Cover of Tamil Brahmans
Tamil Brahmans The Making of a Middle-Class Caste
by C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-15260-8 | Paper: 978-0-226-15274-5 | Electronic: 978-0-226-15288-2
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

A cruise along the streets of Chennai—or Silicon Valley—filled with professional young Indian men and women, reveals the new face of India. In the twenty-first century, Indians have acquired a new kind of global visibility, one of rapid economic advancement and, in the information technology industry, spectacular prowess. In this book, C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan examine one particularly striking group who have taken part in this development: Tamil Brahmans—a formerly traditional, rural, high-caste elite who have transformed themselves into a new middle-class caste in India, the United States, and elsewhere.

Fuller and Narasimhan offer one of the most comprehensive looks at Tamil Brahmans around the world to date. They examine Brahman migration from rural to urban areas, more recent transnational migration, and how the Brahman way of life has translated to both Indian cities and American suburbs. They look at modern education and the new employment opportunities afforded by engineering and IT. They examine how Sanskritic Hinduism and traditional music and dance have shaped Tamil Brahmans’ particular middle-class sensibilities and how middle-class status is related to the changing position of women. Above all, they explore the complex relationship between class and caste systems and the ways in which hierarchy has persisted in modernized India. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

C. J. Fuller is emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of several books, including The Camphor Flame and The Renewal of the Priesthood. Haripriya Narasimhan is assistant professor of social anthropology and sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad.  

REVIEWS

“Tamil Brahmans is a solid, original work that makes a major contribution to our understanding of a vitally important part of the world and of a unique group of people whose numbers in the United States are growing year by year and who are becoming increasingly influential at the highest professional levels in medicine, law, academia, business, and government.”
— Sylvia J. Vatuk, University of Illinois at Chicago

“For decades to come, if someone wants to understand the history and sociology of how and with what social effects the Tamil Brahmans have transformed themselves into a middle-class caste, they will read this book. Quite simply there is nothing comparable. Through comparisons with other Brahman communities throughout India, the authors show that the community-wide uniformity of Tamil Brahman achievement makes them truly unique.”
— Mattison Mines, University of California, Santa Barbara

“This historical analysis of ‘TamBrams,’ written by a unique combination of sociologists, both insider and outsider, provides essential fleshing out of our sociological understanding of caste and class, which has tended to concentrate on the lower end of the caste spectrum. It shows how it is not merely the lower castes who invoke their ‘caste identity’ in contrast to the castelessness and ‘merit’ of the middle classes, but that caste has been critical to the formation and professional success of an urban, ‘modern’ middle class like the Tamil Brahmans. This book is an indispensible read not just for all those who wish to understand caste formation, mobility, and change over the past two centuries, but also for Tamil Brahmans themselves. It will help them rethink the notion that their professional achievements are somehow exceptional and biologically rooted in their caste and see them instead as a product of the opportunities provided by the colonial and postcolonial state.”
— Nandini Sundar, Delhi University

“An essential read for all those who wish to understand how the concepts of both class and caste have changed. And for the community itself, an ‘unusual social group’, as Fuller and Narasimhan refer to them, this book will help them learn and reflect upon their achievements, gain a wider perspective of their history, and smile knowingly at the descriptions of their present lives.”
— Radhika Santhanam, The Hindu

“Drawing on interviews, historical statistics, and active engagement with former studies of Brahmans and other privileged communities in South India, C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan have written an impressive biography of one of India's high-status communities over the past 150-odd years. . . . Tamil Brahmans will be a standard reference in the scholarship of Tamil Nadu and the conundrum of caste and class in general for many years to come.”
— American Anthropologist

"This study is significant for its explicit focus on the dynamics of an elite group’s dominance in
the face of strong societal transformations, even as much social scientific inquiry focuses on
‘the subaltern’. Moreover, it fleshes out at least one historically significant instance by which
caste and class privileges relate to each other, undergo transformations and persist in new
ways in contemporary Indian society."
— South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0000
[Tamilnadu, Brahmans, non-Brahmans, Dalits, caste, class, status group]
The Introduction describes the Tamil Brahman caste and its internal subdivisions, as well as the distinctions between Brahmans, non-Brahmans, and Dalits that are expressed, for example, in vegetarian or non-vegetarian dietary traditions, and ritual purity and pollution rules. It looks at the development of the non-Brahman political movement, and anti-Brahmanism in general, in modern Tamilnadu, and examines their importance for Tamil Brahmans. The Indian middle class, and the neo-Weberian sociological theory of class and status group, are discussed in some detail, because they are important for later chapters. The research projects on which the book is based, and the authors' collaboration, are explained. An outline of the book concludes the Introduction. (pages 1 - 28)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0001
[Tamilnadu, Brahmans, caste, village, land, urban migration]
This chapter describes the social structure of 'Brahman villages' in Tamilnadu, in which Brahmans formerly lived in an exclusive quarter, the agraharam, apart from non-Brahmans and Dalits. It looks at how these villages have changed, mainly because so many Brahmans have emigrated, although they are still the majority in some unusual agraharams, such as Tippirajapuram (studied by the authors), where the Eighteen-Village Vattima subcaste is dominant. The chapter explains that the Brahmans' partial separation from the rest of Tamil rural, caste-based society facilitated migration to towns and cities, where they took advantage of educational and employment opportunities. Moreover, unlike non-Brahman cultivators, Brahman village landlords had a detached attitude to land, which helped them to quit it relatively easily and further facilitated urban migration. These two 'push' factors help to explain why the Tamil Brahmans' urban migration and transformation into fully-fledged urbanites have been unusually rapid and complete. (pages 29 - 60)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0002
[Tamilnadu, Madras, colonial India, Brahmans, Education, employment, genealogies]
This chapter examines education and employment in the colonial period. Tamil Brahmans took up new educational and employment opportunities in Madras and other urban areas faster than other communities, so that by the turn of the twentieth century, they had an overwhelming lead in higher education, and held the majority of higher-level administrative and legal posts; they were also very well represented in medicine and engineering. Brahmans held many lower-level, white-collar jobs as well. The non-Brahman movement grew in reaction to this Brahman dominance. This chapter particularly uses genealogies to trace educational and employment patterns in particular families. It argues that the continuity between modern employment and traditional, Brahman literate service work is very limited, and that the genealogical data mainly show how Tamil Brahmans flexibly adapted to new employment opportunities. The data also show remarkably little intergenerational, downward mobility in occupational statuses. (pages 61 - 88)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0003
[Tamilnadu, Chennai, postcolonial India, Brahmans, middle class, education, employment, engineering, information technology]
This chapter examines education and employment after Indian Independence in 1947. It explains how the government's 'reservations system' has affected the Tamil Brahmans' educational and employment opportunities. For Brahmans, like many other Indians, medicine and engineering are highly prestigious professions, and engineering in particular has expanded enormously, especially since the early 1990s, with the rise of the information technology (IT) sector and the impact of economic liberalisation. Mainly using interview material, this chapter describes work in Chennai's engineering manufacturing companies, and software and services companies, and explains the contrast between them, including IT's greater attractiveness to women. Many Brahmans work in IT, but the main reason is that IT companies mostly recruit from the urban, educated, English-speaking, upper-middle class, in which Brahmans are over-represented. In this case and more generally, Tamil Brahman caste privilege is mainly sustained through a process of class reproduction. (pages 89 - 122)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0004
[Tamilnadu, Brahmans, women, gender, middle class, education, employment]
This chapter examines the changing position of women. In the past, Tamil Brahman girls were ideally married before puberty, the majority received very little education, and the caste's high status was partly expressed in extreme gender inequality. In the mid-twentieth century, pre-puberty marriage for Brahman girls ended; their standard of education also rose and, by century's end, it was virtually equal to boys'. Women increasingly took up paid employment as well, and significant numbers work in IT, so that IT professionals have become important role models for young Brahman (and non-Brahman) middle-class women. Especially in the family setting, women mostly remain subordinate to men. Nevertheless, the Brahmans' claim to superiority over other castes now partly depends on relative gender equality, and the near parity between the sexes in education in particular is important for the status of the Tamil Brahman middle class, particularly the upper-middle class. (pages 123 - 152)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0005
[Brahmans, Chennai, Indian cities, United States suburbs, social control, American dream]
This chapter is a comparative ethnography of urban ways of life in Chennai in particular, as well as Bangalore, Mumbai, and the outer suburbs of American cities. It is mainly based on interviews with Tamil Brahmans, especially Vattimas, in these urban settings. The chapter looks at how Tamil Brahmans evaluate these different localities and how they compare them with villages, particularly with respect to caste-based social control, which is a pervasive concern, especially for women. This chapter describes the contrast between Indian urban areas and American outer suburbs, where most Tamil Brahmans live. It also explores the impact on people of the American dream, whose promises of educational and employment opportunities, and social and personal freedom, are counterbalanced by worries about overseas emigration damaging family ties and children's socialisation. (pages 153 - 182)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0006
[Brahmans, Tamilnadu, religion, Hinduism, Sanskritic, Carnatic music, Bharatanatyam, dance]
Religion and culture are the topics of this chapter. It describes some important features of Brahmanical, Sanskritic Hinduism in Tamilnadu, and how the Brahmans' role as custodians of religious tradition has always been salient for their caste status and relationship with non-Brahmans. In the early twentieth century, south Indian Carnatic music and the dance style known as Bharatanatyam, which both have a strongly religious ethos, were mainly fashioned into their current 'classical' forms by Tamil Brahmans in Madras. Today, Brahmans dominate the two arts and middle-class Brahman girls are strongly encouraged to learn them. One result of these developments is that the Brahmanical, Sanskritic 'great tradition' incorporates classical music and dance, as well as religion. This great tradition, which metonymically represents the 'high culture' of upper-middle-class Tamil Brahmans, is vital in sustaining their collective identity and constituting them as a social class and status group. (pages 183 - 210)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226152882.003.0007
[Brahmans, Tamil Brahmans, colonial India, Bengal, Bombay, Madras, tradition, modernity, middle class]
The concluding chapter begins by comparing Brahmans in colonial Bengal, Bombay, and Madras. Compared with other Brahmans, Brahmans in Madras became a more dominant group within the new urban middle class and adapted more easily to modernity. Tamil Brahmans also came to see themselves as both fully modern and authentically traditional, but their 'traditional' values and practices are now intertwined with modern middle-class ones. Hence Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness have become mutually constitutive of each other. Comparative evidence on other Indian communities mostly shows that Brahmans have been more fully transformed into modern, urban, middle-class groups than non-Brahmans, and that the transformation has been unusually far-reaching among the Tamil Brahmans, especially for the upper-middle class, whose privileged status and distinctive identity have been further reinforced by developments since economic liberalisation. Tamil Brahmanhood, far from fading into anachronistic unimportance, still matters a great deal in the modern world. (pages 211 - 230)

Appendix. Tamil Brahman Demographics

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2014. Page maintained by BiblioVault.