S.Ratnajeevan H. Hoole and Mariyahl Mahilmany Hoole, “The

S.Ratnajeevan H. Hoole and Mariyahl Mahilmany Hoole, “The Internet and Mobility in the Reconstruction of the Past: A Study through a Reassessment of Navalar and Caste Claims,” Fifth Annual Tamil Studies Conference, University of Toronto, May 13‐15, 2010. – Text with slides. Presented by S.R.H. Hoole on May 14, 3:30 to 5:30 PM. The theme of the conference is how the movement of people across time and space has established and destabilized notions of culture and identity. We wish to address here today how the Internet and information technology have radically altered social science 1 research. Our society creates defining myths, myths that define who we are, using the progress of space and time which prevents exposure of the subterfuge through a dissection of the past. But IT now exposes how our histories have been renarrated; recreated; rewritten. We will show using as examples myths about Navalar, Caste, Ramanathan and, indeed, our Tamil society, that such myths can no longer be sustained under the glare of the new technologies. You will see that little of our histories is credible. IT has given us ready access to information – through the Internet, scanned documents and old photographs that were not available before. Interlibrary loans make books readily available to us. For this presentation, whole teams of librarians across continents went to work as we worked from our offices. Google books made several ancient books available to us. Keep in mind how this talk would have been impossible just 10 years ago, without this access. We begin with Navalar. His false histories are floated by nationalist websites like TamilNet, Sangam.org and Tamil Nation as well as by respectable school texts, the Hindu newspaper and biographies. These hold that Navalar translated the Tamil Bible at the request of his friend Percival. The biographer Suddhanatha Bharati gives a comical 2 account of Percival accompanying Navalar – not Navalar accompanying Percival, if at all it happened – to Madras to defend the translation before the Bible society. Percival is nervous. But Navalar assures Percival and tells him not to worry; he would take care of all objections. And Percival is relieved. How can Tamils believe this nonsense? It is also claimed that Navalar is the father of Tamil prose. As we will soon see, modern prose was available in several forms well before Navalar was born. The Bible, prayer books, missionary translations, are all examples. Indeed, Nalavar was trained under Percival at the Wesleyan Mission school in prose writing using the text by Beschi which Percival considered one of the best examples of prose. Here you see an example of prose in the Tamil Bible of 1723 translated by Ziegebalg. Note the character reform introduced by the missions as given by the Tamil Virtual University in Madras. Observe that there are no spaces between words, or dots over letters; v and x are both there 3 (but I and x<; are both I but without a foot‐tail; similarly o and O are both o). Clearly there was no Navalar in 1723 but prose and the Bible were both there. Here we see the Rhenius translation of the Bible, as revised by the Madras Auxiliary of the Bible Society in 1840. You see prose in active develop‐
ment. The Madras Auxiliary resolved to print words, for the first time, with a space in between Note that the dots over letters have now been introduced by the missions. According to U.V. Swaminatha Aiyar– can you believe it? – Navalar wrote the Bible. And this superhuman feat must have been in the brief 2 years from the end of 1845 when the translation began full‐time and 1847 when he quit Central College! It has been pointed out that Navalar knew no Hebrew or Greek to translate the Bible. Navalar was incapable of this translation. C. Rudra and TamilNet have maintained that he translated from English. 4 But here we have the frontispiece of the Jaffna Bible dated 1850 from our family copy. It states in Tamil that it was, one, translated from the original tongues and, two, done so comparing with previous translations. This was because the mandate from the Bible society was to translate from the original tongues while being faithful to the Rhenius version in use in churches then. That is why you see the same titles and wordings from the 2 versions of the Bible at the beginning of the Old Testament. We may note the Tamilization of the partly 5 Tamilised Sanskrit word sish‐tith‐aar in the Rhenius version to si‐rish‐tith‐aar and, going the other way, the Sankrit word sa‐lam – water – being substituted for the Tamil word than‐neer. This may explain why we no longer use this Jaffna translation of the Bible and instead use Bower’s 1872 version from India. That rejection of the Jaffna revision in Jaffna itself again is something unknown to a people who believe that the Tamil Christian Church exists because of Navalar writing the Bible. Just think for a minute – What is the Bible? It defines Christian faith. There were at the time in Jaffna several Tamil Christians trained following school for over 8 years to degree level at Batticotta Seminary. Ask yourselves: Would the Church have entrusted Navalar, a relatively uneducated Hindu hostile to the missions, with such an important task? Remember, Navalar was just a chattambiyaar, albeit driven, teaching Tamil at the Central Wesleyan School. What an ego if we thought even for a moment that the Church would entrust such a monumental task to him. Who then translated? As a whole cupboard of documents at Jaffna College show, it was by a committee of six learned missionaries with knowledge of Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Tamil. Myron Winslow of Dictionary fame joined at the end when Percival and Hoole moved to Madras for the last 2 years, 1849 to 50. The Tamil pandits simply refined the Tamil to a mellifluous form. Navalar was incapable of anything more than that. His 6 duties were as Tamil teacher in the upper forms and English monitor (not English teacher as claimed) in the lower school. And were Navalar and Percival truly friends? Would a native employee have been so close to a European missionary boss? The only reference to Navalar by Percival in the Methodist archives is to “that native pundit who used to help me.” Indeed Navalar got so angry with Percival that he quit when Percival admitted a lower caste boy – we say lower caste rather than low caste because as Sudras all of us in Jaffna are low‐
caste. It seems clear that Percival and Navalar stopped any work together from that point onwards. This is from the CMS archives in the UK about our ancestor Elijah Hoole, showing the timeline of the project. It was part of his ordination process when the CMS made a file with questionnaires and references from St. John’s principal Robert Pargiter and others. It reads “In 1847 Mr. Percival removed me to Jaffna, where he expected to make me useful in several 7 ways. In 1849 I accompanied him to Madras, where I assisted him in the Revision [note the word revision] of the Tamil Version of the Holy Scriptures and returned back to Jaffna in 1850.” We want you to note the grammatical lapse in the phrase “returned back” by a man who had received an English education and published a bilingual book in London by Longman’s. We all know how good or bad our own English is after working in English for many years, even after writing a doctoral dissertation in it. And yet we have praises of Navalar’s command of English after a few years at the Wesleyan school and his broad thinking and tolerance. Anonymous well‐written letters in the Morning Star, are attributed to him by his biographers. But we have seen no provable sample of his English writing. It is even claimed that books by Thamotharam‐
pillai were written by Navalar and given to Thamotharampillai to publish as his own to help Thamotharampillai. The Madras Hindu claims that Navalar worked with Winslow on the latter’s dictionary – but when Winslow left Jaffna in 1833, Navalar was a mere 11 years old. If Navalar was so broad‐minded why did he teach in his Paalar Paadam during the famine caused by floods that charity should be only for the Vellalas and above? Why did he beat up Vaishnavites who argued with him as Dagmar Hellman Rajanayagam points out? 8 A very anti‐intellectual climate pervades us. Anyone who challenges these myths is labeled a communalist and a pack of wolves and monsters are let lose. Mr. Eelaventhan calls us sell‐outs and collaborators. Sachi Sri Kantha wants free licence for this propaganda and labels our protests as “anti‐
Hindu religious zealotry.” As Tamils, our commitment is to the truth; our obligation is to set our histories right and not to back up their ego edifying histories. Tell us: what is the difference between these people and Sinhalese communalists trading in Mahavamsa myths – who label as traitors those Tamils protesting their histories? Enough on Navalar. Now to caste and labels and how we use them. Are caste, religious and race labels real? Well… here is some statistics on how we have changed labels. When the Dutch were with us, Vellalas were a mere 30% in Jaffna and in the 1970s 50% and today, if we were all Vellala 9 that would be good news for a casteless society. When the British came nearly all of us in Jaffna claimed to be Christian. How about race? In Jaffna we have pink Tamils and Black Tamils marrying and mixing races. When the Portuguese had only 64 men to rule the Jaffna Kingdom and Lisbon ordered them to marry th daughters of the Modliars, we rushed to give them our daughters. Being pink was stylish. We deny any Portuguese blood because what was status conferring in yesteryear’s order is embarrassing today. These labels were fluid till recently. Some say rubbish, there is no caste amongst us. We are one people, they insist. Navalar happily worked for an evangelical enterprise. He split only when a low caste boy was admitted. Why? Jesus Christ can be part of Hinduism as one more god in the pantheon, but not caste‐rejection. Caste was society’s foundation. Caste was most important to Navalar. Vellalas without saying they are an elite caste, instead say that Navalar belonged to the elite caste of Vellalas. However, there is nothing elite about Vellalas except in Jaffna. Most scholars say that Vellalas are all Sudra based on the Purusa story where anyone who works with his muscles – that includes farmers – is a Sudra. Indeed, ancient Hindu scriptures prohibit anyone twice born from crossing the oceans and only we Sudras ended up in Sri Lanka. What was Navalar’s real caste according to the Hindu Dharma he advocated so fervently? His father, Aradchy Kanthar, was a Pariyaari according to Martyn’s Notes from Jaffna. And because physicians deal with wounds and bodily excretions, Lord Manu says in his Dharma Sashtra that “The food of a physician is as vile as pus.” They say that recent Sinhalese need to prove their Sinhaleseness. Is that why Navalar was so fastidious about caste? 10 Who really are the Vellalas? Fernao de Queyroz, described the Vellalas as poor, weak and never bearing arms. It would seem they were not the kings. Who then were the kings? The Rajavali refers to Jaffna Kings in 1521 as Karayaar. Were the Vellalas promoted during the colonial era while the defeated Karayaar were marginalised? The Karawas of Moratuwa and Taraki, a.k.a. Sivaram, who sought to promote the late LTTE leader’s caste, seem to take this line. Caste certainly seems important to them. Still insisting there is no caste amongst us? When I was appointed VC, a strange nexus of Tiger supporting Tamils classified as terrorist suspects by the US government, and their organizations like the Ilankai Tamil Sangam purportedly standing for a pan Tamil culture, cheered the death threats, using caste aspersions 11 about Christians. They editorialized “… Christians …had deserted the religion of their forefathers. …Ratnajeevan Hoole as Vice‐Chancellor of Jaffna University, … should not be allowed to roam free in Jaffna’s Tamil Hindu society, particularly in the university campus where there is even a Saiva temple.” The implication is that if I walked around Jaffna campus, the Hindu temple would get polluted. As Swamy Dayanand said, our Christian and Mohammedan bodies let off bad‐smelling, polluting particles. I bathed today but my apologies if my natural stink is floating about here polluting you. Caste is a game of looking down on others and it will be with us so long as people with no accomplishments have only caste to claim superiority over others. This one‐
upmanship game is simple. Go back say 4 generations. You will have 8 great grand parents. Pick the most accomplished of these and keep saying you are descended from him. Simply ignore the ordinary others. Your caste status will grow. Let us give a simple example. A family from Nallur claims to be descended from King Changili, but an honest member of that family admits that they are descended through one of Changili’s concubines. In my own family we speak of Elijah Hoole who was a Maaniakaaran in Point Perdro as a CMS book boasts. But we speak little of his wife “from the Nellore Female Boarding School.” Another example now, though a rare one, to show how this game can take us into uncharted waters. A sixteenth century immigrant from India married a Roman Catholic descendant of the King of Jaffna and settled in Analaitivu. Under Portugal, Roman Catholicism had a high status after king Changili and his descendants converted. In time however, the Catholic‐Theevaan label became uncomplimentary. The family moved to Pandateruppu‐Maathagal and added 12 Pillai to their name, like Navalar, to assert a Vellala identity. His descendants, the brothers Josephpillai, Louispillai and Thomaspillai, went to Malaya for work. Joseph, a tall light‐skinned man (I think, because of Portuguese admixture) fell in love with a Malay girl of royal blood whom he tutored. Josephpillai was sent to Saudi Arabia where he learnt Arabic and Islam and returned, some 4 years later, to Malaya. He was now Thunga Abdullah. When his brother approached him, Joseph signalled to him to go away. He cut off all links to his family. In the early 1960s, Louispillai, now back in Ceylon, received a letter on royal letterhead that his brother is dead – the first and last communication after his marriage. And his grandson? When other descendants made enquiry as he rose in Malaysia, they were sternly told not to speak of it again. Who is he? He is said to be former Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, by some sources. . Kumari Jayawardena says of the Sinhalese that the men advance in the modern world while the women keep up caste and other feudal practices at home. Is the Tamil world any different? We think not. Consider a common Tamil marriage. Here we see a symbolic obeisance to tradition with the couple dressed in Indian if not Tamil costume. 13 Thereafter, even though the wedding meal is vegetarian, obeisance to the new order is seen in the nonvegetarian wedding cake. The groom quickly switches to a western suit to distance himself from the old order while the woman wears the coorai as the guardian of culture. She will now look into caste and all that while he will pretend to be lovingly tolerant of his wife’s eccentric feudal wishes. But he gets what he wants through her, while claiming to have clean hands. It is a perfect partnership. Switching gears a little, Kumari Jayawardena in her book “Nobodies to Somebodies,” says that the Sinhalese nobodies advanced into somebodies through the arrack, mining and plantation trades and that Tamils advanced through English education; and that the Sinhalese were cut off from their culture through English suits and English names but not Tamils. We Tamils are usually proud to read things like that about us, aren’t we? But this is just more of the same stuff. Have we not heard of Markandu becoming Mark in North America? Janani now Jan? The Pilipuppillais and the Polelpillais becoming the Phillipses and the Pauls with time and space? Look around. Look at me. At yourselves. Have we not all adapted so as to move up in the new order? I see some kurtas and trousers, but these with Barefoot sarongs are postmodern, rejecting the East‐West dichotomy. Let us go back to old photographs and news clippings showing the real Tamil society through space and time. 14 Here is my great grandmother Theivanaipillai, the widow of Kodimara Sangarar, the chief trustee of the Maviddapuram Kandaswamy Temple and the mother of the Chief Trustee Mudalyaarpillai. She was a somebody. She was rich and sent her son to Jaffna College and Calcutta paying full fees. Yet she is a nobody in the emerging new order as her clothes show. Her son The Rev. Canon Sangarapillai Somasundaram, BA, Dean at St. John’s College, had joined the new order like us in his three‐piece suit. Here are the Hooles, the Nileses and the Champions hobnobbing with the colonial elite at St. James’ Nellore. We were no different from the Sinhalese. Elijah Hoole’s son, Modliar R.A. Hoole and family are no less westernized. You see the society columns announcing that the Governor had conferred on him the right to retain the Modeliyar title after retirement. At his 15 Silver Wedding Anniversary in 1906, the newspapers reported that dancing was into the early hours. You will readily recognize that such dancing in the Tamil homelands is now a part of our suppressed histories. My great grandmother Sophia Ondaachi (Ondaatje) was a Chetty and the only part of my ancestry that was Vaisya. Regrettably, in Hindu law, I cannot claim even to be one‐eighth Vaisya – the offspring of mixed castes is untouchable! She is part of our narrative suppressed over space and time. Indeed, the Rogers family, once in three‐piece suits and imported convertibles, is today unrecognizable in kathar and pre‐Sanskrit Tamil names. In contrast to the Silver wedding anniversary of Richard Aiyathurai Hoole in 1906, observe the 25th wedding anniversary of his grandson Richard Herbert Ratnathurai Hoole in 1972, observed with a high mass in sobre clothes, followed by breakfast for relations only. In my father’s house no liquor was served and there was no dancing. We were never told that our great grandparents danced and had grand parties announced in the newspapers. We simply put it to you that our history has been renarrated with space and time. Let us now move on to our other high caste Vellala hero, Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan who was successfully endorsed for the Legislative Council by Navalar. Ramanathan insisted that the lower castes be denied the franchise and forced to sit outside the classroom on the 16 ground, as Prof. Sivathamby informs us. Yet we are all asked to accept him as a national hero. This family’ story centers around two key figures. One is Arumugampillai whose family is believed to have come from India to Point Pedro and then moved to Colombo and lived in the Chetty part of Colombo – Chekku Street – thereby raising speculation as to whether they are Vellalas as they sometimes claimed or Chetties. The other figure is Nannythamby of Manipay who is said to have been the richest Tamil of the time through his plantations. He had wealth but lacked social status. These nobodies badly wanted to be somebodies. Arumugampillai’s second son, Modliar Coomaraswamy was the one to rise into a somebody. Educated, he had status but no money – that is, till he married Visalakshi, Nannythamby’s sister, and became rich. He did political favors to the British during King Rajasinghe’s fall. He cultivated British officials including the Governor and the Colonial Secretary by lending them money. For this lapse of compromising their positions by so borrowing money from an inferior official, the latter were sent back to England in punishment. But Modliar Coomaraswamy had already ensconced himself and his family through the influence he had bought – he himself had been appointed to the Legislative Council by the governor; then his son‐in‐law Edirmanasingham; and then his son Muttucoomaraswamy; and finally Ramanathan himself. It is noteworthy that Ramanathan was appointed and not elected (although his biographer V. Muttucumaraswamy says he “was returned” to the legislature). Indeed, Navalar conned the Jaffna public in recommending Ramanathan as “educated at Presidency College” when in fact he never ever graduated from anywhere as we will see. The Observer of May 29, 1879 reported that Navalar’s resolution passed unanimously (although one Hensman and others walked off hooting when their counter‐resolution was not taken up). There is much circumstantial evidence that Ramanathan bought his seat from the governor. Ramanthan became an advocate only when his uncle Sir Muttu used his influence upon Ramanathan’s ignominious return from Madras to have him apprenticed as a law‐student under Sir Richard Morgan, Attorney General. We wish to focus on the yellow text in the slide which raises serious questions of the Vellala pedigree claimed by this family. Modeliar Coomaraswamy studied at the Seminary under Rev. Schroter which means he could have been going as a Christian. He was appointed “Head of Heathen Chetties of Colombo” in 1830. But five years later he claimed to be a Vellala when he sought appointment to the Legislative Council and there was a formal inquiry into his caste. Again, we see that 17 Ramanathan’s wife’s sister was married to Christopher Brito (or Britopulle), a Christian Chetty. We may conclude that both caste and religion were very fluid in this so‐called Vellala family. Interestingly the biographer Vythilingam after berating Christians as those who gave up their dignity for the high offices reserved only for converts, in wanting to praise Ramanathan’s high status through his ancestors, accidentally lets on that Ramanathan’s mother’s mother’s father, Vairavanatha Mudlaiyar, was the Governor of the Vanni District under the Dutch! He surely was a Christian who, going by Vythilingam, had given up his dignity for high office. The so‐called Rice Christians, we thus see, are those who became Christians for privileges and then, naturally, switched back as state and social power shifted. We lost all respect for Vythilingam’s biography after reading in the preface that Mr. Eelaventhan was one of his sources. The influence of Eelavanthan comes through when Ramanathan is referred to as handsome, an aristocrat, “of exceptional nobility,” “pure Vellala”, “descendent of an ancient and illustrious house” and such superlatives. Worse, he is said to have “commiserated for the poor, the oppressed and the down‐trodden,” when we know how he opposed the vote for castes lower than his among us low‐caste Sudras, and seating at schools. Most importantly when Coomaraswamy’s daughter Sellachi lost her husband Arunachalam, the widow married Ariyaputhira, Nannythambi’s brother. We may simply note that in a so‐called respectable Hindu family, widows do not remarry. It is a brazen violation of Hindu law, especially as understood at that time. Given this culture of the family, Ramanathan was publicly about with his mistress, Miss. Harrison, whom he presented as his secretary. When hosting Sir Emerson 18 Tennent the Colonial Secretary or the Governor, the Ponnambalams would serve dinner but not eat because of caste pollution. And this despite his uncle Sir Muthu being married to an English woman and despite the fact that his cousin Ananda not to one but four Euro‐Caucasian women. The family really cared little for Hindu orthodoxy. Strange is it not that white people pollute when eating with them, but are fine for sex? But this Navalar‐Ramanathan set was promoting orthodoxy and were intelligent men. They would have rationalized it. You see, the Manu Dharma that they promoted, in Section III.12‐13 allows a twice born man, whom Vellalas were claiming to be, to have low caste mistresses so long as he had an equal caste wife. Further, Manu Dharma in V.130 says the mouth of a woman is always pure (Although by Manu Dharma III.19 which says that “For him who drinks the moisture of a Sudra’s lips … no expiation is prescribed,” Ramanthan and all of us Sudras with our Sudra wives are doomed with no expiation, whatever mantras we may invoke, it is interesting to ask what Navalar and Ramanathan made of it. Perhaps that is why Navalar, more knowledgeable is the sashtras, never married). So by V.130 at least they were safe in whatever they did with lower caste women. Let us end with some of our family memories about this illustrious family which we Tamils adulate. We take up a relevant family anecdote. At the time Jaffna’s leaders were a small group and knew each other and married each other. So when Coomaraswamy and Ramanathan went to Madras to study at Presidency College as boys, Thamotharampillai looked after them as their Guardian and, according to narratives within our family, was greatly embarrassed when the brothers were caught at examination offences. Like Narcissus of Greek mythology, Ramanathan was also fascinated with his physique and not studying. As his biographer Vythilingam delicately puts it, they were suddenly recalled to Colombo by their father before graduation because of removal from the rolls for “youthful excesses.” They really had no choice, but to return. 19 Later their younger brother Arunachalam would repay this obligation when Thamotharampillai’s niece, Eliza, get into a spot. She was a smart educated girl from Uduvil, married to Crown Proctor Thampoe Hemphil who got indisposed. So she went into legal practice, drawing up deeds and documents which she got Hemphil to sign although he was not aware of what is going on. Several petitions went from Jaffna to Arunachalam, the Attorney General. He suppressed the petitions but on his next trip to Jaffna went straight to Eliza and sternly told her to stop or face action. That was the end of my great grandmother Eliza Hemphil’s brief legal career. In conclusion, everything about us is bluff – our histories, and our caste claims. Every boast is really that, a boast. Our great men are Pappadap Periyaar – great men easily crumpled like Pappadam. Our real culture is in our movies and teledramas. We humbly ask, is this why we Tamils have made rather poor political choices, going by cooked up histories and poor information? Thank you. 20