Tamil Brahmans

The Making of a Middle-Class Caste

By: C. J. Fuller, Haripriya Narasimhan

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Paperback | 3 October 2014 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
288 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.29 x 1.54 x 0.16

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The Tamil Brahmans were a traditional, mainly rural, high-caste elite who have been transformed into a modern, urban, middle-class community since the late nineteenth century. Many Tamil Brahmans today are in professional and managerial occupations, such as engineering and information technology; most of them live in Chennai and other Tamilnadu towns, but others have migrated to the rest of India and overseas. This book, which is mainly based on the authors' ethnographic research, describes and analyses this transformation. It is also a study of how and why the Tamil Brahmans' privileged status within a hierarchical society has been perpetuated in the face of both a strong anti-Brahman movement in Tamilnadu, and a series of wider social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological changes that might have been expected to undermine their position completely. The major topics discussed include Brahman rural society, urban migration and urban ways of life, education and employment, the position of women, and religion and culture. The Tamil Brahmans' class position, including the internal division into the upper- and lower-middle classes, and the process of class reproduction, are examined closely to analyze the congruence between Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness, which - as comparison with other Brahman and non-Brahman groups shows - is highly unusual in contemporary India.

Industry Reviews

"Tamil Brahmans is a solid, original work that makes a major contribution to our understanding of a vitally important part of the world and of a unique group of people whose numbers in the United States are growing year by year and who are becoming increasingly influential at the highest professional levels in medicine, law, academia, business, and government." (Sylvia J. Vatuk, University of Illinois at Chicago)"

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