Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste

By C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan

“An impressive biography. . . . [A] standard reference in the scholarship of Tamil Nadu and the conundrum of caste and class.” —American Anthropologist

A cruise along the streets of Chennai—or Silicon Valley—filled with professional young Indian men and women, reveals the new face of India. In the twenty-first century, Indians have acquired a global visibility of rapid economic advancement and prowess in the information technology industry. C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan examine one group who have taken part in this development: Tamil Brahmans—a formerly traditional, rural, high-caste elite who have transformed themselves into a new middle-class caste in India, the United States, and elsewhere.

Fuller and Narasimhan offer the most comprehensive look at Tamil Brahmans to date, examining Brahman migration to urban areas, transnational migration, and how the Brahman way of life has translated to both Indian cities and American suburbs. They look at modern education and the new employment opportunities afforded by engineering and IT. They examine how Sanskritic Hinduism and traditional music and dance have shaped Tamil Brahmans’ middle-class sensibilities and how middle-class status is related to the changing position of women. Above all, they explore the complex relationship between class and caste systems and the ways in which hierarchy has persisted in modernized India.

“An essential read.” —Radhika Santhanam, The Hindu

“An indispensible read not just for all those who wish to understand caste formation . . . but for Tamil Brahmans themselves. It will help them rethink the notion that their professional achievements are somehow . . . rooted in their caste and see them instead as a product of the opportunities provided by the colonial and postcolonial state.” —Nandini Sundar, Delhi University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780226152882

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C. J. Fuller is emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of several books, including The Camphor Flame and The Renewal of the Priesthood.

Haripriya Narasimhan is assistant professor of social anthropology and sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978–0-226–15260–8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978–0-226–15274–5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978–0-226–15288–2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fuller, C. J. (Christopher John), 1949– author.

Tamil brahmans : the making of a middle-class caste / C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-15260-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-15274-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-15288-2 (e-book)

1. Brahmans—India—Tamil Nadu—Social conditions.   2. Tamil (indic people)—India—Tamil Nadu—Social conditions.   3. Middle class—India—Tamil Nadu.   4. Caste—India—Tamil Nadu.   5. Tamil Nadu (India)—Social conditions.   I. Narasimhan, Haripriya, author.   II. Title.

DS432.B73F85 2014

305.894'8110548208622—dc23

2013046104

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Tamil Brahmans

The Making of a Middle-Class Caste

C. J. FULLER

HARIPRIYA NARASIMHAN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

ONE / The Village: Caste, Land, and Emigration to the City

TWO / Education and Employment in the Colonial Period

THREE / Education and Employment after Independence

FOUR / The Changing Position of Women

FIVE / Urban Ways of Life

SIX / Religion, Music, and Dance

SEVEN / Tamil Brahmans as a Middle-Class Caste

APPENDIX / Tamil Brahman Demographics

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since 2003, when we began the research on which this book is based, countless people have given us information and guidance, discussed our work with us, and commented on our writings. Unfortunately, it is impossible to thank them all here and we apologize to those whose names are omitted, but there is still a long list of people to whom we must express our gratitude.

First and foremost, we are grateful to all the people who told us about themselves, their families, their communities, and their life and work, in the course of our research on the middle class in Chennai in 2003–5 and on Tamil Brahmans, particularly members of the Eighteen-Village Vattima community, in Chennai, the village of Tippirajapuram, and elsewhere in 2005–8. In this book, all our informants have been given pseudonyms, but we can still thank those who have been especially helpful to us. They include the late Rajagopal Natarajan, the late Jayam Vasudevan, the late Komalavalli Vedantachari, T. Vedanthachari and S. Parthasarathy, and V. L. Vijayaraghavan; T. Kannan Jagan and Indira Jagan, R. Ramkumar, P. Ramalingam, the late V. M. Ravikumar, Akila Satheesh, and Srikant Srinivasan; A. V. Ramamurthy and Thayyu Ramamurthy and their extended families, A. V. Swaminathan and Mangalam Swaminathan, N. Gopalaswamy, V. Pichu, Subbu Ramamurthy, Santha Raman, and Jayam Venkatraman. We owe special thanks for their help and hospitality to J. Pari, Akila Santhanam, and K. S. Sasisekaran.

For their comments, criticisms, advice, and encouragement, we thank those who read an earlier draft of this book: Isabelle Clark-Decès, John Harriss (who also worked with us in Chennai in 2003–5), Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Johnny Parry (whose criticisms were characteristically acute), Nandini Sundar, and David Washbrook, as well as Mattison Mines and Sylvia Vatuk, who read the manuscript for the University of Chicago Press. For valuable conversations about Tamil Brahmans, we also thank S. Anandhi, Pushpa Arabindoo, Indira Arumugam, Janaki Bakhle, Mukulika Banerjee, Véronique Benei, André Béteille, Maurice Bloch, Nick Dirks, Henrike Donner, Peggy Froerer, Ramachandra Guha, Eugene Irschick, M. A. Kalam, David Ludden, David Mosse, V. K. Natraj, M. S. S. Pandian, Indira Peterson, Gyan Prakash, Arvind Rajagopal, Bhavani Raman, Velcheru Narayana Rao, the late Marie-Louise Reiniche, Charles Stafford, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Carol Upadhya, Peter van der Veer, Rupa Viswanath, and Susan Wadley. We have benefited, too, from comments on our work at seminars and conferences in Britain, Canada, Germany, India, the Netherlands, and especially the United States. We also owe a general debt of gratitude to our colleagues in the London School of Economics for critical encouragement over many years, and thank the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, where Haripriya was working at the time, for giving us space and time to discuss this book in January 2012.

We are grateful for the support of David Brent and Priya Nelson, and the scrupulous copyediting of Susan Karani, at the University of Chicago Press. We thank Sanjeev Routray for research assistance in the University of British Columbia Archives, and Mina Moshkeri for preparing the maps in this book. Thanks are due to the Economic and Social Research Council, which financially supported all our research, and to the LSE for supplementary assistance.

Last but not least, we owe a debt of gratitude to our families: Penny Logan and Alexis Fuller, and Amma, Appa, Nikhil, Raman, and Subha. Haripriya hopes Sunetra will read this book some day.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

All Indian terms are systematically transliterated with diacritics and italicized. The proper names of Hindu deities, offices, and institutions, however, appear with diacritics only on first appearance and thereafter their spellings are adjusted in the usual way (e.g., Shiva for Śiva). Many Tamil terms in this book are Tamilized Sanskrit and are transliterated accordingly, instead of from the pure Tamil forms that only specialists would recognize (e.g., agrahāram, not akkirakāram). Sanskrit religious terms and names are also transliterated from their more familiar Sanskrit forms, rather than their Tamil ones (e.g., darśana, not taricanam; Śiva, not Civan). A similar convention is followed for revenue terms of Persian or Arabic origin (e.g., mirāsidār, not mirācutār). Personal names, caste names, and geographical and historical names, however, are spelled in their conventional, English forms. In many cases, there are several conventional forms, so that one has had to be selected—normally the commonest or most accurate transliteration. Brahman is preferred over Brahmin; for the Tamil Brahman honorifics, Aiyar and Aiyangar are preferred over variants such as Ayyar, Iyer, Ayyangar, Iyengar, etc. In general, though, personal names are spelled as individuals (apparently) preferred, so that when an honorific is part of a man’s personal name, the form he used is retained. For geographical names, the main difficulty is that many towns, cities, states, districts, etc., have been renamed since Independence. Thus, for example, the Tamil-speaking region of the Madras Presidency became Madras state after Independence and was renamed Tamilnadu (Tamil Nadu) in 1969; the city of Madras was renamed Chennai in 1996. In general, names of places appropriate to the historical context are used, but alternative names are indicated where necessary.

Map 1. South India

INTRODUCTION

Satyamurti Aiyar, a Tamil Brahman, was born in 1914 in Tindivanam, a small town about seventy-five miles south of the city of Madras. Satyamurti was the eldest son of Subrahmaniam, whose family had migrated from northern India in the eighteenth century and intermarried with local Tamil Brahmans, with whom they had become fully assimilated. The family had acquired land in Tindivanam, a small agricultural market town retaining many of the characteristics of a village in the early twentieth century, and they had a house in its Brahman quarter, the agrahāram. When Satyamurti was born, the family lived off the income from their land, whose cultivation was managed by Subrahmaniam, assisted by low-caste Vanniyar laborers, including members of one family hereditarily attached to his own. Around 1918, however, Subrahmaniam secured a minor administrative post in Tindivanam, because by then he had four children and needed more money. He gave up cultivation and rented his land to Vanniyar tenants.

Satyamurti received an elementary education at home, where he learned a little English from a tutor. When he was twelve, Subrahmaniam sent his son to Madras, where he studied in a high school before entering a college run by Catholics. Because he had no relatives in the city, Satyamurti lived in a Brahman hostel, but he regularly traveled by train to visit his parents. The college was located in the suburb of Nungambakkam, which in those days was not very different from Tindivanam, so that when Satyamurti lived there it was much like living at home. At the age of fifteen, Satyamurti was married to a relative, an eleven-year-old girl he already knew, who had had some elementary education in the village school. But Satyamurti’s life hardly changed at this time because his wife remained with her parents and the marriage was not consummated until four years later.

Beneath this quiet continuity, however, a profound and irrevocable break was occurring. Subrahmaniam was essentially a rural man, a hereditary landlord, who dressed in traditional style; although he had learned some English for his administrative work, his old-fashioned outlook on the world had hardly changed. Satyamurti, on the other hand, who knew nothing about agriculture and was uninterested in it, was imperceptibly transforming himself into a townsman, although his father was scarcely aware of it because he and his son rarely talked about such matters. Unlike his father, Satyamurti was completely ignorant of Sanskrit and could not draw much intellectual sustenance from his ancestral cultural heritage, but he was comfortable in English, the language current among students and in many other circles in Madras. On the other hand, in his noisy hostel, Satyamurti could not study very hard, so that he relied on traditional methods of memorization, which satisfied him and his teachers, but equipped him with only a mediocre education.

A return to Tindivanam was impossible anyway, even if Satyamurti had considered it. In 1930, the Depression caused commodity and land prices to fall drastically. Subrahmaniam’s income from cash crops dried up and after a while the family jewelry ended up in the hands of a moneylender. Subrahmaniam was now almost fifty and responsible for four younger children born after Satyamurti, so he decided to solve his family’s financial problems by moving to Madras, which his administrative employment made possible. He rented a house in the city and Satyamurti, who was now twenty and had finished college, came to live there with his wife. Dreams of pursuing further study at Oxford were out of the question. Actually, in spite of the cost, Satyamurti’s father was not completely opposed to the idea, but his mother was adamantly against any breach of religious tradition or dharma, which prohibits Hindus from crossing the sea. Moreover, Satyamurti himself had lost his ambition, partly owing to his poor education, and—especially in uncertain economic times—he was happy to obtain a modest but secure administrative job.

When the Second World War began, prices rapidly recovered and Subrahmaniam discharged his debts by selling some land. He rejected the opportunity to sell all his ancestral lands to invest in speculative businesses, as others were doing, and preferred to retain what was left of his reduced patrimony. Shortly after the war ended, he built a new house with a garden in Nungambakkam; his remaining land in Tindivanam supplied his family’s annual consumption of rice and, most importantly in his own eyes, guaranteed his high social rank. Subrahmaniam died before he was affected by land-reform legislation following Indian Independence in 1947. Not long after his death, his family split up and all their land was sold to a rich moneylender, so that their last links to a rural world were broken and nothing was left of an old Brahman landlord’s prestigious way of life. For Satyamurti, however, none of this mattered, because his life was in Madras and he was particularly attached to English, the colonial language of his education that now enabled him to work as a bureaucrat. From just one generation to another, the transition for this Tamil Brahman family was often difficult, but it was complete: Satyamurti, in contrast with his father, was fully an urbanite.

Satyamurti Aiyar’s life history is recounted by Jacques Dupuis.¹ This introduction could have begun with a more fascinating life history of a more distinguished Tamil Brahman. But we chose to describe Satyamurti because, insofar as any single person can typify an entire group, he does so by personifying the archetypal transformation from rural landlord into urban office worker that was so critical in the middle part of the twentieth century, even though it began in the nineteenth century and has continued to the present day. Most men like Satyamurti actually moved away from villages, rather than small towns like Tindivanam. In most other respects, though, Satyamurti is truly a Tamil Brahman Everyman for the modern age, one of countless members of his caste who have joined the urban middle class. Many Brahmans, like Satyamurti, were and are employed in subordinate posts and white-collar jobs that place them in the lower-middle class, whereas many others are well-paid, high-status, educated professionals and managers belonging to the upper-middle class. These people are often the children or grandchildren of men like Satyamurti who first made the move into the lower levels of urban, white-collar employment. Of course, there are still too many poor Brahmans: for example, landowners with tiny plots, village temple priests, domestic servants, or shop assistants. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the overwhelming majority of Tamil Brahmans were living and working in urban areas as members of the middle class, in its lower or upper strata, and very few remained in the countryside.

The Tamil Brahmans’ transformation from a traditional, mainly rural, caste elite into a modern, urban, middle-class community is the central theme of this book. It is a study of an unusual social group, but one whose history during the colonial and postcolonial periods throws a powerful light on structure and change in Indian society. As a case study, the Tamil Brahmans particularly help to explain, for example, the dynamics of both urban migration and regional, national, and transnational movement; the formation of the middle class; the interdependent relationship between caste and class; and the changing position of women in modern India. As a social group that is the antithesis of those within the fold of subaltern studies, the Tamil Brahmans also enable us to examine how and why privileged status within a hierarchical society can be perpetuated in the face of major social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological changes that might have been expected to undermine it completely. Last but not least, for making sense of the amalgam of ostensibly traditional and modern beliefs and practices characteristic of India today, the Tamil Brahmans provide an exemplary illustration.

In recent years, India has acquired a new kind of visibility across the world, mainly because its economy has been growing so rapidly since it began to be liberalized in the early 1990s. Some sectors of the economy have seen spectacular rates of expansion, notably information technology (IT), which provides a key part of the infrastructure for contemporary global capitalism. Leaving aside wildly optimistic speculation that India may leap from a preindustrial, agrarian economy to a postindustrial, informational one, it is still very probable that by 2050 India’s economy, although smaller than China’s, will be almost as large as that of the United States. These developments and projections have led many American and European politicians, economists, and commentators not only to worry about the impact of outsourcing more and more work to countries like India, but also to recognize more generally that global economic power is decisively shifting, so that talk about the rise of the East and the fall of the West is now commonplace. All sorts of reasons are advanced to explain this transformation, and some of them are more plausible than others, but it is fair to say that they often consist of sweeping generalizations about India or China, as well as the West. One favorite generalization is about education. Thus international surveys commonly show that students in the West are falling behind their peers in the East in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and it is then concluded that the West’s decline is unstoppable unless its educational defects are corrected. In reality, the evidence for this conclusion is highly debatable, as an article in the influential American magazine Foreign Policy in 2011 argued in response to yet another announcement of a massive wake-up call by the US education secretary; Americans, the article’s headline proclaimed, should actually relax because Chinese math whizzes and Indian engineers aren’t stealing your kids’ future.²

This book does not try to join this debate or suggest policy initiatives that might improve American or European education. On the other hand, it is true that Indian engineers are playing an important role in both the national and global economies, and Tamil Brahmans are very well represented in their ranks. During the colonial period, caste traditions of learning were one important factor impelling the Brahmans to take up modern, English-language education, and many of them entered the three main learned professions of their day—law, medicine, and engineering. Law, like administration, was a traditional vocation for high-status Brahmans in precolonial times, but Western medicine and engineering obviously were not, and there was some particular hesitation about medicine owing to the dangers of ritual pollution. The essential point to make here, however, is that the case of the professions shows how caste traditionalism—frequently identified as one of the major brakes on economic growth in India—actually had a mainly positive effect, because it encouraged Tamil Brahmans to enter the modern, educated professions, while only briefly discouraging them from entering medicine and engineering. These developments have had profound, long-run consequences for the Tamil Brahmans and their transformation into a migratory, urban, middle-class group; they have also decisively shaped the Brahmans’ relationship with non-Brahmans in Tamilnadu in the social, cultural, and political domains in the colonial and postcolonial periods, from the early twentieth century to the present day. In the long run, too, the Tamil Brahmans’ early entry into engineering proved crucial—not only within Tamilnadu, but also in the rest of India and overseas—and it is one reason why so many of them, both men and women, are software engineers working in contemporary India’s booming IT industry. They aren’t actually stealing American kids’ futures, but they are active participants in India’s rise to global economic power, which can only be understood in any detail or depth by investigating the part played by people like the Tamil Brahmans.

Introduction to the Tamil Brahmans

The Tamil Brahmans are a small group, by Indian standards anyway. Their total population can only be roughly estimated, however, because no Indian census after 1931 collected comprehensive data on caste. In 2012, however, people were asked to identify their caste in the first socio-economic and caste census, but no results were available when this book’s proofs were being corrected. In 1931, just under 2.5 percent of the population in the region corresponding to the modern state of Tamilnadu were Brahmans, of whom three-quarters were Tamil Brahmans: that is, Brahmans whose mother tongue is Tamil. The rest were mostly Telugu, Kannada, and Maharashtrian Deshastha Brahmans. Through extrapolation, the maximum size of the Brahman population in Tamilnadu in 2011 (the date of the last census) can be estimated at 1.78 million, 1.40 million being Tamil Brahmans. Around one quarter of all Tamil Brahmans are settled outside Tamilnadu, in the rest of India or overseas, and the estimated total size of the caste’s population, which is admittedly just an informed guess, is 1.85 million in 2011 (see appendix).

The Tamil Brahman caste (jāti) is divided into two main sections: the Smartas or Aiyars (smārta; aiyar) and the Sri Vaishnavas or Aiyangars (śrīvaiṣṇava; aiyaṅkar). Aiyar and Aiyangar, like other titles such as Acharya (ācārya) and Sastri (sāstri), are honorific terms that were formerly used by men as caste surnames, but this practice largely ceased in the mid-twentieth century, so that today Tamil Brahmans’ names rarely identify their caste unambiguously. The division between the two sections is primarily religious: Smartas traditionally worship both the great gods of pan-Indian Hinduism, Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and Shiva (Śiva), as well as other deities, whereas the Sri Vaishnavas worship Vishnu alone. Smartas are segmented into four principal subcastes: Vadama (vaṭama), the largest and highest in rank; Brahacharanam (brahacaraṇam), second in size and rank; and Ashtasahasram (aṣṭasahasram) and Vattima (vāttima), the smallest and lowest, their mutual rank in dispute. Sri Vaishnavas are divided into two sectarian subsections: the larger, higher-status, northern Vadagalai (vaṭakalai)—who accord priority to Sanskrit texts in worshipping Vishnu—and the smaller, lower-status, southern Tengalai (tĕnkalai)—for whom Tamil texts are primary. All these various units, which are further subdivided, regularly dispute their ranking vis-à-vis each other. All of them are also traditionally endogamous, but during the last fifty years or so, marriages between Tamil Brahmans from different units have become commoner and more acceptable. Generally speaking, Sri Vaishnavas tend to be more conservative than Smartas—for example, about endogamy, ritual purity, or the proper way to worship the gods—but differences between them rarely matter in most social contexts today. The only census to collect figures on sections and subcastes dates from 1891, but their relative size has probably not changed much, so that about two-thirds of all Tamil Brahmans are still Smartas and the rest are Sri Vaishnavas (see appendix). Brahman priests are described in chapter 6; although Brahmans are often called a priestly caste, the vast majority of Tamil Brahmans have never been priests and have instead lived off the land or earned their living in secular occupations.

In the classical, pan-Indian model of Hindu society, the population is divided into four varṇas: Brahmans (brāhmaṇa), Kshatriyas (kṣatriya) or warriors, Vaishyas (vaiśya) or farmers, traders, and herders, and Shudras (śūdra) or servants. In south India, however, there were traditionally no Kshatriyas or Vaishyas, so that all non-Brahman castes were classified as Shudra. Outside the varṇa system are the Untouchables, the Harijans or Dalits (as they increasingly call themselves), who have also been called Adi Dravidas (ādi drāviḍa, original Dravidian) in Tamilnadu. During the colonial period, the tripartite division into Brahmans, non-Brahmans, and Adi Dravidas or Dalits became a fixed, axiomatic feature of Tamil society, so that today almost everyone assumes that their membership of one of these three groupings matters and almost everyone knows whether their friends, colleagues, workmates, neighbors, and other associates are Brahman, non-Brahman, or Dalit, or alternatively Christian or Muslim. This is not normally a point of contention in ordinary daily life and may not greatly affect how people interact with each other. Moreover, in Tamilnadu like the rest of India today, people often avoid the words caste and jāti, and prefer the euphemistic synonyms community and samāj instead. Even so, almost all Tamil Hindus (and many Christians and Muslims as well) still take it for granted that their caste identity—at least as defined by the gross categories of Brahman, non-Brahman, and Dalit—is a basic part of who they are.

The social and cultural distinctions among the three caste groupings, and especially between Brahmans and the rest of the population, are drawn in manifold ways. Food, though certainly not the only marker, is very important. Tamil Brahmans, like most but not all Brahmans throughout India, traditionally adhere to vegetarianism, which is regarded as ritually purer than and morally superior to meat eating. Some other Brahmanized, high-ranking, non-Brahmans in Tamilnadu, especially Shaiva Pillais who mostly belong to the Vellalar caste, are also vegetarian. By contrast, all other non-Brahmans and Dalits, as well as Christians and Muslims, are traditionally non-vegetarian. In practice, most Tamil Brahmans actually are vegetarians who avoid meat, fish, and eggs, and sometimes other heating foods as well, such as onions and garlic. Not everyone is equally strict, however: for example, some parents give their children eggs for nutritional reasons and other people turn a blind eye to the ingredients in manufactured foods like cake. And some Brahmans, especially men living overseas, do eat meat and fish, at least when outside the home. Conversely, a considerable number of non-Brahmans, especially women, choose to be vegetarian, irrespective of their own caste’s traditional diet. Vegetarianism in India implies teetotalism as well, and Brahmans traditionally do not drink. In Westernized, upper-middle-class and elite circles, mainly in large cities and overseas, social drinking is acceptable and commonplace. In general, however, the consumption of alcohol attracts opprobrium and Brahman drinkers, nearly all men, tend to be evasive or keep quiet about it; don’t ask, don’t tell is common practice, so that guessing how many Brahmans drink is impossible. Many non-Brahmans avoid alcohol as well, of course, but it is not stigmatized to the same extent as it is among Brahmans. But whatever individuals belonging to different castes actually eat and drink, the opposition between vegetarianism and nonvegetarianism is consistently regarded as homologous with that between Brahmans and non-Brahmans in Tamilnadu.

According to traditional, orthodox norms, Brahmans should eat only food that has been prepared by Brahmans complying with the rules of ritual purity. Other things being equal, Sri Vaishnavas have tended to be stricter than Smartas. Yet there has always been considerable variation in how purity rules are interpreted, and that is especially true today. Thus, for instance, some housewives let their non-Brahman servants prepare food and work in the kitchen, whereas others do not, and many people comply with purity rules quite strictly at home, but are less bothered when they eat outside, for example, in restaurants where the cooks are probably not Brahmans. A minority of Brahmans never eat food cooked away from home unless they have to and others do so only if they are certain that Brahman cooks have made the food properly. In towns and cities in Tamilnadu, orthodox Brahmans—as well as others who are less strict—patronize numerous Brahman hotels and messes, restaurants serving only vegetarian food cooked by Brahmans; there is also a growing trade in carryout food made by Brahmans. At weddings and other public events hosted and attended by Brahmans, Brahman cooks are always employed (although in Chennai today, it can be difficult to recruit them when required).³ Cooking, in fact, has always been a common source of employment for Tamil Brahmans, although it is neither very prestigious nor normally very remunerative.

Dietary distinctions are salient among both divine and human beings. Vishnu and Shiva, the two great gods of pan-Indian Sanskritic Hinduism, are worshipped with Devī, the goddess, in temples served by Brahman priests and during worship they are offered only vegetarian food. Non-Sanskritic, Tamil, little village deities, on the other hand, are served by non-Brahman priests and some of them are offered animal sacrifice and then blood or meat (see chap. 6). Moreover, vegetarianism is so highly valued in Brahmanical Hinduism (as well as Buddhism and Jainism) because it is equated with ritual purity, coolness, bodily self-control, ascetical self-restraint, and especially nonviolence, whereas meat eating is equated with impurity, heat, aggression, energetic action, and loss of bodily control, and it also necessitates the immoral slaughter of living beings. To be sure, not all Brahmans are preoccupied by the symbolic and moral connotations of vegetarianism and meat eating, and non-Brahmans generally contest them anyway, insisting, for example, that butchery is not immoral and meat is necessary to build up vigor and strength. Nonetheless, from the Brahmans’ point of view, the ritual purity and ethical value of vegetarianism make it superior to nonvegetarianism, so that vegetarian Brahmans—like the great gods—are superior to all those who eat meat.⁴ Furthermore, vegetarianism, even if its superiority is disputed, is so firmly identified with Brahmans in Tamilnadu that—for Brahmans and non-Brahmans alike—the contrast in diets serves as a diacritical marker of their cultural difference and social distinction, especially, perhaps, in the modern world in which most visible signs of caste hierarchy and separation have faded or disappeared.

The Non-Brahman Movement and Politics in Tamilnadu

The roots of the tripartite division into Brahmans, non-Brahmans, and Dalits, as it exists in present-day Tamilnadu, mainly lie in the emergence during the colonial period of the non-Brahman category within the context of the non-Brahman, Dravidian movement. This movement’s history, both before and after Independence, has been studied by many different scholars.⁵

In December 1916, the Non-Brahman Manifesto was published to protest against Brahman privilege.⁶ Issued by a new organization set up to promote non-Brahman interests, the manifesto quoted copious statistics to show that Brahmans, who formed only 3 percent of the Madras Presidency’s population, held an excessive number of official posts. (The presidency’s territory included most of present-day Tamilnadu, plus coastal Andhra Pradesh, north Kerala, and parts of Karnataka.) For example, in the Provincial Civil Service examinations between 1892 and 1904, fifteen out of sixteen successful candidates were Brahmans. In 1913, ninety-three of the 128 permanent district munsifs (lower-level judges) were Brahmans, compared with twenty-five non-Brahmans and ten from non-Hindu groups; in the Madras High Court, four of the five Indian judges were Brahmans. By 1914, the 650 registered graduates of the University of Madras included 450 Brahmans, 124 non-Brahmans and seventy-four from other communities; eleven out of twelve elected fellows of the university were also Brahmans. Not only did these and other figures show that Brahmans dominated the government service and the university, but the same group also dominated the nationalist movement, for fifteen out of sixteen members elected from Madras to the All-India Congress Committee were Brahmans and only one a non-Brahman.

The manifesto acknowledged that Brahmans were ahead of other castes and communities in educational attainment, but it insisted that non-Brahmans had made significant progress and deserved a fairer share of government appointments. It also made it clear that non-Brahmans could not trust Congress, so that they favored the continuation of British rule, which was more likely to look after their interests fairly. It concluded by calling upon all non-Brahmans to commit themselves to further educational improvement and to make their voices heard, and for each community to put its own house in order so that it could cooperate with others on equal terms.

The Non-Brahman Manifesto marked a decisive moment in the modern history of south India. It postulated a clear-cut opposition, primarily in the Tamil country, between a small Brahman minority and a large, but extremely diverse, non-Brahman majority, which rejected the derogatory name Shudra. The manifesto’s publication was soon followed by the establishment of the Justice Party to represent the interests of non-Brahmans—or more exactly of their urban, middle-class minority—in opposition to the Brahman-dominated Congress. After the Justice Party won the Madras Legislative Council elections in 1920, the government introduced measures to ensure fairer recruitment among different castes and communities, which was the beginning of the reservations policy—affirmative action in favor of the lower castes—in the province. During the 1930s, the Justice Party went into decline and, when India became independent in 1947, Congress was in power, but by then Brahmans were being progressively displaced in the party by non-Brahmans. The Justice Party was eventually replaced by more radical Dravidian organizations representing non-Brahman interests, first the Dravida Kazhagam (DK: Dravidian Federation) and then the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK: Dravidian Progress Federation), founded in 1949. In 1967, Congress lost the state elections and the DMK took power in Madras state, which it renamed Tamilnadu. Since 1967, with only brief interruptions, the DMK or its rival, the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK, or ADMK for short), which was formed in 1972, has continually ruled Tamilnadu. By the end of the twentieth century, with very few exceptions—notably J. Jayalalitha, the ADMK leader—Brahmans had disappeared from state politics and the one or two who remained almost had to deny their own Brahman identity to win elections.⁷ Moreover, the DMK and ADMK governments have greatly expanded the reservations system, so that Brahmans are vastly outnumbered by non-Brahmans at all levels of the government service and public sector. In effect, everything the Non-Brahman Manifesto demanded eventually came to pass during the twentieth century, so that the Brahman raj (to quote Pamela Price), which sometimes looked indistinguishable from the British raj around 1900, had vanished by 2000.⁸

In 1977, the ADMK came to power for the first time and its populist policies were less stridently anti-Brahman than the DMK’s had been, despite the expansion of the reservations system. Indeed, anti-Brahmanism has steadily declined as a basis for government policy since the late 1970s. Yet the dichotomous division between Brahmans and non-Brahmans has not faded away; neither has the Dravidian movement’s broader claim that Brahmans were immigrants from the north whose hierarchical, Sanskritic, Aryan culture was imposed on that of the indigenous Tamil people. On the contrary, an opposition between the two caste groupings and all that they stand for has become more and more entrenched, so that it is now just taken for granted as a basic feature of Tamil society, culture, and politics. In the mid-1990s, Nicholas Dirks commented both that non-Brahman politicians keep alive the threat of the internal other, the Brahman, even though Brahman dominance has vastly diminished, and that caste—and specifically the divide between Brahmans and non-Brahmans—therefore always seems to be the rhetorical point of over-determination in intellectual political debate in Tamilnadu.⁹ One outcome of this situation, as M. S. S. Pandian has argued more recently, is that because the polar opposition between Brahman and non-Brahman has become the naturalized language of politics in the region, [it] blocks the emergence of other inferiorized identities, specifically that of Dalits, who now confront non-Brahman hegemony, much as non-Brahmans earlier fought against Brahmanism.¹⁰ In Tamilnadu today, notwithstanding this naturalized language, caste politics are in reality defined primarily by competition among non-Brahman groups and, of course, between them and the Dalits, whereas Brahmans themselves have left the fray.

Tamil Brahmans and Anti-Brahmanism

Let us now return to