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The Pasts of a Pāḷaiyakārar: The Ethnohistory of a South Indian Little King

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Nicholas B. Dirks
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Abstract

This article examines a text containing the late eighteenth-century family history of a line of South Indian “little kings,” or pāḷaiyakārars. The text provides the basis for a discussion of the Maṟavar caste of the Tirunelvēli region in southern Tamil Nāṭu and the notions held by this and other related groups concerning royal appropriateness and sovereign authority, political and social relations, and kingly privileges and gifts. Further, the text is seen as a cultural form of “history” that has an integrity of its own. Indeed, a structural analysis of the text reveals that the text can not be separated into “fanciful” and “historical” sections, and that underlying assumptions about the past are revealed by the form as well as the content of the text. The results of this analysis are seen to have significance not only for understanding how the past is viewed from within, but also for how it must be analyzed from outside the cultural context. Thus, ethnohistory is asserted to be not simply one agenda for “history” but a way of setting the actual agenda of “history.”

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Articles
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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , August 1982 , pp. 655 - 683
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1982

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