i cannot but help feeling the sense of insecurity among many here who seemed to get upset by the very word intercaste.
the very thread was started by me, more out of nostalgia, on perusing certain old family group photos. within two generations we can hardly ten cousins together for any function, not only due to distances but also to dearth of numbers.
i do not wish to say it is good or bad. it just is. why should saying 'just is' provoke so much anger? or self justification? i don't know.
the next point: a community can grow by shrinking. also in order to be considered a 'community' it needs a critical number of men, women and children, congregated together in one geographical area. i may be of tambram heritage, but my children are not. and that is one family out of the count.
the chettiars have the equivalent called puLLi. the family trees of nagarathars are maintained in books in the various villages. you qualify a separate entry ie puLLi, only when you marry another chettiar and start a chettiar family. otherwise you are banished. and your lineage ends there as far as chettiars are concerned.
now it might be news to know, that chettiars too are a declining community. scores of chettiars, who incidentally are numerically even less than tambrams, are marrying outside, in singapore, canada elsewhere. our p.chidambaram's son karthik is married to a tambram girl and so would not qualify to puLLi.
if we decline beyond a critical number, we might as well guestimate as to what are the losses - would many temples be without priests. no. thanks to the priest training system, eventually our tamil hindu priests will be qualified and become one due to vocation and erudition and not due to accident of birth.
what else? would tamil literature suffer? cinema suffer? industry suffer? what is it that currently we are so unique, that tomorrow if you erase every tambram in tamil nadu from the face of this earth, that there will be some noticeable consequence? i don't know.
what i do know, is that whatever happens, it is a chain of events, that cannot be turned back. small families, migration to the cities and then abroad, education, loosening of ritualistic lives for various reasons, a willingness to abandon the aloofness and a desire to integrate with the socieity (tamil or desi or angrezi or otherwise) and now intercaste marriages - all play role; not one by itself but a combination or keychain effect of many of them - based on current trend will result in few tambrams in tamil nadu.
i suggested two ways towards a critical mass membership - have larger families starting right now (the effect will come only 25 years later) and there was almost unanimous feeling that this will not fly.
another suggestion, was marry other tamils and bring them to what we think is our brahmin way of living (for most of us it is only veggie food & srarthams) as those days of poojai and punaskaram are as rare as the blue moon. i don' think this suggestion needs the violent anti reaction it deserves. it is atleast a feasible solution.
do we care? i don't know because many of us who went abroad, long ago did so willingly and over the years shred without any inhibition one by one or collectively at one time, many of our 'brahminic' values with various levels of eagerness. that is the truth.
should those of the tambrams still in tamil nadu feel besieged. if i had the attitude of some of those here, i would be too. but then, i always felt that unless one is in harmony with the society he or she lives and adjusts to its mores, one is doomed to frustration and unhappiness. i see a lot of frustration and unhappiness.
i wish these folks well, only because they are to me still, kins in blood, but i suggest that the sooner they wake up to the reality of today's tamil nadu and india, and attune their attitudes to be in sync with the general flow, they would only experience more alienation and above all a feeling that they are increasingly strangers and outcastes in their own country - something that manu and their ancestor consigned to the 25 per cent of the population called dalits, eons ago. the wheel has turned a full circle.
thank you.
ps.. thirisangu sorgam is closer to naragam than otherwise believed.
