The car and the palanquin: rival accounts of the 1895 riot in Kalugumalai, South India

The 1895 riot at Kalugumalai in the Tirunelveli District of Madras Presidency, South India, pitted the local Nadar community, then newly-converted to Roman Catholicism, against the main Hindu castes of Kalugumalai, particularly those associated with its Hindu temple and the Ettaiyapuram zamindari estate within which the town lay. It was the violent climax to a long-running dispute over the Nadars' right to take processions through the main streets, and one of the bloodiest episodes in a conflict which posed a severe threat to public order throughout South India in the late nineteenth century. The first and most straightforward purpose of the present article is to provide a more balanced description of what actually happened in Kalugumalai on that occasion, for the 'official' accounts of these events, the only documentary sources cited by historians hitherto, are markedly one-sided and seem to result from an attempt to play down the complicity or, at the very least, incompetence of the police and local judiciary. Its second purpose is to re-examine this riot in the light of recent writing on the history of 'communal' - that is, collective and religiously inspired - violence in South Asia.