When the World becomes Female by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

Author:Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Fluidity of Caste

We were first told by Srinivasulu Reddy, who has written a book on Gangamma jatara (Reddy 1995) and knows the Kaikala families well, that the Kaikalas were a weavers caste. In 1995, V himself identified a group of men who had woven and brought to the Kaikala home a red-and-white checked sari for one of the Kaikala veshams as “from our caste, but a different village”; those men self-identified as Sale (a Tamil caste of weavers). However, in 2000 when I asked one of the in-marrying males about this weaver-caste identity, he responded that the name “Kaikala” was not a caste (kulam) name, but that the term comes from the word kaikalya, which, he told us, literally means “ritual offering to god.” (This is likely a vernacular etymology from the Sanskrit-derived Telugu word kainkaryam, ritual service to the deity). The elder explained that this name derived from the family’s ritual responsibilities at Govindaraja Swamy temple downhill.2 The Kaikala family has the mirasi (right and responsibility) to open and lock (literally, put a seal on) the temple door every day; they also light the lamps for and take first darshan of the god every morning.3 He continued to explain that in “former days,” the family married only within the Kaikalas, but “these days” they can marry others, such as Reddys; and there are also several instances of “love marriages” in the current married generation. Another in-marrying male identified his own family as Reddys and the Kaikala family as Kaikala Reddys, distinguished by the fact that they take jatara veshams. More recently (2010), V confirmed, in response to my continuing confusion about their caste, that the family name is Kaikala, a name derived from their Govindaraja Swamy mirasi, and that their caste (kulam) is Reddy. The different caste identities articulated in different contexts and by various persons in relationship to the Kaikala family suggest a fluidity of caste identities, particularly under the growing influence of middle-class ideologies in relationship to ritual roles, status, and hierarchies.

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