India (37 page)

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.

There was another crisis soon after. It was discovered that, at a Congress school for propagating Gandhian thought, brahmin children were fed separately from non-brahmin children. And then it turned out that the school, though run by a brahmin, was being financed by non-brahmins. The matter was reported to Gandhi; but his response was ambiguous and light-hearted.

Periyar at that moment broke with Gandhi and the Congress. (There is a – brahmin – story in Madras that the break really came because Periyar had been asked to account for money connected with the handloom campaign.) In 1925 Periyar founded the Self-Respect Movement, and it was his brilliant idea then to symbolize his cause by wearing a black shirt. Black-shirted, he campaigned for the rest of his life, for nearly 50 years, against brahminism, caste, Congress, the Hindu religion, the disabilities of women. He established the idea of Self-Respect marriages for non-brahmins, marriages conducted without priests or religious vows. And he preached a crude kind of socialism.

‘In the world of the future, there will be no men without character and culture … The depravity of modern character is founded on culture, justice and discipline being used for maintaining caste and class differences among men … When these capitalist and individualist conditions are absent, the need for depraved character will not arise.’

He offered a vision of a future bright with the fruits of science, and without the need for the idea of God.

‘Communications will mostly be by air and of great speed … Radios may be fixed in men’s hats … Food enriched with vitamins will be encased in pills or capsules sufficient for a day’s or week’s sustenance. The average life may stand at 100 years or more … Motorcars may weigh about one hundredweight and will run without petrol … Electricity will be everywhere and in every house, serving the people for all purposes … No industry or factory will run for the private profits of individuals. They will all be owned by the community at large, and all inventions will cater for the needs and pleasures of all people … When the world itself has been converted into a paradise, the need to picture a paradise in the clouds will not arise. Where there is no want, there is no god. Where there is scientific knowledge, there is no need for speculation and imagination … The struggle for existence needs to be changed into a life of happiness.’

With this preaching, reiterated day after day, this vision of the pain of caste disappearing together with the idea of God, there went his inherited feeling for the practical side of things. He had been born into a business family, and he remained concerned with money all his life, never denying its value, seeking always to keep himself and his movement independent and free of pressure. His movement was never short of money; the trust he left behind to look after his cause was rich.

His relics were in a big room in the main building at the Periyar Thidal. On a four-poster bed in the front part of the room there was a life-size photographic cut-out (the cinema-advertisement style and election-campaign style transferred to this private museum) of Periyar, very old, with a big beard, sitting cross-legged, in a writing posture. There was a patterned pink blanket on the bed, and the cut-out leaned against a bolster. The poles of the four-poster were white; there was no canopy. A tall revolving bookshelf stood at one side of the bed, with small busts of Buddha
and Lenin, souvenir-shop objects, and a statue of a horse, a gift. The horse had no significance; it had been kept by Periyar for its beauty, and as a memento of the giver.

More symbolical gifts were in a glass case: silver implements of iconoclasm: two silver mallets, and two silver sticks, in shape like the stick the aged Periyar used.

The leadership of the Periyar movement had passed to Mr Veeramani. He was the keeper of Periyar’s memory, and the guardian of his relics. When he showed me the mallets and the sticks, he reminded me with a laugh of what he said was an old Sanskrit saying: The poison of the cobra is in his tongue alone. The poison of the brahmin is from head to foot.’ That saying led to another, which Mr Veeramani said was a well known Hindi saying: ‘If you see a brahmin and a snake, kill the brahmin first.’ (I had heard that years before in a different version, and I had been told then that it was a household saying of the people of south-east Asia: ‘If you are in the forest and you see a snake and an Indian, kill the Indian first.’)

After the emblems of iconoclasm, the emblems of kingship. Periyar had often been called the white-bearded king of Tamil Nadu. A town in the South had given the old man a decorated silver throne, and that throne was in a glass case, with a silver crown, the gift of followers in another town. Another gift was a silver sceptre, with small heads of Periyar and Buddha at the top; and in yet another glass case were curving silver swords.

Right around this big museum room, at the top of the walls, just below the ceiling, was a set of 33 oil paintings depicting the stations of Periyar’s long life. It was as with Bible pictures: you had to know the story. And once you knew, it was all there: Periyar as a naked sanyasi in Banaras in 1904, eating such food as he could find; Periyar 10 years later in municipal politics in his home town; Periyar with the Congress in 1919; Periyar campaigning in Kerala in 1924 for the rights of non-brahmins to enter temples; Periyar campaigning not long after for the abolition of caste distinctions in the Congress school; Periyar founding his Self-Respect Movement in 1925, and wearing his black shirt for the first time; Periyar in Germany in 1932, in the company of ‘German atheists’; Periyar in Russia the same year with Russian sanatorium employees; Periyar in 1943, discussing the break-up of India after independence with Mr Jinnah (campaigning for a Muslim Pakistan), Dr Ambedkar
(wanting a scheduled-caste state called Dalitstan), Periyar himself hoping for a southern, Dravidian, non-brahmin state called Dravidstan. Later paintings showed Periyar, after independence, painting out the Hindi names of railway stations in the South, in 1952; breaking idols of Ganesh, Ganpati, the elephant god, in 1953, to show that they were only of clay, and quite harmless; in 1957 painting out ‘Brahmin’ from a signboard saying ‘Brahmin Hotel’, ‘brahmin’ meaning vegetarian, as opposed to ‘military’, non-vegetarian; and in the same year burning the Indian Constitution.

He had been single-minded and unwearying through a long life. In the centre of the room a collection of his personal relics had been laid out by Mr Veeramani in another glass case: his flashlight, his magnifying glasses, his unusually stout stick, his watch, his spectacles, his stainless-steel food tray, his bedpan and syringe and other medical paraphernalia. Almost like Gandhi’s relics; and they would have been Gandhian, if Periyar had left nothing else behind. But the property he had left in his trust, including the large city site of the Periyar Thidal, was worth many millions; and this worth had multiplied many times over in the 15 years since his death.

In spite of his love of food and his meat-eating, there was, in his single-mindedness and obsession, something like purity, and it was this quality that made him the anti-Gandhi. But that figure, of the anti-Gandhi, had meaning only because the real Gandhi existed. Gandhi developed and grew; for the first 40 years of the century, from his thirtieth year to his seventieth, he was constantly searching for new political and religious ways. His search made him a universal figure; people to whom the politics were far away could yet refer their own search to his. Periyar was a local figure; he never outgrew his cause. Without Gandhi and the Congress and the independence movement his cause wouldn’t have had the power it had; he was riding on the back of something very big. That might have been why I hadn’t heard of him.

It was Sadanand Menon, a writer living in Madras, who had taken me to the Periyar Thidal and had given me the background necessary to an understanding of Periyar’s life and movement.

Towards the end of the 19th century, with British rule, Sadanand said, the brahmins became dominant in a way they hadn’t been for
some time. They were dominant in Indian social life, the professions, and in the beginnings of the nationalist movement. But Madras Province (taking in Tamil Nadu and other areas) was very large; Madras was a port; and, as the economy of the province grew, other middle castes began to produce their own prominent personalities. Many of these middle-caste people were well-to-do – like Periyar’s own family; many were landlords; some could send their sons to Oxford and Cambridge. As soon as such people had emerged from the middle castes, the antique brahmin caste restrictions would not have been easy to maintain. What Periyar did was to take this mood of rejection to the non-brahmin masses.

Sadanand said, ‘His mode of communication was cultural. The Self-Respect Movement began three or four newspapers simultaneously. They laid great emphasis on education. In the 1930s one of the methods of the movement was the method of social discourse – not lecturing down. An educated volunteer would go to a slum area in a city, or to the village square, and he would start reading aloud from a paper. In no time he would have a crowd around him. And he would interpret what he was reading according to the Self-Respect Movement’s ideology. This has remained a form till today. It has remained the backbone of the DMK, this direct contact between the party cadre and the people. The other parties don’t have this. They haven’t even attempted it. I remember in the 1960s going to a place near where I was living, and observing a DMK party worker. He would come on the dot at 6.30 in the evening, carrying the party newspaper, together with an English paper and any other Tamil paper. He would have a hurricane lantern. He sat in a shed, just four poles and a roof, and he read aloud, and he would have an audience of 150 people.’

How deep, or important, was the rationalist side of the movement? How far had people been able to reject God or the gods?

Sadanand said that the rationalist movement as such had become a parody of itself over the years. But political power had come to the DMK, which was the political offshoot of that movement, and there had been an upheaval.