What do we learn about south Indian society by studying weavers? South Indian society has been for millennia a commercial society in which textile production and trade have played a prominent role. Yet the images that India conjures up in the minds of scholars are rarely of artisan production and trade; rather, India is perceived as a rural society characterized by provincial villages and interdependent castes organized by agrarian production. These images ignore the weavers who even today form the second largest sector of the south Indian economy. They also largely ignore the interplay between these different sectors of the economy and the south Indian and colonial states that benefited from them. The image of Indian society that emerges is highly local.

The study of the Kaikkoolar weavers in Tamilnadu reveals that this provincial image of Indian society is misleading. The Kaikkoolars have been organized for centuries into supralocal organizations and have been engaged in commercial, often international, trade. As such they have been both a source of wealth for states and, at times, an independent power with which to reckon. In medieval times, they maintained armies not only to protect their warehouses and caravans but also to plunder the agrarian sector. Until the mid-1920s, weavers engaged in constant competition with the dominant agriculturists for status and for control of their regions. Only occasionally were they able to rival the agriculturists' power, but for centuries they maintained a separate locality-segmented confederacy called the seventy-two naaDu and a distinct ritual and status identity in the context of the symbolic division of Tamil society into right-hand and left-hand sections.