INTRODUCTION

The Tamil University of Thanjavur holds about 200 bundles of palmleaf records, which were transferred there about 40 years ago from the office of the Collector of Chengalpattu district at Kancheepuram, where they had been lying for more than two hundred years. Each of these bundles contains about 800 uncut and untreated palmleaves, about a meter long and 3-4 centimetres wide, with writing on both sides in older Tamil script. These manuscripts comprise 18th and early 19th century accounts of the localities of the Chengalpattu region that forms a part of the cultural and geographical area traditionally known as Thondaimandalam.

Of the 200 bundles of palmleaves, about 20 contain accounts collected between 1767 to 1774 at the instance of a British military engineer, Thomas Barnard, and Raja Chengalvaraya Mudaliar, a Dubash employed by the British. These accounts of about 1,500 localities are part of the original data that formed the basis for an extensive survey of more than 2,000 localities of Chengalpattu, undertaken by Barnard on instructions from his superiors in the British administration. The survey was one of the very first efforts that the British made to understand the ways of the Indian people, before devising modes of effectively subjugating and administering them.

The records of that survey present an exquisitely detailed picture of the functioning of Indian society, economy and polity at its most basic level, before it was disrupted and transformed by the alien British administrators. Early British administrators, like Lionel Place, the first British Collector of Chengalpattu, got their ideas about the functioning of Indian society from such locality-level data. From their reports, ideas about the indigenous village economy and polity got incorporated into the Fifth Report presented to the House of Commons in 1813. That Report then became the basis for the misleading and perverted images of insular village republics of India that needed to be smashed before India could join the ranks of the progressive nations of the world. Such images were evoked and perpetuated by administrators and scholars like Charles Metcalfe, Karl Marx, Henry Maine, etc., and have become the main source of our understanding of the indigenous Indian polity.

A preliminary study of these 20 bundles of Palmleaf Manuscripts, along with the summary English records of the Barnard survey that are preserved in the Tamil Nadu State Archives, has been carried out by us at the Centre for Policy Studies. The detailed features of Tamil society of the 18th century that emerge from these accounts are indeed startling.

The palmleaf manuscripts record the amount of cultivated land under different crops and the actual produce of a village for each of the five years between 1762 and 1766. The accounts show that there were localities in this region that produced above 10 tons of paddy per hectare of cultivation per year. The palmleaf manuscripts also provide a graphic picture of the layout of the localities of that time. They record the location and extent of every temple, pond, tank, well, Eri (irrigation tank), channel, garden, grove and forest in the locality. They give details of the streets, paddy-threshing grounds, cattle-grounds and burial grounds. They even give the name of every householder with the size of his house and backyard. The localities that the accounts describe were well laid-out with wide streets, large houses, and larger backyards. Often the habitation was surrounded by gardens, groves, forests, and eris. And all the houses, including those in the Harijan section of the village, were fairly big.

The information recorded in these palmleaf manuscripts is extraordinarily important. It forces us to revise all our ideas about life and society in India towards the latter half of 18th century, immediately before the establishment of the British administration. We have so far been led to believe, on the basis of rather tenuous historical evidence, that India of that time was a poor, scientifically and technological backward, and socially and politically dysfunctional nation. The accounts presented in these palmleaf manuscripts, however, present a picture of an Indian society and polity that were the exact opposite of the images of poverty and dysfunction that have been presented to us.

The accounts describe a society that is unimaginably affluent compared to the India of today: The affluence is seen most strikingly in the per capita availability of foodgrains, which at around one ton per person per year was nearly five times the amount of grain that an average Indian had access to for the last more than 200 years. Only in the recent five years, annual per capita availability of food in India has begun to rise above 200 kg. The affluence of the eighteenth-century society of Chengalpattu is also visible in the range of cultural, economic, artisanal and administrative services that it supported. According to the records, less than half of the people of Chengalpattu of that time were involved exclusively in agriculture. The other half were engaged in manufacture, trade or the varied services that the localities supported through a share of their produce. The affluence of the society that these accounts describe is also visible in the layout, landscape and dimensions of the habitations of the people, and the multiplicity and grandeur of the public spaces, especially the temples, of the region.

The society described in these palmleaf accounts must have been scientifically and technologically efficient. It is hardly possible for a locality to obtain agricultural production of the level of 10 tons per hectare without high scientific and technological skills. The system of eris that formed the backbone of the flourishing economy of the region is indeed known to be a marvel of technological sophistication. The palmleaf accounts also present a picture of a society with very high level of corporate functioning. The localities maintained and provided for an extensive establishment of cultural, economic and administrative services, which often involved around 30 separate functions or functionaries and accounted for around one-third of the produce of the locality. In addition to such extensive local establishments, the localities maintained and provided for the larger regional functions and institutions. There were several high militia leaders, administrators, scholars, musicians, dancers and many cultural and religious institutions that had a share in the produce of hundreds of localities. As many as 1,200 localities gave a share of their produce for the maintenance of the great temple of Varadaraja Perumal at Kancheepuram. Thus, though the localities were largely self-sufficient in terms of their economic, cultural and administrative needs, they were certainly not insular. They seem to have functioned like the innermost circle of the oceanic polity of Mahatma Gandhi.

The society described in these accounts was highly equitable in its functioning. Almost every household and institution had a share in the produce and the polity. Preliminary calculations indicate that the average share of say the barber was not much lower than the average produce per household of the locality, or the average share of, say, the kanakkappillai, the locality registrar. The share in polity that this system ensured for every household in the region was perhaps even more important than the relative economic equality that flowed from it. The sharing arrangements of the region in a way provided to every household and every institution of the region a share in the sovereignty.

The arrangements described in the palmleaf manuscripts, and the ideas of sharing of the produce of the land and sovereignty in the polity, on which these arrangements were based, are derived from the classical Indian thought about the proper way of organising society and polity. These arrangements are similar to what is described in the Indian civilisational texts, and what is known to have prevailed in India during the reign of the great righteous kings of Indian antiquity and history. The fact that Tamil society of late 18th century manifested such structures and ideas so elaborately, ought to invoke great pride in and respect for our heritage and the great contribution the Tamil region has made to it.

The organisation and functioning of the eighteenth-century Chengalpattu society are indicative of the way the people of India organised their affairs when they had the freedom to do so according to their own genius. Documenting and comprehending the society, economy and polity of the eighteenth-century Chengalpattu is of obvious value in working out a polity for today that would be in consonance with the genius and preferences of the Indian people and shall help us rebuild a strong and resurgent India, proud of herself and her place in the world of today.

In this monograph, we describe one of the localities of Chengalpattu for which we have both the archival data and the Tamil palmleaf accounts of the Barnard Survey. Kundratthur is currently a western locality of Chennai city. In the records of the Survey, the area of the municipality falls in three localities, the main locality of Kundratthur, and two smaller adjoining localities of Manancheri and Thirunagesvaram. The last comprised only the temple of that name, which forms one of the major landmarks of the town today, and a few streets surrounding it. In this monograph, we take note of the available records of all the three localities and look at the current state of the town, its people and its various landmarks in the perspective of their situation at the time of the Survey.

Kundratthur was and, for the ordinary people of the area, continues to be a centre of religion and culture. The Kundratthur Murugan or Subrahmanyar Temple is a timeless and highly revered abode of the Lord that attracts a large number of devotees even today. There are three other ancient temples in the town, the Thiruvaleesvarar, the Kandaleesvarar and the Thiruvooraga Perumal. The first of these is in ruins; the deity has been shifted and installed in a sannidhi of the Kandaleesvarar temple.

The Thirunagesvarar Temple, another imposing landmark of the town, is of a relatively later period. This Temple, like the current structures of the much older Subrahmanyar and Kandaleesvarar temples, was constructed in the twelfth century during the reign of Kulotthunga Chola II. But unlike the other temples, which were renovated or reconstructed at that time, this was a new temple built to install a replica image of the ancient Thirunagesvarar of Kumbakonam.

The town also has been a place of great scholarship. Sekkizhar, the author of Periya Puranam, the great text of Tamil Saiva tradition, and arguably the most important Saiva scholar of historical times, was born here. His work provided the scholarly foundation and depth to the great blossoming of Saivism that occurred in the Chola period. The town has several memorials for its greatest son. The palmleaf records mention a Sekkizhar Temple in the centre of the town that still exists and is fairly well maintained. The records also mention a large waterbody in the name of Sekkizhar’s brother, the Balaravayar Kulam, that continues to occupy a prominent place in the town. There is also a modern and impressive memorial built for him near the Thirunagesvarar Temple, the Temple that Sekkizhar himself got constructed to pay daily obeisance to his ishta, the Thirunagesvarar of Kumbakonam.

Being a town of such historical antecedents, it is not surprising that it hosts as many as fifty-five inscriptions from the period of early Cholas to that of the Madurai Nayakars, who ruled in the early eighteenth century. The inscriptions record important transactions concerning property and revenue, major public construction or renovation undertaken at different times, as also donations made by the kings and ordinary people for regular performance of various rituals at the temples and for other charitable activities. These thus offer glimpses of the history of the locality for six-centuries.

The archival and palmleaf manuscript records of the eighteenth century that we have studied give a much more detailed description of the life, culture and economy of Kundratthur including a graphic picture of its physical layout. They give details of many temples besides the largest four that we have mentioned here. They record the presence of a large number of water-bodies, flower gardens, groves and pastures, etc., in different parts of the town. The temples and the few water-bodies that survive today impart a sense of great grandeur to the town. The records make one wonder about the great beauty and grandeur of the town when the temples were fully functional, the flower-gardens were blooming, the pasture were green and the water-bodies were full.

Like other localities of the eighteenth-century Chengalpattu, the economy of Kundratthur was also anchored in agriculture, though Kundratthur was not among the most productive localities. The people of the town were involved in many other activities. Of 471 households in Kundratthur and its two associated localities, 102 were of the weavers. There were also 24 households of the Brahmins, 7 of the Pandarams, and 15 of temple dancers and musicians. This large complement of weavers, scholars and artists was natural for a town that was a major centre of religion, scholarship, culture and art.

In the Kundratthur of today, there is little agriculture. There are some weaver households in the streets around Thirunagesvarar; they mainly weave white cloth for further industrial processing. There are probably still many houses of the Brahmins and Pandarams, etc., to serve the large numbers of temples. There may also be a few households of the temple musicians. But the town today can hardly be thought of as a centre of scholarship, art or craft. Except for the greatly revered Kundratthur Murugan, and some of the other temples that remain functional, this ancient sacred town of great beauty and high scholarship looks like any other bleak and non-descript suburb of Chennai.

We have compiled this monograph, offering a picture of Kundratthur as it looked and functioned in the eighteenth century and its condition now, with the hope that it shall encourage the nation to make an effort to restore the town to its past glory. The people, with their faith, have kept the temples going. There are sporadic efforts made to spruce up the water-bodies, but these remain mostly dry and abandoned. The only greenery in the flower-gardens and pastures, etc., is that of the wild-growth that occurs during the rainy season. Renovating and reviving all these structures does not seem impossible or prohibitively expensive. Bringing scholarship back to the town also should not be difficult. Serious scholars, especially those of Tamil Saivism, would feel blessed to have an opportunity to live and work in the town where the great Sekkizhar was born. The nearness of someone of his stature to follow and emulate would certainly raise the level of their scholarship. The revived town would probably soon begin to attract the master weavers, the great musicians, the dancers and the craftsmen also back into its fold. We have been dreaming thus while looking at the glorious history of this town. We believe that such resurgence of the towns and villages of India shall form the foundation of a resurgent India.

This is the first in a series of monographs that we propose to write on the localities that are described in the Barnard survey of the eighteenth-century. We are thankful to the Indira Gandhi National Centre, its President, Sri Rambahadur Rai, Member-Secretary, Dr. Sachchidanand Joshi for a grant that has made this monograph possible. We are also thankful to Shri Sudhir Lall and his colleagues in the Kalakosha Division of IGNCA for facilitating this work.

We thank Sri T. M. Mukundan for accompanying us on many of our field visits and carefully going through the manuscript. The writing of this monograph has been possible because of the constant support of our wives, Kusum Bajaj and Vijayalakshmi Srinivas. JKB gratefully acknowledges the companionship of his son, Anjaneya Bajaj, in all his endeavours.

JKB & MDS

Chennai
Vasanta Panchami, Vikrama 2080, Kali 5125
February 14, 2024