Rural Urbanism in Tamil Nadu Notes on a "Slater Village": Gangaikondan, 1916–2012

Gangaikondan, a village outside Tirunelveli in southern Tamil Nadu, was the subject of one of the village surveys conducted by the students of Professor Gilbert Slater from the University of Madras in 1916, and re-studied in the mid-1930s, the 1950s, and 1984, and most recently by the authors in 2008. The paper presents the findings of the most recent study and traces the story of agrarian social change in the village through the 20th century, drawing on the successive surveys. At the beginning of the century Gangaikondan was dominated by Brahman landlords; by its end the most numerous Dalit/Scheduled Caste community, the Pallars, had more land in aggregate than any other single caste, though most owned only small holdings. They were also pre-eminent in the electoral panchayat institutions of the village. The agricultural economy of the village has declined fairly steadily, and it might be described as being now "post-agrarian" in the sense that only a small minority of households depend primarily upon agriculture.