They presented the inhabitants with their respective names, but the generic terms keep changing. These first three reports, written independently, described physical, commercial and agricultural conditions more carefully than human aspects. Being technicians who spent from one to three months in the Nilgiris, they are “little in the habit of writing on any subject”, and write “with pleasure but with much diffidence”. Īs Evans Macpherson wrote to John Sullivan, who pressed him to state his opinion, they are “In humble situation in this country”. Ward, Deputy Surveyor-General, was the author of a more substantial Geographical and Statistical Memoir of a Survey of the Neelgherry Mountains., dated 1821. (b) Lieutenant Evans Macpherson, 1820, Superintendent, Neelgherry Road, transmitted a brief report to John Sullivan, the next Collector of Coimbatore, who had entrusted him with the construction of the first road and the survey of the lands. (a) William Keys, Assistant Revenue Surveyor, sent, in June 1812, “A Topographical Description of the Neelaghery Mountains” to the Collector of the Coimbatore District, W. Three of these reports, written between 18, have come down to us : Hence it was felt necessary to make a careful survey of the new territories. After the cession of the Coimbatore District, in 1799, the first task of the British was to abolish the ancient revenue system and establish a new one. The first reports we are able to consult were written by civil servants on assignment, and more precisely by surveyors. Variability of the Terms Used with a Preference for ‘Caste’
The analysis of these texts allows us to identify three main periods, or rather trends, which emerge one after the other and go on to develop without becoming entrapped by specific temporal limits. I shall consider only eyewitness accounts, leaving out all the compilations, despite their interest. But that does not mean it was wholly arbitrary. The choice of what today we call sociological concepts was never discussed. But leaving aside their intrinsic meaning or sociological relevance, a formal analysis of the frequency and the evolution of these words can throw some light on their authors and their time.
Tylor and Herbert Spencer had had some impact on the public, and the Census of India was getting itself organised (1871 and later), that these terms began to lead separate lives” (Hockings 1993 : 352). It was only after the anthropological writings of E. To a certain extent, one can follow Hockings when he writes, concerning the words ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ : “there is no point in our seeking for consistency in the early use of these various terms.
First of all, I shall examine what was initially written about the Nilgiris. Challenging these labels is therefore interpreted, ipso facto, as a political issue.įor my part, I would rather question the perception and the definition of the Nilgiri peoples during the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th centuries. Since then, as Paul Hockings (1993 : 351) reminds us, “the academic question has been overtaken by the political ramifications of being identified with one or the other”. By adopting these same sociological labels, the Constitution of 1949 established them as political dogma, inseparable from Indian Independence and unity, and turned them into political stakes. When the Indian National Census endorsed the distinction and created exclusive categories in 1871-72, it placed endless difficulties before the administrators and soon compelled them to look to the transformation of tribes into castes (Sinha 1980 : 2, 7). These terms have a history in which scientific and political considerations have always been intertwined. The bases of the British distinction between ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ were never clearly defined. Nevertheless, I do not want to enter this debate which has, to my mind, been skewed from the start. Although the weakness of the data from remote times has indeed something to do with this, these same data were still sufficient to lend themselves to divergent elaborations, which clearly points to theoretical and ideological bias in the construction of those models. It has been equally easy to prove that the inhabitants were isolated tribes or that they were part of a jajmânî-like system of interdependence, with either the Todas or the Badagas as the dominant caste. In modern anthropology, the case of the Nilgiris has been used to construct very different sociological models.