India (38 page)

Sadanand said, The DMK came to power in 1967’ – the year I had come to Madras for the second time, and I had gone to see Sugar and his father in their two-storey house in Mylapore, and Sugar had told me about the books of prophecy – ‘and they created a ministry, the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments, the
HR&CE. The HR&CE minister controlled the enormous resources of the Hindu temples and trusts. Land, fixed assets, jewelry – every temple has enormous amounts of jewelry: the idols themselves, and the daily donations. The donations to a temple are anonymous; there is no means of accounting for them. The temple wealth was unassessable. How could you put a value on a 10th-century Shiva? After this – and this was quite separate from what the government was doing – the idols began to be stolen and were replaced by replicas. Archaeologists have recently pointed out large-scale replacement of temple icons by fakes. The originals have ended in private collections around the world.’

‘Didn’t the DMK mind about that? Isn’t it their art too?’

The DMK didn’t think twice about that. They were dealing with the enemy. At the same time the new government started on a policy of distributing temple lands to the landless. But this was a notional thing. The names of 200 people could be produced who had been given one acre of temple land each, but actually that land might all belong to one man or the party. The people didn’t get anything out of it.’

Sadanand spoke of this as the ‘looting’ of the temples, using that word – originally a Hindi word, and this fact reflecting something of the history of India – in the Indian sense. Had the brahmins been impoverished as result?

‘In most of the temples the brahmins became simply the conductors of rituals, the purohits, and certainly there was impoverishment.’ But more important, in Sadanand’s account, was the downgrading of the temples. ‘The temples as originally conceived were largely social institutions. Each temple had schools, granaries, facilities for large-scale water-storage – the origin of the temple tank – hospitals, stalls for cows. They were also patrons of the arts. But the DMK made crude equations. The temple became equated with oppression of a certain sort, and then the whole thing was vandalized, without discrimination.’

The movement claimed to have a link with the non-brahmin past of Tamil Nadu, and especially with the Chola emperors of the eighth to the 10th centuries. But this again, according to Sadanand, was glib and unhistorical.

‘The Cholas were democrats, if you can imagine democracy within a feudal structure. But they were also the imperialists of the area, and the Chola symbol of the movement is the symbol of
Tamil imperialism, nothing else. The Cholas were known to be learned people, to have written books on astronomy, and to have been patrons of the arts. The DMK Chola symbol stands for none of this. The Chola kings developed fascinating systems of irrigation in the Tanjore area. The DMK never bothered to look at irrigation.’

Out of their narrowness, their regionalism, their caste obsessions, other things suffered. The English language suffered. The number of people from the state holding positions in the central government declined; many of the central government officers in Tamil Nadu now came from outside. The Tamil language itself deteriorated.

The movement is not creative any more. Tamil has become a language which is incapable of expressing one modern idea. It’s a fosssilized language, and this is reflected in the quality of Tamil journalism. Much of it is frivolous, inane.

The movement still has a place. But what it keeps reproducing nowadays is this parody. Out of it there has come an impoverished iconography. You saw that flat cut-out of Periyar on the bed. That idea was extended later to the politicians of the movement, the leaders of the DMK and its successor parties. They were projected as giants in 8o-foot cut-outs – a substitute for what they have lost. And religious or neo-religious movements have become stronger in Tamil Nadu.

The current neo-religious movement here is the Adi Parashakti cult. You’ll find it at a place half-way between Madras and Pondicherry. It’s a cult of the primal mother – the Dravidian religion, as opposed to the Aryan religion, was mother-centred. From that has emerged this new cult. Just this one man, a schoolteacher, claimed one fine day that he had had a dream of this Mother or Shakti coming to him and ordering him to propagate her name. He claims that when he woke up there was an idol of Adi Parashakti growing out of the earth in front of him. The followers of this cult have a uniform, red and red. This is one of the paradoxical fall-outs of the rationalist movement.’

There was a deeper irony. The anti-brahmin movement was not a movement of all the non-brahmin castes. It was a movement mainly of the middle castes. There was, as ever in India, a further lower level, a further level of disadvantage. For these people at the very bottom the DMK offered no protection.

Sadanand said, ‘The DMK came to power in 1967, talking of the oppression of the lower castes. In fact, the most brutal attacks on the scheduled castes have happened post-1967. In 1969 40 harijans were burnt alive in a hut. The caste known as the Thevars was responsible. They are a middle caste, a backward caste who have in the last 100 years come up socially and are now powerful, with their own caste association. They are one of the most militant castes. They call themselves the
kshatriyas
, the warriors, of the Tamil hierarchical order. The Dravidian Movement had been founded by the middle castes. When their government came to power, they became the oppressors.’

Sadanand’s analysis of the cultural impoverishment brought about by the movement was almost certainly true. It was there in the iconography; it was there in the exaggerations and simplicities and contradictions of Periyar’s speeches, where words seemed to have been loved for their own sake, and where speeches, in order to be relished, had to be spun out, conceit upon conceit. But, equally, there was the passion of the followers of Periyar. Periyar had touched something in these people, something deeper than logic and a regard for historical correctness; that also had to be taken into account.

Mr Gopalakrishnan was the proprietor of Emerald Publishers, publishers of school textbooks and books about the rationalist movement. He told me this story.

‘My father was a very small businessman. He was of the Mudaliar caste. We were lower middle-caste people. He kept a stall. He sold cigarettes, aerated water, little things like that.

‘I became a rationalist in the early 1940s, when I was ten or thereabouts. I was a student at the Sri Ramakrishna High School in Madras. It was a brahmin-dominated school. Even the peons and the watermen, four or five of them, were brahmins. We were only a few non-brahmins in each class. Every day we got sermons from some of our teachers that we were only fit for grazing cattle. We heard that from three teachers in particular. They thought that non-brahmins shouldn’t study, and the words they oft repeated were: “Go and graze the cattle.”

‘We had to go to the prayer meeting in the prayer hall every morning. The prayers were in Sanskrit. They were the same
prayers every day; they were boring. I had a non-brahmin classmate who didn’t go to the prayer meetings; he would get beatings very often for that. All the boys would come with their caste mark. I used to use a piece of chalk, instead of the so-called sacred ash, to make the horizontal marks on my forehead. My friend never did it, and he was beaten for that, too. He was a creative boy. Ten years later he wrote a play and acted in it – a play with rationalist views.

‘One day, when I was at the school, I had a chance of attending one of Periyar’s meetings. The meeting was in Saidapet, where we were living, and many people, non-brahmins, were going. At that meeting for the first time I was able to understand why the brahmin teachers were so prejudiced against us. Till then I couldn’t understand why they were so prejudiced. I started reading literature published by Periyar’s movement, and the magazines they published. It took me four years to become a complete rationalist.

‘First of all, in 1947 I stopped going to the temple. Until then I used to go with devotion. It was something I had got in babyhood from my mother and my sisters – the environment was like that. In those days the brahmin priests treated their non-brahmin devotees with contempt. The devotees took it for granted: it was the tradition. I used to take it for granted too, in my early days. The priest used to throw the sacred ash with contempt at the non-brahmin devotees, from a distance, whereas the brahmins were allowed to go to the sanctum sanctorum, where the idol actually stands. The non-brahmin devotees could see the idol only at a distance.

‘My stopping temple-going was a gradual process. In my college days I used to read Shaw, Wells, and Russell. Their writings made a big impact, and I had the courage to face the believers in my family and in my society.

‘My mother continued to be ritual-minded. She became worried, many years after, that when she died I might do no ritual for her. But then, three months before she died, she called me to her and told me that I wasn’t to do any ritual for her.

‘Now I ignore the Hindu religion. I don’t waste my time discussing it. I never did any ritual for my mother when she died. That was two years ago. What I do every year on that day is to give new dresses to every granddaughter. That’s all. There’s no community
lecture. No flowers. I just have my mother’s portrait, that’s all.’

More obsessed, with a passion that nothing could assuage, was Mr Palani. He was a small, dark man of sixty-three. He was born in Coimbatore district, and he had fresh memories of the discovery of caste prejudice at his school more than 50 years before.

‘I on my own did not have anything like this anti-brahmin feeling. My brother got admitted to the school where I was. I was doing my fifth standard. My brother was in the fourth standard. One recess, being a fresher, he just followed the other boys to a hotel to drink water. He did what the other boys did. He took a brass tumbler and dipped it in the bowl of water and started drinking it. It was a brahmin hotel – a hotel where people don’t stay, but take their meals. It was a middle-class hotel. The proprietor was terribly angry when he saw my brother putting his hand in the brass bowl and taking water. He emptied the whole bowl outside, and started shouting at my brother.

‘My brother came back weeping to me at the school, and I told him that as we are non-brahmins we are not supposed to take water directly ourselves from the bowl. He should have asked some brahmin boy to take a glass of water and give it to him. Brahmins are lighter in complexion comparatively than we are. My brother said, “Why?” He refused to reconcile with this thing. I started thinking myself. I had just been following the custom that was there. I was eleven; my brother was ten. I had been at the school for a year.

‘We went home and talked to our father. He was a government clerk. He was earning 35 rupees a month. In those days this was supposed to meet the requirements of a small family. My father’s father had been a weaver. We were of the weaver caste, the
sengunthar
caste. But my father had been educated up to the school-leaving certificate, up to the age of sixteen. He was now thirty.

‘When he heard our story, my father said, “This is a custom in these places. So even though it is unfair, you must reconcile.” He followed the rules himself – not wholeheartedly, but he followed. In brahmin hotels he wouldn’t go into the space reserved for brahmins. In those days there were two compartments in any
brahmin hotel, one for brahmins, one for the others. So my father wouldn’t trespass into the brahmin compartment.

‘We were living in a small tiled house, a house with brick walls and a tiled roof. It was a rented house. We were paying about five rupees a month for it. It was not electrified. We had a servant girl whom we fed and paid about three rupees a month.’

‘Did she eat with the family?’

‘She wouldn’t eat with us. She would eat after us. It wasn’t a social discrimination; she was just serving us. She slept in the house. She slept in the adjacent room. We slept – all the children – in the big room. There were three rooms in the house, our parents’ room, the children’s room, and the servant’s room. She came from the village. We knew her family. We had requested them to spare a girl for our house. We were middle-class people.’

‘Was that why your brother reacted as he did?’

‘I’m not sure. It might have been just a human reaction.’ He returned to the story of his political development. ‘Then there was the anti-Hindi agitation in 1938. There had been state legislative assembly elections in 1937 on a limited franchise, and a Congress government had come in. This government proposed to introduce Hindi compulsorily in the schools. There was an agitation started by Tamil scholars and educationists, and by Periyar and his group.

‘Periyar came to talk one evening. It was still daylight when he began, and when the darkness came the Petromax pressure lamps were lighted. He was a stout man, medium height, with a beard. He was wearing a Tamil dhoti and a black shirt, with a shawl over one shoulder. He was fair-complexioned man. He was a Naicker by caste – merchant community.

‘He explained how Hindi was going to eliminate English, and how this elimination of English was going to be a disadvantage for Tamil Nadu. Tamil would become secondary to Hindi in the course of time. Once the language got downgraded, everything related to the culture and the society would also be downgraded. Everybody in the audience agreed with this.

‘This speech was followed by others made by Periyar’s lieutenants. They were young men and middle-class men. One of them was Mr Annadurai. He later founded the DMK, and led it to victory in the state elections in 1967. He was very eloquent. He swayed the people when he started talking. Schools were picketed
on this issue of Hindi, and these leaders undertook a march from the southernmost tip of Tamil Nadu to Madras.’

Seven years before, Gandhi had arrived at the idea of the nonviolent political march. After a long period of thought in his ashram at Ahmedabad, Gandhi had hit on the idea of walking from there to the sea, to make salt: wonderful theatre, with a definite physical goal, and an uncertain outcome; and a wonderful symbolic act of civil disobedience as well, since salt – so cheap, so necessary, and used by even the poorest – was a monopoly of the foreign government. Gandhi’s 1931 salt march lasted many days; it revived and gave new vigour to the national cause. And in 1938 the anti-Hindi march through Tamil Nadu served the Dravidian cause: the Congress state administration dropped the idea of making Hindi compulsory in schools. But Mr Palani didn’t make the Gandhian reference.