Chapter Three
Institutions and Big-men of a Madras City Community
George Town Today

George Town and Fort St. George, just to its south, are the oldest parts of Madras City (see map 2). One can still see fragments of the old wall fortifications that once circumscribed and protected George Town, while the fort still has its walls and traces of its moat. The fort must be entered through heavy iron-studded doors, which remind the visitor of the uncertain peace of former times. Within the old walled area of the Town the streets are narrow, often choked with every sort of vehicle, cycle rickshaws carrying boxes of freight, small children on their way to or from school, and sometimes men holding great sheets of metal, which they have purchased for purposes unknown to the observer, slowly being pedaled among the crowds; there are brightly painted lorries, hand-pulled carts, bullock carts, bicycles, scooters, automobiles, and auto rickshaws buzzing about the Town's outer edges, trying to avoid getting stuck in the traffic jams. Pedestrians clog the streets' remaining spaces.

The Town is the financial center of Madras. American Express has its office here, and so does the Madras Stock Exchange. The Town is where the descendants of Madras City's oldest banks are located; it is also a center of informal banking. The big moneylenders, the "shroffs" of old, dealers in bullion and cash, operate here, so too, the Cashiers, the Kasukaarar,^[1] the accountants of the big banks and enterprises. George Town is also the business center of the city. Madras harbor lies just across the railroad tracks on the Town's eastern edge. Once there was no harbor, only the open sand beach on which small wooden boats departed and landed through the persistent surf, ferrying goods and people to and

Map 2.
Contemporary George Town and Fort St. George, Madras City.

Figure 2.
A view along First Line Beach Road. The photo was taken from the
roof of the Beach Railway Station. The large building on the left is the local head
office, State Bank of India, formerly the Imperial Bank of India during the colonial
period. George Town, 1992.

from ships anchored at sea in the "Madras Roads." Today, Madras has an artificial harbor, which is fitted to receive the giant container ships that ply international waters, although one can still see ships like tiny dashes on the distant horizon, "standing" in the roads waiting their turn in the harbor. For convenience, the Custom House and the General Post Office, the city's main post office, are located near the harbor on North Beach Road, now renamed Rajaji Road.

As the city's business center, the range of enterprises, large and small, located in the Town area is extensive: jewelers, gem dealers, book sellers and publishers, moneylenders and bankers, wholesalers and retailers

of iron and steel, nonferrous metals, textiles, fancy feathers for the fly-fishing industry, fireworks, electrical goods, leather, pharmaceutics, locks, and metal hinges—the list is enormous. Several of the oldest business houses, houses whose names reflect their British colonial past, have home offices here: Binny's, Best and Crompton, Castrol, Parry's, Gordon Woodroffe. This area of the Town, just across from the harbor, is called Muthialpet. Mannady, the adjacent area to the southwest, is considered by old residents to be an integral part of the Muthialpet neighborhood. Popham's Broadway, running north and south, marks the western edge of this eastern section of George Town.

Across Broadway, inland and to the west, is the old community of Pedda Naickenpet, although, today, this area, too, is subdivided. The northern section is still called Pedda Naickenpet, but the southern section is now called Sowcarpet. North Indian Hindu and Jain merchants live here in large numbers, and south Indians say that they feel transported to north India when they step into these streets. Sowcarpet is where many of the big moneylenders, gem dealers, and some of the Tamil-speaking goldsmiths live and operate. The buildings are mostly old houses to which one or two stories have been added over time. On the narrow veranda of one, a goldsmith and his three assistants manufacture 22-karat-gold bangles and necklace "chains." Nearby, a Jain gem dealer sits resting against a long white bolster, talking quietly to another man, his wooden desk cum money-box by his side. Large sums of money change hands in these modest surroundings.

At its heart, Sowcarpet incorporates the city's main green grocers market, Kothawal Chavadi, where I once bought one hundred limes for Rs. 2, about U.S. $0.26 at that time. Business is so intense here that wholesalers rent shop space by the hour. A single shop may have several tenants operating in series, each for a few hours, through the course of the twenty-four-hour day.

Just to the south of Sowcarpet is Park Town, famous for its jewelers and iron merchants and the location of George Town's most popular temple, the Muttu Kumaraswami, or Kandasami temple.^[2] This is the temple to which I was going on a rainy night in September 1985, to begin my fieldwork in George Town.

It was my plan over the next ten months to study leadership and individuality among two of the Town's prominent castes, the Beeri Chettiars, one of the foremost merchant castes of the Town, and the artisan caste once named the Kammaalans (Smiths),^[3] now usually called Acharis or Viswakarmas. The Beeri Chettiars had been close associates

of the British, from the founding of Madras in 1639, up to Indian Independence in 1947. I had chosen the Viswakarmas because they, like the Beeri Chettiars, had once been a leading caste of the left-hand section of castes in Madras City. Their historic rivals were the castes of the right-hand section, especially the famous merchants, the Komati Chettiars, the community that owned and controlled Kothawal Chavadi. While these once bitter rivalries and the left-hand/right-hand moiety division that framed them are now memories, and although today's descendants of these castes pride themselves on their friendly relations, the history of Madras is marked and shaped by riots and competition between the two factions. The area east of Popham's Broadway, Mannady and Muthialpet, was once the territory of the left-hand castes, the area to the west, Pedda Naickenpet, the territory of the right-hand castes. What legacy had this old division of the Town left behind to shape the civic communities of today?

A few days before my first night of fieldwork, I had been discussing my research intentions over tea with an acquaintance, C. Gourishankar, and his friend, "Babu." Babu, recently retired, had volunteered that one of his former colleagues at All India Radio was a Beeri Chetti who also happened to be the head managing trustee of the Kandasami temple in George Town. I asked him if he could help me contact this man. I thought he might make a good starting point for my research.

Babu made the arrangements. We were to meet with his former colleague, Tiru P. Balasubramaniyam ("Bala"), at the temple office a few nights later. Babu had explained my interest to Balasubramaniyam, and he, "Bala," had indicated that he would try to have present at the meeting a few knowledgeable older men of the community.

Although it was beginning to rain, the three of us—Babu, Gourishankar, and I—managed to find an auto rickshaw willing to take us to the Town. It was dark and wet when we arrived at the temple. We left our sandals at the sandal concession next to the temple's main entrance and entered through the Raja Gopuram, the kingly tower that faced onto the street. High on the tower's face a neon sign depicted in Tamil the word "Ore," the primeval sound of meditation. Inside, the temple was stone and cement, cavernous; we made our way toward the back, past a video shop selling religious films, to the office. Several men, all Beeri Chettiars, sat around a table. Along one wall were large steel cabinets, marked with sandalwood paste and vibuti , symbols of Siva.

Over the next two hours, Bala and his associates spoke rapidly, sometimes singly, sometimes several at once, so that it was all that I could do

Figure 3.
Rasappa Chetti Street showing the Kandasami temple entrance tower
or Raja Gopuram. George Town, 1992.

simply to follow what was being said, let alone take the kind of notes I wanted to. In those two hours, this small group of men outlined what they thought I should know about the Beeri Chettiars of George Town. They told me about the Kandasami temple, its history, and why it was important to the Beeri Chettiars of George Town. They told me the names, families, and brief particulars of who in their memory had been the leading men of the Beeri Chettiar community before families had begun to move away from the crowds and congestion of George Town.

Figure 4.
Kandasami temple roof line.

The list included bankers, the cashiers of important British companies, a lawyer politician, and several very wealthy merchants. A few leaders had belonged to families in which sons or sons-in-law had succeeded fathers and fathers-in-law as influential men. I could tell that everyone present knew of these men, including the non-Beeri Chettiar friends who had come with me, even though some of the leaders had been dead for decades. Among those present, there was a shared sense of the George Town Beeri Chettiars as a community distinguished by who its leading citizens had been. It was also clear that several temples and especially the Kandasami temple figured importantly in both the identity of the community and its leading men. Bala then told me who he was and described the schools and charitable institutions that he had helped found as a leader within his community. Next the men told me a little of the history of the Beeri Chettiars in George Town. It was their sense that the community vitality that had prevailed in their youth was weakening. Families had moved away, and now people often did not even know who their neighbors were. Bala said it was a goal of his, as head trustee of the

Kandasami temple, to reestablish some of the old sense of community. Finally, the men described some of the relationships the Beeri Chettiars had with other temples and other neighborhoods in Madras and surrounding towns. What they were describing to me, albeit in outline, was the identity of their civic community—a community that they saw as threatened, a community that was identified with its preeminent men, its temples, and its institutions—and the relationship to that community that Bala and some of the other leading members of the caste held as individuals. These were the topics upon which my research was to concentrate. They were giving me a quick overview. There are several features of this overview that told me much about the nature and role of civic individuality in Madras today.

When I left the meeting at about ten that night, it was raining heavily and the city was dark. The city lights had failed in the storm and the streets were flooded in places. The normally congested streets of George Town were almost deserted except for a few men wading slowly through the deep puddles.

Exploring the Nature of the "Institutional" Big-Man

Later, thinking about what Bala and his friends had said, I was struck by how personalized their description of the Beeri Chettiars in George Town had been. Names had flown about the room as they had described the caste's past and present distinguished men, the caste's periyar .^[4] They had told me which houses had belonged to these men, who they were related to, what they had done, and what their roles in businesses and civic institutions had been. My friend Gourishankar, aged sixty, obviously had known who they were talking about. He had known some of the men when, forty years before, he had attended Christian College, which in his day had been located in George Town. Reflecting on what had been said, I realized Bala and his friends had described their community to me in terms of its big-men and their institutions. I realized that if I were to share their sense of familiarity with their community, I needed to understand what it meant to be a Beeri Chettiar big-man.

In the months that followed, I was to hear informants use a number of terms denoting leaders. I have listed some of these in my previous chapters. In addition to the term periyar , I learned that periyadanakaarar (big-gift-giver) is a related term in a class of similar terms for informal leaders, including talaivar (headman) and ejamaanan (master, headman).

These terms are used to mark the preeminence of persons within their communities and, in some cases of special fame, within the larger society. Mahatma is a similar Sanskrit term, familiar as a designation for Mohandas K. Gandhi, and lexical equivalents of the Tamil terms for big-man are general to Indian languages. In fact, Pedda Naickenpet, the name for the area of George Town west of Popham's Broadway, conveys this same sense of big-man. Pedda is Telugu for "big," and Pedda Naickenpet means the place (pet ) of the "Big Naicken," the title of the headman who used to control this part of the Town in the early years of British East India Company trade. During those early times, in the shadow of the Telugu-speaking Vijayanagar Chiefdoms, the Naicker caste was politically dominant in the locality.

As the head trustee (dharmakarttaa ) of the Kandasami temple, Bala is himself an "institutional" big-man among the George Town Beeri Chettiars. As indicated in chapter 2, I add the "institutional" qualifier to the Indian big-man concept because men like Bala attract followers and enact their roles as generous leaders through the "charitable" institutions that they control.^[5] For south Indians, a "charitable institution" is a highly personalized leader-centered association or group that is designed by its founder or leader to benefit a particular clientele, constituency, or community. The leader attracts a following by the benefits he provides. In return, his followers reward him with prestige and an eminent reputation, attributes that give him great influence and discretion among his constituents. When his eminence is great and his institutions particularly effective, then a big-man's reputation also spreads among outsiders. People will know that he is a man responsible for getting things done among his constituents. Like Annan's banker of the previous chapter, an important big-man is a very valuable person with whom to have connections. In Bala's case, the Kandasami temple is one of several community institutions that he heads, but he founds his reputation and so his leadership in these other institutions on his role as the head trustee of the Kandasami temple.

Institutional position is a necessary condition for the viability of the Indian big-man, but it is not sufficient. In keeping with their highly per-sonalized nature, Indian institutions, including temples, expand and contract in popularity and membership depending on the idiosyncratic charisma of their heads. Although it is often supposed that local Indian leaders can depend on ready-made caste and kin constituencies, the fact is that even hereditary leaders have few followers when they lack charisma and skill. Indian society is salted throughout by these "hollow

crowns"—would-be leaders, the heads of associations who have little or no following (see Dirks 1987). In the case of the Kandasami temple, townspeople told me that they thought Bala a particularly effective leader and that the popularity of the temple has greatly increased during his tenure as head trustee.

As I reflected further on my hosts' naming of their community's past big-men, I began to be aware that knowing the names and offices of many people is a concomitant of leader-centered group organization. I sensed that if a person wishes to navigate a fruitful public life in a society composed of such highly personalized institutions, then it is important to know who heads and is responsible for what, as well as who has connections with whom. This is one of the reasons why Tamils keep tabs on so many people. A person who can claim good connections with influential people finds it is easier to accomplish social objectives and to influence others. Knowledge of this sort and the ability to claim connections is valuable and can be misused by dishonest persons. Reflecting this, when much later in my fieldwork I was collecting Bala's genealogy, he suddenly remarked that the information I was gathering could be valuable to unscrupulous persons who might use the information to claim close ties with him. He asked me to be careful to whom I showed it.

Why, then, did Bala and his friends list the past leaders of their community? It was clear to me from the way they spoke of these men that they did so in order to stress that who the George Town Beeri Chettiars are today is in part built upon their community's connections with men of prominence and responsibility from their recent past. They see their community as a composite of families and other associations that big-men head and the connections that exist among these elements, a community centered on eminent persons, their institutions and groups, and on the connections that link them, forever in the making.

Temple, Trustees, Donors, and the Civic Community

A Tamil villager once told me that a community without a temple was unfit for residence. The temple, he said, indicates that the community is graced by the presence of God and that its citizens form a moral community. A community identifies and is identified by others with its temples. Bala and other Beeri Chettiars went to considerable length to explain to me the nature of their community's identification with the

Kandasami temple and the role that big-men played as its patrons and managers. The temple and its functions symbolize the caste community, and publicize its leading associations and who its leading men are. Stories about the temple's history and endowments reveal as much.

That night in the temple office, Bala and his friends described the Kandasami temple as a "denominational" temple, meaning a temple controlled and managed by a single caste community, in this instance, themselves, the George Town Beeri Chettiars. What makes the temple a particularly important institution of big-man leadership among the Beeri Chettiars today is that it is the primary and by far the wealthiest institution controlled by the caste as a whole and, in much the same manner that villagers use their temples, it is used by leaders to represent the caste as a civic and moral community to the world at large. It is also importantly a charitable institution, the caste's central repository of resources that exist for the benefit of the caste as a civic community. An individual who is elected to the managing board of trustees of the temple is elected, therefore, to a position of leadership within the Beeri Chettiar community with control over its main assets. Among the five trustees of the temple, the head trustee, the dharmakarttaa , is preeminent. It is Bala who holds this position. He is the periyar , the big-man, and he is a preeminent figure in his community.

Until 1980, the electorate of the Kandasami temple included only male Beeri Chettiars who lived in Muthialpet, Mannady,^[6] and Park Town, but because by that time increasing numbers of families had moved to other parts of the city, caste leaders changed the bylaws of the temple to include in its congregation male Beeri Chettiars living or doing business anywhere in greater Madras City (Madras High Court records). The Madras Beeri Chettiars, therefore, today form the temple leaders' constituency. And this constituency, as a group, constitutes the caste's civic community defined most broadly. But even with this change in bylaws, the Park Town-Muthialpet Beeri Chettiars constitute the core congregation of the temple, and temple trustees have always been selected from among the caste's George Town leaders. It is these leaders who are and always have been the principal donors to the temple and sponsors of temple functions, and it is because of them, and because of the location of the temple, that George Town remains the geographic heart of the Beeri Chettiar's sense of their civic community in Madras City.

Because popular temples such as the Kandasami temple are important institutions of civic leadership, control of them is often contested. In George Town, the leaders of several castes would like to gain special

rights in the temple, and some conspire to dislodge the present temple trustees with this aim in mind. These contenders pursue a variety of strategies, among them bringing lawsuits claiming that members of other castes have made donations to the temple and so, since the Beeri Chettiars are not its sole financiers, they should not be its exclusive managers.

In and out of court, Bala and his allies have countered these pleas, asserting that the caste's right to exclusive control of the Kandasami temple is based on what they argue has been more than three hundred years of unbroken management and on a legend that the temple was founded by two old friends, Velur Mari Chettiar, a Beeri Chettiar, and Kandappa Achari, a Viswakarma man. According to this legend, the two friends were on their monthly pilgrimage to worship Lord Murugan at Tiruporur, fifty-six kilometers away, when they miraculously discovered the idol of Kandasami hidden in an anthill and brought it back to Madras. There, on an auspicious day in 1673, they installed and consecrated the deity in a temple dedicated to the elephant god, Vinayakar, located in the garden of one Muthiyalu Naicken of Pedda Naickenpet. Subsequently, when Mari Chettiar sought to build a temple for the deity, funded in part by his wife's generous gift of her jewelry, Muthiyalu donated the Park Town lands on which the temple now stands. When Mari completed the temple, he handed its management and that of its financial trusts to the "eighteen group" Beeri Chettiars, the eighteen named clusters (gumbuhal ; sing., gumbu ) that composed the Town Beeri Chettiar community at that time. In commemoration of his services, the Beeri Chettiars installed a statue of Marl Chetti near one of the temple's sanctums, where he is worshiped today as a god. Here we see an individual, Mari Chetti, being commemorated for what he had done.

Aside from this legend, lists of donations, and a few undocumented stories, little specific historical detail is known of the temple. Nonetheless, challenges by covetous leaders of other castes to the exclusive control of the temple by the leaders of the George Town Beeri Chettiars have been unsuccessful so far. What historical evidence there is of Beeri Chettiar control has been too strong.

From archival materials, endowment records, and stone inscriptions in the temple we do know that Beeri Chettiar control of the temple is at least two hundred years old. F. L. Conradi's 1755 map (map 3) of "Madraspatnam," as the city was then called, depicts a small unnamed shrine at what is the temple's location today (Love 1913, 2: endpocketmap). We know that the temple was renovated and sanctified as a brick temple in 1780 by the "eighteen group Beeri Chettiars." We know that

Map 3.
Madras in 1755. Based on "A Plan of Fort St. George and The Bounds
of Madraspatnam" by F. L. Conradi.

about 1865 the temple was rebuilt of stone in its present form, and that in 1869 a generous man named Vaiyabari Chettiar donated Rs. 66,000, an enormous sum in those days, to establish a trust to fund various temple functions. He also built the large temple car (teer ) in which the processional idol of the god is carried on the seventh day of the main annual festival (brahmootsavam ). We also know that around 1880 Akkamapettai Govinda Chettiar and Narayana Chettiar donated the land next to the temple for the purpose of building a large community hall, the Spring Hall (Vasantha Mandabam). And we know that in 1901 Kali Rattina Chettiar, a wealthy businessman and the father-in-law of Bala's father-in-law, donated Rs. 50,000 to build the temple's entrance tower (gopuram ) and, in a dramatic gesture still spoken of with awe, gave a cup of diamonds for jewelry to decorate the idol.

Richly endowed, the temple today owns more than sixty houses, most located on prime urban land. The head temple priest's house, which is rented to him by the temple, gives an idea of values. In 1986, its worth was estimated at Rs. 10-15 lakhs (1 lakh equals 100,000 rupees), $100,000 or more at a 1986 rate of exchange. A few of the endowments have been especially grand. The previously mentioned gift of a cup of diamonds and Rs. 50,000 by Kali Rattina Chettiar is one of these, a gift that in those days was worth many times the value of a house. Another is Bala's uncle Venugopal Chettiar's gift to the temple of ten grounds of urban land, which are today the site of a one-thousand-student Beeri Chettiar grammar school founded under Bala's administration. Other endowments sponsor particular festivals; they buy flowers and textiles for rituals and clothes for the deity. Yet others fund building, renovations, and cultural events. Today the temple controls hundreds of millions of rupees in assets.

The rich endowment of the temple reflects its popularity and the affluence of the Beeri Chettiars. As a measure of the temple's lively appeal, the temple concession that looks after the sandals of worshipers annually earns about Rs. 36,000 by charging customers a small fee of ten paise^[7] for safeguarding their footwear while they go barefoot into the temple. Given that many locals leave their sandals at home when they are going to the temple and avoid the charge, this sum equates with at least 360,000 individual visits to the temple each year. This popularity is especially evident during the Spring Festival (Vasantha Brahmootsavam) when the god, garlanded in flowers and bedecked in gold and diamond jewelry, is taken on lengthy nighttime processions. On these nights, when the processions are longest, crowds gather in the streets for

miles. These crowds are the audience before whom the trustees play out temple pageantry depicting the trustees' role as patrons and the wealth and importance of the Beeri Chettiar civic community.

The temple's rich endowment also reflects the sense each endowment donor has of his or her civic individuality, since endowments state something about who each donor is in relationship to the Beeri Chettiar community: that he or she is an acknowledged member of the community and makes his or her gift in the interest of the caste's collective good. Through his gift, the individual achieves for posterity a respected reputation within the community congregation. Over the centuries Beeri Chettiars, singly and as associations, have made numerous donations, both large and small, slowly building the temple's wealth. Individual donors without children who have left houses and property to the temple are commemorated in inscriptions and posters that list donations. Without descendants, their donations must preserve their identity within the civic community and keep alive a memory of who they were.

A Viswakarma once told me that a person with lots of gold has abundant strength and fertility. So, too, a community. On the night of our initial meeting, demonstrating the temple's wealth, Bala first described the gold ritual vehicles and processional objects possessed by the temple, and then, with the others at the meeting, we left the office to examine them in their locked sheds. He made clear the connection between donors and sponsors and particular ritual objects: the Beeri Chettiar Iron Merchants Association donated the gold crown worn by the processional idol and all the gems that encrust it; the Town's betel leaf^[8] merchants donated approximately 2.5 kilograms of gold for the gold peacock processional vehicle (vahana ); the shroff (bankers and dealers in bullion) merchants donated 4.0 kilograms of gold for an elephant processional vehicle. And the Town Beeri Chettiars as a community donated 3.0 kilograms of gold for the processional palanquin of the supernatural warrior-hero and ally of Kandasami, Surabatman.

The temple also has a silver-plated car, strung with colored lights, constructed with temple funds. Temple cars have a pyramidal form, ornately decorated with carvings, temples on wheels. Some are huge juggernauts, towering twenty to thirty feet or more. Electric wires obstruct the passage of these biggest of cars, and today only a few are taken on procession in the city. Others, smaller, are designed to pass below the city's electrical lines. The garlanded and jewel-bedecked idol is carried in the car-shrine during processions, often with priests sitting before it in order to accept and present offerings submitted by worshipers. In

Figure 5.
Gold-plated temple car (teer ) with the Kandasami gopuram in the
background. The processional idol of Kandasami may be seen riding in the car.

1984, in his role as head trustee of the temple, Bala himself built for the temple with temple funds a gold teer plated with 7 kilograms of gold, one of twelve in southern India, and a significant new expression of the temple's claim to importance.

In their opulence, each of these ritual objects declares to all who see or hear of them the vitality of the George Town Beeri Chettiars and ide-

alizes the altruistic commitment to the civic community of the associations and leading citizens who gave. Of course, everyone recognizes that the objects also make great advertisements for the donors and the Beeri Chettiars as a community and boost reputations. Bala and the others were showing me that the Kandasami temple is regarded by the Beeri Chettiars as a key institutional symbol not only of their community as a whole, but also of its leading citizens and associations.

Temple Processions, Community, and the Eminence of Leaders

If the temple is a symbol of the community, then the temple's builders and the officers of the temple and its events are key agents of the community. They take responsibility for the community's image and in doing so draw attention not only to the community, but also to their own individual importance within it. Without leaders, there is no community; without a community, there are no leaders. Civic leadership and community go hand in hand.

During festivals and important times of worship, which are collective community events, temple trustees and other leading citizens among the Beeri Chettiars enact ritual roles that single them out and publicly dramatize their eminence as instrumental individuals within their community. During a special worship, for example, the sponsor stands closest to the deity among the spectators and acts the role of a dignified but humble host to important guests and spectators (fig. 6). South Indian culture values the leader who is generous, who acts on behalf of his followers. The leader's actions and position near the god mark him as responsible for the event and indicate that he is important. It will be known that he is responsible for accomplishing things in other social arenas as well. Should he show special respect to others while enacting his ritual roles, this recognition confers on them public prominence. The sponsor's civic individuality, therefore, is expressed partially by his eminence and his seemingly selfless agency, his status as a temple trustee or as a sponsor of a ritual event. After the worship he will receive tokens of special respect from the head priest, marks of honor, such as a large quantity of prasadam (food "left" by the god) that he can distribute, in recognition of his instrumental role as sponsor. When a temple event is important, great prestige is attached to these symbols of respect because they indicate a man's significance within his community, and for all the outward appearance of altruism, the reality is that leading men compete bitterly to achieve or protect rights to them. By the mechanism of his own re-

Figure 6.
Tiru P. Balasubramaniyam, head trustee or dharmakarttaa of the Kandasami
temple, shown here with the decorated processional idol of Kandasami, who is flanked by
his two consorts. The humble demeanor of Bala is characteristic of a sponsor of worship.
George Town, 1992.

distribution, the recipient of honors confers respect on others as well. In a few instances at Kandasami festivals, leaders belonging to other castes are also publicly marked with ritual honors, indicating their status as respected but subordinate allies.

The most important of the Kandasami temple festivals is the annual twenty-day Spring Festival. During this festival the god, Kandasami, is treated like a king, engaged in the activities in which a real king might be engaged at the onset of spring. He leaves his palace, the temple, and goes out on excursions (mandaga padi ), and, symbolizing the annual renewal of life, he reenacts his marriage to his two wives. His love marriage to his second wife, Valli, a mythical tribal princess encountered on one of his excursions, is an especially popular ritual event among women.

The twenty days of the festival are a period of celebration among the Beeri Chettiars, a time of spectacular entertainments and grand ritual events. Under a huge pandal , or thatched roof, funded by the Vaiyabari

endowment and directed by Bala, the temple and Kandan Arts, an association founded and headed by Bala, sponsor public concerts in the street that runs before it, and the crowds that come out to celebrate and worship are large. The temple processions reach out like tendrils, entwining the constituencies the temple serves, providing leaders associated with the events opportunities to be seen publicly in roles that declare their individual importance as the community's civic leaders. Ideally, the more prominent a leader's ritual role, the greater his fame and influence. In reality, the more important a leader's ritual roles are, the more apt his claim to eminence is to be contested. The politics of temple leadership reflect the competition of local leaders for prominence as individuals within their community. Temple offices and ritual roles are their "badges" of prestige and honor, badges that in most cases must be individually achieved.

Temple processions go where the trustees and sponsors have clientele, persons who will be attracted to the event and among whom the leaders wish to publicize who they are. For example, over the years, north Indians, who do not participate in such festivals, have gradually replaced the south Indians who used to live around the non-denominational Ekambareeswarar temple, just to the north of the Kandasami temple (see map 2). As a result, the trustees of that temple have modified its processional routes so that they leave the area behind and enter the residential area of south Indians. There the roles of the trustees are still appreciated. However, processions cannot go anywhere a temple's management might like to go because other temples and their leaders mark off their own domains. A temple's domain is the constituency area of its leading men, and if a procession were to enter uninvited the domain of a temple controlled by a different set of leaders, the incursion would be seen as an act of aggression, an attempt by the encroaching temple's leaders to poach on the clientele of the other temple. In George Town, where prominent castes control their own denominational temples, an elaborate processional etiquette exists, which historically has been much contested and negotiated. Reflecting the old left-hand/right-hand moiety division that separates Muthialpet and Mannady (the domain of the left-hand Beeri Chettiars) from Pedda Naickenpet (the territory of the right-hand castes), even today no Kandasami temple procession enters or passes through Pedda Naickenpet (map 4).

The Kandasami temple has several processional routes (see maps 5 and 6), which declare the influential reach of the Park Town Beeri Chettiars. One circumscribes the block in which the temple is located, the

four streets known as the Chinna Maada Viithi (Little Temple Streets). A second begins like the first but then goes north to the Ekambareeswarar temple along Mint Street, then returns along Nyinappa Naicken Street, Evening Bazaar Road, returning along Mint Street. These streets are known as the Periya Maada Viithi (Big Temple Streets). A third route, now defunct, used to take the idol to the Angalaparameeswari temple for the benefit of the Beeri Chettiars who live in Sulai (Choolai), in west Madras. A fourth route proceeds along N.S.C. Bose Road, Thambu Chetti Street to the Kachaleeswarar temple. A fifth, which used to go to the Harbor Beach, now travels further south to the Marina Beach because the harbor has been closed off, making its beach inaccessible. The sixth runs the length of Thambu Chetti Street, leaves the Town area, and continues north deep into Royapuram. This processional takes Kandasami out beyond the northern border of the Town to what once was countryside. On its return, it travels along Lingi Chetti Street before returning to the Kandasami temple. Bala is now talking about developing yet another processional route that will take the idol to the Kapaleeswarar temple, a major temple located in Mylapore, several miles to the south.

The Community Center and Its Galaxy of Institutions

In the recent past, the Kandasami temple was only one of several religious institutions that the leaders of the George Town Beeri Chettiars used to organize their community. Although the community is no longer so tightly knit, caste members still understand the organization of their community in terms of these institutions and the framework for leadership they provide. To conjure a picture of community and leadership, therefore, it is necessary to describe these institutions and the relationships that once characterized them.

Although it is today the principal remaining community institution, in fact the Kandasami temple was once merely an important satellite temple of a central aggregate complex of institutions located in Muthialpet that the Town Beeri Chettiars used as institutions of leadership and community during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. That the Kandasami temple is among the last institutions with castewide significance in George Town is an indication of just how much community solidarity among the Town Beeri Chettiars has declined since the turn of the century, a decline that has accelerated since the 1950s.

Map 4.
Kandasami temple long processional routes and destinations.

Map 5.
Kandasami temple processional routes to Choolai and to Marina Beach.

Until the late 1950s, caste leaders controlled a big-man centered galaxy of ritual institutions, which together formed a mandala, each point in the layout of which was a satellite that served its own constituency and was headed by a different mix of leaders.^[9] In the case of the George Town Beeri Chettiars, this galaxy framed a minipolity composed of the caste's leading members, including caste headmen (sing. ejamaanan ), and their constituencies, called "clusters," which together constituted the civic community of the caste in the Town.

Map 6.
Kandasami temple processional routes to Kachaleeswarar temple and to Royapuram.

In addition to the Kandasami temple, caste leaders controlled two other major kingly temples in Muthialpet, the Kachaleeswarar temple, built around 1725, which, prior to the twentieth century, was the caste's central temple, and the nearby Mallegeeswarar temple, first referred to in British records in 1652 (Love 1913, 1:119n). Each of these temples was an important satellite in the caste's institutional galaxy (see maps 2 and 3), although in the 1950s the caste lost control of both.

Figure 7.
The north end of Lingi Chetti Street, with the Mallegeeswarar temple
and mandabam . The tin shed to the right of the Raja Gopuram houses a large
temple car. Muthialpet, 1992.

In addition to these temples, other satellite institutions filling out the Beeri Chettiar's George Town mandala were a large agraharam , or residential street of priestly Brahmans, associated with the Kachaleeswarar temple, which was a kind of priestly center to the Town Beeri Chettiar's civic domain; a caste monastery, located within the agraharam , the

Figure 8.
A view of part of the agraharam that surrounds the Kachaleeswarar temple on
three sides. The first building on the right is the Abanatha Dharma Siva Acharya Madam,
the Beeri Chettiar's caste madam or monastery. Muthialpet, 1992.

Abanatha Dharma Siva Acharya Madam, which housed the caste's celibate Brahman guru and was where leaders of the caste community met in council in the nineteenth century; the caste death-rituals shrine and tank, the Attipattaan Kulam, located some distance from the caste's residential streets, and a host of lesser temples and "public" institutions and locations in the Town area and its surroundings within which caste leaders maintained rights. One of the more important of what I am labeling here "lesser" temples included the Kaalahasteeswarar temple, which the Beeri Chettiars built in 1640, one year after the British founded Fort St. George at Madras (Love 1913, 3:388). The temple is located on what became Coral Merchant Street. There are numerous others, some fairly large, some small, built by the caste.

Institutional galaxies, such as the Beeri Chettiar's, are loosely integrated, since each of its satellites can conceivably stand alone and is typically characterized in the public's mind by its current preeminent leader

and lieutenants. These institutions are, therefore, what I am calling big-man or leader-centered institutions, not only because locals sometimes refer to their top leaders as periyar or periyadanakaarar (big-gift-givers), but also because these leaders use the institutions they control to attract their followers (see Mines and Gourishankar 1990; Mines 1992). It is the pyramidal overlapping leadership and constituencies of these institutions, a layering of alliances and tacit agreements among big-men and ordinary caste members, rather than any overarching system of administration, that makes them satellites in a galactic polity. However, as I describe in chapter 4, in the nineteenth century, the principal headmen of the eighteen named gumbuhal of the caste did meet in council, the Periyagramam, to jointly administer caste affairs and to enforce caste codes (ILR, 135). But at that time each of the eighteen gumbuha1 of the Beeri Chettiars also formed a distinct constituency under its own head-man and handled its own affairs with the recognized proviso that when differences between gumbu actions and Periyagramam dictates arose, the gumbu headman deferred to the Periyagramam.

In those days, it was the Periyagramam council that selected the trustees of the Kandasami temple, while some of their members separately controlled major ritual institutions that extended the influence of the Beeri Chettiar leaders beyond the Town. For example, one Beeri Chettiar headman was the suroodiriyamtaar^[10] of a major temple in Tiruvotriyur, just to the north of the Town, a status that gave him an inheritable right to the temple's office of head trustee. His descendant is the suroodiriyamtaar and head trustee today. Another headman was the hereditary trustee^[11] of a major temple in Tiruvanmiyuur, the Murugeeswarar temple, located on the way to Mahabalipuram to the south. Yet another controlled a temple near Poonamallee to the west, while the trustees of the madam also administered a shrine and shelter (mandabam ) in Tiruvaalangadu, not far from Poonamallee at the site where caste elders believe the original Dharma Siva Acharya Madam was located.^[12]

The reader should notice in this description the mandala pattern that begins to emerge, which extends the leadership of Beeri Chettiars well beyond George Town. In fact, according to one informant, himself a descendant from a headman family, when a headman family sponsored an auspicious event, such as a marriage, it was still the custom in the 1920s to prepare twelve offerings of betel nut and leaf (a traditional offering of hospitality, called a taambuulam ) to give to persons who attended as representatives from outlying locations where the Town Beeri Chettiars

maintained Important ritual rights. A taambuulam would then be given to the chief visitor from each locale for distribution at their home institutions, a kind of symbolic announcement to the community of the family's auspicious event.^[13]

Portraying the Center:
Muthialpet’s Kachaleeswarar Complex

Until the end of the nineteenth century the Kachaleeswarar temple was the central temple of the George Town Beeri Chettiars. Today, despite the popularity of the Kandasami temple and the superior wealth of their locale, the Park Town Beeri Chettiars still portray their former status as a satellite of Muthialpet during the Kandasami temple's Spring Festival when, on the morning of the eleventh day, they take the idol of the god on procession. The god, Kandasami, enacting the role of a living king, travels to the Kachaleeswarar temple to celebrate the renewal of life that the winter rains have brought and to float on a raft in the temple's tank. Today, unfortunately, the tank is dry because the Town's water table has fallen, so, as one informant said with a twinkle in his eye, the idol goes instead "for the stroll."

At the tank, Kandasami is joined by the idol of Kaligambal, the benevolent female deity who gives her name to another nearby temple on Thambu Chetti Street (see map 2), this one controlled by the Viswakarmas, or Smiths, who have carried her here this morning in procession. Like Kandasami, Kaligambal's idol has come to "float" on a raft in the Kachaleeswarar tank and to pay respect to the more powerful god-king, Kachaleeswarar. The two deities coming together like this expresses the friendly relationship that has historically existed between the Beeri Chettiar community and the Viswakarmas who live among them, but it also suggests that the trustees of these two temples were once the subordinate lieutenants of the trustees of the Kachaleeswarar temple.

In British times, older informants say, the Viswakarmas were poor compatriots of the Beeri Chettiars and were often employed by them. One informant told me that forty years ago it was common for young Smith girls to work as domestic servants in Beeri Chettiar households. In yet earlier times, when the temple was built in the eighteenth century, the two castes were leading members of the left-hand moiety of castes that lived east of Popham's Broadway and were allies in competition with the right-hand castes that lived to the west. This is the old division of George Town, which, as we have seen, has left its legacy in the local

organization of the Town and in legal rights in institutions. The Float Festival, a day-long celebration that occurs during the annual Spring Festival, continues to symbolize the old alliance between the two castes.

The Float Festival is also associated with two of the Town's most venerable legendary Beeri Chettiar big-men, Thambu Chetti and Lingi (sometimes Linga) Chetti. Two of Muthialpet's main streets today bear the names of these former leaders. In the eighteenth century, the Kachaleeswarar temple was sometimes called "Tambi Chetti's pagoda" (Love 1913, 2:541-2), and according to British East India Company records, the temple and its tank were built by Thambu Chetti in 1725, when he was one of the Company's chief merchants and the premier headman or chief of the Town Beeri Chettiars (Love 1913, 3:387-8, 391). He built the temple on land that had belonged to Lingi Chetti, a contemporary headman-merchant and in the mid-1700s the mint contractor of the British East India Company that ruled Madras at that time (Love 1913, 2:312-13n). Lingi Chetti was a major employer of Smiths in the mint and his relationship with the caste may well have been the source of the connection between the Beeri Chettiars and the Smiths that continues today.

One of the first stories Bala told me, a story others often repeated to me, concerns an attempt by the trustees of the Kandasami temple during Thambu Chetti's reign to carry on the "float" festival independently of the Kachaleeswarar temple. My informants' purpose in telling me the story was to describe the power and control that a preeminent big-man had in former times, power which enabled him to dictate relationships among leaders within the community polity. The story goes that the trustees of the Kandasami temple decided to hold the event at the Kandasami temple itself rather than go to the Kachaleeswarar temple. When Thambu Chetti heard of the plan, he immediately ordered the Town officer to instruct the Kandasami trustees to bring the deity to the Kachaleeswarar tank as tradition dictated. Hearing of Thambu Chetti's displeasure, the persons responsible for the day's festival rushed to him to apologize and beg forgiveness. Thambu Chetti chided them for their presumption and ordered them to renovate the Kachaleeswarar temple palanquin, used to carry the god in processions, as an expiation for their action.

This story, of course, also tells us that the Kandasami temple is seen by today's leaders as once having been a satellite of the Kachaleeswarar temple and that the Beeri Chettiars of Park Town were once under the jurisdiction of Muthialpet's leaders. My informants thought that

the story clearly illustrated the great importance of individual leaders, especially the premier big-man of the community, and his dictatorial power.

F. L. Conradi's map of "Madraspatnam" (see map 3) supports this view of the satellite status of the Park Town Beeri Chettiars. The map depicts the Kachaleeswarar temple in 1755 as centered in what we know from records was the heart of the Beeri Chettiar community. The temple is grand, surrounded on three sides by the tree-lined streets of a Brahman agraharam . There is no other temple in this section of the Town as large. Only the Ekambareeswarar temple in Pedda Naickenpet, the section of George Town then controlled by the right-hand castes, is comparable. There is a noticeable symmetry in the size of these two major temples, a balanced representation of each moiety's importance and power. By contrast, in 1755 the Kandasami temple is depicted as little more than a small shrine. Kachaleeswarar's size aside, what gives the temple its centrality in the caste's institutional galaxy is its agraharam and, located within the agraharam , the Beeri Chettiar's caste madam . The temple, the madam , and the agraharam together constituted the central institutions of civic leadership within the Muthialpet area until the end of the nineteenth century.

The agraharam once housed a Brahman priestly community, members of which were supported at least in part by Beeri Chettiar "charity," reflecting both the caste's spirituality and wealth.^[14] Endowing Brahmans, for example, by feasting them—sometimes the Beeri Chettiars fed a thousand at a time—was a traditional way of symbolically maintaining the relationship between the wealth and power of leading individuals and the caste community on the one hand and the cosmic order on the other. This public gifting of Brahmans and the large agraharam dramatized, therefore, not only the honorable reputation and eminence of the caste civic community and its leaders who endowed Brahmans, but also represented the civic community as an orthodox ethical order. At the center of this urban cosmos was the temple-palace housing the god-king, Kachaleeswarar. Next were the agraharam streets that encircled the temple. Finally, came the civic community itself, which was made part of the cosmic fabric by the processional streets of the temple that wove through the community.

As noted, the third institution of the Kachaleeswarar temple aggregation is the caste madam , the Abanatha Dharma Siva Acharya Madam, located within the agraharam . Until 1876, the madam housed

the celibate Brahman spiritual head of the caste, the Dharma Siva Acharyar, whose duty it was to instruct Beeri Chettiars on their moral codes. In the nineteenth century, the madam was also importantly the administrative center of the George Town Beeri Chettiars and the meeting place of their caste council, the Periyagramam, a council of between twenty-one and twenty-two headmen in the 1880s (ILR, 135). This council remained active until near the end of the nineteenth century. In the uses of the madam , the reader should notice again how the Beeri Chettiars harmonized and dramatized worldly power and wealth with ceremonials and a ritualized depiction of their position in the cosmic order.

Today, the trustees of the Kandasami temple still see themselves as part of the Muthialpet Beeri Chettiar community, but, even so, the George Town community acknowledges few leaders and has nothing like the cohesiveness that it once had. There are still descendants of head-man families living in George Town, and among them there are some who are influential public figures. But, as one informant explained, most today are merely ordinary men. Descendants of many of the old families have left business for other lines of work and, no longer so dependent on connections, have moved out of George Town. As they have, the residential composition of Park Town and Muthialpet has changed dramatically. "You do not even know who lives in the next house," one old-time resident told me.

In the late 1950s, quarreling among themselves, Beeri Chettiar leaders lost control of the Kachaleeswarar and the Mallegeeswarar temples to the state run Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, widely referred to by Tamils as the HRCE Department. In the 1960s, the Kandasami temple was also threatened with takeover by the HRCE Department. First in 1964 and again in 1969 the Department appointed managing boards to the temple. For a time the caste collectively controlled no important big-man institutions.

But in 1967 things began to change slowly. Several Park Town residents petitioned the HRCE Department to allow the caste again to elect their own temple trustees, and in 1976, several residents, including the head trustee of the caste madam and some of Bala's allies, filed a civil suit to regain the legal right to do so. As a consequence, pending a final decision by the Madras High Court, elections were again held in 1978, the first since 1957, but with the new proviso mentioned early in this chapter: In order to increase Beeri Chettiar involvement in the temple, the temple's charter ("scheme") was modified to extend voting rights to

Beeri Chettiars living or doing business anywhere in Madras City. While Muthialpet still had its core of old Beeri Chettiar families, as it does today, by this time most had relations living elsewhere in the city. One elder Beeri Chettiar estimated that today there remain only about one thousand members of his caste still living in Muthialpet. The decline of the headman system, changes in education and in economic opportunity, high real estate prices, family partitioning, and the desire for more open spaces had dispersed the once compact community.

"It used to be," my elder informant said, "that everyone knew each other, but now often your neighbors are strangers." He then gave me an example to illustrate the extent of the change: People used to lend their jewelry to the temple to be used to decorate the idols during festivals. Donors knew that they would get their jewels back. Now, because the community is so loosely knit, no one lends jewelry, and it is unlikely, my informant thought, that they would get it back if they did. The high level of trust that went with a community organized and constrained by personalized face-to-face relationships has disappeared. To a considerable extent the need to establish trust through enduring personal ties has been replaced by impersonal contractual relationships, law, and governmental bureaucracy.

Reflecting on the institutions that the Beeri Chettiars once controlled in Muthialpet, it is easy to imagine how prior to 1959 the processions of the Beeri Chettiar's three main temples crisscrossed and circumscribed Muthialpet and Park Town. Caste leaders used these temples, in conjunction with the madam , their Periyagramam council, and the agraharam , to define the caste as a community and locality-based political domain. Viewed by all who saw them, the temples and their processions were grand and opulent expressions of the Beeri Chettiar's power and wealth. They stated who the Beeri Chettiar's leaders were, that the caste was a moral congregation, and that Muthialpet and Park Town were their neighborhood domains. Of course members of other communities subordinate to the Beeri Chettiars also lived among them, including the Smiths (Viswakarmas), as we have seen. But the caste that historically had been the Beeri Chettiar's chief rival, the Komati Chettiars, lived with their allied castes west of Popham's Broadway, where they had their own temple domain.

Clearly the Beeri Chettiars saw themselves and were seen by members of other castes as the dominant caste of Park Town and of Muthialpet and Mannady. They controlled a more elaborate ritual structure in those neighborhoods, including denominational temples, than did any other

caste, and so they controlled the public symbols of status and prestige associated with these institutions.

To Royapuram and Back, the Singularity of Leadership

My fieldwork journal for January 30 reads: "Bala tells me that he is now trying to reestablish some of the old etiquette associated with festivals. His aim, he says, is to reinvigorate the sense of community that he feels has been so greatly weakened among the Beeri Chettiars, especially over the last forty years." Prior to the Spring Festival, he had a temple servant personally deliver announcement-calenders of the festival to the heads of some of the old leading families of the Town, showing them special respect and inviting them to be present and honored during the events. Taking the Kandasami idol on procession through the Town, Bala still seeks to weave a community constituency from its residents (fig. 9).

On the night of the fifteenth day of the Spring Festival in 1986, Bala, as he has done every year in his role as head trustee, plans to take the idol through the length of George Town in a procession that will last until dawn. The procession will begin in Kasimedu, a part of Royapuram, the area of Madras City that lies just north of George Town. Here the idol is said to have "rested" during the day at a site owned by the temple, Suriya Narayana Chetti Choultry, named after its donor. The Choultry was once a wooded garden on the outskirts of the city, and the idol of Kandasami has been brought here in procession the night before to enjoy the spring forest^[15] and to fetch his bride-to-be, the tribal princess Valli, whom he will marry as his second wife on the sixteenth night of the Spring ritual cycle.

Returning to the Kandasami temple from Kasimedu, a journey of several miles, the procession will proceed down Mannarsami Koil Street, where thousands of celebrators are gathering to watch and make offerings to the god as he passes. When it reaches George Town, the procession will then pass down the full length of Lingi Chetti Street on the way back to the Kandasami temple.

Just prior to the procession, the principal sponsors and participants sit on mats chatting with their guests in a temporary enclosure erected to house the god. Priests dress the god and decorate him with a dense garland of flowers. I want to photograph the process, but after some discussion the priests decide that the deity should not be photographed in

Figure 9.
Kandasami on procession.

an undressed state. When the dressing is complete, the deity is carried to the front of the enclosure on his palanquin and the procession forms up. Bala, as the head trustee of the Kandasami temple, stands with a dignified demeanor at the head of the procession. He beckons me to stand on his right, a position that shows me special respect. The betel nut merchant, who is the chief sponsor of this night's festival, will walk with his middle-aged son on Bala's left. In his role as head trustee of the temple, Bala's eminence and authority is expressed by his position at the head

of the procession, and it is in his power to distinguish his allies with symbolic marks of respect such as inviting me to stand by his side. Normally, the other members of the temple's board of trustees would also walk with Bala, but on this occasion they choose not to attend because of an ongoing dispute for control of the temple. They are waiting to see what happens.

Before the procession leaves the "garden" it pauses, and spectators rush to the god to make offerings of fruit, incense, coconuts, and money. Sitting on the palanquin at the feet of the idol, priests take the offerings from the worshipers and present the offerings to the god, then, keeping the small sums of money and a portion of the rest of each offering, they return to the worshiper what remains as prasadam .

Entering a broad Royapuram street, the procession pauses again. Traffic has been diverted so that the night-long journey back to the Kandasami temple can be made. The residents of this section of Royapuram are poor. Many are fisher folk, someone tells me. Tens of thousands have come out for the god's passing and they fill the streets. As we stand before the god, a young fisherman approaches Bala and, addressing him as if he were a lord, shows him his shoulder, explaining that it was broken when he was beaten by the police. He asks Bala if he could help him to have his shoulder mended so that he will be able to work again. Observing this, I turn to my research assistant, who is walking with me, and remark that people are treating Bala like a king. "He is king!" my assistant responds.^[16]

The god next enters George Town and passes down Lingi Chetti Street. The idol pauses at street corners and before the houses of prominent men who are singled out when the god stops before their houses and the priests perform aaraati to them, giving them a coconut and fruit offering. The honored individual makes an offering of money in return. In this manner, the procession stops at the house of the hereditary trustee of the Tiruvotriyur temple. It also stops at the house of the head trustee of the Kaligambal temple, a Viswakarma. Proceeding further down the street, Kandasami again pauses to give respect to the goddess at the Kaligambal temple and then continues on his journey back to his temple. The following night, under the sponsorship of the betel nut merchant and his son, the marriage to Valli is to be staged.

Beeri Chettiars tell me that this grand procession and those of other festivals have been repeated each year for as long as anyone can remember. Sometimes new processional routes are established, which extend the reach of the community into new areas of the city, as Bala is

now attempting to do. Other times, old processional routes are given up or lost when a section of the city loses its significance to the caste community. Each procession provides its sponsors and the temple trustees a chance to portray themselves as their community's eminent men. Without community, their roles and sponsorship would be meaningless. The converse is also true: without leaders and their institutions, there would be no community. Not only is civic individuality an important expression of who a person is, but also the very structure of George Town is an expression of civic individuality.