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Ideology and Ethnicity under British Imperial Rule: ‘Brahmans’, Lawyers and Kin-Caste Rules in Madras Presidency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Pamela G. Price
Pamela G. Price
Affiliation:
Universitetet i Oslo
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Extract

Consolidated imperial rule tends to alter the relationships among indigenous elites. Some elite groups may adjust to the new regime by joining it or otherwise becoming collaborators in rule. Others may see a marked deterioration in their former ruling status and honor. Groups which cooperated politically during the pre-colonial period may experience new tensions and enter into relationships of a more adversary nature. It is sometimes difficult for observers of social and political change to see clearly the nature of the new conflicts among elites and the directions of cleavage. For this reason a lack of consensus pervades scholarly assessments of the meaning of the development of tensions between high-status non-Brahmans and Brahmans in south India early in the twentieth century. It is not clear why anti-Brahmanism emerged in the ideology of the Justice Party, a party of landholding interests.Was this development another example of the exacerbation of social distinctions under imperial rule, analogous to the Hindu-Muslim communalism which emerged in north India? Or, as one opinion has it, was the ideological change an opportunistic maneuver on the part of a group of politicians, encouraged by British officials anxious to foil the nationalist movement? This paper takes an approach more in line with the first alternative and sees the propagation of an ideology of ethnic antagonism as a result of processes of the reformation of group and personal identities. I link the reformation of group identity to the confusion in rules regarding group behavior which resulted from the imposition and operation of the imperial system of dispute management, the Anglo-Indian legal system.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , February 1989 , pp. 151 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

Funding for research and writing for this paper came from a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship, 1974–1975 and from the University of Oslo. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the conference, ‘The Career and Prospects of Law in Modern India’, funded by the Social Science Research Council and held in Madison, Wisconsin, June 1982, and at the XIX nordiske historikerkongres, Odense, Denmark, 1984. Proceedings from the latter conference were published in 1986.

1 Irschick, Eugene F. gives an intellectual history of the non-Brahman movement in his Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 275–310.Google ScholarA recent discusion of Hindu–Mulism riots and questions of community identity is the dissertation of Freitag, Sandria B., ‘Religious Rites and Riots: Communalism and Community Identity in North India, 1870–1940’, University of California, Berkeley, 1980.Google Scholar

2 Washbrook, DavidBaker, Christopher John have put forth this view. Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Baker, , The Politics of South India, 1920–1937 (Cambridge, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 ‘The Non-Brahman Manifesto’, in Irchick, , Politics and Social Conflict in South India, pp. 358–67.Google Scholar

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5 A discussion of zamindari, landholding litigation with reference to one of the largest estates in Tamil country is in my ‘Raja-dharma in Zamindari South India: Land, Litigation and Largess in Ramnad,’ Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS), vol. 13, no. 2 (1979), pp. 228–34.Google Scholar

6 The definition of legal culture used here refers to those values about law, structures and rules of dispute processing, and links between these structures and relevant social and political structures in a wider society and culture. This follows from discussions in Friedman, Lawrence M., The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective (New York, 1975), p. 15 and chs. viii, ix, and x.Google Scholar

7 Marriott, McKimInden, Ronald B., ‘Caste Systems’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 3, pp. 983–91 presents a formulation of code and substance in caste membership;Google Scholar see also Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System, translated by Sainsbury, Mark (Chicago, 1970).Google Scholar

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9 Ibid.

10 Barnett, Marguerite Ross, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., pp. 161–4.

12 Ibid., p. 327.

13 Irschick, , Politics and Social Conflict, pp. 275–310.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., ‘The Non-Brahman Manifesto’, pp. 358–67.

15 Ibid., p. 362.

16 Stein, Burton, in Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India (Delhi, 1980), well delineates the nature of indigenous polity in the centuries preceding the establishment of British imperial government.Google ScholarKadhirvel, S., A History of the Maravas: 1700–1802 (Madurai, 1977), is an excellent guide to the political structures and events of the Tirunelveli and Ramnad areas.Google ScholarMahalingam, T. V., Mackenzie Manuscripts: Summaries of the Historical Manuscripts in the Mackenzie Collection (Madras, 1972), vol. 1 (Tamil and Malayalam), performs an essential service. For an all-India characterization, showing similarities with Stein's formulations,Google Scholar see Heesterman, J. C., ‘Was there an Indian Reaction? Western Expansion in Indian Perspectives,’ in Wesseling, H. L. (ed.), Expansion and Reaction (Leiden, 1978), pp. 31–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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18 The role of temples, for example, in political integration is examined in Appadurai, Arjun, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in Appadurai, and Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai, ‘The South Indian Temple: Authority, Honor and Redistribution’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s., vol. 10. no. 2 (1976), pp. 187–211.Google Scholar

19 Kadhirvel, , History of the Maravas, pp. 11, 16–21, 52, 57, 59. Published after this article was written,Google ScholarThe Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge, 1987), by Dirks, Nicholas B., discusses the relationship between kinship and rule in Pudukkottai, pp. 203–84Google Scholar.

20 Trautman, Thomas R., Dravidian Kingship (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 6, ‘The Politics of Kinship’, pp. 357–94.Google Scholar

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23 There is much excellent writing on this topic. I simply suggest here two articles on nineteenth century usage of these texts: both are by Duncan, J.Derrett, M., and are taken from his book, Religion, Law and the State in India (London, 1968),Google Scholar ch. 8, ‘The British as Patrons of the Sastra’, pp. 225–73, and ch. 9, ‘the Administrations of Hindu Law by the British’, pp. 274–320Google Scholar.

24 This point was argued in my ‘Changing Meanings of Succession: Maravar Warriors in the Nineteenth Century’, given at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, Toronto, 1981.Google Scholar

25 The evolution of royal polity during the nineteenth century in Maravar Country is the topic of my Ph. D. dissertation, ‘Resources and Rule in Zamindari South India, 1802–1903: Sivagangai and Ramnad as Kingdoms under the Raj’, University of Wisconsin, 1979.Google Scholar

26 I attempt a systematic approach to this conflict in my ‘Competition and Conflict in Hindu Polity, c. 1550–1750: The Integration and Fragmentation of Tamil and Andhra Kingdoms’, presented at the Eighth European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Tällberg, Sweden, 1983.Google Scholar

27 See ‘The Law Courts and the New Structure of Sucession’, in my ‘Resoures and Rule’, pp. 132–75. I am continuing with this study of litigation, but have shifted the focus from Maravar caste country to the Andhra Coast in a paper for the project, ‘Kin in Conflict and Conflict among Kin on the Andhra Coast: Velama Caste “Families” in the Nineteenth Century,’ Universitetet i Oslo.Google Scholar

28 Nelson, pp. 191–203, part II, ch. III, ‘Customs not judicially recognized’.Google Scholar

29 David Washbrook argues that the incidence of litigation in the frist half of the nineteenth centry has been exaggerated. In 1850, 64,500 suits were instituted for property worth just 73.5 lakhs and the number of suits involving land titles were 4,742. By the late century, the total number of cases per year ran at 200,000 for Madras. see his ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,’ in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 3 (1981), p. 670.Google Scholar The argument here, however, is not based upon great numbers of cases, but the types of families involved, families holding large areas of land compared to the majority of agriculturalists. These certainly dominated the highest court of appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, throughout the century.

30 Price, ‘Raja-dharma in Zamindari South India: Land, Litigation and Largess,’ p. 230.Google Scholar

31 Washbrook, Emergence, pp. 235–6.Google Scholar

32 For biographical details see: Gopalratnam, V. C., A Century Completed: A History of the Madras High Court (Madras, 1962?), p. 154;Google Scholar‘The Late Sir V. Bashyam Aiyangar,’ in Madras Law Journal, vol. xviii (11 1908);Google ScholarRamesam, Vepa, ‘Sir Bhashyam Iyengar’, in Advocates Association Golden Jubilee Souvenir, 1939, p. x.Google Scholar

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43 Ibid., p. 43–4.

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57 Ibid., pp. 88–9.

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59 Price, , ‘Resources and Rule’.Google Scholar

60 Those concerning, for example, Nuzvid, Pithapuram, Kolenka, Belgaum.

61 Price, ‘Raja-dharma in Ramnad’, pp. 212 and 226–34.Google Scholar

62 Aiyangar, Bhashynam, ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons’, in The Madras Law Journal: The Law of Hindu Gains of Learning, vol. X, 1900, p. 6.Google Scholar

63 Baker, , Politics of South India, p. 41. This number included the rajas of Panagal, Kalahasti, Venkatagiri, Pithapuram, Mirzapurma, Bobbili and Nuzvid.Google Scholar

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65 Maharajah Sri Rao Venkata Swetachalapati Ranga-Rao Bahadur K.C.I.E., Maharaja of Bobbili, Adivce to the Indian Aristocracy (Madras, 1905).Google Scholar

66 Ibid., pp. 195, 197, 198, 200.

67 Irschick, , Politics and Social Conflict, p. 51.Google Scholar

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69 Irschick, , Politics and Social Conflict, p. 362.Google Scholar

70 Ibid.

71 The dissertation of David Gilmartin is an excellent exploration of issues of law and ruling ideologies in the Punjab: ‘Tribe, Land and Religion in the Punjab: Muslim Politics and the Making of Pakistan’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1979Google Scholar, see for the Unionist Party chs. I and IV. Also, Gilmartin, ‘Customary Law and Shariat in British Punjab’, paper given for SSRC Conference, ‘South Asian Islam: Moral Principles in Tension’, Philadelphia, 1981 and ‘“Tribe”, Custom and Shariat in British Punjab’, given at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, Toronto, 1981.Google Scholar

72 Steven Barnett writes concering contemporary attempts of high-status Hindus to maintain rules inappropriately: ‘hedging, presenting contradictory identities in different contexts, is really a kind of holding action and cannot be sustained in the urban setting’. From his ‘Identity Choice and Caste Ideology in Contemporary South India’, in David, Kenneth (ed.), The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia (The Hague, 1977), p. 406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73 Barnett, Marguerite Ross, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism, pp. 300 and 303–4.Google Scholar