The Low Castes of Tranquebar: Museum Collecting with special focus on culture, religion and everyday life of the low castes and religious minorities.

• Project leader: Bente Wolff, Curator at the National Museum of Denmark, Ethnographic Collection.

• Project participant: Caroline Lillelund, Research assistant, student of the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen.

The project is financed by the Bikuben Foundation and is part of the Galathea3 expedition

When the Danish merchants and colonial officials came to Tranquebar, they encountered a cultural, religious, and economical diversity unlike that of even the most composed European societies. Wealthy princes with grand palaces, ascetic hermit priests, snake charmers, fishermen, basket makers and isolated “primitive” tribes were all integrated into a social system of numerous castes and religious groups with mutual rights and obligations. This multiplicity of cultures and communities both fascinated and astonished the newly arrived Danes.   

The grand princely courts have now disappeared and India has adopted a democratic constitution, which provides equal rights to all citizens, regardless of caste and creed. However, it is still a society marked by large economic and cultural differences that encounters the visitor to Tranquebar. Today as under the colonial rule, the inhabitants of Tranquebar generally live in different streets and neighbourhoods, separated according to caste and religion – and as in all of southern India, the low castes still live in separate hamlets outside the town.

This collection project of the Tranquebar Initiative now focuses particularly on the culture and lifestyles of the low castes, and of the Christian and Muslim minorities. They are all groups whose characteristic traditions and conditions of life often evade attention in museum exhibits’ broad representation of Indian culture, though these groups totally constitute more than one third of the Indian population.

Like in the rest of India, the low castes in Tranquebar are generally very poor and only possess very few belongings. Thus, it is a special challenge to collect objects that reflect the rich culture and cosmology of these castes. Photographic documentation of rituals and daily life will therefore supplement the collection of objects, to better illustrate the close connection between caste, occupation, and cultural tradition.

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