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Book Review: Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste, by C. J.

Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan: Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press,
2014, x + 278 pp., US$30.00 (pa...

Article  in  South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies · January 2017

DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1279710

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 South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class

Caste, by C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan

Mona G. Mehta

To cite this article: Mona G. Mehta (2017) Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste,
by C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40:1,
198-200, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2017.1279710

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198 BOOK REVIEWS

selfishness and mutual suspicion underlay struggles for survival and well-being in the Mumbai
slum of Annawadi.
No One Will Let Her Live provides an insightful and compelling analysis of the individual
and social underpinnings of health and well-being in Delhi’s slum settlements. Yet its impact
would have been even stronger if Snell-Rood had asserted her claims more boldly or situated
them more firmly in a theoretical body of scholarship. And while the women’s lives are set
amid the structural transformations associated with economic liberalisation, the growing
political demands of an anti-poor urban middle class, and the fracturing of Delhi’s public
health infrastructure, the book would have benefitted from a deeper structural analysis to bet-
ter link the micro and macro levels. Regardless, No One Will Let Her Live is a powerful eth-
nography that makes important contributions to the fields of public health, urban
ethnography, and the anthropology of South Asia. It should be read widely and taught in a
range of classes.

Liza Weinstein
Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
L.Weinstein@northeastern.edu
© 2017 Liza Weinstein
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1279709

Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste, by C. J. Fuller and Haripriya

Narasimhan, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2014, x C 278 pp., US$30.00
(paperback), ISBN 9780226152745

Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste examines the large-scale transformation
of the numerically marginal, yet most highly-placed, caste in Tamil Nadu’s caste hierarchy, the
Tamil Brahmans, from a predominantly rural to an urban middle-class caste. The puzzle at
the heart of the study is how Tamil Brahmans have come to occupy dominant positions within
the Indian economy and Tamil society despite a powerful anti-Brahman movement that
actively removed Brahman presence from the government and the public sector in the 1930s.
This study is significant for its explicit focus on the dynamics of an elite group’s dominance in
the face of strong societal transformations, even as much social scientific inquiry focuses on
‘the subaltern’. Moreover, it fleshes out at least one historically significant instance by which
caste and class privileges relate to each other, undergo transformations and persist in new
ways in contemporary Indian society.
The book’s anthropologist authors, C.J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan, recognise
upfront the scant statistical data on the numerical strength of Tamil Brahmans, and convinc-
ingly use mostly anecdotal and ethnographic evidence to illustrate their disproportionately
large representation in the lucrative information technology (IT) and corporate sectors of
India’s post-liberalisation economy. They argue that Brahman migration to urban centres cou-
pled with access to modern education and astute ability to adapt to economic and political
change have helped to both reconfigure and perpetuate Tamil Brahman dominance. Their
new dominance presents itself in the form of a largely secularised urban middle-class (particu-
larly upper-middle-class) identity, rather than traditional caste identity. This, they note, has
resulted in an isomorphism between ‘Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness’, and that the
two ‘have become mutually constitutive of each other’ (p. 27).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 199

In chapters about urban ways of life, education and employment in colonial and post-Inde-
pendence India, Fuller and Narasimhan explain how Tamil Brahmans have become a ‘class-
cum-caste’ group (p. 21). They use Anthony Gidden’s neo-Weberian framework to show that
Tamil Brahmans have become both a ‘social class’ and a ‘status group’, but they do not ade-
quately develop this framework. They rightly recognise the role ‘cultural capital’ plays in estab-
lishing a strong equivalence between ‘high-caste’ and ‘high-class’ statuses among Tamil
Brahmans; however their claim that the overrepresentation of Tamil Brahmans among the
upper-middle classes ‘is not primarily caused by persisting caste privilege, but by class repro-
duction operating within a modern society and economy’ (p.26), creates an impression that it
is ultimately class that matters over caste. This undermines their discussion about the complex
processes involved in the making of a ‘class-cum-caste’ group.
Economic liberalisation of the Indian economy has accelerated the transition of Tamil
Brahmans into the upper-middle class, but what is more significant is how they have achieved
this economic success without access to political power. To a great extent, maintaining domi-
nance despite bypassing electoral politics has been the trajectory of other sections of the
upper-caste Indian middle class as well. This has been partly enabled by their ability to set the
cultural and political agenda through extra-electoral means. Fuller and Narasimhan hint at
this process in the chapter on religion, music and dance in which they discuss how certain
non-Brahman art forms such as Bharatnatyam dance were reconfigured in line with Sanskrit
Brahmanical culture through Brahman-dominated cultural academies and institutions. More-
over, they were simultaneously secularised as middle-class activities such that their growing
popularity allowed non-Brahmans to claim upper-class rather than high-caste status and
Brahmans to reaffirm their supposed superiority.
There is a tinge of admiration in the discussion of Tamil Brahman passage into modernity
without a sense of ‘dislocation and disorientation’ (p. 221), but there is a lack of critical
engagement with the entanglements of modernity with caste privilege. The comparison with
Brahman groups across other parts of colonial India in order to illustrate the scale and speed
of Tamil Brahman modernity, while interesting, does little to sharpen the book’s argument or
reveal new insights. Instead, it might have been more fruitful to reflect on how modernity was
signified in distinctly different ways by Brahmans compared to those at the bottom of the caste
hierarchy. In this regard, it is helpful to recall M.S.S. Pandian’s astute observation that Tamil
Brahman modernity entailed a ‘subtle act of transcoding caste and caste relations into some-
thing else…because to talk about caste as caste would incarcerate one into a pre-modern
realm’.1 In contrast, it was only by critiquing the civilisational claims of modernity and talking
of caste on its own terms that Dalits could engage with modernity. A far more interesting
enquiry of Tamil Brahman modernity would have been how this group found ways to ‘talk of
caste by other means’ and retain upper-caste preferences and practices.2
To what extent should we see Tamil Brahman ‘middle-classness’ as a foil for caste privilege
rather than a story merely of astounding sociological transformation involving urbanisation,
modern education and upper-class reproduction? The ‘middle class’ has emerged as a signifi-
cant and fascinating phenomenon in post-liberalisation India, not least because of its hetero-
geneous and contradictory nature. The fact that the growing segment of the urbanised Dalit
middle class has not become a ‘class-cum-caste’ status group in the way that the Tamil Brah-
mans have, attests to the great value of studies such as this in contributing an important

1. M.S.S. Pandian, ‘One Step outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere’, in Economic & Political Weekly,
Vol. 37, no. 18 (4 May–10 May 2002), p. 1735.
2. Ibid.
 200 BOOK REVIEWS

perspective on the varied dimensions of how middle-class and caste identities relate to one
another in India today.

Mona G. Mehta
Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
monamehta@iitgn.ac.in
© 2017 Mona G. Mehta
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2017.1279710

Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India, by Constantine V. Nakassis,
Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2016, 317 pp., US$30.00 (paperback), ISBN
9780226327853

In this immensely engaging ethnographic study of youth practices in Tamil Nadu, India,
Constantine Nakassis explores the meaning of the catchword ‘style’ in everyday discourse, its
relationship to mass media, and the role of linguistic anthropology in illuminating how phe-
nomena and processes emerge out of a dialectical entanglement between social actors and
the projects they enable. Packed with historical, theoretical, and empirical insight, this book
points to how the performative work of citation is deeply tied to the way college-going youth
in Madurai and Chennai make sense of their aspirations and desires in globalising India, and
how they think about the liminality of college life. Nakassis treats the use of the word ‘style’
as ethnographic datum—a term that is used by his respondents to refer to an array of aspira-
tional objects and activities—and as an analytical entry point into the lifeworlds of college-
going youth. In this book, he explores three sites of mediality where the experience of liminal-
ity inheres in semiotic forms and practices that are constructed, negotiated and experienced
as the very linguistic category of ‘youth’: brand fashion; spoken English; and mass film ‘hero-
ism’. The book is divided into three parts—Brand, Language, and Film—and each part is
divided into two chapters. While one chapter in each part provides a deeply rich portrait of
the ways in which college youth ‘do style’ in everyday life, the following chapter traces the
corollary path of circulation in which media are ‘produced’. Why this matters is that Nakassis
offers a useful way of seeing the emergence of media as a product of citational entanglements
across these three medial sites which begins to account for pressing questions such as: why
do some things count as ‘style’ while others do not? How does one know when one is doing
style as opposed to overdoing it? How does one judge the appropriateness of the ‘style’ being
done?
In Part I of the book, for instance, we see how ‘fake’ brands are implicated in the quest for
stylish self-presentation. While it is important to note that perhaps few students can indeed
afford the ‘real’ brands, it is the callous indifference to authenticity that is striking (p. 41).
While the ethnographic vignettes reveal a deep sense of attachment to brandedness, there
seems to be an indifference towards authentic brands; the youth are citing brandedness, but
not specific brands. In some cases, the author notes how wearing an authentic brand could
actually jeopardise one’s status amongst one’s peers. Instead of the general presumption of
cultural models of consumerist aspiration that assume a proclivity to marking difference and
distinction, Nakassis shows how, while there is a tangible effort to present oneself as being ‘dif-
ferent from the others’, there is also countervailing peer-group pressure to not show difference
in a manner that reinscribes traditional modes of hierarchy. ‘Style’, not ‘overstyle’, is what
matters. The very abundance of a ‘surfeit’ of brand goods in street markets is a crucial part of

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