Preface for 2004 edition of Peasant History in South India. Oxford University Press, Delhi.
New Title Idea: Local History and Asian Capitalism in South India
By David Ludden
This book began as a dissertation plan in 1973. I was twenty-five and translating Tamil
poetry,1 while planning doctoral research on the impact of British imperialism in rural South India. I
was pursuing what came to be called “history from below” into the study of agrarian South Asia.
When Eric Stokes announced a “return of the peasant to South Asian history,” in 1976,2 I felt right at
home. I liked political economy approaches to agrarian studies.3 I wanted to use local sources.4 I had
read agrarian histories of China and Europe and found comparisons instructive. Spending a drought
year near Madras first taught me about wet and dry environments, which I learned more about from
Scarlett Epstein, Burton Stein, and David Washbrook.5 I thus set out to study the British imperial
impact in wet and dry parts of Tamil Nadu. I soon discovered the Tamil Nadu Archives has a rich
collection of District Records, 6 which provided local data for district gazetteers. Encouraged by
A.J.Stuart’s use of these records in his 1876 Manual of the Tinnevelly District and by his description
of the district as including wet and dry areas, I went to Madras to study District Records and related
documents that I thought would record the impact of British imperialism in the Tinnevelly District of
Madras Presidency.
1
David Ludden, "The Poems and Revolution of Bharathiyar." In Imperialism and Revolution in South
Asia. Edited by Kathleen Gough and Hari Sharma. Monthly Review Press, New York, 1973,
pp.267-90. David Ludden and M.Shanmugam Pillai, The Kuruntokai: An Anthology of Classical
Tamil Love Poetry in Translation, Koodal Publishers, Madurai, 1976.
2
Eric Stokes, “The Return of the Peasant to South Asian History,” originally published in 1976,
reprinted in The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in
Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp.265-289.
3
In order of importance, these were David Washbrook, “Country Politics: Madras 1880-1930,”
Modern Asian Studies, 7, 3, 1973: 375-521; Burton Stein, “Integration of the Agrarian System of
South India,” In Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History, edited by Robert Eric
Frykenberg, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969, pp.175-216; Irfan Habib, The
Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556-1707), Bombay & New York: Asia Publishing House,
1963, and “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India,” Journal
of Economic History, 29, 1, 1969: 32-78; Andre Beteille, Caste, Class, and Power: Changing
Patterns of Social Stratification in a Tanjore Village, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1965; and Kathleen Gough, “The Social Structure of a Tanjore Village,” In Village India: Studies
in the Little Community Edited by McKim Marriott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1955,
pp. 36-52.
4
My supervisor, Tom G. Kessinger, encouraged me in this direction. See his “Historical Materials on
Rural India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 7, 4, 1970:489-510, and Vilayatpur
1848-1968: Social and Economic Change in a North Indian Village, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973.
5
6
Scarlett Epstein, Economic and Social Change in South India, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1961. Burton Stein, “Historical Ecotypes in South India.” In Proceedings of the Second
International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies. Edited by R. E. Asher, International Institute
of Tamil Studies, Madras: 1971, pp. pp. 284-88. David A. Washbrook, “Country Politics.”
D. A.Low, J. C. Iltis and M. D. Wainwright. Government Archives in South Asia: A Guide to
National and State Archives in Ceylon, India and Pakistan. London: Cambridge University
Press, 1969.
District Records are copies of day-to-day correspondence in each Collector’s office.
Collectors were the central figures of British power in each Madras district. Until the 1870s,
Collectors sent and received almost all official communications to and from Madras, which staff
copied into foolscap volumes of District Records.7 This detailed compilation of data remains virtually
untouched except by gazetteer writers. From August 1974 until July 1975, I plodded through District
Records and anything else I could find on Tinnevelly. I focused on the conduct of investments in
agriculture, the privatization of property, commercialization, economic growth, and related features of
social life like expressions of individualism, inequality, and collective identity and conflict. I thus
hoped to witness the birth of capitalist development in village society, induced by British imperialism.
My reading indicated that capitalist development did progress in the nineteenth century, but
the role the British played was not what I had imagined. Imperialism propelled major trends like the
shift from textile to cotton production, but local people played much more active roles than I expected
in local investing, privatizing, commercializing, and other activities that altered social relations. As I
began to see more local activity causing historical change, I began to imagine Tinnevelly District as
an Anglo-textual formation of a Tirunelveli region whose native local histories I could study to some
extent in English records. I reasoned that if locals were changing the agrarian scene after 1800, they
would have done so before. They must have changed their environs in ways that made sense to them
in their own cultural terms. After a year reading nineteenth century records, I knew I could not assess
the impact of British rule without understanding change before 1800.
The billiard ball analogy hit me much later. I suddenly realized that I had planned research
imagining the British whacked a virtually inert rural society into motion, but I had learned during
research that the British inflected historical trajectories in complex societies already in motion. I came
to think that capitalism had evolved in these parts under the combined force of long-term local change
and British imperialism. I reasoned the same would apply to other aspects of modernity. This way of
seeing history opened another round of research. I went back to pre-modern economic history.8 I reread old Tamil poems. I studied medieval inscriptions that document temple environs where Tamil
bhakti poets sang. I followed trails of documentation the best I could (with my linguistic limitations)
to trace agrarian change before 1800 and then across the nineteenth century. My dissertation emerged
from all this wandering, in 1978, and then this book appeared, six years later [under the title Peasant
History in South India]. In the interim, I taught South Asian and Third World history, which
encouraged me to tell the historicize Tirunelveli in various ways.
The book has proved useful. It has served as reliable local history for students and scholars in
Tamil Nadu. Its data have entered new district gazetteers. Editors have reprinted two chapters in
thematic anthologies.9 Authors have used it for new research on South India.10 Critics who provoked
my later research highlighted three major problems. The book fails to engage theories of peasant
society, cultural change, colonialism, modes of production, subalternity, and such. It fails to engage
debates in Indian historiography. And Tirunelveli is too small and atypical to support any general
argument. All three points make good sense but the last two have challenged me most. This book
contains a motley theory masala of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Lenin, Chayanov, Polanyi, Bourdieu,
7
This documentary basis for local history also appeared in Bengal Presidency. See Sirajul Islam,
Bangladesh District Records. Dhaka: Dhaka University, 1978
8
The contrast is still useful between Habib, “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development” and A. I.
Chicherov, Indian Economic Development in the 16th-18th Centuries: An Outline History of
Crafts and Trade. Moscow: International Publishers, 1971.
9
Chapter Four in The Making of Agrarian Policy in British India, 1770-1990, edited by Burton Stein.
Oxford University Press, New Delhi,1992, pp.150-186, and Chapter Three in The Eighteenth
Century In Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? Edited by Peter J. Marshall, New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, pp. 319-356.
10
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Transition to a colonial economy: weavers, merchants and kings in South
India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
2
and others. My goal was not to engage theory but to write a realistic, readable story using reliable
data. What that story means for Indian history is weakly sketched in the conclusion: agrarian folk in
Tirunleveli have a history that is intensely local, and in that sense, not Indian, so that their history
should not merely be folded into Indian history; and the broader value of their history does not rest on
Tirunelveli being representative but rather on the idea that historical processes we see in Tirunelveli
may operate more widely. I began explore that idea when the book was done.
One fierce critic called my localistic history “anti-national.” This indicates a good reason
why the book slipped into footnotes without inspiring debate or emulation.11 Readers want history to
grapple with national issues. And in the 1980s, the nationality of Indian history became increasingly
fraught, as a slow-motion dissolution of India’s old regime -- with its Congress hegemony, central
state planning, and socialist idealism -- precipitated confusingly fragmented, disorderly scenes of
ethnic conflict, assassinations, regionalism, globalization, liberalization, diaspora, and Hindu
majoritarianism.12 Analogous transitions occurred in other parts of the world, which Moishe Postone
explained in 1992 as “… the weakening and partial dissolution of the institutions and centres of power
that had been at the heart of the state-interventionist mode [of capitalist development]: national state
bureaucracies, industrial labour unions, and physically centralized, state dependent capitalist firms." He
went on to say this:
Those institutions have been undermined in two directions: by the emergence of a new
plurality of social groupings, organizations, movements, parties, regions, and subcultures
on the one hand and by a process of globalization and concentration of capital on a new,
very abstract level that is far removed from immediate experience and is apparently
outside the effective control of the state machinery on the other.13
Amidst new intellectual challenges, scholars began to compose new kinds of Indian national history
using cultural studies, Subaltern Studies, post-colonialism, and feminism. The ensuing cultural turn
of our most celebrated contemporary historical writing inundated agrarian history with colonial
culture and critical discursive representation. The countryside became a stage for colonial domination,
subordination, and resistance.14 Though in the 1990s, environmentalism did give agrarian history a
little boost,15 and though cultural studies embraced some agrarian topics,16 a flood of new academic
11
Analogous work includes Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200-1999, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999 and Robert Nichols, Settling the Frontier: Land, Law, and
Society in the Peshawar Valley, 1500-1900, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001. See also
Arvind N. Das, “Changel: Three Centuries of an Indian Village,” Journal of Peasant Studies,
15,1, 1987: 3-60, and Changel: the biography of a village, New Delhi: Penguin, 1996; and
M.S.S.Pandian, Political Economy of Agrarian Change, Nachilnadu, 1880-1939, New Delhi:
Sage, 1990.
12
David Ludden, India and South Asia: A Short History. Oxford: OneWorld Publishers, 2002,
pp.235-72, and “Ayodhya: A Window on the World,” in Making India Hindu: Community,
Conflict, and the Politics of Democracy, edited by David Ludden, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1996, 2nd Edition, 2004, pp.1-27.
13
Moishe Postone, "Political Theory and Historical Analysis," in Habermas and the Public Sphere,
edited by Craig Calhoun, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1992, pp.175-6.
14
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford
University Press; 1983, began this shift. Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor
Servitude in Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 is a landmark of
sophistication. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1996, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, is the epitome of subaltern staging.
15
See Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan editors. Agrarian Environments Resources,
Representations, and Rule in India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Sumit Guha,
Environment and Ethnicity.
3
writing in the past twenty years has submerged agrarian life. Ten years after Eric Stokes announced
the peasant’s return to South Asian history, peasants began to vanish into Indian subalternity.17
Yet agrarian history kept going. Since the cultural turn began, the countryside has generated
change in every dimension of national life, which scholars cannot comprehend without bringing
agrarian studies back into history.18 In that effort, this book might be useful, not because Tirunelveli
is typical of agrarian India or South Asia, but rather because we see in this story historical methods,
dynamics, and patterns with wider relevance. Most importantly, we see that long-term perspectives
on available documentation reveal histories that short-term views do not. Together, long- and shortterm views allow causation to be conveyed more complexly by embracing historical forces that
operate slowly and quickly. The fundamental process of constructing agrarian territory appears only
in a long-term view. By seeing agrarian environments as on-going works-in-progress, history and
social science can move beyond enumerations of spatial diversity toward understandings of how
agrarian landscapes house diverse historic trajectories, side-by-side, which spin the impact of historic
conjunctures and interventions in various ways simultaneously.19
Long-term views also expose the constructed quality of historical space more generally.
Spatiality is a horizontal dimension of agrarian history typically ignored in efforts to analyze
vertically structured institutions, social relations, and struggles. The vertical dimension of agrarian
history differentiates space along a horizontal plane where people move, places interact, areas
intersect, and boundaries articulate territorial control. Ecological, social, economic, political, and
cultural elements of agrarian life collect, disperse, intermingle, and suffuse one another horizontally in
space, so as to create shifting geographical patterns over time. Modern imperialism, capitalism, and
national states produce entirely novel territorial designs.20 But some very old spatial patterns persist.
It seems broadly realistic to say that enduring patterns emerge by being literally -- and
literarily -- built into the land, over and again, in a process of reproduction that we cannot see except
in the long-term. When social groups produce and reproduce homelands with distinctive scenery,
artistry, aesthetics, food, institutions, infrastructure, social power and social conflicts, they accomplish
a master feat of lasting significance, which future generations build upon and may modify but rarely
erase.21 South Asia is filled with diverse elements of agrarian life moving in space and time that
16
David Ludden, "Orientalist Empiricism and Transformations of Colonial Knowledge," in
Orientalism and The Post-Colonial Predicament, edited by C.A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der
Veer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 250-78; and "India's Development Regime," in
Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas Dirks, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1992, pp.247-87.
17
David Ludden, “A Brief History of Subalternity,” Introduction to Reading Subaltern Studies:
Critical Histories, Contested Meanings, and the Globalisation of South Asia, edited by David
Ludden, New Delhi: Permanent Black Publishers, 2002, pp.1-42; and "Subalterns and Others in
the Agrarian History of South Asia," In Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge,
Edited by James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, pp.206-235.
18
Making India Hindu, 2nd edition, has a useful discussion and bibliography.
19
One good effort to move social science in that direction is Robert Wade, Village Republics:
Economic Conditions for Collective Action in South India, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988.
20
Neil Smith, Uneven Development, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1984. Manu Goswami, Producing India:
From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
21
An excellent account of one major modification is Sharad Chari, “Agrarian Questions in the
Making of the Knitwear Industry in Tirupur, India: A historical geography of the industrial
present.” In David Goodman and Michael Watts, Editors. Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions
and Global Restructuring. London and New York: Routledge; 1997; pp. 79-105.
4
generations shape into enduring patterns.22 In my own account of these patterns, some readers have
read ecological determinism. Perhaps my wording was at fault. What I mean to convey is that agrarian
cultures do not dig themselves into the land without reference to the physical character of the land
itself. Such referencing is in fact one of the oldest tropes in Tamil literature.23 It is reasonable for
historians to study the architecture of agrarian environments by keeping physical nature in focus,
because people who do the building inflect their understandings of their own world -- including its
supernatural forms -- inside natural settings they make their own. This book indicates how many
different aspects of agrarian environments articulate one another coherently inside natural landscapes
in the long-term. Analogous spatial patterns appear across South India24 and South Asia.25
Distinctively this book also digs beneath regional patterns and territorialism into localities
where circuits of mobility animate everyday life. Considering its definitive long-term patterns of
mobility, we can say Tirunelveli is a region of the Indian Ocean as well as of India. Its localities -like others near the tip of India -- are influentially attached to the sea. In pre-modern centuries,
localities near the tip of India seem to have had more sea connections with other Indian Ocean coastal
sites than overland connections with India’s northern interior. Separate coastal and inland zones of
mobility characterized pre-modern South Asia, and though attached to each other, remained separately
influential for local societies. Inland India had closer overland ties with Central Asia. Coastal India
had closer maritime ties with West and Southeast Asia.26
The pre-modern agrarian scene in Tirunelveli consisted of constellations of localities arranged
in loose spatial patterns amidst circuits of mobility crisscrossing all borders of state territorialism.
Mobility fostered spatial economic specialization among localities with diverse resource endowments.
By the eighteenth century, specialized marketing and manufacturing sites dotted the landscape, most
densely in the Tambraparni basin.27 All kinds of assets accumulated disproportionately in privileged
urbane neighborhoods strategically nestled among very old irrigated paddy fields in equally old
22
David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia. (The New Cambridge History of India, IV. 4.
General Editor: Gordon Johnson). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp.17-59.
23
See David Ludden, "Archaic Formations of Agricultural Knowledge in South India." In Meanings
of Agriculture in South Asia: Essays in South Asian History and Economics. Edited by Peter
Robb. Cambridge University Press, pp. 35-70; A.K.Ramanujan, The Interior Landscape: Love
Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1966; and
Francis Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu
Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
24
David Ludden, "Archaic Formations of Agricultural Knowledge,” and "The Formation of Modern
Agrarian Economies in South India,” for The History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture,
Volume VII, Economic History of India, 18th-20th Centuries, edited by Binay Bhushan
Chaudhuri. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004, pp.1-40.
25
Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, pp.48-59, 104, 142-9, 202-3, 225-6.
26
Ludden, “Formation of Modern Agrarian Economies,” pp.10-14.
27
David Ludden, "Agrarian Commercialism in Eighteenth Century South India: Evidence from the
1823 Tirunelveli Census," Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25, 4, 1988, 493-519
(Reprinted in Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India. Edited by Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, Oxford University Press, Themes in Indian History, Delhi, 1990, 215-241.) The
same was true in eighteenth century northern Coromandel. See Parthasarathi, Transition to a
colonial economy; David Ludden, "Specters of Agrarian Territory in South India," Indian
Economic and Social History Review, 39, 2&3, April-September, 2002: 233-58. After 1880, this
local small-town urbanism pertained across the whole Tamil country. Christopher John Baker,
An Indian Rural Economy: The Tamilnad Countryside, 1880-1955. Oxford and Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1984. Barbara Harriss-White, A Political Economy of Agricultural markets in
South India: Masters of the Countyside. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996.
5
networks of power, authority, exchange, credit, and ritualism.28 This geography indicates how
capitalism emerged in the Indian peninsula.
The early modern upward trend in overseas trade came ashore along old sea routes spanning
the North Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea.29 Commercial capitalism in the Indian Ocean
anchored itself most profitably in strategic coastal sites of agro-textile enterprise, where prolonged
and multi-faceted market relations among rulers, financiers, temples, landowners, merchants, and
manufacturers provoked deep commercialization in agrarian society. Spatially uneven development
resulted. By the eighteenth century, commercialization had spread across the peninsula, inducing both
Tipu Sultan and the English East India Company to crave coast-to-coast dominion. Amidst wars
between them, wide regions suffered destruction and asset outflows that killed wealth and population,
notably Rayalaseema.30 Agro-manufacturing and mercantile centers as well as tank irrigation between
Tirunelveli and Madurai suffered from war, as did Tanjavur and other sites on the eastern coast. At
the same time, strategic sites like those on the Tambraparni (and in northern Coromandel) flourished
as centers of accumulation. In these most privileged places, the upward trend in textile exports -critical for the growth of world capitalism -- was only the tip of the iceberg. Pervasive long-term
commercialism had much deeper significance, and though stimulated by overseas trade, had
distinctive local foundations. Before British rule, intersecting circuits of mobility among privileged
localities of capital accumulation on the Indian Ocean coast had generated Asian capitalisms in local
cultural idioms.31 These urbane centers of asset accumulation anchored British imperial expansion
into the Indian interior from its old homeland on the coast.32
British administration subjected Tirunelveli to commanding imperialism for the first time. Its
force increased after 1757, 1801, and 1850, as indicated by trajectories of land revenue. Before 1757,
Tirunelveli taxes never traveled routinely north of Madurai. After 1757, taxes moved regularly to
Madras. After 1801, local revenues joined others from all over British India on ships to London; and
after 1850, supported capital investments in London that built imperial railways, roads, irrigation, and
administration in India. In late decades of the nineteenth century, Tinnevelly train junctions became
new privileged sites of accumulation, as industrial capitalism forced a vast territorial reorganization33
28
David Ludden, “Caste Society and Units of Production in Early Modern South India," in
Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
Editors: Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1996,
pp.105-133; and "Urbanism and Early Modernity in the Tirunelveli Region," Bengal Past and
Present, 114, Parts 1-2, Nos.218-219, 1995, 9-40.
29
K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise
of Islam until 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Janet L. Abu-Lughod,
Before European Hegemony the World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989.
30
See the case of Rayalaseema in Ludden, “Formation of Modern Agrarian Economies,” p.24.
31
See Capitalism in Asia. Edited by David Ludden, Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2004;
and David Ludden, "World Economy and Village India, 1600-1900: Exploring the Agrarian
History of Capitalism." In South Asia and World Capitalism. Edited by Sugata Bose. Oxford
University Press, Delhi, 1990, pp.159-77; and “Modern Inequality and Early Modernity,”
American Historical Review, 107, 2, April: 470-480. See also Rajat Datta, Society, Economy, and
the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, circa 1760-1800, Delhi: Manohar, 2000.
32
See Ludden,“Spectres of of Agrarian Territory.” My understanding of these processes resembles
that theorized in David M Kotz, Terence McDonough and Michael Reich. Editors. Social
Structures of Accumulation: The Political Economy of Growth and Crisis. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1994; and Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and
Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
33
Roy, Tirthankar. Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
6
and reinterpretation34 of India inside imperial ranks of social and spatial hierarchy. Tinnevelly District
became a tiny piece in the puzzle of India.35 Its localities became molecules of national territory, data
points on national maps, fragments of a nation, and exemplars of “village India.” After Independence,
India became one piece of a global puzzle. Everywhere, national generalizations about tradition and
modernity became staples of social science and history. Those early modern agrarian dynamics of
commercial capitalism, which had once animated Tirunelveli localities amidst promiscuous circuits of
mobility, disappeared from view. Yet data galore survive to document local histories that escape the
gaze of the nation, reveal its novelty, and suggest the haunting possibility that national territorialism is
incomplete and impermanent.36
I am still wandering archaic landscapes, now in and around Bangladesh.37 Ironically, the
Government of India prevented me from settling down to modern history inside India. In 1982, I
proposed research on the Tambraparni River basin during the century after 1870 when it became a
unified, fully managed irrigation system, under state authority. But 1981 mass conversions to Islam
in Meenakshipuram (near Tenkasi)38 and Sri Lankan Tamil rebel activity on the south Tamil coast
made the region too sensitive for the state to permit my fieldwork. So I went back to the archives.
There I rediscovered old Tirunelveli as a wide-open historical space on routes spanning West Asia,
Gujarat, Kerala, Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Southeast Asia, routes traveled by Islam and Tamil Tigers in
the 1980s. I looked again at maps in this book and realized they fell prey to modern territorialism. I
failed to depict open pre-modern spaces of mobility, which modern states carved up.39 Instead I used
modern boundaries anachronistically. The Tirunelveli region depicted here with Tinnevelly District
boundaries is a territorial enclosure of empirical convenience produced by the cataloguing of
historical data by district. Please erase in your mind boundaries in Maps 8, 9, and 10.
Other failures also became apparent. My original obsession with the impact of British
imperialism disappeared as the book became a long-term local history. Localities and patterns of
change in agrarian space became my new obsession, but the idea of a regional system falling under
British impact survived, for instance, in Figure 1. Rather than “system,” the word “space” is better for
labels on the four right-hand columns of Figure 1. It makes more sense to see the characteristics listed
in those columns as features of localities. And rather than “system defining social network” -- which
sounds very odd -- it is better to think of kinship, religion, state, and market as institutional forms that
set the tone of social change in successive periods. As one critic pointed out, the epochal succession
of kinship, religion, state, and market seems to describe a modernization trajectory, but what I want to
indicate is that evidence from each period is increasingly influenced by one kind of social transaction
more than others. Kinship, religion40 and state did not become less important, but the market seems to
34
Manu Goswami, Producing India.
35
Michael Storper, The Capitalist Imperative: territory, technology, and industrial growth. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1989
36
David Ludden,“Why Area Studies?” In Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting
the Area Studies Debate, edited by Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. 131-7; “Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia,”
Presidential Address for the Association of Asian Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, 62, 3,
November 2003: 1057-1078; and "History Outside Civilization and the Mobility of Southern
Asia," South Asia 17, 1, June 1994, 1-23.
37
David Ludden, “The First Boundary of Bangladesh on Sylhet’s Northern Frontiers,” Journal of the
Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 48, 1, June, 2003: 1-54, and “Investing in nature around Sylhet:
An Excursion into Geographical History,” Economic and Political Weekly, 29 November 2003.
38
Mumtaz Ali Khan. Mass-conversions of Meenakshipuram: a sociological inquiry. Madras:
Christian Literature Society; 1983.
39
See Ludden, “Maps in the Mind,” and "The Formation of Modern Agrarian Economies.”
40
See Susan Bayly, “A Christian Caste in Hindu Society: Religious Leadership and Social Conflict
among the Paravas of Southern Tamil Nadu,” Modern Asian Studies. 15, 2, 1981: 203-34; and
7
me to be the locally influential modality of social interaction on the rise more than others after 1750.
That column represents what I see as trend characteristics of historical periods.
The book also left the changing character of territorialism largely unexamined. The idea that
there was a regional system in southern Pandya country is not without merit, but I lost sight of it as a
historical problem because I worked uncritically inside district boundaries. Spatial zones of transition
around Tirunelveli deserved more attention. Though I do consider the Madurai connection, others
were also important: westward with Chera country and Travancore, southward with Kanya Kumari,
eastward with Sri Lanka, and north along the coast with Ramnad and across the straits with Jaffna.
These areas were parts of regional history in Tirunelveli and not just spaces where mobility ran
haphazardly. Had I paid them more attention, changes in the power structure on the coast would have
seemed more influential, as indeed they were after 1498 with the arrival of the Portuguese and Dutch.
In a coastal view of Tirunelveli, pearl fisheries, the fishing economy, and port markets would have
become more clearly part of the pattern of local economic specializations fed by mobility, inland and
overseas. The Dutch in particular altered territorial formations of power along the coast by attaching
Tirunelveli and Ceylon, in the days when Tamil Nayakas were Kandyan kings.41
Even more glaringly absent to me now is any explicit account of how localities fit into
territories inside the agrarian space I call the “Tirunelveli region.” On the one hand, it now seems to
me that the character of territorialism that shaped all the agricultural zones changed dramatically over
the centuries. At the same time, each zone had a distinctive history of territorialism, within which
networks of mobility articulated with localities differently. I do suggest that special privileges
enhanced the wealth of small territorial domains along the Tambraparni, but now it seems to me I
could have made a stronger case that principles of territorial organization stand out in this area as
being, to put the matter simply, more Brahmanical. Other constellations of localities also acquired
their identity inside distinctive modes of territorial order. The local character of kingship, authority,
social power, and conflict differed among various territorial domains whose local influence persists to
the present day. In modern times, Tirunleveli’s old territorial designs became archaic, but old
territorial dynamics survived inside localities. Social conflicts and voting patterns today reflect
continued reproduction of local territorial systems inside national territory.42
It now only remains for me to say that I thank Oxford University Press for this new edition
[with its new title, which reflects its relevance today better than the original title], and that I think the
local focus of this book is now quite important for South Asian historical scholarship. Localities
matter now more than ever. Political parties, NGOs, and activists of all kinds focus on local
initiatives. Territories of political mobilization are getting smaller and smaller. Shifting loyalties
among local voters shake up states and national coalitions. Places like Godhra and Meenakshipuram
break onto the national scene -- seemingly out of nowhere -- with major consequences. Places on the
fringe of national thinking, like Nepal mountain villages, erupt in national revolution. Political
Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Asian Society, 1700-1900, New
York: Cambridge University Press 1990. Also note the origin and home base of Saiva Siddhanta
in Tirunelveli. Mariasusai Dhavamony, Love of God According to Saiva Siddhanta: A Study in
the Mysticism and Theology of Saivism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. For comparative
perspective, see Dietrich Reetz, “In Search of the Collective Self: How ethnic group concepts
were cast through conflict in colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies, 31, 2, 1997: 285-315.
41
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500-1650,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; “Rural Industry and Commercial Agriculture in
Late 17th Century South Eastern India,” Past and Present, 126, 1990: 76-114; and “Connected
Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies,
31, 1997:735-762. See also S. Jeyaseela Stephen, The Coromandel Coast and its Hinterland:
Economy, Society, and Political System (AD 1500-1600), Delhi: Manohar, 1997.
42
David Ludden, "Specters of Agrarian Territory in South India," Narendra Subramanian, Ethnicity
and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens, and Democracy in South India, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
8
demands for new states in India rest on the proven argument that smaller states can better serve
localities in underprivileged regions. Uneven local development visible in the eighteenth century has
achieved powerful political meaning.43 In Bangladesh, everyday news shows that in some localities
disconnected from national thinking only local rules apply. In addition, more localities than ever have
their own connections to the world outside national boundaries. This is quite typical along national
borders, but in places like Bangalore, Sylhet, and Jaffna, changing local identities feed upon
independent connections with the US, UK, and Canada. Assam is a regional of localities tied
historically to Bangladesh, China, and Southeast Asia along routes that are increasing relevance for
India today.44 Understanding local history is increasingly important, but producing appropriate
expertise and integrating it into national thinking will take some time. More relevant material is on my
website http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/.
David Ludden
Dhaka
12 February 2016
43
K Balagopal, “Andhra Pradesh: Beyond Media Images.” Economic and Political Weekly. June 12,
2004, 39, 24:2425-29.
44
David Ludden, Where is Assam? Using Geographical History to Locate Current Social Realities.
CENSEAS Papers, No.1. Series Editor: Sanjib Baruah. Guwahati: Centre of Northeast India and
South and Southeast Asian Studies, Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and
Development, 2003. See also Anindita Dasgupta, “Emergence of a Community: The Muslims of
East Bengal Origin in Assam in Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods” [PhD dissertation].
Guwahati: Department of History, University of Guwahati, 2000.
9