In writing of the village's appearance and spatial relations, I have referred at times to the past. In this and the following chapter I discuss more systematically what is known or believed about the socioeconomic history of Kumbapeṭṭai. My sources are oral traditions and family documents of the Brahmans, and the government land records of 1827, 1897, and 1951. I have divided the two chapters at 1855, when the royal family was deposed by the British, because this was seen as a significant event by the villagers. As we saw in Chapter 6, the late 1850s and early 1860s were also in several other ways a significant watershed in Thanjāvūr's history.

The Founding of the Village

As I have mentioned, Kumbapeṭṭai's Brahman ancestors once lived in an agrahāram in Kiḷiyūr, where they were served by the Devendra Paḷḷar slaves who lived on their present site. The Brahmans were (and are) Smartha or Saivite Tamil Brahmans of the Marainad subdivision of the Brahacharanam subcaste. They intermarried with other Marainad Brahacharanams who lived in eighteen villages in northwest Thanjāvūr and a small neighboring region in Tiruchirappalli district.

During the invasion of Thanjāvūr by Haidar Ali and his French allies in 1780–2, the agrahdram in Kiliyūr was believed to have been destroyed by Muslim armies and the surrounding fields laid waste. A large stretch of wasteland with a few ruined brick structures remained on this site half a mile east of the Paḷḷar streets in 1952.