My Caste

An article I wrote for our family journal "Mayan" some time back.

Recently, I had been to England to set up a project for Glaxo. After we had successfully finished our project, two colleagues (one Indian and one American), our boss (a Canadian) and me went to have dinner at an Indian restaurant. The restaurant was called Bombay Brasserie. The Taj Group of India runs it.

While we were eating, my professor asked my Indian colleague and myself about untouchability in India, whether it was still followed very strictly and so forth.

I was able to answer that it wasn’t followed much in today’s modern times. When I said this, my boss and my American colleague jointly started talking about how stupid they thought it was. I jokingly told them that if it was still followed, I would not be able to come within a certain distance of my Indian colleague (who is a Brahmin), let alone have dinner with him. We all had a good laugh over this, but when I was alone in my hotel room, I started thinking of how it must have been for our ancestors…

Their profession was Toddy-Tapping (the extraction of liquor from the Toddy Palm); they worked almost the whole day in the heat of Southern Tamil Nadu. They owned hardly any land and worked for the higher caste people who refused to even touch coins that had been touched by Nadars. In fact, they would ask Nadars to put the coins into water before they would touch it. They were forced to live outside the village and did not have access to the public well.

However, when Caldwell, the famous missionary came to Tinnevelly, he remarked that the most prominent feature he observed among the Shanars was their “downright insolence”! In fact, our “timiru” got us into a lot of trouble with other castes and that was why the British forced us to pay a “Timiru Vari”!

Some of the key factors that helped in the transformation of the Nadars from one of the lowest castes to the leading caste in Tamil Nadu are a refusal to accept a submissive role, hard work, education, very strong family and caste unity.

I believe that it is a tragedy that the younger generation is being brought up, largely ignorant of the glorious (and inglorious!) parts of Nadar History. The greatness of our caste to me is not that we started a bank, built a thousand schools and colleges, that we run the most successful businesses and that we are successful politicians, lawyers, administrators, doctors, engineers and housewives. It is that we have been able to rise up from the suppression of the past!

So today, when you walk into any commercial establishment, confident that you will be served, when you walk into a temple, confident that you will be welcomed, when you visit a doctor, confident that you will be treated regardless of the doctors caste, REMEMBER, it wasn’t always that way.

The past might seem to be very far away and even unreal, but we always need to be reminded of it, in case we forget about the importance of what made us what we are today – Hard work, education, family and caste unity.

Read more about the Nadars here ...

I will write more about Nadars when I can do so dispassionately ;-)