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Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars. By David West Rudner. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. 341. $50 and $18. ISBN 0520 07236 7 and 08350 4
This book will speak to two different audiences. David Rudner is a social anthropologist. He is overtly addressing academic members of his profession. The volume, and the field research that underlies it, conform broadly to our expectations of Indianist anthropologists. The central issue is the interpretation of caste. The data derive from a detailed ethnographic study of one relatively small community, the Nattukottai Chettiars--or 'Nakatattars', as they call themselves--now numbering about 100,000 people, located in the Chettinand area of Tamil Nadu. There is a wealth of detail on social organisation, kinship, marriage, ritual and the role and control of temples. Rudner's case to his fellow anthropologists is however easily accessible to the non-specialist. It is that they have misconceived the nature of caste in modern India because they have focused largely on populous, agrarian castes. Among such groups, caste has become 'ethnicised': it has become the identity upon which extensive political networks have been built; Indians have begun to understand the concept of caste in much the same way that members of ethnically-divided societies conceive ethnicity. Anthropologists, Rudner argues, should pay more attention to commercial castes like the Nakatattars that are fundamentally organised along economic lines:
For individual Nakatattars, for their families, and for the caste group as a whole, it was...