On
Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in 1992
Part
8: The Twin Narratives of Tamil Nationalism
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian,
September 1, 1992, pp.10-12; prepared by Sachi Sri Kantha, for the electronic
record]
At the turn of the Twentieth century Tamil nationalism was articulated in
terms of two different interpretations of Tamilian identity, propagated by two
distinct movements which were politically opposed to each other. The one was the
Dravidian school; the other was the Indian revolutionary movement. The former
was closely associated with English missionaries and unequivocally supported
British rule; the latter strongly opposed the Raj and preached violence as the
chief means of national emancipation from foreign domination.
 Bishop
Caldwell
The discourse that may be identified today as Tamil nationalism is
constituted at its basis by these two interpretations – or more appropriately
‘founding’ narratives – which contended with each other to offer authentic
readings of the Tamilian past and present, of what ‘really’ constituted Tamilian
identity. The Dravidian school gave political and academic form to linguistic
ethno-nationalism; the revolutionary movement turned traditional Tamil
militarism into a liberation ideology, which evolved into militarist
ethno-nationalism. The militarist reading has also characterised Tamil
ethno-nationalism in the twentieth century not merely because it was
"constructed and deployed to advance the interests and claims of the
collectivity, banded and mobilized as a pressure group" but also because, as
this study intends to show, it appealed to, and arose out of the structures of
experience produced and reproduced through folk culture and religion in rural
Tamilnadu.
This is how, as we shall see later, MGR became Madurai Veeran, the warrior
god of a numerous scheduled caste in Periyar district in Tamilnadu. Jeyalalitha
contested from an electorate there in the last election [i.e., 1991 general
election]. However, it is essential to understand the politics behind the claims
and silences of the early Dravidian school of Tamil revivalism and
‘historiography’ for examining the rise of modern Tamil militarism.
Caldwell and his followers who
wrote and spoke about Tamil culture and history endeavoured to show that Tamils
were essentially a peaceful people who had achieved a high level of civilization
independent of and prior to the arrival of the ‘Aryans’ in the Indian
subcontinent. This was the unique Dravidian civilization. The theory of
Dravidian linguistic and hence cultural independence also contained in it the
idea that the Tamils were originally a class of peaceful farmers. The politics
of Caldwell’s teleology compelled him [to] introduce this idea into his
writings. (It was seen earlier that it arose from the attitude he shared with
the English rulers towards the Maravar.) The views of Bishop Caldwell were found
to be extremely useful by the newly arisen Vellala elite which was contending
for higher status in the Varna hierarchy of caste. Therefore the ‘histories’
which were written by the Dravidian school of Tamil studies at the turn of the
[20th] century were underpinned by,
(a) The political and religious concerns of Caldwell and other missionaries
like Henry Martyn Scudder and G.U.Pope
(b) The caste politics of Vellala upward mobility.
The interests of both were intertwined. Their express political interest was
to show that Tamil culture in essence was pre-Aryan-Brahmin and non-martial. The
first non-Brahmin Tamils to take up the Dravidian theory to examine theTamil
past belonged to the Vellala elite and were supported and encouraged by
Protestant missionaries (and sometimes by English administrators). The writings
of Professor Sunderam Pillai of the Trivandrum University on Tamil history and
culture inspired many of his castemen who had been seething at being classified
as Sudras by the Brahmins, and worse, by the British caste census and courts of
law as well.
 Prof.
Sunderam Pillai
Thus, the historical works of the early Dravidian school were produced as
"social charters directed toward the census, where the decennial designation of
caste status became a major focus for contests over rank between 1870 and 1930.
The first Dravidian history of the Tamils, ‘The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years
Ago’, was written by V.Kanakasabhai Pillai, a Vellala from Jaffna who was a
civil servant in Madras. Edgar Thurston thought it appropriate to quote the
following excerpt from that work, in the section dealing with the Vellala caste
in his ‘Castes and Tribes of South India’.
"Among the pure Tamils, the class most honoured was the Arivar or
Sages. Next in rank to the Arivar were Ulavar or farmers. The
Arivar were ascetics, but of men living in society the farmers occupied the
highest position. They formed the nobility, or the landed aristocracy, of the
country. They were also calledVellalar, the lords of the flood or
karalar, lords of the clouds…The Chera, Chola and Pandyan kings and most of the
petty chiefs of Tamilakam, belonged to the tribe of Vellalas." (Thurston, 1906:
p.367-368)
The efforts of the early Dravidian school of Tamil ‘historiography’
culminated in the work of Maraimalai Atikal – the founder of the Pure Tamil
movement which became a powerful force in the anti-Hindi struggles from 1928
onwards. He published a book called, ‘Vellalar Nakareekam’ – The
Civilisation of the Vellalas – in 1923. The book was a lecture he had given at
the Jaffna town hall on January 1, 1922 on the ‘Civilization of the Tamils’ A
contribution of Rs.200 was made in Jaffna towards the publication of the
lecture, as a book. The Jaffna Vellala of that time saw his interests as being
bound with that of his castemen in South India, who were attempting to rid
themselves of the Sudra status assigned to them in the Varna hierarchy of caste
by Brahmins.
 Prof. V.
Kanagasabai Pillai
However, Maraimalai Atikal had decided to publish it as a book in order to
refute a claim in the caste journal of the Nattukottai Chetti community, that
the Chetties did not marry among the Vellalas because they (the Vellalas) were
Sudras. In the English preface to the work, Maraimalai Atikal says that his
book
"is written in scrupulously pure Tamil style, setting forth at the same time
views of a revolutionary character in the sphere of social religious and
historical ideas of the Tamil people…In the first place attention is directed to
Vellalas, the civilized agricultural class of the Tamils, and to their origin,
and organization…it is shown that at a time when all the people except those who
lived all along the equatorial regions were leading the life of hunters or
nomads, these Vellalas attained perfection in the art of agriculture…and by
means of navigation occupied the whole of India. When the Aryan hordes came from
the north-west of Punjab and poured forth into the interior, it was the ten
Vellala kings then ruling in the north that stopped their advance."
Maraimalai Atikal goes on to claim that the eighteen Tamil castes were
created by the Vellalas for their service; that they (the Vellalas) were
vegetarians fo the highest moral codes;that Saivism and the Saiva Siddhantha
philosophy nurtured by the Vellalas for more than 3,500 years were the pre-Aryan
religious heritage of the Tamils; that the classification of Vellalas as Sudras
was the result of an insidious Aryan-Brahmin conspiracy. Maraimalai Atikal was
also defending fellow Vellala Dravidian scholars and their claims against
attacks and veiled criticisms of Brahmin Tamil academics, M.Srinivasa Aiyangar,
a respected Brahmin Tamil scholar who had worked as an assistant to the
superintendent of census for the Madras Presidency.
Mr.Stuart, had made a devastating attacking on the claims of the Dravidian
school of Tamil historiography, which derived its authority from the
‘scientific’ philological works of Bishop Caldwell. He debunked the theory of
the Caldwell-Vellala school that Tamil culture was constituted by the high moral
virtues of an ancient race of peaceful cultivators, on the basis of what he had
studied of the religion and culture of the Tamil country-side, as an officer of
the census, and on the basis of ‘pure’ Tamil works that had been rediscovered
towards the latter part of the 19th century.
 Maraimalai
Atikal
Srinivasa Aiyangar noted in his
‘Tamil Studies’, "Within the last fifteen years a new school of Tamil
scholars has come into being, consisting mainly of admirers and castemen of the
late lamented professorand antiquary, Mr.Sunderam Pillai of Trivandrum."
Aiyangar argued
that contrary to the claims of the new school, the Tamils were a fierce race of
martial predators. He wrote,
"Again some of the Tamil districts abound
with peculiar tomb stones called ‘Virakkals’ (hero stones). They were usually
set upon graves of warriors that were slain in battle…The names of the deceased
soldiers and their exploits are found inscribed on the stones which were
decorated with garlands of peacock feathers or some kind of red flowers. Usually
small canopies were put up over them. We give below a specimen of such an
epitaph. A careful study of the Purapporul Venba
Malai will doubtless convince
the reader that the ancient Tamils were,
like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, a ferocious race of hunters and soldiers
armed with bows and lances making war for the mere pleasure of slaying, ravaging
and pillaging.
Like
them the Tamils believed in
evil spirits, astrology, omens and sorcery. They
cared little for death. The following quotations from the above work will
bear testimony to the characteristics of that virile race. (1) Garlanded with
the entrails of the enemies they danced with lances held in their hands topside
down. (2) They set fire to the fertile villages of their enemies, and (3)
plundered their country and demolished their houses. (4) The devil’s cook
distributed the food boiled with the flesh of the slain, on the hearth of the
crowned heads of fallen kings. With these compare same passages from the
Assyrian stories of campaigns: ‘I had some of them flapped in my presence and
had the walls hung with their skins. I arranged their heads like crown…All his
villages I destroyed, desolated, burnt; I made the country desert.’ And yet the
early Dravidian are considered by Dr.Caldwell as the farmers of the best moral
codes, and by the new school of non-Aryan Tamil scholars…"
Aiyangar even
claims, "We have said that the Vellalas
were pure Dravidians and that they were a military and dominant tribe. If so one
could naturally ask, ‘How could the ancestors of peaceful cultivators be a
war-like race?"
He argues that
the etymology of the root Vel is connected to war and weapons, that it
was not uncommon for cultivating castes to have been martial
tribes in former days as in the case of the Nayar, the Pillai, the Bants, etc.
He also cites an official census of the Tamil population in the Madras
Presidency, which shows that Tamil castes with a claim to traditional marital
status constituted twenty six percent of the total number of Tamils in the
Presidency. (Srinivasa Aiyangar; 1915, pp.40-58)
 Kasi
Anandan, 1970s
Aiyangar’s attack on the Dravidian theory of Caldwell and the Vellala
propagandists had political undertones. Learned Brahmins of the day were acutely
aware of the political interests that lay behind the claims of the early
Dravidian school. Vellala Tamil revivalism and its idea of Dravidian uniqueness
were closely related to the pro-British and collaborationist poltical
organization that was formed in 1916, by the non-Brahmin elites of the Madras
Presidency – the South Indian Liberal Federation. Its proponents were, therefore
careful not to emphasise the narratives of the martial reputation of the Tamils
that were embodied in the ancient ‘high’ Tamil texts or in the folk culture of
rural Tamilnadu. (Tamil revivalism had been promoted by Protestant missionaries
and British officials in the latter half of the 19th century, only in
as much as it was seen to facilitate the social, economic and religious aims of
demilitarizing Tamil society and diminishing the influence of Brahmins in
it.)
This was done not only out
of a desire to promote Vellala caste culture, as Tamil national culture, but
also in conscious deference to the concern of the Raj about the ‘seditious’
views of Tamil cultural revival that were being prsopagated by the
‘terrorists’ and their sympathisers which were aimed at stirring the "ancient
martial passions" of the Tamils in general and the military castes in
particular, by appealing to martial values inscribed in the caste traditions of
the Maravar and linking them to a glorious past that had been sustained by, what
according to them, was the unique and powerful Tamil martial tradition. The
political life of Purananooru, the foundation text of Tamil militarism
had been initiated by two Brahmins who were sympathisers of the Indian
revolutionary movement at this juncture. (The one was the great Tamil poet
Subramanya Bharathi; the other was the great Tamil scholar M.Raghava Aiyangar,
the court pundit of the Marava kings of Ramnad.)
These concerns, had compelled the Raj to take lines of action aimed at the
terrorists and the military castes. One, it carefully sifted through the Tamil
revivalist propaganda of the suspected sympathisers of the terrorist movement,
to charge them with sedition. Two, it introduced the Criminal Tribes Act of
1911, with the express objective of throughly obtaining knowledge of,
supervising and disciplining the Kallar and Maravar who were classified as
dacoits and thugs under this act. The political mobilization of the Tamil
military castes began as reaction against this act. The political leadership of
this mobilization was inspired by the militarism of the terrorists. Modern Tamil
militarism as a political force emerged from this conjuncture.
As we shall see later, Karunanidhi, Thondaman, Kasi Anandan and Prabhakaran
are all, in varying degrees, products of the notions of Tamilian identity which
arose from this conjuncture. Students of Tamil ethno-nationalism’s current phase
will find that the martial narratives of Tamilian past and present are at work
in two extremes of the Tamil political spectrum. Last month, an audio cassette
was released in Jaffna by the LTTE and a commemoration volume was released in
Singapore in Thondaman’s honour. Both are politically conscious efforts to root
two personalities and their nationalist projects, to what has been portrayed as
the most powerful manifestation of the Tamil martial tradition – the Chola
Empire.
The LTTE cassette evokes a glorious past associated with Prabhakaran’s only
nom de guerre, Karikalan – the founder of the Chola Empire. The commemoration
volume, on the other hand seeks to emphasise the ‘continuity’ of a martial caste
tradition between the leader of the CWC and the great general of the Chola
Empire, Karunakara Thondaman. Thus the examination of Tamil militarism in this
study is an exploration of the answer to the question – why does Tamil
ethno-nationalism express itself thus and how does it sustain power to appeal to
pan-Tamilian sentiments?
*****
Letter of Correspondent
R.B.Diulweva [Dehiwela] and Sivaram’s response:
Martial Tamils
[Lanka Guardian, September 1, 1992, p.24]
I read with wry amusement, and increasing bewilderment, Sivaram’s curious
assemblage of ‘facts’ about Tamil ‘military’ castes. The recluse in the Vanni,
and his acolytes in the diaspora, should be grateful to the L[anka] G[uardian]
for providing a platform for this skewed rewriting of history.
Some random reflections on Sivaram’s thesis. Does he seriously believe that
the buccaneering Portuguese had the time to indulge in sociological analysis of
Tamil militarism (a la CIA) and strategically decide to erase/Vellalise
the ‘military’ castes? This also applies to the Dutch and the Brits. Sivaram’s
overall picture is of a truly fantastic war sodden people imbibing blood
thirstiness with their mothers’ milk. Weren’t the vast mass of Tamils peaceable
farmers, fishermen, craftmen? Or was their sole function to service these
magnificent bravos? And whom did these ‘military’ castes fight during the eras
of peace when Tamil civilization, in its truest sense, flourished?
Another fact for Sivaram. One of his ‘military’ castes the Maravar has made a
contribution to the Sinhala language. To this day, a ‘marava-raya’ is synonymous
with ‘thug’. This is, probably, all that these ‘warriors’ were!.
D.P.Sivaram states:
I suggest that Mr.Diulweva go on reading before he finally decides whether it
is skewed history or not. He should also study Prof.K.Kailasapathy’s Tamil
Heroic Poetry, which describes an earlier phase of the culture that I have
tried to analyse. He might find the overall picture there even more
gruesome.
I understand Mr.Diulweva’s concerns given the current situation of the
country, and hence his wish to think that the vast mass of Tamils were peaceable
farmers. His wish and concern have had precedents in the British era. As for the
sociological analysis of the buccaneering Portuguese, it was based on
Prof.Tikiri Abeyasinghe’s ‘Jaffna under the Portuguese’ (discussed there
in detail). I deal with the Maravar in as much as they were a political fact in
the rise of Tamil nationalism. A write up in the Sunday Times of
23.8[Aug].[19]92 by its Madras correspondent refers to the political influence
of one Mr.Natarajan who he says "belongs to the powerful Thevar (the caste title
of the Maravar) community in southern Tamilnadu." Mr.Diulweva will find, if he
takes a closer look at the politics of Tamilnadu, still an important political
fact.
*****
பாரதியின் பார்வையில் தமிழக போர்க்குடிகள்
மறவரே தமிழகத்தின் சத்திரியர்
On Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in 1992
Part 9: Bharathy and the Legitimation of Militarism
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, October 1, 1992, pp.6-8; prepared by Sachi Sri
Kantha, for the electronic record]
One
of the main figures of the Indian revolutionary movement in Tamilnadu at the
turn of the [20th] century was Maha Kavi Subramaniya Bharathy. One of its
sympathisers was the Tamil scholar M.Raghava Aiyangar, who was the court pundit
of the Maravar kings of Ramnad. Subramaniya Bharathy has been one of
the most powerful influences in Tamilian cultural and political life in the
twentieth century. The fundamental idea of modern Tamil militarism - that the
Tamils were a martial race and that the rejuvenation of their martial traditions
is necessary for national liberation, was enunciated by these two Brahmins in
the first decade of the twentieth century. This idea has informed Tamil
scholarship as well as the narratives of militant Tamil nationalism since then.
It has been reproduced in many forms but its fundamental structure has remained
the same. This narrative has been a basis of the vocabulary of Tamil nationalism
in (a) The Indian revolutionary movement in Tamilnadu, (b) The Indian National
movement in Tamilnadu, (c) The DK’s secessionist and Anti-Hindi movement, (d)
Caste revivalist movements in Tamilnadu, (e) The DMK, (f) The Federal Party in
Sri Lanka, and (g) The armed Tamil separatist movement in the North and East of
Sri Lanka.
Subramanya Bharathy
Thilak’s idea that the kshatriya class of India that had been disfranchised
by the British, had to reasert itself in the struggle for the nation’s
emancipation was more real and immediate to Bharathy, because he came from a
Brahmin family from Tinnevely in the deep south, that had served the Poligars of
Ettayapuram. He was hence, acutely aware of the traditional status of the
Maravar in Tamil society and what had befallen them under the British. The great
famine of 1876 had brought untold suffering upon the people in the deep south
and had led to a further decline in the standing of the poorer sections of the
Maravar. They were constantly harassed by the police which was formed by
Brahmins and other non-military castes.
பாரதியின் பார்வையிலே தனது இனத்தில் உள்ள பிராமனர்கள் ஆங்கிலேயரிடம் வேலை
பார்த்தவரை வெறுத்தார். அவரின்
என்னத்தில் தமிழ் நாட்டின் சத்திரியர்கள் மறவரே.
The poet, a
Brahmin who had given up the holy thread, hated Brahminism and his castemen who
were servile to the English. To Bharathy, the kshatriyas of Tamilnadu were the
Maravar. (This view seems to have been common to Brahmin families that had
served the Marava chieftains and kings. See also, Dirks; 1982; p.662). In a note
to his ‘Paanjali Sapatham’, he says,
"Maram means
valour - Veeram. Maravar are kshatriyar. Understand that, in our country, the
class that is known now as Maravar are kshatriyar."
அவரின்
பாஞ்சாலியின் சபதத்தில் மறம்-வீரம் மறவர் என்றால் வீரர். வீரரே சத்திரியர். எனவே
மறவர் வகுப்பரே சத்திரியர். எண்கிறார்.
His ‘Maravan’s song’ (Maravan Paattu) relates the predicament of the
traditional Tamil military castes under British rule and urges the reassertion
of the Maravar, and their martial reputation. He portrays his own castemen in
the police as a wretched and greedy lot, abject before the English master,
framing criminal cases against the Maravar and fleecing them under various
pretexts.
"Alas, we have to dig the soil today to earn our wage. The might of our
swords and spears are gone! A bad name has come upon us in this world…The times
when we made war with bows, blowing our chanks, are now a thing of the past…Can
we bring disgrace upon our great warriors of yore by selling our honour? Aren’t
we the valourous Maravar? Should we lead this useless life anymore?"
Thus the revival of traditional Tamil militarism - in its caste and broader
cultural forms - was essentially linked to Bharathy’s project of propagating and
kindling Tamil nationalism among the masses as a means of national liberation.
The project has continued to be at the centre of all political schemes that have
invoked Tamil nationalism from his time.
Bharathy’s convictions received a boost in September 1906, at the time when
the activities of the revolutionaries were gathering momentum. It came from a
talk given by U.V.Saminatha Aiyer on a poem from the Purananooru - an anthology
of heroic Tamil poetry. U.V.Saminatha Aiyer, after many years of research, had
discovered and published the Purananooru in 1894. It was considered to be one of
the most ancient Tamil works. It is said that "the publication of Purananooru
created a revolution in Tamilian thinking." (P.S.Mani; p.105. Bharathiyarum
Thamil Pulavarhalum, 1981, Madras. "They - the Tigers - are writing the new
Purananooru", Ulahath Thamilar, 1.5[May].1992)
The talk gave Bharathy what he was looking for - a sound basis for
propagating the idea of reviving the martial spirit among the Tamils to achieve
national liberation through violence. He wrote an editorial on the subject
titled in English as ‘Ancient Tamil Lady of Ever Sacred Memory’, on
8.9[Sept].1906. The political life of Purananooru, the foundation text of Tamil
militarism, begins in this editorial.
It was a time when very few Tamils knew about Purananooru or the Sangam
corpus. He says,
"A Tamil work called Purananooru was written many centuries ago. It does not,
like later works, relate Puranic fables. It tells of the condition of Tamilnadu
in those times, the wars of the kings and many other natural events. A poem from
this work was expounded by U.V.Saminatha Aiyer of the Madras Presidency College.
There are some, who out of ignorance think that there is no use in learning
Tamil and that it cannot inspire patriotism. Aiyer spoke on this poem to refute
their erroneous notions. The poem is about the mother of a warrior (Rana
Veeran). The woman had sent her son to the battle field, thinking that he will
either die in war for his mother country or come back victorious. A liar came
and told her that her son had taken fright and run away from the battle field.
On hearing this the old woman exclaimed, ‘Did I bring up a coward to whom his
life was more important than the love for his nation? I shall go to the battle
front and if he has done so, I shall hack these breasts that gave him suck and
will die there.’ Determined thus the old woman went to the field and was
overjoyed to find her son slain in battle. She was at peace, because her son had
given his life for his motherland. The woman’s name is not known now. But only
if Lord Isvara blesses the continent of Baratha with many such mothers in these
times, a solution to all our problems could be found."
Bharathy draws a parallel here to the story of a Japanese mother who had lost
all her sons in the war but was found crying that she did not have more sons to
send to the battle front. There were books on Japan’s victory over Russia like,
‘The Russo-Japanese War’ in circulation, particularly among the revolutionaries
and their sympathisers at that time. The theme of the heroic Japanese mothers
who nurtured the martial spirit in their sons during the 1905 war was emphasised
in these books.
Japan’s victory over Russia had inspired another nationalist minded Brahmin
to write Parani poems (A form of Tamil war poetry sung for a warrior who slays
1,000 elephants in battle) hailing its martial example. This was M.Raghava
Aiyangar, who was the editor of the Madurai Thamil Sangam’s journal
‘Senthamil.’
Current (establishment) literature in the West on the use of history in
national liberation organizations and terrorist groups, refers to what these
organizations endeavour to disperse among their members and their people as
‘the’ authentic reading of the nation’s past and present, as projective
narratives which are, it is claimed, "stories that not only recall the past, but
also teach how to behave in the present."
"Narratives of this sort tell individuals how they would ideally have to live
and die in order to contribute properly to their collectivity and its
future."
It has been argued in an analysis which draws attention to the frequent use
of these projective narratives by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of
Armenia, that the members of the Army are not marginal outcastes from Armenian
society, but that projective narratives transform them into "paradigmatic
figures of its deepest values." (Gerald Cromer: 1991). The projective narratives
that shaped militant Tamil nationalism and its idea of nationl liberation were
formulated as a reassertion of feudal Tamil militarism and its traditional
cultural hegemony in Tamil society.
This was so because they were eseentially linked to the Indian revolutionary
movement’s idea of reviving India’s traditional martial heritage as a
precondition for national liberation. The importance of chiefly Bharathy and to
lesser extent Raghava Aiyangar in the rise of modern Tamil militarism lies in
the fact that they initiated a political reading of the ancient Tamil text
Purananooru, in particular- an anthology of predominantly heroic poems - and a
heroic Tamilian past in general, as basis of a Tamilian concept of national
liberation. Their reading was conceived as part of the Indian revolutionary
movement’s ideology of national liberation through armed insurrection.
It must be emphasised that they saw the Tamil martial tradition from a
pan-Indian perspective. To them the heroic Tamil past was a reflection of a
great Indian martial heritage, whereas the Dravidian school vehemently rejected
the pan-Indian perspective as a myth promoted by Brahmin interests. Therefore
the politics of the views propagated by Bharathy and Raghava Aiyangar have to be
located at two levels; the pan-Indian and the south Indian.
At the first [pan-Indian] level, the following factors have to be considered;
(a) British recruitment policy and its theory of martial races, (b) the cultural
and political reaction to it among the educated Indian middle classes in Bengal
and west India., (c) the kshatriya revivalism of Bal Ganghadar Thilak, (d)
Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905.
At the south Indian level, the following factors shaped the two men’s
thinking; (a) the movement for elevating the status of Tamil language, (b) the
rediscovery of the Sangam anthologies, (c) the status and role of feudal Tamil
militarism in Tamil society.
The shift in [military] recruitment to the northwest of the subcontinent
toward the latter part of the 19th century was accompanied by the martial races
theory which sought to elaborate the idea as to why some Indian people -
Rajputs, Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims - were martial, while others - Marathas, Bengali
upper castes, Mahars, Telugus and Tamils who had once been the predominant
groups of the British Indian army - were not martial.
Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the commander in chief of the Indian army,
1885-1893, had made disparaging remarks about the martial character of the
Tamils [and] Telugus who had once formed the backbone of the army’s largest
group of infantry units.
"Each cold season I made long tours in order to acquaint myself with the
needs and capabilities of the men of the Madras Army. I tried hard to discover
in them those fighting qualities which had distinguished their forefathers
during the wars of the last and the beginning of the present century…and I was
forced to the conclusion that the ancient military spirit had died in them."
It was reasoned that long years of peace in the south had had a softening
effect on them. There were protests and petitions from the de-recruited classes
including Tamils and Telugus. A need to prove their ancient martial character
arose among many classes that were thus affected.
At a Congress session in 1891, two Telugu Brahmins invoked the ancient Hindu
law giver Manu in support of their contention that they were traditionally a
war-like race, to refute Lord Robert’s alleged slights against the Telugu
people. These sentiments had been already exacerbated by the Arms Act of 1878
which prohibited Indians from possessing arms without permission. This was seen
as a loss of self respect. Raja Rampal Singh protested against it at the second
session of the National Congress in 1886,
"…But we cannot be grateful to it (the British Government) for degrading our
natures, for systematically crushing out of us all martial spirit, for
converting a race of soldiers into a timid flock of quill driving sheep."
(Cohen; 1990, chapters 1, 2)
The Marathas had also been particularly affected by these developments.
Thilak arose as a national leader among them. He propagated the view that the
kshatriya class which had been disfranchised by the British had to rise again.
They were the traditional defenders of the realm and internal order. National
emancipation could be achieved through the rejuvenation of that class and the
traditional Indian social order.
U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar
Thilak’s ideas played an important role in the rise and dispersion of the
Indian revolutionary movement. The movement got a big boost in 1905, when Japan
defeated Russia. The victory demonstrated a point - that Asian martial spirit
could prevail over European military might. Hence, for the revolutionaries (the
Raj classified them as terrorists) India’s emancipation lay in the revival of
its traditional martial values. The impact of Japan’s victory over Russia on the
Indian revolutionary movement in Bengal and west India has been examined (in
detail, in Dua: 1966).
At this time Subramaniya Bharathy was the editor of a nationalist Tamil paper
called, ‘India’. He was an ardent follower of Thilak and the revolutionary
movement and was one of the few in Madras who were bold enough to propagate its
ideas through his paper. On Thilak’s fiftieth birthday, he wrote an editorial
(14.7[July] 1906):
"The present condition of the country makes it necessary to have Veera Poojai
(hero worship)…Veera Poojai is indispensable for a country’s progress. The
people of our country who have always keenly observed Veera Poojai, should not
be slack at a time when it is most needed."
A note in the paper says that, Thilak’s birthday was celebrated in Madras at
Bharathy’s house at Lingaya Chetty street and that a pooja had been held for
India’s martial goddess - Veera Sakthi - Bhavani (the goddess worshipped by the
Maratha warrior king Shivaji). The revolutionary movement was spreading the
Shivaji festival in many parts of India to rekindle the martial spirit which
according to them had been systematically crushed out of the Indian nation and
were establishing gymnasiums to improve its physical power.
Bharathy wrote an editorial titled in English as, ‘The Outrage of the Arms
Act’, reminiscient of Raja Rampal Singh’s outburst - "An evil Viceroy called
Lord Lytton introduced this Act in 1878. The people should have opposed it then.
It is totally against divine law to make a great country’s people cowards who
cannot wield weapons." (1.12[Dec] 1906)
Again he wrote an editorial titled, ‘Are Indians Cowards?’, on Japan’s
martial example. "A few Asiatics soundly beat hundreds and thousands of
Russians. This is enough to show the valour of the Asians. The warrior’s heaven
- Veera Swarkam - is better." (29.12 [Dec.] 1906)
He [Bharathy] was opposed to those who upheld the value of English education.
The ideas of the revolutionary movement had to be rooted in Tamil culture and
its deepest values; and they had to be spread among the ordinary Tamil masses.
This could be done according to him only by adopting a simple style of writing
Tamil. This view underlies his poems and songs through which he propagated the
idea of the rejuvenation of the Tamil martial spirit as part of the India’s
heroic reawakening and liberation.
"Amongst us, the Tamils, manliness is gone, valour is gone. We don’t have a
country. We don’t have a government. Will Saraswathy (the goddess of learning)
appear in this country in such a situation?"
"Tamil Nadu has not lost its wealth, independence, physical strength, and
mental strength and has descended to a low state. Hence good poets disappeared
from this country."
In his Puthiya Aathisoody (a book of moral aphorisms for children), he wrote,
"Dismiss fear. Do not fail in courage. Learn the art of War."
References
1. Bharathi Kavithaikal; 1982, Vanavil Pirasuram, Madras.
2. Bharathi Tharisanam (‘India’ essays, 1906), vol.1, New Century Book House,
Madras.
3. Nicholas B.Dirks; The pasts of a Palayakarar - The ethnohistory of a South
Indian Little King. Journal of Asian Studies, vol.XLI, no.4, August 1982. "Many
of my informants (Brahmins as well as Maravars and Kallars) have told me that
the Mukkulathors - the three Tamil military castes - are really the kshatriyas
of Southern India." Dirks deals with the Poligars (Palayakarars) of Othumalai,
who belong to the Kondayam Kottai subsection of the Maravar, the group to which
most of the Southern feudal military chieftainsbelonged. The Sethupathys - the
kings of Ramnad - belong to the subsection known as Sembi Maravar.
4. R.P.Dua; 1966. The Impact of the Russo-Japanese (1905) War on Indian
Politics, S.Chand, Delhi.
5. Gerald Cromer; In the Mirror of the Past - The use of history in the
justification of terrorism and political violence. [Journal name is missing
here, due to author’s or printer’s slip], vol.3, no.4, winter 1991. *****
Letter of Correspondent C.R.A.Hoole [Ontario, Canada]:
Tamil Military Caste
[Lanka Guardian, September 15, 1992, p.12]
D.P.Sivaram’s claim that Bishop Caldwell’s writing served to "demilitarize
Tamil society" (August 1) discloses a fixation on Tamil martial prowess and
warrior bravery. The fixation is more explicit in Mr.Sivaram’s account of the
‘Tamil military castes’ (May 1 - July 1). The account cannot however be taken as
an accurate reading of Tamil history. It may be better understood as a charter,
providing historiographical legitimacy for the present-day glorification of
warrior-heroes who earn fame and honour through gruesome deeds.
Crucial to his argument is the assertion that the pre-British society was
dominated by martial values and only subsequently "under active British
patronage the Vellala caste established its dominance, and its culture became
representative and hegemonic in Tamil society" (May 15, p.18). Against this
view, it may be pointed out that centuries before the Bishop launched his
so-called pacification programme, the brahmans and their Vellala allies
initiated a process of agrarian expansion that not only brought large tracts of
land under cultivation, but its people under the sway of brahmanical values
(B.Stein, 1980; B.Beck, 1979). Kallar and Maravar during the Chola times
progressively converted their lands to peasant agriculture and also adopted
Vellala titles. This process has been described as "Vellalization" or
"brahmanization" and gave rise to the Tamil proverb, "Kallar, Maravar and
Agambediyar becoming fat, turn into Vellalar". The caste society as we know it
today, began to emerge from process in the tenth century, with its left-hand and
right-hand structural divisions. It would then follow that the dominant values
of the Tamil society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are typically
caste values that is, "hierarchy" and "consensus" - in opposition to "conflict"
(M.Moffat, An Untouchable Community in South India, 1979). In this context, the
Kallar and Maravar who continued to inhabit the remaining marginal or peripheral
tracts at this time, may be seen to represent a classical ethosthat was receding
into oblivion.
There is no doubt that the Kallar and Maravar remained an irritant to the
British Raj, as they had been to the Chola and Pandya overlords. On the other
hand because they existed outside the larger caste society, neither a Kallan nor
a Maravan could during the time become a paradigmatic figure worthy of imitation
by the vast majority of the Tamils. In short, Mr.Sivaram has exaggerated their
influence on the Tamil society during that period.
***** Letter of Correspondent T.Vanniasingham [Canada]:
Maravar Militarism
[Lanka Guardian, October 15, 1992, p.21]
Please permit me to say a few words about Mr.Sivaram’s essays on Tamil
military castes. In his account he is illegitimately glorifying them. He seems
to be implying that they were treated unambiguously with awe and veneratio, at
the time of their exploits. Tamil literary documents of the period are not
reliable on this score.Poets and bards were hired-hands in the service of chiefs
and could be paid to praise and exaggerate their struggles and victories. In any
case there are other Tamil poems that portray the Maravar as blood-thirsty
savages, uncouth, undisciplined and lawless who lived by robbing unarmed
travellers. The Silapathikaram for instance mentions them as practising "the
glorious art of stripping travellers of their wealth - for the brave Maravar
virtue lies in the heartlessness of plunder."
There is no doubt that they established kingdoms of their own - and at other
times they were mercenaries in the pay of other kingdoms. In fact there were
many ruling castes in ancient Tamil society. The Maravar were one such group.
These many castes were always in contention for power and the Maravar won, at
times. They were not overpowering and dominant all the time and over the entire
territory. In this respect, Mr.Diulweva’s claims (Lanka Guardian, 1 Sept.’92)
were quite correct. In fact it is possible to show that they were a "fierce
maravar tribe - who prefer to die a glorious death on the battle field to a
village funeral pyre," as the Silapadikaram puts it, they lacked a theory of
government and civil society. For them a civil society is not something that
people live in but something that one robs and devours because the Maravar never
produce anything. Long before the British came to suppress them, they had shown
an inability to govern a civil society of many castes for any extended period of
time. Governance needs intelligence, political wisdom, historical knowledge,
forebearance and a capacity for trust, all of which, if we are to judge by the
descriptions in the ancient Tamil texts, the Maravar conspicuously lack.
A readiness to kill and be killed, as we know only too well, is not the way
to create a civilized society. *****
Previous installments of 'On Tamil Militarism' by D. Sivaram:
Introduction
Tamil Military Castes
The Code of Suicide
Militarism and Caste in Jaffna
The Suppression of Tamil Military Castes
Bishop Caldwell and the Tamil Dravidians
The Tamil Soldier and the Dravidian Diaspora
The Twin Narratives of Tamil Nationalism
On Tamil Militarism ; a 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written
in 1992
Part 2: Tamil Military Castes
by D. P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, May 15, 1992, pp.17-19; prepared by
Sachi Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
Thus, towards the latter part of the 19th century, there were
large, disgruntled groups with a military past in the Bengal, Bombay and Madras
Presidencies. They felt that the vast field of opportunities opened by the
expanding Indian army was being unfairly denied to them. This grievance was
further exacerbated by views of the British military leadership which relegated
them to a non-martial status as races that were not fit to bear arms; in whom
fighting qualities had declined.
The reaction of these groups was marked by a compulsion to emphasise the
martial credentials of their cultures. Opposition to British rule which emerged
among classes affected by the shift in recruitment toward the ‘martial races’ of
North western India took shape into an ideology that asserted a national spirit
which exalted military virtues and ideals as the cure for the ills of Indian
society under the British yoke. Bal Gangadhar Tilak who emerged as a spokesman
for the disfranchised military groups became the ideologue of this nationalist
Indian militarism. Stephen Cohen has attempted to define Indian militarism in
terms of Indian attitudes towards the British-Indian military structure and
recruitment.
"There are two fundamentally different sets of Indian attitudes towards the
British-Indian military structure, both of which may legitimately be labelled
Indian militarism: modern militarism and traditional militarism…emerged in
Bengal and western India and spread to other regions. Modern militarism stressed
the value of the military as a national universal solvent; as an expression of
the national will and demanded equalitarian recruitment. ‘Traditional
militarism’ resulted from regional traditions and the recruiting practices of
the British. It was confined to those castes and classes which exercised the use
of arms as matter of birth right and was unevenly distributed throughout
India…"(14)
At the turn of the [20th] century there were two groups in the
Tamil region which had a decidedly militarist and anti-British outlook. (a) the
adherents of modern Indian militarism – the terrorists – and their sympathizers.
(b) the disfranchised traditional military castes. The dispersion of modern
Indian militarism’s basic tenet – that the revival of India’s ‘heroic age’ and
its war-like traditions and valus was necessary for national emancipation –
invested the heroic past and martial cultures of the disfranchized traditional
Tamil military castes with a nationalist significance and cogence. Modern Tamil
militarism – the political idea that military virtues and ideals ‘rooted in
Tamil martial traditions’ is essential for national resurgence and emancipation
– was enunciated at this specific conjuncture in the school of Tamil renaissance
established by Pandithurai Thevar – a noble belonging to the sethupathy clan of
the dominant traditional Tamil military caste – the Maravar.
Tamil militarism then, is the effect of inter-related modern and traditional
components; the former as nationalist renaissance ideology, the latter as caste
culture. Traditional Tamil militarism in the Tamil region as elsewhere in India
was confined to a group of castes which considered "the use of arms as matter of
birth and right". The Maravar were, according to the Madras Presidency census
report for 1891 "a fierce and turbulent race famous for their military prowess"
and were "chiefly found in Madura and Tinnevely where they occupy the tracts
bordering in the coast from Cape Comorin to the northern limits of the Ramnad
Zemindari."(15) The Dutch found them to be the traditional soldier caste of
Jaffna and availed themselves of their caste services as such (16) – one of the
earliest instances of a colonial power making use of a specific military caste
in South Asia.
Cohen notes two categories of traditional Indian military castes with
different grievances at the turn of the 19th century. (a) "members of
classes which were no longer recruited or recruited in small numbers", (b)
"those classes which constituted the army but sought even greater status as
commissioned officers."(17)
The
Maravar and their grievances, however belong to a third category. They were a
people whom the British attempted to totally demilitarize by depriving them of
their traditional status in Tamil society through social, economic and penal
measures. This was in direct contrast to the social and economic
privileging of such castes and classes in the north, during the same period.
They were not only disfranchised but were turned into and classified as a
delinquent mass – the subject of a disciplinary and penal discourse – relegated
to the fringes of the new social pact which was being established in the Tamil
South of the Madras Presidency. The obliteration of their traditions and memory
was considered essential to complete the process of demilitarization and
pacification of the Tamil region. The martial races theory of recruitment and
the subsequent martialization of the north futher erased their martial legacy
and that of the Tamil South from the military ethnography of the
subcontinent.
David Washbrook argues that "the subvention and protection of the north
Indian dominant caste communities, and the martialization of their culture, were
but two of the many ways in which south Asia paid the price of liberal Britain’s
prosperity and progress."(18) On the otherhand the strategy of emasculating and
destroying the hegemony of Tamil military caste communities and the
demartialization of Tamil culture were two important ways in which the Tamil
South paid the price of India’s development as a nation.
The legacy of these strategies in the north and south of the subcontinent,
embodied in the structure of the modern Indian army, is central to the emergence
of modern Tamil militarism. The gains of this demartialization were consolidated
by favouring and encouraging non-military castes in Tamil society which
"contrasted favourably with the Maravar".(19)
The more important of these were
the Vellalas, Nadars and Adi Dravidas. The culture and values of the "peace
loving" (Madras census, 1871) Vellalas who had "no other calling than the
cultivation of the soil" eminently suited the aims of demartialization and
suppression of the traditional military castes. In this the
British were following local precedents which had been based on the principle
that the best way to ensure control and security was to "have none there but
cultivators" (21). Thus, under active British patronage the Vellala caste
established its dominance, and its culture became representative and hegemonic
in Tamil society. The Nadars and Adi Dravidas were considered amenable to
conversion. A large section of them had become Anglicans. The recruitment base
of the Indian army in the Madras Presidency was constituted strongly in favour
of these groups. The Dravidian ideology emerged as the cultural and academic
basis for their pro-British politics, led by the newly arisen Vellala
elite.
The nascent Dravidian movement was clearly underpinned by the concerns of
British administrators and Anglican missionaries (22) in consolidating the
social, economic and religious gains of demartialization. This is why the early
Dravidian school of Tamil studies and historiography had a strong political
compulsion to reject, ignore or play down the dominant role of the traditional
military castes in Tamil history and culture, and to assert that Tamil
civilization was Vellala civilization. (Maraimalai Atikal, was the chief
proponent of this view.)
Thus in the early decades of the twentieth century we find two contending
narratives (23) of Tamil national identity – the ideology and caste culture of
the anti-British and "turbulent" military castes and the ideology and caste
culture of the pro-British and "peace loving" Vellala elite – claiming authentic
readings of the Tamilian past and present. The
one claiming that the "pure Tamils" were Vellalas.
The
other claiming that all Tamils are Maravar and that the Tamil
nation was distinguished by its ancient Martial(war)
heritage.
How then did Tamil militarism which originally was related to a
political and social milieu that was opposed to the Dravidian movement become
its dominant feature in the [nineteen] fifties and sixties to the levelof
strongly impacting on the Tamil nationalist movement in Sri Lanka’s north and
east?
It was related politically to changes that took place in the Dravidian
movement and the changes that took place in Maravar – Indian National Congres
relations after the [19]30’s. In the Dravidian movement the change was connected
mainly with, (a) the rejection of the pro-British elitist leadership of the
Justice Party in 1944. (b) the radical change in the attitude towards British
rule and imperialism in 1947048 which gave rise to sharp differences within the
movement.
Relations between the Indian National Congress and the Maravar began to
deteriorate when the moderate Brahmin leadership of the Madras Presidency
Congress preferred not to oppose the harsh measures of the British against the
Tamil military castes. The contradiction became sharp when Pasumpon
Muthuramalinga Thevar the powerful and influential Marava leader, joined the
Indian National Army under Subash Chandra Bose and began organizing the Forward
Bloc against the Congress in the Tamil region.(24) The antagonism climaxed in a
violent caste conflict in 1957. The Congress government arrested Muthuramalinga
Thevar in connection with the riot. The DMK which had very little influence in
the southern districts of Tamil Nadu at that time made a strategic intervention
at this juncture in Maravar affairs. M.Karunanidhi, the only DMK candidate to be
elected in the southern parts at that time, was chiefly responsible for
co-opting the Maravar into the DMK; and for making the culture of the Tamil
military castes a dominant and essential component of Tamilian national
identity.
For many years, until he became chief minister, Karunanidhi wrote under the
pen-name Maravan. His weekly letter to party cadres was known as Maravan Madal
(25) – the Maravan’s epistle. Tamil militarism thus became integral to the
Dravidian movement. The secessionist militancy of the DMK in the [nineteen]
fifties and early [nineteen] sixties wad dominated by the vocabulary of Tamil
militarism. This was the nadir of the Dravidian movement’s impact on Sri Lankan
Tamils. DMK branches were organized in many parts of the north, east and the
hill country. It was during this period that ayoung student named Kathamuthu
Sivanandan from Amirthakazhi, a small village near the Batticaloa town who was
studying in Tamil Nadu took part in the militant agitations of the DMK.
Karunanidhi described him as "the appropriate weapon for Tamil upheaval."(26).
The student who was later known as Kasi Anandan wrote for a fortnightly called
Dhee Mu Ka (DMK) (27) when he came back to Sri Lanka. In it appeared his poem,
‘The Maravar clan’- Maravar kulam (28):
"The Tamil army is a Maravar Army…
the enraged Tamils are a Tiger Army (Pulippadai)…"
These lines of the poem are now part of the history and myths of the Tamil
Tigers’ genesis.
Foot Notes
(14) Stephen P.Cohen: op.cit, p.58.
(15) Edgard Thurstan, K.Rangachari: Castes and Tribes of South India,
vol.V, 1909, Govt.Press, Madras, pp.22-23.
(16) The Maravar’s connections with Jaffna will be examined elsewhere in this
study, especially in view of a recent attempt by a Jaffna historian to show that
the early colonists of Jaffna were Maravar and that the rulers of Jaffna
belonged to the Sethupathy clan of that caste. He has claimed that Vadamaradchi
was in former days Vada Maravar Adchi [the domain of north Maravar]; ‘Yazh
Kudi-etram’, K.Muthu Kumaraswamippillai, 1982, Chunnakam, Jaffna.
(17) S.P. Cohen: op.cit, p.59.
(18) David Washbrook: op.cit, p.481.
(19) A phrase used by the British to describe castes which were found
suitable for the new order.
(20) Edgard Thurston: op.cit, pp.369-370, VII.
(21) The Portuguese had applie this principle to establish their control in
Jaffna. Tikiri Abeyasinghe: Jaffna under the Portuguese, 1986, Colombo,
p.24.
(22) The father of the Dravidian ideology, Robert Caldwell was Bishop of
Tinnevely, the seat of Marava power.
(23) For the idea of ‘contending narratives’ in the formation of national
identity in another Indian context, the Ayodhya crisis, see Barbara Stoller
Miller: Presidential Address, Journal of Asian Studies, vol.50, no.4,
Nov.1991.
(24) The Forward Bloc was found by Subash [Chandra Bose]. I am grateful to
Subash Chandra Bose Thevar, the chief subeditor of the ‘Virakesari’, a
Maravar himself, for drawing my attention to this phase of Maravar history and
for the valuable comments and material on the subject, when I began this study
in 1990.
(25) This was also the name a main DMK party paper, in the [19]60s.
(26) ‘Uyir Thamizhukku’, Kasi Anandan, Fatima Press, Batticaloa;
Preface, p.2, 3rd edition, [publication] year not given.
(27) Two other papers called ‘DMK’ were published in Sri Lanka during this
period.
(28) DMK (fortnightly), 10.7 [i.e., July].1962, Colombo, editor and
publisher Vasantha Appathurai.
Note: I am greatly indebted to Prof.K.Sivathamby for his valuable
comments on Tamil history and culture and for drawing my attention two years ago
to the role of the southern districts of Tamil Nadu in Tamil
renaissance.
###
Posted May 4, 2005
On Tamil Militarism ; a 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in
1992
Part 2: Tamil Military Castes
by D. P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, May 15, 1992, pp.17-19; prepared by Sachi Sri
Kantha, for the electronic record]
Thus, towards the latter part of the 19th century, there were large,
disgruntled groups with a military past in the Bengal, Bombay and Madras
Presidencies. They felt that the vast field of opportunities opened by the
expanding Indian army was being unfairly denied to them. This grievance was
further exacerbated by views of the British military leadership which relegated
them to a non-martial status as races that were not fit to bear arms; in whom
fighting qualities had declined.
The reaction of these groups was marked by a compulsion to emphasise the
martial credentials of their cultures. Opposition to British rule which emerged
among classes affected by the shift in recruitment toward the ‘martial races’ of
North western India took shape into an ideology that asserted a national spirit
which exalted military virtues and ideals as the cure for the ills of Indian
society under the British yoke. Bal Gangadhar Tilak who emerged as a spokesman
for the disfranchised military groups became the ideologue of this nationalist
Indian militarism. Stephen Cohen has attempted to define Indian militarism in
terms of Indian attitudes towards the British-Indian military structure and
recruitment.
"There are two fundamentally different sets of Indian attitudes towards the
British-Indian military structure, both of which may legitimately be labelled
Indian militarism: modern militarism and traditional militarism…emerged in
Bengal and western India and spread to other regions. Modern militarism stressed
the value of the military as a national universal solvent; as an expression of
the national will and demanded equalitarian recruitment. ‘Traditional
militarism’ resulted from regional traditions and the recruiting practices of
the British. It was confined to those castes and classes which exercised the use
of arms as matter of birth right and was unevenly distributed throughout
India…"(14)
At the turn of the [20th] century there were two groups in the Tamil region
which had a decidedly militarist and anti-British outlook. (a) the adherents of
modern Indian militarism – the terrorists – and their sympathizers. (b) the
disfranchised traditional military castes. The dispersion of modern Indian
militarism’s basic tenet – that the revival of India’s ‘heroic age’ and its
war-like traditions and valus was necessary for national emancipation – invested
the heroic past and martial cultures of the disfranchized traditional Tamil
military castes with a nationalist significance and cogence. Modern Tamil
militarism – the political idea that military virtues and ideals ‘rooted in
Tamil martial traditions’ is essential for national resurgence and emancipation
– was enunciated at this specific conjuncture in the school of Tamil renaissance
established by Pandithurai Thevar – a noble belonging to the sethupathy clan of
the dominant traditional Tamil military caste – the Maravar.
Tamil militarism then, is the effect of inter-related modern and traditional
components; the former as nationalist renaissance ideology, the latter as caste
culture. Traditional Tamil militarism in the Tamil region as elsewhere in India
was confined to a group of castes which considered "the use of arms as matter of
birth and right". The Maravar were, according to the Madras Presidency census
report for 1891 "a fierce and turbulent race famous for their military prowess"
and were "chiefly found in Madura and Tinnevely where they occupy the tracts
bordering in the coast from Cape Comorin to the northern limits of the Ramnad
Zemindari."(15) The Dutch found them to be the traditional soldier caste of
Jaffna and availed themselves of their caste services as such (16) – one of the
earliest instances of a colonial power making use of a specific military caste
in South Asia.
Cohen notes two categories of traditional Indian military castes with
different grievances at the turn of the 19thcentury. (a) "members of classes
which were no longer recruited or recruited in small numbers", (b) "those
classes which constituted the army but sought even greater status as
commissioned officers."(17)
The Maravar and their grievances, however belong to a third category. They
were a people whom the British attempted to totally demilitarize by depriving
them of their traditional status in Tamil society through social, economic and
penal measures. This was in direct contrast to the social and economic
privileging of such castes and classes in the north, during the same period.
They were not only disfranchised but were turned into and classified as a
delinquent mass – the subject of a disciplinary and penal discourse – relegated
to the fringes of the new social pact which was being established in the Tamil
South of the Madras Presidency. The obliteration of their traditions and memory
was considered essential to complete the process of demilitarization and
pacification of the Tamil region. The martial races theory of recruitment and
the subsequent martialization of the north futher erased their martial legacy
and that of the Tamil South from the military ethnography of the
subcontinent.
David Washbrook argues that "the subvention and protection of the north
Indian dominant caste communities, and the martialization of their culture, were
but two of the many ways in which south Asia paid the price of liberal Britain’s
prosperity and progress."(18) On the otherhand the strategy of emasculating and
destroying the hegemony of Tamil military caste communities and the
demartialization of Tamil culture were two important ways in which the Tamil
South paid the price of India’s development as a nation.
The legacy of these strategies in the north and south of the subcontinent,
embodied in the structure of the modern Indian army, is central to the emergence
of modern Tamil militarism. The gains of this demartialization were consolidated
by favouring and encouraging non-military castes in Tamil society which
"contrasted favourably with the Maravar".(19)
The more important of
these were the Vellalas, Nadars and Adi Dravidas. The culture and values of the
"peace loving" (Madras census, 1871) Vellalas who had "no
other calling than the cultivation of the soil" eminently suited the aims of
demartialization and suppression of the traditional military castes. In this the British
were following local precedents which had been based on the principle that the
best way to ensure control and security was to "have none there but cultivators"
(21). Thus, under active British patronage the Vellala caste established its
dominance, and its culture became representative and hegemonic in Tamil society.
The Nadars
and Adi Dravidas were considered amenable to conversion. A large section of them
had become Anglicans. The recruitment base of the Indian army in
the Madras Presidency was constituted strongly in favour of these groups. The
Dravidian ideology emerged as the cultural and academic basis for their
pro-British politics, led by the newly arisen Vellala elite.
The nascent Dravidian movement was clearly underpinned by the concerns of
British
administrators and Anglican missionaries (22) in consolidating the social,
economic and religious gains of demartialization. This is why the early
Dravidian school of Tamil studies and historiography had a strong political
compulsion to reject, ignore or play down the dominant role of the traditional
military castes in Tamil history and culture, and to assert that Tamil
civilization was Vellala civilization. (Maraimalai Atikal, was the chief
proponent of this view.)
Thus in the early decades of the twentieth century we find two contending
narratives (23) of Tamil national identity – the ideology and caste culture of
the anti-British and "turbulent" military castes and the ideology and caste
culture of the pro-British and "peace loving" Vellala elite – claiming authentic
readings of the Tamilian past and present. The one claiming that the "pure
Tamils" were Vellalas. The other claiming that all Tamils are Maravar and that
the Tamil nation was distinguished by its ancient martial heritage. How then did
Tamil militarism which originally was related to a political and social milieu
that was opposed to the Dravidian movement become its dominant feature in the
[nineteen] fifties and sixties to the levelof strongly impacting on the Tamil
nationalist movement in Sri Lanka’s north and east?
It was related politically to changes that took place in the Dravidian
movement and the changes that took place in Maravar – Indian National Congres
relations after the [19]30’s. In the Dravidian movement the change was connected
mainly with, (a) the rejection of the pro-British elitist leadership of the
Justice Party in 1944. (b) the radical change in the attitude towards British
rule and imperialism in 1947048 which gave rise to sharp differences within the
movement.
Relations between the Indian National Congress and the Maravar began to
deteriorate when the moderate Brahmin leadership of the Madras Presidency
Congress preferred not to oppose the harsh measures of the British against the
Tamil military castes. The contradiction became sharp when Pasumpon
Muthuramalinga Thevar the powerful and influential Marava leader, joined the
Indian National Army under Subash Chandra Bose and began organizing the Forward
Bloc against the Congress in the Tamil region.(24) The antagonism climaxed in a
violent caste conflict in 1957. The Congress government arrested Muthuramalinga
Thevar in connection with the riot. The DMK which had very little influence in
the southern districts of Tamil Nadu at that time made a strategic intervention
at this juncture in Maravar affairs. M.Karunanidhi, the only DMK candidate to be
elected in the southern parts at that time, was chiefly responsible for
co-opting the Maravar into the DMK; and for making the culture of the Tamil
military castes a dominant and essential component of Tamilian national
identity.
For many years, until he became chief minister, Karunanidhi wrote under the
pen-name Maravan. His weekly letter to party cadres was known as Maravan Madal
(25) – the Maravan’s epistle. Tamil militarism thus became integral to the
Dravidian movement. The secessionist militancy of the DMK in the [nineteen]
fifties and early [nineteen] sixties wad dominated by the vocabulary of Tamil
militarism. This was the nadir of the Dravidian movement’s impact on Sri Lankan
Tamils. DMK branches were organized in many parts of the north, east and the
hill country. It was during this period that ayoung student named Kathamuthu
Sivanandan from Amirthakazhi, a small village near the Batticaloa town who was
studying in Tamil Nadu took part in the militant agitations of the DMK.
Karunanidhi described him as "the appropriate weapon for Tamil upheaval."(26).
The student who was later known as Kasi Anandan wrote for a fortnightly called
Dhee Mu Ka (DMK) (27) when he came back to Sri Lanka. In it appeared his poem,
‘The Maravar clan’-Maravar kulam (28):
"The Tamil army is a Maravar Army…
the enraged Tamils are a Tiger Army (Pulippadai)…"
These lines of the poem are now part of the history and myths of the Tamil
Tigers’ genesis.
On Tamil Militarism ; a 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in
1992
Part 4: Militarism and Caste in Jaffna
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, July 1, 1992, pp.9-10 and 14; prepared by Sachi
Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
Tamil secessionism
and Tamil militarism are two sides of the same coin. Both are legacies of the
attempt by the British to
demilitarize Tamil society in the 19th century. Tamil
militarism arose from the grievances of the disfranchised Tamil military castes.
Tamil secession was the result of the political ambitions of the classes which
were promoted by the British to
consolidate the gains of demartialization. Therefore it is necessary to
understand the colonial strategies which were aimed at
depriving the traditional power and status of the Tamil martial castes in Tamil
society.
In those regions of India where military service was confined to specific
castes, other castes had no desire to abandon their traditional occupations for
soldiering or for violence. Since the ability for violence was caste bound,
disfranchising or removing a region’s military caste could negate its potential
for violence and rebellion. The earliest attempt to thus demilitarize Tamil
society was made by the Portuguese in Jaffna. A brief examination of their
effort and its impact on the subsequent evolution of society in Jaffna will help
understand better the social and political consequences of demilitarization in
Tamilnadu two centuries later under British rule.
The Maravar were the traditional soldier caste of Jaffna when the Portuguese
arrived. Once they took control, they set about dismantling the feudal military
system of the peninsula. Military titles such as Rayer, Athirayer were banned.
The traditional soldier castes were seen as a threat to Portuguese control. In
1627 Lancarote de Seixas, Captain Major of Jaffna, put forward the idea that the
peninsula’s security lay in having none there, but cultivators. Thus began the
rise of the Vellalas in Jaffna. The Portuguese seem to have also favoured
another caste called the Madapalli. The Vellalas were not only cultivators, but
a section of them which had developed scribal skills, provided the local
officials, interpreters and karnams (accountants). Successive colonial powers
found Vellala scribal groups useful where Brahmins were not forthcoming.
Histories of Jaffna were written and presented to the Portuguese, which showed
the Vellala and the Madapalli as the original and dominant community of the
peninsula.
The Kailaya Malai and the Vaiya Padal, the earliest works on the colonization
of Jaffna, appear to be such histories. They name the chieftains of Tamilnadu
who had brought Tamil colonists to the peninsula with them. All
of them are described as Vellalas. But eleven of them have Kallar and Maravar
caste titles. The Jaffna Maravar were able to resume their caste occupation
under the Dutch, who met troop shortages through Jaffna’s feudal military system
which the Portuguese had attempted to dismantle. The Dutch governor and director
of Ceylon, Thomas van Rhee informed his successor Gerrit de Heere in 1697, that
in the Jaffna peninsula "the Marruas are bound to serve the Company as Lascoryns
(native soldiers) and pay t[w]o Fanams a year without anything more". But 93
years later, a Dutch census (1790) of all males between the ages 16-70 in Jaffna
recorded that there were only 49 Maravar males in the peninsula, as against
1,570 Vellala males. This was due to a widespread process in Tamil
society where military castes, finding their traditional status gone, simply
adopted the Vellala caste title and returned themselves as peaceful Vellala
cultivator, to the colonial census; and in time became endogamous subdivisions
of that caste.
In 1834, Simon Casie Chitty recorded in his Ceylon Gazetteer, that Kallar,
Maravar, Ahampadiyar and Palli (Vanniyar) were sub-divisions of the Vellala
caste. It is clear that the Tamil martial castes of Jaffna had swelled the ranks
of the Vellalas when faced with unfavourable conditions under colonial rule, as
they later did under the British in Tamilnadu. This gave rise to the saying in
the peninsula, "Kallar, Maravar and Ahampadiyar came slowly, slowly and became
Vellalas." But, unlike their counterparts in Tamilnad, the Jaffna Vellalas
didn’t generally change their military caste titles. "In former days the
Vellalas had the titles of Rayan, Thevan, Kizhan and Mazhavan."
Today, one of
these military caste subdivisions of the Jaffna Vellala community, bearing the
Kallar caste title Mazhavarayar is a dominant land owning clan in the peninsula.
The Mazhavarayar clan is also connected with the history of Thambiluvil in the
Eastern province. The Mattakkalappu Manmiyam, a work which deals
with the colonization of Batticaloa, mentions the mazhavar frequently among the
groups which peopled the Eastern province. Although the ‘vellalization’ of
Jaffna’s Tamil military castes predates the same process in south India, Vellala
cultural hegemony was achieved in the peninsula only during the early decades of
the twentieth century. The persistence of endogamous subdivision identities was
one reason for this.
The Vellalization of culture and religion in the peninsula began with Arumuga
Navalar’s attempt to convert the Jaffnese from their folk religion which was
dominated by the heroes and godlings of the Tamil martial castes. The martial
caste elements also figures in narratives related to the founding of
Valvettithurai and Myliddy – Karaiyar caste villages on the Jaffna coast, which
are key.
Whereas the Sri Lankan
karava (Karaiyar) caste in general has claimed kshatriya status – that they are
descended from the Kuru dynasty – a strong narrative is found among the Karaiyar
of Myliddy which states that three Marava chieftains who were brothers came with
their caste-men from Tamilnadu, married among the karaiyar and founded the
village. Its dominant clan, known as Thuraiyar – the others are known as Panivar
– was connected by marriage to Ramnad, the home country of the Maravar, until
recent times.
The martial arts of
Maravar were popular among the Thuraiyar of Myliddy, before their youth were
introduced to modern methods of military training in the last decade [i.e.,
1980s]. A narrative related to the founding of Valvettithurai, based on folk
etymology states that the village arose on land given to a Marava chieftain,
called Valliathevan, by the eponymous founder of the Tamil kingdom of Jaffna.
But a strong tradition was prevalent among the Karaiyar of Valvettithurai
that they had fought the Portuguese as the soldiers of the last king of Jaffna,
Sankili. This tradition, as we shall see later, was greatly exploited by TULF
propagandists to mobilise people in that part of Jaffna. The tradition seems to
be related to the trade wars between the early colonial powers and the Maravar
kings of Ramnad.
The Portuguese, Dutch and the British tried to wrest control of the
profitable rice and chank trade between Burma, Bengal and Ceylon which was in
the hands of the Thevars (title of the Ramnad kings) and their Muslim and Tamil
tradesmen, on either side of the Palk Strait, among whom were many Karaiyar
schooner proprietors of Valvettithurai, Point Pedro and Thondamanaru. The
British found that one Vaithianathan of Jaffna was among the few confidantes of
the Thevar, who were looking after his chank trade in Calcutta. Karaiyar
families carried on with the rice and chank trade in collaboration with Muslims,
Chetties and military caste families on the south Indian coast from Ramnad to
Tanjore, even after the British finally wrested control of it from the Maravar
kings of Ramnad.
A large number of Thandayals (traditional navigators – captains of ocean
going craft) from Valvettithurai, Point Pedro were employed in the Thevar’s
domain of sea trade. This became the basis of a vast ‘smuggling network’ between
south India, Sri Lanka and southeast Asia, after independence in1948. The
powerful Vandayar family (Maravar) of Tanjore maintained very close relations
with a leading business house of Valvettithurai until 1983. Sometimes such
connections between the coastal military castes of south Tamilnadu and the
Karaiyar of Jaffna were cemented through marriage. Although Jaffna Tamil society
was the earliest to have been de-martialized, and was the only part of the south
Indian Tamil region where traditional Tamil military castes were completely
subsumed by Vellala identity, it has become the ground in which the most fierce
manifestation of Tamil militarism has taken root in modern times. How was this
possible? Three reasons can be identified.
(A) The pro-colonial politics of the Jaffna Vellala was not formulated as an
attitude against traditional militarisms because the Tamil military castes
having assumed the Vellala identity early, were not present as a social threat
in the peninsula to the consolidation of colonial authority, after the
Portuguese period. Furthermore, the nature of the Vellala caste composition in
Jaffna was in itself not amenable to the scribal-agrarian conservatism of the
pure Vellala elites, which the British found useful in Tamilnadu. The
pseudo-Vellala component of Jaffna was large. A fundamental distinction between
the Vellala elite of Tamilnad and Jaffna would illustrate the point.
Arumuga Navalar campaigned against the activities of Christian missionaries
and his efforts received support from Ponnuchami Thevar, the chief Marava noble
of Ramnad. In former days, the Maravar had opposed the spread of Christianity,
by massacaring missionaries. On the other hand, in Tamilnad, an ideologue of
Vellala elitism – J.M.Nallasami Pillai, who like Navalar worked for the
propagation of saiva siddhanthism among the Tamils, was closely associated with
and supported by Anglican missionaries in his efforts.
As we shall see later, while Nallasami Pillai carefully and deliberately
played down the martial component of Tamil culture and history, attempting to
establish that Tamil civilization was constituted by the peace-loving Vellalas,
his counterpart in Jaffna, Mootootambi Pillai lamented the decline of the
peninsula’s martial heritage. He wrote in 1912,
"When Sankili – the last king of Jaffna – fought the Portuguese, most of his
soldiers were warriors of Jaffna. Even the Portuguese have praised their valour.
The victory of the Portuguese was not gained through their bravery, but through
Kaakai Vanniyan’s treachery. Wasn’t it the warrior of Jaffna who conquered the
whole of Ceylon? The people (of Jaffna) who are descended of those warriors have
lost their martial traits and become a despicable race, having been subjugated
long under the Portuguese and the Dutch and as a result having become weak and
losing their self-identity."
Mootootambi Pillai was reflecting a sentiment that had been expressed in the
Madurai Tamil Sangam – established by the Marava noble, Pandithurai Thevar (the
son of the noble who had earlier helped Navalar) that the decline of the Tamil
nation was caused by the deterioration of its ancient and unique martial
heritage.
(B) The closure of the avenues by which Vellala upward mobility and
conservatism under successive Sinhala governments in Sri Lanka. The colonial
powers opened these avenues to promote the class and culture of Vellala
conservatism as a bulwark and gurantee against the turbulence of Tamil feudal
militarism. The restrictions placed on university admissions and on government
jobs seriously undermined the class and culture of Vellala conservatism and its
politics of non-violence and compromise. The other narrative that was contending
at this juncture, for Tamilian identity – Tamil militarism – began to assert
itself as the bulwark built by colonial powers against it crumbled.
(C) Non-Vellala pockets in the peninsula where the values of Vellala
conservatism had made little impact.
###
Posted May 7, 2005
© 1996-2014 Ilankai Tamil Sangam, USA, Inc.
Foot Notes
(14) Stephen P.Cohen: op.cit, p.58.
(15) Edgard Thurstan, K.Rangachari: Castes and Tribes of South India, vol.V,
1909, Govt.Press, Madras, pp.22-23.
(16) The Maravar’s connections with Jaffna will be examined elsewhere in this
study, especially in view of a recent attempt by a Jaffna historian to show that
the early colonists of Jaffna were Maravar and that the rulers of Jaffna
belonged to the Sethupathy clan of that caste. He has claimed that Vadamaradchi
was in former days Vada Maravar Adchi [the domain of north Maravar]; ‘Yazh
Kudi-etram’, K.Muthu Kumaraswamippillai, 1982, Chunnakam, Jaffna.
(17) S.P. Cohen: op.cit, p.59.
(18) David Washbrook: op.cit, p.481.
(19) A phrase used by the British to describe castes which were found
suitable for the new order.
(20) Edgard Thurston: op.cit, pp.369-370, VII.
(21) The Portuguese had applie this principle to establish their control in
Jaffna. Tikiri Abeyasinghe: Jaffna under the Portuguese, 1986, Colombo,
p.24.
(22) The father of the Dravidian ideology, Robert Caldwell was Bishop of
Tinnevely, the seat of Marava power.
(23) For the idea of ‘contending narratives’ in the formation of national
identity in another Indian context, the Ayodhya crisis, see Barbara Stoller
Miller: Presidential Address, Journal of Asian Studies, vol.50, no.4,
Nov.1991.
(24) The Forward Bloc was found by Subash [Chandra Bose]. I am grateful to
Subash Chandra Bose Thevar, the chief subeditor of the ‘Virakesari’, a Maravar
himself, for drawing my attention to this phase of Maravar history and for the
valuable comments and material on the subject, when I began this study in
1990.
(25) This was also the name a main DMK party paper, in the [19]60s.
(26) ‘Uyir Thamizhukku’, Kasi Anandan, Fatima Press, Batticaloa; Preface,
p.2, 3rd edition, [publication] year not given.
(27) Two other papers called ‘DMK’ were published in Sri Lanka during this
period.
(28) DMK (fortnightly), 10.7 [i.e., July].1962, Colombo, editor and publisher
Vasantha Appathurai.
Note: I am greatly indebted to Prof.K.Sivathamby for his valuable comments on
Tamil history and culture and for drawing my attention two years ago to the role
of the southern districts of Tamil Nadu in Tamil renaissance.
On Tamil Militarism: Introduction
###
Posted May 4, 2005
© 1996-2014 Ilankai Tamil Sangam, USA, Inc.
On Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in
1992
Part 7: The Tamil Soldier and the Dravidian Diaspora
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, August 15, 1992, pp.12-13 and 28;
prepared by Sachi Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
The idea of the ‘modern Indian army’ is rarely associated with the Tamils.
The nature or its ethnic composition generates the impression that it is a
predominantly north Indian phenomenon. This impression has become so strongly
established that the military history of the British Empire’s rise has been
studied in recent times in connection with the role of the ‘martial peoples’ of
north India in the British Indian army. The tenacity and power of this
‘impression’ in modern scholarship is best illustrated in the argument of David
Washbrook:
"The role the British Indian army played in international affairs over the
course of the 19th century however, lifts it out of the context of
British Indian relations and places it in a broader global perspective. It was
not an army intended primarily for domestic defence and police duties in India.
Rather, it was the army of British Imperialism, formal and informal, which
operated worldwide, opening up markets to the products of industrial revolution,
subordinating labour forces to the dominating of capital and bringing to
‘benighted’ civilizations the enlightened values of Christianity and
Rationality. The Indian army was the iron fist in the velvet glove of Victorian
expansionism.Moreover, because the British Empire was the principal agency
through which the world system functioned in this era, the Indian army was in a
real sense the major coercive force behind the internationalization of
industrial capitalism. Paradoxically (or not!), the martialization of north
Indian society and, in many ways the feudalization of its agrarian relations,
were direct corrolaries of the development of capitalism on a world scale during
the 19th century." (Washbrook: 1990)
Washbrook’s view is based on what the Indian army was towards the latter part
of the nineteenth century. It is underpinned by an "impression" which arose many
years after the British had established their strategic hold on India and had
laid the Empire’s foundation with what was known as their ‘Coastal Army’ which
was built up in the latter half of the 18th century, mainly with
Tamil soldiers. The British succeeded in empire-building not by martialising
dominant north Indian military caste communities, but by building up a cheap but
loyal and effective army of predominantly Tamil soldiers. Until the latter half
of the 19th century, it was the Tamil Christian soldier who was the
main coercive force behind the expansion of the Empire in the subcontinent and
elsewhere.
The British recruitment handbook for Madras classes, says "It can
truthfully be said that the Coast Army was mainly instrumental in conquering
India for the British." (p.8) The Tamil soldier was seen as the bearer of
the Sword and the Bible – with few religious and caste prejudices which madehim
suitable for expeditions beyond the sea unlike his more expensive brethren in
north India. Contrary to what Washbrook claims, the early phase of British
overseas expansion in East, West and South Asia was not based on the
martialisation of north Indian society, but on the south Indian alternative to
its military labour market – the loyal classes of Tamils.
"During this whole period, as always throughout its existence, the Coast Army
was specially noteworthy for the cheerful alacrity with which its regiments have
volunteered of service overseas. The Bengal regiments on many occasions refused
to embark for foreign service, on the plea that it was contrary to their
religion. But the Coast Army willingly embarked, and took a leading part in many
successful expeditions, including Manila (1762), Mahe (1779), Ceylon (1782 and
1795), Amboyna and the Spice Islands (1796), Egypt (1801-02), Bourbon and
Mauritius (1810) and Java (1811-12)".
The Coast Army took part in the final expedition against the King of Kandy
which was followed by the first war in Burma (1824-26). The first war by the
British in China was also fought by them in 1840-42 where the 37th
Madras Infantry was made grenadier battalion for its distinguished conduct. Sir
Hugh Gough reported on their service in the China war that "their perseverance
and gallantry before the enemy have secured for them the confidence of the
British European soldiers." (Recruitment Handbook for Madras Classes,
p.6)
Even a brief study of the history of the Coast Army and the Tamil soldiers
who were recruited into it would reveal that the ‘military agency’ which
"conveyed British capitalist power to areas of the world (including the South
Asian hinterland) it could not otherwise have reached" had a very small
proportion of north Indian military groups. Washbrook’s argument that the World
Capitalist system which the British Empire helped so much to expand rested
heavily on the intermediation of the Indian army and that without it and similar
agencies constituted outside the European capitalism core, "the forces of world
capitalism would have been ethnic, much weaker or else of a very different kind"
is plausible but the argument that harnessing the dynamic potential of the
readily available north Indian military groups made it cheaper for the British
to rapidly expand their empire, is untenable in view of the two most critical
phases which determined the hold of the English on the subcontinent.
The first phase begins towards the middle of the 18th century. It
was the contest with the French that first compelled the British to abandon
their policy in India till then, that was was bad for trade, and raise local
troops. There was in the subcontinent at that time paramilitary caste groups
whose services could be obtained for a fee. The British unlike the great Indian
princedoms in that era could not afford the soldiery of the high caste martial
groups although they very much desired them. From the proceedings of the
government, dated 7th May 1770, it appears that the Sepoy battalions
then consisted of Mohamedans, Tamils and Telugus, but no details of caste are
given. It may be inferred that the number of Brahmans, Rajputs and Maharattas in
the Madras army was very small. It is clear that the authorities were desirous
of restricting enlistments to men of good caste, but it is equally clear that
this wasnot practicable during the last (18th) century."
Again in 1795, it is stated that "owing to the small pay of the sepoy and the
high price of rice, considerable difficulty was experienced in obtaining good
recruits, and the battalions were kept up to their proper strength by accepting
undersized men and those of low caste." (Phytian Adams: 1943). Yet Stringer
Lawrence and Clive succeeded in making the cheap low caste Tamil sepoys into an
army with which the English were able to establish themselves as the main
European trading group in India, in the contest with the French. It later won
all the crucial battles that subjugated most of India during the course of the
seventy five years since recruitment of the first Tamil sepoy levies began in
the northern parts of Tamilnadu in 1746.
The East India company established its first military department at Madras in
1752. The main reason behind the rapid rise of the British in this era was their
low cost but hardy army. The major Indian kingdoms of the time, although
possessed of modern and larger forces were falling into financial difficulties
in maintaining their expensive high caste soldiery whose pay arrears was
frequent cause for mutiny. The English fought with the advantage of an extremely
loyal army which did not rebel for pay. The Recruitment Handbook of the Madras
classes records "never were these qualities more fully tried than in the war
with Hyder. The pay of the army was sixteen months in arrears, famine raged all
over the country, the enemy was at the gates offering large bounty and pay to
our Sepoys to desert, but in vain. Under all these circumstances severe action
were fought. Their conduct during the war excited the admiration of all who knew
it, and Frederick the Great of Prussia was known to have said, "after reading
Orme’s account of the war, that had he the command of troops who acted like the
sepoys on that occasion, he could conquer all Europe."(9)
The second crucial phase in which the future of the British as an Empire
building power was determined was the period in which the Indian Mutiny erupted
in North India. Again, it was the loyal Coast Army that helped the English
survive the Mutiny. It was the Mutiny that made the British reorganize the
Indian army into that form which Washbrook considers in his thesis.
"In 1857-58, came the great Mutiny of the army in Bengal, when the Coast Army
displayed its loyalty and devotion in no uncertain manner. In a despatch dated
the 19th August 1859, the Secretary of State of India said, ‘The
commander-in-chiefs Minute contains only a slight sketch of the important
services rendered by the Madras army during the great contest in the North of
India. The great fact has been the perfect fidelity of that army and the perfect
loyalty of the 23 millions of persons who inhabit this Presidency, which enabled
the resources of the South of India to be freely put forth in support of our
hard-pressed country men in North." Lieut-General Sir Patrick Grant
said,
"The services in the field of the Troops of this Presidency employed in the
suppression or the Rebellion and the Mutiny are now a matter of history, and the
glowing terms in which they have been recognized must endure for ever, an
unperishable record of this noble soldiers. It can never be forgotten that,
to their immortal honour, the native troop of the Madras army have been, in the
words of the Earl of Ellenborough, faithful found among the
faithless."
The Dravidian ideology was underpinned by the idea of the loyal Tamil soldier
of British Coast Army, bringing to "benighted" civilizations the enlightened
values of Christianity and Rationality. Caldwell and his successors elaborated a
theory of a Tamil Diaspora as the bedrock of Protestantism and the English
Empire on this idea.
Bishop N.C.Sargant, who like Caldwell, was the Church of England’s Bishop of
Tinnevely spells it out clearly in his ‘Dispersion of the Tamil
Church’:
"The Tamils are great soldiers; they went with the army along with their
families and lived in its newly established camps and in the newly captured
territories…they were excellent instruments for establishing the Church among
the Telugu and Kannada speaking peoples." "There is much evidence to show
that Tamil soldiers – of the British Indian Army – and those (Tamils) who
followed the army took the gospel with them to the other parts of India."
(Sargant: 1940, p.32 and p.68)
About the intention of his word, Sargant says, "The Dispersion of the Jews
was a preparation for the spread of Christianity in the ancient world. Similarly
can it be said that the Dispersion of the Tamil church helped the missionaries?
The first Apostles found some God feating Jews, as their first believers. Did
the missionaries find the Tamils perceptive…was this race the first fruit of
Christian work? I tried to find answers to such questions…This research made me
understand that Christ realised many unexpected and inexplicable things through
the Dispersion of the Tamils and the Tamil Church."
Sargant, like Caldwell and Bishop Whitehead before him, believed that
research into ancient Dravidian forms of expression found in Tamil would reveal
that there were many surprising words and ideas which denoted Christian concepts
such as that of sin. "Like the ancient Hebrews the ancient Dravidians also tried
to lead a righteous spiritual life."(p.3) The close connection between the
British Indian army’s early conquests, the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel (S.P.G.), the Dispersion of the English Church, and the Tamils of Bishop
Caldwell’s flock in Tinnevely is described by Sargant in detail (chapters 2, 3,
5). Thus the Tamil soldier, the Tamil Diaspora and the Dravidian movement came
to constitute a basis of the British Imperial project.
The nationalist reaction to this project in the Tamil country, articulated by
the terrorist movement, proclaimed modern Tamil militarism as the means of
national emancipation from British rule.
On
Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in 1992
Part
8: The Twin Narratives of Tamil Nationalism
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, September 1, 1992, pp.10-12; prepared by
Sachi Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
At the turn of the Twentieth century Tamil nationalism was articulated in
terms of two different interpretations of Tamilian identity, propagated by two
distinct movements which were politically opposed to each other. The one was the
Dravidian school; the other was the Indian revolutionary movement. The former
was closely associated with English missionaries and unequivocally supported
British rule; the latter strongly opposed the Raj and preached violence as the
chief means of national emancipation from foreign domination.
Bishop
Caldwell
The discourse that may be identified today as Tamil nationalism is
constituted at its basis by these two interpretations – or more appropriately
‘founding’ narratives – which contended with each other to offer authentic
readings of the Tamilian past and present, of what ‘really’ constituted Tamilian
identity. The Dravidian school gave political and academic form to linguistic
ethno-nationalism; the revolutionary movement turned traditional Tamil
militarism into a liberation ideology, which evolved into militarist
ethno-nationalism. The militarist reading has also characterised Tamil
ethno-nationalism in the twentieth century not merely because it was
"constructed and deployed to advance the interests and claims of the
collectivity, banded and mobilized as a pressure group" but also because, as
this study intends to show, it appealed to, and arose out of the structures of
experience produced and reproduced through folk culture and religion in rural
Tamilnadu.
This is how, as we shall see later, MGR became Madurai Veeran, the warrior
god of a numerous scheduled caste in Periyar district in Tamilnadu. Jeyalalitha
contested from an electorate there in the last election [i.e., 1991 general
election]. However, it is essential to understand the politics behind the claims
and silences of the early Dravidian school of Tamil revivalism and
‘historiography’ for examining the rise of modern Tamil militarism.
Caldwell and his followers who wrote and spoke about Tamil culture and
history endeavoured to show that Tamils were essentially a peaceful people who
had achieved a high level of civilization independent of and prior to the
arrival of the ‘Aryans’ in the Indian subcontinent. This was the unique
Dravidian civilization. The theory of Dravidian linguistic and hence cultural
independence also contained in it the idea that the Tamils were originally a
class of peaceful farmers. The politics of Caldwell’s teleology compelled him
[to] introduce this idea into his writings. (It was seen earlier that it arose
from the attitude he shared with the English rulers towards the Maravar.) The
views of Bishop Caldwell were found to be extremely useful by the newly arisen
Vellala elite which was contending for higher status in the Varna hierarchy of
caste. Therefore the ‘histories’ which were written by the Dravidian school of
Tamil studies at the turn of the [20th] century were underpinned
by,
(a) The political and religious concerns of Caldwell and other missionaries
like Henry Martyn Scudder and G.U.Pope
(b) The caste politics of Vellala upward mobility.
The interests of both were intertwined. Their express political interest was
to show that Tamil culture in essence was pre-Aryan-Brahmin and non-martial. The
first non-Brahmin Tamils to take up the Dravidian theory to examine theTamil
past belonged to the Vellala elite and were supported and encouraged by
Protestant missionaries (and sometimes by English administrators). The writings
of Professor Sunderam Pillai of the Trivandrum University on Tamil history and
culture inspired many of his castemen who had been seething at being classified
as Sudras by the Brahmins, and worse, by the British caste census and courts of
law as well.
Prof.
Sunderam Pillai
Thus, the historical works of the early Dravidian school were produced as
"social charters directed toward the census, where the decennial designation of
caste status became a major focus for contests over rank between 1870 and 1930.
The first Dravidian history of the Tamils, ‘The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years
Ago’, was written by V.Kanakasabhai Pillai, a Vellala from Jaffna who was a
civil servant in Madras. Edgar Thurston thought it appropriate to quote the
following excerpt from that work, in the section dealing with the Vellala caste
in his ‘Castes and Tribes of South India’.
"Among the pure Tamils, the class most honoured was the Arivar or
Sages. Next in rank to the Arivar were Ulavar or farmers. The
Arivar were ascetics, but of men living in society the farmers occupied the
highest position. They formed the nobility, or the landed aristocracy, of the
country. They were also called Vellalar, the lords of the flood or
karalar, lords of the clouds…The Chera, Chola and Pandyan kings and most of the
petty chiefs of Tamilakam, belonged to the tribe of Vellalas." (Thurston, 1906:
p.367-368)
The efforts of the early Dravidian school of Tamil ‘historiography’
culminated in the work of Maraimalai Atikal – the founder of the Pure Tamil
movement which became a powerful force in the anti-Hindi struggles from 1928
onwards. He published a book called, ‘Vellalar Nakareekam’ – The
Civilisation of the Vellalas – in 1923. The book was a lecture he had given at
the Jaffna town hall on January 1, 1922 on the ‘Civilization of the Tamils’ A
contribution of Rs.200 was made in Jaffna towards the publication of the
lecture, as a book. The Jaffna Vellala of that time saw his interests as being
bound with that of his castemen in South India, who were attempting to rid
themselves of the Sudra status assigned to them in the Varna hierarchy of caste
by Brahmins.
Prof. V.
Kanagasabai Pillai
However, Maraimalai Atikal had decided to publish it as a book in order to
refute a claim in the caste journal of the Nattukottai Chetti community, that
the Chetties did not marry among the Vellalas because they (the Vellalas) were
Sudras. In the English preface to the work, Maraimalai Atikal says that his
book
"is written in scrupulously pure Tamil style, setting forth at the same time
views of a revolutionary character in the sphere of social religious and
historical ideas of the Tamil people…In the first place attention is directed to
Vellalas, the civilized agricultural class of the Tamils, and to their origin,
and organization…it is shown that at a time when all the people except those who
lived all along the equatorial regions were leading the life of hunters or
nomads, these Vellalas attained perfection in the art of agriculture…and by
means of navigation occupied the whole of India. When the Aryan hordes came from
the north-west of Punjab and poured forth into the interior, it was the ten
Vellala kings then ruling in the north that stopped their advance."
Maraimalai Atikal goes on to claim that the eighteen Tamil castes were
created by the Vellalas for their service; that they (the Vellalas) were
vegetarians fo the highest moral codes;that Saivism and the Saiva Siddhantha
philosophy nurtured by the Vellalas for more than 3,500 years were the pre-Aryan
religious heritage of the Tamils; that the classification of Vellalas as Sudras
was the result of an insidious Aryan-Brahmin conspiracy. Maraimalai Atikal was
also defending fellow Vellala Dravidian scholars and their claims against
attacks and veiled criticisms of Brahmin Tamil academics, M.Srinivasa Aiyangar,
a respected Brahmin Tamil scholar who had worked as an assistant to the
superintendent of census for the Madras Presidency.
Mr.Stuart, had made a devastating attacking on the claims of the Dravidian
school of Tamil historiography, which derived its authority from the
‘scientific’ philological works of Bishop Caldwell. He debunked the theory of
the Caldwell-Vellala school that Tamil culture was constituted by the high moral
virtues of an ancient race of peaceful cultivators, on the basis of what he had
studied of the religion and culture of the Tamil country-side, as an officer of
the census, and on the basis of ‘pure’ Tamil works that had been rediscovered
towards the latter part of the 19th century.
Maraimalai
Atikal
Srinivasa Aiyangar noted in his ‘Tamil Studies’, "Within the last
fifteen years a new school of Tamil scholars has come into being, consisting
mainly of admirers and castemen of the late lamented professorand antiquary,
Mr.Sunderam Pillai of Trivandrum." Aiyangar argued that contrary to the claims
of the new school, the Tamils were a fierce race of martial predators. He
wrote,
"Again some of the Tamil districts abound with peculiar tomb stones called
‘Virakkals’ (hero stones). They were usually set upon graves of warriors that
were slain in battle…The names of the deceased soldiers and their exploits are
found inscribed on the stones which were decorated with garlands of peacock
feathers or some kind of red flowers. Usually small canopies were put up over
them. We give below a specimen of such an epitaph. A careful study of
thePurapporul Venba Malai will doubtless convince the reader that the
ancient Tamils were, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, a ferocious race
of hunters and soldiers armed with bows and lances making war for the mere
pleasure of slaying, ravaging and pillaging. Like them the Tamils believed
in evil spirits, astrology, omens and sorcery. They cared little for death. The
following quotations from the above work will bear testimony to the
characteristics of that virile race. (1) Garlanded with the entrails of the
enemies they danced with lances held in their hands topside down. (2) They set
fire to the fertile villages of their enemies, and (3) plundered their country
and demolished their houses. (4) The devil’s cook distributed the food boiled
with the flesh of the slain, on the hearth of the crowned heads of fallen kings.
With these compare same passages from the Assyrian stories of campaigns: ‘I had
some of them flapped in my presence and had the walls hung with their skins. I
arranged their heads like crown…All his villages I destroyed, desolated, burnt;
I made the country desert.’ And yet the early Dravidian are considered by
Dr.Caldwell as the farmers of the best moral codes, and by the new school of
non-Aryan Tamil scholars…"
Aiyangar even claims, "We have said that the Vellalas were pure Dravidians
and that they were a military and dominant tribe. If so one could naturally ask,
‘How could the ancestors of peaceful cultivators be a war-like race?" He argues
that the etymology of the root Vel is connected to war and weapons, that
it was not uncommon for cultivating castes to have been martial tribes in former
days as in the case of the Nayar, the Pillai, the Bants, etc. He also cites an
official census of the Tamil population in the Madras Presidency, which shows
that Tamil castes with a claim to traditional marital status constituted twenty
six percent of the total number of Tamils in the Presidency. (Srinivasa
Aiyangar; 1915, pp.40-58)
Kasi
Anandan, 1970s
Aiyangar’s attack on the Dravidian theory of Caldwell and the Vellala
propagandists had political undertones. Learned Brahmins of the day were acutely
aware of the political interests that lay behind the claims of the early
Dravidian school. Vellala Tamil revivalism and its idea of Dravidian uniqueness
were closely related to the pro-British and collaborationist poltical
organization that was formed in 1916, by the non-Brahmin elites of the Madras
Presidency – the South Indian Liberal Federation. Its proponents were, therefore
careful not to emphasise the narratives of the martial reputation of the Tamils
that were embodied in the ancient ‘high’ Tamil texts or in the folk culture of
rural Tamilnadu. (Tamil revivalism had been promoted by Protestant missionaries
and British officials in the latter half of the 19th century, only in
as much as it was seen to facilitate the social, economic and religious aims of
demilitarizing Tamil society and diminishing the influence of Brahmins in
it.)
This was done not only out of a desire to promote Vellala caste culture, as
Tamil national culture, but also in conscious deference to the concerns of the
Raj about the ‘seditious’ views of Tamil cultural revival that were being
propagated by the ‘terrorists’ and their sympathisers which were aimed at
stirring the "ancient martial passions" of the Tamils in general and the
military castes in particular, by appealing to martial values inscribed in the
caste traditions of the Maravar and linking them to a glorious past that had
been sustained by, what according to them, was the unique and powerful Tamil
martial tradition. The political life of Purananooru, the foundation text
of Tamil militarism had been initiated by two Brahmins who were sympathisers of
the Indian revolutionary movement at this juncture. (The one was the great Tamil
poet Subramanya Bharathi; the other was the great Tamil scholar M.Raghava
Aiyangar, the court pundit of the Marava kings of Ramnad.)
These concerns, had compelled the Raj to take lines of action aimed at the
terrorists and the military castes. One, it carefully sifted through the Tamil
revivalist propaganda of the suspected sympathisers of the terrorist movement,
to charge them with sedition. Two, it introduced the Criminal Tribes Act of
1911, with the express objective of throughly obtaining knowledge of,
supervising and disciplining the Kallar and Maravar who were classified as
dacoits and thugs under this act. The political mobilization of the Tamil
military castes began as reaction against this act. The political leadership of
this mobilization was inspired by the militarism of the terrorists. Modern Tamil
militarism as a political force emerged from this conjuncture.
As we shall see later, Karunanidhi, Thondaman, Kasi Anandan and Prabhakaran
are all, in varying degrees, products of the notions of Tamilian identity which
arose from this conjuncture. Students of Tamil ethno-nationalism’s current phase
will find that the martial narratives of Tamilian past and present are at work
in two extremes of the Tamil political spectrum. Last month, an audio cassette
was released in Jaffna by the LTTE and a commemoration volume was released in
Singapore in Thondaman’s honour. Both are politically conscious efforts to root
two personalities and their nationalist projects, to what has been portrayed as
the most powerful manifestation of the Tamil martial tradition – the Chola
Empire.
The LTTE cassette evokes a glorious past associated with Prabhakaran’s only
nom de guerre, Karikalan – the founder of the Chola Empire. The commemoration
volume, on the other hand seeks to emphasise the ‘continuity’ of a martial caste
tradition between the leader of the CWC and the great general of the Chola
Empire, Karunakara Thondaman. Thus the examination of Tamil militarism in this
study is an exploration of the answer to the question – why does Tamil
ethno-nationalism express itself thus and how does it sustain power to appeal to
pan-Tamilian sentiments?
*****
Letter of Correspondent R.B.Diulweva [Dehiwela] and Sivaram’s
response:
Martial Tamils
[Lanka Guardian, September 1, 1992, p.24]
I read with wry amusement, and increasing bewilderment, Sivaram’s curious
assemblage of ‘facts’ about Tamil ‘military’ castes. The recluse in the Vanni,
and his acolytes in the diaspora, should be grateful to the L[anka] G[uardian]
for providing a platform for this skewed rewriting of history.
Some random reflections on Sivaram’s thesis. Does he seriously believe that
the buccaneering Portuguese had the time to indulge in sociological analysis of
Tamil militarism (a la CIA) and strategically decide to erase/Vellalise
the ‘military’ castes? This also applies to the Dutch and the Brits. Sivaram’s
overall picture is of a truly fantastic war sodden people imbibing blood
thirstiness with their mothers’ milk. Weren’t the vast mass of Tamils peaceable
farmers, fishermen, craftmen? Or was their sole function to service these
magnificent bravos? And whom did these ‘military’ castes fight during the eras
of peace when Tamil civilization, in its truest sense, flourished?
Another fact for Sivaram. One of his ‘military’ castes the Maravar has made a
contribution to the Sinhala language. To this day, a ‘marava-raya’ is synonymous
with ‘thug’. This is, probably, all that these ‘warriors’ were!.
D.P.Sivaram states:
I suggest that Mr.Diulweva go on reading before he finally decides whether it
is skewed history or not. He should also study Prof.K.Kailasapathy’s Tamil
Heroic Poetry, which describes an earlier phase of the culture that I have
tried to analyse. He might find the overall picture there even more
gruesome.
I understand Mr.Diulweva’s concerns given the current situation of the
country, and hence his wish to think that the vast mass of Tamils were peaceable
farmers. His wish and concern have had precedents in the British era. As for the
sociological analysis of the buccaneering Portuguese, it was based on
Prof.Tikiri Abeyasinghe’s ‘Jaffna under the Portuguese’ (discussed there
in detail). I deal with the Maravar in as much as they were a political fact in
the rise of Tamil nationalism. A write up in the Sunday Times of
23.8[Aug].[19]92 by its Madras correspondent refers to the political influence
of one Mr.Natarajan who he says "belongs to the powerful Thevar (the caste title
of the Maravar) community in southern Tamilnadu." Mr.Diulweva will find, if he
takes a closer look at the politics of Tamilnadu, still an important political
fact.
*****
References
(1) Recruitment handbooks of the Indian Army series. Madras Classes,
by Lieut-Col.G.E.D.Mouat, revised by Capt.G.Kennedy Cassels, New Delhi: Govt.of
India Press, 1938.
(2) I have used a Tamil translation of Sargant’s book. The Dispersion of
the Tamil Church, N.C.Sargant, 1940; translated into Tamil by
Rev.C.L.Vethakkan, 1964.
(3) Madras Infantry 1748-1943, Lt.Col.Edward Gwynee Phythiam Adams, Govt.
Press, Madras, 1943.
(4) An interesting study of the military labour market in north India has
been done recently by Ditk.H.Kloff-Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory
of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan 1450-1850, Cambridge University
Press, New York, 1990.
(5) History of the Madras Army, Lt.Col.W.J.Wilson, Madras Govt. Press,
5 vols., 1882-89.
###
On
Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D.P.Sivaram written in 1992
Part
10: Warrior Sons and Mothers
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, November 1, 1992, pp.17-18 and 20; prepared
by Sachi Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
The Madurai Thamil
Sangam was established by Pandithurai Thevar in 1901 with the assistance of his
cousin Bhaskara Sethupathy, who was the Raja of Ramnad at that time. The
institution and its journal – the Senthamil – played an important role in
what could be termed the Tamil renaissance in the first two decades of the
twentieth century among the Tamils of south India and Sri Lanka. Its
importance also lies in the fact that it created a class of Tamil pundits
through a well organized and prestigious system of examinations at a time when
strong objections were being raised against creating a Chair for Tamil, in the
University of Madras.
Pandithurai Thevar
The pundits qualified by the
Madurai Thamil Sangam in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka have also been instrumental in
shaping the vocabulary of Tamil identity when Tamil nationalism began to
constitute itself as a political force on both sides of the Palk Straits. The
Sangam was conceived as a nationalist project by Pandithurai Thevar who
announced and took up the task of its formation at the Madras sessions of the
Congress in 1901. Thevar upheld the view that "the love for one’s language is
the basis of patriotism and the love for one’s religion." (Speech made at
Tuticorin, quoted in P.S.Mani, p.39). Thevar’s desire to establish the
Sangam was also linked to the traditional role of the Maravar and Kallar kings
and chieftains of Tamil Nadu as the patrons of Tamil poets and pundits, despite
the powerful inroads made by Sanskrit over the
centuries.
Most of the Tamil texts that impelled twentieth century renaissance were
unearthed from collections of manuscripts preserved by families of traditional
Tamil poets and scholars who had been patronised by Tamil poligars and kings.
Thevar appointed R. Raghava Aiyangar who was the court pundit of the
Sethupathys, as editor of the Sangam’s journal ‘Senthamil’ in 1901. His
cousin, M.Raghava Aiyangar succeeded him as editor in 1904 and served for eight
years. M.Raghava Aiyangar and his cousin belonged to a family of Vaishnavite
Brahmins who had attached themselves to the Maravar kings of Ramnad from the
eighteenth century. The family produced many Tamil and Sanskrit scholars who
were court pundits and ministers to the Sethupathys and the nobles of their
clan. M.Raghava Aiyangar’s father was a renowned Tamil scholar in the court of
Ponnuchami Thevar, the brother of the Ramnad king Muthuramalinga Sethupathy
(1862-1873). Ponnuchamy Thevar was Arumuga Navalar’s patron in Tamil Nadu.
Aiyangar’s father died when he was young and was looked after by Ponnuchami
Thevar’s son Pandithurai Thevar.
Thus, Aiyangar’s life was bound with that of the Sethupathy clan of Marava
rulers. Later in his life, he wrote a book in appreciation of Thevar and his
father called,Senthamil Valartha Thevarhal (The Thevars who nurtured Sen
Thamil). Aiyangar dedicated two of his most popular books to Bhaskara Sethupathy
and Pandithurai Thevar. His involvement with the Indian nationalist movement was
therefore closely related to the interests and perceptions of Thevar who was
bestirred by the ideas of the revolutionaries and the Swadeshi movement. The
Sethupathys had been resentful of the fact that they were coerced by the British
to hand over the vast and profitable trade with Ceylon and Bengal. Thevar
therefore was attracted by the Swadeshi movement’s campaign to rejuvenate local
industry and commerce to undermine the hold of British capital on India. The
revolutionaries were calling for the revival of the disfranchised kshatriya
classes of India. The Senthamil incorporated these sentiments and ideas
into its projects for Tamil renaissance.
Thevar formed the Swadeshi Steam
Navigation Company with V.O.Chidamparam Pillai in 1907, to break the British
monopoly on the profitable Colombo-Tuticorin steamer service. Chidamparam Pillai
was closely associated with members of the revolutionary movement in Tamil Nadu
at that time. The company resolved in one of its articles of incorporation that
it would contribute one percent of its monthly earnings to the Madurai Thamil
Sangam, as long as it existed (Annual Report of the
Sangam, 1907, pp.7-8). Aiyangar also
contributed to the nationalist cause by buying a Rs.100 share in the company.
The main financial assistance to the Sangam at this juncture came from Thondaman
– the Kallar caste king of Pudukottai, who was its permanent patron, the
Zamindar of Singam Patty (Maravar) and a Kallar caste leader called Gopalsamy
Rajaliar, who had succeeded in a campaign with Thevar’s assistance to alter his
caste name from the derogatory Kallan to a more respectable
form Kallar (Annual Report of Sangam, 1907). The
Dravidian school of Tamil studies on the other hand was keen to show its loyalty
to the Raj and represented Vellala caste interests.
It was in this context that M.Raghava Aiyangar’s Tamil nationalist project
took shape. He conceived of a martial heritage that was unique to the Tamil
country constituted by the Chera, Chola and Pandya kingdoms in South India, and
was - according to him - far superior to the military powers of north Indian
peoples. He, an erudite Tamil scholar, skillfully melded his politics into a
compelling representation of a heroic Tamil past.
The politicisation of Aiyangar’s reading of the Tamil past begins with the
event that kindled the revolutionary movement in 1905 – the victory of Japan
over Russia. Japan’s example was proof that India’s traditional material values
could prevail over British arms. The victory was hailed by those who subscribed
to the ideas of Thilak’s militarism. Aiyangar wrote Parani poems (a form
of Tamil heroic poetry to celebrate the victory of a warrior who slays 1,000
elephants in the battle) exalting Japan’s military might in the Sangam’s journal
‘Senthamil’. In 1907, when the activities of the revolutionary movement
and the Swadeshi movement were gathering momentum, he wrote an editorial essay
on ‘Warrior Mothers’ (Veerath Thaimar). The ideological agenda for what
has been described as the ‘Mother politics’ of militant Tamil nationalism was
set forth in this essay. He wrote,
"Although there may be other reasons for the victory of the Japanese over the
Russians, more numerous and belonging to a larger country, the main reason is
the martial training given [to] them by their parents from childhood…the valour
and patriotisms of Japanese mothers can be seen in the volumes called ‘The
Russo-Japanese War’. These things may appear strange in our times but if we
examine our history we will find such warrior mothers and their valorous
children numerous…In ancient Tamil texts like Purananooru, the martial
theme predominates. It should be noted how the mothers of that era created great
warriors."
The essay is based on heroic poetry of
the Moothinmullai category found in the Purananooru and
the Purath-thirattu. Moothinmullai is a category in the poetics of
codified Tamil martial culture in which the culmination [of] a woman’s
motherhood is portrayed as the heroic martyrdom of her warrior son in battle.
The mothers urge their sons to die valiantly in war. Aiyangar contrasts
a Moothinmullai poem in which the warrior’s mother says her womb is the
lair of the Tiger, who could be found only in battle fields, with another poem
of the category in which a mother whose son has failed to attain martyrdom in
battle, exclaims in anguish that she would cut under her womb that give birth to
a coward.
V. O. Chidamparam Pillai
Aiyangar notes that the earliest
Tamil grammar – the Tholkappiyam – defines and names the poetic theme of the
mother who comits suicide on hearing her son’s lack of valour in the battle
field. (‘These
mothers belonged to Maravar clans’, he says. The Maravar are matrilineal.) He
says that the warriors brought forth by these mothers made Tamil Nadu glorious
in the Sangam era, in which "one does not hear of north Indian kings invading
Tamil Nadu, but only the victories of Tamil kings who fought the northerners.
This was so because of the greatness of Tamil martial might." He concludes that
the decline of the Tamils was the results of the decline of what he
callsThamil Veeram (Tamil martial prowess).
Subramanya Bharathi saw immense political value in the essay for propagating
the ideas of the revolutionary movement’s militarism among the Tamils. He
serialized the essay in his paper ‘India’, and urged his readers to
popularise it among their friends, relatives and ‘women at their homes’. The
essay was used by Bharathy as an instrument for rekindling the martial ethos
among the Tamils to achieve national liberation through armed insurrection.
Bharathy and V.O.Chidamparam Pillai wrote to Aiyangar, saluting the nationalist
spirit inspired [by] his essays.
The politics of the Thamil Sangam was muted next year, when the Swadesh Steam
Navigation company was crushed following riots against the British at Tuticorin
and Tinnevely. V.O.Chidamparam Pillai and the revolutionary leader Subramaniya
Siva were arrested and imprisoned. The publisher of Bharathy’s paper
‘India’was also arrested on sedition charges. Bharathy became an exile in
the French cology of Pondicherry.
Nevertheless, Aiyangar developed the theme of a Tamil martial tradition that
was superior to the north, into one of the most persistent and characterising
narratives of militant Tamil nationalism – the Seran Senguttuvan legend of the
epic Silapathigaram. His belief that the decline of the Tamil martial
tradition caused the decline of the Tamil nation has been echoed in every Tamil
nationalist project since his time. Raghava Aiyangar lamented the decline of
martial values in Tamil society, for he saw himself essentially as a loyal
Brahmin of one of the oldest ruling Maravar clans of Tamil Nadu. His Tamil
nationalist project was rooted in that self-perception.
Notes
(1) Recent gender-oriented critique of the LTTE fails to take note of the
fact that the Moothinmullai Mother is a leitmotif in the structuring and
representation of the Tamil nationalist project. Hence in the BBC documentary on
the Tigers –Suicide Killers – the Black Tiger Miller’s mother is
presented to the TV crew as a woman who feels proud of her son’s heroic
martyrdom in the suicide attack on the Nelliady, Sri Lankan army camp in 1987.
The LTTE here is reproducing a fundamental structure of representing Tamilian
identity. C.S.Lakshmi has examined the role of the concept of the heroic mother
in the militant Dravidian movement and its strategy of mobilising women. She,
however, fails to take note of the politics of Aiyangar and Bharathy and the
impact of the Russo-Japanese war on them in the genesis of this concept.
C.S.Lakshmi; Mother, Mother-community and Mother-politics in Tamil
Nadu. Economic and Political Weekly, October 1990.
(2) [For] the role of the Sethupathys and Marava chieftains in the promotion
of Tamil literature, see Sangath Thamilum Pitkalath Thamilum,
U.V.Saminatha Aiyer, 1949, Kabir Press, Madras.
(3) Senthamil Valartha Thevarhal, M.Raghava Aiyangar; 1948,
D.G.Gopalapillai Co., Tiruchi.
(4) Aiyangar was held in great esteem by the Tamil elite of Colombo and
Jaffna. Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan invited him to lecture in Jaffna. One
V.J.Thambi Pillai translated his ‘Velir Varalaru’ and published it
in the Journal of Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon. K.Srikanthan gave an
award to his work ‘Tholkappiya Araichi’. One of the earliest modern
historians of Jaffna, A.Mootoothambi Pillai, who was a contributor to the
Sangam’s journal Senthamil reflected Aiyangar’s thesis in his Jaffna
history, when he lamented the decline of Jaffna’s martial values which according
to him had flourished under the ruler Sankili. Mootoothambi Pillai,
1912, ‘History of Jaffna’.
(5) ‘Siranjeevi’; 1981. ‘Sethupathikal Varalaaru’ (History of
Sethupathys), Jeevan Press, Madras.
*****
Previous installments of 'On Tamil Militarism' by D.
Sivaram:
On Tamil Militarism ; an 11 part essay by D. P. Sivaram written in
1992
Part 5: The suppression of Tamil military castes
by D.P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, July 15, 1992, pp.15-16; prepared by Sachi Sri
Kantha, for the electronic record]
One of the first concerns of the British as soon as they conquered the
southern parts of India was with the ancient and ingrained "habits of predatory
war" among the Tamils. The extirpation of these "habits" and culture was
considered essential to establishing their authority in Tamil society. The Tamil
region was ceded to the British in July 1801; a proclamation was issued by them
in December the same year, whereby the use of arms was suppressed and the
military service traditionally rendered by the Tamil military castes was
abolished.
It was stated in the proclamation that "wherefore the Right Honourable Edward
Lord Clive…with the view of preventing the occurrence of the fatal evils which
have attended the possession of arms by the Poligars and Servaikaras of the
southern provinces…formally announces to the Poligars, Servaikaras and
inhabitants of the southern provinces, the positive determination of His
Lordship to suppress the use and exercise of all weapons of offence" and that
the Palayams would be turned into Zamindari estates for the purpose of
preventing the Tamil military castes from engaging in their customary military
services. The British proclamation abolished the Palayam system "In the
confident expectation of redeeming the people of the southern provinces from the
habits of predatory warfare", and in the hope of inducing them to take up "the
arts of peace and agriculture".
The ban carrying weapons was
crucial to the urgent task of depriving the Tamil military castes of their
traditional status in the southern provinces. The woods and fortresses of the
turbulent Poligars were destroyed and removed from all maps and official
documents (They remained so, until the time of Karunanidhi). Lushington, one of
the first British officials to be sent to the Tamil region, had noted that the
military castes by remaining armed amidst an un-warlike population wholly
devoted to agriculture stood between the East India Company’s coffers and the
vast revenues of the land (Caldwell: 1888, chapter 9). The demilitarization of
the Tamil region did not spare even the Kallar caste which had rendered valuable
service to the British in the important wars of the Carnatic,by which they
subjugated the whole of south India.
The hereditary
chiefs of this military caste were the kings of Pudukottai – the Thondamans, who
had sided with the British against Hyder Ali and later his son, Tippu Sultan.
In many of the early wars, the British fought on behalf of the
Nawab of Arcot in south India, the Kallar had made up a sizeable portion of
their forces. But the Kallar and the other Tamil military castes had to be
disfranchised to rid Tamil society of its ancient habits and culture of
predatory warfare.
What did the British mean by the Tamil habit of predatory war? The Tamil
works which contain treatises on martial life and the conduct of war define it
as Thannuru tholil (a task undertaken on one’s own) and Mannuru tholil (a task
undertaken on behalf of the king or commander) – Tholkappiyam, Purathinaiyiyal,
[no.]60. Unlike many other martial castes of the subcontinent, the Kallar and
the Maravar were not yeoman peasants who dropped the plough for the sword only
in times of war. They had to seek battles even when their king or chieftain was
not at war. Most of the hero-stones found in Tamilnadu commemorate such battles
between groups of Kallar or Maravar.
Some of the warrior gods who are worshipped to this day in southern Tamil
Nadu are Maravar, who distinguished themselves in such battles which took place
even after the British began to abolish the culture of predatory war. The
bow-song of Eena Muthu Pandian, a Tamil demigod, describes the martial life and
heroic deeds of that Maravar warrior who lived in British times. The warrior’s
virtue was to desire the bliss of the hero’s heaven; it was degrading for him to
seek fertile lands. The Purananooru (an anthology of Tamil heroic poems) derides
the newly arisen kings for their interest in rice yielding fields (verse 287).
War was the sole occupation and aim of the Tamil warrior clans. A mother
describes the Tamil martial ethos – ‘To bring forth and rear a son is my duty;
To make him a warrior is the father’s duty’. To make spears for him, is the
blacksmith’s; to bear bright sword and do battle, to butcher enemy’s elephants
and return, that is the young man’s duty" (verse 312).
In many seventeenth and eighteenth century British reports the epithet
"fierce and turbulent" is very often used to describe the Tamil military
classes. Their ancient and deep-rooted cultural hegemony in Tamil society was
seen as a positive threat to the perpetuation of colonial rule. To eradicate it,
the British adopted a dual strategy. On the one hand they attempted to destroy
the social structures which sustained this culture; on the other, they promoted
castes which stood to gain from the suppression of the military castes. The most
important structure which gave the Kallar and Maravar immense power in the Tamil
country-side was the system of kaval. It was abolished in 1832. This has been
the traditional means by which the Kallar, Maravar and Ahampadiyar derived their
livelihood in times of peace when they were not employed as soldiers.
The manual of the Tinnevely district, described the origins of the Maravar
kavalkarars thus: "As feudal chiefs and heads of a numerous class of the
population, and one whose characteristics were eminently adapted for the
followers of a turbulent chieftain, bold active, enterprising, cunning and
capricious, this class constituted themselves or were constituted by the
peaceful cultivators, their protectors in times of bloodshed and rapine, when no
central authority existed. Hence arose the system of desha and stalum kaval, or
the guard of separate villages. The feudal chieftain (and his Kallar and
Maravar) received a contribution from the area around his fort in consideration
of protection afforded against armed invastion."
The village and district kaval system permeated many levels of rural Tamil
society and hence was hinderance to the effective implementation of new form of
administration and revenue collection. In some instances kaval was taken over
from the military castes and was handed over to the Shanar (Caldwell; 1888,
p.224) or anti-Kaval movements were encouraged among non-military castes to
coerce them to give up kaval, sell their lands and leave (Madras Presidency
Police Administration, 1896). Many efforts were taken to put a stop to the kaval
services of the Tamil military castes in the countryside in the first half of th
nineteenth century, culminating in the organization of a new police system in
1860, which recruited mostly from among castes which were considered favourable
to the British.
The Adi-Dravidas or Parayar were recruited heavily into the Indian Army. The
Nadu-Ambalakarar institution of the Kallar by which justice was traditionally
dispensed in regions dominated by them was also abolished to make way for the
penal and judiciary system introduced by the British. Deprived of their
traditional occupations of kaval and soldiering and in some instances of their
lands, a large section of the Tamil military castes became, in the eyes of the
colonial government, a delinquent mass, a danger to the rural social order. A
body of administrative and ethnographic literature arose on this perception and
on the need to portray and classify the Tamil martial castes as criminal. It
also relegated them to the margins of Tamil history and culture. The Kallar and
Maravar who had been referred to as the military tribes of the southern
provinces by early British writers were classified as criminal tribes towards
the end of the nineteenth century.
The task of disfranchising the Tamil military castes and destroying the
structures of their traditional power in Tamil society was strengthened by the
promotion of the Vellalas, Shanaras (Nadaras), Adi-Dravidas and the Nattampadis,
who constrasted favourably with the Maravar and suited the aims of revenue,
security and conversion. Among these, the Vellalas acquired the most favoured
status for the following reasons:
(A) They were, according to the 1871 Madras census report, "a peace loving,
frugal, and industrious people". They were essential to consolidating the new
revenue and the Administrative Manual (Coimbatore) noted that the Vellalas were
"truly the backbone of the district. It is they who by their industry and
frugality create and develop wealth, support the administration, and find the
money for imperial and district demands."
(B) It was
ascertained that "according to native ideas", husbandry was their only proper
means of livelihood and that they had no established traditions of kingship,
like Kallar and Maravar. The Madurai Manual noted that Aryanayaga Mudali, the
great general of the sixteenth century was dissuaded from making himself a king
on the ground that no Vellalan ought to be a king.
(C) They were found suitable for the expanding manpower needs of British
administration. They were unsurpassed as accountants and many of them were
employed as Karnams or village accountants.
(D) They were extremely conservative in their outlook. The Tanjore Manual
observed, "in religious observances, they are more strict than the generaliry of
of Brahmins; they abstain from both intoxicating liquors and meat."
It is in this milieu that the Dravidian movement took shape as the
pro-British of the de-martialized Tamil social order.
*****
On Tamil Militarism ; a 11 part essay by D. P. Sivaram written in
1992
Part 3: Tamil Militarism – The Code of Suicide
by D. P. Sivaram
[courtesy: Lanka Guardian, June 1, 1992, pp.13-15 and 24; prepared by Sachi
Sri Kantha, for the electronic record]
"You are to know that in this land of Malabar, there is another caste of
people called the Nayres who have no other duty than to serve in war, and they
always carry their arms wither so ever they go…they all live with the King and
the other great lords; nevertheless all receive stipends from the King or from
the great lords with whom they dwell. None may become a Nayre save he who is of
Nayre lineage. They will not touch anyone of low caste…The most part of these
Nayres when they are seven years of age are sent to schools where they are
taught many tricks of nimbleness and dexterity…and when they are fully
accomplished in this way they teach them to play with weapons to which they are
most inclined. All Nayres are mighty warriors."(1)
observes Duarte Barbosa in his account of the Zamorin’s domain (a division of
the old Chera kingdom) – one of the earliest records made by the Portuguese
within a few years of their entry into the Indian Ocean. The feudal military
system described by Barbosa was common to those parts of South India known to
the Portuguese as Malabar.
In its southern and south eastern parts the military castes were known as
Maravar, Kallar and Ahampadiyar; of these the Kallar and Maravar had kingship
traditions. This feudal military system was found in Jaffna as well when the
Portuguese arrived. The Palk Strait was known to them as the Marava
Bay.
The Tamil country was divided into a number of feudal domains, called
Palayams, which literally means ‘military camps’ (2), the chief of which was the
Palayakarar – the commander of the camp. Most of the Tamil Palayakarar were
Maravar. Each maintained a body of Kallar, Maravar and Ahampadiyar warriors who
"served on the battle field and in times of peace engaged in hunting and
training in the military arts, nourishing a rugged and practical character", and
serving as village guards (kaval) for a contribution (3). In Jaffna "the Maravar
had to learn the art of war from the age of sixteen till they were twenty four
years of age; then they had to become village kaval-karar, live on land given by
the King and return to military service whenever the king required them to do
so."(4)
The military system of the Tamil country was yet a dream in eighteenth
century Europe; its armies were in the process of developing methods and
regulations which "got rid of the peasant" in the new recruit and "gave him the
air of a soldier." J.Servan, an 18th century French military theoretician wrote
a treatise on the ‘soldier citizen’ (1780). He "dreamt of a military machine
that would cover the whole territory of the nation and in which each individual
would be occupied without interruption, but in a different way according to the
evolutive segment, the genetic sequence in which he finds himself. Military life
would begin in childhood, when young children would be taught the profession of
arms in military manors; it would end in these same manors when the veterans
right up to their last day would teach the children, exercise the recruits,
preside over the soldier’s exercises…and finally make order resign in the
country, when troops were fighting at the frontiers."(9)
The ideal Palayam was Servan’s military machine; the Kallar, Maravar,
Ahampadiyar and Nayar were its ‘oldest citizen’. The Palayam was sustained by a
codified martial culture. As we shall see later the practice of martial suicide
was most prevalent in the Kongu region of Tamil Nadu, which had a very large
number of Palayams.
Early Europeans who studied the military system of the Tamil country were
inclined to read therein, some of the ideals embodied in the celebrated
regulations of the Prussian infantry that the whole of Europe imitated after the
victories of Frederick II. The 18th century British military historian Robert
Orme’s description of the military castes of the Tamil country is typical. He
says,
"They are tall, well made and well featured. Their arms are lances and pikes,
bows and arrows, rockets and matchlocks, but whether with or without other
weapons every man constantly wears a sword and shield. In battle the different
arms move in distinct bodies, but the lancemen are rated the most eminent, and
lead all attacks. This weapon is eighteen feet long. They tie under the point a
tuft of scarlet horse hair, and when they attack horse, add a small bell.
Without previous exercise, they assemble in a deep column, pressing close
together and advance at a long steady step, in some degree of time, their lances
inclining forward but aloft, of which the elasticity and vibration, with the
jingle and dazzle scare, the cavalry; and their approach is scarcely less
formidable to infantry not disciplined with firearms."(6)
The boomerang - or Valai Thadi in Tamil – was another weapon that "played a
considerable part in the Poligar (Palayakarar) ars". The Kallan and Maravan
warriors plied it with deadly effect and "could at one stroke dispatch small
game and even man."(7). Like the Japanese Bakuhan system, the Palayam system was
based on a feudal class structure of warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants
where the distinctions between the caste statuses of the constitutent classes
were strictly enforced. To symbolize this society, the Tamil warriors, like the
Japanese samurai, wore swords in everyday life because the system was maintained
by their military power.
Mr. Lushington who was sent as Collector to Palayakarar (Poligar) country in
1799, desirous of wresting control of the vast revenues of the land, described
the Palayam (Pollam) system of Tamil feudal militarism as extremely evil. "When
this contribution (Kaval dues) is not quietly submitted to, torture and the whip
are applied, the whole people of the village put into confinement, every
occupation interdicted, the cattle pounded, the inhabitants taken captive to,
and not unfrequently murdered in, the Pollams…and such is the dread which they
have inspired into the cultivators of the circar lands by remaining armed in the
midst of a country otherwise in profound peace, that these requisitions are
never resisted."(7)
A fierce and ancient martial culture and religion was nurtured by the
military castes. As in the other martial regions of India, traditional
militarism permeated several levels of society. Therefore, despite the great
temple centres, the heroes and godlings of Tamil martial culture were worshipped
widely throughout rural Tamilnadu. In Japan, the Samurai nurtured the values of
kyuba-no-michi (the way of the bow and horse). In the Tamil country, Maram was
the martial ethos of the warrior castes. There are three characteristics of
Tamil feudal militarism which set it apart from other pre-modern military
cultures. They are,
(a) the detailed codification of the modes of war, the warriors’ martial life
and rituals etc.; known as Purath thinai.
(b) the rejection of divine participation and perfidy sanctioned by religion
in the conduct of war. The great medieval Tamil commentator Naccinarkiniyar says
that norms which sanction "killing through perfidy and by virtue of divine
powers given by gods" are to be disregarded and that modes of war involving gods
are to be rejected and refuted as modes not belonging to the Tamil speaking good
world."(8)
(c) the classification of war with flowers; and a practice of wearing a
particular flower when engaging in the mode of war, denoted by that flower. The
author of Ramayana had noted that, "the southerners wore flowers for
war."
Codified Tamil feudal militarism was nurtured and transmitted as the Purath
thinai division of high Tamil Senthamizh poetics and grammar. Tolkappiyam, the
earliest Tamil grammar, the Buddhist grammatical treatise Veerasoliyam, the
saivite Ilakkana Villakam (17th century) and Swaminatham, written in early part
of the last [i.e., 19th] century are works which contain treatises in which
Tamil martial culture is codified and annotated. The perfecton and codification
of Tamil martial culture through the ages was paralelled by the thematization of
several narratives of military gloty in Tamil culture through epics,
inscriptions, minor forms of poetry etc.
An observation is made in the British Indian army’s recruitment handbook on
the Sikhs that, "all sikh traditions whether national or religious are martial;
in times of political excitement the martial spirit reasserts itself."(9) The
culture and class interests of Japanese feudal militarism which survived the
Meiji restoration partly impelled and characterized Japan’s militarist
nationalism and its growth as a modern military power. Similarly it can be said
that the culture and structures of codified ‘high Tamil’ and folk forms of Tamil
feudal militarism partly impelled and characterized Tamil nationalism when it
became militant. Therefore two aspects of Tamil feudal militarism which has been
reasserted in Tamil revivalism and militarism will be briefly examined here.
They are,
(a) narratives of Tamil military might, thematized in Tamil culture. The most
important of these can be reduced to the basic form – Tamil King defeats the
Aryans of north India and causes his emblem to be carved on the Himalayas. The
Pandyan king Neduncheliyan bore the title ‘He who overran the Aryan army’. All
three Tamil dynasties – Chera, Chola and Pandya – are distinguished by this feat
in a wide range of texts and inscriptions. These narratives, like the kamikaze –
divine wind – legend of Japan’s war with Mongols, have played an important role
in the growth of Tamil nationalism.
(b) Codified practices of Tamil martial life.
1. Moothinmullai: the duty of the warrior mother to inculcate the martial
ethos and to urge her sons to attain martyrdom in heroic battle. The concept of
the warrior mother’s duty was central to the genesis of Tamil militarism and
later in militant Tamil nationalism. It is a salient theme in LTTE’s current
literature as well.
2. Avippali, Thannai, Verttal, Vallan pakkam, Pun Kilithu Mudiyum Maram and
Marakkanchi: the forms of martial suicide and suicidal battle of the warrior as
the ultimate expression of his loyalty to his commander. These six forms of
martial suicide are defined as described by the works referred to
above.
Pulla Vazhkai Vallan Pakkam – the martial attitude of the warrior who goes
forth into suicidal battle is mentioned by Tholkappiyam. The other works refer
to it as Thannai Verttal. Duarte Barbosa describes the practice among the Nayar
(of the Chera kingdom). It was later
noticed by British officials as well. It was also prevalent among the Maravar
(of the Pandya kingdom) from whom the suicidal Aapathuthavi bodyguard was
selected. Thannai Verttal also refers to the suicide of a warrior on hearing
that his king or commander has died (Purapporul Venpa Malai). Punkilithu Mudiym
Maramis the martial act of a warrior who commits suicide by tearing apart his
battle wound.
Another form of martial suicide mentioned by all the works except Veera
soliyam, is Avippali. Tamil inscriptions speak of it as Navakandam. Inscriptions
found in many parts of Tamilnadu provide greater information on the practice.
Navakandam is the act of a warrior who slices his own neck to fulfil the vow
made to korravai – the Tamil goddess of war – for his commanders’ victory in
battle. The Kalingathu Parani(10) – a work which celebrates the victory of the
Chola king Kulotunga and his general Thondaman in the battle for Kalinga,
describes the practice in detail. "The temple of korravai is decorated with
lotus flowers which bloomed when the warriors sliced their own necks"(106);
"they slice the base of their necks; the severed heads are given to the
goddess"(111); "when the neck is sliced and the head is severed, the headless
body jumps with joy for having fulfilled the vow"(113).
The epics of Chilapadikaram (5: 79-86) and Manimekalai (6: 50-51) mention the
practice. To ensure the complete severing of the head, the warrior tied his hair
to a bamboo bent taut before he cut his neck. Hero stones depicting this
practice are found all over Tamil Nadu, and are called Saavan Kallu by locals.
The warriors who thus committed suicide were not only deified in hero stones
(saavan kallu) and worshipped but their relatives were given lands which were
exempted from tax(11).
An area handbook (Tharamangalam) of the Tamilnadu archeology department notes
that "the Nava Kandam sculpture which is found widely all over Kongu Nadu
(Coimbatore, Salem) is to be seen at the Tharamangalam Kailasanathar kovil also.
The people call it Saavan Kallu. "The practice of Nava Kandam existed in Kongu
Nadu till the early part of this [i.e., 20th] century."(12)
A Saavan Kallu at Thenkarai Moolanatha sami Kovil in Madurai, depicting the
act of a warrior holding his hair with his left hand and slicing his neck with
his right – 14th century – is said to be annually worshipped by the Conjeevaram
Mudaliyars.(13) The Conjeevaram Mudaliyars are Kaikolar, a weaving caste which
was militarized under the Chola empire and was made into a special military
body; there are indications that Kaikolar warriors practiced Nava Kandam(14).
The founder of the DMK, C.N.Annadurai was a Conjeevaram mudaliyar, of the
kaikolar caste.
Apart from these codified forms of martial suicide, a method called
Vadakkiruththal is mentioned in Tamil heroic poetry. It is the act of a warrior
king fasting to death, if some dire dishonour were to come upon him(15). The
Tamil teacher, and the Dravidian propagandist, turned the song of the legendary
Chera king Irumborai who committed suicide when he was taken captive by his
enemies into a compelling theme in Tamil renaissance.
The Avippali form of martial suicide as the ultimate expression of loyalty to
one’s commander, is deeply embedded in the Tamil psyche.
Senchorru-kadan (the debt of red rice) is a phrase that is widely used today by
Tamils as an expression of loyalty. One frequently hears of it in a popular
Tamil song. The phrase sands for the ritual of partaking of rice by which
Maravar and other Tamil military caste warriors bound themselves to their king
or commander to die in suicidal battle for him, or to commit suicide on the day
he was slain. Of Avippali, the Puraporul Venba Malai ([verse] 92) says,
"thinking of nothing but the red (blood) rice the Maravar give their life as
offering in battle."
The ritual of red or
blood rice was described by two Muslim travellers who had visited the Tamil
country in the 9th century. "A quantity of cooked rice was spread before the
king, and some three or four hundred persons came of their own accord and
received each a small quantity of rice from the king’s own hands, after
he himself had eaten some. By eating of this rice, they all engage themselves to
burn themselves on the day the king dies or is slain; and they punctually
fulfill their promise."(16) In modern times it has been observed that "when a
Maravar takes food in the house of a stranger, he will take a pinch of earth and
put it on the food before he commences his meal."(17) This act freed him from
the debt of blood rice.
Foot Notes
(1) The Book of Duarte Barbosa, 1518; first published 1812 English
translation by Mansel Longworth Dames, 1921 Hakluyt Society, 1866; reproduced by
Asian Educational Services, New Delhi, 1989, vol.II, pp.38-40.
(2) R.P.Sethupillai, 1946: Thamilaham- Oorum Perum, Palaniyappa Bros, Madras,
p.76.
(3) Robert Caldwell, 1881: History of Tinnevely, reproduced by Asian
Educational Services, New Delhi, 1989, p.104.
(4) A. Mootootamby Pillai, 1912: Jaffna History, Navalar Press, Jaffna,
p.104.
(5) Michel Foucault, 1991: Discipline and Punish, Penguin Books, translation
Alan Sheridan, pp.135, 165.
(6) Quoted in R.Caldwell, op.cit. p.103.
(7) Thurston, op.cit. vol.III, p.71.
(8) Tholkappiyam Porulathikaram, Naccinarkiniyar’s commentary on verse No.68
& 90.
(9) Maj.A.E.Barstow, 1928: Sikhs, Handbook for the Indian Army, Calcutta
Central Publications Branch, p.40.
(10) Parani – "A poem about a hero who destroyed 1000 elephants in war",
Tamil Lexicon, vol.IV.
(11) South Indian Inscriptions, 1943: Madras, vol.XII, no.106.
(12) R.Poonkunran, 1979: Tharamangalam, publication No.58. Tamilnadu Dept.of
Archaeology, no pagination. "Kongunadu was well known for its palayams",
R.P.Sethupillai, op.cit, p.76.
(13) M.Chandramoorthy: ‘Kalvettu’ Quarterly of the Tamilnadu Dept.of
Archaeology, no.8, January 1975, pp.21-22.
(14) South Indian Inscriptions 1967; vol.XIX, no.3.
(15) Purananooru; [verse] 212-223. Kopperun-Cholan who thus committed suicide
was apotheosized. K.P.Aravanan examines this practice in relation to the
‘Sallehana’ form of fasting unto death among Jain saints: The Other side of
Tamils, 1989; Paari Nilayam, Madras. Cheraman Peruncheralathan committed suicide
thus when he accidentally received a wound on his back in battle which was
considered a great dishonour to a warrior (Purananooru: [verse] 65).
(16) Thurston, op.cit., vol.V, p.287.
(17) Thurston, op.cit., vol.V, p.32.
Note: Swaminatham was first published in full in 1975, by S.V.Shanmugam,
Annamalai University, based on a manuscript found in the British Museum library.
It refers to Avippali as Poar Avikkoduthal, verse 141, p.233.
###
Posted May 7, 2005
© 1996-2014 Ilankai Tamil Sangam, USA, Inc.
Letter of Correspondent M.Raja Joganantham[Colombo 6]:
Militarism and Caste
[Lanka Guardian, July 15, 1992, p.16]
With the reference to the above article in Lanka Guardian (1 July) 1992. In
the article [by] the writer Mr. D.P.Sivaram, some facts are incorrectly stated.
The statement a strong narrative is found in Myliddy is correct. The names of
the chieftains are Veera Maniccathevan, Periya Nadduthevan &
Narasinhathevan. The statement that the Marava chieftains and their castemen
married among Karaiyar of the village is also correct. But the statement about
Thuraiyar and Panivar is incorrect.
The clans known as Thuraiyar and Panivar in this village are the descendants
of the ancient families of Myliddy. The martial arts of Marava are popular
among these two clans, though the Thuraiyar is considered as superior.
Thuraiyar as well as Panivar were connected by marriage to Ramnad, the home
country of the Maravar, for which evidence is available.
I am one of the descendants of the ancient family of the village, and the
writer of an article titled as, ‘Ancient Villages in Jaffna’, which appeared in
Eelanadu on 13.07[July] 1986.
*****
###
Posted May 18, 2005
© 1996-2014 Ilankai Tamil Sangam, USA, Inc.
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