FUNDAMENTACIÓN ANDRAGÓGICA

Left Right

Englishmen Aaron Baker

Edward Winter Capt. James Martin Anthony Baker Henry Greenhill William Gurney John Leigh John Gurney Brahmins Venkata Kanappa

Priests of the Perumal temple (including Narayana Aiyar)51

Other “big men”

Naga Pattan (by ascription)

Beri Timmanna Rudriga Seshadri Nayak Koneri Chetti Raga Pattan

Naga Pattan (by conscription) Beri Chettis Pallis Komatis Painters “Cooly” Painters “Mooree”52 _Weavers “Cangaloone” Weavers Paraiyans Castes

Fishermen (Pattan-varu and Karai-varu)53

THE DISPUTE AND ITS STAKES

In an incisive historical study of the Left-Right phenomenon in European enclaves on the Coromandel coast in the eighteenth and early nineteenth

51 _{Love, VOM, 1: 95}

52 _{“Moorees” and “cangaloones” were different types of textiles. Foster, EFI [9]: 258 note3.} 53 _{Love, VOM, 1: 119 note 9.}

century, Niels Brimnes argues that honour and honours (which he notes can serve an economic function as “symbolic capital”) played a central role in the disputes and that the English were very much aware of that. Brimnes gives the example of Baker’s treatment of the two divisions on the beach at the time of his departure for England. The principals of the Right Hand division complained that:

At the time of his going aboard ship wee went to bidd him farewell and wish him a prosperous voiage unto his country, as our custome in theise parts is with a little fruite, but hee would not soe much as looke upon us turning his back towards us, and by others asked what wee did there, and bidd us bee gone, which wee having attended him till noone did, and went away, but presently after the principalls of the Left Hand were received and had tashereifes [tashrifs: honorary gifts/robes] given them and after them the Braminees also…

That is only one example, however; the Right Hand caste principals further complained that Baker and the Brahmin brothers had encouraged the leading Left Hand caste to become malapert, that is in the New Oxford Dictionary definition of the word “boldly disrespectful to a person of higher standing,” in this case to members of the Right Hand:

The President giving eare to the bramanees persuasions they framed a paper which distinguished the Right and Left Hand parties and endeavoured ther by to bring the Chittees to an uncustomed height of honour, which encouraged them to bee soe malipert.54

To that we can add the example of agent Greenhill who, according to point 107 of the 118-point petition of Kanappa and Venkata, struck one Ammappa Chetti with his slipper over some petty cause “upon which hee [Ammappa Chetti] would dye and 3 dayes eat nothing,” when two other Beri Chettis prevailed with him to eat and for three months “made suite to the agent to favour him with a pishcash [gift] of a cloute [khil‘at: robe of honour] in lieu of the disgrace but hee answered hee would rather s[h]ame then honour him now [nor] his cast for that they were not of his councell now should they look for his good word unto his successors.” The latter example, however, shows not only that the English were aware of the local cultivation of shame and honour, but also that they chose to shame those who were not of their “councell.”55

Moreover the concern with “honour” was not restricted to the Indians in the Chennapatnam area; Baker complained to Greenhill that his broker Rudriga “not many years past was kept and imployed by some of your predecessors as a pympe and pander, having then hardly a pagoda in his purse; and yet now, under your imployment, is grown to such a height 54 _{Brimnes, Constructing, 24-5, 68; VOM, declaration of the Right Hand caste principals ca.} April 1655, 1: 122-3. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) s.v. malapert.

119 that lately he durst come and tell me to my face that hee would turne mee out of my place, and come and sett in my chayre ere long, and make mee wayte on him. And for your other servant Tymana, you your selfe heard here in this Hall how hee snapt mee up, as if I had beene a boy or slave, and not worthy to have spoken or done anything without leave.”56

However, it was not only honours that were disputed, financial matters played a large role as well. A great part of the lists of charges that the parties are bringing against each other is about money: money wrongfully taken, not paid back, defrauded from the Company etc.. It would be too tedious to list or even summarise all those charges. Kanakalatha Mukund who chooses to explain the clash in 1650s Chennapatnam in economic terms notes rightly that the economic approach leaves more fundamental questions unanswered.57 _{It can be}

remarked, however, by way of a summary of the economic aspects, that also in financial matters there was a good measure of cohesion between the big men and the subaltern men in the respective parties. Greenhill championed the case of the Right Hand and “the poore people” in general. When some Painters were held, apparently at Baker’s order, at the chavadi

for some debt, Greenhill stepped in and said he would pay the Painters’ debts “which hee [Baker] could not then but accept for shame.” Greenhill also castigated Baker for allowing the nawab’s adhikari to impose sales duties on petty things such as betel and herbs sold in the market.58

Just as in the Robbers Cave experiment, one party became very high-minded while the other remained businesslike. In the Greenhill party the humanitarian argument was very important. The Right Hand parties accuse the Brahmin brothers of allowing abducted people to be sold as slaves in the town and licensing gambling “to the undoing of some families.”59 _{Also consider the following words of John Leigh in connection}

with the charge that Kanappa was licensing slaves: “Some of us have children: it would greeve our soules to have them stolne and sould for slaves; and these people have as much right to their children and love to them as wee, and therefore ought to have justice on the trators or the manstealers or depeoplers of the countrey,” or Greenhill’s warning that laxity on the part of Baker encouraged Kanappa, “to domineer more and more in high language over the poore people.” Baker on the other hand, against Greenhill’s charge that he was allowing the nawab’s adhikari’s

56 _{VOM, Letter Baker to Greenhill 29.3.1654, 1: 134.}

57 _{Mukund, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant: Evolution of Merchant Capitalism in}

Coromandel (Chennai, 1999) 68 and “Caste Conflict in South India in Early Colonial Port

Cities – 1650-1800,” Studies in History 11 (1995) 1: 1-27, there 19 and passim.

58 _{VOM, Letters Greenhill to Baker 1.3.1654, Leigh to Company 29.3.1654 and Baker to}

Greenhill 29.3.1654, 1: 130-4.

imposing taxes on small things sold in the market, made remarks like: “nor can I conceive, if these customes must bee paid upons such patty things as herbes and beetle, what prejudice the Company can susteyne thereby,” and “I suppose the Company are neither gainers nor losers by it.”60

Finally, the dispute was about space, or perhaps we should say ceremonial or honorary space. Below is a more or less chronological narrative of how the dispute over space in the town developed. It is clear that caste played a role in the initial settlement pattern, and perhaps the Right and the Left Hand castes were clustered to an extent, but that division was apparently not implemented in a very clear-cut way. At the heart of the dispute as it developed in the late 1640s and first half of the 1650s, however, were a series of rulings made by the English and their representatives in the town concerning the division of streets between the Right and the Left.

In the beginning the person responsible for allotting plots to settlers in Chennapatnam and Peddanaikpetta was Timmanna, who seems to have acted rather autonomously in that, expropriating ground from those who “had lived thereon 100 yeares” and offered the Company “greater shares.”61 _{A descendant of Timmanna wrote in 1820 that he}

allotted lands “for both Right and Left Hand castes separately,” but that may be hindsight.62 _{In Ivie’s time (1644-’48) a mud wall was built by public}

subscription, to protect the northern and the western sides of the town, while the southern side was protected by the river which left a progressively narrowing strip of land on which the fort stood. Peddanaikpetta was not walled in, and was therefore also known as “the village without the towne.”63 _{In Peddanaikpetta and the other outlying settlement, the kuppam}

south of the fort, lived some of the lower castes: the washers and the

talaiyaris in Peddanaikpetta, and two castes of fishermen in the kuppam.64

Within the walls we hear of Pallis, and the trading castes of the Beri Chettis and Komatis as well as the Painters, Weavers etc. There were also a number of Europeans living in the conglomeration, including many Portuguese, who lived mostly at the south end, between the fort and the market street which ran east to west, while a few lived south of the fort.65

60 _{VOM, Letters Greenhill to Baker 1.3.1654, Baker to Greenhill 29.3.1654 and Leigh’s}

declaration against Kanappa n.d., 1: 130-4. Another example: VOM, Leigh’s declaration regarding the chavadi 16.12.1654, 1: 138-9.

61 _{VOM, Fort St. George consultation 28.1.1712, 2: 1: 127; EFI, 118 points of Venkata and} Kanappa 4.4.1654, [9]: 260.

62 _{B. Ramaswami Nayudu, Memoir on the Revenue System of Madras, quoted in VOM, 1: 95.} 63 _{VOM, Declaration Painters etc. ca. 12.12.1654, 1: 148-9; EFI, same document, [9]: 243.} 64 _{BL, Declaration Painters etc. ca. 12.12.1654, E/3/24: 364-73; VOM, Translation of award} in caste dispute 5.11.1652, 1:118-20.

65 _{VOM, Fort St. George Consultation 10.6.1672, 1: 383. Love, VOM, 1: 129 note 2. VOM,} 118 points of Venkata and Kanappa 4.4.1654, 1: 143; VOM, Fort St. George consultation 29.2.1676, 1: 388.

The pattern of the basic spatial division into a core living area for the higher castes and outlying areas for the lower castes is also familiar from other contexts. On a painting by an anonymous Indian painter of the encampment of a Dutch ambassador within the Mughal Imperial camp in 1689 one can see the sweepers relegated to the farthest corner of the camp/the painting. Of course one might say that must have been a matter of class rather than caste, but the sweepers were also referred to in the payroll of the mission as halalkwors, a euphemism for very low-caste persons “to whom all is lawful food.” The only way to explain the presence of this term in that payroll would be that sweepers were at the time quite generally marked by the impurity of their eating habits. And while the sweepers are at the back of the camp, some Telugu Brahmins keeping the time are located to the right of the entrance at the front.66 _{Somewhat later,}

at the turn of the eighteenth century, Shahaji, the king of Thanjavur to the south of Chennapatnam, wrote a play about the infatuation of a Brahmin man with a married Madiga woman, and puts the following words in her mouth: “We’re untouchables. If you touch us, you become unclean / Don’t come close. We’re Madigas, working with leather / Our huts are to the east of the village.”67 _{But the least auspicious direction probably varied}

somewhat over time and space, since, in the 1960s, Brenda Beck observed that the west and south were generally allocated to the lowest-ranking members of a community.68

In 1640s Chennapatnam the northern end of the town was considered the most honourable or auspicious. The location where Chennapatnam was situated certainly offered certain constraints, the east being unavailable because of the sea, the fort lying to the south, and south of that an estuary (though there was enough space there for the small

kuppam), but it is significant that Peddanaikpetta was not situated to the north which later became the site of an extension of the town housing mainly Left Hand merchants. But even if the location of Peddanaikpetta as a satellite settlement was entirely contingent on practical considerations — such as access for the Washers to the river — and not on the ideological, it can be established from an incident that took place during Ivie’s time that the west end of Chennapatnam was indeed considered less auspicious or

66 _{Lunsingh Scheurleer and Kruijtzer, “Camping.”}

67 _{Shahaji, Sati-dana-shuramu translated as “Take my Wife,” in Classical Telugu Poetry, an} Anthology ed. and trans. Velchuru Narayana Rao and David Shulman (Delhi, 2002) 354-80, there 363-4.

68 _{Beck, Peasant Society in Konku, 152; Susan Neild also shows some “continuities with the} pre-colonial order” of the spatial organisation of colonial Madras. Neild, “Colonial Urbanism: The Development of Madras City in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Modern Asian Studies 13 (1979) 217-46. Patrick A. Roche also sees some continuity but argues that the spatial separation of groups was to a large extent fostered by the English power and its “traditionalising” influence. Roche, “Caste and the British,” 381, 399-400, 404.

123 honourable than the north. While Ivie and Venkata were away for some time, Timmanna and Rudriga tried to persuade the two sections of the Weavers to put themselves under the protection of Seshadri, but only the “Mooree” Weavers consented, “upon which,” in the words of the Brahmin brothers, “Sesadra made a broyle with causing the mooree Weavers to pass with burialls through the west gate.” Thus that gate was clearly less honourable than the other gates which were the north gates, and we shall see that access to the north gates came to play a central role in the dispute over space.69

In Ivie’s time the first ruling concerning Left Hand and Right Hand streets was made, which defined the second important spatial division of the town within the walls. It is probable that it accorded both the Right and the Left one south-north street for ceremonial purposes. That paper was, however, consequently concealed by Venkata and Kanappa for years, which is one of the more mysterious episodes in the dispute, but all the involved refer to it.70 _{The brothers themselves said they concealed the}

paper for fear that Greenhill would tear it up.71 _{After the Left Hand had}

prevented the Brahmins from riding a palanquin (a very honourable mode of transport) into their street during a wedding, the Brahmins apparently made Greenhill believe that there was no such paper by pledging a large sum of money if the Left Hand could prove them wrong.72

Yet in the time of Greenhill another paper was drawn up after a difference had arisen between the Painters and a Palli. It ruled that the Pallis were allowed to use any street for their wedding processions except the street of the Komatis which was to be reserved for the honour of the Right Hand. The Brahmin brothers, however, claimed that Seshadri “spoyled” the paper, and that Greenhill did not do anything against that although the paper was made up by the brothers upon his order. The brothers also claimed that “the paper is in our hands,” which suggests that the paper was not physically spoiled, but its ruling obstructed.73

After Baker arrived, the Brahmins produced the first paper again upon “strang [sic] intercession,”74 _{but in November 1652 a new ruling was}

made. The original Telugu document was still extant in 1707 and at that time translated into English, to aid judgment in the then current disputes. It stated that “there having been of late severall differences and disputes between the casts about their streets, which this day is settled.” The paper 69 _{EFI, 118 points of Venkata and Kanappa 4.4.1654, [9]: 258-9.}

70 _{EFI, Greenhill’s remonstrance to Baker concerning the Brahmin brothers 1.3.1654 and}

Baker to Greenhill 29.3.1654, [9]: 235, 253; BL, Examination of Venkata and Kanappa over articles of Painters 31.3.1655, G/19/1: 4-9.

71 _{EFI, 118 points of Venkata and Kanappa 4.4.1654, [9]: 258.}

72 _{BL, Declaration Painters, Weavers etc. ca. 12.12.1654, E/3/24: 364-9.} 73 _{BL, 118 points of Venkata and Kanappa 4.4.1654, E/3/24: 159-69.} 74 _{BL, Declaration Painters, Weavers etc. ca. 12.12.1654, E/3/24: 364-9.}

was signed by Baker, Greenhill, Gurney, Koneri Chetti and Seshadri, the latter as mediator. Basically it awarded the two easternmost streets running parallel to the coast, along with the eastern part of the perpendicular market street, to the Left Hand and the western part of town to the Right Hand. A very heavy fine was set upon either group passing through the other’s part with matrimonial and funerary processions. But also more generally “the Right Hand cast are to reside in the particular streets appointed for ’em, where are to live or come none of the Left Hand cast; and the same with the Left Hand cast, where are to be none of the Right Hand cast.” An exception was made for the two fishermen castes from the kuppam south of the fort, who were allowed to pass with their weddings and burials to the Portuguese church north of the town through both the central north-south streets, that of the Left and of the Right. The agreement basically gave all sections of the population access to one or more of the north gates, through an honourable route.75

From all corners we gain the impression that this ruling was really the start of the troubles, though it was meant as a solution to the previous discontent. The Painters and Weavers felt betrayed by this document. They later stated that the Brahmin brothers had obtained their approval and signatures for (a draft) of the document by saying that each side was to be assigned one street, but the next day suddenly said that two streets had been assigned to the Left Hand. It is indeed rather odd that the translation of the final draft that is still extant adds in brackets “(being two street)” after the mention of the streets to be assigned to the Left.76 _{Shortly after}

the ruling some houses that belonged to Right Hand people were taken away from them. In particular, it seems, some of the Painters had to be relocated from the lower grounds to the higher grounds further away from the coastline. Apparently the Brahmins had promised alternative housing to them, because they were said to have “frighted” several people in the higher grounds to dispose of their houses but also to finally have let some of those people keep their houses in exchange for bribes. Disturbances broke out, which included the blocking of Left Hand funerals, and the English imprisoned two “ringleaders” in the fort, whence they were again