Pariah: Why the name of a Tamil Dalit caste entered European vocabulary to mean the ‘ostracised’

A global favourite to refer to any entity deemed devious and worthy of being ostracised, the word ‘pariah’ is in fact rooted in the Indian social landscape, more specifically, in our country’s unique caste consciousness. Although its usage in recent times is removed from caste associations, the weight of a gruesome history attached to the word has often made its application controversial.

The etymological roots of the term ‘pariah’ lie in the name of a caste group called ‘Pariayar’, which originated in Tamil Nadu and can be found concentrated today across the Tamil region, Sri Lanka, and Kerala. The name of the caste, in turn, is believed to have originated from the Tamil word ‘parai’, which means drum.

Historically, the Pariayar are known to have been drummers, and were confined to the status of an outcast or an ‘untouchable’ in the Hindu caste order.

Whether drumming was the occupation of all Paraiyars is subject to debate. However, scholars agree that they were seen as an outcaste, which is how the name lent itself to the English vocabulary to mean one who is socially excluded.The journey of the word, however, was not simple. While initially received through the lens of colonial knowledge production, it took on a political meaning of its own in the context of the European Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a French writer and botanist who is credited with being the first to make the ‘pariah’ figure popular in Europe.

The Paraiyar in Tamil history

Scholars who note that the Pariayar were traditionally from the drummer community explain that drumming has historically been a lower caste occupation. “Traditionally, drum-making and drum-playing was a metier of the lower-caste artisan, whether Hindu or Muslim,” writes Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir in her research paper, Hips Don’t Lie: Salsa and the New Cosmopolitanism in the Indian City. C Joe Arun in his article, From Stigma to Self-assertion: Paraiyars and the Symbolism of the Parai Drum (2007), asserts that “drumming was one of the five distinctive services along with cattle scavenging, cremation, announcement of deaths and acting as village watchmen, that the Paraiyars performed for the ur (higer castes in a village) and which defined their low status and cultural identity.”

Sociologist Karithikeyan Damodaran, however, contests this argument. He suggests that the Pariayars constitute the largest caste group within Tamil Nadu. “Can you imagine that such a large number of people were engaged in drum beating?” he asks. He says that the history of the nomenclature is misleading and that the Paraiyars were involved in varied occupations, from being agricultural labourers to weavers. Even the etymology of the name, he says, is contested since some scholars trace the roots of Paraiyar to the Malayalam word ‘paraiy’, which means ‘to speak’. What united the people from these multiple occupational backgrounds, says Damodaran, was the experience of untouchability, given that all the jobs with which they were engaged were traditionally perceived to be “menial”. However, it is also to be noted that not all people from the fold of untouchability in Tamil Nadu were called Paraiyars.

Even the experience of untouchability, say some scholars, has a more recent history among the Paraiyar community. “There is little evidence prior to the 12th century BCE to suggest that Paraiyars were treated as untouchables,” writer and historian Stalin Rajangham tells indianexpress.com. He explains that the decline of the community in social hierarchy was a gradual process, with untouchability becoming institutionalised under the Chola, Nayak, and British rulers. A further downfall in the social status of the Paraiyars is known to have happened with the appropriation of their lands. “Stories, songs, plays, and literary works from these times portray the community negatively, and were denied access to temples,” says Rajangham.

Rupa Vishwanath, Professor of Indian religions at the University of Gottingen, locates the historicity of the Pariayars in the slavery-like labour system that existed in the rural Tamil-speaking region of the 18th and 19th centuries. The inhabitants of the Tamil villages were divided by administrators as belonging to one of the three categories – landowners, tenant farmers, and landless labourers. The labourers, she writes in her book The Pariah Problem, were almost always from the untouchable castes.

Vishwanath in her book says that in “native usage, there was a practical equivalence and interchangeability between specific caste terms such as ‘pallar’ and ‘paraiyar’ and terms which practically meant a slave. These were the castes that we today call Dalits, she writes. “By the 1890s, the caste name paraiyar was anglicised to pariah (whence the English term ‘pariah’) , and was used as an inclusive term by officials to refer to all Dalit castes, not just pariayars,” writes Vishwanath.

Yet, at least a century earlier, the term had already entered European public literary and political consciousness.

The journey of the ‘pariah’ into European vocabulary

The inclusion of the ‘pariah’ in Western vocabulary was intimately tied to the colonial processes of the 18th and 19th centuries. Philosopher Eleni Varikas, in her paper Outcasts of the world- images of the pariah (2010), has argued that “colonial knowledge” that generally accompanies colonial conquest was responsible for how the word travelled into European consciousness. Consequently, the first European reference to the term was made by the Portuguese, who were the first European colonial power to land in the Indian subcontinent. Varikas writes that the oldest Portuguese reference she finds of ‘pareas’ dates back to 1516 and was used by Duarte Barbosa, a military navigator who served the king of Portugal in India from 1500-1517.

The first reference to the Pariayars in the English language occurred in 1613 when the English East India Company began settling on the Coromandel Coast. According to Varikas, “the ‘drummer’ caste, which accounted for a quarter of the population of Madras, also provided the majority of domestic workers at the service of Europeans in southeast India.” The fact that they were in contact with Europeans more than any other caste might have contributed to the western imagination of the term to refer to all lower castes, and the non castes or the untouchables. Furthermore, the British scholarly understanding of the lower castes and the untouchables was significantly influenced by and produced through close association with the Brahmins.

Consequently, from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the word ‘pariah’ and everything it entailed floated around freely in educated Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, and the Scandinavian population following their recruitment as military and imperial officials, missionaries and scientists, or scholars in India. The ‘pariah’ was described as having the “worst of reputations”, “obnoxious”, “the vilest and the most unworthy race”.

By the mid-18th century, however, the word ‘pariah’ began taking on a political colour. This transformation was preceded by the introduction of the word ‘caste’ in the political vocabulary of Europe. Although ‘caste’ or ‘cast’ had been known in Europe since much before, it was only from the mid-18th century that it came to acquire a pejorative context. Until then, the word in the European world was used as a synonym for ‘condition’, ‘class’, or ‘order’.

Varikas notes that it was in France that the semantic metamorphosis of the word ‘caste’ began, and that it had more to do with the socio-political changes taking place in Europe at the time. Rooted in the age of Enlightenment, which was an intellectual and philosophical movement taking place in Europe between the 17th and early 19th century, when the legitimacy of all forms of social domination was being questioned, be it the church, the monarch or the landlord, the social order of caste in India often became a point of reference or a trope for political reflection. Further, when the French lost large parts of their imperial territories in India in 1763, both the caste system and the pariah came to be largely associated with the French criticism of British India. “Anti-colonialism is always stronger when it comes to the colonies of others,” writes Varikas.

Thereafter, from the second half of the 18th century onwards, the word ‘pariah’ seemed to take on a “totally European political relevance and intelligibility,” writes Varikas. The figure of the pariah was introduced in the political language of the French Revolution to describe any category of people who were excluded from the benefits of a just and equal society, such as the Jews or women.

The special role played by French literature of the 18th and 19th centuries in popularising the ‘pariah’ must be noted. The first among these was a book authored by writer and botanist Jacques-Henri Bernadin de Saint-Pierre called The Indian Cottage in its English translation. Published in 1791, the novel narrates the story of a British traveller who is struck by the wisdom and knowledge of a ‘pariah’ living detached on the margins of Indian society. Saint-Pierre’s work is known to have been one of the key sources of the dissemination of the word ‘pariah’ in France and England.

Yet another literary work of the time to popularise the ‘pariah’ figure was Casimir Delavigne’s play ‘La Paria’, staged in Paris in 1821. It is the story of Idamore, an untouchable who, though banned from serving his country, is courageous enough to free Benaras from enemy occupation. However, as fate awaits him, his origins are soon discovered, and he is put to death by those very people whom he saved. The story, though set in India, contained several allusions to European historical and social realities.

Influenced by the French, the pariah made its way to German Enlightenment circles as well. The play ‘Der Paria’, written by the German Jewish poet, Michael Beer, for instance, was particularly important in connecting the plight of the pariah to that of the Jews, at a time when Germany was afflicted by a strong wave of anti-semitism following Napoleon’s departure.

In the years to come, the pariah would frequently be used as a trope in the political literature of Europe; a tradition that finds itself reflected in the choice of the word by the contemporary western media, politicians and intellectuals.

Paraiyars: An alternative history

Removed from their complex toponymical history in Europe, the Paraiyars today, says Damodaran, constitute the single largest caste group in Tamil Nadu. “They are settled all over the world today, having migrated to wherever they found educational and professional opportunities.”

Historically, too, the community has been noted for its intellectual and political contributions to Tamil society. “Thiruvalluvar (a renowned ancient Tamil poet and philosopher) is from the Pariah community, and even the goddess Mariamman is believed to have originated from this group,” says Rajangham.

Their role in the Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu is noteworthy. Rajangham points out that one of the earliest Dalit journals in Tamil Nadu, Suryodayam, was launched by a member of the Paraiyar community. “Ayodhyadas Pandit, who is regarded as a precursor of the Dravidian movement, emerged as an important figure from the Pariayar community,” says Damodaran. He asserts that the Dalit Panthers of India, who emerged in the 1970s to combat caste-based discrimination, are also largely represented by the Paraiyar community.

In Kerala too where the community has a significant concentration, the Paraiyars have produced big names in the field of social reform, government service, and the creative industries. The 19th century social reformer, Poykayil Apachan, for instance is remembered for establishing a new theology for Dalits called Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (PRDS). Among the names that stand out in the more recent history of Kerala are the Congress leader and member of the Legislative Assembly, Pandalam Sudhakaran, the Carnatic singer Neyyatinkara Vasudevan, film maker Lenin Rajendran, poet and novelist Roshni Swapna, and historian K S Madhavan.

Advocate V M Unni who retired from the government of Kerala and is part of the Paraiyar community says that he is aware of the negative connotation associated with the name of the caste. “However, the community has developed mainly through educational and government service opportunities,” he says, adding, “my father was an illiterate agricultural labourer. But now there are five doctors and three software engineers in our family.”

And yet, in the Western vocabulary, the influential and multifaceted past of the community remains obscured. The ‘pariah’ is fixed in its association with ‘otherness’, an unfortunate outcome of a twisted series of events.

Further reading:

Eleni Varices, The outcasts of the world –Images of the pariahs, 2010

Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Hips don’t lie: Salsa and New Cosmopolitanisms in the Indian City

C. Joe Arun, From stigma to self-assertion: Paraiyars and the symbolism of the parai drum, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2007

Rupa Vishwanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern India, Columbia University Press, 2014

This article has been updated to include the quote by V M Unni.