Honor and privilege

Kaniyatci, one of the fundamental rights in local society, was seen, inter alia, as a right (urimai) to a share (panku) in one's local temple (kovil). Without this right, one did not qualify as a full member of the local community. As we have seen in the last two chapters, temples were often regarded as the primary institution which enabled the formation of communities. These then took on consanguineous, affinal, and territorial forms. The temple was the common ground where each caste had a role, and where the position of each unit of the community was ordered with respect to all the other constituent units. Each social and territorial unit – from the subcaste natu to the village, from the lineage to the family – had a temple which defined its social and ritual being. Temples also situated local society within the larger context of the subcaste/territory and the little kingdom by creating contexts for participation and worship stretching all the way up to the grand state festivals which took place in the tutelary temple of the royal family. Everyone in the state worshipped the family deity of the Tondaimans.