The un/selfish leader Changing notions in a Tamil Nadu village Björn Alm The un/selfish leader Changing notions in a Tamil Nadu village Doctoral dissertation Department of Social Anthropology Stockholm University S 106 91 Stockholm Sweden © Björn Alm, 2006 Department for Religion and Culture Linköping University S 581 83 Linköping Sweden This book, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the author. ISBN 91-7155-239-1 Printed by Edita Sverige AB, Stockholm, 2006 Contents Preface iv Note on transliteration and names v Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Structure of the study 4 Not a village study 9 South Indian studies 9 Strength and weakness 11 Doing fieldwork in Tamil Nadu 13 Chapter 2 The village of Ekkaraiyur 19 The Dindigul valley 19 Ekkaraiyur and its neighbours 21 A multi-linguistic scene 25 A religious landscape 28 Aspects of caste 33 Caste territories and panchayats 35 A village caste system? 36 To be a villager 43 Chapter 3 Remodelled local relationships 48 Tanisamy’s model of local change 49 Mirasdars and the great houses 50 The tenants’ revolt 54 Why Brahmans and Kallars? 60 New forms of tenancy 67 New forms of agricultural labour 72 Land and leadership 84 Chapter 4 New modes of leadership 91 The parliamentary system 93 The panchayat system 94 Party affiliation of local leaders 95 i CONTENTS Party politics in Ekkaraiyur 96 The paradox of party politics 101 Conceptualising the state 105 The development state 108 The development block 110 Panchayats and the development block 111 Janus-faced leaders? 119 Non-state legitimacy 120 The institutional big-man 129 Brokerage, achievements and closeness 131 The leader as a social worker 138 The leaders’ views of themselves 141 Chapter 5 Golden ages 146 The Sangam Age as the foundation story for a language, a culture, and a people 147 Tamilian origins 148 The city and the sangam 149 The Pandyan kingdom 151 The Ramaraj 154 The Ramaraj expressed in Ekkaraiyur bhakti 154 The Ummah 156 Kingship, caste and equality 157 The Brahmans in the Ramaraj and the Sangam Age 165 The destruction and resurrection of the Sangam Age in a local context 171 The Ramaraj in a local setting 174 Critique of the Ummah 176 Chapter 6 The mentality of the ideal society 181 Knowing ‘the moral foreigner’ 182 The material affluence of foreign countries 184 Mentality in the foreign countries 186 The blessings and curses of Marimuttu 189 About Marimuttu 194 Has Marimuttu returned? 196 Marimuttu’s festival 197 Self-reform 201 ii CONTENTS Chapter 7 Debating corruption 205 The padimandram 206 A society in ruins 210 The legitimacy of the pursuit of wealth 214 Corruption 218 Corruption and the state 225 Indian individualism 227 The Ekkaraiyur critique of the selfish individual 237 Chapter 8 A better society? 241 Reflecting on other societies 244 Is there a better tomorrow? 247 Footnotes 249 Bibliography 274 Internet references 315 Index 317 iii Preface A book as long in the making as this has accumulated a lot of debts. I own the biggest debt to the many people in Ekkaraiyur who took an active interest in me and my study. Not only did they find the time to answer my many questions, they also let me share their daily life and concerns, often treating me as a family member. I foremost want to thank Ramakrishnan Udaiyar, Balumani Udaiyar, Padma Iyer, Subramani Vattiyar and my assistant Sekar, but also all the people who together made my stay in Ekkaraiyur an enjoyable time. I own another big debt to my supervisors Gudrun Dahl and Bengt-Erik Borgström at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. Without their help and encouragement this book would never have been written. Their creative suggestions, and also their power of endurance, made it possible. My thanks go also to the many people who have read and commented on the manuscript in its various stages. I am principally thinking of Amare Tegbaru, Beppe Karlsson, Christer Norström, Christina Garsten, Gunnel Cederlöf, Göran Djurfeldt, Inger Lundgren, Marie Larsson, Sten Hagberg and the late Tomas Gerholm. Needless to say, they are not responsible for the views and errors in this study. These are entirely mine. Several other people have also helped this study to come about. My teachers at the Department of Asian and African languages, Uppsala University and the International Institute of Tamil Studies, Madras, taught me Tamil, and the latter also help me get established in the field. In Tamil Nadu, C. Jeyakaran, Håkan Wahlquist, Joop and Els de Wit, Stina Vasu, Tor Skaarud, Åke Nilsson generously gave me hospitality and friendship. At home, my mother Ingegärd and my late father Gunnar Alm, my wife Sara and my son Gabriel have consistently encouraged me to write about Ekkaraiyur. So have also my colleagues at the Department for Religion and Culture at Linköping University. Finally, there is a financial side to all research. This side was taken care of by a generous grant from SIDA/SAREC, and several minor grants from the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi. iv Note on transliteration and names It is far from unproblematic to use Tamil words in an English text. Regardless of which of the several different systems for writing Tamil in Latin script that is used, the tendency in the literature is to follow faithfully the spelling of a literary written Tamil. Unfortunately, this gives the reader unfamiliar with the language little indication of how to pronounce the Tamil words. In the interest of the non-specialist, I therefore follow two strategies: (i) I keep Tamil terms to a minimum, translating them as often as possible into corresponding English terms. (ii) When I use Tamil terms, I adopt a near-speech spelling. There are exceptions. The two most important are: (i) ‘Tamil’ is properly pronounced with a very guttural ‘l’. Noting it as ‘a sound peculiar to Tamil’, Arden defines it as ‘a slurred, obscure sound between r and l.’ (1976:49) (ii) ‘Ekkaraiyur’ is the fictitious name of the village of the study. I spell it in English as it would be spelt in Tamil, if such a name were possible. It is to be pronounced with an initial ‘y’, except in high prose, Villages in Ekkaraiyur’s surroundings have also been renamed, and so have most of the people who appear in the study. This has been done in order to protect their privacy. It should also be noted that: (i) I consistently use ‘Brahman’ instead of the variant ‘Brahmin’. (ii) I add the polite suffix ‘-ar’ to caste names instead of the sometimes seen, and impolite, suffix ‘-an’ (the exception is for Brahman, for which the final ‘-an’ does not seem to carry such a meaning). (iii) I use the old-fashioned term ‘Tamilian’ in order to distinguish the people from other things Tamilian. v Chapter 1 Introduction ‘Alam, look here!’ Ambrose called, using the local version of my name. He picked up a magazine and leafed through its pages until he found the article he wanted to show me. ‘Look’, he said, ‘they don’t even bother to hide their shamelessness any more. Here it is, their greed is made public now and they even publish their fees in the press.’ The magazine article that upset Ambrose dealt with alleged corruption in the Department of Education. The writer claimed that corruption in diverse forms had become an institutionalised practice in the department, and a list of the fees that had to be paid for recruitment, transfer and so on was published. Civil servants and politicians at the highest levels officially sanctioned these fees, the journalist claimed. Allegations of official corruption were not news. The Department of Education had been accused of corrupt practices before, and neither were other government departments believed to have ‘clean hands’. It was common knowledge that corruption existed and was widespread. As a primary school teacher, Ambrose had his own experiences of corrupt demands. Although the article confirmed what he already knew as the reality, Ambrose was deeply upset. He chose to understand the article as a factual statement of the official policy of Department of Education, and it shook him to read that the corrupt practices were now officially sanctioned, with an attached list of fees and all. To Ambrose, this meant that moral decay in the Department of Education and elsewhere had gone so far that public shame had lost any significance. The article told Ambrose that corruption no longer had to be veiled. Ambrose showed me the article in early 1990, when I was living and doing fieldwork in the village of Ekkaraiyur, in Tamil Nadu, India. This was only a minor incident during fieldwork that spanned almost two years, but it was an incident emblematic of a theme repeatedly and forcefully articulated in private conversation and public debates in Ekkaraiyur namely the theme of selfishness. 1 INTRODUCTION Deep tensions were involved in Ekkaraiyur notions about selfishness. Selfishness was understood as the individual’s tendency to further his or her own ambitions, desires and interests without any concern for other people. Selfishness was considered as potentially harmful. Since any individual was liable to selfishness, according to Ekkaraiyur notions, human relationships in general were thought to be threatened. This study is about selfishness. Notions surrounding selfishness in Ekkaraiyur could provide material for a complex and far-ranging study, as could any other human value or trait. This study is however limited to how people in Ekkaraiyur voiced social critique by censuring other people’s selfishness, particularly the selfishness of people in positions of leadership.