How do people come to live as they ought to live? "Crooked Stalks"
seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of
"cultivation" in the moral horizons of development intervention, in
the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own
desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn
inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural
growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary
condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste--classified, condemned, and
policed for decades as a "criminal tribe"--Anand Pandian argues
that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been
essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial
engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied
heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that
echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a
morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious
tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people
of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects
today.
In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together
ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements
drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly
between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons
and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he
reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of
traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies
through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and
counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of
ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident,
chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the
moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and
delicacy.
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