Village Life in South India

Cultural Design and Environmental Variation

Alan R. Beals

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351299909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The traditional South Indian village pictures the entire universe as an entity in which all living things and human beings play a necessary and effective role. The stability of this worldview is based on a close relationship among human beings, grain crops, and cattle, which has permitted the continuous exploitation of agricultural lands over several centuries. Taken as a whole, the life of South Indian villagers represents a subtle and complicated adaptation to complex and variable environmental circumstances. It now faces the challenge of adjusting to modernization.After a fascinating description of the traditional South Indian worldview, Alan R. Beals describes the settlement patterns and social structures that characterize village life, the agricultural technology and ecology, and the techniques of population regulation that have traditionally operated to maintain appropriate man-to-land ratios. He then explains the relationships among villages, including marriage and economic exchanges, and the omnipresent influence of hierarchies of caste and social ranking.Over the past 2, 000 years, South Indian civilization has undergone constant change and modification. Empires have risen and fallen, famine and plague have swept the land, and cities have been built and forgotten. But through all these years of change, the traditional South Indian village has maintained its basic character, adjusting to a variety of environments and countless conquests, yet always adhering to a single basic pattern of life. Village Life in South India, originally published in 1974, provides the reader not only with a still-valid description of a particular and distinctive way of life, but also with an explanation of how life is explained in ecological theory.

Chapter 1

THE SOUTH INDIAN WORLD

Human beings harbor dreams and make maps, and few doubt that the dreams and maps are more real than the confused territory they represent. Men who establish villages bring with them ideas about the world and what should be accomplished within it. From the interaction of these ideas with the cutting edge of reality, every village develops a patern of relationships with the environment and within itself that permits it to survive, to maintain what Ralph Linton called “the things that make life worth living,” and to remain representative of its civilization.

A poet living in Elephant describes his world as follows:

Above the stream bank’s joining

Is the place called Tamarind.

Sixteen shops are in its streets.

Big business is going on.

Heaped with fruits and vegetables,

Buses daily reach the town.

A coconut worth an anna

Sells for six or more.

Villagers, loud and quarrelsome,

Walking with loads on their heads,

Take leave of the town,

Come to the stream that flows like a river.

Fording the stream,

They come to Kasettypur hamlet.

On the hilltop, far above,

Elephant can be seen.

Climb and climb

The long stone stairways.

Near the top is the boundary,

Elephant just beyond.

Fifty-five families in the village,

Farmers all of them.

Singing plowing songs, they grow millet.

Fearless, they live in pride.

The tall landlord, the short village messenger,

The deaf chieftain. These three

Have joined the five council members

And increased village taxes.

If the children’s happy family life is ruined,

These elders hear the cries and come running.

For a dirty sixty rupees,

They wreck the family completely.

When elephants and wild boars cause commotion,

The elders run amok protecting their fields.

Called to worship God in the temple,

They sleep by the side of their wives.

Stand in the village, look to the right.

Toward the hilltop is Attinatha village.

To the left

A black boulder stands.

Beyond the black boulder

Is a waterhole near the path.

Beyond the watering places

Are boundary lines to the left and right.

Beyond the boundary lines,

Climb to “Flat Place.”

After that, go forward.

A place called Jodugeri is beautiful.

Beyond Jodugeri lies the glittering tank.

Beside the tank lies the village Podur.

The people here live and act

As if they were very good people.

Leaving the tank,

Go forward to Attinatha village.

Here good people of peaceful nature

Are serving in the temple.

After Attinatha, climb higher.

Come to Sivapur, truth’s home.

Beyond Sivapur lies

The Shining Throne of truth.

After writing this poem and several others, Elephant’s unofficial poet laureate had to purchase a gun to defend himself from his victims, for one part of the poem is an attack upon the poet’s enemies. This tangled epic is also a description of the things in Elephant’s environment. Fields and forests, irrigation tanks and watering places, villages and towns, landlords and chieftains, and, above corrupt town and gritty village, the Shining Throne.

Through the poet’s eye we see the environment and the region not as a defined area with the village in the center but as a trail leading upward from dishonest townsmen to fearless but victimized villagers to good-seeming people to actually good people, and finally to the Shining Throne. In its innermost meaning the poem is about the body of God and the movement of the individual upward through many rebirths until he reaches the Shining Throne.

The central structural perception of the South Indian world is just this, a massive unity of unlike parts working together in harmony. Although the parts that make up this great unity may be quite different, they also replicate each other in some ways. There are many kinds of people, but each person’s body resembles the bodies of all other persons. Families, houses, villages—every kind of place or social unit—can be interpreted as analogous to the human body and to the body of God. However different or unrelated or even opposed things may seem to be, they are all essentially the same, and all contribute importantly to the harmonious functioning of the inclusive unity known as God, Paramahatma, Krishna, Shiva, and Brahm.

In answering questions about the kinds of things that exist, people in Namhalli make a sharp distinction between the natural and supernatural worlds. The natural world is divided into ground, mountains, forests, hills, oceans, and villages, whereas the super-natual world is divided into separate religious places, such as the loci of Brahm, Shiva, Krishna, and the Earth. Earth as a super-natural place is distinguished from earth as a natural place. Each of the natural and supernatural places, particularly those regarded as on the earth, contains beings, plants, and objects. Things in the sky, such as the sun, the moon, and the planets, are described as lifeless.

Forests and wildernesses contain wild plants, wild people, and wild animals—tigers, lions, foxes, boars, and monkeys. Mountains are the same as forests, except that they also contain stones. Bodies of water contain fish, snakes, and other aquatic creatures. A village consists of houses, men, cattle, and plants. When asked to classify kinds of men, most people throw up their hands in disgust. More specific questions elicit lists of kinds of jatis, kinds of workers, and kinds of relatives. Animals are listed in hierarchical order: first cattle, then lions and tigers, and finally dogs, goats, and sheep.

In sum, the universe consists of places, and each of these places may contain gods, men, animals, plants, and things in varying mixtures and proportions. All of the inhabitants and things in each location are arranged in hierarchical order. Each of the different items and locations in the universe contributes to its perfect functioning. All are tied together and interrelated by the pathways leading to the Shining Throne. The totality is beyond description or perfect understanding. Only a few may follow the way long enough and far enough to grasp the larger picture. Men live surrounded by beauty and divine perfection, but they see it not.

The people are wicked. The lotus will grow beautifully in muddy water. Its fragrance is known only to the bee. It will come and take honey from the flower. Just underneath the flower, there is the crocodile. It cannot understand the smell of the flower or its uses. Like that, the crooked people of this place cannot understand the value of wisdom even though they see every day such wise people as you. [From an old man in Elephant]

Where the European deity exists outside the Universe, playing with it like a toy, the South Indian deity is the Universe and more. The deity and all other things in the Heavens and on the Earth are subject to the Law. The Law, underlying the perfect and orderly functioning of all things, is dharma. Because dharma is the fundamental concept underlying both Hinduism and Buddhism, it is subject to many interpretations and has been given many meanings in English. Much that we might mean by law, right action, harmony, charity, truth, goodness, and virtue is included within the concept.

The notion of the perfect ordering of all things leads naturally to the question, “Why are things in such a mess?” The answer generally given begins with an analogy between the Universe and the human body: a healthy human body is fatigued at times and contains unclean substances; health is maintained by decay; perfection arises from disorder. In the same way, adharma, or negative dharma, is necessary to perfection. What is not-dharma is in some larger sense an aspect of dharma. Evil in the streets of Tamarind or among the corrupt officials of Elephant appears to be adharma. But because it is part of some larger and perhaps poorly understood aspect of universal perfect function, it might well be, had we but the wit to perceive it thus, dharma.

Following the same kind of argument, it can be seen that all of the creatures and things in the Universe possess a rough equality. All human beings may reach the Shining Throne. All things contribute to the functioning of the Universe. As with human beings, so with all other things: some are closer to the Shining Throne than others. Thus, ranks of jatis reflect spiritual progress in former lifetimes. Priestly Brahmans and Jangamas (Lingayat priests) are to be respected and obeyed because of their accomplishments in previous incarnations. Birth into a particular jati reflects reward or punishment for conduct in previous lives. A sinful Brahman is likely to be reborn as a particularly low form of life, but for as long as he is a Brahman, he is entitled to function as a Brahman and to be obeyed, particularly in religious matters, by those below him.

After many false starts, the individual works close to the Shining Throne. To reach the Shining Throne is to achieve a state called moksha, or nirvana. Moksha is not a state of union with God because the individual is already a part of God. It is a state of understanding that permits the individual to transcend the cares of everyday life, a state of release or separation. It is enlightenment. Because the achievement of moksha is an effort extending over many cycles of birth and rebirth, few persons, perhaps only Gandhiji (Mahatma Gandhi) in this century, reach a state approaching moksha. Those who seek moksha or who are on the verge of achieving it may come from any jati and either sex. For the most part, such persons live on fruits and nuts, wandering from place to place or establishing themselves in isolated parts of the forest.

Because far more persons claim to be saints than can be saints, rural people are skeptical about such claims. Saints (sannyasis) attempt to demonstrate their ability to rise above earthly things by abstaining from sex, deserting their families, and sometimes performing self-mutilation. A hermit living at an isolated shrine near Gopalpur was pooh-poohed as “unable to get along with his wife.” When an internationally famous saint from Bombay was arrested as a charlatan by the Mysore police, the people of Namhalli were delighted; even so, they left his picture hanging on their walls. However, a woman near Gopalpur who lived on air and water, a feat mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit scriptures, was regarded as a genuine saint.

The difficulty that most people encounter in approaching moksha, or for that matter any very sophisticated spiritual understanding, results from a failure to see beyond the appearances of things and from the excessive adharma in the present-day world. Failure to perceive truth is caused by maya (illusion). Maya, sometimes personalized as a kind of malign force, refers to distortions of sense impressions stemming from involvement in the material world. As water glittering on the beach resembles silver, so sense impressions present falsehood as truth. A persop who seees through the illusions caused by sense impressions may become a guru, or religious teacher.

Oh, son, hear the great qualities of a Guru:

He is free of the Desires.

He can control sexual and other impulses.

He can control his mind and make decisions.

He can cut off the Desires when they secretly creep into him.

Such a soul is a Guru.

[From Namhalli, attributed to a Jain guru]

In the present epoch, Kali Yuga, the naturally deceptive qualities of sense impressions are augmented because the Universe itself is in one of its periodic states of disorder. During Kali Yuga, the son disobeys the father, the student disobeys the teacher, the servants disobey the master, the wife disobeys the husband. The people are wicked; disease and famine stalk the land. Taken together, the concepts of maya and Kali Yuga account for the presence of imperfection in a perfect universe. They serve to explain why so few individuals achieve the Shining Throne. What is needed now is a means—like Hope in Pandora’s box—by which men committed to the sinful world of maya may yet perceive dharma and achieve moksha.

There was severe drought in Elephant in 1953, and water sources became polluted. Many people were too sick and feeble to plant their crops. The explanation:

It is due to our karma. In our previous life, when someone asked us for a drink of water, we must have told him that we had no water or food to give. Now, in this life, we are suffering without water or food.

The man deceived by maya commits sins—papagalu or karma. When his lifetime has been completed, Yama (Death) sends his messengers. If the dying man is spiritually strong, he may wrestle with them until Yama himself comes riding on a water buffalo and drags him to Yamaloka (Yama’s place). There, Dharmarayya (oldest of the five Pandava brothers and god of justice, or dharma) weighs the man’s good and bad deeds on a scale:

After death, a man or woman is born again. The man who commits karma [sins] is reborn in his next generation as a pig. The man who commits many sins will be reborn as a donkey. He who kicks others will be reborn as an ant and kicked.

The man who does dharma will be reborn as the son of a king. If the king’s son does dharma, he will be reborn as an educated man. A woman who does dharma is reborn as a virtuous woman and in her next rebirth becomes an angel in Heaven. [From an informant in Elephant]

There is a sense in which dharma and karma may be treated as opposed concepts: right action versus wrong action. But karma is also fate, written on the forehead when good and bad deeds are weighed in the balance. A person’s karma determines the jati to which he will belong and the kinds of misfortunes (or rather, punishments) to which he will be subjected. In the sense that karma determines an individual’s social role, it also determines his social duties. When people follow their social duties (obey their karma), when the son obeys the father, when the student obeys the teacher, the result is dharma. Far from being the opposite of dharma, karma provides the dynamic means of resolving discrepancies between the world of illusion and the perfect universe of dharma.

Despite the karma, or sin, which causes a man to be born again and again into the world of maya, there are a variety of ways of avoiding sin and securing progressively more favorable rebirths. Although the pathways to the Shining Throne are diverse, and many may be followed at one time, the four major roads to Heaven are saintliness; bhakti, or unswerving faith; dharma, or right action; and karma, in the sense of dutiful performance. The Namhalli schoolmaster explains saintliness with the following poem:

When my husband went to war,

He sealed the doors with wax.

But I became the mother of six children

After removing the seal and the wax.

I have my house full of children,

Yet I had no union with my husband,

Nor did I sow any grain, nor any paddy,

Nor did I eat cooked rice

Made from the paddy grown in the field.

Oh, fathers and brothers who are going to war,

When you see my husband there,

Tell him I have gone with my lover. [1952]

The wife, enslaved and then deserted by her militarist husband, gains control of her six senses (taste, touch, hearing, sight, smell, and pain), turns away from the material world, and departs with her lover, God.

To control the six senses is to cease to feel pain or joy or other false illusions stemming from maya. In the rural community, those who have ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The South Indian World
• 2. Village Plans and Structures
• 3. Agricultural Technology
• 4. Agricultural Ecology
• 5. Population Regulation
• 6. Intervillage Relationships: Jati and Marriage
• 7. Intervillage Relationships: Economic Exchange
• 8. The Government and the Village
• 9. Religious Rituals and Institutions
• 10. Modernization: The New Ecology
• 11. The Seamless Web
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index
• Photographs—following page 91