‘On completion of the job which our construction firm was doing for him, the great man offered me a job in his own organization. He wanted me to begin as an “attender”, on a salary of 97 rupees, 52 rupees basic and 45 rupees allowance. “Attender” is another word for office boy. But to get into that organization in any capacity would be today like getting into IBM. I did more typing than office-boy work. So at last I began to rise, and I never stopped – with God’s grace. I was seventeen.
‘The company opened a branch in Vellore. I got transferred there – to be with my married sister, and to be independent. When the Chinese war came in 1962, I became politically active – which I’d never been before. I gave my rings and ear-rings – things given me by my uncle on the occasion of my thread ceremony – to the war effort. This outraged my parents, and it also outraged my sister, because the things I had given had belonged for some generations to the family.
‘A visitor came one day from Delhi. He was a first cousin. He worked in the Delhi office of an American concern. He was shocked to see me in my traditional appearance – and also shocked by the paltry salary I was getting. He asked me to leave the job I was doing and to come to Delhi. He said that, for the same effort I was putting into the firm in Vellore, he would get me twice the salary in Delhi. It was a fascinating offer for me. I immediately decided to accept his offer. But I wasn’t sure how my father would react.
‘As I expected, my father was reluctant to let me go to Delhi, lest I should deviate further. For four months there was a lot of debate, and many heated exchanges, between me and my father. But in the end it was my father who bought the ticket for me. It cost about 42 rupees, and he gave me some pocket money as well. For the journey itself my family gave me idli and dosas and fried eatables. They gave me too much. I had to throw away the surplus. Their thinking was that the train might get stranded, and they didn’t want me to suffer if that happened. It is even today the normal South Indian family way with travellers.
‘Finally, on the third of May, 1963, I charted an entirely new course in my life. I left by Grand Trunk Express from Madras Central railway station at 7.30 p.m. I arrived 40 hours later in Delhi, at 11.30 in the morning on the fifth of May – according to the Gregorian calendar, my birthday.
‘The very first thing I did in Delhi – as instructed by my cousin – was to drive straight from the railway station to the barber saloon and remove the churki. That was a moment of great anguish and pain. For 18 full years both my mother and my sister used to rear it – as they would do their own child. They were proud of it. They were jealous of it. I had unusually long hair, longer than my sister’s. It used to hit my calf when I undid it. They would wash it and oil it and comb it and knit it together.
‘My agony was deeper as the barber, a young man, a real thin-looking man with a moustache, started making probing questions – whether I was sure I wanted what I said. He gave me three chances. He said in Hindi, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?” I repeatedly said, “Yes,” though in my heart of hearts I was trembling and worried about what my father would say. The barber was so kind and considerate he started cutting it slowly, from below, instead of killing it at one blow – to give me another chance to think again. That was the day I lost all my religious fervour – as Samson lost his physical power.’
That was where the story should have ended, with the flight to Delhi, the cutting off of the tresses at the back of the head, and the start of a new life. But Kakusthan had returned for good to the colony from which he had fled. His story was of a double transformation; and it was of the second transformation that he told me on another day.
Kakusthan said, ‘In New Delhi I found myself, and for the next 16 years I lived there. I did a small job for the American firm for which my cousin worked. I also worked as a stenographer for a trade union journal.’
Stenography: the old South Indian brahmin vocation, the vocation that followed on from the doing of rituals, and was the other side of the talent for mathematics and physics.
‘I got 50 rupees a month from my cousin’s American firm. I got 200 rupees from the trade union paper. And it was during my time on the trade union paper that the second transformation began to take place.
The trade union movement in India based itself on the principles of Gandhian philosophy: truth and non-violence, duty before right: you produce before you make demands. That is precisely what the Gita tells us, and those were the principles of the Indian National Trade Union Congress. Our day’s work at the paper was started with a prayer meeting. That had an effect on me. So did the daily religious column on the back page of the Hindu newspaper of Madras. And I also read the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, especially his autobiography.
‘In the office there was this religious and spiritual atmosphere. Outside, there was the allurement of Delhi life, the life of money, beauty, everything. For some time it attracted me, that Delhi life. And it worried me – because I didn’t have the money. But then the religious books I was reading began to have more pull. So over a period of time I changed again, and I embraced the religious life.
‘In this period I took a degree from Delhi University; and I married. I had been attracted by my sister’s daughter in Vellore, and I had determined to marry her as soon as I could. The family agreed, but I told them that she should graduate first. I met her educational expenses, and on the last day of her final examination the marriage process started.
‘Other editorial jobs with papers and magazines followed after I left the union paper. One such job took me to the town of Ahmedabad in 1980. I was thirty-seven. My father came to see me there, for the birthday of my second son. He was extremely pleased that I was in a good position at last – even though I was minus my churki. He would have been doubly delighted if I had still had the churki.
The first morning he was there he saw me doing the morning puja. It was something I routinely did, but he was taken aback. We talked for a while about the puja I had done that morning, and the texts connected with the puja. He mentioned some error I had committed in doing the puja, and he hinted that if I had studied better when I was young, the mistake would not have happened.
‘I apologized for that mistake. And I apologized for everything that had happened earlier.
‘I asked him to induct me into our traditional rituals. I asked him also to teach me the 4000 verses of the Tamil Vedas, and all the other mantras that I would need to know for the rituals in the temple in our ancestral village.
‘He said he would teach me. He started that day itself, since it was a Friday and an auspicious day. After 15 days he left Ahmedabad for Madras. Before he left, he promised he would teach me every day for two or three years. But he never came back. He died six months after he left Ahmedabad.
‘For 11 days after his death there were elaborate rituals. All those who came, relatives, Vedic pundits, recalled the greatness of my father, my grandfather, my uncle, and the religious way of life of our family, especially in the service of the village deity. I heard that my grandfather had died after a religious argument with the temple pujari about a particular ritual that had not been carried out properly. My cousin had also died in similar circumstances. He had objected to certain rituals that had been introduced at the temple, and then he had lain down in the temple doorway; and people had walked over him. He died a few days afterwards of grief and shock.
‘I thought, when I heard these stories, that if my grandfather and other relatives could lay down their lives for the sake of the family deity, shouldn’t I at least follow their example?
‘I decided to move back to Madras.
‘I got a job here. It was easy now, with my experience. And my condition with the firm I approached was that they should have no objection to my external form – no objection to my wearing religious marks on the forehead, having the churki, and wearing the traditional brahmin attire: all the things I hadn’t understood when I was younger. It was important for me to get this condition agreed to, since I was
coming back to Madras primarily to continue my family’s temple obligations.’
I asked him, ‘Why this stress on external form? Isn’t devotion something you carry in your heart?’
Kakusthan said, ‘Perhaps if there had been no temple obligation and honour in our family life and tradition, our life would have been a little more flexible, as in many other normal brahmin families. In all the temple rituals external forms come first, because without the external form I will not be entitled to serve the deity. The external form is as important as the internal. The purer the external form, the purer the internal.’
He had suffered because of the external form. He was entitled to speak as he did.
‘I had left the agraharam in 1963. I returned in 1981. I returned to my family house in the colony, and I returned a quite different man, a brahmin fully committed, fully realized. On the first anniversary of my father’s death, at the end of the rituals conducted at that time, there was a total break from the past for me: from loukika to vaidhika, from being in the world to being of the spirit.’
They were words I had heard for the first time in Mysore City, from the brahmin who had been master of religious ceremonies for the last maharaja of Mysore. In the palace where the brahmin had served there had been splendour and extravagance beyond human need, almost as though in the Hindu scheme one of the functions of great wealth was to remind men of the vanity of the senses. But the ruler’s great wealth had formed no part of the brahmin’s story. The physical needs of men were limited: that was the message of the small plain room where the brahmin told his story.
That was the message, too, of the agraharam or colony where Kakusthan lived, in the set of small rooms he had known as a child. In Christian thinking the eternal opposites are the forces of good and evil. In Hindu or brahmin thought the opposites are worldliness and the life of the spirit. One can retreat from one to the other. When the world fails one, one can sink into the spirit, the idea of the world as the play of illusion.
Kakusthan said, ‘I became then, one year after my father’s death, what I now am, the man you see. I decided then to live the vaidhika life as far as as possible, to live with all the rigours and discipline that go with it.’
‘What are the rigours?’
‘I shall not eat outside. I shall eat only what I offer the god at home.’ So the oil lamp burned always in front of the image of the god, just next to the kitchen area. ‘I shall not even drink water outside. Nor mix with people unchaste. Because, if I don’t observe these things, I will be polluting the god of our temple.
‘I now live in the colony as a full brahmin. People respect me for the sudden change in my life, and the strict observances now. My family was poor, and this colony is also poor – lower-middle-class people with limited income. Though I am well off, due to the grace of God and the blessings of my forefathers, I want to live nowhere else. Living among these people I know gives me a tremendous happiness and peace.’
We had met over many days, in my hotel and in the colony. Sometimes Kakusthan had met me at the hotel and taken me back to the colony; sometimes he had sent his teenaged son to fetch me. The son was many inches taller than his father, but he was without his father’s sturdiness; his eyes were softer.
Kakusthan, whatever he had chosen for himself, was ambitious for his son and wanted the boy to do well at school. And just as, many years before, Kakusthan’s father might have asked someone to talk to Kakusthan, so now Kakusthan asked me, the last time we met, to talk to his son and to put to the boy the need for doing well, for geting on with the school books.
The boy, Kakusthan said, was too fond of play. He had gone out that morning, for instance, to play cricket. But that was good, I said. All right, Kakusthan said. But then the boy had gone out again in the afternoon to play cricket.
We were going back to the colony, and Kakusthan had a simple plan for getting me to have a private talk with his son. We – Kakusthan and I – would go up to the terrace overlooking the colony yard directly in front and the walled temple garden to one side. The boy would bring up tea for me, and then Kakusthan would excuse himself and go down to the bathroom.
So, in the colony, the boy brought up a tumbler of tea to me on the terrace; and we began to talk, while down below – in this area where he was king – Kakusthan in his brahmin clothes walked confidently, without hurrying, across the crowded afternoon yard, past the well, to the bathroom in the corner.
The boy loved cricket. He said he loved both batting and bowling. I liked his seriousness about the game. And I couldn’t find it in my heart to give him the lecture Kakusthan wanted me to give, about sticking to the books: I couldn’t see how, in the conditions of the colony, anyone could do any serious reading or study there. One evening, on the dimly lit paved path leading in from the gateway, I had seen a young boy sitting cross-legged outside his little house, in the dark, before an open book: acting out virtue for his parents’ sake, the brahminical love of learning reduced to this ritual form.
I asked the boy, Kakusthan’s son, what sort of job he hoped to do. His soft eyes became startled. He knew the question; he was dismayed to hear it from me. He might become a stenographer, he said; he might get a job in an office; it depended on ‘fate’.
I was surprised by his talk of fate. Kakusthan had never done so. But Kakusthan had been a rebel all his youth. His son was now very much a young man of the colony, with ideas and ambitions not above those of other young men there. Kakusthan, I believe, would have liked his son to be more forceful. But I didn’t want to press the boy. He was years away from getting his degree and taking a job; his world, his way of looking, was going to change before then.
And I told Kakusthan, when he came back up to the terrace, that the boy was going to be all right; that his seriousness about cricket spoke of something spirited and reassuring in him; and the books side and the career side would fall into place when the time came. It was half what Kakusthan wanted to hear; he looked pleased. We began to talk of other things.
It was a late Sunday afternoon, still the Madras winter. The sun was mild; the atmosphere in the agraharam without tension; everyone in the yard seemed to be at play.
The terrace was shaded by an old tree, and Kakusthan and I were sitting in this shade, on the concrete half-wall in front of his sleeping room. I asked him to talk to me about what we were seeing in the yard.
Had I noticed the TV aerials? There were 20 of them, he said. In the colony there were even some colour television sets. People were not as cut off from the rest of the world as they had once been.
‘And look at those girls over there,’ he said. ‘Skipping.’
It would have been easy to miss the significance of that. But 20 years or so ago, he said, those girls wouldn’t have been allowed to play like that, in an open yard. Those girls were close to puberty, and 20 years ago the shades of the prison house would have already begun to fall on them.
And, Kakusthan said, I had spoken of the pallor and debility of some of the people in the colony. But some of the brahmin boys now did exercises. That boy, for instance, across the yard, two houses or so away from where the long-skirted girls were skipping – that boy did exercises. The boy was a young man, bare-backed, elegant of posture, not tall. He had the physique found in many kinds of Indian sculpture: broad-shouldered, slender-waisted, smooth-bodied, strength and tension lying within, not expressed in the ripple or indentation of muscle.
Kakusthan approved; he was concerned with physical fitness. He was a small man; his father had been a small man; they had both been subjected to ridicule and physical torment in the town.
From our perch on the terrace we considered both the young man who did exercises, and his father. Where did the young man do his exercises? Right there, in the busy yard; no one minded. He came from a family of 10. Those 10 people lived in that one room whose door we could see. The father was a peon or office-attender. The son who spent so much time perfecting his body was only a clerk.
I sa
id to Kakusthan, ‘He’s got a good brahmin face.’
‘And the colour,’ Kakusthan said, with a nod.
He looked abashed then, and lowered his voice: a woman had come up to the terrace, he said, and I was in her way. I was sitting on the half-wall in front of Kakusthan’s upper room, and my legs were sticking out into the passage that ran along the edge of the terrace. If the woman had tried to pass she might have touched me, and that would have been wrong; it would also have been wrong for her to talk to me directly. I stood up. Without a word, the woman passed; three or four paces down she turned off into her own little space.
The evening light became softer and yellower. Women and girls went to the well to fill their pots.
When I had first gone to the colony, I had thought, from the way Kakusthan spoke, that the community was fading away, making too many accommodations with the world outside. I realized now that he meant the opposite. The community was learning to adapt: that was its strength.
He said, ‘As long as the world exists, brahmins will always survive. Brahmins are indispensable to the society.’
Mr K. Veeramani, a short, brisk man in a long-tailed black shirt, worn in the Indian way, hanging out, not tucked in, looked after the Periyar Thidal and kept the Periyar flame alive in Tamil Nadu.
Periyar had died in the last week of 1973, at the age of ninety-four; and Periyar’s second wife had suceeded to the leadership of the movement. She had died five years later; and then Mr Veeramani had become the leader. The movement at that time appeared to have lost its way, to have ceased to matter politically or socially. But now, with the election victory of the original Dravidian political party, the movement appeared once again to be at the heart of things.