Formulating the Agricultural Past of Tondaimandalam

If the British used efforts to reshape, repopulate, and rejuvenate the environment as a way to establish their firm connection with the Jagir (to naturalize and place themselves, as it were), various local actors asserted similar connections. Tamils regarded the region around Madras as the center of a cultural region called Toṇḍaimaṇḍalam, one of five such clusters in this language area. Further claims to the area were pressed by the Tondaimandala vellalas, who told British and other investigators that they were the original agricultural settlers in the region. They supported this claim by reference to considerable oral folk material. Other subcastes formed a substantial proportion of the population of the area. These included the paraiyars, who served generally as the Padiyals and Pannaiyals of the vellala Mirasidars, performing the tasks of plowing, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting the crops; the pallis, known as vanikula kshatriyas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the Telugu peasant subcastes originally from the north. According to the 1871 census, in the British administrative area called Chingleput District—which also served as the center of the Tondai cultural area—by far the largest proportion of the inhabitants were vellalas. They amounted to 62 percent of the population, while the paraiyars were 24.3 percent, and the pallis 19 percent. Brahmans, who had palli (not paraiyar) Padiyals and Pannaiyals, were only 3.6 percent of the total.^[91]

Thus, local claims to dominance in the area required certain constructions of the past as well as manipulation of dialogically produced documentation techniques such as the census. Formulations of the past necessarily became interactive projects. For instance, from the last decade of the eighteenth century the British sought to document the relationship of these populations to the Tondai country. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Colonel Colin Mackenzie, originally a military engineer, gathered large collections of local oral materials. Some of those oral histories, “transcribed” by Mackenzie’s local assistants, illustrated the story or the “history” of the entry of the agriculturalist vellalas in- to the Tondai country and their battles with the local “forest people” called the kurumbar.^[92] In addition, the remains of what were conceived to be the mud forts of the kurumbar, coupled with the oral history, caught the attention of British officials in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Thus, documentary projects, although identified with the names of British administrators, were often dominated by local inhabitants and local physical evidence. A prime example of this is the collaboration between Shankarayya and Ellis. Of all the British responsible for helping to document the past of the Tamil region, perhaps Francis Whyte Ellis, who died of cholera in Ramnad in 1819, is the best known. During his tenure as collector of Madras, he tried to describe the land system of this Tamil cultural region. In 1814, he wrote an extended account of the proprietary system of this region that took the form of comments on the mirasi land controlling system still operating with some force in the Tondai region. Ellis’s account of the Tondai country, even more than that produced by Place, formed part of an intensely interactive formulation of local Tamil culture. One educated individual named Shankarayya was very important in this process, although he died before Ellis’s manuscript was published. It was Shankarayya’s answers to a series of questions on mirasi that formed the basis of the material on which Ellis wrote his comments (referred to in this discussion as the Appendix). Shankarayya had held many posts in the Company’s revenue and judicial departments and was assigned to both the northern and southern districts of what became the Madras presidency (the “northern districts” were the largely Telugu ones and “southern districts” largely Tamil). He then obtained an appointment as head of Fort St. George College.^[93]

Although Shankarayya’s specific answers provided a strong basis for Ellis’s construction of the Tondai past, even Ellis argued that these ideas arose from a diffuse authorship. By way of mounting a case to authenticate his work on mirasi, Ellis wrote:

The facts respecting Mi’ra’si and it’s privileges are not matters of speculation, they are known to every inhabitant of the country where they exist, who are brought up in the habitual exercise and observation of them;—the terms which express them they have received from the lips of their mothers, they have formed the prattling of their infancy, and they remain indelible in their minds and on their tongues.^[94]

Ellis could make these assertions, of course, because he could find additional evidence to support Shankarayya’s insights. An unusually able linguist, he could read Telugu, Tamil, Kanarese, Malayalam, Sanskrit (in Grantha script), Hebrew, and apparently some Arabic and Persian. This gave him access to a wide variety of written texts not available to most members of the British bureaucracy in Madras. Indeed, the importance of access to language for this project is underscored by one part of Ellis’s task in the Appendix, which was to provide a large glossary of words then in use by Tamils in connection with the tax-gathering process for the Company. The way in which this glossary was itself constructed from a great variety of languages as well as written and oral traditions illustrates how heteroglot were these conceptions.

Part of Ellis’s self-assignment—encouraged, later, by his superiors, the Board of Revenue and the governor and his council in Madras—involved discerning whether an individual who was a Mirasidar (a person who had a share in what was a coparcenary proprietary system) could alienate that share. That is, Ellis wanted to know whether mirasi constituted a kind of real property so that the British could in turn apply their own legal apparatus to these transactions. Also, Ellis sought to write a history of the Tondai country to show that it was possible to use Tamil literary sources (such as the Kānchi Purāṇam) to illustrate the origin of the land system and caste groups who created it. Within this latter task, one of his main goals was to identify with considerable precision not only the extent of the Tondai area but also the actual number of the inhabitants who lived there when it was first settled by agriculturalists (as compared with the late eighteenth century, when Place first gave it centrality by his descriptions). Ellis contended that, for instance:

the extent and boundaries of the [Tondai] country thus settled, the number of the settlers and its variation in population and property in later times are to be traced, not by vague tradition only, as is too commonly conceived to be the case with respect to the remains of Indian History, but in writings of different periods, as substantially authentic, probably, though intermixed with undisguised fable, as the records of most other countries.^[95]

Both Ellis and his superiors, the government of Madras and the Madras Board of Revenue, agreed to believe that it was possible to identify with extraordinary precision the exact boundaries of Tondaimandalam and the ancient subdivisions within it. Indeed, when the government of Madras published Ellis’s Appendix in 1818, the Appendix included the sentiments of the governor and his council regarding the possibility of precision noting, for instance, the fact that the map of the “country known to the Natives by the name of Tondamandalam…[had been prepared] under the directions of the Officer in charge of the Survey Department” of the Madras government. Information on this map had been contributed by a variety of sources. Ellis found that the indigenous predecessors of the vellalas and the British—the kurumbars—had a series of territorial subdivisions called kōạạams improved on by the agriculturalist vellalas who introduced other subdivisions called nātus (or, as it is written in English, “nadus”). The government of Madras noted that although Thomas Barnard’s 1770s map of the Jagir did not mention these kottams and nadus, Place’s 1799 report did so. Thus, although the subdivision had been bureaucratically documented rather late, the governor’s council argued the age-old authenticity of this spatial organization and asserted that for the Tamils living in the area in 1818 all these territorial subdivisions still had great contemporary meaning:

To the people, however, these divisions, in detail at least, are still well known and, as frequently instanced in the following pages, are always referred to in deeds drawn up according to the old form. It could be easy, therefore, by enquiry on the spot to ascertain if not the precise boundary, the relative situations and general extent, not only of every Cottam, but of every Na’du, throughout that part of the province which remains in possession of the original Tamil settlers, and they may, possibly be traced, even in those parts from which they have been expelled by the encroachments of their Telugu and Cannadiya neighbours.^[96]

By reducing all his oral material and other received versions to governmentally approved texts with maps produced by the survey department, Ellis gave to much of the system a monologic quality and a rigidity that it had not had. Momentarily, the mirasi system had become involved in the production of a centripetal project to create an authoritative “knowledge.”

The following outline of the centripetal project will illustrate how it worked. As noted, Ellis sought to show that the original agricultural settlers called the vellalas (supported by Chola kings from the south) had overcome a group of forest people called the kurumbar who built mud forts. These mud forts, he felt, were maintained by the Cholas long after they conquered the region, “for the sites of many, marked by high mounds and deep hollows…are still pointed out.”

From this original base of society, Ellis then attempted to show the extent of certain areas to the north (where Telugu was spoken) as the region where warrior groups had taken over from the Tamil vellalas. He also wanted to document the fact that there was still a substantial region in the lower Tondai area (a Tamil-speaking zone) in the hands of the descendants of the “original” agricultural settlers of the region. Though a population who were not vellalas held a “considerable portion of the whole mirasi right…the institutions of the ancient Tamil Government, notwithstanding the innovations of recent times, remain in a great degree in force.” He also found, for instance, that in 1797–98, when a survey was undertaken by Place, the proportion of the Mirasidars (coparceners) to the rest of the population had a ratio of 1 to 6.5, or were about 16.5 percent of the total population.^[97] By contrast, at the time of their first agricultural settlement, he claimed that the vellala Mirasidars had represented 20 percent of the entire population. He noted that, until the “termination of the Tamil government by the invading Telugus and Muslims[,] none but the Vellalar possessed or were qualified to possess landed property in the ground.” Moreover, as the proprietary system called kaniyatci (a Tamil word) or mirasi (a later Arabic term adopted into Urdu and Tamil) developed, not only was it impossible for any person except a vellala to have a share in the product of the land, but the right of even allowing a vellala to become a member (Mirasidar or Kaniyatcikkarar) of this coparcenary group could only be granted by vellalas. In this construction, then, Ellis interwove linguistic culture, region, conquest, and land-controlling systems together in a political project that could be linked directly to the polity that British officials and others wanted to create for the future. This helped to unite culture to land.

The concept of a cultural region played an important part in the project whose outline we are tracing. The Tamil countryside was considered to consist of five socio-emotive regions called tinais. Each of these tinais (mountains, forest or pasture, countryside, seashore, and wasteland) had its own character. In addition, the Tamil country consisted of five cultural regions called Tondainadu or Tondaimandalam, Cholanadu or Cholamandalam, Pandyanadu, Kongunadu, and Cheranadu. In his Appendix, Ellis proceeded to show by extracts from the Kuvattu Puranam the exact extent of what he conceived to be the Tondai country. This region, which Tamils identified with the present-day area encompassing the administrative divisions of South Arcot, North Arcot, and the Chingleput districts, he delineated as encompassing 16,645 square miles.^[98] Upper Tondai, largely located in what was then the “native state” of Mysore, contained 5,168 square miles. He concluded that “the best features of ancient polity are now obliterated” but that at the same time “enough remains…of former institutions to prove that they were the same as other countries, swayed originally by the sceptre of the Tamil Princes.” One of the ways he indicated the extent to which ancient practices still obtained was to point to the fact that the paraiyar laborers still possessed “their original mirasi offices,” which indicated that they were still part of an “original polity.” Furthermore, he noted that the pallis (who were also sometimes Padiyals and Pannaiyals of the brahman Mirasidars) and the kaikolar or sengunthar weavers “retain the Tamil language.” What is of interest for us is that the sengunthars were part of the left-caste division who had very broad spatial ideas, in contrast to the vellalas whose self-conception as a right caste was one of extreme localism. The sengunthars throughout the pre-European period considered the propagation of Tamil an almost sacred responsibility. We know that it was the sengunthars who were responsible for spreading a version of the famous Tamil epic by Kamban from the Tamil into the Malayalam area to the west.^[99] We will see in the Conclusion of this work that in the twentieth century the sengunthars as left subcastes (many associated with temples and the performing arts) came to play an important role in spreading Tamil as part of a large-scale political movement. Therefore, long before the British arrival, mechanisms both spatial and cultural were at work in the Tamil region to connect large areas through the spread of Tamil. This activity was an essential ingredient in uniting what was considered Tamil culture and territory. Moreover, the policy of reducing spatial mobility during the course of the nineteenth century ultimately aided in identifying and fixing the constituent elements or villages to a large spatial regime considered quintessentially Tamil. The project of cultural “restoration,” then, brought even greater benefits to the left and right castes who participated in the dialogic process than it did to British administrators.

Another essential aspect of the project was the recognition that members of the Tondaimandala vellala subcastes considered themselves to be the original agricultural settlers of the area. Moreover, even though various groups, the most important of whom were the brahmans, had deprived many vellala of their rights to the mirasi, in 1797–98 the vellalas still comprised 53 percent of the Mirasidars in the Jagir or 14,757 of the total population of about a quarter of a million persons, followed in proportion by the brahman Mirasidars at 20 percent and Mirasidars of all the other subcastes at 27 percent. According to Ellis, not only had the number of vellala villages in the Tondai country decreased over the years, but the total number of vellala proprietors themselves had decreased as well. Some of the other castes had acquired rights to the mirasi or joint proprietorship by initially securing positions as Payirkkaris or Payirkkudis, tenants who were considered to be “strangers” or “outsiders” by the Mirasidars.^[100] Ellis also stated that it was his intention to show that it was possible to derive information

not perhaps precisely accurate nor very extensive, but more considerably than is generally supposed to exist, thereby to establish that there remain the means to tracing the right of landed property…which is claimed and in part enjoyed by the cultivators of the soil in that part of Tondaimandalam still in the possession of the Tamil Aborigines [the Tondaimandala vellalas] to a more remote antiquity than can justly be attributed to the generality of human institutions now existing.

He therefore placed “Tamil indigenous institutions” in an antique light, an important characteristic of the authoritative and monologic reconstruction of the past. How Ellis established his line of argument regarding the migration of the vellalas and their extermination of the kurumbar suggests how perilous was this process. One kind of source used by Ellis may have been a collection of Sanskrit manuscripts found at Pondicherry on the coast south of Madras.^[101] These, Ellis tried to prove, were manuscript compositions by Roberto di Nobili, a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary who created a group of materials under the title “Vedas.” Ellis’s biographer described these materials as joining together expositions of Jesuit religious doctrines with much legendary history in classical Sanskrit verse “with a view to palming them off on the natives of the Dekkan as the work of the Rishis and Munis, the inspired authors of their scriptures.”^[102] However, Ellis probably based the dating of the vellalar conquest of the Tondai country, among other things, on another “history” that related the kurumbar to the coming of St. Thomas (traditionally Thomas is considered to have arrived at Mylapore, south of Madras town). This latter manuscript is noted as having been translated from Latin by a certain ñāṉapirakāsa Piḷḷai. Describing Thomas being appointed to supervise the propagation of Christianity in the area where the kurumbar king, Kantappa Rāja, ruled, the story seeks to show how Thomas defeated local brahmans by doing miracles and converting many people to Christianity.^[103] Interestingly, although Ellis rejected the Jesuits’ use of textual materials from the area to legitimize their ideas, he nevertheless used Christian dating and archaicized these sources as a means for making Tamil cultural material ancient and therefore usable in the new historical setting. Moreover, the historical imperatives associated with his work on mirasi required that he archaicize his constructions in much the same way as he accused Nobili of doing.

It is significant in our delineation of this project to note that, in an environment of heteroglossia involving a number of different interpretations that could be put on the “pasts” of the region, Ellis had decided to place it not in the local or regional antique past of the Chola. Instead he placed it precisely at the time of Christ, a way of reckoning time that was not only Western but associated with the reckoning of those who had juridical power. This was his technique for appealing to the ideas of other times and other places, as well as for suggesting a development synchronized with the history of the West. In this, at least, Ellis’s British audience was significant; as we know, however, Hindus believed that simply reckoning things by Christian ideas was shallow by comparison with Hindu notions, whose era stretched back much farther into antiquity. In this new construction, placing vellala entrance into the Tondai area for Ellis proved to be the beginning of a “new age,” a new millennium that was related to the West and western culture generally. Ellis’s contribution, like that made by any novelist, operated in a heteroglot environment. This was an arena in which a number of local and relatively autonomous voices or interpretations from different epochs could be invoked and in which a large number of meanings could be employed for a unified text. Those elements addressing a British audience existed side-by-side and interacted with elements of great meaning to other actors involved in the project. At the same time, Ellis engaged in dialogic activity in which he dealt with elements of the past, the present, and the future simultaneously; these heterogenous elements were even contradictory in their nature. Not surprisingly, the results were not homogenous intellectual structures.

Ellis’s argument, then, emphasized that the proprietary institutions of the Tamil-speaking part of the subcontinent retained many usages that were more ancient than other areas of the world. Though this was a decision to privilege one interpretation over another, it played a part in a general discourse involving the Tondaimandala vellalas, the Payirkkari tenants, and the paraiyar and palli Pannaiyals and Padiyals, all of whom invested a great deal in these emerging interpretations. It was also a system in which Ellis sought to connect this part of the subcontinent with the rest of the world and to connect the present with the past. However, by proclaiming the great antiquity (at least in Christian terms) of these institutions, he was also speaking about the value of these institutions for a more interdependent future. Ellis obviously intended to demonstrate the great similarities between the political, social, and proprietary institutions of the Tamil country and those of Britain. In that sense, he was fulfilling his historical function. At the same time, Ellis simply formed part of a large authoring process, the product of which addressed far more than Ellis’s avowed goals for the Company.

It was clear that the British and others from the area used the spatial fixing of the vellalas in the Tondai region as a way to prescribe sedentary villages for the area even though earlier evidence suggested that villagers moved about a great deal. Indeed, the emphasis on sedentary society certainly predated Ellis and his work. Prior to Ellis’s account of the mirasi proprietary land system in 1814, Place had outlined many of the same facts and ideas, drawn from his own Tamil, Telugu, and other informants. In a large report written in late 1798 and early 1799, Place had noted that the Chola Raja collected the “whole of the Mudali tribe called the Vellalars who were sent to settle Tondaimandalam.”^[104] Place also wrote that the country had been divided into territorial domains called kottams, a reference to kurumbar policies. He quoted a story about the meaning of the term “kaniyatci,” the older Tamil term for mirasi. According to Place and his local informants, the story indicated that the Chola king from the south had fixed the affections of the vellalas on the soil of the Tondai country “so strongly” that they could not even harbor a wish to leave.^[105] Thus, Place could argue that the spatialization of the vellalas in the villages of the Tondai country had begun long before the British arrived. At the same time, Place participated in the expansion of the idea of “vellala,” arguing that a person was considered a vellala if he had ever possessed the mirasi or kaniyatci right.^[106]

In other Company documents of the late eighteenth century, considerable information emerged to indicate that Company servants knew much about vellala self-ascription as the original agricultural settlers of the area. One document composed by the Board of Revenue focused on the value of the vellalas as sedentarizing agents. In an analysis of mirasi rights of early 1796, the Madras Board of Revenue noted that the right to kaniyatci or mirasi was originally conferred “in compensation for clearing lands…to fix the people to their respective villages.”^[107] All of this helps us understand to some degree the attitude that the British had about the function of the mirasi system and the place that the British believed the vellalas had in the Jagir in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What it also illustrates quite clearly is that vellala self-ascriptions contributed to the general process that characterized the society of the Tondai region as both unchanging and composed of certain villages whose populations hardly ever moved. To achieve this result, both the vellalas and the British appealed to “normative” descriptions of other places and other times. In contrast, evidence suggests that at the end of the eighteenth century only slightly more than half of the Mirasidars of the Jagir were vellalas. What is more important, we know that the population moved continually because of trade, war, famine, searches for sufficient water resources, and work.^[108] Similarly, the material surrounding the repopulation of the Tondai region after the departure of Hyder’s armies provides another vivid example of this movement. Thus, interactional formulations about the “eternal unchanging villages of the Tondai country” primarily related to what local individuals and the British believed and served as projections of future social and political requirements. On the basis of these interactions among Ellis, Place, many other English employees of the Company, and thousands of local individuals, a social utopia constructed from the past was used to invoke a future cooperative and interdependent civil society. These utopian visions of progress and history provided the foundation for the dialogic construction not only of land but also of the future political order.