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From Landlords to Software Engineers: Migration and Urbanization among Tamil Brahmans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2008

C. J. Fuller  and
Haripriya Narasimhan
Haripriya Narasimhan
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Extract

In south India's rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry, the small, traditional elite of Tamil Brahmans is disproportionately well represented. Actually, no figures to confirm this assertion exist, but all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it is true, especially among the IT professionals and software engineers employed by the leading software and services companies in Chennai (Madras).1 Since the nineteenth century, Tamil Brahmans have successfully entered several new fields of modern professional employment, particularly administration, law, and teaching, but also engineering, banking, and accountancy. Hence the movement into IT, despite some novel features, has clear precedents. All these professional fields require academic qualifications, mostly at a higher level, and the Brahmans' success is seemingly explained by their standards of modern education, which reflect their caste traditions of learning.2

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 170 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

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