This article concerns the politics of security and caste difference in the late nineteenth century Madras Presidency. Relying on a vernacular principle of interpretation emerging from the colonial archive itself—a Sanskrit ‘Law of Coincidence’—the article makes a case for collective identity in colonial India as a conjunctural attribution. I closely examine the trajectory of a widespread peasant movement that sought in 1896 to evict a single caste from hundreds of settlements altogether. The article tracks an intimate traffic between administrative sociology and native stereotype that converged on an assessment of this caste as thieving and predatory by nature. This racialised politics of intrinsic character enabled a popular programme of violent eviction. At the same time, peasant efforts to secure property and territory from threat may be understood as an alternative project of rural government, one that marked a crucial turn in the development of a moral order in the southern Tamil countryside.
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