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Dialogue and History
Constructing South India, 1795–1895
Eugene F. Irschick
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · London
© 1994 The Regents of the University of California
Preferred Citation: Irschick, Eugene F.
Dialogue and History: Constructing South
India, 1795-1895.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft038n99hg/
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Transliteration and Other Conventions
Maps
Introduction
1. To Fix the People to Their Respective Villages
2. Using the Past to Create the Future
3. The Rise and Consolidation of the Chingleput Mirasidars
4. From Slaves to the Original Dravidians
5. Conclusion
Abbreviations
Bibliography
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Preface
This book is largely based on colonial archives located either in Madras or in London.
Since the evidence I used was filtered through a series of colonial lenses, even the
petitions of ordinary people were transcribed for inclusion in what ultimately became
part of revenue and other records of the English East India Company. Moreover, the
presentation here seeks to show how structures of meaning and institutions are
cultural products negotiated by a large number of persons from every level of society
in a given place and time. It therefore presumes that a single individual cannot
produce meaning, a cultural development, or an institution by herself or himself.
Nonetheless, the documents used here have perforce focused on individuals and my
presentation, therefore, despite my efforts to the contrary, seems to center itself on the
accomplishments of particular persons, especially men. As cultural historians, we
have to work with the materials that are available and my discussion is no exception.
Readers will therefore find that whole chapters are seemingly devoted to the activities
of a single person. My presentation simply seeks to employ the activities of these
individuals to illustrate the way in which culture is constructed from a wide variety of
materials.
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Acknowledgements
In the course of writing this book, I have benefited from the assistance of many
people. I would like first of all to express my thanks to the American Institute of
Indian Studies and the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars who funded
my work in Madras. I was aided in my work by the staffs of the Tamil Nad State
Archives, the Madras Oriental Manuscripts Library, the India Office Library and
Records, the National Library of Scotland, the Archives d’Outre Mer, and the
Frankesche Stiftungen.
Many people have provided me with materials and have helped me with translations
of difficult material. I would like particularly to thank Mrs. Kausalya Hart for her time
in working on translations and to Dr. Emmanuel Divien for helping me get
photocopies of valuable materials.
Many colleagues and students have read all or part of the manuscript, sometimes in
multiple versions. Others have listened to presentations of the materials that have
formed the basis of this book. I gave an account of the Conclusion at the annual
meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Washington, D.C., in the spring of
1992 and derived much advantage from comments on that and other presentations. I
would like to thank Stuart Blackburn, Katharine Flemming, Thomas Brady, David
Hollinger, Martin Jay, Thomas Metcalf, James Gregory, Douglas Haynes, Stephen
Dale, Susan Neild Basu, William Meehan, David Kuchta, Jeffery Ravel, Dane
Kennedy, Nasser Hussain, Sumathi Ramaswami, Michael Katten, Natalie Pickering,
Aloka Parasher Sen, and Jeanne-Marie Stumpf-Carome for their comments and ideas.
My students in my seminars over the last decade have commented on my notions and
I am most grateful to them: they and my colleagues have helped to make me what I
am. Both Anand Yang and Mattison Mines wrote long and detailed criticisms of the
manuscript that enabled me to enhance the force of the argument in many ways. I am
grateful to two organizations who helped germinate the ideas that appear in this book,
the French History Group and the WIRTH group. In both cases, members of these
groups have provided me useful perspectives. David Gilmartin read the manuscript
two times and enabled me to make the argument more precise. Ines �½upanov read the
manuscript in three different versions. At the time, she was herself writing her
dissertation and I profited enormously from her insights. Sandria Freitag helped me to
clarify further the argument and develop an intelligible text. I would also like to thank
Cherie Semens, who drew the maps, and Lynne Withey, who assisted me through the
process of publication.
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Transliteration and Other Conventions
I have tried to reduce the amount of transcription in the text to aid readability.
However, I have indicated the correct transliteration (usually from Tamil) the first
time a word is used. Often, I have put the correct transliteration in parentheses and
have adopted the Madras Lexicon style of transliteration. I use diacritics for a word
when it first appears in the text and in the Bibliography.
The large number of functional terms in the text side by side with caste names has
posed some problems of intelligibility. In the interests of clarity, I have put all caste
names in lowercase (i.e., paraiyar, vellala, palli, agamudaiyar). However, in the
instance of Kondaikatti vellala, I have indicated the subcaste name with uppercase. I
have also decided to put functional names in uppercase. By far the most confusing
terms are Pannaiyal (bonded laborers) and Padiyal (laborers employed by years or
shorter periods). The reader will therefore be confronted on several occasions with
phrases that place paraiyar or palli—both caste names—alongside Pannaiyal or
Padiyal. In these cases, it means that these bonded or employed laborers are from
either the paraiyar or the palli caste.

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