The Brahmin Problem: Charity, Expenditure and the Genealogy of Sovereignty in Travancore

Envisioned as a contribution to South Asian studies in general, and the fields of historical and political anthropology in particular, this dissertation develops around a set of relationships centered on the concept of sovereignty. In addressing the question of what the expenditure on Brahmins and the colonial, missionary, and Nair critiques against it meant for the evolving notion of sovereignty for the princely state of Travancore in the nineteenth century, I argue that the colonial, missionary and Nair critiques were not just based on the economic logic of productivity and the governmental logic of welfare, but also on the recognition of the Brahmin Problem as the fundamental crisis of sovereignty. Brahmin is the name of a problem that concerns the practice of expenditure, the relationship of property, and the construction of religion in the nineteenth-century Travancore. Travancore, located in the southwest of today's South India, was a native princely state under the indirect rule of the British East India Company in the first half of the nineteenth century and under the British crown in the second half. The problem was articulated in the colonial critique of spending money on Brahmins, their ceremonies, and their feeding. In trying to construct an archive of the crisis out of this problem embedded in the colonial and later missionary and Nair critiques of the state's expenditure in the nineteenth century, I focus on three key sites of contestation. The first one is the relationship of property, the second is the practice of feeding, and the third is expenditure on ceremonials. The postulation of the problem in these three sites is marked by colonial policies such as the integration of temples, or Brahmin properties, to the state treasury in the early nineteenth century and the activation of expenditure as a category of critique owing to the colonial pressure on the native state of Travancore to ensure the surplus of two lakhs rupees per year for the tributary payment for the British and the emergence of what I call public critique in nineteenth century. In my effort to build this problem, I particularly pay attention to its relationship with the evolving notion of sovereignty in the nineteenth century. This relationship is not a stable or steady text for analysis, but rather contingent on how the state variously negotiated this problem, leading to the emergence of the concepts of charity, trust, and religion. I characterize this negotiation of the state as translation, transposition, and adaptation within the colonial grammar of power. The archive of this negotiation, characterized by translation, transposition, and adaptation, provided me with the first material to think about charity, trust, and religion and see how they were connected to the evolving sovereignty of the state. By drawing on primary sources collected from various archives in Kerala, I map how sovereignty constituted a problem space in Travancore for a genealogical rumination. Following David Scott, Quentin Skinner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Talal Asad, and Michel Foucault, I employ genealogy as a method to understand sovereignty as a relationship of power rather than an absolute type of power. This relationship of power is characterized by the crisis of the Brahmin Problem, giving rise to what I call, following Scott, the problem space of sovereignty. My primary sources consist of Travancore administrative records, temple records, written exchanges between the Dewan of Travancore and the British Resident, royal orders, colonial policy records, records of the policy discussion for temple reform, newspapers, and magazines. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on the scholarly stakes in studying sovereignty as a relationship of power in the context of caste, religion, and state in the contemporary context.