Eswari watched a crow saunter into the cooking hut and grab a piece of dried fish. Boldly. Right in front of the eyes of several conversing women. She grumbled:

Puzzled, I asked her to elaborate.

In her exasperation with the audaciousness of the thieving crows, Eswari offered an elegant conceit for expressing what it means to be agnatic kin – fellow members of a patrilineage (hereafter lineage-mates) – and how markedly this differs from being an affine. The crow is ‘a scavenger bird and is everywhere associated with death and accordingly is impure’ (Srinivas 1952: 106). In Indian folktales, the crow is often associated with untouchability – an ascribed and inescapable impurity (Dundes 1997). Crow symbolism is premised on an almost entirely negative portrayal through showcasing the bird's associations with death, impurity, and untouchability. In Vaduvur however, crows are esteemed, albeit reluctantly.

Crows haunt this chapter – alerting us to the rupture of death, the trauma of loss, and the burden of remembrance. In their temerity, they embody the discriminations between different kinds of kin and how they are expected to act. Above all, they foretell the persistence of kinship and especially the insistence on lineage among the Kallars. Here, I trace how political subjectivity is produced through kinship between persons. Unravelling the intricacies of a funeral complex and its aftermath makes clear how fundamental lineage is to definitions of Kallar personhood. Just as the crematory fire disintegrates a dead body into ashes, a funeral ritually decomposes a socially complex and relationally extensive person down to their elemental core. a socially complex and relationally extensive person down to their elemental core. Counterintuitively factoring out competing loyalties, a funeral ritually returns a person to their primordial source, the lineage, and their essential self, as a lineage-mate.