Crooked Stalks : Cultivating Virtue in South India

"The Government of British India, in exercising its imperial obsession to count and classify, created a census category called 'Criminal Tribes Castes' under which it (in)famously included the "Kallar "of South India, a caste, since made famous by two monographs, written by Louis Dumont and Nicholas Dirks, respectively. "Crooked Stalks" is also a book about the "Kallar." Its distinction, however, lies in its sparkling difference from its predecessors. Its concerns are contemporary and of a wider import. It is a study of the self-making of a community, historically located at the meeting of four vectorial complexes: civic governmentality, missionary religiosity, progressivism of modernity and Tamil (traditional) 'virtuosity'--the latter encompassing the word's medieval meanings. This is a meticulously documented, convincingly argued, lucidly written work. It is an original."--E. Valentine Daniel, author of "Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way "