The Kottai Pillaimar of Srivaikuntam: 

On the banks of  the Tamirabarani, in the temple town of Srivaikuntam in Tiruelveli district, Tamil Nadu, there lived a community of  Vellalas, known as Kottai Pillaimar, on account of their living in a mud walled kottai or fort.  No male from outside the fort could enter it. Nor could the women come out except after death,  for being cremated. Quite the stuff of  folk tales. As I read old newspaper reports about the fort, including a sensational one in New York Times, I was galvanised into a search for the exotic.

From 1979 to 1981, I did ethnographic fieldwork in and around Srivaikuntam. In due course, I got disabused of my fanciful notions as I discovered a social system  that seemed to exemplify, so to say, an ideal-type pre-modern South Indian caste society. Castes in a locality are structured hierarchically, they are interdependent yet separate. Notions of purity and honour of women are at the heart of the system. They define the hierarchical position of the caste, creating marital boundary walls around each caste. I found in the Kottai Pillaimar, the compulsions of an upper caste to define their high status through the tight seclusion of women. In practice, it left the women with neither their caste privileges nor civic rights. The social structure supporting the fort consisted of specific families from a variety of service castes with whom the Kottai Pillaimar had jajmani style patron-client ties. The men were traditional landed elites well networked with local institutions, both traditional and modern. The fort had survived as a vestige of past royal service. It was now a crumbling anomaly of history. The community was contemplating ending the system. Endogamy within the fort was no longer sustainable. The pressures and pulls of the outside world were high.

I returned a few times briefly. In 2017, I went back accompanying documentary film maker Shrutismriti Changkakoti. The Tamirabarani river, the state’s only perennial river, watering the region’s rice fields, had dwindled to a ribbon. The path from behind the fort to their Bhadrakali amman temple, once lush and green, was barren. The entire region was water deprived. New buildings, with colourfully and cheerfully bizarre architecture dotted the town, cheek by jowl with the magnificent gopuram of the Srivaikunthanatha Perumal temple.

​The fort walls are mostly gone, in some places rebuilt with cement and plaster. Some doorways remain but are dilapidated. The surrounding roads are full of new constructions. Shruti was shooting for her film on the young women who left the fort as children or had been born after their parents left the fort. For them, the Fort was a tale told and retold by their elders. They are a part of the larger Tirunelveli Saiva Vellala community,  busy with school, college or jobs. Such education was unthinkable for their mothers who are nostalgic about the past but are comfortably integrated with contemporary urban Tamil life. There are two old women, sisters, widowed, who continue to live in their old house in the fort. 

We do not want to leave our homes. Our whole world is here, they say.

My Writings on the Kottai Pillaimar