The anti-reservation stir, which in all likeness is going to intensify as Central and state governments implement their other backward classes quota, brings to mind the situation in the Twenties — the time when the country’s first backward classes movement had rolled out of the Madras presidency. Termed the ‘non-Brahmin movement’, it strangely derived its strength from an elastic view of caste. The homogeneity of the movement against the Brahmins, who comprised three per cent of the population and yet dominated education and the state services under the British, has been attributed to the absence of a clear-cut varna system in the South, which gave room for a simplistic ‘Brahmin-non-Brahmin’ societal divide.

As the more socially-conscious Brahmins were moving towards the Congress, mobilization of the majority of non-Brahmins or the shudras, as they were lumped together for political purposes, had become all the more easy for parties blessed by the British, the Justice Party to start with. The latter spawned the Dravida Kazhagam under Periyar, a rebel Congressman. The Brahmin ‘hegemony’ was fought through a policy of ‘positive discrimination’ (the first introduction of quotas in public services was done through the now-famous order of 1927 that was meant not only for non-Brahmins but also for Muslims, Christians and Anglo-Indians), and a movement towards a “casteless and classless society”. The rest of the Dravidian movement is now history.

However, together with the linguistic reorganization of states, these developments, with respect to Tamil society, unwittingly reinforced the norms of a rigidly hierarchical social order among the majority non-Brahmins. In retrospect, it appears that the new firewalls the ‘social justice movement’ created, were cemented by what M.N. Srinivas called the process of Sanskritization. But Sanskritization implicitly presupposed a hierarchical social order drawn from the ancient varna system, which was supposed to be absent in the South, thus making possible a broad homogeneous coalition of the non-Brahmins in the first place. It was akin to a Hegelian triadic movement in history.

The early part of this triadic movement in pre-modern Tamil society has been documented by the German missionary and Tamil scholar, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719), who was based in the Danish settlement of Tranquebar or Tharangambadi in Tamil. Ziegenbalg’s detailed study of early 18th century Tamil society comes as a whiff of fresh air in the deconstruction of the age-old notion of ‘caste’ — a term first used by the Portuguese in the early part of the 16th century which later became a catch-all phrase to capture the essence of Indian society.

Despite Ziegenbalg’s ‘missionary bias’, his study was a testimony to the ‘empirical approach of pre-colonial Western observers in India as opposed to later speculative interpretations’, says historian Gita Dharampal-Frick. In fact, Ziegenbalg’s 1711 original monograph, which itself was not published in Germany until 1926 because of “ideological opposition of the Pietist authorities”, avoided the use of the word ‘caste’. To this day, it is a reminder of how later observers have often confused between the varna and the jati system. Jati, in a purely descriptive sense, mainly refers to social groups marked by endogamous marriage rules and customs.

Dharampal, who has researched extensively on this phase of Tamil society, points out that instead of caste, Ziegenbalg “chooses the more appropriate German designation ‘geschlechter’, meaning families.” A century later, caste, “with its emphasis on hierarchy, was to be proclaimed a seminal feature of Indian culture.” But the missionary’s more empirical approach to the point of mapping the quasi-ethnography of the various social groups rejected a unitary approach.

Though Ziegenbalg mentions the four varnas, the spotlight of his treatise is only on the ‘majority shudras’. The treatise describes the existence of 98 different social groups or families (jatis) in the Tamil society he saw and lived in, “distinguished by their specific rituals, dress and respective professions.” Of these, he had painstakingly tabulated 71 ‘families or jatis’, that provide “tangible evidence to the diversity of occupational groupings,” according to Dharampal. A typical social group in his list reads ‘Wallarer’ (in modern Tamil ‘Vellalar’) engaged in agriculture, cattle-rearing and corn trade. These descriptions are relatively value-free, which made possible an alternative view, in ‘sheer contrast to the hegemonic explanations of caste from the 19th century onwards.’

Ziegenbalg also made no mention of any ‘inter-group ranking’ and does not take recourse to the purusha myth in the Rig Veda on the origin of the varnas, that implies a hierarchical view of society with the Brahmins at the top and the shudras at the lowest rung. Instead, Ziegenbalg, drew much from the Tamil literary and sacred texts, and identified each of the four varnas with an ‘individual godhead’.

This presents a non-hierarchical view of Tamil society, with “jatis being more a defining group identity... rather than a closed status symbol legitimized by a comprehensive sacred ideology which blocks social mobility and change,” says Dharampal. It was more a functionally inter-dependent system than a rigid hierarchical structure. If one were to apply this finding to the larger pan-Indian situation, the defining thing of Indian society was not hierarchy, as subsequent social anthropologists like Louis Dumont saw. Dharampal, contrary to Dumont, sees jatis more as ‘group identities’.

The problem arose with the first official census in 1871. It was then that the varna scheme — more a theory and a broad classificatory typology — “was used to define the place/position of the various Jatis” to legitimize certain political and legal aspects of the colonial rule, believes Dharampal. Nonetheless, Ziegenbalg, despite his non-evaluative approach, describes the first in his list of “Shudra Jatis”, namely the Saiva Pillaimars, as the Shudra-Brahmin — someone highly respected, concerned with aspects of metaphysics and after-life. It shows how the varna framework had already begun to influence the reading of jatis. This could be seen as the first movement in the Hegelian triad vis-à-vis the discourse on caste.