Introduction
In 1968, a statue of the Anglican missionary Robert Caldwell (1814–1891) was erected on Chennai's Marina Beach in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Caldwell was one of three Europeans to have their statues placed on the beach by the state government, in recognition of their contributions to Tamil language and literature.Footnote 1 Like his missionary-scholar contemporary George Uglow Pope (1820–1908), whose statue also stands on Marina Beach, Caldwell left a profound legacy on the subsequent articulation of modern Tamil identity. His works influenced the discursive trajectories of Dravidian ideology and twentieth-century politics in Tamil Nadu. Caldwell popularized the term ‘Dravidian’ when he demonstrated the existence of a separate family of southern Indian languages in his ground-breaking 1856 book, A Comparative Grammar of the South Indian or Dravidian Family of Languages.
At the time of writing, Caldwell was in a small minority of colonial scholars in India who wrote about the Tamils in largely positive terms with regard to their position within Indian civilization, history, and culture. Several scholars like Eugene Irschick, Nambi K. Arooran, and, more recently, Ravi Vaithees have traced the long-term influence of Caldwell's book. They have followed the movement of Caldwell's ideas beyond the immediate philological implications of his scholarship, as they shaped the development of key tropes contained within Dravidian ideology through a period of Saiva Siddhanta Tamil revival, the Non-Brahman Movement, the Self-Respect Movement, and the subsequent dominance of Dravidian political parties in Tamil Nadu.Footnote 2 Building on the work of earlier scholars, Nicholas Dirks has highlighted the continuing and complicated legacy of this particular work of colonial scholarship and its long afterlife, not only in terms of contemporary politics and identity, but even in much modern scholarship.Footnote 3 Dirks has also made a direct link between Caldwell's missionary concerns and his scholarship and has examined the complex relationship between Caldwell's work and the later ideas of E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker in relation to Dravidian identity, caste, and Brahmans. Dirks suggests that the broader missionary endeavour in South India, which significantly influenced Caldwell's work, has been elided and obscured by modern proponents of Tamil social discourses that trace their intellectual genealogies to his scholarship.Footnote 4 Most contemporary scholars acknowledge that colonial scholar-missionaries were influenced by concerns in the mission field, but generally do not closely examine in any significant detail these influences and the implications for their scholarship on Tamil society, nor situate this within a more detailed study of Christian missions.Footnote 5
By examining Robert Caldwell's scholarship and his evolving views on race and caste, and their relationship to Tamil civilization, this article aims to demonstrate just how closely this genre of scholarship was linked to British Protestant missionary concerns. In order to contextualize Caldwell's work, in the first half of this article I first closely examine missionary views on the caste system and Brahmans, as well as missionary policies on caste and conversion. At the same time I also examine the evolution of colonial ethnography pertaining to race and caste in India. In the second half of the article, I then examine the substantial shifts between Caldwell's earlier scholarship on the Shanars of Tinnevelly and his later book A Comparative Grammar, to analyse his conscious utilization of knowledge capital in his published work on Tamil language, culture, and history.
Ravi Vaithees, who has examined the links between missionary Orientalism and subsequent Dravidian nationalist discourse, argues that missionaries always considered the reactions of members of the Tamil community when they were producing their work.Footnote 6 This important observation underscores the dynamic nature of knowledge production, circulation, and adaptation in colonial South India. By examining Tamil public reactions to Caldwell's work, this article also demonstrates how published colonial scholarship was often very quickly wielded or contested by Tamil communities for forms of social capital, and how this relationship dialogically shaped missionary writing.
The mission field in nineteenth-century South India
The south of India was in some ways the stronghold of British missionary efforts in the nineteenth century. It had the longest history of missionary activity and also contained the bulk of India's Christian converts.Footnote 7 The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG)—to which Robert Caldwell and other prominent missionary scholars like George Uglow Pope belonged—also had the majority of its converts from the region. British missionary activity in the Madras presidency, as in many other parts of India, existed outside the official government administration. However, it was intimately tied to the colonial enterprise in the British public imagination through missionary-run educational institutions and the efforts of missionaries to engage in humanitarian activities and ‘civilizing’ projects. In practical terms, missionaries, by virtue of their embeddedness within Indian communities, also supplied valuable ethnographic information that was used by the administrative arms of the colonial government. Yet throughout their history, British Protestant missions in the Madras presidency were beset by unique problems and threats to their success and relevance. This included the East India Company's initial opposition to the missionary presence in India, as well as a lack of funding which reflected British congregations’ general apathy towards the Indian missions.Footnote 8 Equally serious problems on the ground revolved around organized and violent opposition to Christian proselytization, high levels of apostasy, and the observance of caste among new Christian converts. It was within the context of these issues in India that Brahmans came to be viewed negatively by Protestant missionaries, both as active opponents to mission work and as potent symbols of a socially pervasive and rigid caste system. The development of missionary anti-Brahmanism was also situated within much broader trends that saw the declining prestige of Brahmans as interlocuters and co-creators of Western knowledge about India. This shift in the attitudes and policies of British administrators, educators, and missionaries took many forms in the early decades of the early nineteenth century, occurred across the Anglicist–Orientalist divide, and reflected the much broader consolidation of the power-knowledge nexus within Western scholarship.Footnote 9
Initially, many British missionaries subscribed to a ‘downward filtration’ conversion strategy: in theory, the Brahmans, who were the highest castes, would be targeted for conversion first; if successful, it was believed that their prestige and influence would precipitate more conversions among the lower orders.Footnote 10 However, after a while it became apparent that most conversions were in fact taking place among the lowest castes. The Brahmans, on the other hand, remained indifferent or even hostile to Christianity and proselytization efforts in the Tamil regions.Footnote 11 Indian Christianity thus became associated with low caste status, as a result of the low caste profile of many early converts. The resultant stigma that higher caste groups attached to converts threatened the success of Christian missions. Missionaries therefore came to view the caste system as one of the biggest impediments to Christian conversion, and they regarded the Brahmans as chief antagonists in their efforts to establish local Christian communities.Footnote 12
Although missionaries shared a general consensus about the detrimental character of the caste system to the maintenance and growth of the Protestant Indian churches, there was no initial agreement as to how the caste system was to be dealt with.Footnote 13 Scholarly work about the culture, history, and ethnographic characteristics of Indian groups and communities by missionaries like Caldwell not only reflected these concerns but also represented one strategy by which issues like caste consciousness could be challenged through the field of colonial knowledge production.
British missionary attitudes to caste
The subject of caste divided missionaries in India.Footnote 14 Some missionaries argued that caste maintained the moral and social fabric of Indian society and that its sudden removal would be extremely dangerous and destabilizing. The Jesuit Abbé Dubois (1765–1848), a refugee from the social upheavals of the French Revolution, challenged his European contemporaries who saw caste as an apparatus of oppression. He argued instead that caste helped India to maintain its civilization and that if caste was eradicated, the whole Indian population would ‘descend’ to the state of the lowest castes, who he described as having abandoned themselves to their natural propensities.Footnote 15 According to Dubois, ‘a nation of Pariahs, left to themselves, would speedily become worse than the hordes of cannibals that wander the desarts (sic) of Africa, and would soon fall to the devouring of each other’.Footnote 16 Dubois’ ideas had a lingering influence on the Protestant missionaries who came to South India in the nineteenth century and encountered the caste system. Later in the century, individuals like Bishop Gell, while arguing that caste practice was essentially wrong, cautioned against an insistence on the total renunciation of caste by catechists and other potential converts before their baptism.Footnote 17
Geoff Oddie has pointed out that while many missionaries opposed caste in the church, some were less willing to denounce it in wider Hindu society. In 1858, the Bishop of Calcutta opposed the suggestion that the government tackle caste because, he argued, it was needed to maintain order in a society undergoing rapid change through education and its levelling effects.Footnote 18 The Bishop's stance also reflected his desire to distance himself from more radical elements in the mission field due to the fear that potential social upheaval would be blamed on missionaries and Christian proselytization, as had occurred after the Mutiny of 1857. A Methodist missionary, Reverend Cooling, also warned the Madras Missionary Conference of 1897 against trying to eradicate caste among the Hindus:
Are we to go on doing our utmost to batter it down? Let us remember that if we do, we are throwing down what is practically the only bulwark Hinduism has against immorality…Is it wise, is it right, for us missionaries to go on destroying the only safeguard to morality that there is in Hinduism, when there is so little hope of the people accepting the only other safe-guard we have to offer?Footnote 19
Another view closely associated with the Danish and German Lutherans of the Tranquebar mission was that although in principle caste should not be allowed to persist among new converts, a hardline approach would only weaken missionary influence and drive converts away from the church. The Lutherans therefore tolerated caste practice in local church services and caste observance among members, in the hope that with deepening Christian maturity, these practices would gradually dissipate without heavy handed intervention.Footnote 20 This view, popular in the eighteenth century among early Protestant missionary figures in South India like Friedrich Schwartz, became a source of great contention in the nineteenth century between the German and Danish Lutheran missionaries and their British and American Protestant counterparts.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the growing consensus among leading missionaries of the latter group was that, without uncompromising interventions, caste would simply entrench itself within convert communities and was therefore not to be tolerated in any form.Footnote 21 Although no uniform consensus was reached on how to deal with caste in every context, firm measures against caste were taken up by missionaries from the major missions like the Christian Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to which Caldwell belonged.Footnote 22 Missionary records reveal that the general attitude among many of these missionaries was that it was better to have fewer ‘true’ Christians than many nominal adherents to the faith. Many ad hoc solutions were put in place, with missionaries often insisting on the complete eradication of caste practices within their churches, despite the potential cost of losing church members. Reverend Sherring's History of Protestant Missions in India includes an account of a missionary, Dr John, who, after repeated warnings to his congregation to stop observing caste during holy communion of their own accord, finally lost his patience and decided to melt the two sacramental cups that were being used for different castes into one single vessel.Footnote 23 This resulted in many members of his congregation leaving his church for a period of time, before eventually returning after he refused to compromise.
In another account, the president of the Free Church of Scotland Mission School, Reverend John Anderson, admitted students from the Pariah caste into the school. The result was that ‘the school was broken up, and the missionary was left to empty walls and a sorrowful heart’ after the majority of higher caste students left in protest.Footnote 24 However, in this account, because he held firm and did not capitulate, the students eventually returned and the ‘Pariah and Brahman’ sat together on the same bench.Footnote 25
Many publications produced by British Protestant missionaries about South Indian missions ran stories about anti-caste measures which repeated similar dramatic narratives that served not only to report events, but to demonstrate to a Christian readership the perseverance and success of the missionaries. These stories often followed a familiar template: after initial hardship and the loss of a substantial number of their congregation, the dogged resistance of the missionaries against caste resulted in returning members and a stronger and more meaningful Christianity among the converts. It was not uncommon for schools, seminaries, and churches to be completely shut down by British missionaries who exercised a policy of zero tolerance in the face of caste observance.Footnote 26 By and large, nineteenth-century British and American Protestant missionaries saw staunch anti-casteism as the defining feature of their period in South Indian mission history, separating them from their predecessors.
In 1841, the Lutheran Mission of Tranquebar dispatched missionaries to Tranquebar to revive the old Lutheran missions. The relaxed attitudes towards caste observance entertained by these missionaries became a source of indignation for British missionaries who realized that their strict measures against caste were being severely compromised. Many of the individuals who had seceded from their churches simply joined the Lutheran churches where they could still maintain their caste practices.Footnote 27 Adding to this was the fact that the Lutheran missionaries also proselytized to converts already attached to other missions.Footnote 28 In the 1858 conference of Ootacumund, a complaint letter against the Lutherans was drafted by representatives of nearly all the other Protestant evangelical societies.Footnote 29
After the re-emergence of the Tranquebar Lutherans on the South Indian mission scene, other Protestant missionaries increasingly advanced the argument that caste was an intrinsic part of Hinduism and was therefore unacceptably ‘heathen’, rather than merely being a cultural practice that stood at odds with Christian values. Its observance, it was argued, was religious in nature and therefore completely incompatible with the proper practice of the Christian faith. This provided a more decisive case against missionaries tolerating caste in any form. In a published letter against the Lutherans, G. U. Pope reflected these ideas, arguing that ‘heathen’ caste should not be confused with civil ‘rank’ or class.Footnote 30 The American Madura mission also passed a resolution in 1847 stating that it regarded caste ‘as an essential part of heathenism’.Footnote 31
Caldwell's Grammar, as I shall explain later, went further than this, rejecting the idea that caste was an essential feature of a monolithic Hinduism, and thereby creating discursive space for the erosion of caste within Hinduism. Realizing that Hinduism was a dynamic amalgamation of different theologies, beliefs, and pantheons, Caldwell argued that caste was an essential part of the Brahmanical Hinduism of North India specifically and that it had been introduced to the South when Brahman priests had assimilated southern religions and sects into a wider Hinduism. Caldwell's largely negative depiction of the Brahmans was tied to his critiques of caste, which were closely informed by these missionary debates and were written against the backdrop of worsening relations between Brahmans and missionaries.
Knowledge and power: Rethinking missionary scholarship
Edward Said's Orientalism precipitated a profound paradigm shift in the way that scholars think through the relationship between the so-called ‘West’ and the rest of the world.Footnote 32 As Burke and Prochaska have argued, the importance of Orientalism lies in the novel methodology it provided to theorize ‘the ways in which race and power shaped the modern world’.Footnote 33 By drawing attention to the relationship between epistemology and material reality, Said showed how European imperialism was dependent not just upon superior military, political, and economic power, but also upon the epistemic power of knowledge regimes. While acknowledging the asymmetries of power in knowledge-production processes in colonial contexts, since the 1990s many historians have challenged some aspects of Edward Said's model of Orientalist knowledge production, particularly in the context of the colonial history of India. They have, for example, largely rejected the idea that knowledge produced by the British about India was monolithic, hegemonic, and uni-directional.
Historians like Eugene Irschick have argued that the colonial production of knowledge was an unstable process involving a dialogue between colonizer and colonized, making a case for greater native agency.Footnote 34 Indian interlocutors tried to anticipate and shape classifications, definitions, and schemas to their benefit when supplying information to British individuals involved in producing forms of knowledge about India.Footnote 35 British officials working within the colonial establishment were actually well aware of this. Many nineteenth-century British writers, for example, attributed nineteenth-century Orientalist privileging of a Vedic Hindu India to the biased accounts of Brahman pandits and translators.Footnote 36 Even in the eighteenth century, these pandits, who were employed by the East India Company to teach European Company servants Indian languages and to instruct these servants on the cultural, legal, and religious aspects of Indian society, were seen to be supplying information that would secure status, power, and relative privilege for their communities in British India.Footnote 37 British awareness of Indian attempts to intervene in knowledge production for social capital, and vice versa, shaped many instances of ethnographic representation into complex and consciously political interactions.Footnote 38 While the accumulation of knowledge and facts about the religions, people, and territories of India was almost universally valued, Susan Bayly reminds us that there was no consensus among colonial fact-gatherers and theorists on issues such as the relationship of caste to race, the universality of caste hierarchies throughout India, and the ethnographic attributes of specific castes and tribes.Footnote 39 In this sense, racial, linguistic, religious, and ethnographic categories, and even the valuing regimes in which they were situated, were often unstable and became sites of contestation.
Missionaries were one of many groups that participated in these debates, contributing to knowledge about India through a variety of dictionaries, travelogues, ethnographic treatises, linguistic analyses, and translations of Indian literary and religious works. Missionaries were in a unique position to write and record their observations about India because they were often embedded within Indian society. David Lorenzen has highlighted how religious and linguistic scholarship was central to the missionary enterprise from the earliest days after the sixteenth-century arrival of Portuguese Christians in India.Footnote 40 Missionaries lived and worked in Indian villages among local Indian communities in a way that travelling census-takers and government ethnographers did not. Some missionaries adopted, to varying degrees, the accommodationist approaches of the Jesuits. Notable figures like Roberto Nobili (1577–1656) and later Dubois not only adopted the customs, clothing, and lifestyle of the Indians among whom they had lived for decades, but fashioned themselves as Brahmans, as a method of gaining local respect and obtaining greater access to these communities.Footnote 41 This embeddedness within Indian social life lent authority to the work of missionary scholars. The rights to missionary ethnographic accounts of South India, such as the one produced by Dubois, were bought and promoted by the East India Company, whose officials realized that little scholarship had been produced on the languages, customs, and culture of the South at the beginning of the nineteenth century.Footnote 42
Due to the fact that some colonial scholars served dual roles as ‘missionary scholars’, their scholarship was often influenced not only by Christian perspectives and world views, but by missionary experiences in India on certain issues as well.Footnote 43 This was especially the case when Protestant missionary scholars were writing about the subject of caste, which, as previously explained, was almost universally held to be the greatest obstacle to Christianity in India among British Protestant missionaries in South India.Footnote 44 Considering the missionary context behind these scholarly works is crucial to understanding why missionary representations of Dravidians developed in the manner that they did.
‘Dravidians’ and Brahmans in Caldwell's scholarship
Nineteenth-century missionary scholars promoted many of the key ideas and conceptual binaries that would cast a long shadow over Tamil nationalist discourse, reformist ideology, and identity politics in twentieth-century South India. Caldwell in particular would attempt to challenge caste by making cultural and ethnic distinctions between ‘Aryan’ Tamil Brahmans, who missionaries associated with the caste system, and ‘Dravidian’ non-Brahman Tamils. In doing so, Caldwell would articulate the cultural characteristics of non-Brahman Tamils and situate his work both within and in opposition to the increasingly racialized understandings of caste and race in Indian history in the scholarship of his time.
The term ‘Dravidian’ was popularized by Caldwell when he postulated the existence of a separate language family of southern Indian languages in his A Comparative Grammar of the South Indian or Dravidian Family of Languages. Caldwell was one of the first missionary scholars to describe the culture and characteristics of this ‘race’ of Dravidian language speakers, focusing primarily on Tamils. The promotion of the idea that Brahmans were historically foreign and had little to do with ‘pure’ Tamil culture thus became a strategy to counter and erode the cultural and religious authority of the Brahmans. To a certain degree, this involved subverting and altering some of the pre-existing ideas about the ‘Aryans’ in Indian history, while reaffirming the ‘Aryan’ roots of the Brahman caste, a popular idea in nineteenth-century colonial scholarship.
The notion that ancient India was composed of Aryans and non-Aryans first came about in the eighteenth century through Orientalist theories about Indian languages after the discovery by William Jones of the Indo-European family of languages and the postulation of an original proto Indo-European language. Due to a gradual conflation of language and race, Orientalists like Jones began propagating the idea that the original speakers of this proto Indo-European language—the Aryans—were originally one ‘race’ of people. Jones himself, like many other Orientalists of the time, was of the opinion that this was a race of conquerors who had subjugated the civilizationally inferior original inhabitants of India.Footnote 45 Subsequent mixing between these groups was thought to have resulted in the decline of Indian civilization. However, certain castes like the Brahmans were thought to have retained much higher degrees of Aryan blood through strict caste endogamy.
Thomas Trautmann refers to this as ‘the racial theory of Indian civilisation’, highlighting that the Aryans were believed to be fair skinned, while the aborigines, who some colonial ethnologists later identified as ‘Dravidians’, were regarded as being dark-complexioned.Footnote 46 Although there were several variations and differences, and the very notion of race would evolve over time, the general model of this theory provided the framework through which European scholars, administrators, and missionaries understood the racial dimensions of Indian history in the nineteenth century. Many colonial scholars came to regard caste and its strict rules as an institution set up to prevent miscegenation between distinct groups.Footnote 47 Therefore, caste strictures and the enforcement of endogamous marriages were believed to have ensured the relative commensality of the ancient Indo-Aryan with the later Indian Brahman. The Brahmans came to be identified as the descendants of the group of ancient Aryans who had entered India.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the non-universality of caste hierarchies and the uniqueness of regions like South India became apparent to ethnologists like Hunter and Ibbetson, who developed more nuanced understandings of Indian society.Footnote 48 However, even though scholars realized that many Indians did not see themselves as part of a monolithic and uniformly structured caste system, many prominent ethnologists of the later nineteenth century, like Herbert Risley, continued to view existing caste relationships as race relationships ‘between peoples of supposedly superior and inferior racial endowment’.Footnote 49 This idea had particular importance in South India, where the unique caste make-up of the Tamil-speaking Hindu population contained almost no intermediary Kshatriya or Vaishya castes, making Sudras the next most prominent local Hindu elites in South Indian society after the Brahmans.Footnote 50 The idea that caste categories masked racial categories was also propagated by missionaries like Caldwell and his contemporaries like Pope, although in these cases, this was eventually used to erode the dominance of the Brahmans rather than to reinforce it.
Even though Brahmans would continue to be regarded as racially superior to other Indian groups in many genres of scholarly literature, the nineteenth century saw the beginning of a gradual erosion of the value formerly associated with their cultural and religious doctrines. In Europe, the French Revolution had led to fears that secularization would lead to social upheaval. The search for a bulwark against this possibility was one of the factors that led to a revival of orthodox Christianity in the form of the Evangelical movement in Britain. One of the key figures of this movement was the British parliamentarian and one-time chairman of the East India Company, Charles Grant. In 1797, Grant, submitted a paper he had previously written to the East India Company board of directors entitled ‘Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals; and the means of improving it’. This paper attacked Orientalist respect for Indian customs, laws, and religion. It argued for an aggressive policy of Christianizing India as part of a newly envisioned duty to civilize it.Footnote 51 Grant argued that Indians were ‘a people exceedingly depraved’ and not ‘amiable and respectable’ as previously represented by some quarters.Footnote 52 Grant's ideas significantly influenced subsequent British policy in India and played a role in the later development of civilizing ideologies.Footnote 53
This new perception of Indian culture and society was accompanied by a growing tendency among British scholars to view Brahmans as oppressive despots. This was especially true in Christian circles, which did not accommodate positive views of Hinduism at this time.Footnote 54 Reverend William Ward of the Serampore mission called Brahmanical Hinduism a ‘fabric of superstitions’ and ‘the most complete system of absolute oppression that perhaps ever existed’.Footnote 55 To Ward, benevolent British rule would enable the wrongly oppressed lower castes to throw off their ‘Brahmanical fetters’.Footnote 56 The Evangelical movement and its critique of the Brahman-centred Orientalism of the eighteenth century profoundly shaped the world views and attitudes of many nineteenth-century British missionaries who entered India.
British Protestant missionaries in South India: Criticism and opposition
On 3 July 1813, due to the efforts of individuals like Charles Grant, William Carey, and William Wilberforce, clauses within the Charter Act were passed by the British parliament, legally allowing British missionaries access to India for the first time, despite the objections of many in the East India Company.Footnote 57 From the very beginning, the Company's court of directors had made it very difficult for missionaries to enter India in the years following the Charter Act. Missionaries travelling on ships to India had to have a special licence from India House and had to pay an exorbitant £500 deposit to ensure their ‘good behaviour’ as a condition for the granting of this licence.Footnote 58 The British Protestant missionaries who made it to India in the early years of the nineteenth century were met with open hostility by many Britons stationed there.Footnote 59 Many felt that the presence of British missionaries would have a seriously destabilizing effect on Indian society and would threaten British strategic and commercial interests in the country. In his letters to the Asiatic Journals penned under the pseudonym ‘Carnaticus’, a British officer from the Madras Army levelled criticisms that were typical of the attitudes of the older Company establishment in India and were very familiar to Christian missionaries in India.Footnote 60 These kinds of published criticisms contradicted missionary accounts, and threatened to undermine British public support. In his letters, Carnaticus criticized the amount of money that was spent on sending missionaries to India, which, according to him, could have been better spent closer to home, helping the people of Ireland:
I wish the well-meaning people of England, who are so fond of extending their bounty in the cause of Christianity to India, would look a little near home; to the starving and wretched groupes of their countrymen in Ireland to save them from the pinching grasp of cold and hunger; to let the Hindoo alone, contented, innocent, and happy; and to apply to the side of real charity and beneficence that heaps of money that are extorted from credulity and weakness.Footnote 61
The officer argued that donations and funding were not only misguided, but were obtained through missionary societies’ misrepresentation of their success in India. He gave the example of badly translated gospels, which were distributed widely but barely understood by Indians and which called into question the assertion by some missionaries that the gospel had spread ‘far and wide’.Footnote 62
In his eyes Christian activity was also dangerous because most Indians viewed it as a threat. His ‘tolerably well-informed’ Indian acquaintances seemed to regard the visit of the Anglican Bishop of Calcutta to South India with deep suspicion and thought it heralded ‘some important revolution on the score of religion in India’.Footnote 63 Suspicion of Christian motives and the inability of Indians to differentiate between the Company government and Christian institutions were, to him, the biggest obstacles to the establishment of British control in India.Footnote 64
In his letter to the Asiatic Journals, Carnaticus frequently argued that missionary challenges to the caste system in India would result in Indians adopting the supposed alcoholism and immorality that characterized the European lower classes.Footnote 65 Additionally Christianization would be a step towards blurring the distinctions between Briton and Indian.
To the missionaries it was imperative to emphasize that Christianity could and would improve the lives of Indians. Their opponents, like Carnaticus, challenged this assumption by criticizing the quality and character of the converts. Casting them in a negative light, he said that converts were universally shunned by their countrymen and by European gentlemen who refused to entertain them because they could not be ‘trusted with liquor nor with money’.Footnote 66
Another related criticism, which missionaries were acutely aware of, was based on the fact that the bulk of their converts came from the lower and Untouchable castes. Critics claimed that the bulk of Christian converts in India had converted for pragmatic reasons, seeking to increase their social standing and secure material provisions.Footnote 67 Carnaticus's letters also reveal to us that high caste conversions were so rare and followed by so much social stigma that when news spread of a converted Brahman residing in Madras, an informal ‘investigation’ was undertaken by his associates to discover the nature of his conversion. Suspicions against his character were confirmed when it was discovered that the Brahman had converted to avoid being killed for committing incest.Footnote 68 High caste members who converted were often similarly suspected of doing so to avoid the wrath of their community for criminal offences or for violating caste rules, or simply because they had been expelled from their caste group for similar infractions. Due to suspicions like these, and subsequent ostracization from their caste communities, Christian conversion for high caste Brahmans in many cases entailed a radical reduction in social status.
Missionary representations of conversion were heavily informed by the criticism that converts were mostly from low castes and that these converts were not drawing any moral or spiritual benefits from Christianity. Missionary societies that relied on financial support from congregations in Britain had to prove to them that the mission effort in India was indeed a worthwhile enterprise and was bearing fruit.Footnote 69 This involved demonstrating beyond mere conversion statistics that new converts were of good character and were actually making moral progress after conversion.Footnote 70 One measure that was used to determine moral progress was the disappearance of caste practice, and missionary publications of the nineteenth century are filled with dramatized accounts of the progress made against caste in the Indian Christian community.
After the Mutiny of 1857, missionaries had also managed to turn caste into a salient issue in Britain. Public opinion supported missionary action against caste based on the argument that caste had not only instigated the rebellion, but now threatened the potential for any social progress to be made in India.Footnote 71 However, missionary efforts against caste and tradition were viewed by many in the Indian government as a contributing factor to the Mutiny and to numerous other uprisings in South India that were exacerbated by British intervention in religious issues. The Mutiny and other nineteenth-century rebellions ushered in a heightened policy of British non-interventionism in Indian cultural matters that would come to characterize official policies on issues like caste.Footnote 72 Sasha Riser-Kositsky has highlighted how after the Mutiny, caste was even seen by prominent individuals such as James Kerr, the principal of the Presidency College of Calcutta, as a stabilizing institution that would preserve British rule through a strategy of divide and rule.Footnote 73
One way in which missionary scholars supported their moves against caste, while defending themselves against the accusation that they were creating unrest by challenging native customs, was by disputing the idea that caste was an intrinsic part of historical southern Indian culture. It was also in missionary interests to elevate public estimation of the cultural standing of the lower castes. This developed as one strategy for tackling the criticism that the lower castes were not at a requisite stage of civilization to properly and meaningfully receive Christian teachings. Caldwell's Comparative Grammar directly addressed these sorts of issues, and in doing so, he offered a radically different account of Dravidians, and of Tamils in particular, than had been featured in existing colonial ethnography.
A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages
Caldwell's most famous and influential work, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856), is a convincing argument for the independent origins of South Indian languages.Footnote 74 The bulk of this work presents a consolidation of linguistic evidence to support its central claim. A testament to the book's scholarship is how Caldwell's theories dominated the field of Dravidian linguistics for almost 70 years after it was first published.Footnote 75 Caldwell's introduction to A Comparative Grammar does not merely introduce the idea that southern Indian languages like Tamil are not derivative of Sanskrit, but also contained many new and important ideas about the Tamil language, Tamil culture, and Tamil peoples, which were based on philological evidence but also went far beyond the immediate scope of philology. In the book also Caldwell makes several value-laden claims about the cultural implications of the independence of Dravidian languages and literature from Sanskrit.
A central theme that can be identified in his writing is the casting of Brahmanical Hinduism and Sanskritic culture as being culturally foreign to South India. This is clearly illustrated by the manner in which Caldwell implicitly ranked southern Indian languages based on their ‘purity’. This he defined by the absence of Sanskrit loan-words and influence.Footnote 76 According to Caldwell, Tamil was to be privileged above all other Dravidian languages because it was the ‘purest’ and least tainted by foreign Sanskritic loan-words and concepts—reductively binaristic assumptions that have been critiqued by contemporary scholars like David Shulman.Footnote 77 He also defined different layers of Tamil culture, articulating what, to him, was an original and authentic layer underneath the contemporary layer that had been adulterated by Aryan influence. He identified contemporary South Indian Brahmans as the descendants of foreign Aryans who settled in South India centuries ago and had slowly undermined and attempted to suppress Tamil literature and culture, introducing foreign concepts like idolatry and the caste system.Footnote 78 It is this introduction, which Vaithees calls ‘clearly polemical’, that perhaps gives us the clearest indication of Robert Caldwell's missionary influences.Footnote 79
Like most colonial writers of his time, Robert Caldwell utilized the racial theory of Indian civilization, framing Indian history as being defined by interactions between different racial groups. However, he reversed some of the common valuing regimes associated with this theory at the time. Instead of depicting the Indo-Aryan Brahmans as the bringers of culture to the less civilized natives of the South, Caldwell argued that the Brahmans transplanted northern Sanskritic influences on an already developed Dravidian culture.Footnote 80 Although Dravidian culture was, according to Caldwell, simpler than Indo-Aryan culture, he suggested that it was better off without Brahmanical ideas like the caste system. Here Caldwell was explicitly challenging existing Orientalist ideas about the value of Sanskritic and Brahmanic culture, and he was doing so at a time when many of these ideas were beginning to pass out of vogue both within European scholarship and in terms of British government policy in India on issues like native education.
Caldwell paid careful attention to emerging ideas in colonial scholarship, and at other points he was careful to position Tamils in affirmative depictions within existing theories of race, martial qualities, and civilizational progress. For example, he argued that Tamils or the ‘Tamulians’, as other scholars and ethnologists like Max Muller and Brian Hodgson called them, were not the aborigines of India. This was significant because of the negative place the ‘aborigine’ occupied in the colonial imagination and because that label had lowered the status of non-Brahman South Indians in other colonial accounts. The Indian autochthon came to embody a few different archetypes in colonial ethnology. In the later part of the nineteenth century some ethnologists viewed certain ‘aboriginal’ and casteless hill tribes in a positive light as remnants of an older India unpervaded by caste and characterized by a masculine freedom. The popular viewpoint at the time of Caldwell's writing in the mid-nineteenth century, however, was that the lower castes themselves represented the original inhabitants of India who were conquered by the Indo-Aryans and then absorbed back into the lower strata of society.Footnote 81 Among certain missionaries who viewed the lowest castes as the original inhabitants of India, the Indian aborigine was viewed in the later part of the nineteenth century as the wrongfully degraded former ‘child of the soil’ whose hereditary right to the land had been usurped.Footnote 82 This also meant that several ethnographers, especially those influenced by the increasingly racial paradigms of the European scientific establishment, viewed the conquered aborigines in a negative light, as being a weaker and less dynamic race than the conquering martial Aryans. This viewpoint mirrored popular British self-perception in the context of colonial expansion. The conquered aborigine was also portrayed as being uncivilized and backward and as occupying a very low rung on the ladder of human civilizational progress.
Caldwell did not challenge the negative connotations associated with the term ‘aborigine’, often himself referring pejoratively to other tribal groups associated with this category and disputing their status as ‘Tamulians’.Footnote 83 He instead argued that the Dravidians were not aboriginal, but, like the Aryans, had also entered northwestern India at some time in the past. He criticized Brian Hodgson and Max Muller for being hasty in identifying the Tamils as the autochthons of India.Footnote 84 Caldwell also addressed ideas of martial prowess and race by suggesting that the Aryan Brahmans had entered South India on invitation rather than through conquest, and that relations between the Dravidians and the Aryans in the past were of a ‘peaceable and friendly character’.Footnote 85 Caldwell did suggest that the Dravidians were pushed South by other groups—but by other non-Aryan tribes, thus refuting the suggestion that the contemporary Brahmans of South India were at the top of the South Indian social strata by virtue of the martial superiority of their ancestors.Footnote 86 The idea that the Brahman caste throughout India actually represented a distinct racial community was being adopted and promoted not only by Europeans but by western-educated Brahman scholars themselves.Footnote 87 As scholarly understandings of India moved away from a cultural basis for privileging a Brahmanical Hindu India and towards a hierarchized racial understanding of India and the caste system, many Brahman elites began to assimilate and adopt this racial discourse and to identify themselves racially with the British as fellow Aryans, seeking a European scientific framework to legitimate their social dominance among Indians in Hindu society.Footnote 88 Caldwell's ideas were situated within this increasingly racialized thinking about caste, but demonstrated interesting subversions of the dominant ideas of the day.
The de-emphasis of caste and the paradigm of ‘race’
When it came to prevailing ideas about race and caste, Caldwell did not challenge the idea that caste stratification was related to racial differences in India.Footnote 89 What he did question was the idea that the tiers of caste in South India denoted a gradation of racial purity or value. In so far as it could be used to distinguish Aryans and non-Aryans, caste was indeed a marker of race. However, beneath the ‘Aryan’ Brahmans, Caldwell identified all subordinate castes in South India as being uniformly ‘Dravidian’, without introducing a hierarchy among the non-Brahman Tamil castes. This emphasis on two clearly marked categories of people was a radically simplified way of presenting the composition of South Indian society.
Another way in which Caldwell managed to attack the validity of the caste system in South India was by arguing that the four-fold Varna system did not apply to ancient societies in South India. To Caldwell, the hereditary categories of priest, warrior, merchant, and labourer did not reflect social stratification, but were artificially imposed onto South Indian social structures later on. He noted the peculiarity of the fact that the northern Brahmans who had settled among the Dravidians and formed them into castes did not assign them castes higher than Sudras, regardless of their social standing, and he attributed this to trickery on the part of the Brahmans.Footnote 90 He also went as far as to suggest that ‘the entire mass of Dravidians were considered by Manu and the authors of the Mahabharata and the Puranas as Kshatriyas by birth, but that this fact was consciously ignored by Brahmans in South India.Footnote 91 He argued that it was better to address non-Brahmans by their self-designated Jati names, like Vellala and Nayakka, according to the prevailing customs of specific locations, instead of trying to reclassify the various Jatis into the four-fold caste system according to the law codes of Manu.Footnote 92
In saying that caste and Varna were inapplicable to Dravidians, Caldwell was making a few firm assertions about the historical characteristics of Tamil culture. Even though caste-based discrimination was an almost universal aspect of Hindu life in Tamil-speaking regions across all caste groups, and was even practised by a considerable section of Tamil Christians, Caldwell denied that caste practice represented genuine Tamil culture. In doing so Caldwell envisioned an essential and unchanging Tamil culture rooted in the past—what Dirks calls a fundamental layer of ‘institutions and beliefs that are simultaneously premodern and transcendent of historical process and origins’.Footnote 93 According to this framework, Caldwell considered the contemporary practice of caste in South India to be a form of cultural dilution and inauthenticity resulting from external historical interventions. In order to advance this argument, he represented Tamil-speaking Brahmans as being wholly separate and distinct from the rest of the population. Caldwell also refrained from suggesting that Tamil-Brahmans were themselves a mixed Aryan/Dravidian race, an idea which became popular in the later part of the nineteenth century among British ethnologists and was included in the Madras Census Report of 1891.Footnote 94
The Tinnevelly Shanars
Eight years prior to the publication of his Grammar, in 1849, Robert Caldwell published a pamphlet on the Shanars of Tinnevelly, the region he was based in soon after he transferred from the London Missionary Society to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1841.Footnote 95 Caldwell's Grammar would demonstrate significant points of departure from this earlier publication, and his experiences with Shanar reactions to his pamphlet would not only serve to embitter him, but also to inform his understanding of how affirmative European scholarship could be selectively appropriated and instrumentalized by Indian communities as a form of social capital.
In the early nineteenth century, the Shanars were a low caste community whose primary traditional occupation consisted of climbing and extracting juice from Palmyra palms. They also comprised the bulk of new Christian converts in Tinnevelly, which was the most Christianized province in India during that period. When the pamphlet was published, the vast majority of Shanars were not literate and it is clear that Caldwell did not include them in his planned readership.Footnote 96 Instead, his pamphlet was aimed at a European audience sceptical or apathetic to the quantitative and qualitative successes of mission work in South India.Footnote 97 He intended to demonstrate to European readers the civilizing potential of Christianity by placing the debased nature of the pre-conversion Shanars on full display. Labelling them as a low caste, he proceeded to describe their religion as a form of grotesque demonolatry, revolving around the appeasement of malevolent spirits and deities through practices like blood sacrifice. Caldwell coupled this negative description of the non-Christian Shanars with the claim that they were more receptive to Christianity since their religious practice stood outside orthodox Brahmanical Hinduism.Footnote 98
Because of his descriptions, the government of Madras allegedly came to classify the Shanars as a low caste. As M. S. S. Pandian has highlighted in an editorial that explores the modern distortion of Shanar history by Hindutva revisionists, the educational work of the missionaries also resulted in creating upward social mobility for the Shanars.Footnote 99 Despite this, many Shanars were greatly angered at Caldwell for seemingly cementing their caste history through his publication. Among this group were many Shanar Christians who seceded from the Anglican Church and formed their own native Shanar church: the Hindu Christian Church of Lord Jesus at Prakasapuram in 1857. In that year Sattampillai, the founder of the church, wrote a treatise on the Shanars, alleging that they actually belonged to the Kshatriya warrior caste. Over the next 75 years, no fewer than 40 similar caste histories were published by Shanar writers.Footnote 100 These Shanar spokesmen utilized a European linguistic methodology and raised a theory about the etymology of the word ‘Shanar’ to argue for their allegedly ‘noble’ past.Footnote 101 Latent anti-Caldwell sentiments among the Shanar community erupted again in 1877, when he was appointed coadjutor bishop, with some activists demanding that he write a new pamphlet to refute his earlier version and afford them a higher Kshatriya caste status. Under pressure, Caldwell removed the publication from circulation.Footnote 102 When writing about anti-Caldwell sentiments among the Shanars, Caldwell's colleague and fellow missionary John Sharrock noted that ‘instead of the Christian “Shanars” being grateful to the bishop for raising them from a low Sudra caste to an honourable position among other Christians, they never forgave him, but clung with feverish anxiety to their supposed privileges as a caste and sadly embittered his declining years’.Footnote 103
This example demonstrates Caldwell's intimate awareness of how ethnographic publications were being used by communities who were beginning to deploy, appropriate, and even contribute to European forms of knowledge. They were doing so as part of an expanded repertoire of strategies in the pursuit of social capital and upward mobility at a time of significant social change. It also demonstrates the struggles Christian missionaries had with getting local Christian converts to reject the caste system. Many reasons lay behind this. The caste system, with its multitude of sub-castes, or Jatis, and rules to govern relations between them, operated on what the author of India's constitution B. R. Ambedkar later termed ‘graded inequality’.Footnote 104 This meant that even low castes perpetuated the caste system by practising discrimination against those beneath them in the caste hierarchy.Footnote 105 Caste hierarchies were also fluid and, as seen, certain castes could attempt to improve their status by reimagining the histories of their castes and by trying to imbue themselves with a more ‘noble’ ancestry. This was part of a wider practice that some contemporary sociologists have termed ‘mythic repositioning’.Footnote 106 Caste members also attempted to raise their status in a process that is now called ‘Sanskritization’, which entailed adopting practices associated with higher castes (like vegetarianism) and ascending the caste hierarchy over time through the acquisition of gradual concessions in the regulatory protocol governing their relations with higher castes. By classifying the castes, and standardizing caste hierarchies, the British administration solidified certain caste structures by narrowing the space in which inter-Jati relations could be contested.Footnote 107 Because of the process of Sanskritization itself, many members of the lower castes sought redress from caste persecution, not by attacking the entire structural edifice of the caste system, but merely by challenging their positions within it.
As a deeply entrenched social and religious institution, caste did not disappear or become inapplicable to new Christian converts in the eyes of their surrounding Hindu countrymen. On the contrary, many Shanars felt that by sharing the sacrament of Holy Communion with other Christian converts from lower castes, the social status of their own caste would suffer.
The persistence of this sentiment came as a surprise to many missionaries who, as mentioned, began to employ a conceptual distinction between social and religious customs, a distinction that may not have been meaningful within the lived realities of individuals in South Indian society. Many missionaries felt that since caste was a religious institution, conversion to Christianity ought to have been followed by a separation between the new convert and the social status associated with his or her former Hindu caste.
The example of the Tinnevelly Shanars also demonstrates that nineteenth-century Indian communities were not only aware of the impact that the circulation of the printed word could have on the status of their community, but that with increasing access to Western education, they could also utilize the social capital associated with European discourse and the methodology of European scholarly practice to actively participate in instrumental knowledge creation by exerting pressure, supplying information, or, increasingly, through direct authorship.
Social capital and scholarly representations
In contrast to his 1849 pamphlet, in the preface to his Comparative Grammar, Caldwell specifically included Tamils among his target readers.Footnote 108 He was well aware from the reception of some of his older writing that his ethnographic descriptions could influence the government policies of the Madras presidency, especially in terms of the specific regimes of classification that were employed to categorize local sections of the population. Here he presented a far more positive account of Dravidians and Tamils specifically. The overwhelmingly positive descriptions that Caldwell made in this book even prompted other nineteenth-century scholars to critique him and question the objectivity of his account. George Campbell, writing in the Asiatic Journal of Bengal in 1866, implied that Caldwell's zeal for his ‘beloved Dravidians’ had caused him to ‘to establish for them an aristocratic pedigree without acknowledging obligation to the Northern Hindoos’.Footnote 109
In his Comparative Grammar Caldwell introduced the idea of a common Tamil culture. He often referred to the positive cultural attributes of the Tamils as a broad, linguistically defined category regardless of caste or Jati, with the exception of the Tamil-speaking Brahmans. Caldwell described the hardworking, enterprising nature of the Tamils in Ceylon and their willingness to travel to places like Penang and Singapore.Footnote 110 He even compared the Tamils with the Scots, writing, ‘in short, wherever money is to be made, wherever a more apathetic or a more aristocratic people is waiting to be pushed aside, thither swarm the Tamilians, the Greeks or Scotch of the east’.Footnote 111 In his pamphlet on the Tinnevelly Shanars, not only did Caldwell call the Tamils the ‘aboriginal race’ of South India, in direct contradiction to his later claims, but he also identified the demons that the Shanars worshipped as being specifically Tamil deities, with Tamil origins.Footnote 112
In sharp contrast to the way he talked about how the Shanars’ lives and actions were dominated by the fear of these demons in his pamphlet, in his Grammar he stated that the Tamils were ‘the least superstitious and the most enterprising and persevering race of Hindus’.Footnote 113 In his account of the Shanars, Caldwell also seemed to speak positively of Sanskrit, as opposed to the Tamil language, because of its lexical capacity for words, which conveyed abstract spiritual meanings with Christian equivalents like ‘soul’. This, he argued, was absent in Tamil.Footnote 114 This positive appraisal of Sanskrit is noticeably missing in his Grammar. Caldwell instead suggested that the word for ‘image’ or ‘idol’ was a foreign Sanskritic import and that the concept of idolatry did not exist in Tamil culture until it was brought to South India by the Brahmans.Footnote 115
With these new positive depictions, Caldwell attempted to influence the identity discourses of the Tamil community, describing values that demonstrated the exceptionalism of the Tamil community. These values also included traits that were, in his view, compatible with Christianity and conducive for eroding the characteristics of Hinduism that were at odds with Christian proselytization.
Brahman and non-Brahman elites and the caste question
Christian missionary attitudes to Brahman communities in South India hardened when it became apparent that the ‘downward filtration’ conversion strategy that focused on securing conversions among Brahmans first was not bearing fruit.Footnote 116 Most missionary successes were being seen among the lower castes, who were often converting in large village groups rather than as individuals. Brahman conversions to Christianity were in fact so rare that individual instances of Brahman conversion were celebrated and given special attention in missionary publications.Footnote 117 As missionary efforts shifted towards improving the living and social conditions of converts from the lower strata of Tamil society, relations between missionaries and Brahmans worsened further when the latter began organizing anti-Christian agitation in response.Footnote 118 This agitation, which was most pronounced in the Madras presidency, was closely linked to Hindu upper caste grievances about the breaking of caste protocol by low caste Christians who were encouraged to improve their living standards by missionaries.Footnote 119 Serious riots occurred in 1822, 1828, and 1830, when upper caste members attacked Christian Shanars out of resentment over their rising status.Footnote 120 On several occasions in Tinnevelly, where Caldwell was stationed, planned anti-Christian activity also erupted into high-profile violent attacks against low-caste Christian converts and their property in incidents like the Tinnevelly Riot of 1858 and the Nallur Disturbances of 1845.Footnote 121 The Vibuthi Sangam or ‘Sacred Ash’ Society was responsible for instigating both of these incidents of violence. The Vibuthi Sangam was an anti-Christian, Hindu revivalist voluntary organization, which modelled itself on a Christian mission society and even conducted Christian-style services with benedictions to a triune of Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu.Footnote 122 According to Robert Frykenberg, the establishment of societies like the Vibuthi Sangam represented the shift in anti-Christian action from sporadic violence from landowners and upper caste members against low caste Christians, to sustained opposition against Christian missions within a modern organizational framework.Footnote 123 In one incident, the Vibuthi Sangam sent messages to the headmen of convert villages forcing them to attend a Hindu rally at Trichendur under the threat of violence. Several villages were attacked, prayer houses were destroyed, and villagers were forced to smear ash on their foreheads in the custom of Saivite Hindus.Footnote 124
One of the reasons the Vibuthi Sangam achieved a considerable presence was because it managed to integrate members from across the entire caste spectrum within its ranks, in a similar style of vertical integration that is seen in modern Hindutva organizations today.Footnote 125 One of the leaders of the attack mentioned above, Muthukutty, was himself a Shanar. The society managed this even though, unlike many other neo-Hindu movements of the nineteenth century like the Brahmo Samaj, it still emphasized Brahmanical caste-based stratification. Missionaries were aware, however, that most of the higher leadership positions of these organizations were not held exclusively by the Brahmans, but also included other elite Tamil communities, like the Vellalas who collaborated with the Brahmans in various ways to exert their social and caste dominance.Footnote 126 Outside of these organizations, many of these non-Brahman elites also exerted pressure on the British authorities to reduce the influence of missionaries.Footnote 127
An important question therefore remains as to why the Brahmans were targeted for criticism, if missionaries like Caldwell knew that other elites groups like the Vellalas had also played a large role in perpetuating caste prejudice in society.Footnote 128 Caldwell not only chose to refrain from criticizing the Vellalas, but instead explicitly highlighted this community in his affirmative description of a rational, unsuperstitious Dravidian people. One possible explanation for this was that Caldwell wished to exploit tensions and competition between the Brahman and Vellala communities. Caste ensured the privileges of the Vellalas over lower castes, but it also placed limits on their position within the social hierarchy. Up until the 1820s, Vellala and Brahman students were still segregated in public schools and educational institutions, often occupying different classrooms altogether.Footnote 129 As the nineteenth century progressed, Indian elites placed an increasing premium on education and government and public administrative positions. Elite, educated Vellalas who were qualified for such jobs came to resent what they perceived as a Brahman monopoly on these positions and felt unsettled by increasing Brahman privilege not just in the cultural sphere through caste and religion, but in the secular political sphere as well.Footnote 130 David Shulman highlights that the ‘surviving symbiotic aspects of Brahman and non-Brahman (especially Vellala) social roles also broke down dramatically towards the end of the nineteenth century, under the colonial regime’.Footnote 131
Tapping on the antagonistic aspects of this complicated relationship, not only did Caldwell define the Tamil-speaking Brahmans as outsiders in an essentially Dravidian Tamil society, he also offered evidence to suggest that the ancient northern Indian communities held the Dravidian languages and Dravidians in a certain amount of contempt, calling the Dravidian languages ‘Paisachi’ or the language of demons.Footnote 132 According to Caldwell, who was of the opinion that educated Vellala Tamils harboured a ‘jealousy of Sanskrit’, this ancient Sanskrit contempt for Tamil was mirrored by the inferiorization of Tamil by nineteenth-century Brahmans.Footnote 133 Caldwell argued that these Brahmans, galvanized by the Orientalist privileging of Sanskrit, attempted to marginalize Tamil in educational institutions and promote the value of Sanskrit.Footnote 134 It would have been known to Caldwell, and indeed his predecessors like Ellis, that the Tamil pandits at the College of Fort St George, who were responsible for the earlier scholarship on Tamil that preceded and influenced their work, came entirely from higher non-Brahman castes, including the Vellala.Footnote 135
The argument that the Tamil language had been historically marginalized and denigrated would also later contribute to a developing discourse on the historical victimization of Tamil culture that would be championed by Vellala scholars in the later nineteenth century. Caldwell was not the first to suggest a historically antagonistic relationship between Sanskrit and Tamil, and, by extension, a similar relationship between Tamil Brahmans and the Tamil language. Rather, Caldwell's use of philology to significantly sharpen, articulate, and advance this discourse tapped on older, pre-existing strands of thought and emerging ideas evident in eighteenth and early nineteenth century colonial and indigenous scholarship. Venkatachalapathy notes that the notion of a pure form of Tamil, distinct from Sanskrit influence, and of the recognizably different nature of both languages was already expressed in dictionaries of the period authored by Europeans with the assistance and influence of non-Brahman Tamil pandits who sometimes held antagonistic views towards Sanskrit.Footnote 136
Caldwell's Grammar was therefore published during a longer era of social contestation between Brahman and Vellala groups in the Tamil regions of South India. Much of this antipathy was expressed publicly, for example, in Madras presidency newspapers of the time.Footnote 137 Robert Caldwell's description of an original casteless Dravidian race provided educated and elite Vellalas with a discursive means by which to assert themselves against the Brahmans and to create forms of social capital tied to the emerging field of knowledge about Tamil. With the Brahmans excluded from the cultural merits of Tamil culture and literature, and with the cultural basis of the caste system denied, the Vellalas were able to use Caldwell's scholarly legitimacy to discursively position themselves in the most eminent positions within a reimagined ‘Dravidian’ Tamil culture. Caldwell's Grammar was also the most prominent openly affirmative European scholarly work on Tamil published amid a nineteenth-century Tamil language revival, when Tamil classics were being republished in print format and scholars were making a case for the literary sophistication of the Tamil language.Footnote 138
The reaction against perceived Brahman hegemony was accompanied later in the nineteenth century by renewed attempts to draw a distinction between Tamils and Brahmans in discursive accounts of Tamil identity. Non-Brahman elites like the Vellalas also sought to define Tamil culture and imbue it with a value that was not contingent on the Brahmans or Brahmanical culture.Footnote 139 Dietrich Reetz has highlighted that it was during the mid-nineteenth century that regional groups in India like the Tamils, Sikhs, and Pathans began to see a wave of cultural revivalism.Footnote 140 Amid the categorization and descriptions that were being used by colonial scholars and administrators to comprehend and order India's cultural diversity, regional, religious, and ethnic groups began to shed their insularity and see themselves in relation to other groups across India as they strove to define themselves and compete for economic and social benefits. Self-definition in some cases involved the creative and selective appropriation of existing European scholarship to tailor an empowering account of an ethnic group's culture and history. Caldwell encouraged non-Brahman Tamils to see themselves as a distinct group, inspiring Tamil language specialists to undertake comparative philology. Many of Robert Caldwell's ideas would be used later by Vellala elites like P. Sundaram Pillai and Maraimalai Adigal to assert a Dravidian identity against the Brahmans for what arguably were initially Vellala caste interests. The Dravidian movement would later expand to include members across the different strata of Tamil society. Anti-Brahmanism, however, would continue to be a defining characteristic of twentieth-century politics in Tamil Nadu, in part a legacy of missionary scholarship and the nineteenth-century mission field.
Conclusion
Caldwell was hardly alone in his position as both a missionary and a scholar in the context of colonial South India. Working on religion, his contemporary G. U. Pope also produced a number of highly regarded and influential translations and scholarly works on Saiva Siddhanta and Tamil literature that cast a long shadow on the articulation of Tamil identities in the twentieth century. Many other missionaries produced writings on culture, religion, and ethnography not only within the Madras presidency in British India, but across the trans-imperial world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently, scholars have examined the interactions between religious beliefs and the ethnographic and natural science scholarship of missionaries in diverse locations such as the South Pacific, the Belgian Congo, and Gabon, among many other places.Footnote 141 These scholars have demonstrated how supposedly ‘objective’ missionary scholarship was often complicated by evangelism, missionary concerns, and a strong desire by missionaries to reshape and reconstitute the societies in which they were working.
This particular study of Caldwell has demonstrated how the institution of caste was challenged and philology was used to advance ethnographic depictions of race, identity, religion, and culture that were conducive to Christian missionary efforts in Tamil South India.
There is also evidence to suggest that from the time he arrived in India, Robert Caldwell spent a fair amount of time considering mission strategy in relation to issues like caste.Footnote 142 His decision to assign the Brahmans a foreign origin had philological backing according to the standard ideas at the time regarding the links between language and race. Yet the value judgements he makes in his Grammar reveal an element of missionary anti-Brahmanism that must have come in part from his personal experiences as a missionary in South India, and in Tinnevelly in particular, where he witnessed first hand violence and aggression against convert communities and organized political action against the missions.
Caldwell personally considered caste to be one of the biggest obstacles to Christian missions in the South.Footnote 143 His writing was positioned for, and found a receptive audience in, non-Brahman elites during a period of contestation brought about in part by colonial society in Madras.Footnote 144 The narratives within Caldwell's Grammar, and his previous experiences in publishing ethnographic material, also demonstrate not only how he was able to strategically position his scholarship in relation to existing ethnology of the time, but also his ability to do so in a manner that would maximize the receptivity of Tamils to his work. This was shaped by his past experience of hostile local reactions to his scholarship.
Caldwell's scholarship therefore provides a lens through which to understand the intersections of missionary experiences and the highly dynamic and dialogical field of knowledge production in South India, at a time when Indians were themselves utilizing Western education and forms of knowledge to participate in colonial knowledge production as a strategy for acquiring social capital for themselves and their communities. More broadly, this article has examined how Christian missionaries were able to actively and consciously participate in the epistemic ruptures and social changes that occurred as a result of colonial interactions and encounters. They were able to do so by virtue of their unique positioning between local communities and imperial power, their access to knowledge-production capital, and their keen understanding of how newly emerging local elites were utilizing European forms of knowledge.
Competing interests
None.