i think, re pithrus or 'reclaiming our rights' we are all in a 'no win' situation.
since the dawn of the 20th century, the community has gone by the rule of the #cs - Convenience, Collaboration and Cash.
we twisted the rituals to suit our convenience, the vathiars collaborated with us for doing this, and in return we provided them cash in lieu of values. our conscience was cleared, as per 'namesake' we did the 'rituals' and supposedly satisified the pithrus and the rest of the society (so we thought).
personally, i think, this is the ripe time for reformation of our creed. move away from rituals and into the world of thought. that too simplified thought so that the least common denominator can understand, support, propagate and live by those thoughts. if that is not possible, then i think, we are in for further watering down to eventual merger with our host communities whether it be marathis, punjabis or canadians.
that may not be a bad thing, if one feels that this the normal flow of history. and that the past milleniums, with its adherence to the concept of purity of blood and lineage, through arranged marriage, is but a figment of imagination or aberration of norms. i dont know.
to talk of taking pledges and also getting powerfully positioned tambrams to identify their caste publicly and do religious identity type of things, will eventually smack of hindutva politics, as it invariably becomes a bastion of bashing everyone other than tambrams. that has been the results before, because we have tried. the tambram association is supposed to 'safeguard' our interests, but i think, we will have a big problems identifying what our 'interest' is.
many of us, abhor the cncept of separation from our hindu brethren. that type of distinctivity as practised 100 years ago, including agraharam living, does not hold water anymore. it is perhaps that isolation, more than anything else, prevented us from understanding the deep differences between the various tamil hindu groups. to us these were one homogeneous NB, and we can see from another thread by ashwin, who continues to carry that idea. must have been drummed pretty hard and good into his head.
many adhere themselves to mutts like kanchi or sringeri. but these are rock hard residences of status quo. the previous kanchi mutt head is supposed to have begged gandhi to call of vaikom struggle, as entry of dalits would eventually result in the destruction of sanatana dharma. everyone of us can wonder, on this action from a supposed learned pontiff, the fairness and empathyness of this attitude, as viewed by a God common to us all. in a world of equals, there should be no nandanars, and no need to deify him. for all of us are either nandanars or achaarayars.
i think no amount of hand wringing or breast beating is going to change the way the community is going. we can speculate on the results. but the facts are that agraharams are deserted. our girls are doing better and earning more than the boys. they are more open to marriages outside of our caste. and a significant portion of our community is outside of india. i may even venture to say, with a certain amount of confidence, that the majority of tambrams live outside of tamilnadu - just a gut feeling there.
with all this in the momentum, with an absolute zero in terms of leadership of any kind, and absolutely no vision of what we should be in the future, and having pangs over an imagined but what i think is a highly flawed past, i think, all we can do, to instant outbursts of folks like ashwin (he is gone now i think never to appear again), is to mope and mumble, pat some consolation, and keep on moving, doing the very same things, that some feel are inimical to our existence, and yet practise it.
jai tambram!
ray2:
