Anand Pandian is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is an editor of Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, also published by Duke University Press.

Crooked Stalks

Cultivating Virtue in South IndiaBy ANAND PANDIAN

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4514-5

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………ixNote on Transliteration…………………………………………………………………………………………………….xvIntroduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………1ONE “A Rough Spade for a Rugged Landscape” On Savage Selves and More Civil Places……………………………………………31TWO “What Remains of the Harvest When the Fence Grazes the Crop?” On the Proper Violence of Agrarian Citizenship…………………65THREE “The Life of the Thief Leaves the Belly Always Boiling” On the Nature and Restraint of the Criminal Animal………………….101FOUR “Millets Sown Yield Millets, Evil Sown Yields Evil” On the Moral Returns of Agrarian Toil…………………………………141FIVE “Let the Water for the Paddy Also Irrigate the Grass” On the Sympathies of an Aqueous Self………………………………..181Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….221Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….241Glossary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….283Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………289Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….309

Chapter One

“A Rough Spade for a Rugged Landscape” On Savage Selves and More Civil Places

The Tamil commercial film Karuthamma of 1994 opens with a bespectacled schoolteacher stepping off a bus into scrubby brown village environs. One night soon thereafter, he is horrified to spy an old wet nurse pouring the sap of a poisonous cactus onto the lips of a newborn girl. The nurse is acting on the callous request of the child’s father, who does not want to bear the expense of another daughter. The teacher rescues the girl and takes her away to a city, while the titles roll and the film flashes forward into the present. Young Rosie has grown up to become a doctor, and she unknowingly visits the very village where her life was almost taken. One of her sisters has since been murdered by her husband and mother-in-law for failing to produce a son, and another is left no choice but to kill this man in order to save herself from a similar fate. The film depicts the cruelty and backwardness of a rural milieu, and the struggles of doctors, teachers, police, and other outsiders to save these villagers from themselves. “Class of proper savages, it seems,” a veterinarian mutters to himself as he trudges through the dusty heat toward the settlement for the first time.

Pedagogic in its narrative tone and trajectory, the film presents itself as a parable of moral progress and its tragic limits in the Tamil countryside. But language, backdrops, and social customs in the film make clear that Karuthamma most specifically concerns the difficult lives of Piramalai Kallar castefolk. Directed by the noted Tamil film auteur Bharathiraja-a Piramalai Kallar himself-the movie appeared in the wake of a nationwide scandal concerning female infanticide in Kallar households. Just a few years prior to the film, a sensational cover story on the subject in the newsweekly India Today had opined that “the Kallars of Usilampatti remain the prisoners of their burdensome, savage traditions.” Social activists working in the region in fact attributed the problem to spiraling dowry demands on brides, precipitated by the economic prosperity of certain newly irrigated Kallar villages. The film Karuthamma, however, presented a rather different and deeply suggestive etiology for the prevalence of infanticide in the Kallar heartland: such savagery was the bitter fruit of a barren and undeveloped environment.

The film relies on a certain poetics of place for much of its visual and narrative force. Numerous shots underscore the harsh character of the terrain in which the story unfolds. Lightly dozing on her bus journey to the village, for example, Rosie dreams of arriving in a joyous pastoral paradise: lush green fields of waving paddy, parakeets singing, smiling women dancing through the irrigated fields, and bright flocks of pink and blue chicks chirping along the road. A chicken suddenly startles her awake, however, and a crestfallen Rosie surveys along with viewers the thorny untilled expanse where she has landed. This jarring shift of perspective is critical to the film. As the director himself suggested in one printed interview, “That desiccated earth is the reason why Karuthamma seems very realistic. The killing of children there imprints itself on the heart. No one would believe this story if it had shown a fertile village.”

Director Bharathiraja appears to have in mind here an audience more evidently refined than the tortured protagonists of his film. Critical for his appeal to the imagined civility of such a viewership, however, is the visual and affective force of a harsh and barren rural landscape. This chapter concerns the place of savagery and civility in Tamil cultural imaginations of the countryside. How have elaborations of place and landscape come to provide such a powerful means of judging the quality of those who inhabit them? I turn in the following pages to untilled terrain as a cipher for uncultivated selfhood. To talk of Kallar savagery is to think with an agrarian landscape of civility and incivility. The morality of a possible modernity in the region comes into clearest focus when posed against the backdrop of such imagined terrain.

* * *

This chapter concerns savagery as a condition of Kallar selfhood, and the role of agrarian landscape in the conception of this unshakeable interior nature. “How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. For Du Bois, the query inflamed a war within the black self-“measuring one’s [own] soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” I hope to show that abiding legacies of social reform have left Piramalai Kallar castefolk in much the same condition. The specter of savagery casts a long shadow on the very fact of being Kallar in postcolonial south India, subjecting every feeling, thought, and action to a potential attribution of anger, impulse, violence, and haste. Assertions of savagery are the preeminent means by which Kallars are imagined as underdeveloped selves, both by others and by their own kith and kin. When this critical discourse is interiorized, Kallar selfhood emerges as an ethical problem. The discourse of savagery, in other words, serves as an incitement to work upon, reform, and refine an inadequate way of being. At issue here is the very possibility of a civil selfhood.

What is at stake in civility as a virtue, as a cultivated quality of self-conduct? Modernity has been widely identified with the triumph of civilization over various forms of savagery throughout the globe. But civilization may be taken not only as a certain stage in human history-as Enlightenment thinkers and many others since have done-but also as a certain kind of relation to oneself. This possibility lies at the heart of Norbert Elias’s classic study, The Civilizing Process. Elias identified civilization with the reflexive restraint of impulse and the ability to relate judiciously to others, qualities dependent upon the slow and uneven historical emergence of an internal faculty of self-regulation among the elite classes of modern Western Europe. He and his later interlocutors have attributed the development of civility as a virtue either to the games and perils of courtly life or to the rigors of Christian monastic milieus. From the vantage point of such investigations, civility as an elite mode of self-conduct in places such as modern India might appear as yet another poisoned gift of European colonialism. This chapter takes issue with such a perspective. I call attention here to the abiding legacies of a precolonial tradition of civility in south India, one that derives much of its moral force from the exercise of virtue in agrarian milieus.

Although harsh critiques of savage conduct and undeveloped villages featured prominently among colonial representations of the Kallar caste, in other words, I will address such modern pressures most closely in the chapters that follow this one. Here, I focus instead on savagery’s debt to a much older conception of “agrarian civility” in south India, one that has long tied refinements of character and conduct to the historical experience and exemplary status of the cultivating citizenry. It is here that questions of landscape prove especially relevant. What I write of as “savagery” is expressed most often in Tamil as kattu tanam: what might be described as katu-ness or the condition of being like the katu, that is, like the wilds on the margins of a settled social order. Many discourses of civility in Tamil literary tradition have long cast civilization itself in agricultural terms, charting the development of moral virtue as a process enabled by spade, plough, and sickle. Relying themselves on normative distinctions between lands and peoples bad and good, these literary discourses were tied historically to a lowland agrarian order to which Kallars and other warrior communities were marginal.

In the pages that follow, I discuss the presentation of agrarian civility in the early medieval Tamil literature on virtue, going on to relate these ideas and images to contemporary differences of agricultural terrain. Dry upland tract, lowland paddy field, and irrigated orchard prove distinct topoi of savagery and civility: these are landed classifications wedded to moral contrasts between Kallar and other, articulated through both the imagined qualities borne by particular landscapes and the embodied labor that they are understood to require. Work on the agrarian environments of the Cumbum Valley serves as a means of identifying Kallars themselves as savage and unworked in their nature. To pay heed to such subtle moral distinctions on rural terrain is to challenge the idea-common in the West and in India-of rusticity itself as the very antithesis of civility. It is also to confront the many ways in which modern individuals seeking to develop themselves today may continue to rely upon the moral traditions of much earlier times.

Distinctions of agrarian civility and savagery place Kallar collective nature on a developmental hierarchy somewhere between the opposed poles of itinerant forest dweller and settled rural citizen. Defined in relation to such polarities, the rhetoric of savagery that I outline in this chapter betrays both a desire for reform and a pained recognition of its impossibility. Here lies a crucial ambivalence, as this cause for shame is easily transformed into an emblem of pride. The chapter therefore closes with a consideration of savagery as an object of celebration rather than critique, staged in relation to the political culture and electoral politics of the region. Is virtue to be found in the careful government of one’s own feelings, desires, and impulses, or in the ability to threaten and exercise unbridled violence? The form of moral selfhood outlined in the following pages is fundamentally ambivalent with respect to this question. Let us begin with the inescapability of the savage in Kallar life today.

A Life of Savagery

Throughout my fieldwork in the Cumbum Valley, I was surprised by the extent to which Kallar men and women seemed to insist on their own savage nature. One November morning, for example, I stood chatting with Mokkarasu Thevar in the wet mire of the paddy field that he and his wife were weeding. He suggested that insolence was a quality born of diet. People like me ate in a “decent” fashion, he said, taking in by spoon no more than a little at a time. But people like him would grab big handfuls of rice and stuff them into their mouths all at once: “We are the same as savages, living out in the fields and wilds.” There was an element of rueful pride in the comparison. Mokkarasu spoke of being an unlettered man who could not even read the signs on buses, while his young son, Manoj-playing nearby-joked that his father had hurled rocks at his teacher as a child. Mokkarasu hoped that in this “computer age” others would not say that his son spoke like a savage. But, at the same time, it was clear that the father himself took a certain pleasure in the unrestrained insolence of his own appetites and impulses.

Savagery may be understood as a personal state of uncivil selfhood in addition to a collective condition of backwardness. Over fifty years ago, the ethnographer Louis Dumont offered an allusive “psychological sketch” of the Piramalai Kallars and their characteristic manner: “in the end,” he wrote, “it is a stylization of aggressiveness.” The ethnographer’s terse assessment is widely echoed in the Tamil country today by a remarkably consistent popular language with which Kallars are judged by others and themselves: karatu muratu, a singsong phrase connoting roughness, ruggedness, and obstinacy, sometimes rendered into the mellifluous English “rough and tough”; a stubborn hardness of character and conduct; an unwillingness to listen to the counsel of others; a tendency to quarrel and to fight with great and sudden passion; an easy anger at the slightest provocation; an indiscriminate violence of word and deed; and drunken insolence and proud arrogance-mappu and timiru-in public discourse and conduct. The single Tamil notion that sums up these ideas most fully perhaps is kattu tanam or savagery.

Savagery is often identified in the masculine aggression of Kallar men. But Kallar women too are liable to charges of such violent misconduct, especially in the realm of public speech. Sharp talk in public places provides one of the most consistent foundations for such allegations. Drunken and aggressive rants on the street corners of the bazaar, vulgar slang traded back and forth between schoolchildren, morning quarrels between women competing for scanty water from hand pumps and water pipes, coarse insults cast at poor and delinquent Dalit borrowers by arrogant moneylenders: instances such as these are easily enlisted by denizens of the Cumbum Valley as evidence of Kallar incivility. When others speak of Kallar savagery, they attribute to the caste both a fixed and hardened nature as well as a need for its cultivation and refinement. Such charges echo the criminal reputation of the caste historically as well as the uncertain prospects for its reform and rehabilitation in the present.

The discourse of Kallar savagery presents men and women of the caste as subjects reluctant to change, charging them with an obstinate, recalcitrant way of being. At the same time, it also takes for granted the possibility and the necessity of their acting otherwise. When this rhetoric is turned inward as an incitement to more civil conduct, it therefore serves to open the self as an arena of ethical transformation. For Kallars living under the sign of their own viciousness, the discourse of their own savagery has become one of the most important languages of reflexive critique. Serving as an intimate rhetoric of reform among Kallars themselves, invocations of savagery produce some of the sharpest spurs to change oneself and one’s family and peers.

* * *

I want to convey the potency of savagery as a discourse of self-critique by presenting a few vignettes from the Kallar household that took me as its own most readily. I write of the appa [father] and amma [mother] who welcomed me into their home both day and night from almost the first week of my fieldwork onward, insisting that I was to them the eldest of their sons. Vairam Pandian-who, like many others in the area, shared my surname-was a self-trained homeopath who had married and settled in K. G. Patti over twenty years ago. His wife, Perumayi, hailed from one of the first Kallar lineages that had settled the village. As we sat in the cool drawing room of the house they had built about a decade ago, appa and amma often told me riveting stories concerning their struggles to scrape together a measure of stability and respectability, working for a domestic hearth that began with next to nothing.

Bookbinder, observatory assistant, arrack dealer, wooden furniture contractor-there are few trades that appa had not dabbled in over the decades before resigning himself to pedal up and down the lanes of the village dispensing medicines and injections. His was among the best English in the village. Amma, who had never gone to school, was equally adept with both ladle and spade; “I am a farmer,” she once told me with a proud and weary smile as she brought a hatchet down onto the woody brush spilling out from an overgrown edge of their dry upland sesame field. Their elder son, Sundar, found a store clerk posting in Saudi Arabia in the months that I was there; he was only the second young man from the village to pursue employment abroad. His canny younger brother, Bose, had trained himself as an electrician and pursued wiring contracts throughout the valley. There was little that was evidently “savage” about this household. And yet, the sheer frequency and vehemence with which allegations of savagery were cast about within the home were striking. Some instances:

Amma returned dejected from a visit to a nearby town, disappointed that the family there was uninterested in a marriage alliance with Sundar. Her son had counseled patience: “Why must you hurry and run so savagely behind every girl you see?” To slowly gather details without leaping to any conclusions, she told me-this was a more civilized way of proceeding.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Crooked Stalksby ANAND PANDIAN Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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