Synopses & Reviews
How do people come to live as they ought to live?
Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of
cultivation: in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar casteandmdash;classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a andldquo;criminal tribeandrdquo;andmdash;Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects today.
In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident, chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and delicacy.
Review
andldquo;The Government of British India, in exercising its imperial obsession to count and classify, created a census category called andlsquo;Criminal Tribes and Castesandrsquo; under which it (in)famously included the Kallar of South India, a caste, since made famous by two monographs, written by Louis Dumont and Nicholas Dirks, respectively. Crooked Stalks is also a book about the Kallar. Its distinction, however, lies in its sparkling difference from its predecessors. Its concerns are contemporary and of a wider import. It is a study of the self-making of a community, historically located at the meeting of four vectorial complexes: civic governmentality, missionary religiosity, progressivism of modernity and Tamil (traditional) andlsquo;virtuosityandrsquo;andmdash;the latter encompassing the wordand#39;s medieval meanings. This is a meticulously documented, convincingly argued, lucidly written work. It is an original.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;In this elegantly written and beautifully crafted book, Anand Pandian explores the connections between ways of making a living and the ways in which people make themselves as moral beings. . . . Crooked Stalks builds on and extends a rich vein of research on Tamil culture and on the colonial history of India. It is particularly illuminating in regard to the study of colonial governmentality and in general is a first-class study in the anthropology of morality, deserving of a wide readership.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Overall, Crooked Stalks provides a rich account of the lives of Piramalai Kallars in Tamil Nadu. . . . The subjects of the book are as vivid, lively and dynamic as landscapes, dams, schools, state institutions, parrots, monkeys, oxen, and cows. These lively subjects are examined in the contexts of nature, civility, oppression, colonialism, power, knowledge and hegemony. . . . Letandrsquo;s hope that the book will be used by scholars, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and students working on colonial south India as a source to understand the power-politics and hegemonic impositions of law and order and civility in India and other post-Colonial lands.andrdquo;
Review
“[Crooked Stalks] is a fascinating and insightful study. . . . Its strengths are numer¬ous. . . . [Pandian’s] insistence that the self-awareness of savagery among the Kallar is an instrument of self-transformation is an important extension of Elias’s seminal work on the history of manners.” A. Whitney Sanford, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics
Review
andldquo;Crooked Stalks is comprehensive, theoretically-sophisticated, and persuasively argued. Scholars and students interested in South Asian agrarian history, ethics, development issues, and agrarian thought will find this book compelling.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Anand Pandian . . . skilfully piece[s] together a coherent, well-grounded, nuanced, and highly relevant work that is, moreover, so well written that you may find yourself wanting to read the book thoroughly and carefully, cover to cover. . . . Pandianandrsquo;s own achievement, in Crooked Stalks, is surely one of the best and most important works on the anthropology of the Tamil people published during the last hundred years, and it certainly will form part of the canon of the subject for decades to come.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Anand Pandian brilliantly explicates the complex linkages between the cultivation and care of the self and the cultivation of the land. I have seen no better illustration of the twin meanings of development as an ethical project and as a socioeconomic one. This ethnographically thick, historically embedded volume will be a major contribution to a range of disciplines including anthropology, history, geography, sociology, development studies, and subaltern studies.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;The Kallars of Tamilnadu were categorized by the British as a andlsquo;criminal tribeandrsquo; in 1918. Anand Pandianand#39;s study of the Kallars today asks ground-breaking questions about how subaltern groups, caught in the webs of colonial stereotyping and postcolonial projects of development, use these and other resources to produce their own sense of moral life. Crooked Stalks stands out for its caring and creative deployment of historical, ethnographic, and cultural material in tracking the presence of the colonial past in postcolonial times.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Crooked Stalks might be read for the sheer lyrical quality of its prose. It draws from two distinct philosophical traditions, and has borrowed from Tamil cinema, something that greatly adds value to a book set in Tamil Nadu, where cinema, ideology and politics have been incestuously bound together in the twentieth century. The book is richly footnoted, comes with a fine glossary and an exhaustive index. It is a product of hard work and has taken good shape in the hands of an anthropologist who has kept his feet on the ground without building an ivory tower of theory and methods around his work.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Anand Pandianandrsquo;s beautifully written Crooked Stalks is animated by a deep engagement with the moral life of an erstwhile classified, condemned and policed andlsquo;criminal tribeandrsquo;: the Piramalai Kallars of the Cumbum valley of south India. . . . [R]eading Crooked Stalks filled this reader with both pleasure, as she got a rare and beautifully written insight into the life of a people, as well as a sense of deep foreboding as to the future of marginalized communities in South Asia.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Anand Pandianandrsquo;s poetically composed book about the Piranmalai Kallars in the Cumbum Valley in southern Tamil Nadu is a timely addition to this genealogy of theorising. It represents an important intervention that opposes the tendency to prioritise structure, power and interest over considerations of the ethical dimensions of culture in the anthropology of India. This is one of the first analyses of how actors themselves ruminate on an ethical life, firstly by defining how it is that they ought to live and, secondly, by postulating pragmatic means through which to live as they ought to.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Pandian is a virtuous ethnographer, a civil participant in multiple traditions. . . . Pandianandrsquo;s concerns are profoundly demotic, and as such they constitute a salutary reminder of what, as anthropologists, we might offer to wider conversations about what it is to lead a good life. Because the horizon of improvement is often so important to our interlocutors, it is ethically necessary for us to treat local dreams of development with the dignity they deserve. . . . There should be nothing shocking in such a stirringly anthropological call to arms, but this is but one of many things we always knew but had forgotten until reminded by this supremely thoughtful book.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;[Crooked Stalks] is a fascinating and insightful study. . . . Its strengths are numerandnot;ous. . . . [Pandianandrsquo;s] insistence that the self-awareness of savagery among the Kallar is an instrument of self-transformation is an important extension of Eliasandrsquo;s seminal work on the history of manners.andrdquo;
Review
and#8220;Poverty and the Quest for Lifeand#160;is a brilliant ethnographic exploration of the complex internal contradictions and tensions in a cultural milieu too long dominated by the sere binarisms of structuralist thought. Singh provides deep insights into the economics of survival, caste relations, forms of worship, and the ethics of sexual passion, never shying away from the problem of describing evanescent phenomena that escape more flatfooted authors or from the meat-and-potatoes aspects of economics.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Overflowing with life in all its practical, religious, political, and aesthetic facets, this extraordinary ethnography stuns the reader with its account of poverty in rural Indiaand#8212;not only as a complicated issue for policy, but as the grounds for rethinking how ethnographers study the ordinary and what the quality of life itself means.and#8221;
Synopsis
An ethnography on the meaning of virtue amongst the Kallar people of rural southern India, who were considered to be a criminal caste by the British colonizers.
Synopsis
The Indian subdistrict of Shahabad, located in the dwindling forests of the southeastern tip of Rajasthan, is an area of extreme poverty. Beset by droughts and food shortages in recent years, it is the home of the Sahariyas, former bonded laborers, officially classified as Rajasthanand#8217;s only and#147;primitive tribe.and#8221; From afar, we might consider this the bleakest of the bleak, but in Poverty and the Quest for Life, Bhrigupati Singh asks us to reconsider just what quality of life means. He shows how the Sahariyas conceive of aspiration, advancement, and vitality in both material and spiritual terms, and how such bridging can engender new possibilities of life.
Singh organizes his study around two themes: power and ethics, through which he explores a complex terrain of material and spiritual forces. Authority remains contested, whether in divine or human forms; the state is both despised and desired; high and low castes negotiate new ways of living together, in conflict but also cooperation; new gods move across rival social groups; animals and plants leave their tracks on human subjectivity and religiosity; and the potential for vitality persists even as natural resources steadily disappear. Studying this milieu, Singh offers new ways of thinking beyond the religion-secularism and nature-culture dichotomies, juxtaposing questions about quality of life with political theologies of sovereignty, neighborliness, and ethics, in the process painting a rich portrait of perseverance and fragility in contemporary rural India.and#160;
About the Author
“Anand Pandian brilliantly explicates the complex linkages between the cultivation and care of the self and the cultivation of the land. I have seen no better illustration of the twin meanings of development as an ethical project and as a socioeconomic one. This ethnographically thick, historically embedded volume will be a major contribution to a range of disciplines including anthropology, history, geography, sociology, development studies, and subaltern studies.”—Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India“The Government of British India, in exercising its imperial obsession to count and classify, created a census category called ‘Criminal Tribes & Castes’ under which it (in)famously included the Kallar of South India, a caste, since made famous by two monographs, written by Louis Dumont and Nicholas Dirks, respectively. Crooked Stalks is also a book about the Kallar. Its distinction, however, lies in its sparkling difference from its predecessors. Its concerns are contemporary and of a wider import. It is a study of the self-making of a community, historically located at the meeting of four vectorial complexes: civic governmentality, missionary religiosity, progressivism of modernity and Tamil (traditional) ‘virtuosity’—the latter encompassing the word's medieval meanings. This is a meticulously documented, convincingly argued, lucidly written work. It is an original.”—E. Valentine Daniel, author of Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way “The Kallars of Tamilnadu were categorized by the British as a ‘criminal tribe’ in 1918. Anand Pandian's study of the Kallars today asks ground-breaking questions about how subaltern groups, caught in the webs of colonial stereotyping and postcolonial projects of development, use these and other resources to produce their own sense of moral life. Crooked Stalks stands out for its caring and creative deployment of historical, ethnographic, and cultural material in tracking the presence of the colonial past in postcolonial times.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
Table of Contents
Prologue and#160;
1and#160; First Impressions, and Further
2and#160; The Headless Horseman of Central India: Sovereignty at Varying Thresholds of Life
3and#160; Mitra Varuna: State Power and Powerlessness
a. Who Ate Up the Forests?
b. Mitra, the Caregiving State
4and#160; The Coarse and the Fine: Contours of a Slow-Moving Crisis
5and#160; Contracts, Bonds, and Bonded Labor
6and#160; Erotics and Agonistics: Intensities Deeper Than Deep Play
7and#160; Divine Migrations: Neighborliness between Humans, Animals, and Gods
8and#160; The Waxing and Waning Life of Kalli
9and#160; Bansi Mahatmaya (The Greatness of Bansi), an Erotic Ascetic
10and#160; Departure, and Marriages and Deaths
11and#160; The Quality of Life: A Daemonic View
and#160;
Notesand#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Referencesand#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Index