Caste inequality has been a longstanding reality in the Tamil countryside. Chola inscriptions and Bhakti poetry from a millennium ago tell of social distinctions that enabled the extraction of labour from men and women of the lower castes. Skipping forward to the early 19th century, when the British established control in the southern Madras Presidency, they witnessed slave-like agrarian servitude among Dalits. Although this was the era of global anti-slavery movements, the importance of cheap Dalit labour for land revenue meant that neither the East India Company nor, from 1858, the British Crown, intervened to abolish the system.
Consequently, well into the early 20th century, agrarian relations in the Tamil countryside continued to be marked by inequality between upper-caste landowners (often belonging to the Brahmin and Vellalar castes) and lower-caste (Pallar and Paraiyar) landless labourers. In addition to Dalits, there were other occupational caste groups that also held low status in local communities. These included Nadar, once called Shanar, who were derided for their hereditary occupation of making palm liquor, which was taboo according to Brahminical teetotalling norms.
The persistence of caste inequality does not mean that lower-caste communities did not fight for equality, dignity, or at least better living conditions. They did, often. Some organised to acquire education, move to towns, and change occupations. Others emigrated to the tea plantations of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to escape the caste restrictions of their villages. Yet others opted out of Hinduism by converting to Christianity or Islam, both of which proclaimed the theoretical equality of all persons.
Yet even as they reaped the stray benefits of these acts of courageous resistance, they also faced hostile reactions from their neighbours for challenging the status quo. For example, through the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Nadar attempts to reinvent their caste status were resented by Maravar, who stood just above them in local caste rankings. Likewise, upper-caste communities continued to deny Dalits who had converted to Christianity or Islam access to certain village streets and spaces, by claiming that they would pollute them.
It is perhaps no surprise that those immediately and directly impacted by challenges to social hierarchies opposed them. What is noteworthy is the extent to which the state, via its police force, participated in this project of maintaining caste hierarchies. To explore this, I will draw upon journals from select police stations in the Tamil countryside to reveal the ways in which police power intersected with caste power at the village level.
Manur is a small village, approximately twenty kilometres from Tirunelveli town, which was the capital of Tirunelveli district in British India. Its police station, originally built in 1867 at a cost of Rs 540, has undergone numerous repairs over the past century and a half. Inevitably, it must have lost some of its records, too. But some remain, dating from the early 1930s. One of these is the Marava Sheet: a four-page printed form containing eleven questions, the answers to which the police filled out by hand.
The form reflects a longstanding, but mistaken, British colonial belief that Indians could be classified and understood by their caste identities, so that an Indian belonging to a certain caste would necessarily behave in accordance with its dictates. According to British administrators, this community identity sharply distinguished colonised Indians from colonising, enlightened Europeans, whose actions reflected their individual will and reason. Thus, colonial administrative and ethnographic records routinely described the entire membership of specific castes as thrifty, sly, honest, respectable, or, as we will see, criminal.
By the late 19th century, castes regarded as inherently criminal by the colonial government were subject to extrajudicial policing through draconian legislation called the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), 1870. Those who fell under the remit of the CTA could be convicted of certain crimes with far less evidence than was the legal norm, and their movements were severely restricted even when they had committed no crime. The CTA was extended to Madras Presidency in 1911, and Maravar were brought under its ambit soon after.
The reason the British perceived the Maravar as being inherently “criminal” was their participation in a pre-colonial policing system called kaval, which skirted the line between pillage and protection. In some cases, villagers paid kavalgar (policemen) for their security from thieves. In others, villagers paid the policemen fees to be exempted from theft by the kavalgar themselves.
Condemning the practice as pure extortion, Madras administrators committed themselves to eradicating it for well over a century, albeit in vain. The Marava Sheet, which the police filled out for each village in their jurisdiction, was part of this futile state initiative. Through it, senior police officers sought to collect information on the prevalence of kaval in each village within the region and based on their findings, allotted personnel and resources to tackle it.
In reality, the form did no more than strengthen the stereotype that Maravar were criminal, which rendered them vulnerable to further police intervention. Consider one of its questions: “What form does Marava oppression take? Does it arise from Kaval?” The question takes Marava oppression for granted, without attempting to ascertain whether it occurred or not. The assumption of Marava criminality informed not only the printed questions that came from police headquarters in Madras city, but also the handwritten and typewritten answers filled in by inspectors for each village across Tirunelveli district. Police responses were logically inconsistent within each form and revealed no clear pattern about the practice of kaval across the region.
For instance, a form from one village declared that “there [was] no oppression by Maravas”, but that the (high-caste) village munsif [magistrate], Rangasubbaraya Iyer, was “afraid of the Marava” and that someone would, therefore, “come out boldly to depose against the Maravas”. The village of Mavadi, on the other hand, apparently had no kaval system according to one of the responses on the form, but another response, on the same form, noted that the “Maravars will commit any type of crime if kaval is refused”. Despite these inconsistencies, police administrators used such data to divert resources to policing Maravar in the region, by placing additional police stations and scheduling more frequent beats near villages where Maravar lived. Police harassment was thus woven into the everyday lives of these communities.
The CTA was repealed in 1947, but its impact on criminalised communities did not end then, for multiple reasons. Firstly, many who had been classified as “criminal tribes”, while now denotified, were reclassified as “habitual offenders” under the Habitual Offenders Act, enacted the following year, which kept them just as firmly under the thumb of the police. By 1952, of the 5,268 persons who had been registered province-wide under the Act, as many as 4,097 (almost 78 per cent) belonged to denotified tribes. Even those members of former “criminal tribes” who were not reclassified as “habitual offenders” continued to be policed as “denotified members”, a pejorative term that lives on, three-quarters of a century after independence and the repeal of the CTA. Several recent Tamil films, notably Paruthiveeran (dir. Ameer Sultan, 2007) and Jai Bhim (dir. TJ Gnanavel, 2021), have poignantly explored these ties between denotified tribes and state authority.
A second reason for the lasting legacy of the CTA is the location of police stations. Under colonial rule, police stations were not evenly distributed across the landscape. Administrators took into account various factors, such as population density and demographics, to concentrate stations in areas deemed more deserving of security. Accordingly, European settlements received extra police presence, but so did regions in which the so-called criminal tribes dominated. Unlike the colonial government, which put a lot of time and money into determining and fine-tuning the location of stations, the post-colonial government invested its resources in building better housing for police personnel, around half of whom lived in houses without electricity, running water, or adequate sewage facilities at the time of Independence. The outcome of this shift in priority was that the colonial geography of policing endured well past 1947. As a result, denotified communities continued to be policed harshly in independent India.
A third and final reason for the enduring legacy of the CTA is that the notion that certain castes were inherently criminal was not restricted to British administrators. Indians, including policemen, appropriated it over the course of time. Individual beliefs could not be revoked with the repeal of an act. Consequently, even after 1947, the police institution as a whole, as much as individual policemen, was guided in its practice by the notion that certain castes tended to criminality. As late as 1964, for example, the Madras Police Research Centre conducted a study of criminality among a denotified caste, the Valayar of Madurai, “with an exhaustive report to serve as a guide to the investigating staff in handling Velaya [sic] crimes”.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Everyday Violence: Colonial Past to Post-colonial Present,’ by Radha Kumar in Policing and Violence in India: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Realities, edited by Deana Heath and Jinee Lokaneeta, Speaking Tiger Books.
