Crooked Stalks , livre ebook

344

pages

English

Ebooks

2009

Écrit par
Pandian Anand Pandian

Publié par
Duke University Press

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344

pages

English

Ebooks

2009

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

16 octobre 2009

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822391012

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

How do people come to live as they ought to live? Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of cultivation: in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste-classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a "criminal tribe"-Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects today.In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident, chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and delicacy.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

16 octobre 2009

EAN13

9780822391012

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

Crooked Stalks

anand pandian

Crooked Stalks

Cultivating Virtue

in South India

duke university press durham and london 2009

∫2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Katy Clove Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Earlier versions of parts of chapter 2 originally appeared in ‘‘Securing the Rural Citizen: The Anti-Kallar Movement of 1896,’’ IndianEconomicandSocialHistoryReview42, no. 1 (2005): 1–39.

Earlier versions of parts of chapter 4 originally appeared in ‘‘Devoted to Development: Moral Progress, Ethical Work, and Divine Favor in South India,’’nAorhtolopgicalTheory8, no. 2 (2008): 159–79.

Tomyparents andgrandparents— forwegrewintheirshade, va¯hiaaltf¯avih...ail

Valiantkingsofunﬂagginggraceandceaselesstributeremainresplendent, thescalesofmerchantsstayinbalance,theBrahminsdonotforgettheVedas,and righteousnessdoesnotfalterforasingleday,allduetothesteadilysproutingnature ofthepaddyﬁeldsofthosewhodonotmistaketheproperwayoftheworld. —attributed to the tamil poet kampar, ca. eleventh century c.e.

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Contents

Acknowledgmentsix NoteonTransliterationxv Introduction1 ‘‘A Rough Spade for a Rugged Landscape’’ On Savage Selves and More Civil Places 31 ‘‘What Remains of the Harvest When the Fence Grazes the Crop?’’ On the Proper Violence of Agrarian Citizenship 65 ‘‘The Life of the Thief Leaves the Belly Always Boiling’’ On the Nature and Restraint of the Criminal Animal 101 ‘‘Millets Sown Yield Millets, Evil Sown Yields Evil’’ On the Moral Returns of Agrarian Toil 141 ‘‘Let the Water for the Paddy Also Irrigate the Grass’’ On the Sympathies of an Aqueous Self 181 Epilogue221 Notes241 Glossary283 Bibliography289 Index309

Acknowledgments

The TamilTirukkuhral suggests that the aid of those who give freely— without weighing returns—is greater than the sea in the span of its goodness. Seeking to convey my gratitude to those who have made this book possible, I ﬁnd myself confronted by a debt beyond measure. Were I to try and chart out the many entangled ways in which every word and phrase of this book has been born of the relations I have enjoyed in the years of its writing, I would quickly face the conundrum met by Jorge Luis Borges’s mythical cartographer: a map whose quest for accurate witness would lead it to surpass in size the very thing that it was map-ping. I can therefore do no more here than to name some of my debts, with the hope that those I name and fail to name may ﬁnd some trace of their counsel in the text that follows. This book began as a dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am grateful for the wisdom and friendship of my teach-ers. Donald Moore ﬁrst welcomed me into the ﬁeld of anthropology, and I hope that this work may somehow attest to his acumen, inspiration, and meticulous care. Lawrence Cohen also roused me with the brilliance of his imagination and the humanity of his example. I am deeply grate-ful to a few other mentors who have nurtured my work and especially this project with acute and generous attention: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Val Daniel, Veena Das, Akhil Gupta, M. S. S. Pandian, Indira Peterson, Hugh RaΔes, and K. Sivaramakrishnan. Pandian has been the most long-standing of all of my teachers, and I have him to thank in par-ticular for the kernel of the present project. Tom Dumm, George and

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