"The Kallars of Tamil Nadu were categorized by the British as a 'criminal tribe' in 1918. Anand Pandian's study of the Kallars today asks groundbreaking questions about how subaltern groups, caught in the webs of colonial stereotyping and postcolonial projects of development, use these and other resources to produce their own sense of moral life. Crooked Stalks stands out for its caring and creative deployment of historical, ethnographic, and cultural material in tracking the presence of the colonial past in postcolonial times."--Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference "The government of British India, in exercising its imperial obsession to count and classify, created a census category called 'Criminal Tribes & Castes' under which it (in)famously included the Kallars of South India, a caste since made famous by monographs by Louis Dumont and Nicholas Dirks. Crooked Stalks is also about the Kallars, but its concerns are contemporary and of wider import. It is a study of the self-making of a community shaped by intersecting vectors of civic governmentality, missionary religiosity, the progressivism of modernity, and Tamil (traditional) 'virtuosity,' with the latter encompassing the word's medieval meanings. Crooked Stalks is an original."--E.

Valentine Daniel, author of Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way "Anand Pandian brilliantly explicates the complex linkages between the cultivation and care of the self and the cultivation of the land. I have seen no better illustration of the twin meanings of development as an ethical project and a socioeconomic one. This ethnographically thick, historically embedded volume will be a major contribution to a range of disciplines including anthropology, history, geography, sociology, development studies, and subaltern studies."--Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India.