What is "pillai"

Pillai, Pillay, Pulle, Pilli or Pillaimar (, ) is an upper caste title used by land-owning castes of Tamil- and Malayalam-speaking people of India, Sri Lanka and others living in Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa and Fiji, mostly from the Vellalar community in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and Nair community in Kerala.

South African Tamils use the spelling Pillay, whereas some Sri Lankan castes may also use Pulle or Pilli.

Yadava (Tamil Yadav) also uses Pillai as sur name. At end of the Nineteenth Century, leaders of Yadava associations had their Sur name as pillai. Most notable persons are

Kuppusamy Pillai, Thana Pillai (Advocate), Krishnasamy Pillai, Kesava Pillai. Then many Tamil Yadavas used Pillai instead of yadav.

Pillai is a Tamil speaking community hailing from the elite caste of landlords called Vellalars. The Vellalars identified with ruling authority and were lords in the predominantly wet land villages which they controlled.

Pillai may refer to:

• Pillai (title), a title used by various social and religious groups of South India and Sri Lanka

''(includes a list of people with this title)

• Pillai (community), a community from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka
• Pillai (Nair title), a title used by Nairs of Kerala
• Pilai, a Finnish bagpipe
• The Pillai statistic used in multivariate statistics, named after K. C. Sreedharan Pillai
• The Indian mathematician Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai

Pillai is a title of nobility among the Nairs of Kerala. Early English records address them as the princes of medieval Kerala ranking below the monarch. The most well known are the Pillais of the Eight Noble Houses, the Ettuveettil Pillamar of Travancore. Pillais created before the new state of Travancore was formed by Marthanda Varma are known by their family names and those elevated by Marthanda Varma or after use it as a suffix to their given name. It is from the former that the matriarchal heads of Travancore Royal Family took their consorts from. After the arrival of the refugee princes of Northern Malabar fleeing the invasion of Tippu Sultan, this practice was dropped and the refugee princes were raised to the status of Koyi Thampuran