“How do people come to live as they ought to live?” and “why do people still fail to live as they ought to live”? Setting out from these simple questions (p. 3), Anand Pandian explores the moral horizons of cultivators and their families of the Piramalai Kallar caste in K. G. Patti, a village of the Cumbum Valley west of Madurai in South India. Embarking from the moral challenges faced by these villagers in their everyday lives, Pandian tracks the complex interplay of a precolonial Tamil ethic imaginaire with colonial projects of policing and “Kallar Reclamation,” and the development agendas of the postcolonial Indian state in forming the moral horizons that inform the efforts of contemporary Piramalai Kallars to live virtuous lives. In placing the moral concerns of K. G. Patti's modern inhabitants in relation to the moral horizons and projects of the past, Pandian demonstrates the close correspondence between images of the cultivation of the soil and the cultivation of one's personal life in rural South India, but also the limits of the agrarian moral imagination in an India where the gap between the economic success of the urban middle classes and the lives of rural cultivators is starkly obvious today.
Pandian organizes each of the main chapters of his book around one particular virtue, namely civility, propriety, restraint, toil, and sympathy, and their respective connection to cultivation, both physical and moral. The first chapter traces local concepts of “civility” and “savagery,” and the connections between these concepts and the landscape, with “civility” and agriculture being closely linked in the moral imagination. Pandian turns next to the concept of “propriety,” demonstrating how this concept has served in past and present to mark off the “agrarian citizen” or kuṭiyāṉavaṉ from the Kallars. “Restraint” forms the focus of the next chapter, outlining both colonial attempts to restrain the Kallars by declaring them a Criminal Tribe in 1918 and the way in which contemporary Kallars imagine restraint as the cultivation of one's own animal nature, variously imagined as a bull, bird, or monkey. The fourth chapter focuses on the ambiguous nature of “toil.” Propounded as a virtue to “reform” the Kallars by colonial administrators and missionaries, the imagination of “toil” is deeply ambivalent in the Cumbum Valley today because of the actual vagaries of agriculture. In the fifth and final chapter, Pandian turns to “sympathy” and the resonances of this concept with water and moisture in classical Tamil literature as well as local moral discourse.
Crooked Stalks is exceptionally engaging and well written. Pandian skillfully interweaves ethnography, history, and theoretical analysis, producing a rich account of moral life in the Cumbum Valley and its pitfalls. The historical accounts in each chapter help not only to ground and contextualize present moral discourse, but also to demonstrate the ambivalent outcomes of earlier projects of moral cultivation by confronting the archive with the living memory of cultivators in the Cumbum Valley. Furthermore, Pandian does not limit himself to the last two centuries of history, but also attempts to weave earlier moral discourse into his account by drawing on the rich store of precolonial Tamil literature, most importantly the abundant but relatively understudied collections of moral maxims. Crooked Stalks provides deep insights into the moral imaginaire, choices, acts, and constraints of Kallars between colonial and postcolonial projects of “development” and their own aspirations of “cultivating” their own moral natures. Pandian's study is a brilliant account of the postcolonial condition in rural South India.
The book provides for a very stimulating read, even if one may not be convinced by all of Pandian's claims. For example, Pandian contrasts the notions of the kuṭiyāṉavaṉ, the “agrarian citizen” as he translates it, and the role of agriculture in Tamil discourse on refinement as constituting an “agrarian civility” with discourses in the West and in Sanskrit traditions that identify urban spaces as the proper context of refinement and civility (pp. 40–48). But it would seem to me that Pandian's own account presents a more ambivalent image. First of all, as the agricultural origins of terms such as “moral cultivation” and even “culture” make clear, such images are not absent from Western discourse. It also appears to me that one has to make a clearer distinction with regard to earlier Tamil discourses between the positive image of dominant agricultural groups such as the Veḷḷāḷa and the not always positive image of the “toil” of the actual tiller, something that also seems to underlie the ambivalence regarding “toil” as a virtue as described in the corresponding chapter (pp. 161–71). Yet while one may argue with some of Pandian's ideas, this does not detract from the fact that Crooked Stalks is an outstanding work that is not only of interest for students of anthropology, history, and development studies, but should be read by anyone with an interest in South Indian society and history.
