EAP314/1/1

Hand written petitions sent to Ananji Thevar and his son Pinna Thevar (respectively grand-father and father of the current document holder). These Petitions deal with: application for divorces, agreement for divorce by the village headman, notice of the divorce given to the subcaste headman, property disputes, case of illegitimate children, unpaid "bride price", various inter family disputes, adultery, marriage between prohibited kin relations and prohibited intercaste sexual relations. The panchayat documents share some similarity with the Petition Notebooks in that they were both used to record petitions which were given to the traditional headmen of the Pramalai kallar sub caste as part of the judicial dispute resolution process. The main differences are that the panchayat documents also record the judgments that were handed down at the end of a case, while the notebooks do not and some of these are recorded on stamp paper giving those documents a legal status outside the realm of the subcaste. Furthermore, the panchayat documents were handed to the headmen by their individual applicants while the notebooks contain petitions from whole villages. Several documents included in this series are not related to the issue described but were kept together as a bundle by the document holder and have been included in the series.

230 handwritten and printed paper documents. Legal size paper (height 35.56 cm/width 21.59 cm) and other formats.