“Tamil Brahmans is a solid, original work that makes a major contribution to our understanding of a vitally important part of the world and of a unique group of people whose numbers in the United States are growing year by year and who are becoming increasingly influential at the highest professional levels in medicine, law, academia, business, and government.”
— Sylvia J. Vatuk, University of Illinois at Chicago
“For decades to come, if someone wants to understand the history and sociology of how and with what social effects the Tamil Brahmans have transformed themselves into a middle-class caste, they will read this book. Quite simply there is nothing comparable. Through comparisons with other Brahman communities throughout India, the authors show that the community-wide uniformity of Tamil Brahman achievement makes them truly unique.”
— Mattison Mines, University of California, Santa Barbara
“This historical analysis of ‘TamBrams,’ written by a unique combination of sociologists, both insider and outsider, provides essential fleshing out of our sociological understanding of caste and class, which has tended to concentrate on the lower end of the caste spectrum. It shows how it is not merely the lower castes who invoke their ‘caste identity’ in contrast to the castelessness and ‘merit’ of the middle classes, but that caste has been critical to the formation and professional success of an urban, ‘modern’ middle class like the Tamil Brahmans. This book is an indispensible read not just for all those who wish to understand caste formation, mobility, and change over the past two centuries, but also for Tamil Brahmans themselves. It will help them rethink the notion that their professional achievements are somehow exceptional and biologically rooted in their caste and see them instead as a product of the opportunities provided by the colonial and postcolonial state.”
— Nandini Sundar, Delhi University
“An essential read for all those who wish to understand how the concepts of both class and caste have changed. And for the community itself, an ‘unusual social group’, as Fuller and Narasimhan refer to them, this book will help them learn and reflect upon their achievements, gain a wider perspective of their history, and smile knowingly at the descriptions of their present lives.”
— Radhika Santhanam, The Hindu
“Drawing on interviews, historical statistics, and active engagement with former studies of Brahmans and other privileged communities in South India, C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan have written an impressive biography of one of India's high-status communities over the past 150-odd years. . . . Tamil Brahmans will be a standard reference in the scholarship of Tamil Nadu and the conundrum of caste and class in general for many years to come.”
— American Anthropologist
"This study is significant for its explicit focus on the dynamics of an elite group’s dominance in
the face of strong societal transformations, even as much social scientific inquiry focuses on
‘the subaltern’. Moreover, it fleshes out at least one historically significant instance by which
caste and class privileges relate to each other, undergo transformations and persist in new
ways in contemporary Indian society."
— South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies