Chapter 3 - Injurious Pasts

Summary

The idea of Indian degeneracy or stagnancy was crucial to the case of Ramaswamy Aiyan v. Venkata Achari (1863), which is the focus of the third chapter. While the actual substance of the case concerned the distribution of rights and profits associated with temple management, I suggest that the Privy Council’s engagement with the case served a larger ideological function. The petty squabble between the various sects of Brahmins functioned in the case as a metaphor for the decadent system of caste itself. Over the course of the chapter I show how the very existence of the dispute became evidence of the dysfunction of Indian modes of social and temporal organization. Highlighting the political ramifications of narrative constructions, the Privy Council’s opinion worked to render Indian history as irremediably tainted, and Indian religion as riddled with superstition and irrationality. The case thus reveals the ambivalent interactions between Indian social and temporal organization and British concepts of historicity. Though the case deals explicitly with questions of religion, I suggest that the force of the opnion extends to secular temporalities and teleologies as well.