‘Rights over Wastelands’ and New Narratives of the Paraiyan Past (1860–1900)

Abstract

The rural world of nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu was highly diversified in terms of land control and ownership. Academic efforts have largely focused on the various claims to ‘privileged’ land-ownership. This overemphasis on the authority, rights, claims and protests of the ‘privileged’ too often negated the prospects of a serious introspection into the twin issues of agrestic servitude and landlessness. The present article is concerned with one group of rural labourers, who in nineteenth-century Tamil Nadu were essentially regarded as ‘agrestic serfs’. The Paraiyans were mostly landless labourers and depended for their livelihood on the dominant rural groups. Their existence as a depressed social category, denied of all privileges including landownership, provokes a serious investigation into the operation and mechanism of the institution of mirasi in the Tamil country. The definition of ‘waste’ was mired in terms of complexities emanating from the classification of lands, which were essentially referred to as anadu karambu or gramanattams. These complexities in course of the nineteenth century had fashioned differing sets of opinions within the conservative and reformist sections of the colonial bureaucracy. Such contradictions alongside discussions on the hidden ‘Paraiyan history’ have been explored to understand the broader issues centring around the ‘Sedentary Paraiyan’ as well as the ‘Slave Paraiyan’.