Preface

Summary

During my fieldwork in Pudukkottai, one of my principal teachers, informants, consultants, and friends was a Brahman who was the retired head clerk of the Settlement Office. Known by his acronym PMS, he was the descendant of a family of srotriya or learned Brahmans who had been settled on fertile lands in Pudukkottai state in the late eighteenth century by the Tondaiman Raja of the time. But PMS himself was a laukika or secular Brahman, educated in Shakespeare and British history at St Joseph's College, Trichy. He was initially employed by the Darbar of the Pudukkottai state, where for a long time his immediate boss was a mythic hero of late colonial times, a former ICS man named Alexander Tottenham who spent his retirement as head administrator of a state that until 1944 was ruled by a minor. After independence, or merger as it is called in Pudukkottai, PMS guided the completion of the Inam Settlement until his retirement from Government service in 1957. An honest bureaucrat and a true scholar, he was later helpful to academics and others who would come through Pudukkottai and stay for a time as guests of the royal family. He had helped me during my initial stay in the place years earlier, and he agreed to work with me again when I returned in 1981 for intensive fieldwork.