Of Pachaiyappa Mudaliar∗

Modern Asian Studies 52, 1 (2018) pp. 35–61. C Cambridge University Press 2018 doi:10.1017/S0026749X17000531 Giving Becomes Him: The posthumous fortune(s) of Pachaiyappa Mudaliar∗ SUMATHI RAMASWAMY Department of History, Duke University, USA Email: [email protected] Abstract This article explores the ways in which Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (1754?–1794) has been panegyrized as the quintessential benefactor of our times in Tamil prose, poetry, and pictures over the course of the past century and a half. In the bureaucratic and legal documents of the colonial state, he appears as a rapacious moneylender and behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer, a member of that hated class of ‘Madras dubashes’, a ‘most diabolical race of men’. In contrast, Tamil memory work since at least the 1840s has differently recalled this shadowy eighteenth- century man as a selfless philanthropist whose vast wealth financed some of the earliest educational institutions in the Madras Presidency. I track the posthumous fate of Pachaiyappa’s bequest to argue that even as the founding of the public trust and its educational philanthropy departed radically from his willed intentions, a new complex of living, dying, and giving for the sake of native education was put in place in the Tamil country in the age of colonial capital and pedagogic modernity. Introduction There are no simple returns in history.1 This article is about acts of giving initiated by death, and the gift of death that initiates memory-making acts.2 It derives its conceptual and philosophical inspiration from one of Walter Benjamin’s many ∗ I am indebted to the two anonymous readers for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Rich Freeman, Brian Hatcher, and David Gilmartin. To my fellow co-editor, Filippo Osella, my deep gratitude for his feedback and encouragement. 1 Peter Burke. ‘Afterthoughts on Afterlives’. In Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory. Edited by Marek Tamm. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 262– 275,herep.264. 2 My thinking here is indebted to Jacques Derrida. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. I explore his arguments 35 36 SUMATHI RAMASWAMY cryptic aphorisms, perhaps his most salutary for me as a professional historian: ‘At any given time, the living see themselves in the mid day of History. They are obliged to prepare a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table.’3 While other scholars have interpreted this enigmatic assertion variously, I am compelled to consider the code of hospitality to which the historian— the herald who invites the dead to the table—is obliged as they host what Benjamin calls ‘a banquet for the past’. At a minimum, such an ethic ought to accommodate the demands of the place where the banquet for the past is hosted, and also perhaps take into consideration the other guests who the historian-as-herald summons to the table.4 As I write this, I am also mindful of Immanuel Kant’s ruminations in the late eighteenth century when he observed, ‘Hospitality (a host’s conduct to his guest) means the right of a stranger not to be treated in a hostile manner by another upon his arrival on the other’s territory. If it can be done without causing his death, the stranger can be turned away, yet as long as the stranger behaves peacefully where he happens to be, his host may not treat him with hostility.’5 Mindful of this imbrication of hostility and hospitality (hence the neologism ‘hostipitality’ he coined), Jacques Derrida insisted almost two centuries later, ‘To be what it “must” be, hospitality must not pay a debt, or be governed by a duty: it is gracious, and “must” not open itself to the guest [invited or visitor], either “conforming to duty” or even, to use the Kantian distinction again, “out of duty.” This unconditional law of hospitality, if such a thing is thinkable, would then be a law without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law, in short.’6 at greater length in my manuscript-in-progress, provisionally titled Dying to Give: Pachaiyappa Mudaliar and the Birth of Educational Philanthropy in Modern India. 3 Walter Benjamin. ‘Convolute N [on the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’. In The Arcades Project: Prepared on the Basis of the German Volume Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 456–488,herep.481. 4 On Indic notions of hospitality, see especially Ravindra S. Khare. ‘Indian Hospitality: Some Cultural Values and Social Dynamics’. In Cultural Heritage of the Indian Village. British Museum Occasional Paper No. 47, 1991, pp. 45–61; and Leela Prasad. Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town.New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 5 Immanuel Kant. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Translated by David L. Colclasure, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006,p.82. 6 Jacques Derrida. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000,p.83. GIVING BECOMES HIM 37 What Derrida ethically named ‘the law of unlimited hospitality (the one that would command that the “new arrival” be offered an unconditional welcome)’7 might well, however, clash with the non-negotiable law of professional historical writing—premised on protocols regarding ascertainable facts, demonstrable evidence, causal reasoning, and principled truth-telling, among others—to which I am (as a card-carrying historian) also subject. This law is especially fraught in post-colonial contexts like India where, even after two centuries of its formalization, the discipline of history remains a rather elusive, even imperial, knowledge formation for a majority of its people. As others have shown, in such post-colonial contexts, the debate between history and myth, between ‘professional’ and ‘lay’ writing, between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ histories, and between ‘cloistered’ and ‘public’, pasts is especially consequential but remains unresolved, even after all this time, and especially in our time.8 If in such a place and time I hold my banquet for the past and invite the dead to the table, does not the law of unlimited hospitality compel me to seek a ‘moment of freedom from History’,9 and be ‘gracious’ as well to other modes of mindful remembering that are not hostile to the ahistorical, indeed even the openly anti-historical? What are the risks in keeping at bay my hostility, as academic historian, to such rememberings, and the challenges? These as well are my questions. Inviting the dead (back) to the table Historia abscondita [concealed history]—Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places—into his sunshine.10 7 Ibid., p. 77. 8 For some recent works on this, see Indrani Chatterjee. Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013; and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. See also Ann Laura Stoler. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 9 Ashis Nandy. ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, History and Theory 34,no.2 (1995), pp. 44–66. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Jeremy Tambling. Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001,p. 122. 38 SUMATHI RAMASWAMY My argument in these pages regarding history and hospitality unfolds in this space of uncertainty between these two laws—‘at the frontier between two regimes of law’.11 But first, I will introduce you briefly to the dead man whom I have chosen to invite to the table, a man whose very name summons up today in Tamil-speaking India an image of extreme generosity and selfless altruism that for many remains unmatched to this day. His name is Pachaiyappa Mudaliar and he lived and died in the second half of the eighteenth century, yet he has a posthumous presence in the colonial and post-colonial Tamil life-world that far exceeds his significance in his own time, exerting in the process ‘a retroactive force’, to recall Nietzsche. Speaking on 5 January 1963 at the dedication of a large commemorative statue in his honour on the grounds of the college in Madras (today Chennai) that bears his name and that was initially endowed in 1841 by the charitable trust that also bears his name,12 the then-president of the Republic of India, S. Radhakrishnan, declared, according to the recall of a member of the audience, Pachaiyappar was the first Indian to create an endowment for education. Others have since then followed in his footsteps. Pachaiyappar was a deeply religious man, devoted to the cause of learning, and very skilled in commerce and trade. Believing as he did that all his wealth was because of God’s grace, he desired that all of it should be given back to the cause of religion and learning. If others follow Pachaiyappar’s noble example, we can look forward to a better future.13 11 Derrida, On Hospitality,p.77. 12 Despite its importance as the earliest such institution, a serious history of this trust (the subject of my ongoing research) has yet to be written, but for some background (based largely on non-archival sources and oral histories), see C. S. Srinivasachari. ‘Pachaiyappa: His Life, Times and Charities’. In Centenary Commemoration Book. Edited by V.

Load more