Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste

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A cruise along the streets of Chennai-or Silicon Valley-filled with professional young Indian men and women, reveals the new face of India. In the twenty-first century, Indians have acquired a new kind of global visibility, one of rapid economic advancement and, in the information technology industry, spectacular prowess. In this book, C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan examine one particularly striking group who have taken part in this development: Tamil Brahmansa formerly traditional, rural, high-caste elite who have transformed themselves into a new middle- class caste in India, the United States, and elsewhere.

Fuller and Narasimhan offer one of the most comprehensive looks at Tamil Brahmans around the world to date. They examine Brahman migration from rural to urban areas, more recent transnational migration, and how the Brahman way of life has translated to both Indian cities and American suburbs. They look at modern education and the new employment opportunities afforded by engineering and IT. They examine how Sanskritic Hinduism and traditional music and dance have shaped Tamil Brahmans' particular middle- class sensibilities and how middle-class status is related to the changing position of women. Above all, they explore the complex relationship between class and caste systems and the ways in which hierarchy has persisted in modernized India.

"Tamil Brahmans is a solid, original work that makes a major contribution to our understanding of a vitally important part of the world and of a unique group of people whose numbers in the United States are growing year by year and who are becoming increasingly influential at the highest professional levels in medicine, law, academia, business, and government." Sylvia J. Vatuk, University of Illinois at Chicago

C. J. Fuller is emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of several books, including The Camphor Flame and The Renewal of the Priesthood.

Haripriya Narasimhan is assistant professor of social anthropology and sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad.

Satyamurti Aiyar, a Tamil Brahman, was born in 1914 in Tindivanam, a small town about seventy-five miles south of the city of Madras. Satyamurti was the eldest son of Subrahmaniam, whose family had migrated from northern India in the eighteenth century and intermarried with local Tamil Brahmans, with whom they had become fully assimilated. The family had acquired land in Tindivanam, a small agricultural market town retaining many of the characteristics of a village in the early twentieth century, and they had a house in its Brahman quarter, the agraharam. When Satyamurti was born, the family lived off the income from their land, whose cultivation was managed by Subrahmaniam, assisted by low-caste Vanniyar laborers, including members of one family hereditarily attached to his own. Around 1918, however, Subrahmaniam secured a minor administrative post in Tin- divanam, because by then he had four children and needed more money. He gave up cultivation and rented his land to Vanniyar tenants.

Satyamurti received an elementary education at home, where he learned a little English from a tutor. When he was twelve, Subrahmaniam sent his son to Madras, where he studied in a high school before entering a college run by Catholics. Because he had no relatives in the city, Satyamurti lived in a Brahman hostel, but he regularly traveled by train to visit his parents. The college was located in the suburb of Nungambakkam, which in those days was not very different from Tindivanam, so that when Satyamurti lived there it was much like living at home. At the age of fifteen, Satyamurti was married to a relative, an eleven-year-old girl he already knew, who had had some elementary education in the village school. But Satyamurti's life hardly changed at this time because his wife remained with her parents and the marriage was not consummated until four years later.