Spiritual slavery, material malaise: 'Untouchables' and religious neutrality in colonial south India

Historical Research

Volumn 83, Issue 219, 2010, Pages 124-145

  Viswanath, Rupa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 75149141905     PISSN: 09503471     EISSN: 14682281     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2008.00464.x     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. The full text of the proclamation may be found in G. Dunbar, A History of India from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1st edn., 1936; 2 vols., 1943), ii. 518-20
2. See, e.g., B. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India (Princeton,N.J., 1996)
3. N. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge, 1987)
4. and his Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J., 2001)
5. L. Mani, Contentious Traditions: the Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Los Angeles, Calif., 1998)
6. D. A.Washbrook, 'Law, state and agrarian society in colonial India', Mod. Asian Stud., xv (1981), 649-721
7. The uncertain character of caste and its ramifications for the exercise of neutrality have been recognized in only a couple of studies, addressing not colonial policies of neutrality, but post-colonial law and secularism; such studies are therefore based upon assumptions that this article begins to historicize. Marc Galanter discusses neutrality and caste incisively, though very briefly, in his text on post-colonial policies of compensatory discrimination for low-ranked castes, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Delhi, 1984), pp. 18-29
8. The first serious study of post-colonial Indian secularism,D. E. Smith's India as a Secular State (Princeton, N.J., 1963), discusses caste's relation to religion in colonial policies, but remains within the colonial problematic of interpreting religious tradition in terms of classical Sanskrit sources, in order to distinguish caste's genuinely 'religious' character from its merely 'civil' accretions
9. Other aspects of the transformation of caste in colonial India have been well described in S. Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the 18th Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999)
10. Dirks, Castes of Mind
11. B. Cohn,'The census, social structure and objectification in south Asia', in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987), pp. 224-54
12. N. Peabody, 'Cents, sense, census: human inventories in late precolonial and early colonial India', Comparative Stud. in Soc. and Hist., xliii (2001), 819-50
13. D.A.Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: the Madras Presidency, 1870-1920 (Cambridge, 1976)
14. and D. A.Washbrook and C. J. Baker, South India: Political Institutions and Political Change, 1880-1940 (Delhi, 1975)
15. Examples of modern scholarship which assume that caste is primarily a matter of religion - and are thus forced to explain the importance of caste in post-colonial political mobilization as the result of an allegedly new politicization of it - include figures as diverse as: L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: the Caste System and its Implications (Chicago, Ill., 1980)
16. R. Kothari and R. Maru, 'Caste and secularism in India: case study of a caste federation', Jour. Asian Stud., xxv (1965), 33-50
17. D. L. Sheth, 'Secularization of caste and making of new middle class', Economic and PoliticalWeekly, xxxiv-xxxv, 21-28 Aug. 1999
18. M. N. Srinivas, Collected Essays (New Delhi, 2002)
19. This literature includes A. Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: a South Indian Case (New York, 1981)
20. C. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton, N.J., 1964)
21. K.W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (New York, 1989); Mani
22. As the legal historian William McCormack has admitted, 'caution needs to be exercised in drawing inferences from published legislation . . . to the effects of such decisions on society . . . What is lacking is the necessary research on the enforcement of regulations at local levels' (W. McCormack, 'Caste and the British administration of Hindu law', Jour.Asian and African Stud., i (1966), 27-34, at p. 33).The lacuna to which he refers has scarcely been recognized, let alone filled
23. For descriptions of missionary mobilization on the Pariah issue, see G. Houghton, The Impoverishment of Dependency: the History of the Protestant Church in Madras 1870-1920 (Madras, 1983), ch. 4
24. G.A. Oddie, Social Protest in India (Delhi, 1979), pp. 128-45
25. The mechanisms by which concerns of governance converged with the public and missionary outcry to render the Pariah a problem for the state are delineated in R.Viswanath, '"The Pariah problem": missionaries, the administration of "untouchables", and the elaboration of neutrality in colonial south India, 1885-c.1918' (unpublished Columbia University Ph.D. thesis, 2006), ch. 1
26. Fuller treatment of the very complex history of mirasi tenure in colonial Madras, what mirasi rights entailed, and how they were distributed, bought and sold, as well as changing state conceptions of them, can be found in E. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795-1895 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994)
27. D. Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (Delhi, 1992)
28. D. Ludden, Peasant History in South India (Delhi, 1985)
29. and M. Shah,'Capitalist development and the transformation of agrarian relations in Chingleput District, c.1780-1983' (unpublished Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum Ph.D. thesis, 1984)
30. Tremenheere's 'Note' is itself a rich contemporary observation of some aspects of mirasi tenure.The classic contemporary source is W. H. Bailey and W. Huddleston, Papers on Mirasi Right Selected from the Records of Government (Madras, 1862)
31. The schematic account in this article largely follows the emphases of Tremenheere's exposition.Tremenheere's 'Note' has been considered in B. Hjelje, 'Slavery and agricultural bondage in south India in the 19th century', Scandinavian Econ. Hist. Rev., xv (1967), 71-126
32. R. Viswanath, 'Reading J. H. A. Tremenheere's "Note on the Pariahs of Chingelput"', in Note on the Pariahs of Chingleput: a Translation, ed.V. Alex (Madurai, forthcoming) (in Tamil)
33. Washbrook, Emergence of Provincial Politics, esp. chs. 2, 3
34. The Revd.Adam Andrew, a missionary of the Free Church of Scotland who worked among Pariahs for three decades in rural Madras Presidency, had this to say in an article addressed to his fellow missionaries:'How can the higher officials really know the Pariahs in their haunts and ways? A European revenue officer, with the increase in his indoor official duties and his frequent changes from one district to another, has no time to look into the numerous details of village life in the many villages which crowd his district. Nor can he get near the people, clothed as he is with authority derived from the State . . . and [thus] acquire an intimate personal knowledge of them first or second hand.The multifarious duties of his office prevent him from acquiring the former, but he is not a whit better with reference to the latter, as it is extremely difficult for him to arrive at the truth regarding the Pariahs through his subordinate officials, who belong to the upper monied classes, and who are therefore selfinterested and prejudiced' ('The Madras government and the Pariahs, part I', in Harvest Field (1893), pp. 208-9)
35. See Cohn, 'The census'; Dirks, Castes of Mind
36. E. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict: the Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-29 (Berkeley, Calif., 1969)
37. N. Roberts and R. Viswanath, 'Dravidian', in Keywords in South Asia, ed. R. Dwyer (forthcoming)
38. Washbrook, Provincial Politics
39. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., ccclvi (7 July 1891), p. 539. Gorst made this statement in response to a question by Samuel Smith, M. P., who had in turn been approached in this regard by the missionary Revd. Adam Andrew of the Free Church of Scotland. Andrew, then on furlough from Madras, was engaged in actively promoting the interests of the Pariah in Britain (see Viswanath, '"The Pariah problem"', ch. 2)
40. Examples of bonds can be found inTremenheere's 'Note' inT.N.S.A., Revenue, G.O. 1010-1010A, 30 Sept. 1892; Revenue (Confidential), G.O. 875, 19 Apr. 1916; and Revenue (Confidential), G.O. 748, 29 March 1919. For analyses of forms of debt bondage in other parts of India, see G. Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1990)
41. and J. Breman, Patronage and Exploitation: Emerging Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (Berkeley, Calif., 1974)
42. The widespread use of influence in small law courts by village elites has been described, inter alia, in Washbrook, 'Law state and agrarian society'; and R. E. Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788-1848: a History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford, 1965). The invocation of the law as a tool deployed specifically against Pariahs is attested in much of the missionary literature. Caste-based discriminatory practices - e.g., the refusal to allow Pariah witnesses and even defendants to enter the courts, forcing them to give testimony from outside - were still routine even in 1924, as revealed in the testimony of twoTamil Dalit political activists, M. C. Rajah and R. Srinivasan, to the Lee Commission (see London, India Office Library, Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services, Evidence: Madras, vol. 36)
43. Some of these aspects of labour-mirasidar relations in pre-colonial and early colonial Chingleput district have been well described in M. Shah, 'The kaniatchi form of labour', Economic and Political Weekly, xx (1985), 65-78. (Kaniatchi is the Tamil equivalent of the Persian mirasi.)
44. It has been well documented that Pariahs instigated these mass conversions (cf. J. Webster, The Dalit Christians: a History (Delhi, 1992)), though popular perception in India, then and now, has it that missionaries seduced them into abandoning their ancestral religions. These conversions took place throughout India, following different trajectories in different mission fields, and peaked in the 1890s in the northern part of Madras Presidency, the area of concern here.While it is true that scattered mass conversions occurred in south India even before 1870, they only acquired an empirical density - and became a specific focus of Protestant missionary writings - in the period described here
45. The Missionary Conference: South India and Ceylon, 1879, i (Madras, 1880), p. 64
46. The Hindu (n.d. [1897])
47. cited in Harvest Field (1897), p. 479
48. Studies that document the vacillations of official views towards missionaries in the early establishment of the British presence in India include P. Carson, 'The British Raj and the awakening of the evangelical conscience: the ambiguities of religious establishment and toleration, 1698-1833', in Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. B. Stanley (Richmond, 2001), pp. 45-70
49. and E. D. Potts, 'Missionaries and the beginnings of the secular state in India', in Essays in Indian History: in Honour of Cuthbert Collin Davies, ed. D.Williams and E. D. Potts (NewYork, 1973), pp. 113-36
50. For an interesting late colonial source, see A. Mayhew, Christianity and the Government of India (1929)
51. Thus the Revd.William Goudie, aWesleyan Methodist stationed near Madras, reported that 'It is a common thing for people to request that if we cannot undertake work among them, I will at least visit their village and pitch my tent in it for a few days' ('The missionaries and the Pariah land problem', Harvest Field (1894), p. 532)
52. This will strike some readers as a counterintuitive claim, and it cannot fully be substantiated here for reasons of space; it has been addressed in Viswanath, '"The Pariah problem"', ch. 2. For the moment, it must suffice to underscore, first, that doctrinal divergences on matters of the observance of caste distinctions among their Indian congregations - that is, the difference between the accommodative position of the German Lutheran Mission (of which Kabis was a member) and the more denunciatory rhetoric of other European and American Protestant missions - were not as serious as most missionaries, and most historians, have imagined, at least when it came to punitive measures taken against those non-Pariah congregants who insisted on 'keeping' caste. Under pressure from home to secure large congregations, missionaries of all denominations rarely imposed strict rules on 'high' caste converts. This explains why, when one of the most ardent crusaders against caste, the Revd. J. A. Sharrock of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded a Caste Suppression Society for all the missionaries of India, which required member missionaries strictly to enforce the discontinuance of caste practices among their congregations, not a single taker was found after over four years of wide publicity (see 'Notes on the debate', Harvest Field (1898), p. 250). Second, whatever their theoretical differences on caste, missionaries from a wide range of Protestant societies largely agreed on methods of evangelization among Pariahs, and on why those methods were theologically justified
53. As Henriette Bugge puts it, 'To be labelled as [a] supporter of rice Christians [a derogatory epithet for impoverished Christians assumed to have converted for 'temporal' reasons] was . . . one of the harshest criticisms one could raise against a missionary society in South India' (H. Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India (1890-1900) (Richmond, 1994), p. 44)
54. And there was stiff competition for converts among Protestant missions as well, which led to the forging of 'comity' agreements, essentially territorial divisions of the countryside designed to prevent the activity of more than one mission in the same area. See also H. Grafe, History of Christianity in India, iv, pt. ii
55. Tamilnadu in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Bangalore, 1990)
56. J. Kabis, 'Should legal and financial help be given to Pariahs?', Harvest Field (1897), pp. 361-73, 415-22, originally presented at the Madras Missionary Conference, Aug. 1897 (Bangalore, United Theological College Ecclesiastical Archives (hereafter U.T.C.E.A.))
57. The idea that the primary work of the missionary should consist of preaching or other tasks directly related to the transmission of the gospel was a mainstay among Protestant missionaries in south India at this time, a corollary of the view that the sole legitimate domain of mission activity was the spiritual life of the congregation. Even the spiritual validity of mission-sponsored education (which would, its advocates claimed, prepare the mind of the heathen to receive the gospel) as opposed to preaching alone was a hotly debated issue, as the 'missionary controversy' among the Wesleyans in the late 19th century makes manifest (see A. N. Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester, 2004), pp. 274-8
58. and C.-A. C. Bennett, 'Seeking the soul of India: Wesleyan discussions 1886-1900', Jour. Asian Mission, iv (2002), 243-66). While missionaries could thus disagree on which tasks were directly conducive to receiving the gospel, Protestant missionaries of all denominations maintained that material aid, such as that being given to impoverished Pariahs, was unacceptable as a rule, and required thorough justification
59. Many historians have described the interlinkages of control over land, credit and markets by rural elites in south India. Thus, e.g., landed elites provided credit to smallholders, and in the not uncommon event of a bad season, coerced debtors into mortgaging their land to them under conditions in which foreclosure was highly likely. The extent to which these forms of control were further concentrated in the hands of a few during the 19th and early 20th centuries is still a matter of debate, and probably a single answer - yes or no - will not do, given both the diversity of south Indian society, and the fact that what counts as 'control' in these diverse arenas is scarcely agreed upon. These 'polarization' debates may be found in Kumar; B. Robert, 'Economic change and agrarian organization in "dry" south India, 1890-1940: a reinterpretation', Mod. Asian Stud., xvii (1983), 59-78
60. D. A. Washbrook, 'Economic development and social stratification in rural Madras: the "dry" region, 1878-1929', in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ed. C. Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (1978), pp. 68-82
61. D. A. Washbrook, 'The commercialization of agriculture in colonial India: production, subsistence and reproduction in the "dry south", c.1870-1930', Mod. Asian Stud., xxviii (1994), 129-64
62. and D. A.Washbrook, 'South India, 1770-1840: the colonial transition', Mod. Asian Stud., xxxviii (2004), 479-516
63. The transformations in Madras province's 'pastoralism' - a term borrowed from the writings of Michel Foucault - and the central role that Pariah 'uplift' played in this project are described in Viswanath,'"The Pariah problem"'. For a classic statement of 'pastoral' elements of modern governance - which include targeted intervention aimed at maintaining the well-being of specific sub-populations such as 'the poor' - see M. Foucault, 'Omnes et singulatim: towards a criticism of political reason', The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Cambridge, 1981)
64. See M. C. Rajah, The Oppressed Hindus (Madras, 1925)
65. M. N. Srinivas, 'A note on Sanskritization and westernization', Far Eastern Quarterly, xv (1956), 481-96, at p. 495 (cited in Smith, p. 297)
66. On these features of anti-caste politics - also known as Dravidianist politics in south India - see Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict; Roberts and Viswanath
67. D. A. Washbrook, 'Caste, class and dominance in modern Tamil Nadu: non-Brahminism, Dravidianism and Tamil nationalism', in Dominance and State Power in Modern India, ed. F. Frankel and M. S. A. Rao (Delhi, 1989)