Acknowledgements: I have been fortunate to have been helped by many friends and colleagues in the writing of this paper. I am grateful to V. K. Natraj, the Director, and to K. Nagaraj, M. S. S. Pandian and Padmini Swaminathan at the Madras Institute of Development Studies for their hospitality and kindness whilst I did research in Chennai in 2000. My friend and colleague Chris Fuller in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE has encouraged this work from the start and has made substantial comments on several versions of this paper, while I also want to thank George Rosen, David Rudner and Raminder Kaur for their commentaries on the final draft. I am further deeply grateful to Chakravarti Ram-Prasad at the University of Lancaster for his insightful comments both as a scholar and as a ‘subject’. The paper is substantially different as a result of Ram's interventions. All these friends have led me to correct some errors of fact and of understanding. Those that remain are of course my responsibility alone. I also thank Jonathan Spencer, Thomas Blom Hansen and Filippo Osella for comments made during the meeting of the South Asian Anthropologists' Group at the University of Edinburgh in September 2000, and Mary Hancock, the discussant, and Joanne Waghorne, Indira Peterson and Ginette Ishimatsu, fellow panellists on ‘From Madras to Chennai: The City That Milton Singer Never Saw’, at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago 2001. Research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).