THE KALLARS AND DUMONT'S THEORY OF ALLIANCE

The Tamils are born sociologists and the culture is beautiful. —Louis Dumont (in Jean-Claude Galey 1982: 21)

La réciprocité impredictable, voilà le terrain privilégié des rapports de dons. —Pouillon 1996: 159

I first went to the heart of Pramalai Kallar country to check on a story I read in the Sunday section of the Tamil newspaper called Daily Thanthi. That morning, as I was making my way through the printed news, the usual ministerial exaggerations, the babbling of opposition leaders, a couple of murders, matrimonial ads, and so on, I came across the story of the "Beautiful Tevar," who allegedly once lived in the village of Corikkampatti, located just a few kilometers away from my rented house. I already knew how it ended: This Kallar hero enters a bull-baiting contest (jallikattu) to win back the girl who "rightly" belongs to him. He fights courageously until a bull gores him to death, pulling his entrails out. But there were enough differences between the version featured in the weekend supplement of the Daily Thanthi and the one recorded by Ulrike Niklas (2000) in the same village (see next chapter) that I decided to pursue.

It is not that difficult to show up in a Tamil village with an ethnographic agenda. In my experience, at least Tamil rural folks do not seem to mind a foreigner and her assistant (in this case a young man from the area) dropping by out of nowhere to ask questions about this or that aspect of their lives. In fact, over the twenty years I have conducted ethnographic research in Tamil Nadu I have almost always encountered an extraordinary goodwill that never fails to astonish me. In this case, however, the reception in this village was beyond my expectations.

As soon as we reached the main tea stall, four or five men waved me in their direction. It did not take me very long to realize that they were not drinking tea. They were drunk, very drunk in fact, but not so stupefied that they could not figure out why I had come. Every Tamil New Year (usually mid-January on the Western calendar) foreign tourists come to Kallar country to take pictures of the popular bull-taming contest held in the nearby village of Alankanallur. Every so often anthropologists like myself turn up, confident that our semicommunicative competence in Tamil will get us closer to the "meaning" of Kallar cultural activities. And so as soon as I uttered the Tamil greeting "vanakkam," these men already knew who I was and why I had come, and they invited me to sit nearby on a stone slab.

After they recounted, I should say leaped through, the version of the story that I (and they) had read that morning, after they reenacted the ways in which the Beautiful Tevar tries to bring the bull down, pressing on its neck so as to reach over its hump, we sat together in silence. Here we were at the familiar anthropological crossroad where culture is trafficked and peddled. There was no nervousness in the air, definitively none of that awkwardness that sometimes one encounters with earnest and helpful Tamil hosts. But then again these men did not make a big show of hospitality, asking me neither to sit in the shade, nor drink a soda, and so on. There were no complications whatsoever.

It took just a few minutes for one of them, a very thin fellow with deep-sunk pouches under his eyes, to ask permission to refocus my inquiry. "You ask about what you know," he said with an impish grin on his face, "but may I tell you what you don't?" "Well, of course," was my immediate reaction; "By all means, tell me what I should know," is what I very much wanted to say. In my experience a request like this does not come by often enough. The business of having an interlocutor volunteer information outside the ethnographic box is a dream come true.

A sort of glow came over my new friend, who despite the constant burst of inebriated-sounding commands—"Tell her this!" "Tell her that!"—managed to stay focused on what he wanted to impart to me, namely the time-honored brutal but moral dynamics of his society. His mode of instruction consisted of probing me with rhetorical questions. In the old days, he asked, there was no police or court, so how did the Kallars handle crime back then? How did they dispense justice when killed or wronged? "They took revenge," the man answered with a raucous laughter and launched into a drawn-out but apparently true story about two farmers who pick up a fight while working in the field. One slashes the other with a sickle and, when caught by the villagers, he violently throws his newborn baby on the ground, shouting: "A life for a life!" When the villagers deny him the opportunity to turn his crime into a sacrifice, his Dalit (untouchable) servant kills his own child, crying out: "Two lives for one then!" It was then that my narrator got to the moral of his tale. The Kallars cannot choose their own punishment. They cannot say, as he mimicked with a disparaging and exaggerated tone of supplication, "No sir, you can't penalize me; I did it myself!" "No sir, don't take my son's life, take mine instead!" Only the victims' families can decree the sentence and exact revenge however they want, as evidenced by the fact that in the story the villagers hackle the killer with the sharp, sweeping strokes of their sickles right on the main square (mantai) where the cows graze.

The men took delight in my horrified reaction, which I cultivated because I knew that was what they wanted. And because I was such an appreciative audience, they called up more examples of their society's passion for revenge. "What about the police and the state?" I finally asked, "Don't they deter you from exercising violence?" The men answered in unison, "No one can control us; we're masters of our lives." A skinny fellow with missing teeth added, "No one can change us. We the Kallars are brutal. If someone attacks us, we retaliate, and we never forget a slight; we are great keepers of grudge. Whether we are rich or poor, revenge is our trademark."

On the ride back to my home on the outskirts of Madurai that late afternoon I kept thinking about Louis Dumont, who resided among the Pramalai Kallars for eight months during the two years he spent in Tamil Nadu in 1949 and 1950 (1986: 4). The question in my mind was not so much, How did the French anthropologist manage to live with these tough people (although that too)? It was, How could Dumont have failed to incorporate the Kallar agonistic and aggressive worldview into his theory of alliance? This omission is all the more conspicuous in that Dumont was well aware of "the importance of rivalries among these people" (1986: 159) and "the frequency of conflict in Kallar life" (1986:...