CASTES AND TRIBES OF SOUTHERN INDIA EDGAR THURSTON, C.I.E., Superintendent, Madras Government Museum; Correspondant E’tranger, Société d'Anthropologie de Paris ; Socio Corrispondante, Societa Romana di Anthropologia. ASSISTED BY K. RANGACHARI, M.A, of the Madras Government Museum. VOLUME I—A and B First published in 1909 With commentary by VED from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS Aaradhana, DEVERKOVIL 673508 India www.victoriainstitutions.com admn@ victoriainstitutions.com Telegram: https://t.me/VICTORIA_INSTITUTIONS EDGAR THURSTON, C.I.E. Please note: ‘Castes and Tribes of Southern India' is in the public domain. However, the Commentary written by VED from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS is not. All rights reserved. This print version edition published in January 2020. PRINT You can print this book, for your own use or for selling to others. The cover-file of this book can be opened by clicking on the Pin image here. 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Please note that all books published by VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS in the digital format can contain various errors including spelling errors, wrong words, blurry text/images &c. and at times, even erroneous information. This book is offered to you on an As-is basis. Please note that for using this book as a digital book, it is better to download the digital book version from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS’ Telegram pages. Or from any website this book is available for download. CASTES AND TRIBES OF SOUTHERN INDIA 1. Commentary 5 Edgar Thurston’s book 7 A few profound mistakes of an astronomical level 9 India and Indians 9 Continental Europeans versus the English/British 9 Malayalam versus Malabari 10 Hindu and Hinduism 12 Shamanistic spirituality 13 What Thurston missed 15 Hammering force of feudal language word-codes 16 The degradation set upon native-English nations 17 2. Annotating the textual matter 21 3. Castes and Tribes of Southern India 69 4. Books by VED from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS 403 3 EDGAR THURSTON, C.I.E. This is Volume One of Edgar Thurston’s CASTES AND TRIBES OF SOUTHERN INDIA. In this book, Thurston has attempted to list out the various castes and tribes of the southern parts of the South Asian Subcontinent. The various attributes of the various castes and tribes, including their family systems, customs, traditional vocation, spiritual beliefs, rituals, death ceremonies, position in the social hierarchy and such other things are delineated in this book. In the case of some of the castes, very detailed descriptions can be found. The Commentary given by VED from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS aims to position this book’s actual merits and also to point out certain deficiencies in the general outlook. The book is great. It was a pioneering attempt at understanding ethnographic differences inside the South Asian subcontinent. However, the most powerful factor that actually influences ethnographic differences in closely connected populations has not been mentioned or detected. This most powerful factor is the verbal codes in the native feudal languages, and the exact position of a caste or tribe or individual inside these languages. As of now, a few newly emerged buffoons sitting inside the cosy ambiences of native-English nations have tried to decry the great endeavour of Edgar Thurston. They do not know much and do not understand anything. Even the term ‘feudal language’ would simply pass through their brain, without connecting to anything inside it. Some other native jokers have added another individual’s name also as the author to this book. That is from the platform of a lowly jingoist aspiration of a population which has nothing on its own to showcase. Another clown has had the daring to mention that Thurston’s writings are bereft of merit because he was a ‘British colonial official’. CASTES AND TRIBES OF SOUTHERN INDIA Commentary VED from VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS It took a lot of efforts on the part of the erstwhile English administration to improve the quality of the lower classes in the subcontinent. Picture taken from http://pazhayathu.blogspot.in/ I think this is my fifth commentary written about certain books of formidable reputation, in the world of history and sociology studies. The first one was on Travancore State Manual written by V. Nagam Aiya. The second one was Native Life in Travancore by REV. Samuel Matter. The third one was on Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. The fourth one was on OMENS AND SUPERSTITIONS OF SOUTHERN INDIA by Edgar Thurston. However, this last one did go beyond the parameters of a commentary and did sort of become an independent book of mine, titled: Software codes of mantra, tantra, witchcraft, black magic, evil eye, evil tongue &c. The way I work on these old time books is to take the text and images from the scanned digital copies of these books, which are available online (mainly archive.org), to create a very readable digital book version in pdf. This effort brings up a lot of seemingly unsolvable problems. One is that the text does not get copied correct. Or that text recognition does not work properly. So that there are umpteen instances of erroneous words appearing in the copied text. 5 EDGAR THURSTON, C.I.E. Next is that there would be missing letters or words. This makes text correcting and proofreading a huge work. Then there is the issue of alphabetic ligatures. These are combined letters such as œ (c + e), æ (a +e), Æ etc. These old-time books do use them profusely. However, when copying the texts, these words do split. I do not remember as to how I dealt with this issue in my earlier attempts at creating a more readable version of the former four books. However, in this present book, I have made some effort to retain the original typographic ligatures. However, the most formidable issue was that when the digital texts from pdf files are copied, the text more or less mirror the layout of the pdf page. That is, the page becomes a line-by-line arrangement of each line in the page, in a list-like manner. So that, practically I had to correct each line and sentence individually. In a book with around more than 100 thousand words, this becomes a huge work. This was one of the most terrible issues that I had to face in my earlier attempts at this work. However, over the years, I have learnt a lot of tricks to accomplish various things in the digital world. I experimented with a lot of ideas and came upon a trick that would help me circumvent the problem. Incidentally, I have written a book on my various information on computer usages, data processing and internet, titled: VEILED routes to resources in Computers & on the Internet, unVEILED!. I find that this digital book has received a good rating on Google books. This digital book (which can be opened in computers, but not in mobile devices) can be bought from this webpage: books.deverkovil.com. My work on Travancore State Manual was the most tedious and time- consuming one. It was my first attempt at this kind of work. The problem with that book was that the original text I got from online sources was quite corrupted and many words simply invisible. I had to work on more than one source to find the correct word which was missing. Moreover, there were a number of botanical technical words, which I had to painstakingly type out. In fact, in the case of that book, I did a lot of typing work. When I work towards creating an easily readable digital version of these books, the frill benefit that derives upon me is that I get to invariably read the books, and almost without much of an extra effort. CASTES AND TRIBES OF SOUTHERN INDIA When pondering about what I get in return for this unsolicited-by- anyone works, I think that there is a certain kind of feeling of accomplishment that I derive when the digital book creation is done. Apart from that I come across a lot of information which thitherto I had not known, or seen mentioned in any academic textbooks or other insipid sources of information. As to financial benefits, though they are deeply expressive of appreciation, the truth is that I do not get much pecuniary benefits. That remains a truth. Since, I am myself an author, who has done quite pioneering and original research and ponderings on such exceptional themes as Feudal languages, Codes in languages, Software codes of languages, Life and reality, Codes of reality, Software codes of supernatural events, Software codes of human life, body and mind etc., unusual bits of information do help me much. Edgar Thurston’s book The writings of Edgar Thurston are not a totally unknown commodity for me.