Books at Duke University Press

Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India
Anand Pandian

344 pages (October 2009)
33 photographs, 4 maps

Cloth - $84.95	0-8223-4514-5
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4514-5]

Paperback - $23.95	0-8223-4531-5
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-4531-2]

How do people come to live as they ought to live? Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of cultivation: in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste—classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a “criminal tribe”—Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects today.

In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident, chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and delicacy.

“The Kallars of Tamilnadu were categorized by the British as a ‘criminal tribe’ in 1918. Anand Pandian’s study of the Kallars today asks groundbreaking questions about how subaltern groups, caught in the webs of colonial stereotyping and postcolonial projects of development, use these and other resources to produce their own sense of moral life. Crooked Stalks stands out for its caring and creative deployment of historical, ethnographic, and cultural material in tracking the presence of the colonial past in postcolonial times.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

“The government of British India, in exercising its imperial obsession with counting and classifying, created a census category called ‘Criminal Tribes & Castes’ under which it (in)famously included the Kallars of South India, a caste since made famous by monographs by Louis Dumont and Nicholas Dirks. Crooked Stalks is also a book about the Kallars, but its concerns are contemporary and of wider import. It is a study of the self-making of a community shaped by intersecting vectors of civic governmentality, missionary religiosity, the progressivism of modernity, and Tamil (traditional) ‘virtuosity,’ with the last encompassing the word’s medieval meanings. Crooked Stalks is an original.”—E. Valentine Daniel, author of Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way

“Anand Pandian brilliantly explicates the complex linkages between the cultivation and care of the self and the cultivation of the land. I have seen no better illustration of the twin meanings of development as an ethical project and a socioeconomic one. This ethnographically thick, historically embedded volume will be a major contribution to a range of disciplines including anthropology, history, geography, sociology, development studies, and subaltern studies.”—Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India

Anand Pandian is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is an editor of Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, also published by Duke University Press.

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