Introduction

K.S. Madhavan “Primary producing groups in early and early medieval Kerala:
Production process and historical roots of transition to castes (300-1300 CE)”
Thesis. Department of History , University of Calicut, 2012
 Introduction

Historical narratives on early and early medieval Kerala mostly focus on the
wetland agriculture region. Paddy cultivation became the important form of
agrarian activity and paddy is the major form of agrarian surplus. The wetland
paddy cultivation has been given prime importance in the social formation
process in such studies. The formation of the stratified society leading to the
emergence of the state was conceptualized on the basis of the surplus
generated exclusively from the wetland paddy cultivation.1 However,
comparatively large area of multi crops cultivation in the laterite region,
including the land spaces called parambu and forested areas, in which variety
of mixed crops, spices and forest produce generated; do not get attention in
such histories. The way in which the resources produced in the mixed crops
areas and the realization of labour and forms of appropriation of multi culture
products leading to the process of stratification have not been studied
properly.

Another significant issue is the problem of mono causal explanation

given to the formation of wetland paddy agriculture in the mid land of
Kerala.2 Such narratives give undue importance to the origin and development
of Brahman settlements as a linear process and argue that Brahman
settlements are the only agency which made changes in the economy and
society and evolved socio-economic structures and cultural developments in
the society.3 The arguments are centered on the temple centered Brahman

1
K N Ganesh,State formation in Kerala;A Critical Overview, [ICHR, Bangalore,
2010],pp.24-26.
2
M G S Narayanan has argued that Brahman settlements scattered along the many fertile
river valleys between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea and the Brahmans
occupied the lands most suitable for rice cultivation. M G S Narayanan, Perumals of
Kerala,[ Calicut, 1996], p.144.
3
Kesavan Veluthat, Brahman Settlements in Kerala, [Calicut University,1978], [see
chapters 3 and 5 ].M G S Narayanan has further added that Brahmin settlers were

1
villages4 which transformed the economy and society, created number of
institutional structures including the political structure of Nāttutayavar and
the Chēra Perumāl.5 The historiographical silence on the existence of
settlements created by the settler cultivators where the cultivating kutis
cultivated the lands has not been given attention to; instead the Brahman
villages are given importance in the production of resources and how thereby
these villages became the nodal agency in the transformation of society and
economy.6

In the historiography of Kerala, Brahman villages have been explained

as the catalyst agency in the transition from tribal clannish society of early
historic period to a settled wetland agrarian society of early medieval times.
The social stratification process leading to the formation of state resulting
from the consolidation of agrarian hierarchy and caste formation was
attributed to the technological and cultural advancement made by the
Brahmans and the temple centered Brahman villages. However, the Brahmans
were made to settle granting the productive villages and donating produces
from the already settled and cultivated ūr settlements of the settler cultivators
and the kutis. Studies concentrating the social formation process in early and
early medieval Kerala have ignored the importance of the settlements of the
settler cultivators and the cultivating kutis. The anteriority of the primordial
settlements that had been developed prior to the emergence of temple centered
Brahman settlements has not been properly studied. The invisibility of the

largely interested in cultivation in the fields and plantations of the plains with assured
water supply round the year, M G S Narayanan, Perumals of Kerala, op.cit., p.144.
4
Ibid,pp.141-149.
5
Ibid, p.149.
6
This is explained in terms of the emergence of the non- kin labour in the agrarian sector
through the interaction between Brahman households and the neighboring clannish folk.
Rajan Gurrukkal and M R Raghava Varier,[eds] ,Cultural History of Kerala,
[Department of Cultural Publications, Government of Kerala,Thiruvananthapuram ,
1999],p.240.

2
settlements other than the Brahman settlements in such studies has led to the
mono causal explanation to the process of socio-economic transition based on
the centrality of one economy concentrating the paddy cultivating Brahman
settlements. However, the settlements other than Brahman settlements were
large in numbers which made impetus to the development of the temple
centered Brahman settlements by way of production of resources and
donation of the share of the surplus to the temple centered Brahman villages.
This process, in fact, has not been given due attention in the historiography of
Kerala.

The cultivating kutis and the households of the settlers made donations
in the form of the share of the produce to the temples to meet the expenses of
the offerings that ensured supply of the surplus to the temple centered
Brahman villages. This further accelerated the process by which the
Nāttutayavar and the ruling lineages that made donations to the temples in the
form of share of the produce from the villages other than Brahman
settlements, a few attippēr grants were also made to the Brahmans and the
temples, and Brahmans were made to settle granting lands in the settlements
created by the settler cultivators and the cultivating kutis. The social
stratification process is often explained in terms of mechanism of labour
realisation and the appropriation of the surplus generated. The villages other
than the Brahman settlements where surplus was generated and from where
the agrarian resources reached the temples and the Nāttutayavar. This process
has not been much visible in epigraphical documents as the historical
contingency of the production of such documents had no intention of making
this visible and this led to the historiographical silence on the process of
surplus generation in such villages.

The historical narratives on the social formation process in early and

early medieval Kerala have, in fact, emphasised the linearity of the historical

3
process giving importance to the centrality of one economy, wetland paddy
economy, in understanding the socio-economic development which resulted
in giving the mono causal explanation i.e., the Brahman settlements are the
nodal agency of historical change as well as the cause and effect of the same
process. This has completely evaded the existence of other economies, the life
activities of the people who subsisted on it and the process of resource
generation in such economies. The process of resource generation and the
modes of appropriation involved in the various economies are also important.

Present study entitled ‘Primary Producing Groups in Early and Early

Medieval Kerala: Production Process and Historical Roots of Transition to
Castes [300- 1300 CE]’ focuses on the social formation process in the
multiple economies in which both parambu cultivation and the forested areas
in the laterite regions and the wetland areas including the estuarine land
spaces and the wetland plains are given importance. The study mainly focus
on the formation of primary producers in relation to land, labour and
production process that developed in the early and early medieval Kerala and
how the agrarian surplus generated primarily because of the labour of the
primary producers in the period under discussion. It tries to locate the ways in
which the production process developed and the transition occurred which led
to the consolidation of agrarian hierarchy and formation of castes.

The Problem:

The kutis were the backbone of the various economies that must have
developed from early historical period and the primary produces began to
develop as part of the expansion of agrarian activities and generation of
surplus in the multiple economies. Those groups who provided labour to the
various labour activities in the midland including the laterite areas called
parambus appeared from the period of the Classical Tamil texts when the wet
land and parambu area began to be cultivated. Āl /Atiyār/ Pulayar appeared to

4
have developed as a particular social and cultural group and referred to in
epigraphical sources from the early medieval period. They are conceptualized
as the primary producers and agriculture production depended on the labour
of these groups. The epigraphical evidences indicate the presence of Āl,
Atiyār, Pulayar Parayar etc, and they are found to have been tied to the lands
on which they did their labour. However, the historical scholarship of Kerala
seems to have hardly problematised these categories. The most pertinent
question is who are the primary producing groups and how did they become
the groups variously termed Āl, Atiyār, Pulayar Parayar etc. How they became
the labouring groups to be designated as the primary producers in the agrarian
system in the early medieval period and what was the historical antecedence
which led to the formation of such groups. What were the ways and means
which made them primary producers or what kind of socio-political and
ideological system subjugated them and incorporated them to the varna jāti
system as untouchables, are to be properly studied.

A study giving importance to the labour process in the production of

agrarian resources in the multiple economies leading to the appropriation of
surplus, consolidation of agrarian hierarchy and the formation of castes would
help us to delineate the complex process of subordination of the primary
producers in the early and early medieval Kerala. The neglect of historicising
the process of the formation of caste in relation to the development of
multiple economies is also responsible for the negligence of problematising
the primary producers in the early and early medieval Kerala. Agrarian
production process and the generation of surplus is the base of the social
formation process in which the social stratification gave way to the
consolidation of production process in instituted manner leading to the
development of the producing and non producing groups in the social system.
The entire edifice of the agrarian system is built on the labour and life
activities of the producing groups consisting of primary producers, the

5
cultivating and occupational groups called kutis. The labour was realized for
the production of surplus which developed a group who engaged in the labour
process as the primary producers and they appeared in generic nomenclatures
in documents whose labour was institutionally realized and they were
attached to the means of production. The significance of the study of the
primary producers is that it would unravel the nuances of the complex process
of the subjugation of the primary producers to a number of overlords and how
they were made part of the jāti hierarchies. No such study has so far been
conducted in the history of pre- colonial Kerala in particular and pre-modern
south India in general. Hence, a study of the origin and development of the
primary producers giving importance to the production operations and the
labour process in the multiple economies in the early and early medieval
Kerala has relevance of its own.

The prime objective of the study is to locate the primary producing

groups in the labour process in the multiple economies. To unravel the
process of the generation of agrarian resources and the labour activities in the
production operations are the other objective of the study. The complex
process of the redistributive process and the formation of number of non
producing social groups developing particular political dominance is also to
be studied. Yet another objective is to know the process in which hereditary
occupational collectives had become particular endogamous groups and how
they had become part of the occupational and service hierarchies. The
ideological system which incorporated the producing groups as subjugated
categories into the varna jāti system is also to be studied as one among the
other objectives of this endeavor.

The social relations which developed on account of the complex

process of production operations involving various forms of labour activities
and diverse modes of appropriation of resources would reveal the way in

6
which multiple forms of power and subjugation strategies evolved in early
medieval period. It also locates the production localities, predominantly the
settlements of the settler cultivators and the cultivating kutis, where agrarian
resources generated from where number of non producing groups and
institutional structures including Nāttutayavars and the temples squeezed out
the resources. It also enables to understand the process of social stratification
that had been developed in the multiple economies leading to the emergence
of a hierarchy based on agrarian power structure that also evolved
corresponding political power structure. It would also reveal the way in which
the production process made impetus to the transition to the formation of
castes and the subjugation of the primary producers under the varna –jātis
system as untouchables.

Historians like Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai,M G S Narayanan, Kesavan

Veluthat and others who wrote extensively on the pre-modern history of
Kerala did not give due attention to the primary producing groups .They came
out with only marginal comments and passing references to these groups in
their studies.7 None of them attempted to give explanation to the origin of
these groups or the ways in which these groups became the primary producers
in the process of production of agrarian surplus and how their labour had been
realised to produce the agrarian surplus. One exemption in this regard is
perhaps Professor Rajan Gurukkal, who has tried to problematise the primary
producers, even though, it was explained in the context of the formation of the
hierarchy that developed in the process of surplus appropriation in the wet
land agriculture in the midland where the Brahman settlements and temple
centered Brahman villages proliferated. However, these historians do not pay
attention to the multiple economies that existed in the region in early and
early medieval period and to the origin and development of settlements other
7
M G S Narayanan considers that the groups called Pulayar or l are agrestic serfs
during the Chēra period, Perumals of Kerala,op. cit., p.154.

7
than Brahman ūrs where the lion share of the agrarian resources generated.
They paid more attention to the wetland paddy agriculture, settlements of the
Brahmans and studied the social formation process concentrating almost
exclusively on wetland paddy area.

Historians paid attention to the Āl / Atiyār/ Pulayar etc only when they
tried to locate the formation of caste groups in Kerala rather than to study the
primary producers who were engaged in the production operations for the
generation of surplus on which the edifice of the economy and society rested
and that process made them primary producing groups in the social form that
came into being. Such historians were in search of caste in history rather than
to problematise the historical process that transformed an already evolved
hierarchical formation into castes and the institutional and ideological
structures that formulated the caste as system of multiple forms of oppression
in terms of gender and class. Some of the studies appear to have focused on
the question of caste as structural phenomena developing within the
institutional structures of the temples wherein the functional arrangement
developed due to the formation of occupational and service hierarchies in the
temple centered society. Some others argued that the dispersed nature of the
village community that existed in the period under discussion developed the
caste system as a functional arrangement within such village communities.
They formulated the structural – functionalist understanding in which the
functional groups or occupational categories are interpreted to have developed
as the fixed and variable entities of an already imagined system of hierarchy
in the early medieval period.

However, the problems lie in the conceptualization of the spatiality in

the multiple economies in which the process of social formation and the
stratification occurred in multiple ways. But the historical scholarship on
early and early medieval Kerala interpreted the social formation process as

8
something which had exclusively happened in the wetland paddy cultivation
region and the centrality of the paddy economy got prominent position in the
analysis of social formation process. Then, the analysis of such narratives
naturally fall in line with the arguments that a great transformation had
occurred in the social form which formed the major institutional structures
like temples and the temple centered Brahman settlements that created
historical transformation of economy and society. The formation of various
social groups has been explained as the product of the structural entities like
temples which exclusively constituted the occupational and service
hierarchies. Therefore, any attempt in problematising the social stratification,
location of the primary producers, castes, social subordination, hierarchy, etc
would revolve in and around the temples and the temple-centered villages, the
analysis would confine to the clutches of structuralism and the structural
functionalism or relativism.

Those who try to develop critical position on the narratives based on

the temple centered villages must transcend the tenets of relativism in
understanding the social transformation process. Therefore, it is necessary to
problematise the agrarian production and the labour process involved in the
multiple economies and importance is to be given ūr settlements and kutis
which appeared in the classical Tamil texts and how it continued to exist
during the early medieval period. Attention should be given to understand the
social stratification process which evolved in the multiple economies and the
ways in which the production and labour process developed in these
economies. The formation of a surplus appropriation mechanism and its
redistribution system are also to be probed. Importance is to be given to the
labour process in which the cultivating kutis, primary producers and the kutis
of the occupational groups are involved. Social stratification process and the
agrarian hierarchy are to be problematised in relation to the ways in which
multiple forms of production operations developed and the various modes of

9
appropriation forms that came into being. The evolving hierarchy engendered
the positional and dispositional forms out of the production process that
developed the historical roots of transition to the castes. Hence, the
understanding of the historiographical scholarship on the formation and
consolidation of hierarchy of castes in Kerala is a starting point.

There are two major strands of approach to the varna – jati system that
existed in pre-modern Kerala. One is the ethnographic understanding of the
caste and another is the view which emphasizes the ideas and values of the
temple centered Brahman villages that created the caste system. Early writers
on Kerala either followed the travelers’ account and the reportage given by
missionaries and merchants or they subscribed to the ethnographic
understanding of caste which was largely influenced by the oriental / colonial
interpretations. William Logan’s position of the varna –jati system is
important because it was the leading administrative ideology. He followed
the oriental colonial position of caste and he partially rejects the Kēralōlpathi
tradition of claim held by the indigenous elites on customary landed
ownership and at the same time he subscribed to the brahmanical perception
of caste represented in Kēralōlpati.8 Missionary discourse on Kerala’s caste
system has a history and early European accounts of Lingschoten and
Vathema was mediated by the brahmanic perception of caste as they were the
informants to these missionaries. These missionaries primitivised the
indigenous people with the European predilections.9 This can also be seen in
the works of French Missionary, Abbe j Dubois.10 The missionary discourse

8
K S Madhavan, Representation of Caste in Pre- Colonial and Colonial Keralam,
[Unpublished M Phil Thesis, University of Calicut,2001],Chapter 3 ‘Colonial Discourse
on Caste’,pp.81-86.William Logan,Malabar[in two volumes] vol.1.[1887] Reprinted,
Charithram Publications, Trivandrum,1981], Section D-Caste and Occupations,pp.135-
182.
9
K S Madhavan, Representation of Caste in Pre- Colonial and Colonial Keralam, op.cit.,
pp.86-87.
10
Abbe j Dubois, Hindu Manners, Custom sand Ceremonies, [AES Reprint, Delhi ,1983]

10
on caste has systematically been started with the establishment of London
Missionary Society [LMS, 1795 C E] and the Church Mission Society [CMS,
1799 C E].

The most important representative of the missionary engagement with

the varna –jati system in Kerala is Samuel Mateer who was an LMS
missionary. The basic premise on which Mateer developed his argument is the
Aryan theory and he argues for the existence of antagonistic Dravidian and
Aryan Brahman groups.11 The Aryan theory became an explanatory mode of
analysis in the administrative ideology and missionary discourse on caste.12
The historians who wrote on Kerala in the beginning of the twentieth century
largely subscribed to the views developed by the administrative ideology and
the missionary discourse on caste which were based on the colonial ethnology
and racial science.13 The leading exponent of the ethnological understanding
of caste is L K Ananthakrishna Ayyar who followed the typical colonial
anthropological position on caste.14 K P Padmanabha Menon largely
subscribed to the views of the medieval travelers, missionaries and on the
colonial anthropologists and developed a synthetic theory of caste
formation.15

Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai can be considered as the pioneer to give a

historical perspective to the origin and growth of the caste system. He viewed

11
K S Madhavan, Representation of Caste in Pre- Colonial and Colonial Keralam, op. cit.,
pp.87-88.
12
Ibid, pp.89-92.
13
Susan Bayly, ‘Caste and ‘Race’ in the Colonial Ethnography of India’ in Peter Robb
[ed],The Concept of Race in South Asia, [OUP Culcuta,1995],pp.165-218. Thomas R
Trautmann, ‘Inventing the History of South India’ in Daut Ali[ed], Invoking the Past,
[OUP, Delhi, 1999], PP. 36-54.
14
L K Ananthakrishna Ayyar,The Cochin Tribes and Castes,[ two volumes,1909 and
1912, Reprinted,Johson Reprint Corporation New York, 1969].
15
K P Padmanabha Menon, History of Kerala, vol .3, [AES Reprint, Delhi, 1984],
Kochirajyacharithram,[1914][,Mathrubhumi,Calicut,1989],Chapter-7,pp.58-74.

11
the Sangam period as a period of castless society.16 The transfer of land to the
Brahmans was one of the consequences of the aryanisation of Kerala starting
from seventh century CE.17 It was during the eleventh C E that the Brahman
centered land system, when the forces unleashed by the Chera –Chola war
helped the brahmanas to acquire vast area of land and became wealthy and
powerful janmis.18 He argued that the fall of the united polity in Kerala under
the Kulasekhara Empire in the later period of the war and rise on its ruins of
innumerable petty principalities helped the Brahmans to extend their sway
further, when they made the caste system and janmi centered land system
more complete.19

The typical example of understanding the caste in terms of the

brahmanical ideology and the temple centered village can be seen in the
works of M G S Narayanan. Aryan- Dravidian binary with functional
relativism can be seen in the works of M G S Narayanan who has argued that
the Dravidian society consisting of Izhavar,Vāniyar,Vannār,Taccar, Tattār,
Vellalar,Pulayar and others were divided on the basis of hereditary profession
and their dependence of Aryan Brahman settlements made the caste system
more rigid.20 The evolution and consolidation of caste system is directed by
the well –organised Aryan Brahmins.21 The hereditary occupations of groups
such as Īzhavar,Vāniyar,Vannār,Taccar, Tattār, Vellālar,Pulayar probably
took place even without the agency or inspiration of the Brahmins and this
type of hereditary occupation provided a powerful impetus to the evolution of

16
Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, ‘Kēralam Chāturvarnyathinte Pitiyil’, in N Sam[ed],
Elamkulam Kunjan Pillayute Thiranjetutta Kritikal, Vol .1,Historical Works
[International Centre for Kerala Studies , University of Kerala,Thiruvananthapuram] ,
2005], p.241.
17
Ibid.,pp.480 and 511.
18
Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, ‘Janmisambrathayam Keralathil’, in Elamkulam Kunjan
Pillayute Thiranjetutta Kritikal, op.cit., pp.590-621.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., p.155.
21
M G S Narayanan, Perumals of Kerala, op.cit. , p.154.

12
sub castes within the general frame work of caste.22 He formulates a view
that the caste system existed without any tension or conflict and there
prevailed a general atmosphere of harmony and peace23 in the social fabric.
Kesavan Veluthat has argued that the tribal population got transformed into
peasants and other occupational groups into so many jatis.24 The primary
producers were bonded labourers and the surplus labour at their disposal was
expropriated mostly in the form of a labour rent.25

According to Rajan Gurukkal the period between the seventh and ninth
centuries witnessed the proliferation of Brahman villages and expansion of
irrigated agriculture in wetland which integrated the non kin labourers into the
labour process. The functional association of producers, artisans and
craftsmen constituted the social formation of the period. The period from the
eight to the tenth centuries is characterized by the proliferation and
consolidation of temple centered agrarian villages of the Brahmans. The
interaction of landed households into corporate settlements and the formation
of larger agrarian society corresponded to the emergence of temples marked
the expansion of agriculture through Brahman dominance as well as super
imposition of superior land rights of the Brahmans. The temples employed
large number of people in its various services on the basis of a system of
service tenure.26 The nature of rights over the land and the level of
entitlement to the producers determined the strata of the people and aggregate

22
Ibid, p.153. Professor Narayanan has argued that Brahmins created upper castes like
Kshatriyar, Sāmantar,Antarālar, and Nāyar out of the aboriginals according to status
and profession, ibid.,p.155.
23
M G S Narayanan, Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala, [Kerala Historical Society,
Trivandrum, 1972], p.3.
24
Kesavan Veluthat, ‘The Structure of Land-rights and Social Stratification in Early
Medieval South India’, in Vijaykumar Thakur and Asok Anshouman, [eds],Peasants in
Indian History,[ Janaki Prakasan New Delhi,1996],p.326. Kesavan Veluthat, Political
Structure of Early Medieval South India,[ Orient Longman, Delhi, 1993], p.235.
25
Kesavan Veluthat, ‘Medieval Kerala’ in The Early Medieval in South India, [OUP,
Delhi, 2009] 2010], p.256.
26
Rajan Gurukkkal, ‘Formation of Caste Society in Kerala: Historical Antecedents’ in K L
Sharma [ed], Caste and Class in India, [Rawat, publications,Delhi,1998] p.395.

13
designed the social relation of the period. The dominant position of the
Brahmans that was crucial in the operationalisation of jāti hierarchy.27 What is
Brahmanical is not jāti but the notion of hierarchy.28

The amateur scholars have attempted to unravel certain issues involved

in the writings of professional historians who worked on caste formation and
the consolidation of varna-jati system. Scholars like P K Balakrishnan
polemically postulated certain notions in which caste has been understood as
a system of perpetual backwardness and which became a category to
primitivise the economy and society of the early and early medieval Kerala.29
However, the scholars who were concerned over the former untouchables
took a constructive critical engagement with the positions taken by historians,
mostly of Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, and tried to develop narratives of the
historical past of the Atiyār and the Pulayar of Kerala.30

Since the main concern is to know the way in which hierarchical social
order had been consolidated over the centuries and the primary producing
groups developed, it is necessary to make a critical evaluation of some of the
important theories which focus on how caste has emerged in history and the
historiographical positions on the development of the ideology and practice of
caste system. The social science practices in India gave much emphasise on

27
Rajan Gurukkkal, ‘From Clan and Lineage to Hereditary Occupation and Caste in Early
South India’ in Dev Nathan[ed], From Tribe to Caste, [Indian institute of Advanced
Study, Shimla, 1997], p.216. Rajan Gurukkal, ‘the Formation of Caste Society in
Kerala: Historical Antecedence’ op.cit., pp.393-402.
28
Rajan Gurrukkal and M R Raghava Varier,[eds] Cultural History of
Kerala,op.cit.,p.256.
29
P K Balakrishnan, Jātivyavasthitiyum Kērala Charithravum, [National Book Stall,
Kottayam, 1983].
30
T H P Chentharassery,Kerala Charithrathile Avakanikkappetta Edukal,[Prabhath Book
House,Trivandrum,1970]. Kunnukuzhi S Mani,Polayar Nootandukalil,[
ISHPO,Trivandrum,1989] N K Jose, jāti Vyavasthayilūte Kēralacharithram,[
Hobby Publishers,Vaikom,1993].Atisthana Keralam, [Hobby Publishers,Vaikom,2001]
and Pulayalahala,[Prakasam Publications,Kottayam,1982]. K K Kochu,Kerala
Charithravum Samuharupikaranavum, [the State Institute of
Languages,Kerala,Thiruvananthapuram,2012].

14
functional aspects of the caste including the ideology of the caste system,
namely, on its ritual aspects, to the exclusion of material conditions and
questions of power. This is a consequence of focusing on the brahmanical
view drawn from brahmanical texts.31 It disinclined to engage with the
materialistic interpretations given by historians32 and the counter view of dalit
writers who have provided on the caste system by focusing on the experiential
dimensions of caste based oppression.33 B R Ambedkar’s writings on the
history of Shudras and dalits were not cited in studies of social history;
nevertheless they had an indirect impact.34 However, the theory propounded
by Louis Dumont, that is so much more popular because it follows the

31
K S Madhavan, Internalist Perception of Jati – A Study of Brahmanical Canonical
Literature in Kerala, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 62nd Session, Bhopal,
2001, PP.84-97. Debjani Ganguly, ‘The Dark Rock of Indian Tradition: Caste and
Orientalism’ in Caste and the Dalit Life Worlds: Post Colonial Perspectives,[Orient
Longman,Delhi,2005],pp.33-62.
32
D D Kosambi is the pioneer one to provide a general frame work of historical
materialism to study the caste system and describes caste as the class in the primitive
level of production; D D Kosambi, Culture and Civilisation in Ancient India in
Historical outline, D D Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History.
Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings, Compiled, Edited and Introduced
by Brajudalal Chattopadhyya,[OUP,Delhi,2002]. R S Sharma, Sudras in Ancient India,
[Motilal Banarsidas Publishers, Delhi,1958]. Irfan Habib, Caste in Indian History, in
Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, [Tulika Publishers, Delhi,
1995].
33
In contrast, a striking formulation of the caste system provided by Babasaheb B.R.
Ambedkar is perceived from the bottom end up. In Ambedkar’s formulation, caste is a
system of graded inequality in which castes are arranged according to an ascending
scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt. B R Ambedkar, The
Untouchables: Who were They and Why they Became Untouchables in Babasaheb
Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches,[Compiled by Vasant Moon], Vol.7.[Education
Department, Government of Maharashtra, Bombay, 1990] , pp.233-379. Who were the
Shudras[1946] in Writings and Speeches,Vol.7,pp.5-232. Caste in India: Their
Mechanism, Genesis and Development [1917] in Writings and Speeches,
Vol.1,[Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, Bombay,1989], pp.3-22.
Annihilation of Caste [1944] in Writings and Speeches,Vol.1,pp.23-96.Braj Ranjan
Mani, Debrahmanising History,[Manohar,Delhi,2005].
34
Romila Thapar, Decolonising the Past: Historical Writing in the Times of Sachin – and
Beyond, Economic and Political Weekly, April 2, 2005, p.1444.

15
brahmanical perception of caste as it emphasizes the purity and impurity as
the fundamental governing principle on caste.35

The brahman informants and brahmanic upper castes scribes informed

the early European travelers the social ordering of the people only after
placing themselves in a privileged position in their ideal universe. It was
because of this, the practice of untouchability was conceived as an ideology in
the ideal universe of brahmanical self perception. This brahmanical self
perception about the social realities and material practice of cultural
specificities inverted to represent in their ideal social universe as an
ideological schema. It was this indigenous elite's self perception that was
followed by the early European travelers and subsequently became a frame of
reference in the missionary discourse and the colonial position of caste.36

The colonial position on caste is that the brahmanical self perception

regarding caste hierarchy is inverted to constitute the 'other' in the form of a
stagnant, inflexible hierarchy based on racial differences which enabled to
ossify occupational differentiations.37 It was this position on caste that
became a prism through which the colonial rulers began to see Indians and the
whole Indian society. Caste was seen as representing the worldview of Indian
social and cultural life in a stagnant and degenerated form. The non-ritual,
even non religious elements which always existed in the caste system as part

35
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, [Mouton,
1970].
36
This representation of caste had to be materialized by the way of colonial modalities of
survey and reportage, systematized through census and ethnographic science. The
investigative and survey modalities of colonial state has to be analysed in this context,
Bernad S Cohn, An Anthropologist Among Historians and Other Essays, [OUP, Delhi,
1987]. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, [OUP, Delhi, 1997].
37
Susan Bayly, New Cambridge History of India,Vol.4[3],[Cambridge ,1999],p.9.Thomas
R Trautman ,Aryan and the British India, [OUP,Delhi,1997],p.155. Bernad S
Cohn,Colonialism anf its Forms of Knowledge: British in India,[OUP,Delhi,1997],pp.7-
8.Nicholas Dirks ,Caste of Mind,[OUP,Delhi,2002].

16
of labour process and some aspects of inter-caste relations were theoretically
ruled out of the system.38

Louis Dumont's 'Homo Hierarchicus'

The most influential contribution to the study of caste since the end of Second
World War has been Louis Dumont's 'Homo Hierarchicus'. The fundamental
feature of Indian caste system is, according to Dumont, the principle of
hierarchy in the caste system, which is the opposition of the pure and impure.
Superiority and superior purity are identical. Distinction of purity is the
foundation of status. The fundamental characteristic of caste system for
comparison is the hierarchical disjunction between status and power. Dumont
is of opinion that separation, interdependence and hierarchy are the essential
characteristics of caste system. Hierarchy ranks the groups as relatively
superiors or inferior to one another.

Dumont insists that these three principles are reducible to a single true
principle – namely, the opposition of the pure and the impure. He explicitly
states that the fundamental opposition of pure and impure is not the cause of
all the distinctions of caste, but rather that it is their form. It is the idiom
through which Hindus understand their own society. He claims that their
disjunction of power and status is implicit in the hierarchical opposition of
pure and impure.39 Dumont’s theory of caste is an attempt to answer one
question: how and why do Brahmins enjoy a monopoly on the religious
domain? Historically and conceptually, this monopoly is the basis of what
Dumont considers the essential feature of the caste system – the dysfunction

38
The colonial understanding of caste is represented in the works of H H Riley [ the
People of India, London ,1908]D Ibbetson,Punjab Castes, Lahore I916],J H Hutton ,
Caste in India, [Camebridge,1946] and G S Ghurye ,Caste and Class in
India,[Mumbai,1957].
39
Declan Quigley, ‘Dumont’s Theory of Caste’ in the Interpretation of Caste, [OUP,
Delhi, 1999], pp.21-38.

17
between status and power40. For Dumont, the distinguishing feature of caste
society is that status is superior to, and encompasses, power. The principle of
purity and impurity structure the relation between all castes. According to
him, caste is the uniquely Indian expression of a pure form of hierarchy in
which the values of the king, of politics, are subordinated to the purer values
of the priest which alone reflect the social whole.41

European interpretation of traditional India has always tended to

assume that caste is a product of priestly values of purity and impurity. What
Dumont has done is to take this assumption as a premise and build a
systematic theory around it. Dumont demonstrates that he has simultaneously
misunderstood the connection between caste and ritual functions and the
connection between caste and kinship. Purity is a relational concept, not a
substance. Purity is the absence of impurity and this is an entirely relative
matter – in any culture.42

Understanding of caste as an ideological system based on the

principles of purity and pollution, as outlined by Dumont ,in fact, dominated
the discipline of sociology and is completely unsatisfactory to analyse the
historical process of origin and development of caste system, especially to
study those who have been condemned and oppressed in the bottom rungs of
degrading conditions of existence. This theory is totally unmindful of the very
material dimensions of the caste system.43 Caste is not merely the opposition
between pure and impure but at a more fundamental level it incorporates
other kinds of domination and subordination, exploitation and oppression
40
T N Madan,’Louis Dumont and the Study of Society in India’ in Pathways: Approach to
the Study of Society in India,[OUP,Delhi,1994],pp52-84.
41
Suvira Jaiswal,Caste: Origin ,Function and Dimension of Change,[Manohar
,Delhi,2000],pp.35-36.
42
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
[1966, ARK Paperbacks, London], pp.1-6.
43
Umachakravarti, Gendering Caste, op.cit., pp.37-65.

18
based on unequal access to material and cultural resources, multiple forms of
power related to kinship, gender, class etc. This also points out the importance
of the occupational and functional dimension of caste hierarchy. The synthetic
theory of caste provided by Dumont failed to understand the immediate
reality of caste, the diversity of particular jātis with specific characteristics.44

Occupational theories

Colonial state and its apparatus made changes in the economy and society,
introduced various modalities for the continuation of the colonial rule such as
tenurial systems like permanent settlements, systematic land surveys and
resource surveys etc which forced the British to study the occupational
dimension of caste and community life in the society leading to evolve certain
occupational theories of caste.

The colonial ethnologists and anthropologists like John C Nesfield

argued for an occupational theory of caste, Nesfield was of opinion that
occupational class existed prior to the formation of castes. Occupational
groups were existed in all societies in India. He argued that guild had
transformed into caste in a hierarchical order.45 It is important to point out the
interpretation given by Ibbetson to the formation of caste. According to him
caste is social far more than a religious institution, it has no necessary
connection whatever with the Hindu religion. The formation of caste is a
socio- economic and cultural rather than religious phenomena. There are two
principles at work in the formation of caste system, i.e., community of blood
and community of occupation.46 The former is helpful to the understanding

44
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Caste and Subaltern Consciousness’ in Ranajith Guha [ed] Subaltern
Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Vol.6, [OUP, Delhi, 1989, 2005]
pp.169-209.
45
Suvira Jaiswal, Caste: Origin, Function and Dimension of Change, op.cit., p.33.
46
Morton Klass, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System, op.cit., pp.66-
67.

19
of the development of kinship descent structures and formation clan
endogamy among different occupational groups. And the latter is useful to
develop for the analysis of the formation of hereditary occupation and
gradation among various occupational groups. It is also useful to reveal the
way in which occupational and service hierarchies developed which played
important role in the development and continuation of caste system. He says,
‘the whole basis of diversity of caste is diversity of occupation’, difference of
degree rather than kind, Indian society differs only in degree. ‘Caste is simply
a form of position or rank’. The special circumstances made these
occupational groups in to castes. The principle of community of blood has
become fused with that of occupation.

Emile Senart argues that juxtaposition of superordinated Aryan

restricted communities and subordinated indigenous tribal groups was
responsible for the formation of caste system. He rejects the arguments of
Nesfield and Ibbetson as they had argued that tribe evolved in to guild and
later in to caste.47 Aryan population invaded in to South Asia at a particular
time conquered the indigenous population and materialized themselves as
distinct from the conquered. However, he says that, there is no racial factor in
the population. Here he rejects the position of Risley on racial conquest.
However, he relates primitive nature of the institutions of the indigenous
population with that of the invaded Aryans. However, at the same time, he
does not share the arguments of Ibbetson and Nesfield who traced the
evolution of caste from the indigenous tribal structure. He proposes that it is
the juxtaposition of Aryan and tribal system that is the source of caste, with
the Aryan as the most influential of the two elements. Aryan social
institutions such as the family structure are the source of the caste
exclusiveness.

47
Ibid.,pp.71-72.

20
 Weber has already made that caste is a social rank, occurrence of a
class system exhibiting closed status groups. In a productive engagement with
Weber’s position of Indian caste system, Celetian Bougle, developed certain
arguments in relation to the concepts like repulsion, hereditary, and hereditary
occupation.48 The development of mutually opposed groups, which are
hereditarily specialized and hereditarily arranged are important for the
development of caste system.49

However, Mortan Klass, offers a materialist explanation to the origin

of caste and he makes sense of the inter- disciplinary nature of the problem.
According to him, in prehistoric times, a galaxy of equalitarian endogamous
groups inhabited in south Asian regions. Each group was internally
characterized by full and undifferentiated membership and constituting a
single marriage circle in which prosperity and misfortune was shared by all.
Many of these endogamous societies were composed of equalitarian segments
or class. Initially all of them were at the gathering and hunting stage with no
significant economic specialization or exchange of goods and services. In the
following millennium food production began in favorable ecological zones
with cultivation of rice or hard grain, and plants and animals were
domesticated.50 The new technologies provided these areas with ‘absolute
surplus’ that is, the ability to produce continually more than what was
required for subsistence. This development placed those corporate groups,
who were in possession of cultivable lands in an advantageous position vice
versa those who did not have such land the latter began to exchange their
labour and services for access to cultivable land and crops. Since both the
possessors and non-possessors were structured in egalitarian class, the net

48
Suvira Jaiswal, Caste: Origin, Function and Dimension of Change, op.cit., p.33.
49
Morton Klass, Caste: The Emergence of the South Asian Social System, op.cit., pp.84-
85.
50
Ibid., see chapter 5 ‘The Units of the Caste System’, pp.87-104.

21
work of exchange had a corporate character. Labour and services were
provided not on individual but corporate basis with prosperity and misfortune
being shared equally by all members of the clan. Thus, a hierarchy of
corporate groups developed owing to unequal access and control of economic
resources. This led to a transition from clan to caste.51 According to Klass the
system emerged not in any one specific region but over the entire
subcontinent.52

The marriage circle assembly is the endogamous body with the power
to control the behavior of the membership, characterized by the rule of
endogamy. There must be a unit capable of enforcing such a rule and these are
the smallest endogamous unit. The marriage circle assembly had the specific
legislative judicial and executive body responsible for administering the affair
of marriage circle and for controlling the behavior of the members. The
Indian marriage circle reflects both territoriality and kinship. A marriage
circle on the one hand, a kin group it contains all ‘those with which a given
village considers himself related [by blood, marriage or whatever], and it
contain in principle, all the families with which marital arrangement may be
made by members of that villagers family. This body includes all those too
closely related to be acceptable as marriage partners, all those to whom one is
already related by marriage and all those sufficiently distantly related to be
eligible for marriage. Every household belongs to an endogamous marriage
circle. Every household is a constituent member of marriage circle. Beyond
this body [marriage circle assembly] are not only total strangers who are
therefore not acceptable as marriage partners, but also some who are in fact
perceived as kinsmen. These are the members of the distant marriage circles
of the same caste, who are assumed to be derived from the same origin but

51
Suvira Jaiswal, Caste: Origin, Function and Dimension of Change, op.cit., pp.3-6.
52
Morton Klass, Caste, op.cit., Chapter 6, ‘The Economy of Caste’, pp.105-134.

22
who are too distant in space and too different in behavior to be acceptable in
marriage.53 The geographical distribution of a marriage circle of any
particular caste represented in a given village need not coincide with that of
any other caste of that village. Each marriage circle has its own independent
leadership, set up, rules and regulations. The theories mentioned above would
help us to reveal the problems involved in the constitution of caste hierarchy
and various historiographical positions of the scholars who addressed certain
issues of caste.

Another important observation on caste is made by Cloude

Meillassoux54 who argues that jati emerged within the varna system through
fragmentation as well as the incorporation of tribal communities within a
structure which regulated hierarchy through marriage rules and endogamy,
and privileged heredity or birth in a particular lineage. The use of the term jāti
indicates membership in a particular community. Thus, Varna was extended
to provide the institutional and ideological base for the growth of a wider
society. To quote Meillassoux “contradiction inherent in the coexistence and
development of the rival classes and foreign intrusion and conquest led to the
rise of new status system of jāti deriving from the earlier varna system, and it
was at once ‘more flexible and arbitrary and could be applied to a fragmented
society by any faction of the dominant classes whatever their origin”. He tried
to locate the class into the framework of caste,which enable us to extend this
framework to include gender as well. The notion of impurity was crucial to
the ideology of caste system.

Historiographical Positions on Caste

A host of studies in the discipline of History has attempted to reveal that

formation and development of caste system is historically and culturally
53
Ibid., pp.97-103.
54
Cloude Meillassoux, Are There Caste in India?, Economy and Society, Vol.2,1973.

23
contingent upon the complex process of production and distribution of
material resources and ideological domination in various periods in Indian
history. The studies which are based on the premises of historical materialism
provided a general hypothesis of the formation of caste in which the insights
given by D D Kosambi is significant. According to Kosambi the advance of
agrarian village economy over tribal country is the first great social revolution
in India55. The major historical change in ancient India was not between
dynasties but in the advance of agrarian village settlements over tribal lands,
metamorphosing tribesmen into peasant cultivators.56 The new social
organization that took place in Gangetic basin, which was different from that
of what existed in Harappan culture, gave germination to the caste under
totally different technic of production. The beginning of caste system can be
traced to the formation of a servile group from the ‘dāsās’ and the origin of
caste endogamy are attributed to the process of assimilation of Ayan and Pre-
Aryan in to a single civil society. Therefore, he postulates, ‘caste as class on a
primitive level of production’.57

The entire course of Indian history, Kosambi says, ‘shows tribal

elements being fused into a general society. This is the very foundation of the
most striking Indian social feature, namely the caste’.58 The formation of
servile caste from the defeated dāsa and sūdara tribes led to the development
of new relations of production in Aryan society, this was the origin of the
older northern caste system.59 Transition from tribe or guild to caste means
primarily enrolment of the group on a hierarchical scheme of general society,

55
DD Kosambi, The Basis of Ancient Indian History, in Combined Methods in Indology
and Other Writings, Compiled , Edited and Introduced by Brajudalal
Chattopadhyaya,op.cit.,p.308.
56
Ibid,p.312.
57
D D Kosambi,Culture and Civilisation in Ancient India in Historical outline,p.50.
58
D D Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, p.56.
59
D D Kosambi, Culture and Civilization…………., op. cit., p.50.

24
under Brahman sanction.60 However, in south India caste cum class was
developed under external stimulation of the materially and technologically
superior Aryans and the aborigines of different cultural levels and territories.
Kosambi argues that caste and occupational levels became rigid only in the
stagnant Indian villages with the emergence of feudalism.61 ‘Because of the
caste system’ Kosambi wrote, ‘India had helotage, not slavery…’62 . ‘Caste is
an important reflection of the actual relations of production, particularly at the
time of its formation’.63

Devraj Chanana has studied the development of the slave or dāsas in

different periods in early India.64 However, Chanana does not focus his study
of the slavery in relation to the untouchable castes. He says that it is difficult
to assign the term dasa to any particular varna in society.65 It was in the
Buddhist context that there developed institution of slavery in large scale as
society and state was expanded to evolve multiple forms of subordinations.66
Slavery is vividly described in the Arthasāstra in relation to the economic
conditions that existed in the period.67 Chanana also emphasized the point
that there was no impurity attached to the dāsās since they worked and lived
in close proximity to their masters. It indicates that there existed the marked
differences between the Dāsās and impure castes. Devraj Chanana and R S
Sharma have shown that slaves were employed in large number in the
60
DD Kosambi, The Basis of Ancient Indian History, in Combined Methods in Indology
and Other Writings, op. cit, p.317.
61
Suvira Jaiswal,Caste: Origin ,Function and Dimensions of Change, [Manohar,Delhi,
2000], p.47.
62
D D Kosambi, Marxism and Ancient Indian Culture in Combined Methods in Indology
and Other Writings, op.cit, p.788.
63
D D Kosambi, On the Development of Feudalism in India, in Combined Method in
Indology and Other Writings, op. cit, p.804.
64
Devraj Chanana, Slavery in Ancient India, [People Publishing House, Delhi,
[1960]1990].
65
Differences in the evolution of slavery are due to differences in material and historical
conditions, ibid, p.112.
66
Ibid.,pp.39-63.
67
Ibid.,pp.87-104.

25
production process in certain regions of India in post-Vedic and Mauryan
times. However, Marxist historians in India generally endorse the view that
slaves did not constitute the main basis of production at any stage.68

R S Sharma worked on early and early medieval India with a Marxist

perspective69 and probed caste as being rooted in material conditions closely
allied with the super- structural dimension in politics.70 However; it could not
provide the base for a social class of exploiters. The early Vedic society was
neither fully egalitarian nor class divided.71 It was a ‘small scale non
monetary peasant society’ characterized by unequal distribution of the
produce of land as well as the prominent tribal features.72 The social structure
from the sixth century BCE to the fifth CE is suggested to be a Vaiyas –Sudra
based society in which Vaiyas were peasants and Sudras were artisans and
73
hired labourers. Sharma has studied the origin and development of the
Sudras74 and he stated that the term Sudra was not always used to refer to
conditions of subordination and oppression but also referred to the ruling
elites, especially during early medieval times.75 Attempts have been made to

68
Suvira Jaiswal, Caste: Origin, Function and Dimensions of Change, op.,cit. p.47.
69
Romila Thapar,Ram Sharan Sharma, [1920-20011],Economic and Political
Weekly,Vol.XLV1NO.38,September 17,2011.
70
R S Sharma, Social Changes in Early Medieval India [circa A.D.500-1200, [People
Publishing House, Delhi,1969]. R S Sharma, Material culture and Social Formation
in Ancient India,[1983, Macmillan 1996],pp.23-55.
71
R S Sharma, Mode of Production in Ancient India, in Rethinking India’s Past,
[OUP,Delhi,2009, 2010],p.133. Suvira Jaiswal, Caste: Origin, Function and Dimension
of Change, op. cit., pp.48-49.
72
R S Sharma, The State and Varna Formation in the Mid-Ganga Plains: An Ethno -
archaeological View, [Manohar,Delhi, 1996].
73
R S Sharma, Class Formation and Its Material Basis in the Upper Gangetic Basin [1000-
500 BC]Indian Historical Review,Vol,2:1,July1975,pp.1-5.
74
R S Sharma, Sudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order Down to Circa
A.D. 600,[Motilal Banarsidass Publishersm,Delhi,1958,Third Revised Edition,1990]
75
Aloka Parasher –Sen [Ed] Subordinate and Marginal Groups in Early India, [OUP,
Delhi,2004], Introduction, p.36.

26
study the various aspects of labour and forced labour practice in ancient and
early medieval India.76

Romila Thapar has focused on the changes that took place in the
Gangetic valley for the explanation of formation of a non egalitarian social
order and the origin of caste. Thapar explains the transition of a lineage based
society to the state society in the Gangetic valley.77 She argues that
communities that existed in Vedic period practiced reciprocity and
redistribution and was based on lineage and householding economy. The
lineage distinction appeared in the form of that between rājanya and vis and
in later Vedic times the former had become the senior lineage and the latter
was meant for the junior lineage. Kin- based differences may give rise to class
only in productive economy. The development of these institutions led to the
formation of the state. Thapar held the view that the functional aspects of
castes appear to have been jāti and varna represented the theory of the social
structure. Jāti relationships represented the actual way in which society
functioned. Varna became ‘ritual rank’ whereas jāti was the indication of the
actual status.78

The untouchables and untouchability received prime importance in the

studies of Vivekananda Jha who concentrated in the early north Indian
societies to formulate a general frame work for the study of the origin of
76
P C Jain, Labour in Ancient India: From the Vedic Age up to the Gupta Period, [Sterling
Publishers, New Delhi,1971]G K Rai, Forced Labour in Ancient and Early Medieval
India, Indian Historical Review,Vol.3No.1,July 1976,pp.16-42.
77
Romila Thapar , From Lineage to State: Social Formation in the Mid-first Millennium
BC in the Ganga Valley,[OUP Delhi,1984]. She explains the lineage theory in which
elders enjoy authority and better access to resources at the cost of the juniors because of
their kin based seniority. Thapar also describes the development of householding
economy which means a large , self sufficient households comprising several small
houses , all belonging to the same kin group . The head of the households assumes
power and authority over its members, and also employs labourers not belonging to the
kin.
78
Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretation, [1978,OUP,
Delhi,1996], pp.36-35.

27
untouchability and the communities of untouchables.79 He has argued that the
notion of pollution had historically been developed at different periods which
incorporated several groups into the category of asprasya.80 He also
highlights the way in which a number of ethnic and occupational groups
became servile groups with the mark of untouchability in their social and
cultural life. These groups are designated as impure and various disabilities
were imposed upon them along with severe punishments. These untouchables
and outcaste social groups developed through the historical evolution of
society from pre-state, state and to the feudal society. Jha is able to develop a
class analysis which enabled him to postulate that untouchability developed
out of the notion of pollution that existed in the pre-Mauryan phase of the
post-Vedic class society in northern India.81 The class relation and the
ideology of varna and jāti developed simultaneously. Budhists addressed the
caste inequality and the disabilities of the outcastes and Candālas with ethical
and moral notions and Budhists treated varna as an ideological framework.
He concluded that both budhism in the sixth century C E and the bhakti
movements in the early medieval times did not succeed in dismantling the
domination of varna ideology and the practice of untouchability.

Suvira Jaiswal has argued that the evolution of caste system cannot be
detached from the emergence of patriarchy, class division and state.82 By the
close of the Later Vedic period the varnas were being clearly distinguished on
the basis of caste organization: hierarchy, inherited occupational

79
Vivekananda Jha, ‘Candala and the Origin of Untouchability’, Indian Historical Review,
Vol.121-2July 1986-January11987, pp.3-36. The Brahmanical prescriptive literature,
Budhist and Jaina literature, and also non Dharmasastric Sanskrit literature are used to
reconstruct the history of untouchability up to the period 1200 CE.
80
Vivekananda Jha, ‘Stages in the History of Untouchables’, Indian Historical Review,
Vol: 2, July1975; ‘The History of Untouchability’, Indian Historical Review, Vol.8:1-2
July1986- January 1987.
81
Vivekananda Jha, ‘Candala and the Origin of Untouchability’, op.cit.,pp.3-16.
82
Suvira Jaiswal, Caste: Origin, Function and Dimensions of Change op.cit., P.6.

28
specialization and endogamy.83 The patriarchy was intrinsic to the process of
stratification in Vedic times and clan endogamy that existed came to be
transformed into an instituted form to regulate and reproduce patriarchy as
well as the hierarchy of social groups.84 Jātis emerged within the varna
system through the fragmentation as well as the incorporation of tribal
communities within a structure which regulated hierarchy through marriage
rules and endogamy, and privileged heredity or birth in a particular lineage,
leading to the use of the term jāti for indicating membership in a particular
community. Thus, varnas were extended to provide the institutional and
ideological base for the growth of a wider society.85

Uma Chakravarti has used the Budhist sources and the texts of the
popular traditions like jātakas to offer a very constructive understanding of
the social stratification process in early India.86 She also locates the cultural
subordination and the economic oppression which had led to the caste
subordination and oppression of the subordinated groups. Budhists texts
reflect the existing conception of high and low prevalent in the area in which
they were located.87 The Budhist categorization or system of social ranking
was based on the principle that those who work for themselves as owners and
producers as high and, whereas those who work for others as low.88 The
manual and non manual works were treated as low and high respectively. The
people who were associated with the low material culture like

83
Ibid., p.12
84
Ibid.,p.9
85
Ibid., P.13.
86
Uma Chakravarti, ‘Towards a Historical Sociology of Stratification in Ancient India’, in
Every Day Lives, Everyday Histories: Beyond the Kings and Brahmanas in ‘Ancient’
India.[Tulika Books, 2006], pp.59-69.
87
Ibid., p.62.
88
Ibid., p.63.

29
Chandāla,Pukkusa,Vena and Nesāda were treated as nīca kula or hīna jātis. It
indicated that jāti and kula appear in the concrete situations.89

Occupational divisions among the people were given more importance

in Budhist literature and kula division was used to indicate the social
stratification. The function that one actually performed provided the basic
identity of the individual.90 Uma Chakravarti categorically assume that varna
divisions constituted purely conceptual scheme that had no application, jāti
was both a conceptual and actual scheme of categories based on ascribed
status.91 Importantly, Buddhist did not subscribe to the views of the
brahmanical dharmasāstra literature as the brahmanical model of depicting
the social stratification failed to explain the political and economic life world
and was distanced from the empirical reality of the time.92 Chakravarti has
argued that the representation of a system of stratification independent of
brahmanical scheme has always existed in India.93 She has attempted to
analyse the bondage and servitude including the servitude of dāsis that had
been developed in relation to the dāsa-karmakāras from the Vedic period to
the period of the Guptas.94

89
Ibid.
90
There was relationship between low kulas,low kamma and low sippa , it is suggested
that the kamma [work]or sippa[craft] that provided identity for the lower orders, ibid
,p.65.
91
Ibid., p.63.
92
Ibid, p.66. The brahmanical framework representing caste failed to provide the social
reality as it failed to accommodate the gahapati in to the brahmanical scheme. The
gahapatis were an economics category, a class, who controlled the land who used the
labour of the dāsa-kammakārās to cultivate the land. Therefore ,gahapatis were
agriculturists who controlled the land and labour, ibid ,p.66
93
Ibid., p.67.
94
Uma Chakravarti, ‘Of Dasas and Karmakaras: Servile Labour in Ancient India’ in Every
Day Lives, Everyday Histories: Beyond the Kings and Brahmanas in ‘Ancient’ India,
op. cit., pp.70-100.

30
 Chakravarti further clarifies the process of both class formation and
caste system from gender perspective95 and she argues that it is difference
between class as a system of production and caste as a system of both
production and reproduction that distinguishes the Indian system of
stratification from other regions and introduces the specific complexities of
the Indian situations. Caste cannot be reproduced without endogamy and it is
for this reason that endogamy has been regarded as a tool for the
manifestation and perpetuation of caste and gender subordination.96 She says
that brahmanical patriarchy is a mechanism to preserve land, women, and
ritual quality within it. The whole of the complex formation of social status,
economic production and social reproduction is contingent on what has been
characterized as ‘brahmanical patriarchy’.97 Brahmanical patriarchy implies
the model of patriarchy outlines in the brahmanical prescriptive texts, to be
enforced by the coercive power of the king, or those who act on behalf of the
king. This set of norms has shaped the ideology of the upper castes in
particular. It continues to be the underpinning of beliefs and practices extant
even today among these castes and is often emulated by the lower castes
especially when seeking upward mobility. The caste system and brahmanical
patriarchy work to the advantage of a very few men at the top of the order,
thus, all others who are complicit in this system only facilitate its
reproduction.

Subscribing to the Kosambian argument in analyzing the social

stratification process, Irfan Habib tried to historicise the jāti-varna system of
the subcontinent and he says that the varnas mentioned in Rig Veda is more a

95
Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens, [Stree, Culcutta,2003,
2005]
96
Ibid.,pp.27-34.
97
Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in early India’ in Every
Day Lives, Everyday Histories: Beyond the Kings and Brahmanas in ‘Ancient’ India,
op. cit., pp.138-155, Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens, op. cit., pp.34-36.

31
description of social classes than the caste. The hereditary division of labour
and endogamy did not exist in early Vedic period.98 When primitive hunting
and food gathering tribes entered the general society they were subjugated by
the advanced peasant communities and consequently became the lowest jātis.
Those tribes who were excluded from participating in agriculture became a
large reservoir of servile landless labour and available for work to peasants
and landholders. They were the original untouchable castes.99

Caste system operated in two different worlds of labour, caste labour

belonged to a natural economy and the artisan of the town.100 The self
sufficiency of the village sustained the hereditary artisans and the servile
groups. It not only isolated the village but also enlarged its capacity to pool a
larger part of the surplus to the ruling class. The hereditary occupation
enabled the artisanal groups to accumulate the special skill from generation to
generation.101 Being a relatively rigid form of division of labour, caste
system was part of relations of production. It functioned as much ease in a
natural economy as a market oriented one and it was a system of class
exploitation rather than a fabric of imagined purity102. This structure of
hereditary caste labour in villages and in towns, Habib argues, is practically a
continuation from ancient times to the eighteenth century.

Nilakanta Sastri and his students who studied the Pallavas and
Vijayanagara history did not give any constructive attention to the question of
caste, the formation of untouchability and the oppression of marginal caste

98
Irfan Habib, Caste in Indian History, in Essays on Indian History: Towards a Marxist
Perception, [Delhi , 1995],p.165.
99
Ibid.,p.166.
100
Ibid., p.,169.
101
Ibid., p.171.
102
Ibid., p.177.

32
groups.103 Sastri makes only passing comments on the subordinated and
marginal castes in his voluminous work and commented only on slavery and
agrarian labour rather than untouchability and the untouchable castes.104
Describing the economic life of the village C Minakshi makes a passing
reference to the untouchable castes as ‘in the midst of the cultivated lands far
removed from the main village the Pulayas or Parayas lived’.105 She also says
that the Pulayas and Parayas were the lowest in the social order and lived in
paracheri with the condition of little better than that of serfs.106 This kind of
treatment is also made by T V Mahalingam in his study of the Vijayanagar.107
The existence of a hierarchical system of caste division is attested by him108
and he also subscribes to the view, mainly following the information given by
the foreign travelers account, that there existed slavery in Vijayanagara109 and
the rulers of the kingdom upheld the varnāsramadharma.110 However, the
question of caste oppression and the untouchability do not get attention in the
works of Minakshi and Mahalingam.

An important study concerning the economic conditions of South India

from 1000- 1500 C E is done by A Appadorai in which the material basis of
social existence of the people is described.111 The types of village

103
K A Nilakanta Sastri, The Cōlas [First Volume in 1935 and Second Volume in 1937
second Revised Edition in one volume in 1955 and third Reprint, University of Madras,
Madras,2000]. ibid, p.555 and p.567.
104
Ibid., pp.555 and p.567.
105
C Minakshi, Administration and Social Life under the Pallavas, [1938][University of
Madras, 1977],p.159.
106
Ibid., p.200.
107
T V Mahalingam, Administration and Social Life Under Vijayanagar [1940, University
of Madras ,second Revised Edition, 1975].
108
Ibid.,pp.14-30.
109
Ibid.,pp.10-11.
110
Ibid., p.14.
111
A Appadorai, Economic Conditions of Southern India [1000-1500 A D] 2Vols,
[University of Madras ,1936, Reprint, 1990].

33
communities112 existed in different localities in South India and how it
contrasted with the view given by the colonial administrators’ on the Indian
village communities113 are also described in this work. Detailed description of
land tenure system and the agriculture practices of South India are given. The
small tenants and the hired labourers are base of agriculture practices.114 He
argues that slavery undoubtedly existed in South India in the medieval
period.115

Kathleen Gough has tried to postulate the theory of mode of production

with the notions of Asiatic mode of production116 to analyse the changes in
the political economy and the production relation from the first half of the
ninth century CE until the middle of the eighteenth century in South India in
general and Thanjavur in particular.117 The land tax and the rent were
identical, upper share called mēlvāram belonging to the king and the lower
share called the Kīlvāram to the cultivators. The vellanvagai villages were
communes containing a kinship community of peasants or Vellalars together
with specialized smaller caste and kinship groups of village artisans and other
village servants. These inhabitants held the land in joint possession.118 In
such villages each peasant household organised part of its own cultivation, but
communal labour persisted for major undertakings such as digging out
112
Ibid., Vol .1,pp.69-97.
113
They are Sir Henry S Maine [Village Cammunities,1871] Baden Powell, Maine [Indian
Village Communities,1899]
114
A Appadorai, Economic Conditions of Southern India op.cit.,pp.253-254.
115
Ibid.,pp.313-322.
116
There are attempts to critically engage with the concept of AMP , Brendan O’ Leary,
The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism and
Indian History,[Basil Blackwell,Camebridge,1989], see Chapter 7 ‘The Asiatic Mode of
Production and Indian History’,pp. 262-329. M J K Thavaraj, The Concept of Asiatic
Mode of Production: Its Relevance to Indian History, Social Scientist, Vol.12, No.7,
July, 1984, pp.26-34.
117
Gathleen Gough, Modes of Production in Southern India, Economic and Political
Weekly, Annual, No.Vol.15, No.5,6 and 7,1980,pp.337-364.
118
Ibid.,p.344.

34
irrigation channels and transplanting, harvesting and threshing rice.119 The
artisans and other village servants belonged to separate endogamous caste
below the peasants. The village slaves were called adimai and most of them
were descended from the conquered tribes who had earlier possessed the
lands out of which the irrigation state was carved. They were called Parayar
and they lived as separate kinship communities.120 They specialized in
ploughing wet rice lands, transplanting the seedling, harvesting, threshing the
crops and they were attached to the land.121 Slaves, and perhaps ordinary
peasants, were corveed to build and repair irrigation channels and to quarry
and transport stone for palaces and temples, make roads and drag heavy ruins
of royalty. They were also used large scale irrigation and drainage works
consisting of dams, reservoirs and numerous channels leading from the
Kavery.122

As far as Kerala in the early medieval period is concerned, Kathleen

Gough argues in line with the AMP and substantiated that the claimate and
terrain along with the heavy rainfall and numerous rivers and streams Kerala
had no need for large irrigation works and this also influenced to develop the
political structure which hardly developed centralized state system and
bureaucracy.123 It is because this that she characterizes the economy and
society that existed in Kerala as ‘feudal’. The Brahman ūr and the settlements
of royal and noble aristocrats are conceptualized as a kind of manor where
they ‘owned’ the village in a form of a possession known as janmam.124 The
estates of the temples are autonomous. At the village level , personal and

119
Ibid.
120
Ibid.,p. 345.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
123
Ibid., pp.349-350.
124
Ibid., 349.

35
inter- household ties of service bound the village lord to his military Nāyar ,
and below them to each household of artisan or other village servants , to
separate the households of tenant serfs of the Tīyar or Īzhava caste, and to the
lowest Untouchable households of patriarchal slaves who carried out rice
cultivation. The slaves were fewer in Kerala than in Thanjavur for wet rice
region was less. The important point she makes is that the tenant-serfs who
cultivated dry lands and orchards were more numerous in Kerala.125

Noboru Karashima has studied the Chōla inscriptions126 and says that
the inscriptions of Rajaraja, the Chola king, have references to certain
tīndāchēri, the residential area of untouchable communities.127 It also
mentions certain parai-chēri, the residential area of the Paraiyar. Karashima
is of opinion that there was a faire prevalence of paraichēri in the villages in
the Cholamandalam.128 The tīndāchēri and paraichēri are one and the same.
The social position of Paraiyar was at the bottom of jāti hierarchy. Karashima
states that the Paraiyas and Pulayas had become slaves to be transferred
[adimailadiyār] by the fourteenth century.129 Pallar who were a community
who lived mostly in Thanjavur and Tiruchirappalli Districts appeared to have
become slaves which is attested in the nineteenth century palm- leaf
documents130, much later than the Chola and Vijayanagar period. Karashima

125
Ibid.. Each Nāyar vassal households of the village lord also had a small collection of
Izhava serfs and Untouchable slaves attached to it, who worked the land which was
leased by the vassal house from the lord’s estate and also that possessed hereditarily on
military service tenure by the vassal house. On the lord’s own demesne, a large number
of serfs and slaves labored directly in his service, ibid.
126
Noboru Karashima, Y Subharayaalu and Toru Matsui, A Concordance of the Names in
the Cola Inscriptions [Three Volumes] ,[Sarvodaya Ilakkiya Pannai, Madurai, 1978].
127
Noboru Karashima, ‘The Untouchables in Tamil Inscriptions and other Historical
Sources in Tamil Natu’ in H Kotani [Ed ], Caste System, Untouchability and the
Depressed [Manohar, Delhi,1999], pp.21-30.
128
Ibid., p.22.
129
Ibid., pp.26-28.
130
Ibid., pp.26-27.

36
concludes that certain communities were considered untouchables during the
Chola period, though their identity was not very clear. Parayas and Pulayas
were engaged in menial jobs and were made slaves [adimai] and transferred
from one owner to another. He states that the conditions of these untouchables
do not seem to have changed much since the Chola period.131

Karashima has studied the historical nature of village community and

the structure of power network over those village communities.132 Communal
ownership and the economic and social independence or self sufficiency was
often attributed as the common nature of the village communities133. There
were different residential areas in the villages134 and Parayas in those villages
were employed for cultivation operations.135 They have separate well and
cremation grounds, paraikulakuzhi and paraichuchudukātu.136 However, the
villages did not have as independent a nature as has been presumed by
historians following the view taken by Maine and Marx.137 Dharma Kumar
studied the land ownership in medieval south India especially the communal
131
Ibid., p.28.
132
Noboru Karashima, ‘Integration of Society in Chola Times’ in South Indian History and
Society: Studies from Inscriptions- AD 850-1800, pp.36-68.
133
Ibid.,p.42.
134
Ibid., pp.46-47. Different residential areas are ; ūrnattam [ūrirukkai] ,kammalachcheri,
paraicheri, vannarachcheri,izhachcheri,tindachcheri,talaivaycheri, etc. The existence
of different residential areas indicates the actual location of a number of social groups
engaged in different occupations and therefore there was division of labour based on
caste difference in those villages, ibid.,p.54.
135
Ibid.,p.48. [uzhapparayaririkkum kīzhāchccheri and uzhapparayaririkkum
mēlaiparaichēcheri are the epithets denoting the separate residential areas of the
Parayars,ibid.]
136
Ibid., pp.49-50.
137
Ibid.,p.55. Two types of villages, ie. brahmadeyam and the non brahmadeyam are
studied by Karashima, the Isanamangalam and Allūre respectively. Individual
landholding existed in the brahmadeya village where the land holders and cultivators
formed two distinct classes. The communal land holding existed in the non-
brahmadeya villages where the landholders themselves were the cultivators. ‘Alllur and
Isanamangalam: Two South Indian Villages of Chola Times’ in History and Society in
South India: Cholas to Vijayanagar; South Indian History and Society, [OUP, Delhi,
2001], pp.3-15.

37
ownership of the village and the collective possession of the extended
households.138

The social life of the Ādisūdra caste during seventeenth and

eighteenth century in western Deccan and Konkan region under the Maratha
kingdom / Peshva government has been studied.139 The Mahar , Mang and
Chambar were the Ādisūdra communities and they were historically
incorporated to the exploited framework of the village system called vatan
system. The contact with an Ādisūdra was regarded as bringing impurity
which was also considered to be transmittable to other persons and various
purificatory ceremonies were conducted to the eradication of such impurity.140
There were measures to avoid physical contact with the Ādisūdras in villages,
temples etc.141 To prevent any physical contact with the Ādisūdras their
dwelling places were restricted and their settlement called mahārvāda were
located outside the village walls.142 Sometimes, their dwelling places were
relocated and occasionally changed due to the hard measures of the practices
of untouchability.143 Caste was officially ranked, a stratified caste ranking
was existed among the Ādisūdras, and each caste was represented by its head
to the state or its representatives and vatan system enabled the effective
control of the various castes within a frame work of exploitation.144 The sin –
penance, dōÀa- prāyachitta, and ideology must have been used by the

138
Dharma Kumar, ‘Private Property in Asia? The Case of Medieval South India, in
Colonialism, Property and the State,[ OUP, Delhi, 1998], pp.135-170.
139
Hiroyuki Kotani, ‘Adisūdra Castes in the Medieval Deccan’ in H. Kotani [Ed], Caste
System, Untouchability and the Depressed, [Manohar,Delhi, 1999], pp.55-75.
140
Ibid.,pp.56-57.
141
Ibid., pp.57-58.
142
Ibid., p.58.
143
Ibid., p.59.
144
Ibid.,pp.60-63.

38
medieval state in Decan to the continuation of caste exploitation and
subordination of the marginal castes.145

Theoretical Issues:

Considering the understanding of social stratification process in pre-modern

societies and the issues involved in the formation of endogamous groups
leading to the caste hierarchy, certain theoretical positions and
methodological issues have helped the researcher to develop the analytical
framework for problematising the topic of research. The dominant
methodological orientation of nineteenth century sociology, as the discipline
of history, was positivism. However, the critics of positivism developed the
methodological concerns over explanation and understanding of social reality
as against the notions of positivism. One of the main theoretical developments
was the social action theory. The historical world has been defined, as the
notions given by the social action theories, both in terms of its constituent
parts [individual experiences and interactions] and the comprehensive
structural whole. Human actions and experiences were not external data but
idiosyncratically146 subjective and formed part of a humanly created historical
whole.147 Dilthey has defined the society in terms of interactions and
individual as an element in the various systems of interaction.

Sociology began to give much importance to social action in general

and the notions given by George Simmel and others got prominence in
German sociology in particular. This was further developed by Max Weber

145
Hiroyuki Kotani, Dosa[Sin] –Prayascitta [Penance] the Predominating Ideology of
Medieval Deccan’ in Masaaki Kimura and Akio Tanabe [eds] The State in India, Past
and Present ,[OUP,Delhi,2006],pp.103-119.
146
Dilthey has separated the natural from the cultural sciences, the former is nomothetic
science concerning with the establishing general law and the latter is idiographic
sciences concerned with unique and unpredictable events.
147
Allen Swingewood, A Short History of Sociological Thought, [1984, Second
Edition,Macmillan ,London,1991],pp.128-132.

39
who formulated a methodology to understand the integration of individuals
into the culture and Weber located it within a social action frame work with
certain holistic categories.148 The fundamental task of social science,
according to Weber, is to analyse the society as a structure of meaning-
endowing actions centered on the human subject.149 Therefore, he defined
sociology as a science ‘which attempts the interpretative understanding of
social action in order to arrive at a causal explanation of its cause and
effects’.150 He formulated a methodological device called ideal type to
analyse the social action and ideal types are probable and unique rather than
certain. These ideal types are the historical formation of capitalism and the
Protestant ethics, bureaucracy and feudalism and types of action such as
rational action, rational goal oriented action, affectual action and traditional
action. The social formations and institutional structures are to be studied by
reducing them to the understandable actions of participating individuals.
Thus, the main task of sociologists, according to Weber, is to interpret the
meaning of social actions, rational actions of the individuals in the
motivational structure of culture. However, Weber’s theory of social action is
not separable from the social system. The meaning of social action is inter-
subjective, the social whole conferring historical meaning to individual
actions.151 Society as a social system and the study of which is developed as
the study of society as the product of non logical social action can be seen in
the works of Vilfredo Pareto.

148
Weber ‘s sociological methods were developed as a response to evolutionary positivism
and the intellectual culture of Marxism that was developed in German world and he uses
the categories like Protestant ethic, pre- industrial social structures, bureaucracy and
nation state to explain the social action.
149
Ibid., p.142.
150
Ibid., p.143.
151
Ibid., p.149.The motivational structure of culture for the development of spirit of
capitalism is found only in the Western Europe.

40
 Durkheim has argued that social institutions exist to fulfill specific
social needs and he influenced the development of sociological
functionalism.152 The social facts worked to promote the social solidarity.
Durkheim’s functional approach to the study of institutions emphasised
synchronic, structural dimension of society at the expense of the
diachronic.153 It treated the society as a differentiated and integrated whole
in which the various elements exercise interdependence function to sustain a
complex unity. The social typologies like mechanical and organic solidarity
are postulated to explain the function of elements.154 Radcliffe – Brown
maintained that culture which constitutes the functionally interrelated system
and argued for the functional unity.155 Functionalism became a theory of
system analysis and Talcott Parsons was the leading figure who developed the
theory of structural functionalism which emphasised structural properties of
social systems and its functional interrelations.156 However, structuralism
defined the social reality in terms of the relations between elements, not in
terms of things and social fact. Observable social phenomena are meaningful
only in so far as it can be related to an underlying structure or order.157

By the beginning of 1970’s, there appeared the crisis in anthropology

and in other social sciences, leading to the search for alternative

152
Heine Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen [eds], Classical and Modern Social Theory,
[Blackwell, Massachusetts, 2000], pp.57-72.
153
Allen Swingewood, op. cit., p.226.
154
Ibid.
155
Ibid.,pp.226-227.
156
Heine Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen [eds], op.cit., pp.218-229.
157
Allen Swing wood, A Short History of Sociological Thought, op.cit., p.296. It
originated in the study of language [Saussure and Jakobson] and has exerted influence
in anthropology [Levi-Strauss], semiotics and literary theory [Roland Barthes]. It made
significant analytical impact upon Marxism and sociology [Althusser and Poulantzas]
,economics [Godelier],philosophy [Foucault] and psycho-analysis[Lacan], Heine
Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen [eds], op.cit., pp.278-289. Allen Swing wood, A Short
History of Sociological Thought, op. cit., pp.296312.

41
approaches.158 It offered a powerful challenge to the structuralism as a
dominant model and stood against the notion of structural totality as
structuralism could not have been a basis of the general theory of pre-
capitalist modes of production.159 It resulted in the formation of
investigations and analysis of pre-capitalist social and economic
formations.160 There began the increasing tendency among the French and
American anthropologists to make use of the notions of mode of production to
concentrate on pre-capitalist formations and relations of production of those
formations. The code word of this form of analysis has been economic
anthropology for some non -Marxist anthropologists, but rather, it is an
academic endeavor to apply the concepts of historical materialism to primitive
social formations.161 For Marxist anthropologists and others the central
problem was the role of kinship in primitive societies.162 Kinship dominates
the reproduction of social relations but this does not mean that the economy is
not determinant.163 In a primitive society kinship relations dominate social
life, they determined the places occupied by the individuals in production ,
their rights to land and goods , their obligations in respect of work and gifts
etc. Then, they function as production relations, just as they act political and
religious relations.164 Kinship is here both infrastructure and superstructure.

158
David Seddon[Ed], Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic
Anthropology, [Frank Cass, London 1978], Preface, pp.7-13.
159
Jean Copans and David Seddon, ‘Marxism and Anthropology: A Preliminary Survey’ in
David Seddon[Ed],Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic
Anthropology, op.cit., p.2.
160
Ibid., pp.1-46.
161
Ibid., p.7.
162
Ibid., p.36.
163
Ibid.
164
Ibid., p.37.

42
Accordingly, the correspondence between productive forces and production
relations is at the same time correspondence between economy and kinship.165

There are attempts to study various primitive and pre-capitalist social

formations by the anthropologists using the notions of historical
materialism166. Primitive economies are under productive where the labour
power is under used, technological means are not fully engaged and natural
resources are untapped167. Kinship relations of the domestic groups are
important to organise these economies. Slash and burn form agriculture made
production primitive and thus economy is characterised by under
production168. The economy of primitive society is largely functioned by the
involvement of social groups whose kinship relations developed the house
hold the dominant form of family system in determining economic activities
which also developed household as work group with appropriate technology
and division of labour.169 It evolves a specific form of man –tool relation and
the primitive relation between man and tool is the condition of the domestic
mode of production.170 It is intrinsically an anti –surplus system, production
for the use of producers. Certainly there is exchange but production is
oriented to livelihood, not to profit. The kinship relations prevailing between
households must affect their economic behavior.

165
Ibid.
166
The French anthropologists are pioneers in these attempts who heralded new methods
and analytical tools in the understanding of primitive social and economic structures.
Marshal Sahlin who worked on the domestic Mode of production, Emmanuel Terrey on
lineage mode production, Maurice Godelier has detailed on the object and method of
economic anthropology and Claude Millassoux on the social organization of peasantry
and the economic basis of kinship.
167
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, chapter Two ‘Domestic Mode of Production:
the Structure of Under Production’, [Tavistock, London [1974]1984], pp.41-43.
168
Ibid.
169
Ibid., pp.74-78.
170
Ibid., pp.79-86.

43
 The production process and the relations of production developed in
self sustaining kinship groups must have developed a segmentary and lineage
based society of its own.171 Claude Millassoux formulated the idea of mode
of production of lineage based segmentary societies, although other Marxist
anthropologists have developed these concepts during 1970’s. Millassoux is
of the view that cultivation of soil by self subsistence kinship groups requires
very short term production techniques and human energy is the main source
of power.172 However, Emmanuel Terray also makes the point clear that the
modes of production should not be confused with a general description of an
economy. According to him mode of production is a three part system, an
economic base, a juridical -political structure and an ideological super
structure. In the final analysis the economic base is the determining factor
within the system and must, therefore, be the point of departure for the
construction of the theory of the mode of production. The economic base is in
turn, a combination of a system of productive forces and system of relation of
production.173 Productive forces174 and relations of production175 are two
conjoint forms of one and the same process.176

171
Claude Millassoux has studied the Guro of the Ivory Coast and described the mode of
production of the lineage based segmentary society of Guro and Emmanuel Terray has
made critical comments on the work made by Millassoux on Guro , see ‘Historical
Materialism and Segmentary Lineage – Based Societies’ in Emmanuel Terray
,Marxism and ‘Primitive Societies’, [Monthly Review Press, London, 1972],pp.195-
186.
172
Ibid., pp.128-129 and 139.
173
Ibid., pp.97-98.
174
It consisted of all the material conditions of production –raw materials, tools,
machinery, etc, ibid., p.98.
175
Relations of productions entail the relations established between the producers in the
course of their work, ibid., p.98.
176
Ibid., p.99. ‘Social labor is divided into a certain number of divisions , and labor
processes are developed in each of these divisions : a raw material is transformed into a
product by the joint action of the labour force and the means of production and this
operation is carried out according to a specific mode of material appropriation’,
ibid.,p.99.

44
 Societies displaying this mode of production are characterized by
coalitions made of a number of households or domestic units which are bound
together by rights in property which they have jointly inherited and which
they jointly manage. They developed into co-operate lineage. Kinship
provides both the ideology by which group membership is justified and the
means by which the labour is coordinated. These mutual rights and activities
lead to members of the junior generation being subjected to the political
authority of the elders, from whom they will inherit the right to the essential
subsistence resources which belong to that group. The authority is therefore
vested collectively with the elders of the groups. Women are often used by the
senior men to create strategic marriages which maintain inter-lineage
relationships in the absence of an overarching political authority. The concept
of lineage mode of production has become a convenient analytical tool to
study the societies of nomadic pastoralists and the subsistence farmers on the
one hand and to analyse how political relations are sustained by collective
property rights and exchange relations on the other.

Emmanuel Terray has substantiated the arguments given by Millassoux

on the lineage society of the Guro of the Ivory Coast by explaining his own
study on Dida community in the West Africa. The whole village is engaged in
net hunting and war. Effective net hunting requires a large party which helps
to create cohesion among lineage. The cultivation is characterized by the
irregular labour demand for various agriculture operations and this was met
by the long term social relationships established between the members of the
lineage. The lineage was held together by the need for cooperation, both
extended and restricted co operations, in agriculture works. In villages where
lineages were strong, extended co operation in agriculture is to be carried by
the whole lineages, while restricted co operation occurred within the lineage
segments.

45
 Both structuralists and the functionalists and the structural
functionalists failed to unravel the location of social relation operated in the
material process of production. It is necessary to avoid the methodological
antinomies that might creep into the analytical frame work of the researcher
who is likely to inherit it from the structural understanding of the social world
and the functional meaning assigned to the economic process of social groups
who create number of relations as part of the production of the material
wealth for their own survival. It is also important to ground the relations
evolving out of the material world of economic production in its proper
historical process. The insights given by Meillassoux while explaining the
social organization of peasant groups in West Africa are important in this
context. His formulations of the relations developed out of the material milieu
of the peasant agriculture are at two levels; first is analyzing the self
sustaining agrarian communities as productive units and the second is the
understanding of the relations of these units themselves.

The term peasant in this context is important; it is a differentiated

group of people living off the land through their agriculture labour and
cultivation being the dominant activity, dominant because it determines the
overall social organization of the community.177 Land in such communities
is treated as instrument of labour178 as labour is invested into the land with the
expectation of a later return.179 Agriculture cycle is divided into successive
productive and unproductive periods.180 The involvement of the people in

177
The agriculture is dominated by the features such as [a] use of human energy n
agriculture work,[b] use of individual means of production requiring little labour
investment,[c] non-methodical division of labour, but rather than allocation of tasks
between the number of productive cells,[d]immediate accessibility to land and raw
materials and [e] self sustenance, ibid,pp.109-110.
178
Hunting and foraging communities use land as subject of labour.
179
Ibid., p.109.
180
Delayed production, accumulation and storage of products and managed distribution are
the characteristics of agriculture, Meillassoux, ‘The Social Organization of Peasantry:

46
agriculture process creates bonds between people at two levels. The first level
is the bond that is created between people who worked together from the time
of the preliminary tasks to the time of harvesting and at the second level is the
relations developed between successive terms of labourers who at each season
are depending for survival during the unproductive periods and for the
preparation for the next cycles. Changing composition of the work team who
are engaged in the labour process is also responsible for the emergence of the
hierarchy in the agricultural communities.181 The social cooperative units of
the segmentary linage groups are included in several productive units in
which segmentation and cohesiveness take place through decentralization of
economic activities and the matrimonial relations.182

The power of the seniors shifts from the control over subsistence to
control over women.183 Therefore, social reproduction of community is
actualized through the authority of the seniors by which both productive cycle
and reproductive cycle, the control of subsistence and the means of human
reproduction, ie, women are regulated by the authority of the seniors. The
reproduction of both products and the producers means the reproduction of
peasant community and their means of subsistence which ensures the
solidarity and hierarchy among the successive groups.184 What is important
here is the failure of both the functionalists and the structuralists and also the
structural functionalists to grasp the manifold aspects of the process of

The Economic Basis of Kinship’, in David Seddon [Ed], Relations of Production:

Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology, op.cit., pp.160-161.
181
The actual hierarchy rests on the notion of ‘anteriority’, the ‘people who come before'
[elders] and ‘people who come after’ [the junior partners/members], Meillassoux, ‘The
Social Organization of Peasantry: ibid., p.161.
182
Meillassoux, ‘The Social Organization of Peasantry: The Economic Basis of Kinship’,
in David Seddon[Ed] Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic
Anthropology, op .cit., pp.160-162.
183
Ibid., pp.162-163.
184
Ibid., pp.165-166.

47
production and reproduction of the peasant community. They also fail to
understand what exactly the kinship relation is, which in our analysis is
nothing but the expression of the relation of production and of the
reproduction of various communities. It should be noted that the
understanding of self-sustaining segmentary societies and their lineage
structure are important. In order to conceptualise the formation of kutis and
the development of households in early and early medieval Kerala, studies
done by Middleton and Tait et al185 and Marshal D Sahlins186 on tribal
societies and their lineage structure provide necessary explanatory framework.

The important point is how the departure was made from the
conventional rational of economics which did not analyse the social relations
involved in the economic activities. Maurice Godelier has attempted to give
the objective and method of economic anthropology which aimed to provide a
comparative theoretical analysis of different economic system.187 It makes
sense of the task of constructing a general theory of various social forms of
man/woman’s economic activity. In this sense, for Godelier, the production is
the totality of operations aimed at procuring for a society its material means
of existence.188 Combination of factors of production is carried out within the
setting of production units, it may be a family holding, the village community
etc. In primitive economies, the village community or the entire tribe is

185
John Middleton and David Tait,[Eds],Tribes Without Rulers, Routledge,London,1958.
186
Marshal D Sahlins, Tribesmen, [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968]. An illuminating
conceptual clarity of tribal social form can be seen in the work of Maurice Godelier,
Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology,[Camebridge, London,1977], see part 1.chapter 3.
‘The concept of the ‘Tribe’.
187
Maurice Godelier, ‘The Object and Method of Economic Anthropology’ in David
Seddon [Ed] Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology,
op. cit., pp.49-126.
188
The forms of production resembles functions according to certain technical rules,
R = Resources, I = Instruments of Labour, M = Men and P = So as to attain a product.
The production or the functional combination of three sets of variables; the factors of
production [ P= R- I-M]. Every production process entails an ordered series of
operations in a given natural milieu, ibid, pp.60-64.

48
mobilized for the production operations. But in an agrarian community
cultivation requires the members other than the family labour which is met
either by relatives of blood or marriage or by groups located outside by force
or cohesion.189 He argues that economic science studies the social relations
that operate in production, distribution and consumption.

Karl Polanyi, an economic historian drawing inspiration from Marcel

Mauses, combining the methods of economics and anthropology, expanded
the subject matter of economics. He formulated a theoretical framework for
the study of economies which were neither industrialised nor organized by
market institutions.190 He has defined economics as ‘substantive’ as it refers
to an instituted process of interaction between man and his environment
which results in a continuous supply of want-satisfying material means.191
He has described the importance of the integration of the economy192 and the
main pattern of the forms of integration is the principle of reciprocity193,
redistribution194 and exchange.195 Polanyi says ‘reciprocity, then assumes, for
a background symmetrically arranged groupings; redistribution is dependent
upon the presence of some measure of centricity in the group; exchange in

189
Economic activities appear as activities with many different meanings and functions, the
economic domain is thus both external and internal to the other structures of social life
and this is the origin and basis of the different meanings assumed by production,
exchanges and consumption.
190
Karl Polanyi et el, Trade and Market in the Early Empires, [1956,the Free Press, New
York, 1957].
191
Karl Polanyi, ‘The Economy as Instituted Process’ in Trade and Market in the Early
Empires, p.248.
192
Ibid., p.250.
193
Reciprocity denotes movements between correlative points of symmetrical groupings,
ibid., p.250.
194
Redistribution means appropriational movements toward a centre and out of it again,
ibid., p.250.
195
Exchange refers here to vice versa movements taking place as between ‘hands’ under a
market system, ibid., p.250.

49
order to produce integration requires a system of price-making markets’.196
Polanyian way of analysis has been developed by his disciples like George
Dalton who developed new frame of analysis to study the aboriginal stateless
societies.197 The studies of Polanyi on economic anthropology have
influenced the French Marxist economic anthropologists198 who have studied
the structures of pre-capitalist formations with a new method and
interpretations. Attempts have been made to study various forms of pre
capitalist modes of production and the condition of the transition from one
mode of production to another is also examined.199

There are two major viewpoints of the nature of the peasantry; the
Chayanovian and the Marxist; the former one is conceptualized by A V
Chayanove, extended and refined by Teodor Shanin and Daniel Thorner. The
characteristic peasants are ‘small agricultural producers who, with the help of
simple equipment and labour of their families, produce mainly for their own
consumption and for the fulfillment of obligations to the holders of the
political and economic power’.200 This is linked to the peasant economy,
peasant mode of production, which is conceptualized as part of a doctrine: the

196
Ibid., p.250.
197
George Dalton, Aboriginal Economies in Stateless Societies in Timothy K Earle and
Jonathan E Ericso [eds],Exchange System in Pre History, [Academic Press, New
York,1977],pp.191-212. Introduction; the Subject of Economic Anthropology, in
Studies in Economic Anthropology, [eds] George Dalton, [American Anthropological
Association, Washington, 1971].
198
Jean Copans and David Seddon, ‘Marxism and Anthropology: A Preliminary Survey’ in
David Seddon[Ed] Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic
Anthropology, op. cit., p.18.
199
Barry Hindes and Paul Q Hirst, Pre –capitalist Modes of Production, [Rutledge and
Kegan Paul, London, 1975]. Barry Hindes and Paul Q Hirst, Mode of Production and
Social Formation: An Auto Critique of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, [The
Macmillan Press, London, 1977].
200
Teodor Shanin, Peasantry as a Political Factor,p.240 quoted in ‘In Search of Peasant in
Early India’ in Uma Chakravarti , Beyond the Kings and Brahmanas of ‘Ancient’
India,[2006]Second Edition, Tulika Books ,Delhi,2007],PP.101-118.

50
theory of the family economy.201 The peasant mode of production is based
on petty commodity production containing only one class and hence was
characterized by the absence of relations of exploitations among the peasant
themselves.202

According to Thorner the most representative units of production are

peasant family households which cultivate its own lands relying its own
family labour. Peasantry as a group is subject and exists to be exploited by
others.203 However, from the point view of production, peasant households
constitute almost independent entities.204 According to the Marxist
formulation peasantry refers to ‘those who labour on the land and possess
their means of production: tools and the land itself’205. Peasants must pay a
rent or tribute to maintain its possession of land. Peasant is different from the
agricultural labourers. In pre- revolutionary Russia, the Narodniks and
populists argued that the peasantry represented a distinct mode of production
which was antagonistic to capitalism.206 However; Lenin rejected this
position and held the view that peasant production represents a special type of
economy characterized by the vestiges of the feudal mode with the aspects of
the expanding capitalist mode. Lenin saw peasant production as the basis for
the development of capitalism.207 The internal differentiation of peasantry

201
Uma Chakravarti, ‘In Search of Peasant in Early India’,op.cit., p.102.
202
Ibid.
203
Daniel Thorner, ‘Peasant Economy as a Category in Economic History’ in Teodor
Shanin [ed]Peasant and Peasant Societies,[Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,1971],pp.
202-218 quoted in Uma Chakravarti, ‘In Search of Peasant in Early India’, pp.102-3.
204
Ibid., p.103.
205
Tom Bottomore et al. [eds], A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, [Basil Blackwell,
1983,OUP, Delhi, 1987], p.363.
206
The supporters of this view point argued that there was no tendency for capitalism to
breakdown, or to develop within, the peasant communities. The populist were in favour
of this position and argued for the isolation of the peasantry against the efforts to unite
the struggles of the peasants with the revolutionary struggle s of the Russian proletariat,
Tom Bottomore et al. [eds], A Dictionary of Marxist Thought,op cit., p.363.
207
Lenin V I, Development of Capitalism in Russia [1899]1960, in Tom Bottomore et al.
[eds], A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, pp.363-364.

51
indicated the fact that capitalist relations of production constantly developed
within the peasant community in Russia. Lenin found that competition led to
the impoverishment of the vast majority of the peasantry and at the same time
a small minority expanded its land holdings. It was this process that
developed poor peasants who sell their labour and became the rural
proletarians, working the land of the emerging rich peasant, who later
developed into agricultural capitalists.208

The term peasant has become a problematic category in Indian social

science practice and it has been influenced by the notions given by the
sociologists and social anthropologists209 . Taking note of the Marxist notions
of peasantry, Irfan Habib has tried to locate the peasant in the agrarian system
of medieval India. He is of the view that the social distribution of landed
property is an important aspect of the medieval Indian economic and social
life.210 Agrarian property system that existed in medieval India and the
peasants and their relation to the land determined nature of the rural life in
medieval India.211 He described the formation of Indian peasantry in different
historical periods.212 Habib argues that the peasants are highly differentiated
rural mass whose property system contained a network of transferable rights
and obligations with different claimants to differently defined shares in the

208
Ibid., p.364. Between these two opposing classes were the middle peasants most of them
were slowly merged with the status of poor peasants and became part of the rural
proletariat, ibid.
209
Vijaykumar Thakur and Asok Anshouman [Eds], Peasant in Indian History: Theoretical
Issues and Structural Enquiries, Vol.1, [Janaki Prakashan, New Delhi, 1996].
210
Irfan Habib, ‘The Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre- British India: A
Historical Survey’ in Essays on Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, op.
cit,pp.59-108.
211
Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, Chapter 4 ‘The Peasant and the
Land; The Village Community, [1963, Revised Edition and Ninth OUP Impression,
2009], pp.123-168.
212
Irfan Habib, ’The Peasant in Indian History’, in Essays on Indian History: Towards a
Marxist Perception, op. cit., pp.109-160.

52
produce from the land.213 Individual peasant production existed with
differentiation which formed village as a community, a net work of caste
division and customary services.214

The existence of untouchables was thus a pillar of Indian peasant

agriculture from very early times, ever since, that is the food gatherers and the
forest folk were humbled and subjugated by settled agricultural communities.
The actual status of many of them in Mughal India too was semi servile,
implying same kind of bondage including the obligation to render forced
labour, begār to zamindars and upper caste peasants. The artisanal and menial
population of untouchables in the village was exploited and the village
community framework functioned as the effective instrument of
exploitation.215

However, the formulation made by Burton Stein to analyse the social

formation and the political structure of medieval south India has been loaded
with the ethnographic perception of the peasantry.216 He failed to grasp the
multiple meaning of the socio-cultural and economic entities which evolved
as part of the social formation process and the differential meanings derived
in the process of the constitution of the tribe, caste and peasant.217 The
clannish groups called kutis in the Tamil anthologies are referred to as

213
Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, op.cit., pp.134-135.
214
Ibid., pp.144-145.
215
Ibid.
216
Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, [OUP, Delhi, 1980].
217
There are number of critical reviews of the segmentary model and peasant state, D N
Jha, The Validity of the ‘Brahmana Peasant Alliance’ and the Segmentary State in Early
Medieval South India, Social Science Probing, June, 1984.D N Jha, Relevance of
“Peasant State and Society” to Pallava Chola Times” in Economy and Society in Early
India, [Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Delhi,1993],R Champakalakshmi, Peasant
State and Society in Medieval South India: A Review Article, Indian am Economic and
Social History Review, Vol.18.Nos.3and 4. Vijaya Ramaswamy, Peasant State and
Society in Medieval South India, Studies in History, Vol.4, No.2 [1982].

53
peasants in the works of MGS Narayanan who also failed to define the term
peasant as a differentiated group.218

The most important problem is the status of the term peasant to be

treated as an analytical category as it lacks explanatory potential to analyse
the various aspects of the social formation process and the multiple forms by
which various historical entities got specific meanings in its historical setting.
The monolithic and undifferentiated way that the term peasant has been used
in historical studies also created certain category mistakes which made the
category peasant a misnomer to address the question of class, gender, caste
and the term peasant itself in South India in general and Kerala in particular.

G E M .de Ste Croix has described the way in which the surplus was
extracted from the primary producers in ancient societies, especially in the
ancient Greek society. The studies made by Croix on the historical process of
formation of slavery in the ancient Greek world give a general framework to
look into the process of the subjugation of the primary producers.219 Class
has been variously defined in terms of status group, occupational category and
income group etc. However, class relations are functioned as mediated
relations and it is mediated through a number of extra economic forms. Class
has been understood here as a relation in the process of production and this is
incorporated in the analysis of the problem under discussion. The insights
given by G E M .de Ste Croix and E P Thompson are important to develop a
perspective.220 While describing the class and class relations in ancient Geek
world G E M .de Ste Croix argues that class is a general concept and is

218
M G S Narayanan, ‘Peasants and Warriors in the Sangam Age’ in Foundations of South
Indian Society and Culture, [Trivandrum, 1976]. M G S Narayanan, the Role of
Peasants in the Early History of Tamilakam in South India, Social
Scientist,Vol,16,No.9,September ,1988,pp.17-33.
219
G E M .de Ste Croix, ‘Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour’ in Leonie J. Archer
[Ed] , Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, [Rutledge, London, 1988] , pp.19-32.
220
E P Thompson, the Making of English Working Class, [Penguin Books,[1963]1986]

54
essentially a relationship.221 Similarly the most important theoretical position
regarding the way one can make use of class in analysing the historical
process is given by E P Thompson and he is of opinion that class is a
historical phenomenon. He does not see class as ‘structure’ or a ‘category’ but
it is happened in human relationship. He argues that the concept of class
entails the notion of historical relationship. The class experience is largely
determined by the production relations into which men are born – or enter
involuntarily.222 Class is relation and it is also meant for the overall position
in the production relation.

This is also the case of gender and patriarchal relations which used to
subjugate women and the primary producers to the coercive power structures.
This must have worked to form and to reproduce the hierarchical structures
like caste system and its ideology and the concept of brahmanical patriarchy
gains importance.223 It seems that there existed complex relationships between
caste, gender224 and class which must have been developed as multiple forms
of power in structuring the hierarchy, subjugation of both women and the
marginalized. There is also the question of the hierarchy and the way in which
it has been conceptualized in the studies made by the anthropologists and
historians. Attempt has been made to locate the caste subordination in relation
to the question of labour.225

221
G E M .de Ste Croix, Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, [DuckWorth, London
[1981]1983], p.32.
222
E P Thompson, the Making of English Working Class, op.cit., Preface, pp.8-9.
223
Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India’,op.cit.,
pp.138-155, Gendering Caste Through a Feminist Lens, op.cit., pp.34-36.
224
Anupama Rao [ed], Gender and Caste, [Kali for Women,New Delhi, 2003].Kumkum
Roy [Ed], Women in Early Indian Societies,[Manohar,Delhi,2005].Jaya Tyagi,
Engendering the Early Households: Brahamanical Precepts in the Early Grahyasutras,
[Orient Longman,Delhi,2008].
225
Peter Robb[ed], Dalit Movement and the Meanings of Labour in India, [OUP, Delhi,
1993].

55
 Labour is an interaction between a person or a group who works upon
the elements of the natural world and consciously alters it in a purposive
manner226. It is a social activity that results in the making of a tangible social
product either in the form of material object or mental artifact. However, there
is no mental labour without the existence of material labour. Labor process is
the process whereby labour is materialised in the use values of the produces
or services. Each labour process takes place within a given set of social
relations of production and implies a particular allocation of the means and
agents of production.227 The primary producing groups are defined as those
who directly involved in the production of subsistence and the surplus for the
existence of themselves and for others. There are references to the groups who
directly engage in the labour process for the production of valued things and
their social labour is appropriated from the time of classical Tamil Texts. In
early medieval period they came to be represented as Atiyār / Āl/ Pulayar ,
Parayar etc in epigraphical documents. They are referred to as existing tied to
the land on which they did their labour. It also shows the way in which the
complex production process that make those people who are engaged in the
direct labour activities the primary producers.

We have seen in the above discussion the development of social action

theories, structuralism, structural functionalism and the phenomenological
approaches and how it conceptualized the social reality and the ways in which
the process of social stratification and the formation of hierarchy have been
theorized . Subjectivist approaches treat desires and judgments of agents as
the centre of social analysis and consider these agents as endowed and
empowered to make the world and act according to their own way. On the
contrary, objectivist views explain social thought and action in terms of

226
Tom Bottomore, Dictionary of Marxist Thought, op.cit., pp.265-270.
227
Emmanuel Terray , ‘Historical Materialism and Segmentary Lineage-Based Societies’
in Marxism and Primitive Societies, op. cit., p.100.

56
material and economic conditions, social structure or cultural logic.228 The
problem under discussion is how to analyse the particular castes which had
been functioning as fussy and floating entities specific to its cultural and
geographical location and how it became part of the whole system of
hierarchy. Many of anthropological theories of caste including the attempts
made by some historians who subscribed to the notions of structuralism and
the structural functionalism tried to focus the hierarchy of castes which has
ended up in relativism, rather than to focus the process that transformed the
fussy entities of particular endogamous groups to particular jātis. It is in this
context certain questions may be raised to be probed.

It is necessary to make an enquiry into the ways in which the multiple

economies that existed in early and early medieval period and what kind of
production processes it evolved. Kuti and ūr in the Mullai-kurinchi region in
early period and its transformation into the occupation and settlement space
of the settlers when the people migrated from the Mullaui -Kurinnchi region
to the laterite parambu areas and to the river valleys and the riparian areas in
the midland is another important point to be discussed. Another significant
issue is the process of social stratification that developed in the multiple
economies in the midland comprising of the forested spaces, parambus and
the estuarine areas along with the development of various production
operations and life activities. It is also to be discussed the ways in which the
production process that developed the ūr settlements of the settler cultivators
and the cultivating kutis and how it became the production localities in early
and early medieval period. How temple centered Brahman settlements
developed in the mid land and the ways through which the ūr settlements of
the settler cultivators and the cultivating kutis sustained the Brahman

228
Pierre Bourdieu, and J D Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, [Polity Press,
University of Chicago, 1992], pp2-59. Pierre Bourdieu, Structuralism and Theory of
Sociological Knowledge, Social Research, Vol.35, No.4, winter, 1968, pp.681-706.

57
settlements by providing the surplus for the existence of latter settlements.
How Nāttutayavar and the households of the settlers developed in both
parambu and the wet land areas and how the Brahman villages get patronage
from them. The most important point for discussion is the process which
developed the primary producing groups in the context of the formation of a
number of overlords and how they became the Atiyār/ Āl or Pulayar.

How kutis retained their rights over the resources including the skill
and knowledge is a significant question to be addressed which would make
sense of the ways in which the occupational gradations developed and were
maintained among the kutis and why and how the kinship descent groups
sustained the thalamura avakāsams. The development of the hereditary
occupation and the form of control over the resources, exchange and
production forms by various occupational groups are also to be probed. The
way in which the households in both Brahman and non Brahman groups had
been developed and how it evolved as collective form of possessions over
material resources are to be interrogated. How the Brahmans, temples and
Nāttutayavars incorporated the structures of different avakasams of the kutis
in to their fold of authority and how they maintained it under their control is
also related to the problem of the development of hierarchy of rights.

The question of clan exogamy in the early period and the ways in
which it had been changed into clan endogamy and then how it transformed in
to caste endogamy in relation to the development of complex division of
labour in multiple economies are significant points to be answered. How the
production process gets transformed into the complex process of agrarian
hierarchy which transformed the hierarchy into a particular system of jātis.
The question is the historical roots of transition to castes and its relation to the
production process. How Brahmans and temples legitimized the hierarchy
with the notion of varnashramadharma and how the concept and the practice

58
of purity and pollutions get materialized to control and subjugate the primary
producers. How can we offer explanations to the formation and development
of castes in the process of production and exchange in relation to the
development of a multiple economies, and the polity dominated by the
Nāttutayavar and the Chēra Perumāl along with the ritual and the ideological
dominance made by the temples and Brahmans is a vexed problem to be
investigated.

Sources and Methodology

The present study is mainly based on the primary sources; classical Tamil
texts, epigraphical materials, which are available from ninth century C E
onwards, and the folk literature pertaining to production operations and labour
process. Secondary material like books and articles are also used to
substantiate the arguments presented. An interdisciplinary method is
followed. The non –conventional sources, primarily the oral texts belonging
to folk literature, are not as contemporaneous as the epigraphical sources.
Even though there are references to people engaged in the labour process in a
number of inscriptions, non-conventional sources, like folk literature reflect
upon the labour process and the historical development of the primary
producing groups. The regressive and productive reading of this genre would
help us to corroborate it with the conventional epigraphical sources for the
understanding of the labour process and the life world of the primary
producers who were engaged directly in the production process.

The problem of the literary sources including the folk texts is its
spatio-temporality. However, literary texts belonging to the brahmanical
tradition like Kēralōlpatti also contains the problem of a literary source in the
case of spatio-temporality of the text; even then, it has been selectively used
to create the narratives of Brahman migrations and establishment of their

59
settlements.229 Similarly, the oral texts are important non conventional
sources to the understanding of the labour process and the location of the
primary producers who were involved directly in the production operations.

The present study is focused on the formation of the primary producing

groups and their involvement in the labour process and the representation of
which is much entrenched in the non-conventional sources like folk literature.
What is required here is a methodological exercise by which the non-
conventional sources can productively be read and interpretatively undersood
to historicise these texts and to corroborate with the conventional sources like
epigraphic materials.230 The remnants of the labour process are floated in
these texts, which is to be regressed to its anterior spatio- temporal location.
The subjective dimension of the life activities of the primary producing
groups are embedded in the literary and folk narratives preserved in oral
tradition and ritual acts. The objective material structure of the political
economy in early medieval period is largely represented in the conventional
epigraphical sources. The subjective experiences of the primary producers are
historically and culturally contingent upon the objective material structure of
production process in the agrarian order. The historical contingency of the
social relation of power and the practical insubordination of labouring body of

229
Kesavan Veluthat, The Keralotpatti as History: A Note on Pre-colonial Traditions of
Historical Writings in India, pp.11-14.
230
Wendy Singer, Creating Histories: Oral Narratives and the Politics of History –Making,
[OUP. Delhi, 1997].Velcheru Narayan Rao,David Shulman and Sanjay Subramanyan,
Textures of Time: Writing History in South Asia, [Permanent Black,Delhi,2000].Walter
J.Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word, [Methuen,
London1982].Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, [Manchester University
Press, Manchester, 1984].Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, [Bungay
1985].Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson, The Oral History Reader,
[Routledge,London, 2000],Jawaharlal Hundoo, Current Trends in Folklore, [Institute of
Kannada Studies, , University of Mysore, 1978].Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, : An
Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, [ARK Paperbacks, London], K N
Ganesh, Vākkum Samūhavum, [Vallathole Vidyapeedam, Sukapuram, 1999]. M R
Raghava Varier, Madyakāla Kēralam,Sambathu Samūham Samskaram,[Chintha
Publishers, Thiruvanadapuram, 1997].

60
the primary producers can be revealed taking into account the corroborative
reading and analysis of both conventional and non conventional sources. The
notions of human geography can also be used to analyse the ways in which
the settlements and production operations materialised and the ways in which
people were made to deploy themselves in different spatialities.231

The Organization of the Study

The present study is arranged thematically into four chapters preceded by this
introduction and followed by a brief conclusion. The first chapter deals with
the nature and importance of the land, labour and production process in early
and early medieval period. The various forms of life activities and the people
engaged in it in the early historic period are dealt with in this chapter. The
migration and settlement of people from the Mullai - Kurinchi region to the
river valleys and the riparaian areas in the mid land and in the laterite areas
are also discussed. Ur and the kutis developed in the midland and the
development of production localities of the settlers and the cultivating kutis
are also delineated. The expansion of agriculture and the formation of a
number of groups and households of both Brahman and non Brahman are also
delineated in this chapter. The instituted development of production process
and formation of number of overlords including the Nāttutayavar and the
temples in relation to the generation of agrarian resources made by the
cultivating kutis and the primary producers are discussed.

The second chapter deals with the various forms of agriculture

practices, multi crops in the laterite parambus including the spices varieties in
the forested areas and the wet land agriculture. The location of primary

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Insights are given in the works such as; Anne Buttmer and David Seamon [eds], The
Human Experience of Space and Place, Croom Helm, London, 1980.Trevor Barnes and
Derek Gregory [eds], Reading Human Geography: the Poetics and Politics of Enquiry,
[Arnold, London, 1997].Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer [eds], Human Geography:
A History for the 21st Century,[OUP, New York, 2004].

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producers in the labour process in the agrarian activities in both laterite and
wetland areas is discussed in detail. Importance is given to the primary
producers who are known to have developed as the Āl / Atiyār/ Pulayar/
Parayar etc engaged in the various labour activities in the production
operations in both laterite and wetland areas. Mixed crop cultivation in the
parambu areas and forest produce including the spices and herbs and their
importance in the multiple economies is dealt with in this chapter. It deals
with the development of agriculture practices and the labour activities done
by the cultivating kutis and the primary producers. The development of a
number of skilled labour practices and knowledge related to agrarian
production are also explained.

The agrarian production process and the formation of hierarchy based

on occupational gradation and the gradation of number of rights related to
material and ideological resources including occupational skill, agriculture
knowledge are discussed in the third chapter. The formation of number of non
producing groups developed in relation to the appropriation of resources
generated by the cultivating kutis and the primary producers and the ways in
which a complex process of redistribution of resources is also discussed. The
historical process of the formation of agrarian hierarchy developing in relation
to the multiple forms of power structure and the complex form of
redistributive economy is also discussed in this chapter.

The fourth chapter deals with the agrarian process and the historical
roots of transition to the castes. It starts with the historical antecedence of the
formation of clan endogamy and the subordination of women by
problematising the gender relations called kalavu and kārpu that existed in the
society represented in the classical Tamil texts. It tries to delineate the pattern
of development of the households and the collective forms of material
possession developed in early and early medieval period. Endogamous

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marriages and the hereditary occupation developed among the kutis of
cultivating and occupational groups and also among a number of non
producing groups who were positioned in various service assignments in the
polity of the Nāttutayavar and the Chēra Perumāl and in the temples are also
discussed. The social reproduction of the production process and the
redistributive process by way biological reproduction of the producing groups
and also the non producing groups is the very foundation of the historical
roots of transition to the formation of castes which is discussed along with the
process of the subjugation of the primary produces as untouchables. This is
followed by a brief but open ended conclusion in which findings of the study
is summed up and suggestions are made for future research.

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