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The breast tax (mulakkaram or mula-karam in Malayalam) was a tax imposed until 1924 on the lower caste and untouchable Hindu women by the Kingdom of Tranvancore (in present-day Kerala state of India) if they wanted to cover their breasts in public. The lower caste and untouchable women were expected to pay the government the breast tax when they started developing breasts. The lower caste men had to pay a similar tax, called tala-karam, on their heads. Travancore tax collectors would visit every house to collect the breast tax from any lower caste women who passed the age of puberty. The tax was evaluated by the tax collectors depending on the size of the woman's breasts.

The baring of breasts by the lower caste and untouchable Hindu women was a longtime Travancore tradition and a sign of respect to an upper caste person. It was considered part of the Indian caste system, and came to be challenged, when a woman cut off her both breasts instead of paying tax.

Background

The Kingdom of Travancore was known for its rigid and oppressive caste system and hence Swami Vivekananda called Travancore a "lunatic asylum". The breast tax was levied by Travancore on lower caste Hindu women, which was to be paid if they wanted to cover their breasts and was further assessed in proportion to the size of their breasts. This was seen as a sign of respect towards the upper caste and the lower castes including Nadar and Ezhava women had to pay the tax. Dr. Sheeba KM, professor of gender ecology and Dalit studies, says the purpose of the tax was to maintain the caste hierarchy.

The law resulted from Travancore's tradition, in which the breast was bared as a sign of respect to a higher-status person. Attingal Rani once had a lower caste woman's breast cut off as a punishment for wearing upper cloth. For example, the Nair women were not allowed to cover their breasts while in front of the Namboodiri Brahmins or entering the temples, while the Brahmins bared their breasts only to the images of the deities. The women of the even lower castes, such as Nadars, Ezhavars and untouchables castes, were not allowed to cover their breasts at all. With the spread of Christianity in the 19th century, the Christian converts among the Nadar women started covering their upper body, and gradually even the Hindu Nadar women adopted this practice. After a series of protests, known as the Channar revolt, Nadar women were granted the right to cover their breasts in 1859.

Multiple historians have documented that uncovering one's breasts was revered as a symbolic token of homage from the lower castes towards the upper castes in the state of Travancore and a state-law prevented this covering which served to demarcate the caste hierarchy in a prominent manner and often served as the core locus of spontaneous rebellions by lower castes.

Channar Revolt

During the time of Travancore, lower-caste women, including Nadar and Ezhava women, were not allowed to wear clothes that covered their breasts to indicate their low status, although higher-class women covered both breasts and shoulders. They had to pay the breast tax if they wanted to cover themselves. Uneasy with their social status, a large number of Nadars embraced Christianity, and started to wear long cloths. When many more Nadar women turned to Christianity, many Hindu Nadar women also started to wear the Nair breast cloth, which led to violence between the upper caste and lower castes.

From 1813 to 1859, several laws were enacted and removed by Travancore regarding the upper cloth issue. On one such occasion, the members of the king's council argued that this right would remove the caste-differences and pollute the kingdom. Agitations and violence continued against the lower caste Christian and Hindu women on the right to cover their breasts and several schools and churches were burned. Several waves of violence continued for four decades.

In 1859, the violence reached a peak when two Nadar women were stripped of their upper clothes by Travancore officials and hung on a tree in public for covering their breasts. The Nadars revolted in ferocity and started to terrorize the upper caste neighborhoods and looted their shops. Thus the kingdom was forced to take action on the upper cloth law to bring peace in the kingdom. In the same year, under pressure from the Madras governor, the king issued a decree giving all Nadar women the right to cover their breasts. Yet they were still not allowed in the style of the higher-class women which the Nadar women did not follow.

Legend of Nangeli

The village-legend of Nangeli is about a woman who lived in the early 19th century at Cherthala in the erstwhile princely state of Travancore in India and supposedly cut off her breasts in an effort to protest against the caste-based breast tax. According to the legend, she cut off her breasts and presented them to the tax collector in a plantain leaf, then died of blood loss. Following the death of Nangeli, a series of people's movements were set off. Soon the place where she lived had come to be called Mulachiparambu (meaning place of the breasted woman).

However, the story is not officially recognized in any of India's historical accounts and its authenticity is debatable. Historian Manu Pillai argues that covering breasts was not the norm in Kerala's matrilineal society during Nangeli's life-span. Victorian standards of morality penetrated into the society decades later under British colonial influence, which led to subsequent class-struggles for the right to wear upper cloth. He believes Nangeli to have protested against an oppressive tax regime that was imposed upon all lower castes, which got appropriated with the passage of time, in pursuit of a different patriarchal fight for the preservation of female dignity.

References

1. ^ "The CBSE Just Removed an Entire History of Women's Caste Struggle". The Wire. Retrieved 13 November 2019.
2. ^ "The woman who cut off her breasts to protest a tax". BBC News. 28 July 2016. Retrieved 13 November 2019.
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4. K.S. Manilal (15 November 2012). "Sikhism in Kerala: Forgotten Chapter in the Social History of the State". Samagra. 8: 3–4. ISSN 0973-3906. One such infamous law that was in force in Travancore until as late as the first quarter of the 20th century was known as Mulakkaram, i.e., the law of breast tax. According to this law the avarna women, were to pay tax to the government for their breasts from the very time of their girlhood, when they start developing breasts
5. R. N. Yesudas (1980). The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore, 1806–1908. Kerala Historical Society. p. 19. The lower classes were to pay tax for the hair they grew, and for the breasts of ladies called breast-tax.
6. ^ Jacob Kattackal (1990). Comparative Religion. Oriental Institute of Religious Studies. p. 144. In South India, until the 19th century, the 'low caste' men had to pay the 'head tax', and the 'low caste' women had to pay a 'breast tax' ('tala-karam' and 'mula-karam') to the government treasury. The still more shameful truth is that these women were not allowed to wear upper garments in public.
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20. Robert L. Hardgrave (1969). The Nadars of Tamilnad. University of California Press. pp. 59–62. OCLC 12064.
21. Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. (1968). "The Breast-Cloth Controversy: Caste Consciousness and Social Change in Southern Travancore". The Indian Economic & Social History Review. 5 (2): 171–187. doi:10.1177/001946466800500205. S2CID 143287605.
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23. ^ Cohn 1996, p. 140.
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25. ^ "Re-writing History, Saffronising Education: Remembering Nangeli Lest Government Makes Us Forget". NewsClick. 19 March 2019. Retrieved 13 November 2019.
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30. Ross 2008, p. 78.
31. Jones 1989, p. 159.
32. Ponnumuthan 1996, p. 110.
33. Cohn 1996, p. 141-142.
34. Kertzer 1988, p. 113.
35. ^ Pillai, Manu S. (2019). "The woman with no breasts". The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History. Chennai: Westland Publications. ISBN 9789388689786 – via The Hindu.
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37. Singh, Vijay (7 March 2016). "She died fighting 'breast tax', her name lives on". Times of India. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
38. ^ Pillai, Manu S. (18 February 2017). "The woman who cut off her breasts". The Hindu. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
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Sources

• Cohn, Bernard S. (1996), Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691000435
• Jones, Kenneth W. (1989), Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-24986-4
• Kertzer, David I. (1988), Ritual, Politics, and Power, Yale University Press
• Ponnumuthan, Selvister (1996), The Spirituality of Basic Ecclesial Communities in the Socio-religious Context of Trivandrum/Kerala, India, Universita Gregoriana
• Ross, Robert (2008), Clothing: A Global History, Polity

• Breast
• Discrimination in India
• Caste system in India
• Taxation in India
• Kingdom of Travancore
• Women of the Kingdom of Travancore
• People of the Kingdom of Travancore