‘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.
He said, ‘Five years after that agitation, in 1943, I joined engineering college. That again was a very big thing for me. In my old school I had been an outstanding student. I had won scholarships and all that, and my teachers recommended to my father that I should be put in a college. So I did a two-year arts course in an arts college. A professor in that college, when I finished the arts course, insisted I should do engineering. So I applied to the engineering college. I would not have got admission in the open competition, because the brahmin boys scored much higher marks. But fortunately for me – and for people like me, who came from backward, non-brahmin communities – thanks to another agitation of Periyar, some additional seats were reserved for such backward communities. Had this reservation for the backward communities not been there, I wouldn’t have been an engineer. That is what I mean when I say that my joining the college was a big thing.
‘Now let me tell you this. When I joined the engineering college, I found that in the mess in the hostel the brahmin boys were fed in the nearest enclosure to the kitch
en, and their enclosure was separated from the rest of the mess by a wooden partition. All the cooks in the mess happened to be brahmins. So brahmins had a lion’s share of the advantages of the mess. This upset us. We started going earlier and sitting in that enclosure. Because there were more of us than brahmins, they finally agreed to remove the partition, and there was a common mess afterwards. You see, they will try to do something so long as we are dumb. Once we start asserting our rights, they wouldn’t have the temerity to oppose that.’
‘What about the national cause? 1943 was an important time. Did you take part in the national movement?’
The national movement was going on. But at the same time, within that, we wanted our self-respect to be recognized.’
‘Was your brother as active as you?’
‘He was in another college. He was a sympathizer with the cause, but he didn’t come out in the open as much as I did. He left everything to me.’
‘What did your father and mother think of the rationalist side of Periyar’s message?’
‘They didn’t bestow much thought on that side of things. They sympathized more with the linguistic issue and the reservation of places for non-brahmins. In 1943, while we were not at one with the atheistic aspect of Periyar’s philosophy, we were very much with him in his fight for the eradication of superstition and rituals.
‘This Tamil civilization of ours is a very old one. Say, about 5000 years old. The cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa – Mohenjo-Daro now in Sind in Pakistan – are Dravidian cities. They go back to 5000 BC. That’s what historians say. Till about 2000 years back, the society was a casteless society. What happened at that time was that this foreign civilization came from the north, and they started differentiating among classes. Every century since then there has been a protest by some Tamil intellectuals against the caste system. These intellectuals have always in different degrees been resisting rituals and superstition. But they didn’t decry the entire system. They said that religion was necessary and God was necessary. But the Aryans were introducing superstitions.’
‘You were religious when you were young?’
‘I was a regular visitor to temples when I was very young, with and without my parents. We would go and see, and walk around, and go to the deity, and we would pray for prosperity and education and wealth. I was a believer. Up to my twelfth year. After hearing Periyar, I slowly withdrew myself. After twelve, I was a believer, but not a temple-goer. I started disbelieving the ritual part of the religion. In my younger days I read a lot of mythology, but when I started understanding it was all exploitation, I stopped being interested.’
He went back to his personal story. ‘I left engineering college in 1948. I was twenty-three. This other thing happened then. I joined the government service, and I was posted as a junior engineer to a small town. My parents were very happy about my becoming an engineer and joining the government service.
‘In the small town where I was posted I had to take over from a brahmin officer. On the day of my taking over he gave me a dinner at his house. He was living in a rented house. After the dinner the servant maid took back the vessels inside. I could hear the wife of that brahmin officer telling the servant maid not to take the vessels I had used inside the kitchen, but to put them in the back yard for further washing and cleaning, because those vessels had been touched by me. This upset me.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I didn’t say anything at the time.’
‘Had you and the officer eaten together?’
‘We had eaten together, sitting on the ground, eating with our hands. That experience left a dent. I pocketed the insult. I didn’t do anything. They were giving me the dinner, and it wasn’t courteous to shout or rebel or say anything.’
‘Your grandfather was a weaver. Your father was a clerk. You became an engineer when you were twenty-three. Isn’t your story also the story of a rise and of opportunity?’
‘I became an engineer because of reservation. And I resolved to fight for similar privileges for others in similar fields. I wanted to devote myself full-time to that cause. I did whatever I could in my official capacity – allocating funds to backward areas, setting up facilities in remote places. The DMK was founded by Mr Annadurai in 1949. But, being an official, I couldn’t join.’
‘India became independent in 1947. You’ve left that out of your story.’
‘Periyar hadn’t bothered too much about the national movement and independence. He was solely concentrating on caste and religion.’ And Mr Palani, treating my question as an interruption, went on, ‘The DMK emerged as a political wing out of his social movement and began to involve itself in the political life of the state and the country. The Congress was dominant at that time. In 18 years the DMK took power from the Congress. From being a secessionist movement, the DMK had become a party looking for regional autonomy. Many of my friends, people of my own age group, happened to occupy positions of responsibility in the administration. So I could use their goodwill to see that many social-justice programmes could be introduced.’
In this small dark man were locked up generations of grief and rage. He was the first in his line to have felt the affront; and, from what he had said, he was still the only one in his family to have taken up the cause. His passion was very great; it had to be respected. But I also began to wonder whether so great a rage left any room for a private life, the play of simpler emotions.
‘When did you get married?’
‘In 1951.’ This was three years after that dinner with the brahmin officer.
‘What caste was she?’
‘Same weaver caste. From a neighbouring town.’
‘Why the same caste?’
‘It was more to please the parents. And also the girl chosen by my parents appeared acceptable to me.’
‘Educated?’
‘Moderately educated. Up to school-leaving standard. It was an arranged step.’
‘In some ways a backward step?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dark girl?’
He showed the back of his hand. ‘My colour.’
‘A religious wedding?’
‘Yes. But we didn’t have a pundit. We had a senior man from our community who conducted the rites. He just prayed to God to bless the couple. It was a via media. Not a brahmin marriage, nor a marriage of Periyar’s Self-Respect type.’
‘You’re still a Hindu? You haven’t thought of becoming Buddhist?’
‘It’s not necessary. So long as you’re allowed to propagate your own views, there’s no need to go to another religion.’
‘How do you arrange the various ceremonies?’
‘When my children were born I had no ceremonies. In our forefathers’ time there was a religious ceremony connected to each individual event in a man’s or woman’s life – birth, ear-piercing, puberty for a girl, marriage, pregnancy. All these things we don’t have now.’
‘What happened to your younger brother?’
‘He also became an engineer. He married an educated girl in Coimbatore. Same weaver caste. Again out of deference to parents.’
‘How did you marry your own daughters?’
‘My first daughter’s marriage was conducted in the presence of a very small number of most intimate relatives and friends. My second daughter’s marriage was a Self-Respect marriage. It was a Periyar marriage, and it was conducted by a well known academic, a man from our movement.’
He was unrelenting in his cause, though his own need for religious faith involved him in contradictions and compromises; though the caste structures in his own family remained in place; and though, in the garbage of Madras, the broken roads, the absence of municipal regulation, the factionalism and plunder of the DMK administration and its successor administrations, something close to chaos could be seen.
Sadanand Menon had spoken of the ‘looting’ of the ancient temples of the city. And the great tank of Mylapore temple was indeed sad to see, empty, seemingly about to fall into
ruin, with its beautiful internal steps buckled in parts.
I asked Mr Palani about the temple.
He said, ‘I would like Mylapore temple and tank to continue and uphold their architectural and cultural part of our heritage. But still at the same time I am against these institutions being used to create differences among people. They say that brahmins alone can take water from the tank and use it in the sanctum sanctorum. Only brahmins can go there. People have tried to go into the sanctum in other places, but they have been prevented by law. About 10 years back, Mr Karunanidhi, the DMK chief minister then – he’s chief minister again now, after the election – introduced a law that non-brahmins should be entitled to become priests. The brahmins took the matter up, and the law was struck down by the Supreme Court of India on the grounds that Hindu law as it is today required priests to be brahmins.’
That was where we always came back: brahmin prejudice. It was the fount of his passion. To that passion he was always loyal, however much the way of protest might lead to the undoing of his world. And, really, that brahmin cause, part of the apparent wholeness of the world of the South in 1962, was indefensible.
I asked, ‘The servant girl who worked in your parents’ house – what happened to her?’
‘She got married.’
‘Weaver-caste man?’
‘Same weaver caste, and they’ve started a little weaving business. They’re just making a living.’
I asked what his feelings were about the various Dravidian governments since 1967.
‘The DMK government was very good at the beginning. But power corrupts, and the brahmins are intelligent people. They have their own means of diluting the devotion of these people to social reforms. They promise things from the centre in Delhi – in return for which they want concessions locally. They are pre-eminent in the cultural field. There again they tone down the efforts and intensity put forward by the state government.’
His cause made his world complete, left no room for doubt, supplied explanations for everything. And I wondered again whether there was really no part of him that was private, no part not touched by his cause.