This dissertation work focuses on the cultural work of the ubiquitous and highly heterogeneous dominant caste group known as vēḷāḷars (“cultivators”) in modern Tamil south India. Many vēḷāḷar subcastes are known for their relatively high ritual status, caste-endogamous marriage practices, ownership and management of agrarian land, and often, their political visibility. Significantly, for this project, vēḷāḷars also represent a group whose agrarian pasts are supplemented by their pre-eminence in the fields of literary and musical production across the Tamil-speaking world. In this dissertation I demonstrate how vēḷāḷars emerged as cultural stewards within the political matrix of colonial power through their participation in literary and musical patronage, print culture, as well as their deep involvement in the shaping of modern Tamil Śaiva religion and Dravidianist politics. My project thus seeks to reposition vēḷāḷar participation at the center of Tamil cultural production from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. It does so by thinking critically about the deployment of caste-based power by vēḷāḷars in the fields of musical production as well as patronage, the mediating role played by vēḷāḷar- dominated religious institutions, and the place of vēḷāḷar philanthropists and intellectuals in the cultural life of modern South India. By mobilizing extant caste-based power centered in Śaiva monasteries such those at Dharmapuram and Thiruvavaduthurai, founded by vēḷāḷar preceptors of the Śaiva Siddhānta lineage in the sixteenth century, and by publishing caste purāṇas or “mytho-genealogies” that imagined them as stewards of Tamil Śaivism and Tamil society-at- large, vēḷāḷars are also among the first authors and ideologues to forge and disseminate discourses on Dravidianism in the Tamil language in the twentieth century. Although the main focus of this project is the dominant vēḷāḷar caste community, a parallel discussion that takes place throughout the dissertation is that of service caste communities who traditionally were considered subordinate to the vēḷāḷars. Service caste communities (including hereditary musicians, dancers, and others) scramble to confirm their affiliation with vēḷāḷars and even claim vēḷāḷar-hood for themselves in the early twentieth century, and this is a stark example of vēḷāḷar power in this period. These modes of identification and the idea of “aspirational vēḷāḷar-hood” are clearly visible in the successful religious careers of two modern figures who are central to this project: Kirupāṉanta Vāriyār (1906-1993) and Cāyimātā Civa Piruntā Tevī (1927-1998). In re-centering the vēḷāḷar in the cultural history of Tamil Nadu, this dissertation provides a tangible example of how caste elites deploy culture in projects of identity-making and social ascendancy in modern India.