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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2022
This article examines British Protestant missionary scholars' representations of Tamil culture and history, analysing how this form of knowledge evolved in relation to missionary concerns and the intellectual trends of nineteenth-century India. I focus on the work of Robert Caldwell, whose scholarship had a profound influence on the identity discourses of twentieth-century Tamil nationalism. I situate Caldwell's work in ethnography and philology within the broader field of colonial knowledge produced about Tamils in nineteenth-century India and within a broader study of British missionary concerns in South India. I examine two of Caldwell's publications to argue that his later work, far from being driven by mere scholarly interests, was also shaped by his concerns as a missionary, and that his evolving scholarship mirrored the development of anti-Brahmanism in British Protestant missionary circles of the time. Missionary anti-Brahmanism arose as a response to the caste system, which missionary groups came to regard as the biggest obstacle to Christian conversions. Departing from some of his earlier ideas, Caldwell strategically positioned his later work to challenge Brahman influence, which he saw as being intrinsically tied to the strength of caste sentiment in Indian society. Caldwell's construction of a discursive framework for understanding Tamil linguistic identity was informed by public reactions to his first publication and his subsequent understanding of the dynamic relationship between European scholarship and Indian social relations. More broadly, this article demonstrates the close relationships between Protestant Christian missionary activity, Indian social politics, and the field of knowledge production in colonial South India.
1 Kumaradoss, V., Robert Caldwell: A Scholar-Missionary in Colonial South India (Delhi: ISPCK, 2008), p. 139Google Scholar.
2 Irschick, Eugene, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Arooran, K. Nambi, Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism, 1905–1944 (Madurai: Koodal, 1980)Google Scholar; Ravindiran, V., ‘Discourses of Empowerment: Missionary Orientalism in the Development of Dravidian Nationalism’, in Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities, T. Brook and A. Schmid (eds) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Vaithees, V. Ravi, Religion, Caste, and Nation in South India: Maraimalai Adigal, the Neo-Saivite Movement, and Tamil Nationalism, 1876–1950 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Dirks suggests that many works of contemporary scholarship reproduce Caldwell's Orientalism by situating the historical roots of Tamil anti-Brahmanism in primordial differences in South India. Dirks instead argues that caste identities have undergone significant dramatic transformations under colonialism, for example, in terms of the production of ‘macro-categories’ like Brahman and non-Brahman. Nicholas Dirks, ‘Orientalist Counterpoints and Postcolonial Politics; Castes, Community and Culture in Tamil India’, in Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska (eds) (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 335, 337.
4 Dirks, ‘Orientalist Counterpoints’, p. 336.
5 For some examples, refer to: Trautmann, T. R., Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (London: University of California Press, 2006), p. 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dirks, ‘Orientalist Counterpoints’, pp. 333–357. Linguistics and literary scholar Kamil Zvelebil is one of the few scholars who have suggested that the scholarly work of missionaries in Tamil South India was not pervaded by missionary concerns: Zvelebil, K., Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1992), p. 256Google Scholar.
6 Ravindiran, ‘Discourses of Empowerment’, p. 79. Vaithees has more recently turned his attention to the ways in which neo-saivite intellectuals from the late nineteenth century received, adapted, and indigenized missionary scholarship and laid the groundwork for the subsequent secular phase of Tamil nationalism with the entrance of Periyar in the 1920s. Vaithees, Religion, Caste, and Nation.
7 The Church Missionary Atlas (London, 1896; eighth edn), pp. 137–151; J. A. Sharrock, South Indian Missions: Containing Glimpses into the lives and customs of the Tamil People, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in foreign Parts (Westminster, 1910), p. 31.
8 Four Letters of Carnaticus, explanatory of his view of the Indian army, the missionaries, and press of India: as inserted in the Asiatic Journals for May, September, October, and November, 1821, Hume Tracts, pp. 10–39; Sharrock, South Indian Missions, pp. 2, 18–25, 46; Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, p. 152.
9 Hatcher, Brian A., ‘What's Become of the Pandit? Rethinking the History of Sanskrit Scholars in Colonial Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3, July 2005, pp. 683–723CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 David Lorenzen also suggests that Brahmans were also targeted by missionaries for conversion because they were seen as a valuable source of information about Hinduism. However, unlike British administrators and Orientalists, missionaries had far less access to Brahman interlocuters and pandits, owing to mutual distrust as well as the missionaries’ smaller financial resources: Lorenzen, David N., ‘Marco della Tomba and the Brahmin from Banaras: Missionaries, Orientalists and Indian Scholars’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 65, No. 1, 2006, p. 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Third Decennial Congress of Protestant Missions (1892), quoted in Phillip, K., Civilising Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in Colonial South India (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 157Google Scholar.
12 Minute of the Madras Missionary Conference, 1850, p. 14, quoted in Oddie, G., Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms, 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), p. 56Google Scholar.
13 Oddie, Social Protest in India, p. 52.
14 For a concise summary of the attitudes of Catholics and Syrian Christians to caste, refer to Forrester, D. B., Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Curzon Press, 1980), pp. 13–16Google Scholar.
15 Dubois, J. A., Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India; And of their Institutions, Religious and Civil (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817), pp. 13–14Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., p. 15.
17 This was probably due to a fear that such insistence would result in catechists abandoning their instruction before conversion. Oddie, Social Protest in India, p. 53.
18 Ibid., p. 56.
19 Harvest Field, Vol. IX, February 1898, p. 55, quoted in ibid.
20 G. U. Pope, The Lutheran Aggression: A Letter to the Tranquebar Missionaries regarding ‘Their Position, Their Proceedings, and Their Doctrine’ (Madras: American Mission Press, 1853); digital copy retrieved from http://anglicanhistory.org/india/pope_aggression1853/, [accessed 1 December 2021]; M. A. Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions in India from their commencement in 1706 to 1881, Religious Tract Society (London, 1884; 2nd edn), p. 50.
21 When writing about the Danish and German Lutherans and the Roman Catholics, Reverend Sherring said, ‘they chose to make caste a friend rather than an enemy. In doing this, however, while they made their path easier, they sacrificed their principles, and admitted an element into their midst which acted on the Christian community like poison.’ To add further evidence to show how caste toleration bred poor Christian faith, he argued that most of the convert communities of the past century had been whittled down in the face of apostasies: Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions, pp. 50–51.
22 The Digest of SPG records contains an argument against the notion that caste would simply fade away with passive Christian teaching. C. F. Pascoe., Classified Digest of Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1892, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (London, 1893), p. 512.
23 Ibid., p. 349.
24 Ibid., p. 392.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p. 311; Pope, The Lutheran Aggression.
27 Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions, p. 354.
28 Ibid., p. 356. With the exception of certain denominations like the Lutherans and organizations like the Salvation Army, most Protestant missionary societies practised ‘comity’ which entailed dividing the territorial jurisdictions of the various societies to avoid complications between them. Etherington, N., Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 117Google Scholar.
29 Ibid., p. 357.
30 Pope, The Lutheran Aggression.
31 Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions, p. 337.
32 Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978)Google Scholar.
33 Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska, ‘Rethinking the Historical Genealogy of Orientalism’, History and Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2007, p. 146.
34 Eugene Irschick has argued that ‘knowledge is not constructed by the willed activity of a stronger group over a weaker one’, but is instead the ‘production of all members of any historical situation, though not always in equal measure’: E. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1845 (London: University of California Press, 1994), p. 8.
35 Ibid., pp. 8, 10.
36 M. Vicziany, ‘Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in Early Nineteenth Century India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–1829)’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1986, p. 632. It is important to note that Brahmans were not the only social group employed as pandits in South India, but they remained the group most closely associated with this class in the minds of European critics. Pandits from both Brahman and Vellala backgrounds were employed in the College of Fort St George in Madras, for instance. Beyond language instruction, these pandits were also involved in the printing and publication of Tamil classics with the support and patronage of other wealthy land-owning Indian groups. V. Rajesh, ‘Patrons and Networks of Patronage in the Publication of Tamil Classics, c. 1800 to 1920’, Social Scientist, Vol. 39, No. 3/4, March–April 2011, pp. 65–67.
37 Brian Hatcher has reminded us that William Jones himself doubted the veracity of the information supplied by his pandit interlocutors and that early on British officials sought to acquire independence from pandits and relegate their status to that of assistants: Brian A. Hatcher, ‘What's Become of the Pandit? Rethinking the History of Sanskrit Scholars in Colonial Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3, July 2005, pp. 690–691.
38 Hatcher and others have discussed the shifting place of Sanskrit pandits in colonial knowledge production and their increasing marginalization. Hatcher also highlights the heterogeneity of individual pandits’ attitudes and relationships to colonial power and Brahman orthodoxy. Ibid., pp. 685–686, 702.
39 S. Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, in The Concept of Race in South Asia, P. Robb (ed.) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 166–169.
40 Lorenzen, ‘Marco della Tomba and the Brahmin from Banaras’, pp. 117–118, 123.
41 Ines G. Zupanov, ‘“One Civility but Multiple Religions”: Jesuit Mission Amongst St. Thomas Christians in India (16th to 17th centuries)’, Journal of Early Modern History, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2005, pp. 287, 322; J. A. Dubois, A Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India; And of their Institutions, Religious and Civil, G. U. Pope (ed.) (Madras: Law Bookseller and Publisher, 1862; 2nd edn; first translated 1817), p. xiv.
42 The preface to the second edition of Dubois’ work contains a letter of advertisement to the first edition from 1816, in which Major Wilks praises the value of the book to the Madras Government and recommends it: Dubois, A Description, pp. v–ix.
43 Caldwell was educated at the University of Glasgow, where he came under the tutelage of Professor Sir Daniel Sandford, an authority on the comparative study of languages. Evidence suggests that although Caldwell felt that Christian missionary work was his life's calling, he had a passion for academic work as well, in particular the study of comparative linguistics: Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, p. 4.
44 In his history of Protestant missions in South India, Reverend M. A Sherring referred to caste as a ‘pernicious evil’: Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions, p. 342. Throughout the nineteenth century, the issue of caste was raised at several regional missionary conferences, with British missionaries almost unanimously condemning it. Several signed resolutions against caste were published by these missionaries. For instance, in 1848, Bishop Spencer and 84 clergy and missionaries published a resolution that stated that the ‘Heathen Institute of Caste’ should have no place in the Indian church: Minute of the Madras Missionary Conference, 1850, pp. 34–39. Similar resolutions were repeatedly expressed in resolutions passed at South Indian missionary conferences in 1858, 1879, and 1900. Oddie, Social Protest in India, p. 48.
45 W. Jones, The Journal of Asiatick Researches, 1807, p. 64, quoted in Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race”’, p. 172.
46 Trautmann, Languages and Nations, p. 4; Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race”’, p. 173. In his memoirs, the influential writer and artist James Forbes describes skin colour as the basis of different varna groupings within the caste system: J. Forbes, Oriental Memoirs, 1813, p. 72, cited in Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race”’, p. 173.
47 Such beliefs continued to be held by many European academics right up to the early twentieth century, when prominent ethnologists linked the degree to which an individual was biologically ‘Aryan’ with his caste-rank. For an example, refer to H. Risley, The Castes and Tribes of India (Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1969), p. 33. At this time, ‘race’ was a fluid concept that had yet to adopt some of its later biological notions. Climate and physical environment were still popular explanations for phenotypical and characteristic differences in human groups.
48 Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race”’, p. 169.
49 Ibid.; M. Waligora, ‘What is Your “Caste”? The Classification of Indian Society as Part of the British Civilising Mission’, in Colonialism as Civilising Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India, H. Fischer and M. Mann (eds) (London: Anthem South Asian Studies, 2004), pp. 144–146.
50 Ravindiran, ‘Discourses of Empowerment’, p. 33.
51 Ibid., p. 101.
52 C. Grant, Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals; and the means of improving it (1796), p. 20.
53 Trautmann, Languages and Nations, pp. 101–103.
54 Christian clergy in India in the early part of the century were extremely critical of the notion that an essential morality could exist in any non-Christian society, let alone a Hindu one, although this would change by the end of the nineteenth century. In a sermon at St Georges Church, the Chaplain Thomas Robinson said, ‘what is there in this assertion so often repeated, and which it is hardly credible that the assertors themselves can seriously believe—that there is an equal share of social virtue in the heathens of India as in the Christians of our native island!’: T. Robinson, The Glory of the Church in its Extension to Heathen Lands: A Sermon Preached in Aid of The Incorporated Society For the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; At St. George's Church, Madras, on Whitsunday, May 14, 1826 (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1827); digital copy retrieved from http://anglicanhistory.org/india/robinson_glory1827.html, [accessed 1 December 2021].
55 W. Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos: Including a minute Description of their Manners and Customs and Translations from their Principle Works (The Mission Press, 1818; 2nd edn), Vol. 1, pp. 52, 54.
56 Ibid., pp. 49, 65.
57 Some years earlier, in 1793, a director of the East Company, Mr Bensley, when speaking about a request to allow British missionaries access to India, called the suggestion, ‘the most wild, extravagant, expensive and unjustifiable project that was ever suggested by the most visionary speculator’, quoted in Sharrock, South Indian Missions, p. 30. For a concise pan-denominational history of Christianity in India, refer to C. Mallampalli, Christians and Public Life in Colonial South (London, New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 6–9.
58 G. Gogerly, The Pioneers: A Narrative of Facts connected with Early Christian Missions in Bengal, Chiefly Relating to the Operations of the London Missionary Society (London: John Snow and Co., 1871), p. 7. Licence requirements were removed in 1833, leading to a considerable expansion in missionary activity. L. Caplan, ‘Class and Christianity in South India: Indigenous Responses to Western Denominationalism’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1980, p. 647.
59 Missionaries and clergy in India faced many obstacles from the Indian government in the early nineteenth century, such as hostile legislation and a lengthy bureaucratic process functioning as a check to their work. The metropolitan Bishops of Calcutta were often denied the ability to set up new Sees, leaving them in charge of large areas of poorly administrated territory which at one point stretched from ‘the Himalayas to Singapore’ and even included New South Wales. Memorial of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, on the extension of the Episcopate in India; with a statement of detailed information on the subject, an appendix of documents, and a coloured map of the present dioceses (London: Society for the Propagation of Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1857), pp. 11, 20, 22, 27. There were also laws in place against converts, making conversion efforts even more difficult. For example, before 1850, a Hindu who converted to another religion lost all his civil rights, and in some cases his property and custody of his family: C. F. Pascoe, Classified Digest of Records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701–1892 (London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1893), p. 508.
60 Four Letters of Carnaticus, explanatory of his view of the Indian army, the missionaries, and press of India: as inserted in the Asiatic Journals for May, September, October, and November, 1821, Hume Tracts.
61 Ibid., p. 10.
62 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
63 Ibid., p. 16.
64 Ibid., p. 12.
65 Ibid., pp. 10, 19.
66 Ibid., p. 19.
67 Ibid., p. 18.
68 The Brahman had apparently converted in the hope of obtaining protection from Christian missionaries as his own community members wanted to execute him by strangulation as a punishment for committing incest. Ibid.
69 Financial concerns weighed heavily on many missionary societies. A review of the finances of the SPG for the year 1857 reveals that it was spending far more than it was actually receiving. A contributor to the monthly records of the SPG stressed that treasurers would need to borrow to facilitate the deficit spending that was required for the Society to operate. The Mission Field: A Monthly Record of the Proceedings of The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, At Home and Abroad (London: E. Clay Printer, 1857), Vol. II, p. 263. Several seminaries and colleges were closed due to financial difficulties, like St Peter's College and the Vediarpuram Seminary. Sharrock, South Indian Missions, p. 45. Robert Caldwell's own thriving Caldwell College also had to be closed as a result of financial difficulties. J. A. Sharrock, ‘Caldwell College’, The Madras Diocesan Record, Vol. VIII, January 1894, p. 25.
70 Missionary publications frequently emphasized the strict selection process for converts and catechists, based on their character. One noted that ‘If converts were received irrespective of character, and bought, as some falsely say or insinuate, they would be far more numerous… Probably most missionaries have refused baptism to more than they have given it to; and in the latter cases usually kept candidates waiting for months’: The History of Protestant Missions in India from their commencement in 1706 to 1881 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1884), p. 433.
71 Forrester, D. B., Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London: Curzon Press, 1980), p. 65Google Scholar. One notable critic of the Indian Government, John Bruce Norton, argued that Brahmans had been among the key instigators of the ‘mutiny’ through the use of ‘wily intrigue’ and ‘underhand sedition’. He said the reason for this was they felt their caste privileges were being challenged and they maintained that the regions of India that had been most unaffected by the Mutiny had been the areas where the exploited lower caste masses had been socially and economically emancipated from the caste prejudice of the upper castes like the Brahmans: Norton, J. B, The Rebellion in India: How to Prevent Another (New Delhi: Navrang, 1988; first published 1857), pp. 57–58Google Scholar.
72 Evolving British responses to, and analyses of, the Mutiny came in diverse and complex forms that go beyond the scope of this article. For more detailed discussions of the subsequent British understanding of causes and consequences of the Mutiny, including a discussion of how subsequent nineteenth-century publications related the Mutiny to caste and the Brahman priesthood, refer to Chakravarty, Gautam, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49–71Google Scholar.
73 Sasha Riser-Kositsky, ‘The Political Intensification of Caste: India under the Raj’, Penn History Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2009, p. 38.
74 Caldwell, R., A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (New Delhi, 1875; first published 1856)Google Scholar.
75 Aiyar, R. S., Dravidian Theories (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1987), p. 7Google Scholar. Thomas Trautmann has argued against the popular idea that Robert Caldwell was the first scholar to prove that a separate South Indian family of languages existed separately from Sanskrit. He offers evidence to show that colonial administrators like Francis Whyte Ellis and his associates had already come up with a ‘Dravidian proof’ as early as 1814. Trautmann, Languages and Nations, pp. 73–75, 103–104. Caldwell also extended and reinforced the views of earlier figures like Whyte, which were little known at the time.
76 Tamil is granted the highest position. Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, p. 45.
77 Contrary to Caldwell's understanding of the centrality of Tamil in South Indian history, Shulman has demonstrated that Tamil was not always the dominant language in historical South India, but instead shared prestige with other languages like Sanskrit, Prakit, and Malayalam. Shulman further argues that Malayalam did not develop out of Tamil but that both languages split off from one another and developed along separate trajectories. Shulman also highlights the close interdependent and often complementary relationship of Sanskrit and Tamil in the past: David Shulman, Tamil: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 3, 6, 309.
78 Ibid., pp. 47, 106–114.
79 Ravindiran, ‘Discourses of Empowerment’, p. 35.
80 This is a clear reversal of his earlier position when he stated that ‘the Brahmans were doubtless the civilisers of the Tamil people’, and when he argued that the most civilized Tamils were also the most Brahmanized. R. Caldwell, The Tinnevelly Shanars: A Sketch of Their Religion and their Moral Condition and Characteristics as a Caste; With Special Reference to the Facilities and Hindrances to the Progress of Christianity Amongst them (Madras: Christian Knowledge Society, 1849), pp. 11, 22, 24. In Caldwell's preface to the second edition of a Comparative Grammar, he critiques both Sanskrit pandits and early Orientalists for attributing many aspects of Indian culture and literary traditions to a Brahmanical origin. R. A Caldwell, Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974; reprint of 1913 edition), pp. 41–42.
81 J. Wilson, Indian Caste (Bombay: Times of India Office, 1877), pp. 88, 93, 98.
82 A Wesleyan missionary based in Ikkadu, William Goudie, argued in 1894 that the Pariahs (an Untouchable caste) should be compensated and partially restored to the ‘position which their fathers held with honour long ago when their race saw better days’, quoted in Irschick, Dialogue and History, p. 182.
83 Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, p. 38.
84 Ibid., p. 39.
85 Ibid., p. 106.
86 Caldwell clearly links martial success with the superiority of a ‘race’ or group. He found it hard to accept that non-Aryan groups in the North, whom he believed represented the ancestors of the northern lower castes in his time, were once able to drive the Dravidians southwards. He hypothesized that they must have degenerated over time. Ibid.
87 In contrast to earlier views, in the early twentieth century, some European authors like Gilbert Slater would view the Southern Brahmans as Dravidians who had been successfully Aryanized and had learnt the language and culture of the Aryans: Slater, G., The Dravidian Element in Indian Culture (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1924), p. 53Google Scholar.
88 A good example of this can be seen in the writing of Mahadeo Moreshwar Kunte, a Brahman scholar, who described the British as ‘Western Aryas’, and the Brahmans and the British as being of the same racial stock and sharing the same positive racial attributes: M. Kunte, The Vicissitudes of Aryan Civilization in India: an essay which treats of the history of the Vedic and Buddhistic polities, explaining their origin, prosperity, and decline (Bombay: Oriental Printing Press, 1880), pp. 21–22. Several other notable southern Tamil Brahman scholars in the early twentieth century also utilized and promoted this racial understanding of themselves as superior ‘Aryans’ in books they wrote about the cultural history of southern India. Indian writers largely ignored the possibility that Tamil Brahmans were not racially distinct from the rest of the Tamil population until much later. Aiyangar, M. S., Tamil Studies: Essays on the History of the Tamil People, Language, Religion and Literature (New Delhi, Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1998; first published 1914), pp. 6, 10, 19, 60Google Scholar; Aiyangar, S. K., Some Contributions of South India to Indian Culture (New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1981; first published 1923), p. 1Google Scholar.
89 For instance, Caldwell was of the opinion that ‘servile’ castes could indeed belong to a different race from higher castes, but rejected the universality of such claims. Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1974, p. 62.
90 Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, pp. 77, 112.
91 Ibid., p. 112.
92 Ibid.
93 Dirks, ‘Orientalist Counterpoints’, pp. 336–337.
94 Edgar Thurston cites Mr. H. A. Stewart whose entry in the census report of 1891 states that ‘it has often been asserted, and is now the general belief, that the Brahmans of the South are not pure Aryans, but are a mixed Aryan and Dravidian race…’, quoted in E. Thurston, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1909), Vol. A–B, p. Lii. Herbert Risley also argued in 1915 that Tamil Brahmans were less ‘Aryan’ than their northern counterparts because racial mixing must have occurred when the existing Dravidian priests of South India were co-opted into the Brahman fold: Risley, The Castes and Tribes of India, p. 46.
95 Caldwell, The Tinnevelly Shanars.
96 Caldwell insisted that the Shanars had received a good education solely through the efforts of missionaries, and that in 1849 he did not know of a single Shanar who had enough English to read his pamphlet. Letter from Caldwell to Revd. H. W. Tucker, Secretary to the SPG, London, June 20, 1883, CLR 52, Madras VII (August 1880–April 1886), Rhodes House, Oxford, p. 241, quoted in Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, p. 203.
97 Caldwell is more explicit about this perceived apathy in his introduction to a publication on the Tinnevelly missions. Caldwell, R., Lectures on the Tinnevelly Missions, Descriptive of the Field, the Work, and the Results; With Introductory Lecture on the Progress of Christianity in India (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857), p. 4Google Scholar, quoted in Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, pp. 152–153.
98 According to Caldwell, ‘Without priests; without a written religious code; without sacred traditions…they (the Shanars) have always been found more willing to embrace Christianity’: Caldwell, The Tinnevelly Shanars, p. 71.
99 M. S. S. Pandian, ‘Caste in Tamil Nadu: A History of Nadar Censorship’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2013, pp. 12–14.
100 Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, p. 198.
101 Ibid., p. 199.
102 Pandian, ‘Caste in Tamil Nadu’, pp. 12–14.
103 Sharrock, South Indian Missions, p. 52.
104 B. R. Ambedkar, The Untouchables (Shravasti, Balrampur: Jetavan Mahavihar, 1969; 2nd edn).
105 Sharrock describes how Sudra converts chose to leave the Anglican Church rather than accept an equal status with the Untouchable castes. He also mentions how the Untouchable castes themselves were ‘great sticklers’ for adhering to caste. Sharrock, South Indian Missions, pp. 183, 25.
106 Assa Doron and Ursula Rao, ‘From the Edge of Power: The Cultural Politics of Disadvantage in South Asia’, Asian Studies Review, Vol. 33, no. 4 (December 2009), p. 425.
107 For a more detailed analysis of the colonial role in the construction of modern caste identity, see Inden, R., Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000; first published 1990)Google Scholar; Dirks, N., Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
108 In his preface he indicates that his book targets both European and Tamil readers. Regarding the uses of his book, though, Caldwell states that he ‘thought more, however of the requirements of the natives of the country than those of the foreigners’: Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, p. xi.
109 Quoted in D. Chakrabarty, Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt, Ltd, 1997), p. 105.
110 Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, pp. 6–7.
111 Ibid.
112 Caldwell, The Tinnevelly Shanars, pp. 5, 26.
113 Ibid., p. 13; Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, p. 7.
114 Caldwell, The Tinnevelly Shanars, pp. 10–11.
115 Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, p. 47.
116 Missionaries also held the view that Brahmans harboured a hatred of Christianity. Dubois wrote that Brahman ‘hatred of the Christians’ was due to the perceived threat of being deprived of their livelihoods should Christianity gain ground. His book influenced many, including G. U. Pope, who edited the 1862 edition. Dubois, A Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India, p. 135.
117 ‘Baptism of Brahmans in Tinnevelly’, The Mission Field, 1 September 1870, pp. 267–268. Caldwell wrote that his evangelistic work with the higher castes only bore fruit in one town, Alvar-Tiru-Nagari, where six men were baptised. Wyatt, J. L., Reminiscences of Bishop Caldwell (Madras: Addison and Co., 1894), pp. 126–127Google Scholar. In the same year he published his Grammar, Caldwell recorded in another publication that, to the best of his knowledge, ‘only one Tinnevelly Brahman has yet become a Christian’. Caldwell, Lectures on the Tinnevelly Missions, p. 34. Several authors have examined the genre of the conversion story in biographical and autobiographical accounts in colonial India in greater detail. Mathias Frenz's study of the Indian pastor H. A. Kaundinya's autobiographical conversion story highlights the performative element of such stories as manifestations of personal transformation and ‘regimes of truth’: Frenz, Matthias, ‘Truth by Narration—Why Autobiographical Conversion Accounts are so Compelling: The Case of H. A. Kaundinya, the first Indian Pastor in the Basel Mission’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, pp. 384–399CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Israel and Zavos highlight the nature of conversion accounts as ‘constituent and constitutive narrative acts which regulate the boundaries between the personal, the social and the political’: Hephzibah Israel and John Zavos, ‘Narratives of Transformation: Religious Conversion and Indian traditions of “Life Writing”’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, p. 361.
118 In the later part of the nineteenth century, William Hickey criticized Robert de Nobili for forgetting Jesus's emphasis on the poor and focusing on the Brahman community and only turning to the lower castes when success with the Brahmans was limited. W. Hickey, The Tanjore Mahratta principality in Southern India: The Land of the Chola; The Eden of the South (Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1988; first published 1873), p. 80. The chaplain James Hough, a major influence on Robert Caldwell, argued that the Jesuits had failed in India because they had strengthened the position of the Brahmans in South India by emulating them: Hough, J., A Reply to Letter of the Abbé Dubois on the State of Christianity in India (London: Seeley and Son, 1824), p. 62Google Scholar.
119 The Calcutta-based Friend of India reported that ‘Perhaps there is no city in India, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, which has a stronger claim to be considered the headquarters of Hindoo Bigotry than Madras’, quoted in R. Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginning to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 276.
120 L. Kitzan, ‘The London Missionary Society and the Problem of Authority in India, 1798–1833’, Church History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 471–472.
121 Ibid., pp. 275–289, 290–296. The Nallur incident saw widespread destruction of convert property, robbery, rape, and assault. The assailants received considerable public support and were acquitted by Brahman judges who instead charged low caste Christian witnesses with perjury for inconsistencies in their testimonies. Both Robert Caldwell and G. U. Pope lent their signatures to a public statement in support of the dismissal of the Brahman judges, showing that they were intimately involved in the Hindu–Christian clashes going on in Tinnevelly. E. Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society: Its Environment, Its Men and Its Work, Church Missionary Society (London, 1899), Vol. I, pp. 323–324.
122 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, p. 278.
123 Ibid., p. 279.
124 Ibid., p. 278. In most of these attacks Brahmans rarely physically participated in acts of violence, but were involved in leadership and organization.
125 Eric Frykenberg identifies the Vibuthi Sangam as one of the progenitors of the modern ‘Hindutva’ movement of today's Hindu Right. R. E. Frykenberg, ‘Gospel, Globalisation and Hindutva’, in Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century, D. M. Lewis (ed.) (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), p. 113.
126 Mallampalli, Christians and Public Life, pp. 7–8. On the topic of Vellalas, John Pickford of the CMS wrote in his journal that, ‘there is something particularly offensive to an Englishman's feelings in the ignorant pretensions of the Vellalas to superiority on account of their caste’, highlighting missionary awareness of Vellala caste consciousness, quoted in A. Copley, Religions in Conflict: Ideology, Cultural Contact and Conversion in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 153. Venkatachalapathy notes the strong caste prejudice and ‘repugnance’ of non-Brahman Tamil pandits of the College of Fort St George towards a Pariah applying for admittance to the college in 1833: A. R. Venkatachalapathy, ‘Grammar, the Frame of Language: Tamil Pandits at the College of Fort St George’, in The Madras School of Orientalism, Thomas R. Trautmann (ed.) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 122.
127 P. Appasamy, The Centenary History of the C.M.S in Tinnevelly, Palamcottah Printing Press, 1923, p. 86, quoted in Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, p. 19. In the aftermath of the Nallur incident, a petition was signed against the Government for allegedly aiding and abetting missionary activities, and deliberately eroding special privileges formerly enjoyed by the Hindu elite. Many of the 12,000 signatures belonged to non-Brahman elites like the Vellalas. Frykenberg, R. E., ‘Modern Education in South India, 1784–1854: Its Roots and Its Role as a Vehicle of Integration under Company Raj’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1, Feb. 1986, p. 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
128 Many of the caste-observing members of the Tranquebar Lutheran Church were also Vellalas. Mallampalli, Christians and Public Life, pp. 7–8.
129 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, p. 318.
130 While the Brahmans constituted only around 3 per cent of the population in the Madras presidency, they held the majority of the best-paying government jobs, positions in the judiciary, and various other departments. Pandian, ‘Notes on the Transformation of “Dravidian” Ideology’, p. 86. R. Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India, 1852–1891 (Jaipur–Delhi: Rawat Publications, 1980, p. 123). David Shulman has described the ‘highly visible domains of Tamil Brahman privilege in the civil service, the courts, education, and prestige professions’ in the later part of the nineteenth century. David Shulman, Tamil: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 308.
131 Ibid.
132 Caldwell considered members of an Untouchable South Indian caste, the Pariahs, to be Dravidians as well, quoted in Aiyangar, History of the Tamil People; Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, pp. 510–511.
133 Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar, 1875, p. 45.
134 For a detailed account of the subsequent marginalization of the Tamil language by certain Brahman scholars in the twentieth century, including their claim that Tamil was derivative of Sanskrit, their promotion of Devanagiri script, and their supposed dislike of using Tamil in public, refer to Pandian, ‘Notes on the Transformation of “Dravidian” Ideology’, pp. 86–88. Ravindiran Vaitheespara also argues that before missionary Orientalism, Brahmanical/Sanskritic culture was gaining ascendency over the more regionally bound Tamil cultural forms and practices: Ravindiran, ‘Discourses of Empowerment’, p. 16.
135 Venkatachalapathy notes the ‘astonishing absence of a single Brahmin’ in the extensive list of Tamil pandits at the College of Fort St George, suggesting that Tamil scholarship in the early colonial period was largely the preserve of non-Brahmans. Venkatachalapathy, ‘Grammar, the Frame of Language’, pp. 122–123.
136 Ibid.
137 In 1878, a Brahman, Muthuswamy Iyer, became the first Indian judge of the Madras High Court. His appointment became the centre of heated criticisms among Europeans and non-Brahman Indians in the South. A ‘Sudra Correspondent’ sent a letter to the Madras Mail arguing that as a Brahman, Muthuswamy was too far removed from the rest of the community to discharge his duties properly. He also argued that Hindus were too swayed by caste sentiment to be expected to conduct their duties impartially. Another ‘Dravidian Correspondent’ to the Madras Mail argued that the Brahman ‘was least fitted of all castes to deal fairly with the masses…since he considers himself as a god, and all others Milechas’. Apart from showing anti-Brahman sentiment among the English-educated non-Brahman elite, the second example also shows the relative speed with which Caldwell's ‘Dravidian’ category was appropriated and used against the Brahmans. The Madras Mail quotes are taken from Ram, N., ‘Dravidian Movement in Its Pre-Independence Phases’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 14, No. 7/8, Feb. 1979, p. 380Google Scholar.
138 The rediscovery of old Tamil classics began during the second part of the nineteenth century by individuals such as C. W. Tamotharam Pillai and U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar. The first time an ancient Tamil work was converted to book form from Palmyra leaf manuscripts was in 1847 with the publication of the Tolkappiyam Eluttatikaram (first century ad) published by Malavai Mahalinga Aiyar. For more on the nineteenth-century rediscovery of ancient Tamil texts and the subsequent scholarly interest in them, see Arooran, K. N., Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism: 1905–1944 (Madurai: Koodal Publishers, 1980), pp. 15–20Google Scholar.
139 In a reaction against what he saw as a political move by the Vellalas to break cultural ties with the Brahmans, Brahman scholar Srinivasa Aiyangar criticized the ‘castemen of the late Mr. Sundaram Pillai’. According to him, the Vellalas of the past 15 years (since 1899) ‘try; to disown and to disprove any trace of indebtedness to the Aryans, to exalt the civilization of the ancient Tamils, to distort in the name of historic research the current traditions and literature, and to pooh-pooh the views of former scholars, which support the Brahmanization of the Tamil race’: Aiyangar, Tamil Studies, p. 46.
140 D. Reetz., ‘In Search of the Collective Self: How Ethnic Group Concepts Were Cast through Conflict in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 2 (May 1997), p. 290.
141 Irving-Stonebraker, Sarah, ‘Theology, Idolatry and Science: John Williams’ Missionary Ethnography and Natural History of the South Pacific’, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2018, pp. 343–358CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maxwell, David, ‘The Soul of the Luba: W. F. P. Burton, Missionary Ethnography and Belgian Colonial Science’, History and Anthropology, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2008, pp. 325–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cinnamon, James M., ‘Missionary Expertise, Social Science, and the Uses of Ethnographic Knowledge in Colonial Gabon’, History in Africa, Vol. 33, 2006, pp. 413–431Google Scholar.
142 While on board the ship on his way to India for the first time in 1837, Caldwell was already well acquainted with Evangelical criticism of the Calcutta-based Orientalists and their privileging of Vedic Hinduism. He was aware of the link between positive and empowering accounts of Hinduism and the interests of the Brahmans. He derisively called Orientalists like Colebrooke and William Jones ‘Western Brahmans’. Wyatt, Reminiscences of Bishop Caldwell, p. 19. Vincent Kumaradoss also raises the point that on board the ship, Caldwell was exposed to Alexander Duff's plan to use English education as means of targeting the influential castes for conversion in the interests of a downward filtration mission strategy. Kumaradoss suggests that Caldwell gave this strategy serious thought before going to Tinnevelly. Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell, p. 11.
143 Caldwell, R., The Languages of India in Their Relation to Missionary Work, A Speech Delivered at the Meeting of the SPG in Foreign Parts, April 28, 1875 (London: R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor, 1875), p. 9Google Scholar.
144 Richard Temple described how Brahman influence was moderated by the trading and literary castes in Bengal, by the Rajputs and the Muslims in the North-West Provinces, and by the Parsis and Jains in Bombay, but that their influence was unrestricted in Maharashtra and South India; Temple, R., Men and Events of My Time (London, 1882)Google Scholar, quoted in Ram, N., ‘Dravidian Movement in Its Pre-Independence Phases’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 14, No. 7/8, Feb. 1979, p. 379Google Scholar.