The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu Footnote 1 teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body cloth. While a few young women wore printed blouses, many, particularly the older women, wore no upper-body clothes except for large, beaded necklaces made of red-colored stones. Most people, with the exception of the men who clothed their upper body, walked along the sides of the road, leaving the path clear for the occasional bullock cart. These bullock carts, also known as villuvandi, carried young men-about-town, almost exclusively landowning, upper-caste Nairs. Dressed in a spotless white shirt, white mundu, and matching white turban, the Nair riding his villuvandi assumed the haughty air of a master surveying his subjects; out to observe his inferiors as much as be seen as a superior. These Nairs, and other upper-caste men and women, had the exclusive right of way, on bullock cart or on foot, the right to wear clean white clothes, and, of course, the right to ride a villuvandi. These rights were codified through caste-based rules or norms known as jati maryada, which governed all aspects of social behavior.
One day in 1893, a bullock cart wound through this busy market street, dragged by two enormous white bulls. The clangs from the large brass bells on their necks rang clear above the market's persistent din. The villuvandi carried a tall, dark, smartly turned out young man dressed in white clothes and matching turban. A Nair man, the scene suggested. A villuvandi was, after all, the mark of a pramani, a local man of prominence, as was the attire. It seemed a rather mundane scene that had been rehearsed thousands of times in colonial Thiruvananthapuram. If anything, the well-rehearsed familiarity of the scene obscured what made it possible: the absoluteness of the performance codes of jati maryada.
The appearance of this particular young man, though, caused turmoil. Upper-caste men seemed to go berserk. Enraged, they threatened him, and some even threw stones. As if in anticipation of this opposition, the young man had armed himself with a dagger. Mayhem ensued. What appeared at first to be an ordinary bullock cart ride turned out to be the beginning of one of the most important moments of anticaste struggle in modern Kerala history: Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram (or, Ayyankali's bullock cart protest).
My reconstruction is based on the historian T. H. P. Chentharassery's authoritative oral historical account.Footnote 2 Chentharassery writes:
The savarna decrees had it that the avarnas could not enter public streets.Footnote 3 [Ayyankali] challenged those codes by purchasing a villuvandi [bullock cart]. . . . On the necks of two white bulls, he hung two loud brass bells. . . . He was clad in a white half-sleeve banian and a white upper-cloth wrapped around his head. Those clothes were the biggest violation of jati maryada.
The villuvandi galloped along the forbidden public streets. The bulls clamored with their bells and hooves. The savarna pramanis, who could not tolerate this sight, drew close with murderous weapons. It was only then that the cart slowed down a little.
“Hey you, how dare you wear an upper-cloth!”
A roar. Unfazed by that roar, [Ayyankali] drew the dagger tucked at his waist.
The young man, Ayyankali (1863–1941), belonged to the Pulaya caste of untouchables, who were prohibited from riding on bullock carts, wearing clean clothes, and walking on public roads. In one action, Ayyankali had violated nearly every aspect of jati maryada, claiming public space, riding bullock carts, and wearing new white clothes. He did not merely proclaim the need to access public space but performatively claimed it for the oppressed castes. His bullock cart ride became a protest only because it was commonplace for upper-caste men to ride in that fashion, and because this was an act forbidden to Pulayas. In other words, Ayyankali's appropriation and rehearsal of upper-caste behavior transgressed the performance codes of jati maryada.
If performance is understood in its widest sense as “twice-behaved behavior” or “restored behavior”Footnote 4—that is, as something that is never for the first time—then caste may be meaningfully conceptualized as performance.Footnote 5 My usage of performance here, and throughout, goes beyond aesthetic forms to include all forms of social behavior.
Caste shapes embodiment, choreographs movement, and establishes notions of linguistic propriety and social etiquette through codes of conduct that govern behavior by regulating everyday practices and rehearsing modes of self-presentation. These performative codes of conduct seek to order interaction in ways that makes castes legible and, ultimately, governable. These caste codes are performative in that they are, to borrow from Judith Butler, not “a singular or deliberate ‘act,’” but rather a “reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”Footnote 6 Caste codes are reiterative citational practices whose identifications of castes produce, in effect, their social existence. Caste becomes, therefore, a product of social behaviors that embody performative codes of conduct. Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram shows that transgressing these caste codes through forbidden behavior can initiate a struggle for change—even, as we shall see later, for equality.
Caste Scripts
Yet, caste is not, after all, simply a matter of prescriptive code and social behavior. Conceptualizing caste as performance must bear in mind the nonhuman aspects of caste: the world of things and institutions. The materiality of things and institutions embodies and encastes social behaviors, attempting to align them with, or resist, performative codes of conduct.
Let us return to Ayyankali. His villuvandi samaram would not have been possible, to state the obvious, without the bullock cart. Made of material that human labor turned from tree trunk to wooden yoke, the cart bears testimony to the entanglements of the human labor and nonhuman material. Moreover, a cart needs bullocks to power its movement, further entangling humans and animals. In short, owning a villuvandi meant that one could buy wood, direct human labor, and own animals. The material presence of the cart lies, therefore, at the center of this event that performatively claimed and reconstituted public space that caste-based codes of conduct denied the oppressed castes. Similarly, Ayyankali's spotless white clothes and turban defied codes that prescribed what material may adorn a Pulaya head. As with the villuvandi, here too materiality interacts with code and behavior in overdetermined ways. This interaction between performative codes of conduct, materiality, and social behavior I call “caste scripts.”Footnote 7
Caste scripts govern particular modes of self-presentation by dictating conduct, defining access to particular things, and mandating forms of social behavior. They are interactive in that their purview extends beyond the three discrete aspects I identified—code, material, and behavior—into the heterogeneous realms that lie between them. These scripts are also always relational in that castes, as B. R. Ambedkar points out, “exist only in the plural number.” Their relationality is a constant reminder that “[t]here is no such thing as a caste: there are always castes.”Footnote 8 That is, caste scripts not only characterize particular modes of self-presentation but also govern encasted social interaction.
Although caste codes form only one part of the interactive triad of caste scripts, they occupy a position of particular significance, for they make castes legible and provide scriptural, “traditional,”Footnote 9 or theological legitimization for humiliation, oppression, and appropriation. Caste codes are typically Brahminical in origin and tend to assert caste. They are encasted grammar in Ludwig Wittgenstein's sense that “essence is expressed in grammar.”Footnote 10 Like grammar, caste codes offer rules of right conduct: precepts, prescriptions, proscriptions, and examples of correct usage. Wittgenstein describes the essential grammatical function in a phrase that has deep resonance for caste codes; he calls it “Theology as grammar.”Footnote 11 Similarly, caste codes comprise a theology-as-grammar revealing the fundamental objects of caste: legibility, ordered interaction, subjection, graded inequality,Footnote 12 and, ultimately, governance.
In contrast, caste scripts exist in the real world, and are typically the lived experience of caste iniquity and the forms of governance that make this possible. These scripts characterize those assumptions, judgments, substances, and practices that encaste human experience and social meaning. By encasted experience, I mean that performative process through which the caste order ascribes values and attributes to human lives by blurring the boundaries between code, material, and behavior. They conceptualize encasted human experience by revealing the workings of this triangulated relationship of code, material, and behavior.Footnote 13
Caste scripts map to social meaning and exist in a creative relationship with the grammar of caste codes. If caste scripts enable us to conceptualize the performative process of encasting in everyday life, it is because they are weighted in favor of social meaning even as they remain tethered to grammatical rules. Meaning, as Wittgenstein notes, lies in actual use, and takes primacy over rule; understanding it depends upon knowing something of the particular form of life within which it was born.Footnote 14 The transaction of meaning is, therefore, not a dry trade in rules but a rich sharing of lived experience.
But meaning is not merely use. There exists, for Wittgenstein, “a correspondence between the concepts ‘rule’ and ‘meaning.’” Such play between rule and meaning, which forges and reforges the relationships between words and objects, he calls “language-games.”Footnote 15 A language-game is a situated practice, for “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”Footnote 16 Where caste codes offer the rules that correspond to an encasted grammar, caste scripts refer to actual lived experience and social meaning within particular forms of life.
Caste scripts characterize forms of life in that they define not only the vagaries of human experience, the forms it takes, but also grant and withhold recognition of the fact of human existence, or what makes a life. This tension between form and life constitutes, for Veena Das, the “distinction between the horizontal and the vertical axes of forms of life.”Footnote 17 Das suggests here that the horizontal axis marks vagaries or differences in forms, whereas the vertical axis imposes limits on who is considered to have a human life. Such a reading of forms of life brings us to an appreciation of “not only the security provided by belonging to a community with shared agreements but also the dangers that human beings pose to each other. These dangers relate to not only disputations over forms but also disputations over what constitutes life.”Footnote 18 Caste scripts constitute particular definitions in everyday life of what makes a human life. They provide a language within which particular struggles over what it means to be human are conceived, disputed, negotiated, fought. They offer, in short, a language within which to contend who is, and is not, considered to be human. Thus, the purview of caste scripts extends far beyond merely prescribing how one might appear, and what things one could use, and how one should behave. They offer nothing less than meaning in an encasted form of life.
My usage of “script” here refers not to a written document, or text, but rather to codified action and behaved imagination. In an influential formulation, Richard Schechner contrasts scripts with dramatic text and defines it as a “blueprint for the enactment.” For Schechner, scripts “pre-exist any given enactment” and “persist from enactment to enactment.”Footnote 19 I do not share Schechner's certainty in his temporal schema, asserting as he does that the script as blueprint always preexists the enactment. Scripts just as often follow performative phenomena, as surrogations, as acts of transfer, and as remembered, narrated, and restaged scenarios.Footnote 20 In this sense, scripts are fingerprints of the prior presence of a particular social phenomenon.Footnote 21 Caste scripts are, in short, both blueprints that preexist enactments and fingerprints of prior appearances. As codified action, they bear testimony to the cultural ideation or imagination of events before they take place, and also, equally, to the ghosted afterlives of embodied cultural behaviors.
In other words, caste scripts are culturally overdetermined and ontologically indeterminate, existing rarely, if ever, without fierce contestation. These contestations are akin to Wittgenstein's “language-games” in that what is critical is not the grammar but the actual performance of speaking within a form of life.Footnote 22 The fractious relationship between rule and use—between grammar and meaning, or caste codes and caste scripts—within forms of life makes language-games an unstable practice of contestation. The friction resulting from the contentious performance of caste scripts within particular forms of life gives it the potential both to assert and to oppose caste.
Ayyankali's bullock cart bears two conflicting caste scripts: one asserting domination, and the other performing resistance. These conflicting caste scripts abrade to enact political claims: on public space, on embodiment, and ultimately, on equality. The Nair landlord riding the villuvandi was a master surveying his subjects, whereas Ayyankali rehearsing the same behavior was a rebel against caste. The first caste script performs domination through repetitive behavior whereas the second enacts anticaste resistance through political action.Footnote 23
The villuvandi samaram attested to the emergence of egalitarian discourses and concomitant genealogies of the human in Kerala, which burst open the closed world of subjection circumscribed by jati maryada. Footnote 24 Fully grasping the significance of Ayyankali's intervention and appreciating the magnitude of the genealogies of the human require taking a closer look at the caste codes of colonial Kerala. These caste codes were comprehensive, and governed social interactions in the domains of space, body, and language. They spatialized hierarchy by mandating distances between castes, made castes legible through prescribed modes of embodiment, and enforced linguistic proprieties. Taken together, these three domains of caste codes governed modes of self-presentation and ordered interaction. As with caste anywhere, the jati maryada of colonial Kerala rewarded those who followed its codes, and brought down harsh punishment upon those who dared to challenge it.Footnote 25 The remit of caste codes, however, went beyond governing discrete aspects such as space, body, and language, to cohering acceptable forms of personhood that ranged from abjection to reverence.
Moreover, caste codes formed only one aspect of the lived experience of caste, interacting with nonhuman materials to assert and contest the caste order through embodied behavior. This triangulated interaction of caste codes, materiality, and social behavior—caste scripts—reveals the actual lived experience of caste and cohered forms of personhood. The significance of Ayyankali's political actions lie not only in their contestation and refusal of the caste codes of jati maryada, but also in performing new caste scripts exemplifying a modern individual forming collectives to struggle toward a new egalitarian society. In the aftermath of the villuvandi samaram, Ayyankali emerged as a leader of the former enslaved communities and led more broad-based agitations against caste elsewhere across Travancore.Footnote 26 He continues to be the most widely recognized icon of the contemporary Dalit movement in Kerala. To this day, the villuvandi samaram continues to inspire reenactments in Kerala in contexts ranging from Dalit women demanding entry to the Sabarimala temple in 2018 to Dalits agitating for right of way in 2021.Footnote 27 Ayyankali's transgressions of caste codes beginning with the villuvandi samaram offered new forms of personhood embodying self-respect that drew upon discourses of equality to perform new caste scripts challenging the caste order of abjection and reverence. In transforming self and society, these transgressive anticaste actions ushered in political modernity to Kerala.
The performance framework of caste I theorize here accommodates both the modes of self-presentation that assert caste and the political actions that perform anticaste resistance. This framework allows us to look beyond the specific mandates codified by caste to the encasted forms of personhood that emerge through everyday performance. The significance of Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram was not merely transgressing caste codes but enacting new caste scripts that embodied a modern person and presented a vision of an egalitarian society. By conceptualizing caste as performance, this essay shows that Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram was not merely a protest against an unjust order but was, rather, a harbinger of political modernity in Kerala.
The Jati Maryada of Colonial Kerala
The caste codes of colonial Kerala mandated encasted self-presentation and governed interaction in the domains of space, body, and language. The spatial codes were especially remarkable for their intricate relational choreographies that not only decreed access and controlled mobility, but also directed proxemic relationships. Furthermore, these codes included prescriptions regarding embodiment, posture, clothes, hairstyles, and jewelry. Finally, language—understood as situated linguistic practices rather than as discrete codes—also fell under the purview of jati maryada, particularly by encasting self-referential terms that defined modes of self-presentation and forms of address that governed interaction. Analyzing the codes of jati maryada within a performance framework allows me, first, to reconceptualize caste-mandated distances as spatial codes that choreographed abjection and reverence; second, to rethink signifying objects representing a graded hierarchy as performative encasted things conscripting bodies; and third, to reframe caste-prescribed language customs as linguistic codes of self-presentation that coconstitute the social order through everyday performance.
These caste codes were also always gendered practices, since maintaining caste purity depends upon policing women's sexuality. Given that “endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste,” preventing miscegenation through patriarchal regulation of women's sexuality is central to maintaining the caste order.Footnote 28 Caste codes must therefore be understood intersectionally, for their regulations were compounded by, and inseparable from, patriarchal norms in each domain. Spatial codes relegated women of even the most privileged castes to their homes,Footnote 29 and abolishing this caste patriarchal practice became a rallying point of upper-caste reformist organizations in the early twentieth century.Footnote 30 Embodied codes forbade avarna women from covering their breasts, and protests against this humiliating practice were an important aspect of modernity in Kerala.Footnote 31 In the case of linguistic codes, I show below that practices of aachara bhasha, or the encasted language ideologies related to jati maryada, were coconstitutive of social power structures. Such coconstitution of language and power provides one theoretical through line for feministFootnote 32 and DalitFootnote 33 historians of Kerala.
These caste codes encompassed and arrayed all—across caste, across gender—in a hierarchical order. They performed within and across the domains of space, body, and language, the “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt” that Ambedkar described as a key characteristic of caste.Footnote 34 The hegemony of caste codes was enforced through violence; numerous ethnographic and historical sources indicate that anyone found in violation of jati maryada could be killed by a caste superior.Footnote 35 Such binding of terror and performance is, as Rustom Bharucha points out, reiterative and citational.Footnote 36 The violent enactment of these performative codes of caste constituted the encasted society of colonial-era Kerala. If caste is performatively constituted through these iterative embodied practices spanning the domains of space, body, and language, then Ayyankali's interventions constituted both an insurrection against the caste order and an assertion of the modern human.
Space
The history of colonial Kerala is, in a sense, the history of access to public spaces such as roads, schools, law courts, and temples.Footnote 37 Insurrectionary and reformist movements from the period before Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram, such as the Channar Lahala (1822–59) or Narayana Guru's temple consecration at Aruvippuram (1888), and after, such as the Vaikkom Satyagraha (1924), lay claims to public space in direct contravention of jati maryada. Footnote 38
In the decades leading up to the villuvandi samaram, these political claims were not unheeded by power. The princely state of Travancore responded to the pressing demands for change by establishing new policy in devious and cynical ways. Under the stewardship of Dewan T. Madhava Rao (1828–91), the state government perfected the art of appearing to concede demands as a way to contain further political protests. In 1870, Madhava Rao signed a proclamation that gave the slave castes open access to all roads designated by the government as “public.” This proclamation was a direct response to a potentially damaging report on caste disabilities filed by Travancore Resident G. A. Ballard to the Madras Presidency, and was intended to reassure the British rulers that immediate measures were being adopted to contain political uprisings.Footnote 39
However, the Travancore Government Gazette reported in May 1870 that a drummer employed by the state announced that all Pulayas were to disregard the recent proclamation, and to stay off the public roads as before. Madhava Rao dismissed the drummer from service, only to see him reinstated by the Maharaja Ayilyam Thirunal Rama Varma III (1832–80) with a fine of a month's salary. That the proclamation was reissued in 1884—a good fourteen years after the first time and nearly a decade before Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram—shows that such periodic concessions of access to public space remained a mere administrative sleight of hand intended to reassure the British rulers of the Madras Presidency rather than to recognize the political demands of the slave castes.Footnote 40 Repeated proclamations notwithstanding, public roads continued to be inaccessible to the slave castes.
If spatial caste codes put these spaces beyond the reach of the untouchable slave castes, they also simultaneously identified those who were denied access as untouchable. This was, in other words, a coconstitutive process that marked both spaces and bodies.Footnote 41 Moreover, reserving access to spaces such as roads, schools, and temples facilitated savarna appropriation of commons. Seen in this context, Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram can be readily understood as a transgressive political action that enacted anticaste resistance.
But this was not all: for strict and absolute though these spatial caste codes were, they were not unique to Kerala.Footnote 42 What was unique to Kerala was the complex choreography scored by the relational codes that governed proxemic relations.Footnote 43 This phenomenon, known as “distance pollution” in missionary ethnographies and scholarly literature,Footnote 44 is understood to have choreographed proxemic relations between various castes, and thereby spatialized the caste order.Footnote 45 When viewed through the lens of performance, however, these spatial codes of jati maryada reveal more than what prevailing theories of distance pollution can accommodate. Situating Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram within a performance frame shows that he enacted more than merely a transgression of spatial jati maryada.
These spatial codes were organized under three broad categories: “untouchability,” “unapproachability,” and “unseeability.” A Nair could, for instance, approach, but not touch, a Namboodiri.Footnote 46 Between them existed a relationship of untouchability.Footnote 47 These norms regarding pollution imposed varying distances of unapproachability across castes.Footnote 48 An Ezhava or Thiyya must keep thirty-six feet from a Namboodiri and twelve feet from a Nair. Pulayas, who were considered unseeable by the Namboodiris, had to maintain a distance of at least ninety-six feet from a Namboodiri.Footnote 49 The practice was so well-established that the distances mandated by jati maryada between castes became, in popular parlance, units of spatial measurement: a tiyyapad refers to thirty-six feet, the distance between a Thiyya or Ezhava and a Namboodiri; while a cherumapad refers to sixty-four feet, the distance between a Cheruma and a Nair.Footnote 50
But how was this distance maintained when all parties were on the move? The anthropologist Joan Mencher points out that these prescribed distances corresponded to standard architectural features, such as the distance from the doorway of a Namboodiri home (illam) to the main gate, to the courtyard, or to the first step of the veranda.Footnote 51 While this distance could be precisely imposed within the home, on open grounds or public roads, they had to be roughly assessed by sight. Thus, the typical distance from the illam to the main gate—ninety-six feet—was applied between the two extreme ends of the caste order, Namboodiris and Pulayas. This distance became roughly equated to unseeability. The other mandated distances were calculated in similar fashion, through rough assessment. These spatial codes were, in other words, highly uncertain.
Uncertain though they were, violating these norms attracted extreme punishment, even death. The combination of uncertain codes and extreme punishment in the spatial codes gave precarious terror to tyrannical power. The proper observance of these codes meant willing participation, which was rewarded (rather poorly, one might add: by being allowed to remain alive!), whereas any aberration was punished (severely: with death). Therefore, the slave castes were obliged not only to follow these choreographic prompts, but also to appear to be willingly adhering to these caste codes by abjecting and debasing themselves. For the upper castes were on the watch for any transgression: anyone who appeared not to be subjecting themselves to these caste codes, who dared to presume to be a fellow human, acting with self-respect and autonomy, was to be “cut down” like an “animal.”Footnote 52
In other words, the spatial codes of jati maryada effected much more than what the concept of “distance pollution” accommodates: they not only spatially positioned the slave castes, but also mandated performances of abjection and humility. Anything less was seen as a violation of jati maryada, for the object of spatial codes was never merely distance but an abjected form of personhood. These spatial caste codes provided choreographic prompts that went beyond governing space to regulating particular encasted modes of self-presentation. This relational choreography is, therefore, central to understanding the performative constitution of caste. This distinctive feature of Kerala's caste order has been understood thus far as either curiosity or survival, as odd expressions of caste.Footnote 53 However, in a performance-centric view, spatial codes become an essential part of the caste scripts that governed behavior, and may be considered a form of caste choreography. In this view, Ayyankali's appearance reimagined caste scripts of abjection choreographed by spatial jati maryada to embody a new self-respecting modern individual.
Caste codes configured bodies in space. In order to do this effectively, caste had to be made legible from a distance through embodied codes.
Body
In Chentharassery's vivid re-creation of the villuvandi samaram, he imagines a savarna man outraged that Ayyankali had dared to wear an upper cloth. Humiliating practices such as not being allowed to wear upper-body clothes served the purposes of easily visible identification necessary to maintain the codified distance. In other words, the embodied codes of jati maryada made caste legible and enabled encasted emplacement. In colonial Kerala, bodies were encasted through things such as clothing, accessories, hair and makeup, and jewelry.Footnote 54 These caste-marked bodies enacted caste scripts that were born of the interaction among performative caste codes of jati maryada, the materiality of encasted things, and everyday social behavior.
The materials that encasted bodies became assertive and agential entities through social performance. These encasted things constituted entangled relationships between the human and the nonhuman, exhibiting the kind of agency that Martin Heidegger identified as the hallmark of a thing, as opposed to an object.Footnote 55 A thing, in Robin Bernstein's words, invites us to dance.Footnote 56 These encasted things not only made castes legible and identifiable for the purpose of maintaining the codified distance, but also formed insignia that arrayed human bodies on a graded hierarchy from abjection to reverence. Understanding the everyday performance of reverence and abjection enacted by the dance of encasted things and caste-marked bodies is necessary to grasp the significance of Ayyankali's violation of the jati maryada for slave castes and appropriation of Nair costume.
Namboodiri men and women wore their hair in a distinctive topknot arranged in front of the forehead. They covered their upper bodies with a cloth, and carried palm-leaf umbrellas that were visible from a considerable distance. They had right of way, barring none, and the right to use palanquins and bullock carts (such as the villuvandi). Namboodiri women rarely ventured outside their homes, and when they did, they went with an entourage and were shrouded neck to toe in unstitched white cloth (chelaputha) and protected by an umbrella. This practice of being hidden from view gave Namboodiri women the name of Antarjanam or Agathamma (literally, the woman or mother of the interior). Both men and women were entitled to gold jewelry encrusted with precious stones—and the lavish incomes from their vast lands, with its enslaved or indentured labor, ensured that they could afford it. The men wore a white, sacred, multistrand thread over their left shoulders and across their torsos (poonol).Footnote 57 They often wore gold rings and a gold waist string with an amulet (elassu), whereas women wore the wedding ornament (tali) and often a smaller halter necklace made of gold coins (cherutali). Ornaments helped stratify within the caste as well: not merely in economic terms, but in terms of finer ritual subdivisions. For instance, high-ranked priests among the Namboodiris (akkithiris or somathiris) often wore bell-shaped earrings (kundalam), whereas other Namboodiri men had their ears pierced but rarely wore earrings. The makeup for Namboodiris consisted of three lines of sacred ash (bhasmam) on the forehead, often with a vertical or crescent-shaped mark drawn with sandal paste. Turmeric (manjal) and vermilion (kumkumam), by virtue of their use in worship by avarna castes, were prohibited for Namboodiris.Footnote 58 In all, a Namboodiri was obliged to follow sixty-four finely defined codes of conduct that ordered their everyday behavior.Footnote 59 Much of these caste codes prescribe norms of purity and pollution, leading to the common understanding that, as the gazetteer Nagam Aiya noted, “A Nambudiri only wants an excuse for bathing . . . [and his] . . . thirst for bathing very often takes the form of a mania.”Footnote 60
Nair men and women wore around their waists a single piece of unstitched white cloth, the mundu, which stretched below their knees.Footnote 61 They were entitled to cover their upper bodies, though the men rarely did. Men wore instead a thin piece of white cloth (neriyathu) over the left shoulder, or occasionally tied it around their forehead like a turban. Turbans were especially the norm for Nairs on ceremonial occasions.Footnote 62 The women covered their upper bodies with a single cloth, which they tucked into the mundu at their waist and wound around their right shoulders. They also wore an additional garment called the onnara—literally, the one and a half—which, when paired with the mundu, was known as the onnarayum mundum. The colloquial name for this costume leaves no doubt of its caste significance: it was known as the achchipudava, or literally, the costume of the Nair woman.Footnote 63 Women were obliged to take off their upper-body cloth when approached by a Namboodiri or royalty.Footnote 64 Nagam Aiya records in the early twentieth century that although most Nair women continued to remain topless at home, the more modern among them had begun wearing a blouse modeled on the English corset (ravikkai).Footnote 65 Both men and women kept a tuft of hair (kuduma). Men tied theirs in a knot and let it hang behind their head; women kept their well-oiled hair knotted loosely on the left side of their head.Footnote 66 The men eschewed jewelry, and almost always carried a sword or long-handled sickle. Women wore an array of necklaces, a nose stud set with rubies or diamonds (mookkuthi), anklets (padasaram or kolusu), waistbands (odyanam), and earrings (takka or toda).Footnote 67
These codes affected not only the savarnas and the slave castes, but also intermediate castes who were faced with the problem of struggling against their caste disabilities while preserving their caste privilege. The caste known variously as Channars, Shanars, or NadarsFootnote 68 is an example: they agitated against the humiliation imposed on them by the embodied codes of jati maryada even as they worked to maintain the spatial codes asserting their superiority over the slave castes.Footnote 69 Embodied jati maryada codified the dress of Channar men similar to the Nairs, including keeping a kuduma, although, unlike Nairs, they often sported tattoos. Channar women did not wear nose studs, and neither did they, till the first half of the nineteenth century, cover their upper bodies.
The slave castes endured the most humiliating embodied codes. Neither men nor women of the Pulaya and Paraya castes were allowed to cover their upper bodies. The women wore brass bangles and a red-stone bead necklace known as kallu mala. Footnote 70 They were denied the right to wear any precious ornaments, and given that they largely subsisted on daily wages measured out in paddy (unthreshed rice), they could not afford any gold jewelry. The bodies of men, women, and children were treated as part of the land: they were most often traded along with the land, though occasionally, slaves—especially children—were bought and sold on their own.Footnote 71
From the most revered to the most abject, these codes of embodiment did not merely mark bodies to make caste legible but interacted with bodies to encaste modes of self-presentation. As with spatial choreography earlier, here too bodies were governed through posture and comportment once their caste was made legible. For instance, when approaching a Namboodiri, a Nair had to stand slightly bent with his right hand covering his mouth (ochchanam). Channars and other intermediate castes had to bend even further when addressing Nairs (and were, of course, forbidden from addressing Namboodiris).Footnote 72 For the slave castes, the sight of a Namboodiri's palm-leaf umbrella in the distance meant having to leave the road and hide in the fields.
Be it the Namboodiri's palm-leaf umbrella, or the Nair woman's achchipudava, or the Pulaya woman's kallu mala, or a villuvandi, encasted things further conscripted human bodies and entangled them in the relational choreography of caste in colonial Kerala. They caste-marked bodies in order to array them in a graded hierarchy. Embodiment, spanning caste-marked human bodies and encasted nonhuman things, became another domain in which caste codes governed encasted forms of personhood and social interaction in colonial Kerala. Ayyankali's white clothes and villuvandi bore testimony to the ways in which caste scripts encasted bodies through the interaction of code, material, and behavior.
Language
These spatial and embodied codes played directly into linguistic caste codes that formed a third domain that jati maryada governed, adding speech to choreography and embodiment. In Chentharassery's description of the villuvandi samaram, the outraged savarna man screams, “Hey you, how dare you wear an upper-cloth!” In the original Malayalam, he merely says, “Eda, melmundu!” (“Eda, upper-cloth!”)Footnote 73 The Malayalam word “eda” is a masculine second-person pronoun used to address a social inferior. This was only one of the many ways in which language was codified to govern encasted social interaction. Speech extended in language the spatial choreography of encasted bodies in nineteenth-century Kerala. All castes—from savarnas to the slave castes—shouted particular phrases to announce their presence as they walked, so that they would not violate the spatial codes of jati maryada. Footnote 74 Savarnas such as Namboodiris and Nairs shouted “ho ho” to announce their arrival, whereas Ezhavas shouted “theendaley theendaley” and slave castes were forced to shout “eezhokkida.”Footnote 75 This practice of announcing oneself caused considerable consternation to the British Protestant missionaries, for they held it responsible for “the habit of shouting aloud in conversation, which,” one of them noted with barely concealed exasperation, “many respectable men have acquired.”Footnote 76
Caste codes enforced linguistic conventions that rehearsed modes of self-presentation. Linguistic practices, like those mandated by spatial and embodied codes, were encasted and relational: a Nair speaking to a Namboodiri differed considerably from a Nair addressing a Pulaya. These linguistic practices gave voice to social actors in the hierarchical role-play of reverence and contempt that characterizes caste.Footnote 77 The caste codes that govern linguistic practices and associated modes of self-presentation are known as aachara bhasha (language customs), and the dominant approach in studies of aachara bhasha is to point to the linguistic stylization by caste and argue for a reflectionist approach. In this view, if society is unequal, then language would quite naturally reflect these inequalities. Here, social bonds and power structures exist prior to, and somewhat independent of, language.Footnote 78
In contrast to this reflectionist perspective, I adopt a Goffmanian approach in which language forms but one critical aspect of social performance. Here, linguistic formations and social power structures are coconstitutive, and the one maps onto the other. Central to my approach to linguistic performance is the concept of language ideologies, which emphasizes “how languages become enregistered as racialized [here, encasted] objects, how linguistic differences are created and mapped onto social differences, including race, gender, class, and sexuality [as well as caste], and how these webs of social meaning are mapped onto interactions.”Footnote 79 The key concept of enregisterment, which denotes the “processes whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized (or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users,” is also relevant to my understanding of encasted language in nineteenth-century Kerala.Footnote 80 In the always-relational field of communicative practices, enregisterment led to complex role-playing of caste identities, where social actors spoke in what Asif Agha influentially termed “enregistered voices.”Footnote 81
This relational role-play meant that social actors often adopted different parts. For example, a Nair spoke differently to a Namboodiri and to a Pulaya: his voice is enregistered as a slave when addressing the Namboodiri, and as a master when addressing the Pulaya. All three players are already choreographed spatially, and their bodies are encasted in various ways through proxemics, posture, bearing, dress, accoutrements, and gestural vocabularies. Language forms, therefore, the third key component in the performative constitution of caste. The enregisterment enacted by the language ideology of aachara bhasha contributed another significant aspect to the caste scripts of colonial Kerala.
Aachara bhasha is distinguished by the graded hierarchy that stretches between respect and humility. As Sunny M. Kapikkad points out, value dyads such as humility–impertinence are always undergirded by caste.Footnote 82 The aggrandizing effect of words indicating reverence (aadara soochaka padam) and the belittling effect of words indicating humility (vinaya soochaka padam) is the basic principle upon which the language ideology of aachara bhasha is organized. This spectrum between self-aggrandizement or reverence, and self-effacement or humility, constitutes another caste script that extends to all aspects of communicative practices and refers to people (nouns, pronouns, and forms of address), things (nouns), and everyday practices (verbs). This relational spectrum is referred to in everyday parlance through its endpoints: uchchabhasha, or the higher language, refers to the language an inferior adopts to their superior, whereas neechabhasha, or the lower language, refers to a superior addressing their inferior.
Language encastes human bodies within particular modes of self-presentation that personify the graded hierarchies of uchchabhasha and neechabhasha. These encasted modes of self-presentation are not merely outcroppings of an already existing entity, or the expressive manifestations of caste that existed, somehow, out there. Rather, aachara bhasha was one critical aspect of the performative codes of jati maryada that defined a closed world of subjection in colonial Kerala. The forms of personhood available in colonial Kerala were inflected by language, in addition to the spatial and embodied codes of jati maryada.
Contesting Forms of Personhood Governed by Jati Maryada
The object of jati maryada was, in short, always more than the particular domain it governed, be it space, body, or language. Jati maryada mandated performances of encasted forms of personhood and hierarchically graded them on a scale that ranged from abjection to reverence. In doing so, jati maryada constituted a governing theology-as-grammar making caste legible, ordering interaction, maintaining graded inequality, and enforcing subjection.
Such were the moral certitudes of the old world of jati maryada that the concept of equality broke open. If the encasted forms of personhood within this closed world of subjection ranged between abjection and reverence, then discourses of equality and the concomitant notion of the human opened up new horizons within which these certitudes were interrogated, challenged, and fundamentally reimagined. Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram was more than merely an appropriation of savarna appearance or a transgression of caste codes, for it enacted claims to equality that reimagined conceptions of life and what it meant to be human. In the collision between egalitarian notions and jati maryada, Ayyankali's action interrogated and challenged these codes in the domains of space, body, and language, while embodying a new modern individual demanding respect in a modern society that was, at least in principle, egalitarian. It made available, in short, new forms of personhood based on what we have come to recognize as modern values: respect, autonomy, inwardness, and a sense of self-possession.
Equality may be seen, in this sense, as what Charles Taylor calls a “hypergood,” which refers to notions of the good that are not only more important but provide the standpoint from which other life goods are “strongly” evaluated.Footnote 83 They orient human life by providing a kind of moral horizon within which to place other values. Hypergoods are generally a “source of conflict,” notes Taylor, for conceptions of the self depend upon the moral horizons established by these higher-order goods.Footnote 84 Conflict over equality was inevitable, for the governance remit of jati maryada went beyond movement, appearance, and speech to conceptions of selfhood. Hypergoods not only offer a reason for moral thinking and acting, but also fundamentally define identity.Footnote 85
Though Taylor holds that a vision of the good is necessary to any understanding of moral agency, he points out that hypergoods have the disadvantage of leading to decontextualized theories of obligatory action.Footnote 86 Here, the Ayyankali story would go something like this: equality appeared in Travancore and inspired an insurrection against the caste order. While there is a kernel of truth in this formulation, the argument I have been making here emphasizes a thick description of Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram that takes egalitarianism as a “constitutive good,” which Taylor defines as “something the love of which empowers us to do and to be good.”Footnote 87 Constitutive goods always enable action in a situated manner inclusive of other ordinary life goods. They never quite override other goods but offer moral sources that inspire and guide action without ever making them obligatory or mechanistic. Seen as such, Ayyankali and his organization undertook political actions inspired by egalitarianism as a constitutive good, which led to a transformation of self and society in modern Kerala. For to accommodate a constitutive good such as equality into an old world stifled by caste was to lay claim to a new, and distinctly modern, self, and to contest fundamentally what it meant to be human. Moreover, it meant transforming a caste-ridden society, built with the logic of dehumanization along the scale from abjection to reverence, to one in which it was conceivable to speak of the shared humanity of individuals and communities. In other words, the adoption of this constitutive good provided new caste scripts that militated against the caste code of subjection, and lay claims to material resources, and enacted self-possessed forms of behavior. In doing so, the concept of equality empowered contestation of forms of personhood mandated by jati maryada. The significance of Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram—coming as it did in the wake of the genealogies of the human that brought the concept of equality and concomitant notions of the human to colonial Kerala—lies in fundamentally calling into question the closed world of subjection circumscribed by jati maryada.
Transgression and Modernity
In his reconstruction of the villuvandi samaram, Chentharassery pays particular attention to the clanging brass bells attached to the necks of the bulls pulling the villuvandi. The bells signified a determined insubordination, and their sonorous clangs suggested a new confidence that not only dared to transgress caste codes of subjection but proudly announced it. The figure at the center of this scene, Ayyankali, was acting with assertive autonomy: he was starting something new, and he demanded respect. He was, in fact, willing to fight for it. This scene was truly epoch-making in that it serves as a watershed event that can highlight the striving for modernity among the former slave castes. To this day, the Dalit movement in Kerala stages reenactments of the villuvandi samaram scene to construct a performance genealogy of radical action for their political causes.Footnote 88 Ayyankali's actions and their consequences endure because they exemplify what Anupama Rao calls “caste radicalism,” which moves from “an epistemology of caste” toward a “critique of everyday life” articulated by situated experiences of “stigmatized selfhood.”Footnote 89 In other words, the caste radicalism of anticaste leaders, such as Ayyankali, performed emancipatory acts through a situated practice that brought together encasted lifeworlds and radical concepts of political modernity. They performed acts of strong evaluation demonstrating the emergence of a modern individual committed to changing the old, closed world of caste subjection. For to be modern is, as Michael Gillespie points out, “not merely to define one's being in terms of time,” that is, to be in history, but “also to define time in terms of one's being,” or to make history.Footnote 90
In caste-bound colonial Kerala, to be modern was to transgress the dehumanizing codes of jati maryada. By “to be modern,” I refer to a self-conscious attempt to break from the past and claim to be new—and, above all, to seek the values of equality, individual autonomy or selfhood, and respect. As Taylor points out, “To talk of universal, natural, or human rights is to connect respect for human life and integrity with the notion of autonomy.”Footnote 91 In colonial Kerala, radical claims to modernity asserted that to be human means to struggle for these rights.Footnote 92
In the world of Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram, the reiterative nature of social behaviors and the imposition of caste codes upon them certainly made subjection an ambivalent process that both subordinated and constituted.Footnote 93 However, this is not all: the explosively unstable concept of equality, and other attendant universals such as autonomy and respect, brought a new consciousness that could, and did, call into question the closed loop of subjection.Footnote 94 With the growing acceptance of these concepts associated with political modernity, agency could now include a Pulaya making a daring claim to play the part of a Nair: to be, in fact, an equal. In doing so, this transgressive act introduced the figure of a modern individual whose emancipatory methods were insurrectionary. Ayyankali's insurrectionary political action performed a claim to, in Hannah Arendt's influential formulation, “the right to have rights.”Footnote 95
Transgressing the codes of subjection was integral to the assertion of common humanity: to have the right to have rights, one had to stop acting as a slave of the caste order. This was, as Ambedkar noted in the context of untouchable subjection in eighteenth-century Maharashtra, a “necessary preliminary” en route to political subjecthood.Footnote 96
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I have argued in this essay that understanding Ayyankali's villuvandi samaram requires situating it within the world of jati maryada in colonial Kerala and recognizing that the explosive indeterminacy of the concept of equality split open that closed world of subjection. Constitutive goods such as equality not only challenge existing forms of injustice and oppression but also make available new forms of personhood and reveal a new vision of society. The performative framework of caste I proposed in this essay accommodates both conceptualizations of the encasted self governed by caste codes and the significance of political actions making claims to equality. In enacting a defiant new beginning against the performance codes of the old caste order, Ayyankali's transgressive actions offered a vision of a new form of personhood, and an articulation—or at the very least, a hope—of new freedom.
Vivek V. Narayan is Assistant Professor of English, Theatre, and Performance Studies in the Department of English, and, by courtesy, the Department of Performing Arts at Ashoka University, where he teaches courses on theatre history, performance studies, critical race theory, Dalit studies, and postcolonial theory.
