... to coincide with the temple's summer festival. After days of tense but peaceful confrontation, the demonstration turned violent as dozens of self-styled “Defenders of Saivism,” Hindus of high-caste rank (Veḷḷāḷars and their domestic servants, the Kōviyars), beat back the Minority Tamils with iron rods...

... colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some enslaved people, however, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance, as well...

... American head- THE KATARAGAMA PILGRIMAGE 263 fact that Tamil Hindus do try to organize the worship of Murukan within the Jaffna District, and that these attempts are opposed sometimes violently by the dominant farming and landholding caste (Vellalar). The Ritual Organization of Vellalar Supremacy...

... until they were finally displaced by the southern spread of Nayaka rule (Nilakanta Sastri 1929: 138-252). David Ludden has recently shown that the Maravars settled in areas that were unoccupied by the earlier settlers (Vellalars and Brahmans) and that where they settled they did so with sufficient...

... and other Muslim communities of south India), has signalled the arrival of this new kind of perspective. My own work on the earliest nonCatholic Christians of India, has shown how Vellalar preachers and teachers brought their doctrines from Tranquebar to Thanjuvur and then to Tirunelveli, along with printed...

... demonstrates the relationship between the Tamil Hindu pantheon, the structure of society in which the Vellalars have their proprietary interests well served, the social rationale whereby this potentially disruptive ritual setting is kept geographically at a distance, and the reasons why Sinhalese Buddhists...

... priest's name, Deyvanayaka Pandaram, indicates his membership in a cluster of Vellalar families with hereditary rights as ritual specialists at Palani temple signified by the title Pandaram. It does not indicate membership in the Adi Pandaram caste. 366 DAVID WEST RUDNER Table 1. List of Nakarattar Deeds...

... of popular standards of kingly attributes and behavior. Familiar to her readers in other contexts, "The Story of the Brothers" repays examination here for its portrayal, in two fascinatingly variant versions, of alternative personality types and styles of rulership favored by the area's Vellalar community...

.... Both books address the politicization of Bharata Natyam dance and the community of dancers who perform and teach it. Krishnan's tracks the way the men from the hereditary dance community embraced a new, higher-caste and status identity as Icai Vellalars and became active in Dravidian politics...

... on the Parava (Catholic) Christians of Tirunelveli (as also in her work on the Lubbai and other Muslim communities of south India), has signalled the arrival of this new kind of perspective. My own work on the earliest nonCatholic Christians of India, has shown how Vellalar preachers and teachers brought...

... in Pondicherry, whose observations cover a comparable, if somewhat shorter, period a century earlier, nothing quite like the documents by Savariraya Pillai is currently available.l Savariraya Pillai's family belonged to the Vellalar community. His family's remote ancestral heritage had been staunchly Saivite...

..., but the evidence that is available, much of which involves reading back from nineteenth-century sources, indicates that narrower identities, such as that of the Jaffna Vellalar (cultivators), were much more important than a general Tamil identity that incorporated all non-Muslim Tamil speakers on the modern model...

... for a concubine. They left their old village at night, concealing the girl in a large grain-storage vessel (Mosse 1986, 73). E. Valentine Daniel relates a similar story among Aru Nattu Vellalars (1984, 96). 11Signi cantly, while accepting the of ce of village watcher ( tallum cavel ) as an ancient, aboriginal...