No one is self-made : Evolving iterations of giving and shaping of transnational Kamma caste subjectivities

Abstract

This article focuses on the transnational giving practices of Kammas (a dominant caste in Coastal Andhra, South India) by examining their records, standing myths and evolving iterations around the practice. While Kammas date their giving practices to the 1700s, written records trace community giving to the late colonial period, where a few elites instituted and patronized caste associations. The practice was reconstituted in the late 1990s, with many affluent Kamma professionals in the US embracing the role of community welfare organizers. In its transnational moment, expressed through the idiom of donations, horizontal giving has become one of the key embodied markers of Kamma selfhood, recursively produced as a group trait of a globally dispersed community of professionals. Despite the evolving iterations and modernizing impulses, the article argues that historically, giving for the Kammas has engendered an interiority and exteriority and is intimately tied to their collective quest for upward social mobility.

Introduction

‘We are a community that gives’, explained Mastaniah garu, ¹ a prominent Kamma welfare organizer in Guntur, a town in Andhra Pradesh, South India. He was responding to my query about the visibility of diasporic giving in and around Guntur. By contextualizing his non-resident Indian or NRI ² daughter’s altruistic engagements through the above statement and collapsing it with other forms of community welfare organized locally by the members of his community, ³ he had at once socialized the giving practices to his caste and placed diaspora philanthropy within the larger socio-spatial milieu of the region: Kammas of Coastal Andhra as a community that gives. Kammas are what M N Srinivas (1959) has termed as a dominant caste, a numerically small yet socially and politically influential caste group in a given geography in India - in this case, the Krishna River Basin of coastal Andhra Pradesh - whose material control of resources now spread across South India (Benbabaali, 2018). Since the late 1960s, educated Kamma and other upper-caste youths from the region have been migrating to the West, particularly the USA, searching for better job opportunities. By the mid-1970s, many of them had started to organize themselves under the banner of different regional and national Telugu associations in the US, ostensibly for preserving Telugu culture and language. By the early 1990s, some of these associations extended the scope of their activities and started raising funds to provide welfare to their ‘community back home’ and ‘develop’ their home region.

The NRI philanthropic engagements in the region have expanded manifold since then. As I travelled across different towns and villages in Coastal Andhra between 2011 and 2018 and the USA in 2012 and 2019, ⁴ many of my Kamma interlocutors narrated stories of largesse of their kin who were living abroad (often in the USA) and were inclined to ‘serve the matrubhoomi’ (motherland). From building hospitals to investing in hybrid seeds, from sponsoring the education of ‘meritorious’ students to building communal halls or water treatment plants, examples of NRI charitable giving were expansive and ubiquitous in the region (Roohi, 2016, 2018a, 2018b).

Such aid, flowing from the migrants to their places of origin, has been termed diaspora philanthropy in the literature and is seen as a major modality through which migrants engage ‘back home’ (Johnson, 2007; Espinosa, 2016; Flanigan, 2017; Newland et al., 2010). The category of diaspora philanthropy is distinguished from household-level remittances, which are usually intended to support families ‘left behind’ (Gulati, 1987: WS 41; Zachariah and Rajan, 2015) or contribute to the development of the ‘homeland’ (Johnson, 2007). In this article, borrowing from Osella (2018), I apply the term (diaspora) philanthropy expansively, using it interchangeably with charitable aid and transnational giving. Meant for the welfare of those outside of the donors’ immediate family, given without expectations of (immediate) return, these resources are professedly meant for the uplift of the people in the region of origin. However, rather than seeing diaspora philanthropy as a novel phenomenon engendered during or due to the transnational mobility of these high skilled migrants, in this article I trace the historicity of these acts of giving and analyze how transnationality has inflected its meaning and practice.

NRI giving in Coastal Andhra can be explored through multiple vectors. Nevertheless, a recurring articulation is through notions of reciprocity and obligation – of ‘giving back’ to the community to which these NRIs belong and to whom they owe their success, as the following interview excerpt from Dr Venkatesaiah, a retired political science professor from Nagarjuna University in Guntur, encapsulates:

Most of the NRIs who are giving for village development or education belonged to lower class. They were brought up in villages and experienced hardships. Nobody is self-made. Everyone plays a role… [and] is involved in making the other. A collective effort goes into making someone what he is today. There is also a feeling of oneness. They realize that my parents alone are not involved in my success, but the entire village is. This attitude makes them responsible for their village and town and its people. ⁵

Directed mostly toward the donors’ kin and caste members in their region of origin, such iterations around giving can be read as acts of ‘generalized’ and long-term reciprocity (Parry and Bloch, 1989; Sahlins, 1972) that reproduces the community. Adding to this argument and going beyond it, in this article, I show that community giving has not been static, and the articulation around it has evolved over the last century. From danadharma to viraalamu, and in its current transnational moment expressed through the idiom of donation, the changing iterations around giving reflect the changing subjectivities of an agrarian caste transitioning to a caste of transnational professionals. Despite its changing articulation, giving has continued to foreground caste as central to these practices.

In what is to follow, the article first explores the engendering of an interiority and exteriority in Kamma transnational giving. It then traces the historical antecedents of this dichotomizing, focussing on the evolving iterations around giving by examining the community’s records and standing myths around the practice. Using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (1986, 1992) and distinction (1987) and extrapolating it to the making of caste-inflected subjectivities for the Kammas, the article then puts these concepts in a productive conversation with the changing performances of Kammahood over time, which is in itself recursively shaped within a social field of inter-caste relations. In doing so, the article suggests that diaspora philanthropy, articulated through the English term donation, signals the horizontalization of giving and has become one of the key embodied markers of Kamma selfhood, recursively produced as a group trait of a globally dispersed community. However, it argues that despite these overtly changing iterations and modernizing impulses, the meaning around giving has consistently reproduced the imagination of the community’s interiority and exteriority with caste at its centre. Tied intimately to their collective pursuit of upward social mobility in the last century, horizontal flows of charitable resources meant for community uplift have continued to eclipse more vertical inter-caste flows.

Transnational giving and the production of interiority and exteriority

The passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 to fill the high skilled labour shortage in the US incentivized many young doctors, engineers and scientists from coastal Andhra to migrate to the US in pursuit of jobs or for doctoral degrees and medical residencies. This development accelerated after the dot com bust in the 1990s (Roohi, 2017). Among the swiftly expanding Telugu diaspora in the US, ⁶ Coastal Andhra migrants are considered the oldest. They also have strong philanthropic engagements with their region of origin. While Coastal Andhra boasts of many charitable programmes run by locals, NRIs are seen as an important stakeholders invested in the region through their philanthropy. In some instances, projects are conjointly run and managed by the two groups.

Kamma NRI donors, however, tend to see their giving as different, drawing attention to the points of divergences between the locals’ more dated charitable activities and their own ‘modernized’ forms of engagements. This qualitative difference is attributed to their own superior educational qualifications and their NRI status, which endows them with a different set of values and awareness about the needs of the community ‘back home’. Take, for instance, Dr Padmavati, a New York-based gynaecologist and Mahesh, an IT software company owner near Boston, two of my Telugu American interlocutors. They stressed that their philanthropy is not religiously motivated but is avowedly secular, intended to uplift the Telugu community and bring development to the region. Like many other Kamma NRIs, they articulate their giving practices as more professionalized, effective, and outcome-oriented, pointing to its modernizing impulse. However, this ethnographic research tracing the channels and beneficiaries of their transnational giving reveals that the recipients of these projects are often from their extended kin and caste networks - a practice that has a long history in the region.

In the first instance, many of my US-based interlocutors express their giving as informed by American values (Cornuelle and Annunziata, 2017). They view voluntary work, organizing fundraising events or forming alumni associations (that make endowments to its alma mater) as an American convention that the Telugus have imbibed from their American counterparts. However, more extended reflections generally tend to bring out stories of charity by kin in Coastal Andhra and the different Telugu associations in the US as an emulation of practices in place in Coastal Andhra. Take for instance Sumathi Rao, a 43-year-old ⁷ ‘a housewife… (who) also do(es) digital marketing work from home’. She often volunteered for community events organized by the local or national Telugu organizations in New Jersey. Sumathi contextualized her engagement as American inspired and was ‘impressed by what the Americans do for the community’. Over the course of our conversation however, she also narrated the story of her grandfather, a farmer in a village near Tenali with ten acres of agricultural land, who would offer grains and money to those in need and how this spirit of charity was passed on to all her family members. Without a ‘proper job’, she used her time to help the community by donating her time and money. When asked what she meant by her community, she explained her community was the Telugus living in her town in Iselin, New Jersey and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. Many hours later, it became more apparent that the people she closely interacted with mainly were from her own Kamma caste and often from her region of origin in Coastal Andhra.

The expanding group of transnational donors constantly invoke their own hardships and toil to recognise these traits in their co-caste members in Coastal Andhra. By doing this, Kammas attempt to bridge the socio-spatial distance between an NRI donor and a non-NRI receiver to signal a more horizontal relationship. Even if, in some instances, these acts of giving spring from receiving personal community help which may have contributed to the donor’s successful transition to an NRI, many of my interlocutors, including the donors and the receivers, expressed intra-community giving as a ‘duty’ and obligation to one’s community and not only an act of reciprocity.

Dr Padmavati and Mahesh Alluri introduced above belong to two different waves of migrants. Nevertheless, they display a strong commitment to ‘uplift the community’ and consider educational support for the ‘needy’, ‘poor’ and ‘meritorious’ students who are ‘left behind’ as a fundamental way to achieve this goal. Their narratives about ‘useful’ forms of philanthropy are morally infused with the discourse of giving as an older practice that has now become streamlined and effective. Dr Padmavati moved to the USA in 1972 along with her husband for her medical residency. She is one of the most respected community leaders in the USA and has been closely involved in the Telugu Association of North America or TANA, working with the association since its inception in 1977. She grew up in a village in Guntur district that only had a primary school, forcing her to walk a few kilometres every day to a neighbouring village to attend middle and high school. Despite these hardships, she emerged as one of the most illustrious daughters of her village, having completed her MBBS from Guntur Medical College and her residency in the USA, after which she started her private practice in New York. One of her first philanthropic acts was to start a school in her village; it was an ‘obligation’ towards her village for facilitating her education as a child. Besides this, she was also a part of many other philanthropic projects under the auspices of TANA.

Mahesh Alluri, another NRI living near Boston, migrated to the US in the early 1990s. As I travelled with him and other members of TANA across Andhra Pradesh in December 2012, he recounted the ‘extraordinary journey’ of his life in detail. His early life was marked by relative deprivation. Born in a village near Repalle town in Guntur district, his family sold off their small but expensive and productive parcel of agricultural land and migrated to nearby Khammam district (an ‘underdeveloped’ region of Telangana), a move that enabled them to increase their landholding substantially. Mahesh went to study in a local government school in Kothagudem town in Khammam. After school, he would help his father in the small family owned restaurant to augment the family income. With ‘hard work’, he cleared the entrance exam for Krishna Engineering College or KEC in Vijayawada. This college is run by a Kamma Trust run educational conglomerate that gives priority seats to the Kamma youths. As a private college, the fee for the engineering course in the mid-1980s was very high – 5000 rupees per year – which was a ‘fortune’ for Mahesh' family at that time. At this crucial moment, a distant relative ‘adopted’ him and paid most of the tuition fees. Once he graduated from college as a software engineer, Mahesh put all his efforts into migrating abroad. Many graduates from Krishna Engineering College were at the forefront of migration from the Krishna River Basin to the USA after the IT boom. Mahesh went to the USA in 1992, and after working for a few years in the software industry, he grew from ‘strength to strength’ in his career and managed to climb to the ‘top rungs’ of the American corporate ladder. A few years later, he started his own software company, registered in Boston as a multi-million dollar enterprise.

When I met him again in the US in July 2012, he recounted how he was a part of multiple charitable projects in Andhra Pradesh through his Alluri and Friends Foundation, operating since 2000. Apart from these activities, Mahesh and a close friend – both alumni of Krishna Engineering College – had put together a scholarship endowment fund worth 20 million rupees for their alma mater KEC. The foundation had supported almost 100 scholarships till then, covering the tuition fees for ‘deserving’ engineering students of that college: ‘We are the first to start this great scholarship scheme in a private engineering college’, he exclaimed, visibly proud of the idea. He sometimes writes posts about his philanthropic activities on social media, where I follow him.

For both Mahesh Alluri and Dr Padmavati, modern notions of upliftment, generating employment, and especially providing education for the needy, frame the goals of their philanthropy. Both also reiterated that as NRIs earning in dollars, their obligation is to look after their counterparts in Andhra who lack resources. The obligation also stems from the fact that they were also the recipients of community help during their student days. This is not to suggest that transnational giving among Kammas does not generate symbolic capital for the donors. In fact, they publicize their donations through print advertisements or ceremonies to mark the various stages of progress of their philanthropic engagements. These ceremonies are often ostentatious, accompanied by feasting in large function halls where community members are also invited. In all the events I took part in, such functions involved ‘felicitation’ ⁸ of the donors, earning them considerable recognition from the community.

Beyond the generation of symbolic capital, transnational giving ties the Kamma donors and Kamma receivers in a circular and long-term reciprocity, producing a caste based transnational community. The beneficiaries of most of these transnational philanthropic projects are the relatively poorer members of their community, they are also future donors to the community. Kammas explain their caste centric giving through a sense of ‘oneness’ and being related to each other by virtue of their caste. Such pronunciations around giving are not new and have emanated from what some scholars have termed as ‘caste ideology’ (Barnett, 1977) that defines the contours of their giving.

A recurring theme that animates Kamma diasporic giving is that it is geared towards (safeguarding) community interests vis-à-vis other groups against whom it competes. As the following sections show, who these competing groups are has been contingent upon prevailing social contexts. Kammas give within a historically informed transnational social field of inter and intra caste interactions. While the articulation around giving has changed over time, it has continually engendered an interiority (marked by horizontality, intra-community recognition and obligation) and an exteriority denoting responsibilization of Kammas to safeguard evolving community interests against its perceived outside. This careful demarcation produced through giving has been central to the social and later political mobility of Kammas in Andhra Pradesh, proffering them to a dominant caste status over the last century.

Evolving iterations of giving and the quest for upward social mobility

Like many other castes in India (Gupta, 2005; Jangam, 2016), Kammas trace their origin to a ruling dynasty, the Kakatiyas in their case, who ruled Andhra during the medieval period. However, the foundational myth of their giving practices goes back to a much later period - the late 1700s when Vasireddy Venkatadri Naidu, a rich zamindar (landowning aristocrat) and a ‘pedda Kamma’ (belonging to a higher-ranked sub-caste), lived in the region (Frykenberg, 1965: 268). He was known for his lavish lifestyle, referred to as ‘Raja’ or a local ruler (Narayan Rao, 2008). Vasireddy was from the upper Krishna delta region but made Amaravati (in the lower part of the delta) his ‘capital’ and gave daanam (traditional gift-giving in India, termed dana/daan in Sanskrit and Pali or daanam in Telugu). Indianists have long explored the Hindu or Brahminical texts that inform daan and dakshina, or sacrifice (Heesterman, 1985; Malamoud and White, 1996; Parry, 1986). Theorizing daan as a counterfoil to the Maussian gift (Trautmann, 1981: 279) - a form of a social contract that entails an obligation of reciprocity, daan presents a challenge to this theory because it appears not to create any counter-obligation (Heim, 2004: 34), but rather entails absolute alienation (Parry, 1980, 1986). Daan thus stands in for a broader system of morality within these religious cultures even as the concept itself has changed in the contemporary moment and is invoked in diverse contexts in India (Copeman, 2011: 3).

Vasireddy’s daanam was mainly in the form of temple donations. Temple donation in medieval South India has received intense scholarly attention, ranging from its transactional nature (Heitzman, 1987) to this practice being an integral part of South Indian kingship (Appadurai, 1977). South Indian temples were a site of surplus storage and its distribution (Stein, 1960) and an important yet declining centre mediating social life during pre-colonial times (Subrahmanyam and Bayly, 1988). Temple donations were a key constituent of Danadharma (law of gifts to temples, Brahmins and other castes), which itself was constitutive of South Indian sovereignty in medieval times (Appadurai, 1977). Through extensive exploration of temple inscriptions, Talbott (2001) distinguishes between major temples (most of them located in Coastal Andhra and having a more extensive network) and minor temples (located primarily in interior Andhra) and suggests that in Andhradesa (corresponding to modern Andhra Paresh and Telangana), temple giving was an arena ‘wherein lords, warriors and their followers could openly compete with each other’ (Talbott, 2001: 214). Despite the complexities surrounding temple giving in pre-colonial South India, it was ostensibly tied to the pursuit and sustenance of power.

In their communal rendering of the story, for Kammas, the practice of danadharma undertaken by Vasireddy Venkatadri Naidu is seen as a starting point of community giving. Yet Vasireddy’s giving has a macabre side. One evening while chatting over tea, Kantaraju (one of my key interlocutors) explained to me that the story of Vasireddy’s benevolence has a gory twist: attempting to rid the district of the Chenchus (a tribal group), who were reputed to be expert robbers, Vasireddy invited hundreds of them for a feast and then had their heads cut off. However, he became guilt-ridden soon after and thus devoted his life to building temples and offering daanam. For Kammas, more than the exculpatory nature of his daanam, the fact that he saved the community members from the marauding Chenchus cemented his position as the protector of the community. While the articulation of community giving has moved beyond danadharma since then, a thread running across time is the motivation to safeguard the community and its interests by dispensing patronage within, even as these interests have transformed over time.

Relations of patronage, which involve giving and receiving based on the ideology of mutuality and cooperation between castes in the jajmani system assume a vertical social positioning of the giver and receiver (Dumont, 1980; Raheja, 1988). Even when patronage relations are intra-caste, where communities prioritize ‘giving’ to their own kinsmen (Roberts, 1982: 130), a hierarchical relationship exists between the wealthy donors and the relatively poorer receivers. Accounts of different castes like Izhavas of Kerala (Osella and Osella, 1999), the Marwaris (Birla, 2009), Chettiars (Rudner, 1994) or religious communities like Parsis (Vevaina, 2018; White, 1991) or Muslims (Larouche, 2019; Osella and Osella, 2009) point to the importance of patronage by elites who become benefactors for the poor or underprivileged members of their communities. These examples point to the role of philanthropy in the generation of intra-caste or community solidarity and defining of community boundaries – processes that gained momentum during the colonial period (Breckenridge and Van der Veer 1993; Dirks 2001).

The region corresponding to the current Coastal Andhra was under the colonial administration as part of the erstwhile Madras Presidency. In the early 20^th century, the administration’s policies led to the growth of communication, the spread of education, and the expansion of marriage circles, which facilitated the growth of caste associations in the region (Washbrook, 1975). For Washbrook, this did not herald a unified caste consciousness as much as it pointed to roles played by educated ‘publicists’ keen on benefitting from the colonial administration. Other works show that caste associations played multiple roles: from unifying sub-jatis (sub-castes) to paving the way for their caste’s upward social mobility and political influence. They created ‘corporate consciousness’ among particular castes (Conlon, 1974: 353; Dirks, 1989), producing essentialized uber-categories like Kammas or Reddys, transforming into hardened identities that have wide purchase to this date. It was through such moves that Kammas claimed Kshatriya status (Keiko, 2008) from the colonial administrators, rejecting their varna classification as Sudras – despite the fact that the varna system was not very salient in most of south India (Ramaswamy, 1978). ⁹ Non-rigid political structures in pre-colonial south India during Vijayanagar kingdom had already seen the movie for upward social mobility among artisanal Kammala castes (Ramaswamy, 1978), but the claiming of ‘Sat Sudra’ or clean caste status (Bayly, 1999: 301), or even Kshatriya status among peasant castes was recorded under the colonial rule.

Social mobility in this period, therefore, meant the pursuit of higher ritual status for agrarian castes like Kammas that the consolidation of the various Kamma sub-castes into a larger caste group, which challenged the dominance of Brahmins and demanded parity with them in government jobs from the colonial state (Keiko, 2008; Ramaswamy, 1978). The Non-Brahmin movement and the setting up of educational institutes in the region (Frykenberg, 2008) provided an impetus to the Kammas and other agrarian castes to lay emphasis on higher education. It also led the Kamma community to invest in community education collectively. My Kamma interlocutors would often reiterate the role education has played in their social ascendence. One of them, Srini P, recounted the oft-repeated story of caste notables such as J. K. Chowdary of Guntur district or Tripuraneni Ramaswami Chaudari of Krishna district who lived around the late 1800s and early 1900s and were the major benefactors of the Kamma caste associations in Coastal Andhra (Elliott 1995). They became the chief patrons of the community and built caste hostels, educational institutions, and caste-based trusts that ran scholarship programmes for the community students. The advancing of broadly defined ‘caste interests’ by these associations was not only socio-political but included caste history writing projects and the codification and dissemination of caste histories. The best example of this is K. Bhavaiah Chowdary’s A Brief History of the Kammas, written in the 1950s, a copy of which could be found in most Kamma households I visited.

Patronage distributed via the caste associations through the currency of viraalamu (translatable to donations in English), evidenced by printed texts, including K. Bhavaiah Chowdary’s book or other locally published family history books I collected during my fieldwork ¹⁰ which contained details of the viraalamu dispensed by these affluent families. Kamma caste associations I visited in coastal Andhra or even in Hyderabad kept records of the viraalamu directed at more secular and community welfare-oriented activities. Haynes (1987) had already noted the shift from religious oriented giving in pre-colonial Surat to a more secular oriented philanthropy meant for the welfare of people under colonial rule. Moreover, it also points to the rationalization of the emotive instinct to give (Bornstein, 2009) but rather than being directed towards humanity as a whole, their giving has been restricted to their own (Malkki, 1994).

Viraalamu, worked in the same vein and therefore portends a discursive shift from daanam - a move away from temple centred giving to a form of giving directed at community upliftment. Fostering the patronage of community notables toward less well-off community members still points to an unequal relationship between the donors and receivers. However, it played a crucial role in cohering a unified community identity around caste and the early furthering of caste interests that focused on attaining parity with the Brahmins in seeking government jobs or acquiring a higher caste status. Viraalamu was a small but crucial communal step to achieve social mobility vis-avis the Brahmins for Coastal Andhra Kammas. Caste association activities continued well into the 1950s when my respondents explained that it took a downward turn thereafter, only to be revived in the 1980s and 1990s across Andhra Pradesh, a period coinciding with sustained outward migration from the region to the US and the simultaneous ascendence of a Kamma caste led party – the Telugu Desam Party - in Andhra politics.

Notwithstanding the sustained outward migration from among the dominant castes to the US, the project of forging a strong morally bound community or engaging in community uplift oriented giving that started with the setting up of caste associations in the early 1900s was not disrupted by rural to urban migration or international mobility. In the US, the small yet growing Telugu community started organizing themselves under the banner of various local and national Telugu associations, ostensibly to preserve their Telugu culture. By the 1990s, these associations branched off to take welfare-oriented measures in their region of origin. While some initial philanthropic responses were aimed at providing relief for natural disasters like cyclones or droughts and were ad hoc, other diasporic members began a more organized form of engagement. One key measure instituted by the NRIs was to provide intellectual and financial support for the higher education of ‘meritorious but needy students’ aspiring to study in India or even the US. Different scholarship schemes, often routed through the Telugu Association of North America or TANA Foundation, were set up in the US and in Coastal Andhra (Roohi 2018a).

In the last three decades, NRI philanthropic projects in Coastal Andhra have only grown manifold since then. Every ‘well settled’ NRI member becomes either a donor to big organizations or engages in small, often individualized projects supporting one or more beneficiaries ‘back home’. US based NRI associations are exempt from paying taxes and donors can deduct charitable contributions from incomes that might otherwise be taxed. In its transnational iteration, welfare is dispensed through the currency of donations – an English term now widely used in Telugu by my NRI interlocutors. Beyond the mere loaning of an English word into the Telugu language, the travel of the term implies the intersecting of locally situated meanings of giving with a more globally inflected conceptualization that has shaped the practice of giving itself. The term donation further indicates that the social mobility strategies adopted by the Kammas over the last century have come to fruition where the gap between the donor and the receiver is flattened, and beneficiaries are only temporary receivers and future donors. Therefore, this changing articulation around giving signals a more horizontal relationship between the donors and receivers, whose subjectivities are now transformed and imbued with a transnational habitus.

Giving and shaping of transnational caste subjectivities

Giving embodies the laws and morality of the societies within which it takes place, shaping the subjectivities (or a set of terms of self-reference used by a particular caste in a representational capacity) of both the givers and receivers in the process (Strathern, 1988). However, rather than seeing the morality underpinning giving as fixed in some form of unchanging cosmic order (Parry and Bloch, 1989: 24), historical and anthropological contextualization of giving practices alert us to their potential to shape and transform the subjectivities of the givers and receivers (Magazine, 2003). When different geographies are entangled in acts of giving and receiving, it further adds a scalar dimension to the formation of subjectivities. These emergent subjectivities spread across multiple vectors of self-making straddling across differing culturally recognized markers. Kamma transnational subjectivities have recursively produced acts of giving that are voluntary and obligatory and simultaneously ceremonial and non-ceremonial. Currently expressed through the idiom of donation, the semantics of the term portend their changing caste subjectivities and indexes the transition of an agrarian caste to a transnational class of professionals whose giving practices reflect their hyphenated American-Telugu transnational subjectivities.

The dominant caste status gained by the Kammas over the last century is not only reflected in their control over economic resources, especially land (Benbaabali, 2018), but in their strategically cultivated flexible caste habitus and the bodily performances around it (Gorringe and Rafanell, 2007) that modulates their evolving caste subjectivities. Borrowing from Ortner, subjectivities are ‘modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate acting subjects…as well the cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke those modes of affect, thought, etc.’ (Ortner, 2006: 37). Changes in the material condition of the Kammas have added newer self-referential meanings of what it is to be Kamma over time that has recursively redefined their caste subjectivity and habitus in the process. The social selves of Kammas are constructed iteratively through the performance of various roles or personae that have become associated with the community. Kamma self-making in its transnational moment encompasses the community’s agrarian past and its transition to a class of educated professionals who are increasingly becoming transnational.

Kammas have carefully crafted their community history that deeply inflects their caste subjectivities. In the early 20th century, to be a Kamma was associated with being a farmer, intuitively connected to the land. ‘They had nimble fingers, a green thumb, and a never give up attitude that could make even the driest regions fertile. That is why they migrated across different parts of South India wherever they found land’, one of my interlocutors explained to me in July 2012 in Houston. By the 1980s, the community had built its standing and repute as an educated caste poised to meet the demand of high skilled labour in the West – a point reiterated by many of my interlocutors who worked as professionals in India or abroad.

In Coastal Andhra, local Kammas and those from other castes and religious groups equate migration to the USA with the Kammas, seeing them as pioneers who crafted their story of upward social mobility via higher education and transnational migration. Their transnationalization can be read as an attempt to create ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu, 1987). Distinction between different social classes or categories is a cultural process through which groups cultivate and exhibit a particular sense of taste, lifestyle, or set of values that sets them distinctively apart from their non-peers. Among the Telugus in the US and Andhra, the creation of distinction is caste-specific. For the Kammas, it is produced and reproduced through the performance of ‘Kamma-ness’ that is now infused with a transnational disposition, apart from other material markers like land ownership or acquiring of professional education attributes shared by other dominant castes as well. By the time I started my fieldwork in late 2011, a new self-referential marker was added to their caste subjectivity – Kammas of Coastal Andhra as a community of givers. By invoking Vasireddy or Tirupuraneni, they retroactively attributed giving as an inherent community trait that was only amplified by the community’s diaspora. For the Kammas, giving is a symbolic marker to distinguish themselves from other dominant castes in Coastal Andhra, while projecting themselves as a community of givers who organize welfare efficiently, collectively and through the currency of collective donations.

A marked difference between earlier forms of community engagement and that of the post-1990s is that earlier community giving was seen as individualized, almost private transactions initiated by a handful of community notables (Washbrook, 1975). Since then, these transnational efforts to aid and ‘develop’ the community have been more collective and public in nature. While earlier forms of giving were seen as the domain of wealthy Kamma notables, with widespread higher education and migration to the USA, the number of those engaging in secular, development or community uplift oriented philanthropy has multiplied rapidly. Sustained transnational migration has swelled the donor base of givers. Today, giving is no longer limited to the community elites but includes an expanding transnational pool of donors who were, in many instances, beneficiaries earlier, like Dr Padmavathi and Mr Mahesh Alluri. In turn, the beneficiaries of today are potential donors of tomorrow. While community charity is not limited only to Coastal Andhra Kammas and wealthy Kammas and Telugus living in other parts of South India also contribute to welfare initiatives for less affluent community members. However, such charitable engagements are restricted to the affluent community members only, whereas, in Coastal Andhra, intra-community giving is no longer limited to the rich but includes an expanding transnational middle class.

These repeated performances of being a Kamma (as opposed to other dominant castes) in Coastal Andhra and in the diaspora and the cultivation of specific attributes that Kammas consider particular to them not only creates a collective disposition or ‘caste habitus’ but also informs their caste subjectivity. This caste habitus is not acquired or reproduced only by reiterating embodied cultural differences. Notions of Kamma selfhood are tied up with their historically attained ‘dominant caste’ status as a landowning community, and their giving has to be situated within this backdrop. Kamma (transnational) giving appears in contrast to what has been noted among educated Dalits who have achieved social mobility and are keen to ‘pay back’ to society (Naudet, 2008). While caste has been central for both the Dalits and the Kammas in their quest for social mobility and has inflected their giving, the divergence is pronounced when we see how social mobility is individualized for the former. In contrast, for Kammas it is collectivized and imbricated in regional politics and the state apparatus (Roohi, 2018b). Their class mobility is therefore channelled communally through the medium of caste (Roohi, 2019).

Since its institutionalization via caste associations during the late colonial period, community giving has been intrinsically tied to the political landscape of Andhra Pradesh. During their inception in the 1920s, the task of these associations was to bargain with the colonial administration for jobs and a higher ritual status and to raise corporate consciousness among caste members. The revival of caste associations since the late 1970s and the formation of Telugu associations in the US during the same period coincided with political churnings in Andhra Pradesh that led to the formation of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) by N. T. Ramarao, a Kamma cine star in 1982, that swept to power soon after. By the time NRI Kammas commenced their transnational philanthropic engagements in the late 1990s, it had corresponded with the time when Andhra Pradesh, under the chief ministership of Chandra Babu Naidu, embarked on a path of reforms under the aegis of the World Bank (Mooij, 2007). Naidu, a Kamma himself, drew the NRIs (most of them from his caste) firmly into the state’s developmental agenda through his Telugu Desam Party, and many NRIs directed their philanthropy to this cause of regional development and infused it with their community uplift agenda. In all these instances, the community had sustained an idea of an interiority and exteriority that circumscribed their giving.

During my fieldwork, there was a widespread power struggle between the TDP and the Congress party – seen as the bastion of Kammas and Reddys, respectively. While both the communities have strong agrarian roots, their political struggle became marked after the formation of the TDP, and their political constituencies have been at odds since then. This enmity for the control of resources and political power has created an uneven social field in which Kammas and Reddys hold an advantageous political position from which they can monopolize state resources, often politically. For Kammas, in this current transnational moment, Reddys form the exteriority of the community against whom Kammas need to protect themselves and their community’s interests. Transnational community giving has become a fundamental way to realize this goal.

The enmeshing of politics with caste morality creates a form of sociality whereby the community becomes so important that not giving back when one becomes prosperous is seen as a moral transgression, and giving is socially enforced through the performative aspects of giving. Unlike earlier, rather than using daanam or viraalamu to describe their philanthropic currency, the term donation highlights the more horizontal imagination of the community. The solicitation of donations to foster the development of the community, a long-standing social practice within the Kammas, has now become transnational and has been institutionalized – often through transnational civil society groups that mimic the role of caste associations of the last century. This caste subjectivity, now shaped within a transnational social field, contributes to the power of an already regionally powerful group. Philanthropy then becomes a form of caste capital (Deshpande, 2013; Roohi, 2017; Subramanian, 2015) that reproduces the social and economic privilege of a community transitioning from an agrarian caste to a transnational class of professionals.

Conclusion

Focusing on Kamma diaspora philanthropy in Coastal Andhra, this article has traced the standing myths and changing iterations around the practice, exploring how the present transnational scale of operation has reconstituted giving and inflected caste-based subjectivities in the process. While Kammas delineate their practices of giving to Vasireddy Venkatadri Naidu, a zamindar in the eighteenth century who built temples as part of his danadharma, written records trace community giving to the late colonial period where a few elites patronized caste associations through the currency of viraalamu. The practice was reconstituted in the late 1990s, with many affluent Kamma migrants in the US embracing the role of community welfare organizers. Articulating their giving through the idiom of ‘donation’, the term engenders notions of horizontality, obligation, class mobility and intra-community recognition. When Kammas express their community giving through the category of donations and not viraalamu or daanam, the term congeals and indexes newer markers of Kamma selfhood pointing to their decisive shift from an agrarian caste to a transnational one.

Despite the changes in articulation, transnational giving has engendered an interiority for the community towards whom one has a relation of moral obligation and responsibilization that ties them into circular long term reciprocity. It has also produced an exteriority that defines the limit of community boundary. This exteriority historically constitutes of other powerful castes with whom Kammas vie for power. The sharp articulation of this politics of difference was vital in making Kammas a dominant caste in Andhra and has shaped the contour of their community giving. In its transnational expression through the currency of donations, it repositions this powerful caste group in ways that consolidate its dominant (social, political, economic) position vis-à-vis other communities, both transnationally and locally.

The practice of community giving among Kammas has a history traceable to early the modern period, yet it is only with widespread migration to the West since the late 1960s that community giving became extensively prevalent among the expanding transnational middle-class donors. While the motivations are complex and its outcomes are multi-dimensional, for Kammas, caste is central to their giving, and as such, it encompasses the self and the community as it incorporates both the obligation to give and the freedom to do so. It also engenders a circularity where yesterday’s beneficiaries are today's donors, and current beneficiaries are tomorrow’s donors. Within the South Asian context, this example marks a shift in how gift-giving has been theorized among the dominant castes. Whereas Raheja (1988, 1989) observed the principles of centrality (of the dominant castes engaging in vertical flows of daan to other castes in lieu of their services) and mutuality (horizontal giving within the dominant castes), recorded history over the last century and current transnational giving practices suggest that horizontal rather than vertical flows of gifts and charitable resources have been a norm within the Kammas and is intimately tied to their upward social mobility strategy as a group.

In the present moment, giving is a key part of an embodied Kamma disposition in Coastal Andhra which produces new forms of modern transnational Kamma subjectivity –constituted socially, culturally and historically within caste and place inflected discursive frameworks. However, as this research shows, such practices are not new – instead, they are a continuation of older community-specific practices linked to consolidation, status production and preservation efforts among the Kammas. Today, the difference however, lies in the inflow of transnational capital due to the wealth generated by transnational migration, increasing the number of donors and community benefactors, and forging newer channels and idioms of giving in the process.