Rethinking caste and class: "Labour", the "Depressed classes", and the politics of distinctions, Madras 1918-1924

International Review of Social History

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2014, Pages 1-37

  Viswanath, Rupa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GÖTTINGEN   (Germany)

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EID: 84898491124     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: 1469512X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859013000709     Document Type: Review

References (104)

1. The caste character of agrarian labour was especially pronounced in the wet rice-growing regions, which in economic terms and with respect to population density (if not necessarily in land area) were the most important parts of the Presidency. The morphology of Madras' castebased labour regime, and its systematic downplaying and misrecognition by the ruling native elite-colonial state nexus, is described in detail in Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem (New York, 2014).
2. The history of how the wretched condition of Pariahs (as Dalits were known in the 1880s and 1890s) was forced upon the reluctant attention of the colonial state, and how the state's faltering efforts at reform brought the state briefly, and partially, into conflict with landed interests and native elites more generally, is detailed in The Pariah Problem.
3. On trends in Indian labour historiography, see for instance, Chitra Joshi, "Histories of Indian Labour: Predicaments and Possibilities", History Compass, 6 (2008), pp. 439-454
4. and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, "Aspects of the Historiography of Labour in India", in idem, History, Culture and the Indian City: Essays by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 236-250.
5. Exemplary works in this vein that specifically discuss Dalit labourers include Nandini Gooptu, "Caste, Deprivation and Politics: The Untouchables in UP Towns in the Early Twentieth Century", in Peter Robb (ed.), Dalit Movements and the Meanings of Labour (London, 1993), pp. 277-298
6. Chitra Joshi, Lost Worlds: Indian Labour and its Forgotten Histories (London, 2003), esp. pp. 237-276
7. and Janaki Nair, Miners and Millhands: Work, Culture and Politics in Princely India (New Delhi, 1998) pp. 87-126.
8. Although Dalits had able representatives on the Legislative Council, they were vastly outnumbered, as we will see.
9. Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern India (New York, 2014), chs. 2 and 3.
10. "A Letter from the Rev. A.C. Clayton", printed pamphlet dated 15 October 1895; WMMA (SOAS).
11. Andrew's report focused on Chingleput District, where his station was located and where he worked for several decades between the 1880s and the 1910s. Andrew's administrative importance, and therefore the continuity between state and missionary projects for which I argue in The Pariah Problem, is attested by the inclusion of Andrew's report in a document with far-reaching consequences for state welfarism, Government Order Revenue Department [henceforth GOR] 875 (Confidential), 19 April 1916, Tamil Nadu State Archives [henceforth TNA].
12. GOR 2941, 12 August 1918, TNA.
13. Notes to GOR 875 Confidential, 19 April 1916, TNA, p. 20.
14. Viswanath, The Pariah Problem, ch. 7.
15. see Nicholas Dirks's depiction of what he calls the "embarrassment of caste" among nationalist Indian sociologists and other high caste academics in idem, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ, 2001), pp. 290-296.
16. See, for instance, Notes to GOR 875 (Confidential), 19 April 1916, TNA, p. 20
17. as well as Viswanath, The Pariah Problem, ch. 7.
18. In analytic language philosophy a term's extensional meaning refers to the set of empirical objects to which it refers, as opposed to how it is conceptualized. Thus, terms that may have distinct conceptual significance, such as featherless biped and human being, may be empirically co-extensional insofar as humans are the only featherless bipeds. The fact that Panchamas were, until the late colonial period, empirically speaking almost always landless labourers, and, outside relatively elite labour contexts like factories, labourers who did not own the means of production were almost always Panchamas, the two terms "labourer" and "Panchama" were largely co-extensional in Madras. They could therefore be used interchangeably in practice.
19. Report of the Indian Industrial Commission (Calcutta, 1918).
20. GOR 271, 2 February 1920, TNA, p. 2 [emphasis mine].
21. For a succinct overview of the relation between India and the ILO, see Gerry Rodgers, "India, the ILO and the Quest for Social Justice since 1919", Economic and Political Weekly, 5 March 2011, XLVI, No. 10, pp. 45-52.
22. Thus, men like B.R. Ambedkar and M.C. Rajah were universally described as "depressed classes leaders", without any ambiguity over the fact that what this meant is that they were leaders of the first category. Similarly, one could refer to conflicts between depressed classes and Kallars (a dominant group often used by landowners to discipline Dalit labourers, and not infrequently landowners themselves), despite the fact that Kallars were a so-called criminal tribe and therefore themselves also members of the depressed classes in the more technical sense.
23. Cf. Board's Proceedings (Settlement) 60, 18 March 1918, TNA.
24. GOR 2254, 14 September 1920, TNA, p. 13, §12.
25. See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago, IL, 1980), pp. 239ff.
26. GOR 749 (Confidential), 29 March 1919, TNA, p. 28, §9.
27. This was the opinion of Collector of Chingleput C.M. Mullaly in Board's Proceedings (Revenue) 617, 6 September 1889, TNA.
28. §12 of District Munsiff's Judgment, GOR 1740 Mis., 25 July 1919, TNA.
29. Arthur Young (1741-1820) most famously wrote on agriculture and economics, and he and Jeremy Bentham were mutual admirers. The phrase "the magic of property turn sand into gold" appears in his 1793 pamphlet, The Example of France: A Warning to England.
30. Cf. G. Mingay (ed.), Arthur Young and His Times (London, 1975).
31. GOR 1740 Mis., 25 July 1919, TNA, p. 9, §13.
32. Board's Proceedings, Revenue [henceforth BPR] 347 (Mis.), 3 November 1919, TNA, p. 11.
33. A thorough exploration of women's labour and remunerative hierarchies in rural Tamil Nadu is beyond the scope of this essay. One of the most penetrating accounts of the consequences of gendered ideologies of work and respectability on womens' organization and labour militancy in colonial India is Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry (Cambridge, 1999), especially pp. 177-212.
34. This is was the Wesleyan Adam C. Clayton, see above, n. 6.
35. Protestant missionary pamphlet literature in Tamil that circulated at this time often carried similar stories about women's virtue, but, to my knowledge, refrained from according women a leadership role in accumulating household capital, as the story of Arasayi does here. Cf. Canthayiyin Carittiram (Madras, s.a.).
36. Government Order, Law (General) Department [henceforth GOL(G)] 1846, 7 November 1921, TNA.
37. Rupa Viswanath, "Spiritual Slavery, Material Malaise: 'Untouchables' and Religious Neutrality in Colonial South India", Historical Research, 83: 219, February 2010, pp. 124-145.
38. This phrase comes from a statement made by government in 1892, in response to a report made by Collector of Chingleput, J.H.A. Tremenheere, which stated that Pariahs experienced unfair treatment in courts; GOR 1010-1010A, 30 September 1892, p. 70, §11 (d).
39. GOR 3559, 10 November 1917, Appendix: "Further Notes to Discussion on Matters of General and Public Interest", p. 3.
40. GOR 1740 Mis., 25 July 1919, §34.
41. There is considerable evidence to suggest this was not a recent development in Panchama evaluations of relations with their caste masters - Collector of Chingleput C.M. Mullaly found himself besieged with applications when he offered house sites to cēri dwellers in the late 1880s; BPR 617, 6 September 1889, TNA.
42. B.R. Ambedkar, "States and Minorities - Memorandum Submitted to the Constituent Assembly on the Safeguards for the Scheduled Castes", 15 March 1947, Babasaheb Ambedkar Speeches and Writings, I (Bombay, 1979), pp. 391-450
43. cited in Sukhadeo Thorat and Narender Kumar (eds), B.R. Ambedkar: Perspectives on Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies (New Delhi [etc.], 2008), p. 329. In an earlier period missionary archives attest to these relations, but style them as evidence of "religious persecution". I elaborate on this in The Pariah Problem, ch. 2. Foucault has also famously used war as a metaphor to characterize relations of power of this kind. Although Foucault came to question the applicability of the metaphor to a general theory of power, it is particularly apt at evoking the feints, tactics, and uncertainty that mark the relation between the Panchama and her master in this period in Madras.
44. See "Society Must be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (New York, 2003), especially Lectures 1, 2 and 3. For an astute political theoretic analysis of Foucault's use of this metaphor
45. see Pasquale Pasquino, "Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modern Political Theory", Economy and Society, 22 (1993), pp. 77-88. Gyan Pandey has recently produced a sobering account of forms of conflict in contemporary India, allied to those I am discussing here: Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Palo Alto, CA, 2006).
46. BPR 1256 Mis., 10 September 1918, TNA.
47. Kallars are a dominant caste in some parts of Tamil Nadu, with members across the state ranging from sharecroppers to kings. Today Kallars are classified amongst the "backward classes" (BCs) for administrative purposes.
48. BPR 1256 Mis., 10 September 1918, TNA.
49. The thesis that bondage provides labourers with protection under conditions of famine and scarcity has been aptly challenged by Dharma Kumar, Land and Caste in South India (Delhi, 1992 [1965]), p. xxii
50. see also Viswanath, The Pariah Problem, Introduction and ch. 1.
51. Special Deputy Collector D. Arulanandam Pillai's Progress Report, BPR 347 Mis., 11 March 1919, p. 18, §10. With respect to techniques of labour control, it was not only ownership of sites that was critical, but their location: a report on Kistna demonstrated that even without control over the house site itself, ownership of an adjacent site provided employers with the means to harass labourers: "[The landowner enjoys] an indirect hold [...] over the Mala [a Telugu Dalit caste] labourers by reason of possessing a piece of vacant land in close proximity to the Malapalli [cēri]. [It is] an instrument [for] impounding their cattle or killing their fowls on the slightest pretext, whenever they assume an attitude of independence. He thus becomes privileged to command their manual labour at less than the market rates; GOR 1230, 27 April 1917, citing a report from Achary dated 26 August 1916. In Thenperambur, the village of which we have been speaking, we are told that there were a few Panchamas who owned their sites in the old cēri, but that in order to live elsewhere they were "willing to relinquish their house sites without any compensation in favour of Government in addition to the moiety of the cost of acquisition [of new sites] which they have agreed to pay"; BPR 1256 Mis., 10 September 1918. This was likely due to the location of the old cēri, and attests further to Panchamas' willingness to assume loss and risk to alter labour relations.
52. Special Deputy Collector D. Arulanandam Pillai's Progress Report, BPR 347 Mis., 11 March 1919, TNA, p. 18, §10.
53. Some instances of violence are recorded in BPR 347 Mis., 11 March 1919, TNA.
54. We also know that following a mass meeting of the mirasidars of Tanjore to protest against the Government Order, the SIOCU organized their own meeting to counter the mirasidars' claims. The speeches made at the meeting have not survived, and all that remains is a brief but bracing commentary on the issue in the pages of Val{line below}ikāt{dot below}t{dot below}uvōn{line below} ; "Notes Connected with Resolution on Matters of General Public Interest", GOR 3201 Mis., 10 September 1918, TNA, p. 7, §7 (iii).
55. Val{line below}ikat{dot below}t{dot below}uvōn{line below}, January 1918, pp. 2-3 [emphasis mine].
56. GOR 3559, 10 November 1917, Appendix: "Further Notes to GO 3559", p. 3.
57. P. Samuel, "South Indian Oppressed Castes, their Income and their Expenses", [Ten{line below}intiya Ot{dot below}ukkappat{dot below}ukir{dot below}a Jātikal{dot below}um, Avarkal{dot below}ut{dot below}aiya varavu-celavukal{dot below}um] Val{line below}ikāt{line below}t{line below}uvōn{line below}, February 1918, p. 48.
58. Illātavan{line below} pollātavan{line below}, cited in Herman Jensen, A Classified Collection of Tamil Proverbs (New York, 1997[1897]), p. 122.
59. cf. Gerald Berreman, Caste and Other Inequities: Essays on Inequality (Meerut, 1979).
60. see also Eamon Murphy, "Class and Community: The Madras Labour Union, 1918-21", Indian Economic and Social History Review, 14 (1977), pp. 291-321
61. A.R. Venkatachalapathy and V. Sivasubramanian, Pin{line below}n{line below}i Ālai Vēlai Niruttam 1921 [The Binny Mills Strike, 1921] (Chennai, 1990). The latter is the only full-length study of this watershed event. While appreciating its empirical and analytic richness, I note in passing my disagreement with the authors' view that the state's actions can be read as evidence of a policy of divide and rule. For an alternative argument, see the following section, and n. 75 below.
62. Gandhi's speech of 16 September 1921 is reproduced in Swadharma, 18 September 1921, p. 341.
63. The Adi-Dravidas describe their evolution from loyal unionists to disillusioned strikebreakers in a memorial to government; GOL(G) 1844, 2 August 1922, TNA.
64. Madras Legislative Council Proceedings [henceforth MLCP], 12 October 1921, TNA. pp. 1005-1033.
65. Subho Basu, "The Paradox of Peasant Worker: Reconceptualizing Workers' Politics in Bengal, 1890-1939", Modern Asian Studies, 42 (2008), p. 52.
66. Murphy, "Class and Community," p. 319.
67. William B. Ayling, T.M. Narasimhacharlu, and R. Venkataratnam Nayudu, "Report on the Madras Disturbances Inquiry Committee", GOL(G) 1957, 21 November 1921, TNA, p. 7.
68. GOL(G) 1912, 27 June 1924, TNA. This file includes a memorial from Adi-Dravida refugees at the camp in Vyasarpadi who describe miserable living conditions persisting over three and a half years later.
69. MLCP 12 October 1921, TNA, p. 1011.
70. Dewan Bahadur R. Venkataratnam Nayudu, one of the authors of an official inquiry into the disturbances, included the following in his addendum to the report, at GOL(G) 1957, 21 November 1921, p. 11: "418 huts were destroyed by the several fires: of these 269 belonged to the Adi-Dravidas and 149 to others - 67 of the latter belonging to Chucklers [another Dalit caste in Madras]. Living under similar conditions, they were all undoubtedly of a similar condition in life. But how glaringly unequal the relief afforded to these two sections of equal sufferers! Over and above contributions made by philanthropic persons, a sum of twenty thousand rupees of Government money was spent on feeding and sheltering the Adi-Dravida occupants of the 269 huts; whereas the other 169 huts received attention to the extent of Rs. 100! What way this one-sided measure will interpret itself to the average mind [...] need not be dilated upon." This dissenting minute was then circulated in the popular press; Swadharma, 23 October 1921. The "Chucklers", it would appear, neither worked in the mill nor participated in the strike either way, but were simply the victims of fires because they happened to live in the vicinity of the strikebreakers. Their mention here is critical however, for it shows another series of conceptual encompassments: Adi-Dravida sometimes simply meant depressed classes, but could also be used specifically to refer only to members of the Paraiyar caste, as was being done here.
71. Murphy, "Class and Community", p. 310, n. 53.
72. Swadharma, 10 July 1921, p. 123.
73. Ayling et al., "Report on the Madras Disturbances", p. 7; cf. Swadharma, 10 July 1921, p. 123; MLCP 12 October 1921, TNA, 1007.
74. "Note by Mister T.M. Narasimhacharlu", GOL(G) 1957, 21 November 1921, TNA. p. 8.
75. MLCP 12 October 1921, TNA, pp. 1005-1033; Swadharma, issues ranging from 5 June 1921 to 2 April 1922. The latter contains many transcripts of speeches made by prominent Justice Party members, as well as Madras Union men, throughout the city.
76. MLCP 1922, TNA, VII, p. 3503.
77. MLCP 29 March 1921, TNA, p. 1337.
78. There is a vast and highly contentious literature on political non-Brahminism in Madras. An excellent sceptical account of its early history may be found in Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-29 (Berkeley, CA, 1969)
79. a positive assessment is contained in V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: Iyothee Thass to Periyar (Kolkata, 1999).
80. "The Non-Brahmin Manifesto",' The Hindu, 20 December 1916, reproduced as Appendix 1 in Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict.
81. Letter from Collector H.A.B. Vernon, in GOL(G) 462 Mis., 9 February 1923, TNA, §13.
82. See Nathaniel Roberts and Rupa Viswanath, "Dravidian", in Keywords in South Asian Studies (London, forthcoming). The five Adi-Dravida members of the Legislative Council in 1922 were M.C. Rajah, the most politically powerful at this time, M.C. Madurai Pillai, L.C. Guruswami, R. Kesavalu Pillai, and G. Vandanam.
83. Printed petition entitled "Resolution of the Dravida Mahajana Sabha, Madras: Protesting Against the Abolition of the Labour Commissioner and Protector of the Depressed Classes", GOL(G) 2693 Mis., 3 November 1922. Rettaimalai Srinivasan was also the son-in-law of Ayothee Thass Pandithar, an important early Dalit leader in Madras Presidency
84. cf. G. Aloysius, Religion as Emancipatory Identity: A Buddhist Movement Among the Tamils under Colonialism (Delhi, 1998)
85. G. Ayyathurai, "Foundations of Anti-Caste Consciousness: Pandit Iyothee Thass, Tamil Buddhism, and the Marginalized in South India", Columbia University, Ph.D. dissertation, 2011.
86. Cf. M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (Delhi, 2007)
87. V. Geetha and S.V. Rajadurai, Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (New Delhi, 1998), Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict.
88. On this point see, for instance, David Arnold, The Congress in Tamilnad, 1919-1937 (New Delhi, 1977). Congress did, however, have a close relationship with the Madras Labour Union, and M.C. Rajah, the Adi-Dravida leader, blamed Congress for politicizing the movement by roping it to the wider movement for Non-Cooperation: see MLCP, VII, 1922. Adi-Dravidas sometimes explained their reasons for defecting from the Union as a refusal to participate in its anti-British Congressite politics; GOL(G) 1912 Mis., 27 June 1924. My purpose here is not to give an exhaustive account of the strike, but to chart changing uses of "labour" in administrative and political discourses, in which the strike was a precipitating event in an ongoing political antagonism.
89. GOL(G) 462 Mis., 9 February 1923, TNA.
90. R.E. Frykenberg, "Village Strength in South India," in idem (ed.), Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 227-247
91. idem, "The Silent Settlement in South India, 1793-1853: An Analysis of the Role of Inams in the Rise of the Indian Imperial System", in idem (ed.), Land Tenure and Peasant in South India (New Delhi, 1977)
92. David Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870-1920 (Bombay, 1977)
93. Viswanath, The Pariah Problem, ch. 1.
94. GOL(G) 462 Mis., 9 February 1923, TNA.
95. The political peculiarities of dyarchy are not germane to this paper; their considerable complexity, moreover, has been addressed only cursorily in recent historiography, with a few exceptions such as James Chiriyankandath, "'Democracy' Under the Raj: Elections and Separate Representation in British India", in Niraja Jayal (ed.), Democracy in India (New Delhi, 2001).
96. Several near-contemporary sources may be consulted for the structural rudiments of diarchy: A. Appadorai, Dyarchy in Practice (London, 1937)
97. K.M. Pannikar, The Working of Dyarchy in India, 1919-1928 (Bombay, 1928).
98. BPR 0893 Mis., 30 May 1922, TNA.
99. MLCP 12 October 1921, TNA, p. 1013.
100. The prevailing emphasis on consciousness to the exclusion of other potential problematics in Indian labour historiography has been critically discussed in Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, "Aspects of the Historiography of Labour in India".
101. For an insightful account of the changing conceptions of culture in Indian labour historiography, see Joshi, "Histories of Indian Labour".
102. Rupa Viswanath, "Spiritual Slavery, Material Malaise: 'Untouchables' and Religious Neutrality in Colonial South India", Historical Research, 83:219 (February 2010), pp. 124-145
103. idem, "The Emergence of Authenticity Talk and the Giving of Accounts: Conversion as Movement of the Soul in South India, ca. 1900", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55 (2013), pp. 120-141
104. See also Nathaniel Roberts, "Caste, Anthropology of", in William S. Darity (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 2008, 2nd edn), pp. 461-463.