The Jati

A word commonly on everyone's lips was jāti. In its widest sense it might mean almost any “type” or “kind.” Villagers often referred to jātis of bicycles, cloth, goats, chickens, paddy, coconuts, or cattle. With respect to humans, jāti might refer to nationalities, religious communities, or preliterate “tribes” outside the regular society of Hindūs. To Hindūs of Thanjāvūr, for example, Christians, Muslims, Jains, Telugu speakers, the British, or the Koravar gypsies who wandered through their villages were all jātis. When speaking to Christians or Muslims, Hindus themselves might say that they belonged to the “Hindū jāti.”

In everyday life in Thanjāvūr, however, especially among the Hindūs who formed 90 percent of the population, jāti usually referred to the group that Europeans translate as “caste.” In this sense, as is well known, jātis were ranked birth-status groups. The caste or jāti, or a subsection of it, was endogamous in Thanjāvūr as in most of India. A caste was a named category usually extending over all or most of a linguistic region, and sometimes beyond it. Invariably, castes were segmentary units containing two or more levels of subdivisions or subcastes within them. The caste, or a subcaste within it, was usually associated with a traditional occupation, although many castes carried on agriculture in addition and some members of all castes had moved into noncaste occupations with the development of capitalism. The members of a caste, or in some cases of a subcaste within the caste, might eat together, enter each others' households, touch others of the same sex, and share a relatively egalitarian social life.