In Nāki’s Wake

Mark E Balmforth

doi:10.26812/caste.v1i1.117

Abstract

In 1832, a woman named Caṅkari Nāki died in Ceylon, and her descendants have been haunted by a curse ever since. One of the first converts of the American Ceylon Mission, Nāki was part of an enslaved caste community unique to the island, and one of the few oppressed-caste members of the mission. The circumstances of her death are unclear; the missionary archive is silent on an event that one can presume would have affected the small Christian community, while the family narrative passed through generations is that Nāki was murdered by members of the locally dominant Vellalar caste after marrying one of their own. In response to this archival erasure, this essay draws on historical methods developed by Saidiya Hartman and Gaiutra Bahadur to be accountable to enslaved and indentured lives and, in Hartman’s words, to “make visible the production of disposable lives.” These methods actively question what we can know from the archives of an oppressor, and for this essay, enable a reading of Nāki’s life at the center of a mission struggling over how to approach caste. Nāki’s story, I argue, helps reveal an underexplored aspect of the interrelationship between caste and slavery in South Asia, and underlines the value of considering South Asian slave narratives as source material into historiographically- and archivally-obscured aspects of dominant caste identity.

Highlights

For nearly two centuries, a curse has haunted a family anchored to Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Peninsula and flung out across the globe as part of the Tamil diaspora
What we can say for certain, is that the death and the marriage are linked by an origin story entangled with Sri Lanka’s relatively unknown history of caste and slavery, all found deep in the archive of an institution named the American Ceylon Mission (ACM)
In the decade preceding Nāki’s death, the ACM pursued the spread of Christianity by attempting to knock down the pillars on which they thought ‘Hindooism’ rested

Summary

Introduction

May 10, 2013). The family’s sorrowful and hushed story-telling is the sole memorial to the 1832 death of one of the family’s first two converts to Christianity, an event that, according to the family, initiated a curse that claims the life of an infant boy in each generation. Guided by a comparable project of imagining a caste-free state while remaining grounded in the intertwined historical genealogies of slavery, caste, and contemporary oppressions in South Asia, this article considers the life of Nāki, an enslaved and oppressed-caste, Ceylonese Tamil woman at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Her story, I argue, helps reveal an underexplored aspect of the relationship between caste and slavery in South Asia, and illustrates how new readings of South Asian slavery can transform the way we interpret nineteenth-century social life in the region. In considering Nāki’s story alongside the story of a caste preference in the mission, this article demonstrates the value of considering South Asian slave and oppressed-caste narratives as source material into historiographically- and archivallyobscured aspects of dominant caste identity

Methods

Conclusion