Misplaced Pages

Breast tax

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 223.233.68.43 (talk) at 04:18, 18 July 2021 (Fact check). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 04:18, 18 July 2021 by 223.233.68.43 (talk) (Fact check)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) Tax imposed on the lower caste and untouchable Hindu women by the Kingdom of Tranvancore

The Breast Tax (Mulakkaram or mula-karam in Malayalam) was a tax imposed on the lower caste and untouchable Hindu women by the Kingdom of Tranvancore (in present-day Kerala in the state of India) if they wanted to cover their breasts in public, Though this tax appears to be Psuedo Historic Most historians consider this tax baseless because no records of this tax being collected has been found in the archives of the Kingdom of Travancore furthermore the theory of this tax loses weight because the historic sources who mention this tax do not give any primary sources or secondary sources furthermore many social reformers like Periyar were present in South India and Ambedkar who succeeded in giving rights to Lower caste women .Their lack of protest against this outrageous tax further cements the point that tax never existed. This tax was never recorded by any British official working in India.This tax was first bought up by a CPI-M in their bid to win over the Lower caste

Background

The breast tax was supposedly forced by the landowning Brahmin king 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 "breast tax" Dr Sheeba KM, Professor of gender ecology and Dalit studies says the very purpose of the breast tax was to maintain the caste hierarchy.

The law resulted from Travancore's tradition, in which the breast was bared as a symbol of respect to higher-status people. For example, the Nair women were not allowed to cover their bosoms 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, the 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

Main article: Channar revolt

During the time of Travancore, lower-caste women were not allowed to wear clothes that covered their breasts. Higher-class women covered both breasts and shoulders, whereas lower castes including Nadar and Ezhava women were not allowed to cover their breasts, to show their low status. 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. This led to violence between the upper caste and lower castes.

From 1813 to 1859 several laws were enacted and removed by the Kingdom of 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 its peak when two Nadar women were stripped of their upper clothes and hung on a tree in public for covering their breasts by Travancore officials. 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 the right for all Nadar women 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.

The story of Nangeli

Main article: Nangeli

The village-legend 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, the died of blood loss. Following the death of Nangeli, a series of people's movements were set off. Soon the place she lived had come to be called as 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. 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. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference :2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. Cite error: The named reference Jacob_1990 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. Judge, Paramjit; Bal, Gurpreet (1996). Strategies of Social Change in India. MD Publications. p. 167. ISBN 9788175330061,. Retrieved 11 July 2021. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  6. Robert L. Hardgrave (1969). The Nadars of Tamilnad. University of California Press. pp. 59–62. OCLC 12064.
  7. 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.
  8. "Women at the Intersection of Caste and Sex: History of Breast Tax". in.makers.yahoo.com. Retrieved 10 July 2021.
  9. ^ Cohn 1996, p. 140.
  10. Hardgrave, Robert L. (1969). The Nadars of Tamilnad. University of California Press. pp. 55-70.
  11. ^ "Re-writing History, Saffronising Education: Remembering Nangeli Lest Government Makes Us Forget". NewsClick. 19 March 2019. Retrieved 13 November 2019.
  12. ^ "Travancore parallel: the fight to wear an upper garment". The Indian Express. 18 October 2018. Retrieved 13 November 2019.
  13. ^ "A struggle for decent dress". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 15 November 2019.
  14. ^ Ponnumuthan 1996, p. 109.
  15. ^ Cohn 1996, p. 141.
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference :4 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. Ross 2008, p. 78.
  18. Jones 1989, p. 159.
  19. Ponnumuthan 1996, p. 110.
  20. Cohn 1996, p. 141-142.
  21. Kertzer 1988, p. 113.
  22. ^ 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.
  23. Surendranath, Nidhi (21 October 2013). "200 years on, Nangeli's sacrifice only a fading memory". The Hindu. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
  24. Singh, Vijay (7 March 2016). "She died fighting 'breast tax', her name lives on". Times of India. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
  25. ^ Pillai, Manu S. (18 February 2017). "The woman who cut off her breasts". The Hindu. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
  26. "Revisiting Nangeli, the Woman with No Breasts". NewsClick. 3 November 2019. Retrieved 15 January 2021.

Sources

Categories: