Anand Pandian
Johal Chair of Indian Studies, Institute of Asian Research
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology & Sociology
University of British Columbia
W/ http://urlsnip.com/415836
Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil
Country
Saturday, May 13, 2006 | 16:30 - 18:30 EST
This paper concerns the emergence of the agrarian landscape as a paradigmatic
space of collective virtue in the political discourse and popular legacies of
twentieth-century Tamil Nadu. Prominent ideologues of the early Dravidian
movement sought to identify civility or "nakarikam" in southern India with the
imagined nature of its dominant peasant communities. By the mid-twentieth
century, Tamil literary critics had coined "panpadu" as a Tamil neologism for
"culture," identifying the term with a cultivated state of heart, speech, and
deed. In the official school textbooks and print media through which the term
began to circulate, such cultivatedness was often identified with the conduct
and character of the agrarian citizenry. Numerous popular Tamil films from the
1960s onwards have promoted peasant heroes as icons of virtuous conduct,
culminating perhaps in the "nativity" genre of contemporary Tamil film that
roots Tamil culture in the quotidian trials of rural existence. This paper
tracks reverberations of these representations in the ethical life of agrarian
cultivators in the Cumbum Valley of southern Tamil Nadu, exploring agricultural
practice as a terrain of moral distinction. Tracking discourses of virtue
between tea stalls and tilled fields, I seek to account for the conditions under
which the cultivator may be taken as a sign of cultivated being in contemporary
south India.
Dr. Pandian's research concerns the cultural politics of development, nature, and identity in Tamil Nadu. He is currently completing a book manuscript regarding the social reform of a caste of putative thieves in the Madurai countryside, and beginning work on a second project concerning representations of rural life and landscape in Tamil cinema. Dr. Pandian is a co-editor of Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (2003). Other publications include "Securing the Rural Citizen: The Anti-Kallar Movement of 1896" in the Indian Economic and Social History Review (2005); "An Ode to an Engineer" in Waterlines: The Penguin Anthology of River Writing in India (2003); "Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India" in the Journal of Historical Sociology (2001); and "Land Alienation in Tirunelveli District" in the Economic and Political Weekly (1996).