The Pallar, who prefer to be called Mallar, is a Tamilsub-caste of peasants found in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The Pallars own small bits of dry lands and do cultivation but to supplement their income they work as tenant agriculturists. The Pallars traditionally inhabited the fertile wetland area referred to as Marutham in the literary devices of the Sangam landscape.
Etymology
The Pallar name may be derived from pallam, which means a pit or low-lying area. This aligns with their traditional occupation of cultivators of the low wetlands. There is literary evidence that suggests that Pallars were traditional farmers who produced large quantities of food grains, and that some were probably rulers in the Tamil region. The name of the caste has previously been spelled as Pallan; however, some caste members replaced the Tamil non-honorific terminal-"n" with an honorific "r", resulting in the name Pallar; a similar process was seen in other Tamil communities. The change of name from Mallar to Pallar is thought to have been imposed upon them after the decline of their rule, when the leaders of competing tribes wanted to suggest a degradation in status. Some Pallars today prefer the Mallar name due to their belief that Pallar is a derogatory term.
History
The Pallars traditionally inhabited the fertile wetland area referred to as Marutham in the literary devices of the Sangam landscape. Vendan, also known as Devendra and identified with Indra, is the god of the Marutham landscape and also one of the chief deities of the Pallars. According to some historians, the Pallars are descendants of the Pallavas who ruled the Andhra and Tamil countries between the 6th and 9th centuries; Pallars themselves may have ruled in the 14th-15th centuries. The socio-economic position of the Pallar as bonded servants working on farms is a central theme of Pallu poetry.
Nowadays, community members prefer to refer to themselves as Devendra Kula Velalar, a name connoting that they were created by the god Devendra. In support of a name change to DKV, Pallars have undertaken hunger strikes and rallies. The Puthiya Tamilagam claims to have campaigned for the appellation of DKV to be applied to the Pallar, Kudumbar, Kaladi, Mooppan, Devendra Kulathan and Pannadi communities since the 1990s and between 2006-2011 a one-man commission looked into it on behalf of the state government, then controlled by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Nothing came of the commission because the DMK lost power in 2011. The PT then allied with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in the hope that this would lead to the renaming but by 2015 had become frustrated with the inaction and was organising protests. In 2016, the national government, run by the Bharatiya Janata Party, announced it would appoint anthropologists to investigate the DKV claim in relation to the Pallar, Kudumbar, Pannadi, Kaladi, Kadayan, Devendra Kulathan and Vadhiriyar communities. It said that the decision was not motivated by a desire for political support from the affected communities but rather a reaction to a petition organised by the Thevendrar Thannarva Arakattalai that had attracted over 500,000 signatories. Whilst the TTA said at the time that the change of name would have no effect on the Scheduled Caste status enjoyed by the communities under India's system of positive discrimination, by 2018 the PT leader, K. Krishnasamy, was demanding that they be removed from that classification. This announcement met with criticism, in part because it was claimed that Krishnasamy had only in the previous year become an advocate for the putative DVK communities and that previously he had been concerned more generally with Dalit politics. Doubts were expressed by Dalit intellectuals regarding whether Krishnasamy actually had the support of the majority of people from the affected communities for an idea which had originated with the Sangh Parivar and which, it was claimed, Krishnasamy was "latching on to" because he was "losing his political relevance". It was argued that the Vellalar term implied that the communities were adopting the sanskritisation process and that this would further emphasis caste divisions in a society that should be lessening them.
