Brahmin and Non-Brahmin Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present M.S.S. PANDIAN Published by Permanent Black 'Himalayana', Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt, Ranikhet 263645 Email: [email protected] Distributed by Orient BlackSwan Private Limited Registered Office 3-6-752 Himayathnagar,Hyderabad 500 029 (Telangana), INDIA e-mail: [email protected] Other Offices Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneshwar Chandigarh Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna www.orientblackswan.com © 2007 M.S.S. Pandian eISBN 978-81-7824-503-4 e-edition first published in 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, expect in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests write to the publisher. for Anandhi and Preethi Contents 1 Introduction: The Politics of the Emergent 2 Becoming Brahmin in Colonial Tamil Nadu 3 Brahmin Hybridity 4 Speaking the Other/Making the Self: The New Voice of the Non-Brahmin 5 From Culture to Politics: The Justice Party 6 The Brahmin as a Trope: The Self-Respect Movement Epilogue Bibliography Notes ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many of the ideas and arguments that find expression in the following pages have been the result of my conversations with a number of fellow academics and friends over the past several years. They include Itty Abraham, S. Anandhi, Theodore Baskaran, Chris Chekuri, Venkatesh Chakravarthy, Chris Fuller, V. Geetha, Lalitha Gopalan, J. Jeyaranjan, Shankaran Krishna, Rajan Krishnan, Nivedita Menon, Aditya Nigam, S.V. Rajadurai, Vidutahalai Rajendran, Ravindran Sriramachandran, V. Ravindiran, Padmini Swaminathan, and Ravi Vasudevan. I have presented many of the arguments in rudimentary form at conferences and seminars over the past decade. The final shape of the arguments owes a great deal to comments from audiences at the Central University, Hyderabad; Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge; George Washington University, Washington, DC; India International Centre, New Delhi; International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo; Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford; Columbia University, New York; University of Manitoba, Winnipeg; University of Washington, Seattle; University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Yale University, New Haven. Part of the manuscript was written during summer 2004 while I had a research fellowship at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. The fellowship was funded by the British India Golden Jubilee Banquet Fund. The hospitality of Raj and Jennifer made my stay at Cambridge both enjoyable and productive. The manuscript, in full or in part, has been read and commented on by Itty Abraham, S. Anandhi, Vijay Bhaskar, John Harriss, Sarah Hodges, Rajan Krishnan, Aditya Nigam, Vincent Kumaradoss, Anand Pandian, V. Ravindiran, Rupa Viswanathan, and Akbar Zaidi. Their comments, both critical and appreciative, were of great help in reworking half-formed ideas as well as adding clarity to the arguments. The comments of Permanent Black’s anonymous reader were also of much help in recasting the manuscript. V. Arasu provided me with critical bibliographical details. Vincent Kumaradoss and S. Anandhi were generous in sharing their collection of archival material. Rukun Advani responded to my uncertain email about the manuscript with great enthusiasm and found the time to read it without delay. I am truly grateful to all these individuals and institutions, without whose camaraderie and generosity this book would not have happened. The spirit of nationality is no better than the spirit of caste. Nationality has sentiment, pride, and fanaticism for its basis, and is found on analysis to be no more than imaginary justification of the will to power and possession. Nationalism is the camouflage by which hooliganism masks its true nature . . . —P. Lakshmi Narasu, A Study of Caste 1 INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF THE EMERGENT 1 ‘Names set up a field of power.’—Michel-Rolph Trouillot In 1916 a group of prominent nationalists from the Madras Presidency, led by T.M. Nair and Pitti Theagaraya Chetti, broke ranks with the Indian National Congress and issued a controversial document called the ‘Non-Brahmin Manifesto’. Their Manifesto argued that Indians were not yet ready for self- rule, and if the British granted self-rule to Indians it would result in the tyranny of Brahmins over others. Though Brahmins constituted about 3 per cent of the population of the Madras Presidency, their presence in the colonial bureaucracy, in modern professions such as law, and in the leadership of the Indian National Congress was preponderant and highly visible. Provocative in its claims, the Manifesto stirred a variety of moods in the public, within Madras and elsewhere. Dismay and anger were the dominant moods in the nationalist camp. In the understanding of nationalists, such talk of ‘the non-Brahmin’ was a result of the British strategy of ‘divide and rule’, a deliberate move to fragment the putative unity of the Indian national community. The Manifesto also evoked surprise in many quarters, and those who expressed surprise directed it at the invocation of a hitherto unavailable political identity—the non-Brahmin. For, while it was true that the term non- Brahmin had been used occasionally since the late nineteenth century in the Madras Presidency, a manifesto—a declarative modern form of announcing a political intent—in the name of the non-Brahmin symbolized desires of a different order altogether. The intention was clearly to mobilize non-Brahmin identity as the basis of a new form of politics. After all, a manifesto represents 2 a group to itself and invites similarly placed others to partake in its identity. The Manifesto invoked the term ‘non-Brahmin’ a full thirty times, as though 3 repeating a self-evident truth. Yet it could not produce the truth of the non- Brahmin unambiguously. There were sceptics who doubted its validity, and they had their reasons. For instance, the Times of India commented on the Manifesto thus: To begin with, there is no such community as the non-Brahman of which Mr [Pitti Theagaraya] Chettiar or any other individual may be regarded as an accredited representative. The very word non- Brahman shows that the only common ground among the communities which are meant to be included in it, is that they are not Brahmana. No one who knows the bitter feuds between the right hand and left hand non- Brahman castes of Madras will accept the implication underlying Mr Chettiar’s manifesto that the non-Brahmans are a single, homogeneous group, capable of common or united action, even as against the social and religious 4 supremacy of the Brahminical caste. Clearly, non-Brahmin identity was not yet in the realm of the acceptable and could be represented as an illegitimate fabrication, a political fiction. In fact the Manifesto itself carried strong traces of an awareness of the relative novelty of a non-Brahmin identity. As much as it spoke of non-Brahmins, it also referred to non-Brahmin communities in the plural, and, in one instance, it had to name some of them—‘The Chetty, the Komati, the Mudaliar, the Naidu, and the Nayar 5 . . .’ In other words, non-Brahmin was not yet an accomplished identity. It was in the process of becoming. Others, in particular Brahmin nationalists, tried to prevent the materialization of non-Brahmin identity by excluding it from public discourse. Commenting on the Manifesto, the Brahmin-owned nationalist newspaper The Hindu claimed: ‘It can serve no good but it is bound to create bad blood between persons belonging to the same great Indian Community . . .’ It further declared: ‘We do not wish to open our correspondence column to a discussion on this subject, as it cannot but lead to acrimonious controversy and as it would indirectly promote the invidious object of some of those who are 6 engineering the movement.’ The Non-Brahmin, one of the newspapers published by the Justice Party—a party founded on the basis of the Manifesto— retorted: ‘Let the scoffers come to scoff . . . When the Pacific Ocean 7 community . . . is moving, it moves with a force that is irresistible.’ The Non- Brahmin was proved right. Soon The Hindu had to open its columns to discuss and criticize claims made on the basis of non-Brahmin identity. If The Hindu’s resolve to shut out the non-Brahmin from its pages was short-lived, the Times of India’s scepticism towards the validity of non- Brahmin identity was dissipated over time. The business of politics proved to be a way of doing things with what was not yet. In 1931 the Census Commissioner for Madras, M.W.M. Yeatts, proposed that since the ‘Political tendency [in the Madras Presidency] is to deal only in broad classifications, Brahmans, depressed classes, other Hindus . . . some such classification should be considered at future censuses . . . Instructions could easily be given to enumerators to enter only the categories Brahman and non-Brahman. If it was desired to retain separate figures for depressed classes, they could be added 8 and also primitive tribes . . .’ Yeatts’s suggestion signals the materialization of non-Brahmin identity within official political taxonomy. Yet it took several more decades of intense conflict and negotiation for non-Brahmin identity to normalize itself in Tamil-speaking South India. The phase of uncertainty about non-Brahmin identity has now indubitably passed. Anyone acquainted with the politics of contemporary Tamil Nadu, this post-Independence Indian state carved out of the Madras Presidency in 1957, will know that the categories Brahmin and non-Brahmin possess a normal presence in the region and have in fact reconfigured the landscape of political possibilities and constraints. The account of Balakumaran, a Tamil fiction writer, about his friend’s first encounter with communists within a study group in Madras is instructive in this context: He was asked, ‘There are two classes in the world. Let us see if you can identify them.’ ‘What is class?’, he wondered. ‘There are two castes in the world. Can you tell what they are?’ ‘One is Brahmin; the other non-Brahmin.’ 9 Laughter [in the room] shook the tin-roof. The categories Brahmin and non-Brahmin thus carry a seemingly self-evident validity, framing the way one thinks, feels, and does things in Tamil Nadu. It is equally significant that they make sense only within a framework of mutual opposition and antagonism. In his Preface to The Brahmin in the Tamil Country, N. Subramanian notes: ‘I know I run some risk in writing this book. There will be people willing to call me “a renegade writing an anti-brahminical work” and 10 others . . . “a communalist issuing a brahminical pamphlet”. ’ The risk envisaged by Subramanian involves his making any statement about the imagined or real non-availability of political ground outside the opposition between Brahmin and non-Brahmin in contemporary Tamil Nadu. The consequences of conducting politics around the polar identities of Brahmin and non-Brahmin over the past eight decades are, in the Tamil region, equally significant and substantial. Let me briefly give a few pointers from the post-Independence period to illustrate this: (1) The first amendment to the Indian constitution, introducing Article 15(4) in 1951, which ensured the reservation of seats for non-Brahmins in educational institutions and government jobs, was a result of agitations in Madras state against a Supreme Court judgment; (2) The first ever Indian state not to have a Brahmin in its ministry was Madras state under the chiefministership of K. Kamaraj in 1954. Interestingly Kamaraj, who belonged to a formerly Untouchable caste, was heading a Congress Party ministry. By the 1950s even the leadership of the nationalist Congress Party, which was dominated by Brahmins during the colonial period, had passed to the hands of non-Brahmins; (3) By the 1970s both ruling and opposition spaces in Tamil Nadu politics came to be occupied by parties claiming allegiance to non-Brahmin interests. This is a feature which continues to mark the state’s politics till today and shows no sign of changing in the near future; (4) In August 1990, when V.P. Singh as Prime Minister of India announced 27 per cent reservations for the Backward Castes in government jobs, North India witnessed large-scale agitations by the upper castes. But the Tamil Nadu state assembly passed a resolution on 21 August 1990 welcoming the announcement. The resolution was printed by the state government for public circulation; (5) Rightwing Hindu organizations that oppose reservations for non-Brahmin castes in education and government jobs at the all-India level support such reservations in Tamil Nadu. To oppose reservations in the state would be to risk their already minuscule hold in the state by going against the broad political consensus. GENEALOGIES OF BRAHMIN AND NON-BRAHMIN Against this background, my attempt in this book is to plot the genealogies of the opposition between Brahmin and non-Brahmin, of how this opposition has become taken for granted, self-evident, and naturalized in the Tamil region. In unravelling the facticity and political efficacy that this opposition has acquired over time, I concentrate primarily on the complex processes involved in the long-term normalization of non-Brahmin identity as a category of politics, and how these processes depended on and resulted in rearticulations of Brahmin identity under colonialism. Thus, the Tamil Brahmin is the central figure around whom this book revolves. The very term ‘non-Brahmin’, in its lexicalization, makes the Brahmin central. Terming the arrival of new identities ‘the politics of becoming’, William Connolly has characterized the process of imagining, asserting, and affirming such identities thus: ‘The politics of becoming is that conflictual process by which new identities are propelled into being by moving the pre-existing shape 11 of diversity, justice and legitimacy.’ Further: ‘To the extent it succeeds in placing a new identity on the cultural field, the politics of becoming changes 12 the shape and contour of already entrenched identities as well.’ Taking analytic cues from Connolly, I attempt to concretely plot and unravel how the two identities Brahmin and non-Brahmin were mutually constituted in the Tamil region during the colonial period. In other words, I engage with how the normalization of the category non- Brahmin—i.e. the process of making it a transparent, naturalized, and sedimented category—simultaneously reconfigured the preexisting Brahmin identity. And, as we will see, the process of this coproduction of non-Brahmin and Brahmin under colonialism unsettled pre-existing socio-political arrangements and consensus, and ushered in fundamentally new notions of ‘diversity, justice and legitimacy’ in Tamil- speaking South India. More specifically, this book maps the historical and political conjunctures that led to the formation of Brahmin and non-Brahmin as objects of discourse: the enunciative modalities which delimited the ways in which Brahmin and non-Brahmin were talked about, and how these figures acquired over time