ABSTRACT
In the 1920s, the Tamil scholar and Dravidian ideologue Maraimalai Adigal1 wrote a series of articles and short monographs on Tamil culture and “Velala” culture. Those were contentious times, when a new articulation of a Tamil, specifi cally anti-brahminical Dravidian identity had already emerged within the context of colonialism. There were several reasons for its emergence: British trade and colonial practices had brought economic opportunities and improved material prospects to the lives of many nonbrahmin and subaltern communities; political debates, aided by the gradual spread of print culture, was conducted in a language of rights and liberalism; and these developments contributed to the formation of religious or caste associations which challenged or at least resisted existent power structures.2 Particularly important in this context were the cultural and political tensions which had begun to emerge in the urban milieu of Madras between elite groups of brahmins and non-brahmins. The preponderance of brahmins in the civil administration of the Madras Presidency under the employment of the British was complemented by their successful and increasing acculturation to British manners, modes, and language. This, in turn, was refl ected culturally in a new-found pride in an “Aryan” and Sanskritic past, an enthusiasm supported both by recent Orientalist scholarship as well as organizations like the Theosophical Society and its publications. These political and cultural developments, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, came to be strongly challenged by a non-brahmin elite through a re-articulation of what constituted authentic Tamil, “Dravidian” identity and religion. This identity and religion was increasingly located in the realm of the “non-brahmin,” itself a newly constituted meta-category subsuming within it the heterogeneous caste-structure of those other than brahmins in Tamil society. The re-imagining of history played a vital role in this new articulation, and long-dominant or newly constituted elite histories and historiography were strongly contested, not just with the “hard” evidence of literature, inscriptions, and archaeology but through a “soft” and imaginative reclaiming of lost homelands of power, lost seemingly irredeemably from the perspective of the distressing present.3 Maraimalai Adigal’s short monograph Velala Civilization (Velala Nakarikam), standing
for the Dravidian side of the debate, is characteristic of the blending of both hard and soft historiographical practices.
