“Crooked Stalks might be read for the sheer lyrical quality of its prose. It draws from two distinct philosophical traditions, and has borrowed from Tamil cinema, something that greatly adds value to a book set in Tamil Nadu, where cinema, ideology and politics have been incestuously bound together in the twentieth century. The book is richly footnoted, comes with a fine glossary and an exhaustive index. It is a product of hard work and has taken good shape in the hands of an anthropologist who has kept his feet on the ground without building an ivory tower of theory and methods around his work.” — R. Venkat Ramanujam Ramani, The Book Review
“Anand Pandian’s beautifully written Crooked Stalks is animated by a deep engagement with the moral life of an erstwhile classified, condemned and policed ‘criminal tribe’: the Piramalai Kallars of the Cumbum valley of south India. . . . [R]eading Crooked Stalks filled this reader with both pleasure, as she got a rare and beautifully written insight into the life of a people, as well as a sense of deep foreboding as to the future of marginalized communities in South Asia.” — Annu Jalais, Pacific Affairs
“Anand Pandian’s poetically composed book about the Piranmalai Kallars in the Cumbum Valley in southern Tamil Nadu is a timely addition to this genealogy of theorising. It represents an important intervention that opposes the tendency to prioritise structure, power and interest over considerations of the ethical dimensions of culture in the anthropology of India. This is one of the first analyses of how actors themselves ruminate on an ethical life, firstly by defining how it is that they ought to live and, secondly, by postulating pragmatic means through which to live as they ought to.” — Indira Arumugam, Contemporary South Asia
“Pandian is a virtuous ethnographer, a civil participant in multiple traditions. . . . Pandian’s concerns are profoundly demotic, and as such they constitute a salutary reminder of what, as anthropologists, we might offer to wider conversations about what it is to lead a good life. Because the horizon of improvement is often so important to our interlocutors, it is ethically necessary for us to treat local dreams of development with the dignity they deserve. . . . There should be nothing shocking in such a stirringly anthropological call to arms, but this is but one of many things we always knew but had forgotten until reminded by this supremely thoughtful book.” — Jonathan Spencer, Cultural Anthropology
“Crooked Stalks is comprehensive, theoretically-sophisticated, and persuasively argued. Scholars and students interested in South Asian agrarian history, ethics, development issues, and agrarian thought will find this book compelling.” — A. Whitney Sanford, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics
“[Crooked Stalks] is a fascinating and insightful study. . . . Its strengths are numer¬ous. . . . [Pandian’s] insistence that the self-awareness of savagery among the Kallar is an instrument of self-transformation is an important extension of Elias’s seminal work on the history of manners.” — Satadru Sen, Environment and History
“Anand Pandian . . . skilfully piece[s] together a coherent, well-grounded, nuanced, and highly relevant work that is, moreover, so well written that you may find yourself wanting to read the book thoroughly and carefully, cover to cover. . . . Pandian’s own achievement, in Crooked Stalks, is surely one of the best and most important works on the anthropology of the Tamil people published during the last hundred years, and it certainly will form part of the canon of the subject for decades to come.” — James Frey, Itinerario,
“In this elegantly written and beautifully crafted book, Anand Pandian explores the connections between ways of making a living and the ways in which people make themselves as moral beings. . . . Crooked Stalks builds on and extends a rich vein of research on Tamil culture and on the colonial history of India. It is particularly illuminating in regard to the study of colonial governmentality and in general is a first-class study in the anthropology of morality, deserving of a wide readership.” — John Harriss, American Anthropologist
“Overall, Crooked Stalks provides a rich account of the lives of Piramalai Kallars in Tamil Nadu. . . . The subjects of the book are as vivid, lively and dynamic as landscapes, dams, schools, state institutions, parrots, monkeys, oxen, and cows. These lively subjects are examined in the contexts of nature, civility, oppression, colonialism, power, knowledge and hegemony. . . . Let’s hope that the book will be used by scholars, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and students working on colonial south India as a source to understand the power-politics and hegemonic impositions of law and order and civility in India and other post-Colonial lands.” — Vineeth Mathoor, Anthropology Review Database
“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 as 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
“The Government of British India, in exercising its imperial obsession to count and classify, created a census category called ‘Criminal Tribes & Castes’ under which it (in)famously included the Kallar of South India, a caste, since made famous by two monographs, written by Louis Dumont and Nicholas Dirks, respectively. Crooked Stalks is also a book about the Kallar. Its distinction, however, lies in its sparkling difference from its predecessors. Its concerns are contemporary and of a wider import. It is a study of the self-making of a community, historically located at the meeting of four vectorial complexes: civic governmentality, missionary religiosity, progressivism of modernity and Tamil (traditional) ‘virtuosity’—the latter encompassing the word's medieval meanings. This is a meticulously documented, convincingly argued, lucidly written work. It is an original.” — E. Valentine Daniel, author of Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way
“The Kallars of Tamilnadu were categorized by the British as a ‘criminal tribe’ in 1918. Anand Pandian's study of the Kallars today asks ground-breaking 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