India: A Million Mutinies Now

  The film star who had been chief minister for much of the past decade, and whose death had led to the present state election, was shown with dark glasses and a white fur cap. The glasses and the cap had been his trade mark both as a star and a politician. He had been a famous stunt man, a kind of local Errol Flynn figure, and to his admirers he had been almost divine. He had been more interested in being a ruler and a star rather than in the business of governing. It was said that at his death some 18,000 files were waiting for his attention. One of the things he had done was to abolish the Madras Corporation. So Madras was in a mess, with mounds of rubbish everywhere. It was as though this, too, was part of the revolt of the South, this violation of the old ideas of purity.

  The politics of colonial revolt in Tamil Nadu had followed a colonial course: theft, waste, stagnation, words, the eternal appeal to old grievances. But those grievances were real. The original Dravidian revolt had not been gone back on, had not been rejected by the people of the state: the election fight now was between factions of the original DMK, and what had remained of the DMK itself.

  It was the DMK, the winners of 1967, who won again this time. A few days after my arrival the black-and-red flags of the party were everywhere – black the colour of caste revolt, red the colour of revolution. The flag fluttered in celebration from three-wheeler scooter-taxis; from bicycles. Sometimes in open vans or jitneys raised hands held the flag aloft, the raised hands symbolizing the rays of the rising sun, which was the DMK’s election emblem.

  *

  I looked up Sugar’s name in the telephone directory late one evening. I found a name that was like his, but the address was new. I telephoned. A Tamil voice was at first totally rejecting, totally refusing to understand. But then, as the owner of the voice made the adjustment to my English, his own English began to surface, became quite clerk-like and precise. Sugar was asleep, he said; he couldn’t be disturbed now; he had ‘retired’ for the night; it was his habit to ‘retire’ at nine. When did he get up? He got up at five. I left my name.

  The next day there was a message from Sugar. A woman’s voice answered when I telephoned, and after a while Sugar came on the telephone. He sounded ill. I asked him how old he was; I said it was something I had never known.

  He said, ‘Sixty-four. Not too young.’

  ‘So you were thirty-seven when we met in Kashmir?’

  ‘I was a young man. Like you.’

  Now Mr and Mrs Raghavan looked after him. It was Mr Raghavan I had spoken to the previous night, and this morning it was Mrs Raghavan who had taken the call. The telephone was theirs; they kept it upstairs; he lived downstairs; it wasn’t easy for him to climb steps now. He had retired from ‘service’. His mother had died; his father had died. He had left the family house I had seen him in. He had moved from Mylapore. He lived in a little apartment in the Raghavans’ house. He wanted me to come right away. He gave the address and said – curiously, I thought – ‘Everybody knows my house.’ He spoke with something like urgency. His voice began to break; I thought he was very ill.

  He was waiting for me, and when the taxi stopped he ran up to me, calling me by my name – I was about to go through a gate to the wrong house. He was in a yellow singlet and dhoti. He was not as tall as I had remembered. In the Himalayas he had been dark, burnt by the mountain sun; he was paler now. The melancholy of his expression had merged into his invalid’s appearance. The flesh on his face and his exposed shoulders had grown softer, suggesting the man who couldn’t climb steps.

  He led me through the correct gate to the house where his apartment was. The apartment was on the ground floor, and we stepped directly from the garden path to his sitting room. He said, ‘Drawing-sleeping,’ meaning that the room was his sitting room as well as his bedroom. ‘Attached bathroom.’ He pointed, but didn’t offer to show it. There was also a kitchen, and a room that was his temple. That was his great news for me: his temple. He had set up his own temple in his apartment. There were images there of the three most important deities, the deities of wisdom, strength, and money.

  ‘Come, let me show you. Take off your shoes.’

  The last command was friendly but firm, without the diffidence with which the request was usually made, the suggestion that if one didn’t want to, one didn’t. But friendship was uppermost in his mind: he was offering me this sight of his temple as a gesture of friendship.

  I took off my shoes and stood before the black, garlanded, unreadable images.

  He watched with me. He had always been tolerant of my lack of faith. Then he took me to the room that was his kitchen. He made a show of hanging his head and letting his drooping shoulders droop a little more. He laughed and said, ‘Please don’t write about my kitchen.’ He knew it wasn’t clean, he said. But there was no running water. All the water he used in the kitchen had to be fetched in jars. It wasn’t easy for him now to lift a full jar; he gave a demonstration, to show how his body could no longer do some of the simple things he wanted it to do. He became ill if he lifted things that were heavy; so he couldn’t keep his kitchen clean. The kitchen was grimy. Dirt and cooking grime had caught on the wire netting over the window, and on the ledges and shelves just below. He was looking after himself now, he said; he was dispensing with things. A girl came in to sweep for him. But (though he didn’t say) he couldn’t as a brahmin allow that girl into his kitchen.

  He was sixty-four now. He was dispensing with things. In the front room, the main room of the apartment, the drawing-sleeping, he had a number of small pieces of furniture pushed together in a jumble at one end. He was going to get rid of that furniture; he didn’t need it.

  ‘I want a plain room.’

  I asked why he hadn’t married.

  ‘Why? Why? How can I answer? I didn’t feel like it.’

  And that was the kind of reply he gave when I asked him about the temple and how the idea had come to him. The idea had just come to him, he said.

  I remembered his interest in 1967 in the prophetic books. I asked him about that. Had that interest left him now? And, again, I wanted to know how that interest had come to him.

  He said, ‘Why? Why? These are your sort of questions. How can I answer?’ The wish had simply come to him. But I was right about one thing: that wish, to delve into the books of prophecy, was now in the past.

  And, considering his new solitude, his stained dhoti and singlet, for the first time since I had known him I asked him directly about his life.

  He had worked in the same firm all his life, starting when he had left college. Towards the end he had run the office, been a kind of office manager. He had looked after the files of all the employees. He loved the firm still. At the time of his retirement he was earning 2000 rupees a month, £80. That was enough for a single man. The firm was now giving him a pension of 1000 rupees a month. From some money that the firm had invested for him he was getting a further 1300 rupees. It was enough.

  The concrete floor of the drawing-sleeping where we were was decorated with white floral patterns, such as exist on the threshold of many Indian houses. They are usually done with flour, and done afresh every day, but the pattern on Sugar’s floor was a plastic stick-on. The walls were blue, tarnished from the rubbing of backs and hands and, above the back of the chairs, from oiled heads. All the pictures on the walls were religious pictures. There was a hanging two-shelf wall cupboard with sliding glass doors; inside, medicine bottles and candles and tablets in foil-covered cards were mixed up with papers and household bric-a-brac. I had never felt this kind of desolation in his parents’ house in Mylapore.

  I asked whether he had had a happy life.

  ‘A plain life. A plain life.’

  Then he began to receive people. They came in through the open front door. The first man to come in was a dark man with fresh holy marks on his forehead: he had done his morning puja, or had been to the great temple.

  ‘He’s a landlord,’ Sugar said, when the man went into the temple room. ‘A moneyed man.’ r />
  The second visitor was younger; his features were finer. He greeted Sugar and then, with no further word, went into the temple room. This man wore a formal, reddish-brown long tunic. Sugar said the man was an executive in a big company.

  ‘People come,’ Sugar said, as though explaining his visitors.

  The first man, the landlord and moneyed man, came out and sat against a wall in the drawing-sleeping. When the man in the reddish tunic came out, he sat on a chair that was part of the furniture jumble at one end of the room.

  This second man, the executive, was the production manager in his company. It seemed rather late in the morning for him to be here, but he said he came every morning to Sugar’s temple, to meditate, and to be calm. They didn’t talk a lot when they were together. On Sunday evenings he came for three hours; he had a lot of time on Sundays. Once, during a power failure, he had sat with Sugar for nearly four hours, and they had hardly talked during that time. To come and sit in the room where we were, with the tarnished blue walls, and with a glimpse of the dark kitchen, was a form of meditation. Meditation, which implied the emptying of the mind, wasn’t easy, the production manager said: the beginner’s thoughts ran too easily to family, job, and things like that. It took years to learn to meditate. He wasn’t like Mr Sugar.

  This was news to me: that Sugar had this reputation, as a sage, a holy man.

  I asked him, ‘Can you empty your mind?’

  He said, playing it down, yet pleased that – without his saying anything – I knew, ‘I have achieved little.’

  The production manager said, ‘With most god-men you go to get something.’ It wasn’t like that with Sugar. He came to Sugar just for the peace; he wanted nothing from him.

  The brahmin world of Mylapore had been turned upside down. But in Sugar’s little blue sanctuary the politics of the streets outside were far away: the red-and-black flags, the 80-foot painted cut-outs of the new heroes (against rough wooden scaffolding). In the little apartment in the Raghavans’ house Sugar kept a kind of court and had his own circle, and was perhaps more protected, more looked-up to, than he had ever been in the family house where he had grown up. He was holy, offering peace. It explained one of the things he had said on the telephone: ‘Everybody knows my house.’

  He said, when I was getting ready to leave, ‘You must come and eat with me. I will cook for you myself. I will cook pumpkin for you.’

  ‘Pumpkin?’

  ‘You ate pumpkin every day at Woodlands in 1962.’

  There were other things he had remembered that I had forgotten. He remembered that in his family house in 1962, and again in 1967, I had had long, serious talks with his father about books and India.

  It was flattering to be remembered in this way, in these details, after so long. I felt it also spoke of a life plain to the point of tears. Yet this plainness had in the end brought its reward. His gifts had become known. Perhaps the very qualities that had made him memorable in the pilgrim throng in the Himalayas – his solitude, his stillness, his melancholy, the feeling of incompleteness and search that he gave off – had attracted others.

  Only 33 or 34 per cent of the voters had voted for the victorious DMK party; but the red-and-black flags of the party so multiplied in the city, it began to seem that nearly everyone had voted for the DMK. On walls where it had been painted before election day, the party’s election emblem, of the sun rising above hills, was now lovingly reworked and decorated, a little more and then a little more again, seeming further to mock the open palm and the two doves, emblems of two of the defeated parties, emblems until a few days before of great hope and jauntiness, but now abandoned, neglected, no loyal or happy hand adding a celebratory touch of extra colour.

  Within a day or so of the election result very big painted signboards began to appear in some places in the city with very big portraits of the three heroes of the party. There were no names, no words; you had to know who the heroes were. They were shown in profile, in a staggered line, each profile like a royal head on a coin; and each hero was done in a different colour. The current leader of the party was done in a kind of brown; the man who had led the party to its first election victory in 1967 in a slatey-blue or grey; and the profile behind these two was that of the old, pink-cheeked man with a long wavy beard who had been the prophet of the party.

  The prophet was known as ‘Periyar’. It was a Tamil word, meaning a sage or a wise man. I knew the name Periyar, but only just; I knew nothing about the man. I began to learn now, and I was astounded as much by what I learned as by the fact that, with all my reading about the independence movement in India, I had read or registered so little about this prophet of the South.

  He was an atheist and a rationalist, and he made two or three speeches a day over a very long life. He ridiculed the Hindu gods. He cruelly mocked caste Hindus, comparing the poverty of their scientific achievements with the achievements of Europe. And then, having it both ways, he also said that the Hindus had copied their gods (‘some selected animals, a few birds, a few trees and creepers, a few mountains and some rivers’) from the gods of ancient Egypt and Greece and Persia and Chaldea.

  This was the first surprise: that someone who – at least in the English translation of his often disorganized Tamil discourses – came over as a humorist and a satirist should have been received by the people of Tamil Nadu as a prophet, and at a moment of political triumph so long after his death should have been freshly honoured. But Periyar had never intended humour when he spoke against Hinduism and caste Hindus. He had once been a believer; and he was as obsessed with the religion and its propounders as only a man once a believer could be.

  There was a place in Madras called Periyar Thidal. It was on the site of a former bus or tram depot. Periyar himself had bought the place in 1953, for a lakh of rupees, 100,000 rupees, worth then about £7,500. It was the place from which his organization still operated.

  A garlanded black statue of Periyar stood in the middle of the big sandy plot, with this inscription on the plinth: PERIYAR THE PROPHET OF THE NEW AGE THE SOCRATES OF SOUTH EAST ASIA FATHER OF THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT AND ARCH ENEMY OF IGNORANCE; SUPERSTITIONS; MEANINGLESS CUSTOMS AND BASELESS MANNERS. Periyar’s grave was in a corner of the plot. All around the grave were polished grey granite slabs engraved with some of Periyar’s sayings. One of those sayings, virtually an incantation, was very famous: There is no God. There is no God. There is no God at all. He who invented God is a fool. He who propagates God is a scoundrel. He who worships God is a barbarian. This was how Periyar began all his discourses.

  It was hard to imagine anything so blunt and bitter being accepted in any part of India, if something else wasn’t being offered with it. And what Periyar offered, with his ‘rationalism’ and his rejection of God, was his rejection of the brahmins and their language; his rejection of the North; his rejection of caste; his rejection of the disregard the fair people of the North had for the dark people of the South.

  There was importance, too, in the fact of that grave in the Periyar Thidal. Hindus are cremated; Periyar insisted on being buried. He was more than the rationalist: to the people who listened to him and liked what he said, he was the anti-Hindu.

  He was born in 1879, 10 years after Gandhi was born, and 10 years before Nehru was born. His political life began in 1919, and continued until his death in 1973. And that was the second big surprise of Periyar: that he should have lived so long, that his career should have for many years run parallel with that of Gandhi, and that Gandhi, through many of the later years of his struggle and search, should have had at his back this figure of the anti-Hindu who finally became the anti-Gandhi, a man whose life and career echoed and reversed much of Gandhi’s own.

  Gandhi was a vegetarian. Periyar made a point of eating beef. Gandhi struggled to control the senses. Periyar ate enormous quanties of food, and was enormously fat. One of Periyar’s admirers told me, ‘He was a glutton.’ And, in this reversal of values, the word was intended as praise. ‘He always
had a biriyani – rice and mutton, beef, pork. He was never fussy about food.’ Gandhi was always fussy about his food.

  He was different from Gandhi, opposed to him, and yet in some ways – in his discovery of his cause, his working out of ways to serve it, his lifelong adherence to it, and, above all, in his practical business sense – he was like Gandhi. Like Gandhi, Periyar was born into a Hindu merchant caste. Gandhi came from a family of small-scale administrators. Periyar came from a family of well-to-do merchants. Periyar was not as well educated as Gandhi, and it could be said that he was more devout and traditional. Gandhi went against the principles of his caste and travelled to London to study law. Periyar, in his mid-twenties (while Gandhi was in South Africa, fighting hard battles), went to Banaras, to live the life of a sanyasi, to live naked, on the alms of the devout, in the hope of finding some kind of spiritual illumination.

  The illumination never came, and he left Banaras and went back to his family business in his own town. He also went into local municipal politics, and then in 1919, when Gandhi had been back in India for some years, Periyar joined the Indian National Congress. He supported its handloom campaign and took part in the non-cooperation movement.

  Then came the break. It had to do with the caste prejudices of the brahmins in the South. Non-brahmins were not allowed free entry to temples. They were absolutely barred from the inner sanctum where the temple deity was; they had to be content with a view from a distance. Sometimes non-brahmins were not even allowed to walk on the lane in front of a temple.

  This last prohibition caused an especial commotion in the neighbouring state of Kerala in 1924. Kerala was at that time a princely state, with its own maharaja, and the brahmins of Kerala were even stricter about caste prohibitions than the Tamil brahmins of Madras. Within the compound of the royal palace there was a temple, and there was also a law court. One day, when a sacred temple fair of some kind was going on, the temple lane was closed to non-brahmins. The temple lane was also the lane to the law court. A lawyer called Madhavan, a non-brahmin, had to appear in a court case that day; but (fame comes to people in unlikely ways) Madhavan was not allowed to walk past the temple. Some non-brahmins in Kerala protested and started an agitation; they were jailed by the maharaja. They appealed to Periyar. He came to Kerala and campaigned for a whole year, until the temple lane was opened to non-brahmins.