Identity and "twisted" debt relationships in Kerala, India

This is a story about what happened to people and spirits in the ancestral land when "inalienable" ancestral land was alienated. Hindu Malayalis are closely related to soil/land and ancestors in it. This intimate relationships with soil/land is much stronger among the "Untouchables". The ancestral land of the "Untouchables" is believed to embody powerful "life force" (shakti) and "fault" (doosham) which are believed to be concentrated in a "sacred grove" (kaavu) in their ancestral land. The "sacred grove" (kaavu) is a symbol and a metonym of ancestors, "life force" (shakti), and "fault" (doosham). There are many "sacred groves" in the landscape of Kerala. The "sacred groves", puja performed in front of them, and stories of the "sacred groves" narrated by people express the inseparability and con-substantiality of ancestors, ancestral land and descendants. In the recent past, many higher caste creditors took the ancestral land of the "Untouchables" debtors who pawned the land as security. In this paper I shall describe the way in which the high caste creditors became indebted to the ancestor spirits of the low caste debtors. The new owners of the land made a regular cash gift to the original owners of the land. Yet this process was not automatically "regulated" by the "structural mechanisms". In one case, a new landowner suffered from misfortunes known locally as the "misfortune of land" (vastuned doosham) and the "misfortune of god" (deeva doosham). Nevertheless, he refused to return the land to its original owner. On the other hand, the original owner attempted to extract more land from its new owner than was prescribed by an astrologer. In another case, a new landowner who "owned" the land of the debtor returned the land to the latter, for he feared the "life force" (shakti) and "fault" (doosham) embodied in the land. [author's abstract]