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On Tamil Militarism - a 11 Part
Essay
Part 8: The Twin Narratives of Tamil Nationalism
Lanka Guardian, [pp.pp.10-12]
[prepared by
Sachi Sri Kantha, for electronic record]
1 September 1992
 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.
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).
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Professor Sunderam Pillai, 1855 - 1897 |
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.
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.
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V.Kanakasabhai Pillai
1855 - 1906 |
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, lordsof 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.
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.
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)
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.
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