Hoole, S. Ratnajeevan H. & Hoole, Mariyahl M.

S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole and Mariyahl M. Hoole: The Internet and Mobility in the Reconstruction of the Past: A Study through a Reassessment of Arumuka Navalar and Caste Claims

In the past scholarship was limited to a few with esoteric knowledge acquired through lengthy years of training and reading. Sources of ancient history were scarce and often nonexistent. Thus for example it was argued some years ago that Arumuka Navalar could not have translated the Bible into Tamil because he knew neither Hebrew nor Greek, the source languages. One C. Rudra thereupon shut the argument down by writing that Navalar translated from English. With little access to original sources in Sri Lanka, the matter ended there till recently when Rudra’s was shown through e-resources to be a wild claim.

Today for scholars working in the West, electronic resources have made the rediscovery of the past a new science – even a new game. E-books have made several centuries old previously inaccessible books freely available in the light of expired copyrights. Cheap interlibrary loans make these sources available in a few days though teams of librarians across continents putting their time into searching. High speed internet has made communication easy and web pages have opened up many new sources of information, though often of questionable origin and untrained authorship without the usual vetting by subject experts. The authority attached to the written word makes these vulgar sources difficult to assail or counter.

This paper surveys electronic resources available in Sri Lanka and the West. How have these resources affected Tamil scholarship as people moved and been empowered by technology and their newly rich status in the West? This question is examined through a reassessment of Arumuka Navalar and increasingly numerous claims to being Vellala in caste. Almost canonical positions on Navalar as the first Tamil translator of the Bible and the man followed by C.W. Thamotharampillai are rendered untenable by easily accessible interlibrary loans and e-books. At the same time other internet sources such as wikis and a myriad web pages make it impossible to correct these false canonical histories of a personally defining nature of a people when a sufficiently motivated coterie keeps posting and re-setting wikis to propagate their ideological/canonical position defining themselves.

As for caste, as people move across continents they take on new upwardly mobile identities in societies where their past is not known. This is in the Navalar tradition of low caste Sudra Vellalas – described prior to Navalar as having nothing to lose in terms of caste – taking on theetchai and wearing poonool to become the high caste twice born promoting the previously prohibited Bharata Natyam. As surveyed, a preponderance of the now high caste Vellalas marry endogamously; however, a much larger proportion of educated non-Vellalas of the western Tamil diaspora, now that their social gap with Vellalas in terms of wealth and education is minimal, are seen nonendogamously to marry Euro-Caucasians or educated persons from peripheral but respectable communities like Batticaloa Vellalas or equally educated persons from other marginalized Tamil castes. This shows that while their labour migration is central to their economic production, it has been marginal to their caste citizenship insofar as they hold on to caste for status affirmation. At the same time a political group has used the internet to give a high status to the fishing caste, making claims that will not be entertained in the scholarly literature.

Much of the old but newly accessible literature shows how fluid caste really has always been. The fluidity of caste among the Jaffna Hindus may be gleaned from the changing statistics of Vellalas in the literature and the claim made by almost all Ceylonese to being Christian in the Dutch period. But there is much firmer information on Christian Tamils showing that many early lower caste converts have indeed been absorbed into the so Jaffna Tamil Christian (JTC) Protestant Vellala caste and that the lower castes in the Tamil Churches today are converts of the 20^th century who ironically face the same obstacles as among Hindus in marrying into older JTC families. As such what of sections of Hindu leadership that lay claims to being high caste when many of their ablest have recent well-hidden Christian genealogies?
 

Biographical Statement:

S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole, D.Sc. (Eng.) London, Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon, M.Sc. with a Mark of Distinction London, B.Sc. Eng. Hons Ceylon, Fellow of the IEEE, C. Eng. (Sri Lanka), is Professor of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA. He has previously served as Member, University Grants Commission of Sri Lanka and Vice Chancellor, University of Jaffna. Mr. Hoole was trained in human rights and its teaching at René Cassant’s International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg, France, and has taught Political Economy of South Asia at Harvey Mudd College in California and Ethics and Human Rights for Engineers at many universities and for the IEEE and the Scholars at Risk Network. A sample of his numerous publications in the humanities and social sciences includes the two papers “Human Rights in the Engineering Curriculum” ( Int. J. for Eng. Educ., Vol. 18, No. 6,, pp. 618-626, 2002), and, with,  D. Hoole, “Asian Values and the Human Rights Basis of Professional Ethics” (Int. J. for Eng. Educ., Vol. 21, No.3, pp. 402-414, April 2005) and the three books The Exile Returned: A Self-portrait of the Tamil Vellahlahs of Jaffna, Sri Lanka (Colombo: Aruvi Publishers, 1997), C. W. Thamotharampillai, Tamil Revivalist: The Man Behind the Legend of Tamil Nationalism (Colombo: ICES, 1997), and Enforcing Human Rights: Towards an Egalitarian Sri Lanka (Colombo: ICES, 2003).

Mariyahl Mahilmany Hoole, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, is currently a Programme Designer and Researcher at the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka. Her academic concentrations include gender, culture, and history (especially in the context of South Asia), while recent research includes studies on the Sri Lankan peace process, faith-based peacebuilding and nationalism in the media. Findings from her research have been used to develop the inter-religious peace movement in Sri Lanka, and incorporated into Government plans to serve the displaced. Mariyahl is also a contributor to the grassroots power-sharing newspaper Thulava. She hopes to pursue these, and similar interests during her graduate work, while working among and researching grassroots movements for peace and equality. She will be reading for a graduate degree at Columbia University, beginning Fall 2010.