to specific economic niches.

It still seems to me that Nakarattars followed a mercantile, minimizing strategy, but not by practicing the minimizing strategy of patrilateral cross-cousin marriage. Rather, they accomplished their strategy by rejecting any rule that would perpetuate ties of marriage alliance: not only maximizing rules that generate large marriage circles, but even minimizing rules that generate small circles.

Nakarattar marriage strategy did, in fact, produce small marriage circles, but these circles were temporary and adjustable in the face of changing economic opportunity. They represented a form of liquid wealth, just like the financial instruments that were invested in their production and maintenance and that they, in turn, produced and maintained. Indeed, the symbolic capital of Nakarattar marriage alliance was explicitly indexed by deposits of real capital in the form of accimar panam , the dowry trust fund

that Nakarattars established on behalf of their daughters at the time of marriage (generally in the groom's family's bank) and enlarged over the two-generation life of the marriage alliance. Finally, both of these kinds of capital were further indexed and augmented by the entire set of ceremonial prestations that marked the life of the marriage alliance.

As I observed above, Nakarattars controlled many forms of capital differing from each other along a scale of relative liquidity. Thus, Nakarattar marriage alliances were liquid relative to the kinds of capital Nakarattars invested when they sought control of a temple endowment, but fixed relative to the kinds of capital they invested in an agricultural loan. When I speak of Nakarattar marriage alliance as liquid capital, however, I am not merely making a comparison between the various forms of capital invested by Nakarattars; I am also contrasting the specific capital of Nakarattar marriage alliance with the kinds of capital represented by marriage alliances established by non-Nakarattars. The difference emerges not only with respect to the contrast between the presence and absence of marriage rules but also with respect to the twofold contrast in ceremonial prestations between Nakarattar and non-Nakarattar castes, described in Chapter 8. On the one hand, Nakarattar prestations of cir and moi failed to coincide neatly with the distinction between external and internal gifts in the manner Dumont ascribes to the Kallar, Maravar, and Vellalar castes. On the other hand, Nakarattars did not make even a token symbolic expression of reciprocity in cir exchanges on the occasion of a wedding (let alone on the subsequent occasions for external gifting, which are asymmetric among all groups studied). Both of these ceremonial distinctions coincided with the absence of a deferred normative obligation to return a daughter in marriage to a group from which one had taken a wife. In sum, the asymmetry and lack of marriage rules signaled both the lack of reciprocity and the determinate, one-time-only nature of the alliance (regardless of subsequent pragmatic considerations that might lead to renewal). The absence of any clear demarcation of two distinct moi -giving groups did not even provide an opportunity for renewal because it failed to define self-perpetuating, corporate kin groups that could renew an alliance at all!^[3]

Merchant and Peasant: Nakarattar and Goundar Political Structure

As in the case of marriage, so in the case of political style in the control of temples and land in Chettinad. In both instances Nakarattar practice differs from current anthropological views of dominant agrarian castes in South India, and it differs in the direction of flexibility and liquidity. The following three sections undertake two tasks: (1) to contrast Nakarattar

and non-Nakarattar forms of political organization as alternative ways to invest in the symbolic capital of descent-based cults of territorial dominance, and (2) to consider implications of Nakarattar political strategy for the cultural principles by which the Nakarattars conceive social relations between different political segments.

According to Brenda Beck (1972), Nakarattars and merchant castes, in general, diverge dramatically from dominant agrarian castes. I do not refer here to the effective use of "formal" political structures institutionalized by Indian governments since the turn of the century.^[4] Rather, I mean the operation of a distinctively organized "informal" political system, such as that described in Chapter 9, which predated the colonial system and which continues to underpin Nakarattar political dominance up to the present day. As we have seen, this informal system is defined by principles of descent, territory, and cult membership. The importance of such variables for understanding the organization of caste groups was pointed to by Dumont (1964) thirty years ago.^[5] My analysis of Nakarattar data, however, suggests that Nakarattars constructed their social organization with respect to these variables in ways that were significantly different from investments in social organization by noncommercial castes such as the Kallar, analyzed by Dumont, or the Goundar, analyzed by Beck.

As we saw in Chapter 9, Nakarattar social organization comprised a two-tier social structure that allocated and legitimized control over specific temples by specific clans and lineages. This two-tier organization played one additional, highly important political function: it tied together what were otherwise territorially discrete temple cults in a pattern of crosscutting segmentation. Every Nakarattar was simultaneously a member of the cults of both his clan and his village. These cults crosscut Chettinad in such a way that members of the same clan belonged to different villages, and members of the same village belonged to different clans. Moreover, although lineage groups from particular clans dominated particular villages, they did not dominate adjacent villages, nor did clans dominate clusters of villages.^[6] Thus, the Chettinad territory was not divided up into microregions over which different clans exercised control.

This situation contrasts dramatically with the pattern of control in agrarian castes. In the case of the Goundar Vellalar, the dominant peasant caste of Kongunadu in Coimbatore, described by Beck (1972), it can be argued that lineage groups who controlled territorial clusters of Goundar settlements all belonged to the same clan.^[7] Unlike the Nakarattar, among the Goundar both tiers of descent-group organization controlled corresponding tiers of Goundar territorial organization. In other words, there was an isomorphic relationship between descent groups and territorial

divisions in Goundar social organization: a relationship that was replicated again by a system of religious cults in which members of Goundar descent-cum-local groups participated.

According to Beck, the caste as a whole dominated the region of Kongunadu as a whole. Goundars asserted their common identity through collective worship at Sivan and Murugan temples inside and outside Kongunadu. The Kongunadu region was divided into discrete subregions, each of which was dominated by a different Goundar subcaste that worshiped at a Mariamman temple in the major revenue village of the subregion. Revenue villages were in turn divided into hamlets dominated by separate clans, each with its own clan goddess temple. Hamlets were divided into settlements, each with its own Vinayakar temple dominated by a specific lineage. Settlements were divided into neighborhoods with common (nattukkal ) shrines, whose inhabitants attended each other's funerals. Neighborhoods were divided into streets, whose inhabitants attended each other's weddings. Streets were divided into houses, each with a shrine for the household's ancestors and family deities. All of these simultaneously descent-cum-territorial-cum-ritual groups formed a single nested system.

Anthropologists will already have recognized in this description of Goundar social structure the characteristic pattern of segmentary political organization familiar from African studies of the Nuer and the Tiv. Presumably, one could explain Goundar dominance in Kongunadu by appeal to their segmentary organization, and explain the subordinate status of other caste groups by the absence of any organization with equal political impact (Sahlins 1961). This seems to be what Beck has in mind when she compares the way that different non-Goundar castes of Kongunad integrate (or fail to integrate) descent and territory. From Beck's point of view, however, deviation from the Goundar pattern of isomorphism between units of descent and territory is tantamount to an absence of any organization. For example, in her analysis of "left-hand," mercantile groups, she is moved to say that they lack any descent organization (1972: 106). Since this is demonstrably not the case, I take it she means that their descent organization does not fit isomophically with a nested territorial organization. In any case, Table 15 presents an idealized table showing the nested segmentary structure among Goundar social groups (including groups at higher and lower levels of organization than just clans and lineages). It also indicates the isomorphism among organizing principles of descent, territory, and ritual cult membership.

This is all straightforward stuff. But how are we to understand the operation of the differently organized forms of Nakarattar dominance? Among the Nakarattars, descent groups and territorial groups formed two crosscutting systems. There was no isomorphic correspondence between a

nested system of descent groups and a nested system of territorial groups. There were macro-territorial units that encompassed endogamous clusters of villages called vattakais (see Chapter 8). But these differed from Goundar subcaste regions, revenue villages, and hamlets in that clan membership in Nakarattar multivillage vattakais was mixed, and no clan emerged as a dominant political force.

Lacking an isomorphic system of descent and territorial groups, did Nakarattars therefore lack a political organization enabling them to dominate Chettinad? Obviously not. There are many ways to construct a political system besides resorting to the anthropologically classic forms of segmentary organization. The Nakarattar crosscutting segmentary organization was simply different from the nested segmentary organization of the Goundar.

Hierarchy, Territorial Precedence, and Royal Honors: The Pudukottai Kallars

Nakarattar investment in crosscutting social organization has important implications for the cultural (as opposed to formal or functional) principles

by which the Nakarattars conceive social relations between different political segments. In particular, it is difficult to see how Nakarattars could combine a system of status hierarchy—which is, according to Dumont (1957b), the alleged standard hallmark of politico-ritual relations within caste groups as well as between them—with a formally crosscutting, non-hierarchical structure. And indeed, notwithstanding the presence of titled, elite members of their caste, Nakarattars have adhered to an egalitarian ideology that fails to fit Dumont's model of status hierarchy, a model which, as we have already noted, is overgeneralized from studies of agrarian castes. Before considering Nakarattar egalitarian political culture, however, it is useful to review ways that a nonmercantile dominant caste has overlaid a ranking system rooted in Tamil beliefs about kingship on top of a nested segmentary kinship system. Once this is accomplished, we will then be in a position to contrast the hierarchical values that have shaped a Tamil "little kingdom" with the egalitarian values of mercantile Nakarattars.

According to Dumont (1957b), nonmercantile castes such as Kallars, Maravars, and Vellalars conceive and order their internal kinship groups according to the same basic principle by which entire caste groups are ordered in relation to each other: namely, status hierarchy. Moreover, it is clear in his (1957a) monographic treatment of Pramalai Kallars and in his (1957b) comparative essay on a variety of caste groups that this hierarchy is associated with a system of territorial control. Finally, it is also clear from Dumont's data that many dominant castes exemplify a nested segmentary system of ranked descent groups and territorial units (although this system differs in some respects from Beck's descriptions of Goundar social organization).^[8]

The pattern of nested and hierarchically ranked segmentary social organization that Dumont finds among many landed and military castes also emerges with particular clarity and elaboration in Nicholas Dirks' (1988) analysis of the Pudukottai Kallar.^[9] Unlike Goundars, Pudukottai Kallars inflected their segmentary system with an incipient state organization under the control of a king, a political form that Aidan Southall (1956) christened "the segmentary state" and that has entered the South Indian research literature through the work of Burton Stein (1969, 1980). In the Pudukottai kingdom, structural distance between political segments was a function not only of descent, territory, and cult membership, but also of a differentiated and ranked system in which military service was exchanged for land control (inam ) and honors (maryatai and piratu ).^[10]

Pudukottai Kallar relations of royal service and honor formed a super-structure for every other relationship and occasionally altered the strict

isomorphism between descent and territory that was characteristic of the purely segmentary Goundar. In some cases, clusters of lineage segments (karai, pattappeyar ) combined together to form larger, territorially bounded lineage clusters (kuppam, teru ) on the basis of coresidence within a territorial region (sub-natu ).^[11] Among these groups, structural closeness to the king sometimes reflected the order of lineage entrance into the (in part) residentially defined lineage cluster (kuppam ) instead of the genealogical closeness or "blood purity" of descent-group relations. In other words, residential priority could play an alternative and not just a complementary role to descent.

Pudukottai Kallar lineage clusters (kuppams ), in turn, were clustered together into discrete sub-jatis , once again through operation of the descent principle—in this case, expressed by a rule of endogamy. Sub-jatis , however, were grouped together into the Pudukottai Kallar jati not by any principle pertaining to kinship, but solely by principles of honor and service. This final integration of all Pudukottai Kallar social groups (comprising the jati ) and all territorial segments (comprising the "little kingdom") was accomplished by the king's appointment of chiefs or commanders (cervaikkarars ), typically from the royal subcaste, to territories (natus ) outside his own (Dirks: 1976: 30, 1983: 28).^[12] Like the lineage clusters (kuppams ), Pudukottai sub-jatis were ranked in consideration of their order of entrance into the relevant territorial unit: here, the "little kingdom" rather than the sub-natu .

Despite these differences from purely segmentary systems, the segmentary state of the Pudukottai also exemplified a nested or inclusive taxonomy of social groups, including (from top to bottom) the jati , sub-jati , lineage cluster (kuppam, teru ), and lineage (karai, pattappeyar ). Again, each group was marked by participation in a common cult; the group's participation provided the context for the exchange of honors for service that tied together the different segments in the Pudukottai segmentary state and that ranked the different segments belonging to various cults in the Pudukottai status hierarchy (see Table 16).^[13]

A Mythic Charter for Nakarattar Values

At this juncture, we are ready to return to the question: is the principle of hierarchy a universal principle in Indian conceptions about political relations between the constituent segments of castes? Some elements of my previous discussion about Nakarattar elites suggests that it may be. Nevertheless, the Nakarattar varalaru , already alluded to in Chapter 9, suggests otherwise.

The story in question concerns the consequences and implications of royal abductions of Nakarattar women. According to their traditional

caste history, the Nakarattar accepted a Pandyan invitation to immigrate to and take possession of the land of Chettinad.^[14] One day, the Pandyan king went riding in the countryside and came upon a beautiful maiden. Unaware that the girl was a Nakarattar, he carried her off to his palace. As soon as he discovered his error, however, he returned the girl to her people, without molesting her sexually or harming her in any other way.

The Nakarattar history records that he implored them not to harm the girl since he would not have carried her off if he had known who she was and since he had returned her untouched once he had discovered her identity. Furthermore, not content with this plea, he warned them that if they killed her he would collect eight heads and eight thousand gold pieces from them in retribution. Despite his warning, the Nakarattar determined that their caste regulations had been infringed upon and that, as a consequence, they were required to put the girl to death. They recognized, however, the justice of the king's demand and decided that a representative from each of seven families who had initially immigrated to Chettinad should offer himself for execution. This posed a further dilemma. The Nakarattar were still responsible for selecting an eighth person for execution, but they had no moral basis for choosing who it should be. The following translation of

a passage from an early published version of the caste history describes the way in which the dilemma was solved:

At that time one of the seven families, viz, the people of the three temples of Ilayattakudi, Iraniyur, and Pillaiyarpatti said, "Even though our family is the same our temples are three. Therefore it is us that should give the extra head." Okkurutaiyar [the leader from a subdivision of the Nakarattar of Ilayattakudi] arose and said, "We will give that extra head. We esteem honor more than our life. It is enough if all Nakarattar agree to let us receive first honors such as receiving holy ashes, etc. from temples and the gurus." The Nakarattar agreed to this. Then all of them approached the king and said, "We have brought eight heads and eight thousand gold pieces according to your orders." Hearing this, the king was deeply worried. He said to them, "I don't want to commit any additional sin other than the one I already have done [i.e., abduction of the girl]. You need not give me anything. Please return to your city." And so the Nakarattar did return to their city. (Paramasivam 1981b: 7)

One moral of this story is that the abduction of a Nakarattar maiden by the Pandyan king represented a form of hypogamous union, recognized and prohibited by Hindu doctrine as pratiloma marriage. In the view of the Nakarattar, compliance with dharmic law took precedence over any obligation to obey the king's law and justified the execution of their own daughter. At the same time, the Nakarattar also recognized that the Pandyan king acted out of justice, in compliance with his own dharma , and accordingly they were willing to submit themselves to his judgment. In doing so, they indicated that each of the seven Nakarattar families making up the caste was the status equal of every other family. No family commanded the others, and no family had any special obligation or honors before the others. A single subbranch of one family voluntarily offered itself as a special sacrifice on behalf of the entire caste. But its doing so constituted an exception that proved the general Nakarattar rule that every caste member belonged to the same family. In other words, the same motif that represents Nakarattar superiority over non-Nakarattars also represents Nakarattar equality among themselves.

Ambidexterity in the Nakarattar Varalaru

There have been very few systematic studies of South Indian caste histories. In fact, their discussion is most typically confined to ethnographic paraphrases of the relevant versions collected eighty years ago by Edmund Thurston (1909). Brenda Beck (1972) offers an important exception to this generalization in the same book to which I have already referred. It is her

view of Indian society and its extension to the analysis of merchant caste varalarus that I now address.^[15]

As in the case of variation in South Indian social organization, Beck interprets most South Indian caste histories as corresponding not only to the varnic classification scheme of the sastras but also to a mercantile/agrarian or "left-hand/right-hand" division of society. It seems to me that the current unqualified acceptance of this specific model of South Indian society is ill-considered. It is true, as Beck asserts, that high-ranking, left-hand varalarus in Kongu share some common motifs with South Indian mercantile varalarus from other regions. But the overlap is by no means so extensive as Beck makes out. In the case of the Nakarattar, for example, the shared motifs number only three out of the seven that Beck proposes as core motifs for all 'left-hand' varalaru , namely:

Moreover, in other notable respects, South India's merchant varalarus frequently diverge from one another. In the case of the Nakarattar varalaru , the differences suggest that Beck's economically based, binary classifications of left- and right-hand castes should not be generalized beyond the Kongu region. The following list identifies distinctive contrasts between the motifs that Beck suggests characterize all merchant varalaru and the motifs that actually figure in the Nakarattar varalaru:

In sum, the difficulty with Beck's "economic" theory^[16] of a left/right division associated with occupational specialization is that it fails to predict the right-hand stylistic features of Nakarattar histories—stylistic features which root their mercantile origins and migrations in the actions of men and kings rather than gods. In other words, Nakarattars seem to give more weight to political considerations connected with their position as a dominant caste in Chettinad than to any ritually unblemished origin. This is not to say that Nakarattars thereby adopt an unambiguously right-hand style. On the contrary, Nakarattar myths almost go out of their way to avoid ranking Nakarattar clans and lineages: an avoidance characteristic of Beck's left-hand castes. There is, at most, a single event in the Nakarattar myth of arrival and domination in Chettinad that singles out a Nakarattar subclan for preeminence over any other clan, and even this event highlights the relative equality of all clans.

In other words, just as in the case of their kinship organization, Nakarattars represent an ambidextrous anomaly in terms of Beck's principal diagnostic features for distinguishing between left-hand and right-hand varalarus . We should not be surprised. The anomaly is striking only as a consequence of the present widespread acceptance of Beck's model of South Indian society. But she presents no persuasive evidence to support her generalizations from the specific region of Kongunadu to all of South India. Moreover, a careful review of the distribution of indigenous historical uses of the left/right metaphor for social relations shows (a) that it occurs sporadically in time and space, (b) that it is employed most frequently in urban, not rural, centers, (c) that within these centers, it is employed as a political idiom, often marking a difference between establishment and arriviste contenders for various ritual privileges, and finally, (d) that on those occasions when political combatants are classified by the left/right metaphor, they do not invariably break down into mercantile and agrarian communities (Appadurai 1974).^[17]

Cross-Cut Segmentation and Equality

The mythical motif of status equality among Nakarattar kin groups faithfully replicates life. Unlike the Kallar groups analyzed above, there were no Nakarattar kings with whom other Nakarattars could undertake an asymmetrical exchange, even though Nakarattars did receive honors in temples. Nakarattars simply did not engage among themselves in asymmetrical exchanges of military service for royal honor. Instead they engaged each other in symmetrical exchanges of credit. In other words, Nakarattar kin group relations were marked by an absence of structural hierarchy even in the presence of individual receipt of temple honors.

In general, for the Nakarattar, the symbolic expression of descent group hierarchy was negligible or relativized to contexts that cancelled each other out. As we saw in Chapter 9, at each taxonomic level in Nakarattar descent-group organization, specific kin groups maintained a shrine or temple for cult worship. At these temples, elite cult members might have been ranked according to their generosity (vallanmai) or trustworthiness (nanayam) , as measured by active participation and donorship in supporting the cult. Such minimal ranking was marked by rights to the receipt of honors from the cult deity. But the majority of cult members were ritually undifferentiated and unranked.

Moreover, unlike the invariant ranking of elites among the royal Kallar of Pudukottai, the minimal ranking exhibited by Nakarattars was relativized to specific contexts, so that cult members who were honored on one occasion did not receive special honors on another occasion, when they were replaced by some previously unhonored cult member. The effect of this "replaceability" was to offset and equalize the ritual rank acquired by cult members on different occasions. Every lineage segment had its own village temple in which it received first honors. But the segment did not by receipt of this honor obtain a higher ritual rank than any other joint family or lineage segment, which likewise had an associated village temple. Where lineage segments shared a village temple, they maintained separate shrines. Alternatively, in the same shrine of the same temple, different groups controlled different rites of worship, either on the occasions of different religious festivals or in the same festival during the performance of different ceremonies.

In the context of membership in Nakarattar temple-clan cults, the same principles of differentiated membership and performance operated to give members from different clans more or less equal access to temple honors. In addition, the nonhierarchical ordering of clan members was maintained through the system of rotating trustees. The reason for this difference from both Goundar and Kallar groups—insofar as a functional explanation provides us with a reason—was telegraphed at the beginning of our comparison of mercantile and agrarian strategies for territorial dominance. Unlike their agrarian brethren, Nakarattars dominated their own little kingdom not by force of arms but by the force of money remitted from their trading empire back to villages, temples, and descent groups in Chettinad. Conversely, the shifting tides of change in Asian and world economic systems in which they participated required an ability to mobilize money from multiple sources. Relationships of opposition and cohesion in a purely segmentary organization might suffice for dealing with the local conflicts encountered by Goundar agriculturalists. But they were

limiting to a businessman interested in attracting venture capital from beyond his immediate locale. Institutionalized chains of command established in a segmentary state were useful to the Pudukottai king and his commanders in mobilizing military forces. But such hierarchical relationships could get in the way of mutually depositing and loaning bankers who were creditors on one occasion and debtors on the next and who, again, needed to maximize the possibilities for attracting capital beyond the narrow avenues defined by chains of command. The great efficiency of the Nakarattar banking system depended in large part on the freedom to draw on kinship ties that were independent of and crosscut territorial ties and, conversely, to draw on territorial ties that were independent of and crosscut ties of kinship.

Equality and Elitehood

Did Nakarattar values of equality conflict with the reputations of elite members of their caste, of their temple trustees (dharma kartas) , and of adathis? Does the existence of a Nakarattar elite imply that Nakarattars subscribed to a principle of hierarchy in business matters compartmentalized from the arenas of myth, ritual, and kinship that we have just reviewed? In other words, is there not a Dumontian case to be made that Nakarattars maintained a principle of hierarchy in ordering their internal social relations, just like any other caste group?

A poetically just answer might be to argue that Nakarattar equality "encompassed" differences of economic stratification signaled by elite Nakarattar status. Indeed, I have offered evidence for precisely such encompassment in the preceding analyses of egalitarian values in the Nakarattar jati varalaru and of ritual mechanisms for relativising and distributing temporary elitehood in Chettinad temples, such the rotation of temple trustees. Yet this argument is only part of the answer. For the rest of the solution, it is important to recognize that, regardless of the symmetry and lack of rank among Nakarattar relationships with each other—in fact, as part of this symmetry and lack of hierarchy—Nakarattars competed with each other for non-Nakarattar clients. It was precisely in contexts external to the caste community that terms such as adathi had a currency. The only Nakarattars today who remember the term adathi are retired bankers. The only published reference to adathis is the Imperial Bank's "adathi list" of approved bankers. Those few Nakarattars that are familiar with the term adathi gloss it as "parent banker" without any literal Tamil translation. In other words, just like titles such as "Salt Chetti," Zamindar, Rao Bahadur , or even, in the most extreme case, "Raja Sir," the elite status of the adathi gained meaning outside the caste. From the

inside , it was recognized as an asset or an investment; something to be achieved, not something ascribed; and something equally achievable by any Nakarattar businessman. Elite status among Nakarattars was a valuable tool, but it had no intrinsic value in ordering Nakarattar relationships with each other. It could be sought, obtained, and employed in relationships with non-Nakarattars without coming into conflict with Nakarattar egalitarianism.

The Symbolism of Finance

Whether advancing a loan, making a deposit, encashing a hundi, negotiating a dowry, or endowing a temple, Nakarattars exchanged goods or services in self-perpetuating and generative social relationships.^[18] In every case, the exchange not only reproduced and transformed the social relationships existing among transactors, but also served as a sign or index of those relationships. In each case, transactors fetishized the objects they exchanged by objectifying them as alienable commodities or by transforming them into charismatic gifts of transcendental value. In making this argument, I do not mean to deny important differences among the various objects, services, and persons exchanged by Nakarattars, but rather to underscore two qualities that they shared in common: their use as capital for social investment and their significance as symbols of social relationships. These two qualities are inseparable.

In contrast to other items of exchange—food, land, or women, for example—Nakarattar financial instruments (including those employed for the inter-Nakarattar deposits that indexed Nakarattar social organization) were remarkable for their context-free liquidity and negotiability. They were, in McKim Marriott's (1976) terms, things which had a "subtle substance-code" among the universe of things exchanged by actors in Hindu society.^[19] This subtlety—in Marriott's sense—was clearly reflected in their negotiability. Nakarattar financial instruments did not conduct pollution. Actors of different ritual status who exchanged financial instruments were not at risk as they would have been if they had exchanged such things as cooked food, garbage, or bodily waste (hair clippings, menstrual blood, etc.). Financial instruments, therefore, had a negotiability throughout society that permitted their exchange between people whose ritual status was known to be unequal and (in long-distance, indirect, or multiple-party transactions) between people whose ritual status was unknown. Beyond this negotiability, Nakarattar financial instruments were often saleable, with the larger Nakarattar firms acting as clearing-houses for instruments drawn up by smaller firms. Finally, although in many cases loans were refinanced or deposits maintained indefinitely,

transactions of specific Nakarattar instruments either were automatically terminated after a fixed period of time or were terminable on demand. A transaction involving Nakarattar financial instruments was therefore, in principle, free from any of those enduring obligations that mark gift-giving relationships of generalized reciprocity (Sahlins 1966). The social relationship symbolized by a financial transaction was, to adapt Marriott's (1976) terminology, "minimized." In fact, Nakarattar financial instruments constituted a type of commodity, circulating freely in Indian and Southeast Asian society; their transaction was constrained only by considerations of price (Kopytoff 1986).

In one crucial respect, however, Nakarattar financial instruments were distinct from commodities in the idealized, market-oriented sense of the word. Although exhibiting a discrete value that left their transactors free from the obligations of generalized reciprocity, they did establish temporary bonds of trust and mutual expectation between transactors. Moreover, different kinds of instruments symbolized different bonds, for different periods, and secured by different sanctions. In other words, although financial instruments as a class of objects were, in Marriott's terms, all constituted of subtle substances in the Hindu universe of exchange, within this subtle class there existed various subtly distinguished subclasses.

This is particularly apparent in the different kinds of deposits established by interbank transactions between Nakarattars. In "purely" business contexts, these deposits included short-term kadai kanakku ("shop account") deposits that functioned like checking accounts and that could be drawn on by dharsan or nadappu hundis ("sight" or "walking" hundis ). Other "purely" business transactions included long-term thavanai ("resting") deposits on which Nakarattars could draw thavanai hundis , payable after a short period of rest. But business was seldom "pure," especially among the Nakarattars themselves. So, in addition to their kadai kanakku deposits, Nakarattars established various long-term, ritually generated deposits (mempanam) , including deposits for affinal relatives (accimar panam) ; deposits for lineage mates and clanmates, particularly through the medium of deposits from temples controlled by various descent-based cults or worship (tanatu murai panam); and deposits made to parent bankers (adathi panam) . In other words, transactions of Nakarattar financial instruments that established different kinds of deposits with different terms to maturity also established distinct spheres of exchange between Nakarattar firms related by a variety of caste-based principles for social cooperation.^[20]

The capital structure of individual firms reveals the extent of caste-based mutual risk taking through the number and size of long-term

deposits. And the disposition to take risks over the long term, it seems to me, corresponds very closely to our notion of "trust": what Nakarattars refer to in Tamil as nanayam . It emerges in Nakarattar account books as a continuous cultural variable that distinguishes a range of long-term and short-term social relationships, exploding the overly-simple dichotomy between gifts of open-ended, generalized exchange and market commodities restricted to a momentary, one-time-only transaction.

The spheres of exchange that entailed the most trust and that were defined by ritually based, long-term deposits are especially interesting in the present context because they included transactions that were functionally equivalent to investments in long-term certificates of deposit issued by Western banks. And, like these long-term certificates of deposit, the funds they represented were not left sitting idly in the recipient firm's coffers. They were lent out. The firm then received interest. The borrower had capital he could invest or otherwise spend. At the same time, the original deposit still stood to the credit of the original long-term depositor, earning him interest and providing him security against which he could obtain loans for further investment and expenditure.

By conducting financial transactions within different spheres of exchange, individual firms were able to control their cash flow and to insure that original depositors and subsequent borrowers did not claim the funds at the same time. In this way, every deposit to a Nakarattar bank could and did serve as the basis for expanding the supply of money and credit for the system as a whole. That is, Nakarattar financial transactions generated what Western economists refer to as a "multiplier effect." The capital thereby created (along with profits and interest generated by other banking and trading operations) was expended on a wealth of items for consumption, exchange, and further investment. To put it simply, financial transactions between different Nakarattar spheres of exchange created wealth. In Marriott's terms, multisphere transactions were made possible by the subtle medium of Nakarattar financial instruments and generated an increase both in the supply of money and in the production of things with substance-codes of grosser quality, such as land, minerals, or agrarian commodities. Nakarattar financial instruments were, indeed, not only highly liquid, negotiable, and transformable, but also richly productive and generative.

The extent of Nakarattar money creation is not clear. I have not ascertained the normal reserve ratio maintained by Nakarattar bankers. The ease and reliability of interfirm loans reported by retired bankers suggest—and the practices brought to light by court records (see Chapter 4) confirm—that the ratio was remarkably high. In any case, it seems clear that

the tremendous growth of Nakarattar assets in Southeast Asia cannot be entirely attributed (as it is sometimes suggested) to either a transfer of funds from India or a diversion of profits from the agricultural and mining industries of Southeast Asia.

This is not to say that the Nakarattar banking system resembled an economist's model of Western-style banking systems. It bears repeating that Nakarattars loaned and deposited money with one another in caste-defined social relationships based on business territory, residential location, descent, marriage, and common cult membership. Unlike in modern Western banking systems, it was the reputation, decisions, and reserve deposits shared among exchange spheres defined according to these principles, and not a government-controlled central bank, that played a dominant role in the regulation of reserve levels and assured public confidence in individual Nakarattars as representatives of the caste as a whole. In other words, the Nakarattar banking system was a caste-based banking system. Individual Nakarattars organized their lives around participation in and management of various communal institutions adapted to the task of accumulating and distributing reserves of capital.

Macro-, Micro-, and Mediate Analysis

I suggested in Chapter 1 of this book that anthropological studies of culture and society have moved in two increasingly divergent directions. One entails a macroperspective on the causes and consequences of people's actions within their environment, both social and natural. The other takes a microperspective on the concepts and values that motivate people's everyday lives and give them meaning. The present study has tried to mediate between these two perspectives: on one hand, describing the cultural world in which Nakarattars created, reproduced, and transformed their distinctive social institutions, and on the other hand, describing the interaction between these institutions and the world of colonial India. The result is similar, in some respects, to an old-fashioned anthropology focused on institutions of Nakarattar kinship organization: its families, lineages, clans, and kindreds.

Yet, despite certain surface similarities, I do not subscribe to assumptions about social equilibrium that mar so many classic structural-functionalist accounts written in the 1950s and 1960s. On the contrary, I have taken my task to be describing how, for a moment in India's long history, a group of people, calling themselves the Nakarattar of Chettinad, organized themselves as a particular kind of "trading diaspora" (Cohen 1969; Curtin 1984; Timberg 1978) and in so doing provided much of the financial basis for agriculture and commerce in South and Southeast Asia. The

core of my analysis lies in an expanded view of the nature and functioning of capital: a view that encompasses investments of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977) as ways of achieving different kinds of transcendental goals (Bloch and Parry 1989), as part of elite tournaments for prestige (Appadurai 1985; Tambiah 1984), and as tactics for obtaining different kinds of more calculable, tangible rewards (Bourdieu 1977). Nakarattar symbolic capital, I have argued, consisted not only in their financial instruments but in the social relationships and institutions they symbolized. Moreover, the capital and investment goals of individual Nakarattars coincided with the capital and investment goals of collective institutions of caste and kinship. For a specific moment in Indian history, these goals reinforced and reproduced each other.^[21]

It was, however, but a moment in a dynamic historical process of individual and collective investment. Nakarattar investments created a specific institutional structure. This institutional structure, in turn, provided an efficient system for transferring knowledge and money throughout the world of British South and Southeast Asia. But it was not long before that world changed, and individual Nakarattars responded to these changes by altering their investments and their institutions. It is important not to adopt the classic structural-functionalist stance and hypostatize the colonial pattern of social organization as necessarily or purposely self-reproductive. But it is also important not to ignore that pattern. One cannot understand the actions of individual Nakarattars without understanding the historical contexts, institutional and global, in which they lived their lives and which made their actions possible. Similarly, one cannot understand the mechanisms of colonial credit markets for agrarian and industrial development without understanding the institutions of informal banking constituted by Nakarattar collective practice. All three levels of analysis—the macro political economy of colonial India, the micro world of individual Nakarattar business practice, and the mediating world of Nakarattar caste and kinship—affected each other. The most general conclusion drawn by the present study, then, concerns neither caste nor capital but the necessity for integrating micro and macro studies with a mediating focus on social institutions.

Conclusion

This completes my reflections on the Nakarattars of South India, at least for the present. There remains much left undone. As I write these comments, an anthropology student at the London School of Economics is completing her Ph.D. dissertation on women and the domestic economy of the Nakarattar, another anthropologist in Japan is exploring their rela-

tionship to the goddess cults of Chettinad, and Nakarattars themselves continue to chronicle their past history, exploring the propects for creating a Chettinad museum and seeking insights into modern business tactics by exploring old business successes. My study stops in 1930, just when Nakarattars began their return from Southeast Asia. I did not explore the impoverishment of the majority of Nakarattars since that time, nor the massive investment of their elite in the full range of South Indian industry, from leather to films, and from textiles to engineering. What I have tried to do is to examine aspects of their business practice and social organization in colonial India in order to carry out a critical revision of standard Western conceptions of caste and capitalism. For the Nakarattar do not fit well with these conceptions.

Many students of India will argue that the case of the Nakarattar requires no modification to the standard view since they represent a unique exception to general patterns that the standard view accurately captures. This, it seems to me, is an unfortunate perspective. Every caste in India forms a unique case. The Nakarattar divergence from the Western concept falls well within the range of variation that exists in Indian society. Indeed, the Western conception generally has more to say about Western essentialism and orientalism than it has to say about India. In particular, it is imbued with a normative vision of Western political and economic destiny so powerful that it renders non-Western forms of capitalism invisible and inconceivable, even while depending on those forms for the pursuit of its political and economic dreams.

The last few decades have witnessed what may be the beginning of a serious internal deconstruction of Western normative visions. But the outcome of this deconstruction is far from clear. It is still largely restricted to a few small intellectual circles, and it may well prove a passing fashion. Moreover, it is still in its infancy. Most of the critical efforts directed at the standard view are precisely that: critical. No new way of conceiving India has yet emerged. And, as this study demonstrates for study after study, the old ways still prevent an appreciation of even such major players as the Nakarattar of South India. The research on which the present book is based has been possible only because of the Nakarattar themselves, who remain the people most responsible for remembering and transforming both their past and their future.