Envisioning the social order in a southern port city: the Tamil diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai

Abstract

The Tamil ‘diary’ left by Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709–61), agent to the French Governor of Pondicherry, Jean Baptiste Dupleix, has attracted admiration and puzzlement in equal measure. Why, much before the forces of colonialism had made their full cultural impact, should a Tamil merchant with few intellectual pretensions seek to keep a ‘diary’ – that core instrument of ‘Western’ subjectivity? By most standards, it is not really a ‘diary’ at all. It is rather a curious combination of trading day-book, chronicle, record-of-correspondence and vehicle-of-invective against his many enemies. Yet the diary, for all its curiosity, bears closer inspection. Ananda Ranga is a master of paradox and irony, through which he reveals much about his own social thought, and occasionally, albeit inadvertently, even about himself. He revealed himself to be a conservative in matters of established Hindu social hierarchies, albeit deeply suspicious of Brahmans, a staunch defender of customary rights and a tireless advocate of the moral virtues of the Tamil people. He was also markedly hostile to Catholic missionaries in the Tamil country, not so much for their theology, as for their apparent determination to unsettle the established social order. The ideas contained in his diary, many of which persisted into the colonial and indeed post-colonial worlds, raise important questions about the paradoxes of ‘modernity’ as it was beginning to be felt in French-occupied South India.