Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T02:47:44.987Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Leadership and Individuality in South Asia: The Case of the South Indian Big-man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Mattison Mines  and
Vijayalakshmi Gourishankar
Get access

Extract

Although there has been great interest in how properly to conceptualize the person in Indian culture, few have explored Indian perceptions of leadership, achievement, and agency as valued features of individuality (Singer 1972; Mines 1988; Fox 1989). Indeed, since Dumont (1970a,b) forcefully argued that the values of equality and liberty that support the Western notion of the individual were absent from Indian society, the important roles that personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement play in Indian history have been largely overlooked or understated. This paper reconsiders an Indian sense of these roles by examining the south Indian concept of the “big-man” (periyar, periyavar), a notion of individuality and instrumentality that is central to the politics of south India and crucial to an understanding of the dynamic relationship that exists between action and organization in Indian society (cf., Fox 1989).

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , November 1990 , pp. 761 - 786
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Aiyer, Nataraja and Sastri, S. Lakshminarasimha. 1962. The Traditional Age of Sri Sankaracharya and the Maths. Kanchipuram: Kanchi Kaamakooti Peetam.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1981. Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1983. “The Puzzling Status of Brahman Temple Priests in Hindu India.” South Asian Anthropologist 4, 43–52.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun and Breckenridge, Carol A.. 1976. “The South Indian Temple: Authority, Honor, and Redistribution.” Contributions to Indian Sociology n.s. 10, 187–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beteille, Andre. 1986. “Individualism and Equality.” Current Anthropology 27:121–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breckenridge, Carol A. 1977. “From Protector to Litigant—Changing Relations Between Hindu Temples and the Raja of Ramnad.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 14:47–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1984. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dirks, Nicholas B. 1987. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dumont, Louis. 1970a. Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dumont, Louis. 1970b. “The Individual as an Impediment to Sociological Comparison and Indian History.” In Religion/Politics and History in India: Collected Papers in Indian Sociology. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Fox, Richard G. 1989. Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Fuller, C. J. 1984. Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Godelier, Maurice. 1986. The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hart, George L. III. 1975. The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sanskrit Counterparts. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Haynes, Douglas E. 1987. “From Tribute to Philanthropy: The Politics of Gift Giving in a Western Indian City.” The Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 2: 339–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inden, Ronald. 1986. “Oriental Constructions of India.” Modern Asian Studies 20:401–446.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Indian Law Reports. 1883. Madras Series, vol. 6.Google Scholar
Indian Law Reports. 1885–1887. Madras Series, vol. 7–10.Google Scholar
India Today. 1987. International Edition, September 30, 1987.Google Scholar
India Today. 1988. International Edition, June 30, 1988.Google Scholar
Jaer, Oyvind. 1987. “The Ideological Constitution of the Individual: Some Critical Comments on Louis Dumont's Comparative Anthropology.” Contributions to Indian Sociology n.s. 21:353–362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kakar, Sudhir. 1981. The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, 2nd ed.Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Leach, Edmund. 1960. “The Frontiers of ‘Burma.’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3:49–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewandowski, Susan J. 1985. “Merchants and Kingship: An Interpretation of Indian Urban History.” Journal of Urban History 11:151–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marriott, McKim. 1969. Review of Homo Hierarchkus by L. Dumont. American Anthropologist 71:1166–1175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marriott, McKim. 1989. “Constructing an Indian Sociology.” Contributions to Indian Sociology n.s. 23:1–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marriott, McKim and Inden, Ronald. 1977. “Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems.” In The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia, ed., David, K.. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Mines, Mattison. 1988. “Conceptualizing the Person: Hierarchical Society and Individual Autonomy in India.” American Anthropologist 90:568–579.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, D. L.. 1955. A Solomon Island Society: Kinship and Leadership among the Siuai of Bougainville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Presler, Franklin A. 1987. Religion Under Bureaucracy: Policy and Administration for Hindu Temples in South India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Raheja, Gloria G. 1988a. “India: Caste, Kingship, and Dominance Reconsidered.” Annual Review of Anthopology 17:497–522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raheja, Gloria G. 1988b. The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Reddiar, N. Krishnaswami. 1987. Some Judicial References and Some Administrative Records Regarding Sankaracharya Mutts. Madras: D. Ramanathan Chettiar.Google Scholar
Rudner, David W. 1987. “Religious Gifting and Inland Commerce in Seventeenth-Century South India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 2: 361–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall D. 1963. “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5:285–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shulman, David D. 1985. The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Shweder, Richard A., and Bourne, E. J.. 1984. “Does the Concept of Person Vary Cross-Culturally?” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotions, eds., Shweder, R. A. and LeVine, R. A.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Singer, Milton. 1972. When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization. New York: Praeger Publishers.Google Scholar
Srinivas, M. N. 1976. The Remembered Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, Burton. 1980. Peasant, State, and Society in Medieval South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tambiah, S. J. 1972. Review of Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System by L. Dumont. American Anthropologist 74:832–835.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tambiah, S. J. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Max. 1958. The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.Google Scholar
The Week. 1987. September 6–12.Google Scholar