- colonialism is a time which intensifies the emergence of new identities and leads to a redescription of old ones. - <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Given their need to compare Hinduism with Christianity so that missionaries could at least try convincing natives, missionaries produced a flood of literature that tried to contain Hinduism’s fluidity and fix its meaning.</mark> - ‘The observance of caste is intrinsically connected with the Hindu religion. Therefore caste must be exterminated root and branch. That at least was the consensus that Anglo-Saxon Protestant missions in India had reached by 1850 - The question of caste also led to the formation of new churches free of established denominations. Missionaries were to make compromises at various levels to manage the varying outcomes of their stance on caste. - Importantly, the Brahmins had now to reconstitute themselves, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by responding to the dual demands made on their selfhood by colonialism, i.e. to be historically authentic and modern at once. The Brahmin had now to strive hard to affirm at once his religion as authentic (to consolidate European admiration for his religion as a way of firming up his power) and as modern (to stave off European criticism of his religious practices and the practice of caste, so to legitimise his power). - it was by working within Western rationalist conventions that Hindus could confront Christian criticism, driving missionaries into defensive postures and sometimes silencing Bible teachers. However, the rationalist literature could also simultaneously be the source of anxiety for Hindus. As the Saivite scholar J.M. Nallaswami Pillai noted, ‘I do entertain the highest veneration for the name and character of the late lamented Charles Bradlaugh and his portrait finds a place in my studio but when I contemplate how much sin and misery and ungodliness he is the cause of, can I cease to abhor his Nastika atheistic views. - Hindu preachers became Hindu catechists, temple dharmakarthas turned into temple wardens, and Hindu religious texts became the Hindu scriptures. The founding and naming of Hindu institutions too functioned as replications of Christian institutional practices - Further, the Brahmin judge, working for the British, could not adequately be a Brahmin. His new occupation was, as Suryodayam lamented, one of ‘mean service’ and his high-caste rank was rendered only a hollow claim. - As we will see in the last section of this chapter, claiming the Brahminic as the national was an important move made by Tamil Brahmins. It was a move which implicitly reduced non-Brahmins and religious minorities as being inadequately Indian. - A number of <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">publications in the first half of the twentieth century tried to present untouchability as a social practice based on modern rationality. These publications most often explained away untouchability by resorting to arguments on hygiene and sanitation, which meant using terms and speaking in a language intelligible to the colonizers. Hygiene and sanitation were key themes in the British medical discourse on India.</mark> - Aihwa Ong notes in a different context, modernity does not have a fixed meaning. The key question, she cogently argues, is ‘who controls that which is signified as modern’. - The Hinduism of the Indians elaborated by Iyer is undoubtedly the Hinduism of the Brahmins as redefined by Orientalist discourse. <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Vedas as truth, Sanskrit as deva basha, canonized religious texts such as the Ramayanam, Mahabharatam, Bhagavatam, Dharma Sastras and Smritis, as well as festivals like Sivarathiri, Devi Puja, and Gokulashtami have an emblematic presence in Brahminical Hinduism. As one moves down the caste hierarchy of the Hindus, all these texts and festivals disappear and what one has is a distinctly different domain of religiosities</mark>. Thus, what we have in Iyer is the reinscription of Brahminical Hinduism as the Hinduism and as the sign of Indianness. The implications of this move are quite obvious: Iyer too renders lower-caste Hindus and adherents of other religions imperfect as Indians. - That is to say, the very domain of sovereignty that nationalism carves out in the face of colonial domination is simultaneously a domain of enforcing its own domination over subaltern social groups within the nation. - what we see here is a hybridized form of power whereby the Brahmin metonymically equated his culture with that of the nation and simultaneously embraced the protocols of colonial modernity in order to access power and resources in the material domain. - The other side of this naturalized ‘intelligence and good behaviour’ of the Brahmin was the claim that the other castes lacked these virtues. This rendered non-Brahmins, in the Brahmin eye, unfit for leadership and governance. - they the Brahmins spoke a colloquial Tamil brahmin dialect, a slang, at home; and impeccable English in office and from public fora; they praised Sanskrit and learnt enough to make a vocal show of it. They disdained to speak in their mother tongue on public occasions and never felt ashamed to admit that they could not express themselves sufficiently well in Tamil. Some of them became great orators in English but none of them could speak a single sentence in Tamil without using a high percentage of Sanskrit. They know the Sanskrit lore, became soaked in Western intellectual tradition but remained ignorant of Tamil literary and cultural traditions. - Let us turn now to the power effects of Brahmin bilingualism. The consequences of this particular kind of bilingualism are not far to seek. While English ensured the Brahmin’s access to authority in the material sphere of colonial institutions, Sanskrit, celebrated as deva bhasha (language of the gods), reinforced his authority in the spiritual/cultural sphere of indigenous society - In Italy the term ‘national’ has an ideologically very restricted meaning, and does not in any case coincide with ‘popular’ because in Italy the intellectuals are distant from the people, i.e. from the ‘nation’. They are tied instead to a caste tradition that has never been broken by a strong popular or national political movement from below . . . The current term ‘national’ is connected in Italy to this intellectual and bookish tradition. Hence the foolish and ultimately dangerous facility of calling ‘anti-national’ whoever does not have this archaeological and moth-eaten conception of the country’s interest. - There were efforts as late as 1917 to find a solution to the problem of separate boarding arrangements for ‘each caste and creed of delegates from various Provinces’. Avantika Gokhalay from Bihar suggested that the Congress organizing committee should in future settle for no more than two kitchens, one for vegetarians and the other for non-vegetarians. She argued that her suggestion would not only save enormous unnecessary expense but also knit people together as a national community. In a word of advice to Congress delegates, Gokhalay said: ‘Delegates should realize that they are on a political pilgrimage and that they should forego not only a few comforts but should be prepared to outgrow some of their hard prejudices.’ - This is perhaps why, as we saw earlier, the Dravidan, the Tamil newspaper of the Justice Party, compared the Indian National Congress to an agraharam, an exclusive residential enclave of Brahmins. Commenting on the fact that thirteen of the fifteen members from the Madras Presidency on the All-India Congress Committee of 1917 were Brahmins, the paper noted: ‘Thirteen Brahmans are going to labour hard for the comforts of forty millions of people! This committee deserves therefore to be styled as the “All-India Agraharam Committee” and not the “All India Congress Committee”.’ - The committee, despite representations by the MPA, decided ‘it would be unreasonable to adopt the expedient of communal representation for protecting a community which had an overwhelming electoral strength.’ - The overlap between the private and public, the cultural and material and the inner and outer worlds of the Brahmin was thus addressed in non-Brahmin discourse through the metonym of the agraharam. - In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries Untouchables, Sudras, neo-Buddhists, Saivites, and rationalists in the region did therefore speak and write ceaselessly about the Brahmin. Often, it was the Brahmin’s new forms of power, aided by his increased public visibility, that incited such groups into speech. This ‘talkativeness’ about and around the figure of the Brahmin generated a complex network of new connotations, both about the Brahmin and others. - The distinction revolved around the so-called ideal and actual practices of Brahmins, as though Brahmins constituted a self-enclosed community. This notion, as Marc Galanter points out, is based on a sectarian view of caste ‘which sees the caste as an isolable religious community distinguished from others by idiosyncratic doctrine, ritual, or culture.’ This is why the relation between Brahmins and others finds very little mention in the discourse of the League, except for the grounds on which others could become members of the League. This is also precisely why the League insisted on vegetarianism, the avoidance of alcohol, the Bhagavat Githa, and Vedic samskaras such as upanayam, marriage, and yogadiksha as hallmarks of the ideal Brahmin. In contrast, Thoss located Brahminhood primarily in a relational axis—an axis which foregrounds castes not as discrete communities but as mediated by relations of power among them. - Thoss’s project of refashioning a new self for Parayars through reinterpretations of pre-existing rituals and festivals strongly favoured innovation: ‘religious practices ought to be conducted according to the times, comfort, convenience and within limited expense, instead of uselessly arguing that ancient Buddhists did this or that . . . for Buddhist prescription itself advises us: “the passing of the old and the coming of the new is inevitable law of the times . . .”’ Indeed, the very act of reinterpreting Buddhism is an act of innovation. - Thoss had therefore appropriated Brahminical ritual by claiming it as originally Buddhist, a reclamatory act which contested the Brahmin’s exclusive claim to it. However, such appropriation also served to idealize existing Brahminical practices and inferiorized Parayar practices such as fire-walking and animal sacrifice. - ‘Tamil Pundits have turned Tamil language into a totem of a group. That is, they have destroyed Tamil by speaking and writing in a language which is not understood by 90 per cent of the people.’ In other words, a substantial part of Thoss’s intellectual labour failed to reach the realm of the popular. In contrast, Christian missionaries, whose project was to convince and convert, were well aware that the Pundit’s Tamil was of no use to them. - We must also note here that he worked hard to reconcile Saivism with modern science. ‘Religion tends to ignore books of physics, logic and knowledge. They should not. If a religion is true, it has to establish its commensurability with all forms of knowledge, and establish its supremacy vis-à-vis all of them . . .’ He argued that the philosophy of Saivism met this requirement of validation by science. We have earlier seen that Brahminical practices were validated as modern via making claims to science. In other words, both the defence of Brahminic practices as well as their critique, as developed by Adigal, had to participate in the new grids of intelligibility authorized by colonialism. Science was for him, without doubt, one of them. - We find again Robert Caldwell’s influence in Adigal’s formulation, for according to Caldwell, ‘The Brahmans, who came in “peaceably, and obtained the kingdoms by flatteries”, may probably have persuaded the Dravidians that in calling them Sudras they were conferring upon them a title of honour.’ - As with the Brahmin account of the caste system, the category of division of labour is invoked here—but with an important difference. The Brahmins, as we have seen earlier, in order to render it modern and legitimate, claimed the caste system as an indigenous form of division of labour. But Adigal argued that caste was the corruption of a pre-existing form of division of labour and an invention of Brahmins to dominate Tamils. In other words, while the Brahmin invoked the division of labour to legitimize caste, Adigal invoked it to discredit caste. - Adigal resolved the problem of power between Vellalars and the others by means of a romanticized Vellalar moral economy: ‘with the lowly submitting themselves to their superiors the Vellalars, and the superiors protecting the lowly, the ancient Tamils led a beautiful life of peace and order.’ Foregrounding a moral economy of paternalism without engaging with the question of power was quite evidently a move to salvage the Vellalars as representing an ideal. - this substitution only recast their ideal in more or less the image of the Brahmin: this is explicit in Thoss and less than explicit in Adigal. In other words, the Brahminic ideal remained substantially intact even if the supposedly moral qualities of the ideal Brahmin had been freed from the Brahmin’s body and relocated in the idealized Buddhist Parayar and the Saivite Vellalar. Thus, in the discourses of Thoss and Adigal the Brahmin looms large as a figure of scorn and simultaneously as one whose ideal status is appropriated. - The anti-Brahminism of Iyothee Thoss and Maraimalai Adigal was no different, for the metaphysics of caste as an enforced hierarchy remained in their discourses, largely intact. If, as Gilroy argues, ‘The desperate manner in which this inversion proceeds betrays it as merely another symptom of white supremacy’s continuing power’, in our Tamil context it is the continuing power of the Brahmin which these discourses underscore. - By unshackling the Brahmin from the domain of the spiritual/cultural and relocating him in the domain of the material/political and conceptualizing his power as located in an integral and overlapping material-and-spiritual domain, the Justice Party spoke yet another language about the Brahmin. This language was framed within— but simultaneously exceeded—the categories of colonial governance. - Colonialism also institutionalized a new framework within which politics, in the public domain, had to be conducted. Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858 and the new status of India as a crown colony was a critical moment in establishing this new framework. As John Zavos has argued, idioms of ‘constitutional liberalism’ such as forming organizations to articulate interests, and politics based on representation, were key elements of this new framework, which produced profound outcomes in terms of how different people represented themselves as collectivities and how they decided what would count as legitimate grievances. - Going through the epistemological careers of diverse projects such as the emergence of rule-governed mercantilist writing and the decline of rhetoric, Baconian natural philosophy and Scottish conjectural history, she establishes how numbers, in early-nineteenth- century Britain, gained connotations of transparency and impartiality and became the basis for systematic knowledge. With the emphasis now being on ‘disinterested’ knowledge, numbers— because discrete and deracinated—were treated as the foundations of such knowledge. - While self-recrimination and an emphasis on self-help—which were similar to the agenda of earlier non-Brahmin associations such as the Madras Dravidian Association—were an important strand within the discourse of the Justice Party, it was also aware that such political autarky could not address or alter the existing condition of non-Brahmins. In its understanding, their condition was a result of a historically evolved relationship between Brahmins and non- Brahmins. - This invocation contrasts with the conceptions of Thoss and Adigal, for division of labour was an exalted ‘pre-Aryan’ mode of organizing Tamil society—an idea that was clearly a result of their notion of a non-Brahminic golden age. For the Justice Party, such division of labour was a mechanism sustaining Brahmin power by draining away non-Brahmin wealth. - By redescribing the spiritual authority of Brahmins as a means by which non-Brahmin wealth was appropriated by Brahmins for nonproductive purposes, the Justice Party caused the delicate boundary between the spiritual and material to become unstable and permeable. Their emphasis was, once again, on the worldly: the party conceptualized the otherworldly as folded into the worldly and not as autonomous. - We have seen that Benthamite Utilitarianism as practised by the nineteenth-century colonial administration in India institutionalized the idea of disinterested rule via substantially replacing rule by personal discretion with rule by codified law. Macaulay’s Penal Code, drafted in 1837 and enacted in 1860, is perhaps the most telling instance of this. - Two competing definitions of what was meant by disinterested now vied for space. The first definition suggested that people should be treated as deracinated and unmarked by identities, and the only criterion of choice should be efficiency. In other words, a ‘veil of ignorance’ could alone be the foundation of disinterestedness. This was a position advanced primarily by Brahmin nationalists and a section of the British bureaucracy. - The second definition of disinterested rule, which was advanced by the Justice Party, argued that only the recognition of difference could be the basis for disinterested rule: ‘The Non-brahmin movement is the most emphatic protest against “communalism”, against the monopolistic spirit.’ - The new political language now claimed that Brahmin uses of non- Brahmin temple endowments were an unjust appropriation of non- Brahmin wealth. - In fact the atmosphere of confrontation that the Justice Party spawned resonated in classrooms and streets. New India reproduced a report from Servant of India which claimed: ‘It is extremely to be regretted that the Brahmana non-Brahmana controversy should have begun to invade our colleges and schools too, but such is the fact . . .’ Supporting the claim it reported that, ‘According to reliable accounts, the students of this institution Pachayappa College, Madras now seem to be divided into two factions, Brahmanas and non-Brahmanas, and quarrels between them are of almost daily occurrence. Nor is this all. The students display the same spirit towards their professors and teachers. Recently a Brahmana professor was not allowed to open his mouth by his non-Brahmana pupils, who would have none of a Brahmana teacher.’ - ‘no god, no religion, no Gandhi, no Congress, and no Brahmins’. Foretelling his future politics, this credo fused Hinduism, Brahminism, and nationalism as interwoven themes for critique. He founded the Self-Respect Movement in 1926 with the primary objective of advancing a rationalist critique of caste, religion, and mainstream nationalism. - ‘He who created god is a fool, he who propagates god is a scoundrel, and he who worships god is a barbarian.’ Given this disenchanted view of religion, he described in 1924 the idol at the Vaikkom temple as ‘a mere piece of stone fit only to wash dirty linen with.’ Such criticism of religion continued all through his life: ‘Had it not been for the rationalist urge of the modern days, the milestones on the highways would have been converted into gods. It does not take much time for a Hindu to stand a mortar stone in the house and convert it into a great god by smearing red and yellow powders on it . . .’ - ‘I have . . . broken the idols of Pillayar and burnt pictures of Rama. If, in spite of these words and acts of mine, thousands of people throng my meetings, it only indicates that self-respect and wisdom have dawned on them.’ - Ramasamy argued: ‘If there is no varnashrama dharma, there is no ground to talk about Hindu religion.’ - ‘The words of “God” which appear in the Bhagavad Gita approve of it caste: “I created the four varnas. I created the dharmas (duties) to be carried out by respective castes. If anyone does not follow his duty, I will put him in hell.” Lord Krishna, the philosophical God of the Hindus, has uttered these words . . . Can those who believe that Krishna is a God or that the Gita is his prophecy eradicate caste?’ - <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Only with the arrival of words such as Thara Mukurtham and Kanniga Dhanam, our women had become puppets in the hands of their husbands. Only after the arrival of such words, we ended up with such fathers who advise their daughters, who return to their natal home after some quarrel with their husbands, that they had been gifted away to their husbands, and they belong to the husband’s place. Can you find an equivalent word for Kanniga Dhanam in Tamil? Thiruvalluvar called it as Vazhkkai Thunai life companionship. It only means that husband and wife are friends. What a vast difference in thought . . . Is there a Tamil equivalent for Pativratha? This is the deleterious result of our association with Sanskrit</mark> - The actual caste of these different power-holders—the Brahmins, the upper castes, the rich, the religious, the connoisseurs of art—did not matter to the Self-Respect Movement. The very act of exercising power rendered them Brahminic. By constituting the essence of power as Brahminic, the movement tried to bring together a vector of varied interests based on inferiorized identities— against the Brahmin, and against all that was Brahminic. - What precisely was the new common sense of this subaltern public? The late Chandrasekarendra Saraswathi Sankaracharya, spiritual head of the powerful Brahmin mutth in Kancheepuram, once noted in despair: ‘There is this word parppan / pappan in Tamil meaning that one who knows the true philosophy, which referred to the Brahmins. Today, the very same word is being used to run down the Brahmins.’ It was the Self-Respect Movement and its later incarnations that popularized the word ‘pappan’ as an invective denoting the Brahmin. - I do not have any attachment to the Tamil language for the reason that it is my mother tongue or the tongue of the nation. I am not attached to it for the reason that it is a separate language, ancient language, language spoken by Shiva or language created by Agastiyar. I do not have attachment for anything in itself. That will be foolish attachment, foolish adulation. I may have attachment for something for its qualities and the gains such qualities will result in. I don’t praise something because it is my language, my nation, my religion . . . If I think my nation is unhelpful for my ideal and could not also be made helpful, I will abandon it immediately. Likewise, if I think my language will not benefit my ideals or will not help my people to progress and live in honour, I will abandon it . - We need to remember here that the Self-Respect Movement, despite its criticisms of Islam, treated it as a religion promoting equality, and Ramasamy was a regular presence during the Prophet’s birthday celebrations conducted by Muslims. - Such ‘normal understanding’ pervaded the response of Congress to the anti-Hindi agitation. Reporting the death of L. Natarajan, the anti-Hindi prisoner, Rajagopalachari referred to him in the Madras Legislative Council as ‘an illiterate harijan’. His illiteracy came to signify, for Rajagopalachari and other nationalists, the illegitimacy of the anti-Hindi agitation. The following excerpt of a ‘light-hearted’ discussion over his prison death by nationalists in the Madras Legislative Council bears this out: - This was perhaps why those who, in the ‘normal understanding’, need have had nothing to do with issues such as Hindi and ‘Sri’, found it necessary to take up these issues with passion. L. Natarajan, the illiterate, had a stake in opposing Hindi because Hindi was connected with Sanskrit, Sanskrit with the Brahmin, the Brahmin with Hinduism, and Hinduism with his status as an Untouchable. - In brief, the reconfigurings we looked at earlier have been so far-ranging and widespread that now only a certain political language is being treated as legitimate. While this political language signals the success of non-Brahmin identity in challenging the political dominance of Brahmins and caste exclusivity, it also shows how the dominant idioms of non- Brahminism have become the settled vocabulary of politics. - This can be illustrated by going through the election campaign of Mani Shankar Aiyar in the Mayiladuthurai parliamentary constituency. Aiyar won on a Congress (I) ticket, defeating his DMK rival K.P. Kalyanam. Recalling his victory, Aiyar said: ‘Most significant of all, I, a Brahmin by birth (if not by conviction) with “Aiyar” emblazoned (for reasons of regional identity) on my name and on the ballot paper, contested from a constituency of Thanjavur district, the very citadel of the Dravida movement. And became the first Brahmin in a generation to be elected from a Tamil Nadu constituency other than Madras South.’ Aiyar was understandably proud of his achievement—but precisely because a Brahmin’s victory was something he recognized as exceptional. - As we have seen, Brahmins were steadfastly preoccupied with authenticity during the colonial period and claimed the Brahminic as national. In the 1990s the political context so dramatically changed that the chances of a Brahmin’s political survival hinged on his denial of his Brahmin identity. - Dalit Voice had thus fissured the homogenized and singular non-Brahmin identity by bringing to life the other possible identities submerged by it. K. Veeramani’s response to Dalit Voice was an effort to rescript the antagonistic divide among non-Brahmins as counterfeit. - If Brahmins of the past claimed that the arrival of non-Brahmin identity was a result of the British policy of divide and rule, they were now being accused of using the same strategy to divide non-Brahmins. In both the cases what animates the charge is a desire for the singular wholeness of identities. While Brahmins did not want national identity to be fissured, Veeramani wanted to preserve the putative integrity of non-Brahmin identity. - Thus, ‘Dravidian’ no longer signifies all non-Brahmins but only Dalits. The unselfconscious interchange of Dravidian and non-Brahmin was a central plank on which non-Brahmin identity normalized itself. In calling this into question Kamalanathan attempts to denaturalize a sedimented non- Brahmin claim. - Our problem is not one of becoming owners of wealth or rich or crypto-Brahmin. To become owners, we need several workers. Likewise, to become rich, we need several poor. To become a crypto-Brahmin, one needs a series of lower castes including the Dalits. That is why we do not need the order of domination and subordination. Only when the Dalit protest culture destroys this order, we shall arrive at the consciousness that one need not either be a crypto-Brahmin or a drudging Dalit. Instead let us be human beings . . . We call those who are not bound by domination and subordination as human beings. - His critique of power is so overarching that he does not spare even mainstream Dalit politics, which desires power as the solution to Dalit powerlessness: ‘Those who have been oppressed by power desire today to taste power. The situation also looks favourable. But Dalit liberation is basically about destroying power. If Dalits yearn for power, only the kind of politics that destroys even that power can be Dalit politics.’