The Right Spouse

Preferential Marriages in Tamil Nadu

Isabelle Clark-Decès

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780804790505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

The Right Spouse is an engaging investigation into Tamil (South Indian) preferential close kin marriages, so-called Dravidian Kinship. This book offers a description and an interpretation of preferential marriages with close kin in South India, as they used to be arranged and experienced in the recent past and as they are increasingly discontinued in the present.

Clark-Decès presents readers with a focused anthropology of this waning marriage system: its past, present, and dwindling future. The book takes on the main pillars of Tamil social organization, considers the ways in which Tamil intermarriage establishes kinship and social rank, and argues that past scholars have improperly defined "Dravidian" kinship. Within her critique of past scholarship, Clark-Decès recasts a powerful and vivid image of preferential marriage in Tamil Nadu and how those preferences and marital rules play out in lived reality. What Clark-Decès discovers in her fieldwork are endogamous patterns and familial connections that sometimes result in flawed relationships, contradictory statuses, and confused roles.

The book includes a fascinating narration of the complex terrain that Tamil youth currently navigate as they experience the complexities and changing nature of marriage practices and seek to reconcile their established kinship networks to more individually driven marriages and careers.

1

THE KAḶḶARS AND DUMONT’S THEORY OF ALLIANCE

The Tamils are born sociologists and the culture is beautiful.

—Louis Dumont (in Jean-Claude Galey 1982: 21)

La réciprocité impredictable, voilà le terrain privilégié des rapports de dons.

—Pouillon 1996: 159

I first went to the heart of Pramalai Kaḷḷar¹ country to check on a story I read in the Sunday section of the Tamil newspaper called Daily Thanthi. That morning, as I was making my way through the printed news, the usual ministerial exaggerations, the babbling of opposition leaders, a couple of murders, matrimonial ads, and so on, I came across the story of the “Beautiful Tēvar,” who allegedly once lived in the village of Corikkāmpaṭṭi, located just a few kilometers away from my rented house. I already knew how it ended: This Kaḷḷar hero enters a bull-baiting contest (jallikaṭṭu) to win back the girl who “rightly” belongs to him. He fights courageously until a bull gores him to death, pulling his entrails out. But there were enough differences between the version featured in the weekend supplement of the Daily Thanthi and the one recorded by Ulrike Niklas (2000) in the same village (see next chapter) that I decided to pursue.

It is not that difficult to show up in a Tamil village with an ethnographic agenda. In my experience, at least Tamil rural folks do not seem to mind a foreigner and her assistant (in this case a young man from the area) dropping by out of nowhere to ask questions about this or that aspect of their lives. In fact, over the twenty years I have conducted ethnographic research in Tamil Nadu I have almost always encountered an extraordinary goodwill that never fails to astonish me. In this case, however, the reception in this village was beyond my expectations.

As soon as we reached the main tea stall, four or five men waved me in their direction. It did not take me very long to realize that they were not drinking tea. They were drunk, very drunk in fact, but not so stupefied that they could not figure out why I had come. Every Tamil New Year (usually mid-January on the Western calendar) foreign tourists come to Kaḷḷar country to take pictures of the popular bull-taming contest held in the nearby village of Alaṅkānallūr. Every so often anthropologists like myself turn up, confident that our semicommunicative competence in Tamil will get us closer to the “meaning” of Kaḷḷar cultural activities. And so as soon as I uttered the Tamil greeting “vaṇakkam,” these men already knew who I was and why I had come, and they invited me to sit nearby on a stone slab.

After they recounted, I should say leaped through, the version of the story that I (and they) had read that morning, after they reenacted the ways in which the Beautiful Tēvar tries to bring the bull down, pressing on its neck so as to reach over its hump, we sat together in silence. Here we were at the familiar anthropological crossroad where culture is trafficked and peddled. There was no nervousness in the air, definitively none of that awkwardness that sometimes one encounters with earnest and helpful Tamil hosts. But then again these men did not make a big show of hospitality, asking me neither to sit in the shade, nor drink a soda, and so on. There were no complications whatsoever.

It took just a few minutes for one of them, a very thin fellow with deep-sunk pouches under his eyes, to ask permission to refocus my inquiry. “You ask about what you know,” he said with an impish grin on his face, “but may I tell you what you don’t?” “Well, of course,” was my immediate reaction; “By all means, tell me what I should know,” is what I very much wanted to say. In my experience a request like this does not come by often enough. The business of having an interlocutor volunteer information outside the ethnographic box is a dream come true.

A sort of glow came over my new friend, who despite the constant burst of inebriated-sounding commands—“Tell her this!” “Tell her that!”—managed to stay focused on what he wanted to impart to me, namely the time-honored brutal but moral dynamics of his society. His mode of instruction consisted of probing me with rhetorical questions. In the old days, he asked, there was no police or court, so how did the Kaḷḷars handle crime back then? How did they dispense justice when killed or wronged? “They took revenge,” the man answered with a raucous laughter and launched into a drawn-out but apparently true story about two farmers who pick up a fight while working in the field. One slashes the other with a sickle and, when caught by the villagers, he violently throws his newborn baby on the ground, shouting: “A life for a life!” When the villagers deny him the opportunity to turn his crime into a sacrifice, his Dalit (untouchable) servant kills his own child, crying out: “Two lives for one then!” It was then that my narrator got to the moral of his tale. The Kaḷḷars cannot choose their own punishment. They cannot say, as he mimicked with a disparaging and exaggerated tone of supplication, “No sir, you can’t penalize me; I did it myself!” “No sir, don’t take my son’s life, take mine instead!” Only the victims’ families can decree the sentence and exact revenge however they want, as evidenced by the fact that in the story the villagers hackle the killer with the sharp, sweeping strokes of their sickles right on the main square (mantai) where the cows graze.

The men took delight in my horrified reaction, which I cultivated because I knew that was what they wanted. And because I was such an appreciative audience, they called up more examples of their society’s passion for revenge. “What about the police and the state?” I finally asked, “Don’t they deter you from exercising violence?” The men answered in unison, “No one can control us; we’re masters of our lives.” A skinny fellow with missing teeth added, “No one can change us. We the Kaḷḷars are brutal. If someone attacks us, we retaliate, and we never forget a slight; we are great keepers of grudge. Whether we are rich or poor, revenge is our trademark.”

On the ride back to my home on the outskirts of Madurai that late afternoon I kept thinking about Louis Dumont, who resided among the Pramalai Kaḷḷars for eight months during the two years he spent in Tamil Nadu in 1949 and 1950 (1986: 4). The question in my mind was not so much, How did the French anthropologist manage to live with these tough people (although that too)? It was, How could Dumont have failed to incorporate the Kaḷḷar agonistic and aggressive worldview into his theory of alliance? This omission is all the more conspicuous in that Dumont was well aware of “the importance of rivalries among these people” (1986: 159) and “the frequency of conflict in Kallar life” (1986: 310). Yet his treatment of what he considered “the most important aspect” of Kaḷḷar marriage ceremonies, namely gift giving (1986: 239), and for that matter his entire analysis of their marriage practices, skirts the moral, social, and political issues that, as I show in this chapter and the next, are fully operationalized in Kaḷḷar matrimonial exchanges and Tamil intermarriage at large.

The Watchmen of Yesterday and Today

The Kaḷḷars Dumont met in the early 1950s had a complex history, which the Kaḷḷars of today (as my opening vignette suggests) use for the construction of their identities (see also Headley 2011). The trouble with this history is that both the Kaḷḷars and the Europeans have manipulated it for practical and ideological purposes. In the nineteenth century there was nothing the Kaḷḷars could do that was not perceived as hostile to the British and non-Kaḷḷars. The very name of this subcaste evoked suspicion, as kaḷḷar means “thieves.” The British were keen on documenting that when these ex-martial castes² settled into new villages, they took up duties as village watchmen (kāvalkarars) but only to steal cattle from the very castes they were supposed to protect from theft. The belief that the Kaḷḷars forced farmers into paying for the return of raided livestock (Thurston and Rangachari 1987, Volume 3: 69) and practiced reprisals on anyone who tried to do without their protecting services eventually led the colonial administration to place them under the jurisdiction of the “Criminal Tribes and Castes Act” of 1911. From 1918 to 1947 the Kaḷḷars were subjected to intensive police surveillance, techniques of intimidation, and judicial discipline.³

For postcolonial scholars it has been hard to resist sympathy for a people targeted by the British Empire. Stuart Blackburn (1978), for example, has argued that the predatory Kaḷḷar watchman of the late nineteenth century was a perverse product of colonial administrative imagination and policy (Blackburn 1978).⁴ More recently, the Kaḷḷars underwent an apotheosis in Anand Pandian’s book (2009) that depicts them not merely as scapegoats of the Madras presidency but as unambiguously moral subjects and champions of virtue.⁵

My own sense is that Indira Arumugam, a young anthropologist (and a Kaḷḷar herself) is onto something when she writes that “subalternity is an inadequate framework for analyzing complex Kaḷḷar histories” (2011: 12). She argues that over the last half-century the Kaḷḷars of Thanjavur have acceded to the status of a dominant caste by means of intimidation and coercion (2011: 12). Her fieldwork experience accords to mine: The Kaḷḷars of Madurai have accrued power by almost any kind of force, or threat of violence, property damage, or harm to reputation. They still specialize in the role of dangerous watchmen but nowadays mostly in the city, bullying storekeepers into accepting Kaḷḷar protection for a hefty price or else vandalizing their merchandise. In addition, the Kaḷḷars use violence to secure exclusive commercial control of profitable businesses. Here are three examples of their monopoly.

Some twenty years ago, villages located on the Vaigai’s banks would lease the many access roads to the river on a yearly basis. This was done by means of auction, and the bidder who obtained the rental contract was permitted to levy the sand miners (maṇal kuttakai ēlam). Because river sand is an essential ingredient in the construction industry and because Madurai was then fast expanding, the business became very profitable. I was told that on a given day 100 bullock carts could come by, and, at 10 rupees a cart, the leaseholder’s daily revenues could fetch 1,000 rupees, which was then, as it is still, a huge amount of money.

This was when, I was also told, the Pramalai Kaḷḷars took over the “sand-mining business,” as it became known then. But instead of paying the middlemen or leaseholders for the right of access to the river, they “secretly” began buying coconut groves along the riverbank at double or even triple the cost of the prevailing land value. This gave the Kaḷḷars direct access to the river, where at dawn when the sun is not yet up they would mine up and down its bed and along its banks where the prized, fine sand needs to be filtered. Sometimes no sale took place; the Kaḷḷars entered direct partnerships with the owners of coconut groves, especially during monsoon time when the river floods and regurgitates more sand.

The unchecked expansion of these new sand merchants began causing environmental problems. The decimation of coconut groves along the Vaigai incurred soil erosion and desertification. As the river’s sand level went down, the ground water level also fell, and some village wells completely dried up. These natural problems led to conflicts and litigation. Farmers dependent on the river or wells for the irrigation of their crops filed suits in court. Their legal action, however, did not stop the Kaḷḷars from mining the sand, sometimes with the complicity of the police, because the regulation of plundering is a Kaḷḷar speciality. Consider the following article from the online edition of one of India’s national newspapers, The Hindu:

Monday, Sept. 27, 2004

Sand mafia eating away Vaigai’s northern bank

By Our Staff Reporter

MADURAI, SEPT. 26. For more than a year now, V. Jeyaraman, a retired person, has been fighting hard to save his coconut grove along the Vaigai riverbank from the hands of sand mafia. With both the revenue and police officials not showing any interest to put an end to the illegal activity, Mr. Jeyaraman is now contemplating to seek the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court’s intervention.

Two groups of sand miners operating from Viraghanoor and Puliyankulam are simultaneously eating away the western and eastern corners...