India (45 page)

Mr Veeramani was born in 1933, in the town of Cuddalore. His father was a tailor. Tailoring was an ‘imported’ profession (the way coffee was ‘an imported item’), and so it wasn’t associated with a particular caste, like weaving. Cuddalore was a port, and Mr Veeramani’s father, in addition to his local trade, did a certain amount of tailoring for foreign sailors. Mr Veeramani’s father was as a result quite well off; but much of his money went first on a court case (he was an expert in stick-fighting and wrestling, trained people in these arts, and in a roundabout way he found himself dragged into a serious local feud); and then the rest of his money went on medical expenses when he fell ill with filarial fever, caused by infected water.

One of Mr Veeramani’s school-teachers was an admirer of Periyar, and important in the Self-Respect movement. This teacher, a man of about twenty-eight or thirty when Mr Veeramani got to know him, had changed his name from Subramaniam (the name of a Hindu deity) to Dravidarmani, which meant ‘an important Dravidian person’. He got Mr Veeramani to change his name as well: from Sarangapani, the name of a god, to Veeramani, ‘brave man’, ‘hero’.

When he was about ten or so, Mr Veeramani acted in a school play, and Mr Dravidarmani was so impressed by the boy’s talents that he began writing speeches on the Self-Respect theme for the boy to deliver at public meetings. In 1944 in Cuddalore there was a Dravidian Conference. Periyar came to that. There also came a famous atheist Tamil poet who was a disciple of Periyar’s. The poet’s name was Bharathidasam. He was forty-seven, originally of the weaver caste, and he lived in great poverty in the town of Pondicherry (then a French colonial enclave in British India). He was thought of as the Shelley and the Whitman of the movement. There was a poem of Bharathidasam’s that was regularly quoted in Self-Respect speeches. Mr Veeramani gave me this translation of the poem:

Unlike Periyar, who was short and very fat, an avuncular-looking old man, Bharathidasam was forbidding. He was tall and very big. He wore a dhoti, a shirt, and a red shawl – red for the revolution. He lost his temper easily and had the reputation of always speaking his mind.

It was in the presence of this man, and Periyar, that the ten-year old Mr Veeramani acted out the speech his teacher had written for him to deliver at the Dravidian Conference. The speech was in Periyar’s broadest anti-brahmin, anti-Hindu style. It was about the absurdity of the Hindu myth that brahmins had sprung from the head of Brahma, kshatriyas or warriors from his arms, banias or merchants from his thighs, and shudras from his feet. How – the ten-year-old asked the conference – could someone not a woman give birth to people from so many parts of the body from which birth couldn’t take place?

Periyar was impressed by the speech, and after that Mr Veeramani became one of the recognized speakers for the Self-Respect movement. He used to be billed as the ten-year-old rationalist, and soon he began to write (or at any rate to make up) his own speeches.

In 1949, five years after the Cuddalore conference, there was a split in the movement. It was caused by Periyar’s decision, at the age of seventy, to marry for the second time.

The woman he wanted to marry was the daughter of a timber merchant in Vellore. The family were supporters of the movement, and Periyar used to stay in their house when he went to Vellore. The daughter was training to be a teacher; but her mother, though she was a follower of Periyar, was yet sufficiently influenced by traditional ways to want her daughter to give up the idea of teaching and to get married. The daughter was twenty-five; that was thought to be very old. When the daughter got to know what her mother’s plans for her were, she left the family house in Vellore and went to stay in a far-off place in a school-teacher’s house.

Periyar knew the daughter. When he heard what had happened, he called the daughter away from the school-teacher’s house and he put her up in his own house in the town of Erode. He refused to let her go back to her mother’s house. He made the young
woman his secretary; she also became his nurse; and six years later they were married. She was thirty-one then; Periyar was seventy.

This was the story Mr Veeramani told me, and he was anxious for me to understand why Periyar had married at this late age. Periyar had accumulated a lot of property. He didn’t want this property to pass to his relatives. He wanted it to be used for the movement, and he thought that this could be best done by leaving it to his secretary-nurse. Under Hindu law, however, he could make her his legal heir only by marrying her.

Not everyone understood the motives, and an important section of the movement broke away to form their own group. Mr Veeramani, however, at this stage a fifteen-year-old rationalist, remained loyal to Periyar. He remained loyal when he went to the university; he remained loyal when he began to study law. And then, while he was still doing his law studies, something important happened.

In 1957 Periyar was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for burning the Indian Constitution. (There was an illustration of this episode, literal, clear, and cool, in the relic-room of the Periyar Thidal.) Up to this time Mr Veeramani had just been a propagandist for the movement, energetic and with a reputation, but still at a distance from Periyar. Now, with the great man in jail, Mr Veeramani found himself touring the state with Periyar’s wife, Mrs Manyammai – as Mr Veeramani called her.

When Periyar came out of jail, he sent for Mr Veeramani. Periyar was in the town of Tiruchy. Mr Veeramani went there immediately.

Periyar said to him, ‘What about your future? Are you going to get married?’

It was a surprising question, because Periyar was against early marriages; he thought they worked against the uplift of non-brahmins. Mr Veeramani at this time was twenty-five, and he still had more than a year to do at Madras Law College.

Mr Veeramani said, ‘Sir, I don’t think marriage is a necessity at this stage. I don’t have my own economic independence, and I would like to give my most to the party.’

Periyar said, ‘But it’s only in the interests of the party that I’m suggesting marriage to you.’

The girl or young woman whom Periyar wanted Mr Veeramani to marry was the eldest daughter of a couple for whom, in 1933,
Periyar had performed a Self-Respect marriage. That Self-Respect marriage had become politically famous, because in 1952 its validity had been challenged in the courts. But – sentiment apart – Periyar’s real reason for wanting Mr Veeramani to marry the daughter of that couple was that the family was well-to-do, the father belonging to a merchant community, the mother coming from a landowning family; and marriage to the daughter would enable Mr Veeramani to work full time for the movement.

When Mr Veeramani understood this, he said to Periyar, ‘If it is in the largest interests of the party, I will obey your command.’

Mrs Manyammai then went to Mr Veeramani’s parents to give them the news that their son was going to get married, and after this she took Mr Veeramani to the girl’s house in Tiruannamalai. They went by train and bus and finally arrived at the farm-house where the girl and her mother were staying. There was a lot of fertile land attached to the farm-house – rice fields and groundnut fields. After the usual preliminaries the girl came came out and served some food (a curious remnant of old ritual), and then went back inside. But, in fact, she knew Mr Veeramani well, from his appearances in public meetings.

Six months later the marriage took place. Periyar and Mrs Manyammai sent out the invitations in their own names, so the wedding gathering was like another Dravidian conference. The wedding itself took place on a Sunday afternoon at five. The time was chosen quite deliberately, because orthodox Hindus considered it an especially inauspicious time. The atheist poet Bharathidasam, the Whitman-like figure of the movement, read out a poem he had composed for the occasion.

There was a curious sequel: in his final law examination, Mr Veeramani found himself having to answer a question about the 1933 Self-Respect marriage of his in-laws.

The marriage had worked out as Periyar had hoped. Mr Veeramani had been free to do his work for the Dravidar Kazagham, the Dravidian Movement, and had kept Periyar’s name and message alive. And now, after all the ups and downs of the last 30 years, Periyar’s more-than-life-size portrait was to be seen in many places in Madras, and Mr Veeramani, keeper of the flame, moved through Madras like a hero.

The house in which Mr Veeramani lived belonged to his wife. It was in the Adiyar area of Madras, near the Theosophical Society.
It was a big concrete house, fifteen years old. It was on three floors, and the Veeramanis occupied one floor.

High up on a wall in the drawing-room was a big black-and-white photograph of Periyar and Mrs Manyammai. Periyar was seated, holding his stout stick with the curved handle. The other components of his appearance were now well known to me: the big, wavy beard, the dhoti, the shawl, the black shirt. Mrs Manyammai, steady-eyed, stood plump and firm in a black sari at the side of his chair, and her right hand rested on the back of the chair.

It seemed fitting for that photograph to have a place of honour in Mr Veeramani’s drawing-room: that marriage of Periyar’s was like a forerunner of Mr Veeramani’s.

Mrs Veeramani served tea and withdrew: dutiful and correct, saying little, and still like someone serving a cause. Though, if one didn’t know what that cause was, one might never have guessed, so traditional and demure and self-effacing was her manner.

In that family atmosphere, below Periyar’s photograph, Mr Veeramani told me about the practical side of Periyar. He had come from a rich merchant family, and he had made himself richer.

‘He was very careful. He was a custodian not only of human rights, but of the party property rights. He multiplied those rights by investing in mills and banks. In 1973 his worth, or his party’s worth, was more than two crores.’ Twenty million rupees, a million pounds. ‘Now the property is worth about 10 crores.’ Four million pounds.

‘People would give him money. And when, say, he had got 99 rupees, he would take a rupee from Mrs Manyammai, and he would convert those 100 rupees into a 100-rupee note, so that he wouldn’t easily spend it. Mrs Manyammai would laugh.’ Mr Veeramani laughed too. ‘ “Frugality, thy name is Periyar!” The whole of Tamil Nadu knows it. Even for his signature he used to charge. Instead of garlands, he asked people to give him two rupees.’

He charged for his speeches, and he made two or three a day, travelling an average of 200 miles a day in the van his supporters had given him. His last speech was made five days before he died, at the age of ninety-four. He had married Mrs Manyammai when he was seventy, so that she would inherit his property; but their
marriage lasted 24 years, and she outlived him by only five years. Then the mantle had passed to Mr Veeramani.

Mr Veeramani’s eldest son was an engineer, studying in Boston. His second son had a degree in commerce, and was now in plastics. And the first daughter was also in the United States, doing a master’s degree in information systems. Mr Veeramani’s father had been a tailor in the town of Cuddalore. The world had opened out for his grandchildren in a way he could not have imagined.

On the wall opposite the one with the photograph of Periyar and his wife there was a 1989 Tamil Tigers calendar, hanging above a bookcase. The calendar had a big colour photograph of the two Tamil Tiger leaders, Pirabhakaran and Mathaiya. They were shown in sun-struck, hot-looking woodland, and they were in camouflage guerrilla garb. They were both fat and big-bellied, and smiling, as though at the absurdity of the uniform they had put on for the calendar photograph. But they were not clownish at all. They had brought chaos to Sri Lanka. And their calendar for 1989 was here, in Mr Veeramani’s drawing-room. The rationalist movement of Tamil Nadu, the anti-brahmin movement, also contained this idea of Tamil glory, past and present.

Until this trip to Madras, Periyar had been barely a name to me; and I had never heard of Mr Veeramani. But for 40 years Mr Veeramani had been at the centre of an immense local revolution, which, with all the economic and intellectual growth that had come to independent India, had taken on the characteristics of a little war; and so far Mr Veeramani had been on the winning side.

The same could not be said of Kakusthan. A good half of his story had been of retreat and flight – until family feeling and filial piety had made him turn back and consciously embrace an archaic way. But perhaps the comparison of Mr Veeramani with Kakusthan wasn’t just. Perhaps a better comparison would have been with those brahmins who had moved from old learning to new, from temple rituals to science, the brahmins who (almost in the manner of Mr Veeramani) had broken out of old ways more radically.

Madras, with the sculptured towers of its temples, its special foods, the idlis and dosas, its music and its dance, the museum with the great bronzes, could appear to the visitor to be still a whole culture. It took time to understand that a usurpation had
taken place, that brahmins were on the defensive, though they were still the musicians and dancers, still the cooks, still the priests in the temples.

It was hard not to feel sad at the undoing of a culture. But the brahmin cause – if such a cause existed – could not be isolated from all the other Indian causes. It was better to see the undoing of a culture – the rise of Mr Veeramani, the flight and transformation of the brahmins – as part of a more general movement forward.

Bharathidasam, the atheist poet of the Dravidian Movement, wore a red shawl – red for the revolution. The flag of the DMK, the political party that had grown out of the Dravidian Movement, was red and black – red for the revolution, black for the Dravidian cause. The two colours, taken together, might have been thought to stand for all the insulted and injured of Tamil Nadu, all the people whom the especial brahmin rigidity of the South had put outside the pale. But the Dravidian Movement represented only the middle castes – Periyar himself was a man of a merchant caste – who, in other parts of India, had a fairly honourable place in the caste system. Below those middle castes, now triumphant, there were, as always in India, others. They, too, had been shaken up; they too had begun to stake their claim.