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Marriage, Education, and Employment among Tamil Brahman Women in South India, 1891–2010*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2012

C. J. FULLER  and
HARIPRIYA NARASIMHAN
C. J. FULLER
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
HARIPRIYA NARASIMHAN
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
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Abstract

A hundred years ago, pre-puberty marriage for girls was the norm among South Indian Tamil Brahmans, and Brahman girls received little or no education. By the 1940s, child marriage had largely ended and girls’ education was improving gradually. Today, girls’ educational standards more or less match that of boys’, and many Brahman women are also employed outside the home. In relation to marriage and education in particular, the position of women has greatly improved, which is regarded by Tamil Brahmans themselves as a sign of their modern, educated, professional, middle-class status, whereas extreme gender inequality formerly indicated their traditional, high-caste status. This paper examines how female marriage, education, and employment are interrelated and how they have changed among Tamil Brahmans, particularly in the Eighteen-Village Vattima subcaste, which continued child marriage until the 1970s. Among Tamil Brahmans, as both women and men recognize, a real reduction in gender inequality has occurred. Moreover, Brahman men have more readily ceded status to Brahman women than Brahmans together have to non-Brahmans, so that there is a striking contrast today between persisting ideas of caste superiority and diminishing gender inequality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 53 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

For useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, we thank Mukulika Banerjee, Henrike Donner, Johnny Parry, Mytheli Sreenivas, and Sylvia Vatuk, as well as participants at a workshop convened by Peter van der Veer at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. We also thank the Economic and Social Research Council which has supported our research. Although this paper was written by C. J. Fuller, it has been discussed extensively with Haripriya Narasimhan and it represents our joint views.

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35 Research was carried out among Eighteen-Village Vattima Brahmans in Tippirajapuram from September 2005 to March 2006, in the United States in September 2006, and in Chennai and other Indian cities (and in Tippirajapuram again) from January to April 2007, in August 2007, from January to March 2008, and March to April 2010. Most of the research was undertaken by Haripriya Narasimhan, accompanied by Fuller some of the time.

36 In the Indian education system, children usually start school when they are five years old. Primary school has five grades—first to fifth standards—and secondary school, five more—sixth to tenth standards. Pupils successfully completing the final grade are awarded the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC). Two more years of study—now the eleventh and twelfth standards (otherwise known as the Pre-University Certificate [PUC] course or the Intermediate course)—are required before entering college or university to study for a Bachelor's degree.

37 ‘Veranda schools’ were known as ‘pyal schools’ in Anglo-Indian administrative terminology (see Raman, Getting Girls to School, p. ix).

38 Fuller and Narasimhan, ‘Companionate Marriage in India’, pp. 738–40. In this paper, all informants’ names are pseudonyms.

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