Abstract
Like several other land-holding and literate classes of people in nineteenth-century India, the Tamil Brahmans reduced their dependence on land, acquired university education, especially degrees in law, medicine and engineering, joined government service and became urban, mobile and global in the twentieth century. In the process, the younger members earned more money than their parents, went for work further away from home, and the community became more unequal than before. The transition happened even as the community lost its hold on political power in Tamil Nadu state. The immediate factor behind the intergenerational upward mobility was an ability to supply the skills that were in demand, when the colonial bureaucracy grew in scale, or when the postcolonial state pushed for industrialisation, and again when the post-liberalisation Indian economy built world-class capability in software development. Where did that particular form of adaptability come from?
Fuller and Narasimhan’s study offers an answer to this question. In one word, the answer is education. The book does more than this. At the most general level, it relates the story of the transition, tying together history, politics, anthropology and economics into one coherent whole. The book develops an analytical narrative suggesting how ‘caste’ or rather the Tamil Brahman identity mattered to occupational choices and economic performance, and how economic performance in turn reshaped class and status. As the Indian economy has grown rapidly in the last 25 years, the demand for skilled services has grown too. Inherited personal and family traditions, expectations and discourses about ‘who we are’ shaped to some extent which families and groups would meet this demand before the others did. The book illustrates this point with a particularly appropriate example.
The introduction discusses the key stylised facts, sets out the theoretical propositions and describes the nature of the research work. This last activity was a many-layered one, combining fieldwork in some of the original homes of a number of families, with reconstruction of biographies, and extensive interviews. The theoretical discussion engages with neo-Weberian arguments integrating class, status and economic change at one level, and fitting caste into the model at the next level. André Béteille suggests that caste and economic power were interdependent in earlier times when economic power flowed from land ownership and the Brahmans were landowners. But the two things diverged, rapidly with land reforms in the mid-twentieth century. The authors of Tamil Brahmans accept that model and complicate it by suggesting that the root of the divergence was partly internal to the community, and flowed from a propensity to acquire and use education for betterment. In the process, there emerged an economic class with a sense of social distinctness, or a ‘caste-cum-class’ (p. 21).
The rest of the book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1, titled ‘The Village: Caste, Land, and Emigration to the City’, returns to the agraharams as the authors found them at the time of the fieldwork (early 2000s) and reconstructed the pattern of change in the recent past. The picture they describe is surprisingly variable, suggesting that while there was a universal trend of the Brahmans leaving the agraharam and of non-Brahmans coming in to live in that once exclusive space, local conditions shaped that trend to some extent. Of particular interest is the transformation of some Brahman landowners from rentiers to capitalist farmers. Chapters 2 and 3 describe changes in education and employment situations in colonial and postcolonial times. Chapter 4 deals with changes in the position of women, as marriage patterns changed and the education of girls advanced. Chapter 5, ‘Urban Ways of Life’, presents, mainly through interviews, the reflections of professional and managerial people on their sense of the community. The chapter deals with migration and concludes with the observation that ‘overseas migration is merely an extension of the urban migration and circulation within India that Tamil Brahmans have undertaken since the nineteenth century’ (p. 181). I find this statement remarkable because persistence in patterns of migration has been noticed by economic historians in other contexts, especially merchant migrations. There is not yet a good theory of persistence, but statements like these suggest the need for one. Chapter 6 (‘Religion, Music, and Dance’) shows how classical Hinduism is integrated in the Tamil Brahman identity through sponsorship of certain forms of performing arts. Chapter 7 (‘Tamil Brahmans as a Middle-class Caste’) restates the main thesis of the book.
Caste in this book appears less as hierarchy and inequality, and more as a process that economic historians would call ‘path dependence’, a handy expression suggesting that initial conditions matter to how things change. Stating the process of change in such general terms allows us to see parallels more easily. This point leads me to my only criticism of the book.
I think the education-driven mobility story that Fuller and Narasimhan tell us was, in part, a geographical one, and not a particularly Tamil nor a Brahmanic one. It can be found among urban Bengalis and Parsis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (which the book notes). Their own sense of who they were may have made members of these communities more willing to go for higher education. Path dependence was present in this sense. But there was another sense in which path dependence was present. The fact that some of them came to live in the port cities, Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata) and Madras (Chennai), made it possible for them to attain scientific or legal education of international standard. The opportunity did not really exist on a comparable scale in the interior towns until the interwar period. These people may have been in some sense the right sort to accumulate human capital in that time. They were also in the right place. The book underemphasises the geographical context and thereby overemphasises the distinctness of the Tamil Brahman experience.
Many biographies of Bengali and Parsi families around 1900 would display a similarity with the biographies compiled in Chapters 2 and 4. The twentieth-century history of the Parsis is a history of retreat from business, entry into medicine, law and intellectual pursuits, and then becoming global in the same way as the Tamil Brahmans did more recently. The influences that shaped trajectories such as these may have come from within the community, but they came also from the cosmopolitan public culture and education available in the nineteenth-century port city. In 1950, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras had been global cities for nearly 300 years. The book may have underestimated the power of that environment.
This is a minor argument. Tamil Brahmans is an exceptionally good book. It has the depth of a well-researched ethnographic study and the readability of a popular history. It breathes life into a now somewhat dated subject, caste and community, and shows how these concepts are still useful in making sense of the changes going on in contemporary India.