The Gypsy Goddess (10 page)

In this dire situation, moneylending in villages has become deplorable, with rates of interest ranging from 50 to 300 per cent. The poor have no recourse but to further enslave themselves in these circles of debt.

At least as a humanitarian gesture, the government loan collection could have been postponed. But when does the government act with the proletariat in mind?

Only an extremely heartless and perversely well-entrenched government can be unmoved on hearing of the atrocities of untouchability that are committed against the Adi Dravidar agricultural labourers in our Tanjore district. The landlords build a cement shelter for their cows, but these people have to huddle under a blanket of night sky because they are considered ‘untouchable'. Even worse, the greed of these landlords is killing the poor workers. In the last two years, at least three men have died in every large farm because of the poisonous effects of spraying Polydol. They have died in the field, hospital, or en route, and while it is clear that these deaths have occurred because of chemical pesticides, the government has not taken a single step to prevent these deaths from occurring, it has not issued any stern warning to the landlords and it has even not paid any compensation to the families of these victims. Instead,
it has maintained its comprador-bourgeois character and continues the import of these poisonous pesticides in order to bring about its promise of a ‘Green Revolution'.

We have been swindled in the name of gods, in the name of religion, in the name of caste. Now, we are being swindled in the name of development.

Comrades, we will be making a grave blunder if we assume that everything that is happening in the delta district is merely a local problem. Was it just drought and defective distribution that caused the food crisis? Even American imperialism needs to shoulder its share of the burden of guilt. Using the ruse of the Indo-Pak War, America delayed shipment of food grains, and we sank into famine. America is interested in the Green Revolution because it seeks to prevent the Red Revolution.

In the name of this Green Revolution, we are dependent on American fertilizers. In Tanjore district alone, the use of fertilizer has had a 2,000 per cent increase. This is not healthy. We have seen in every village alcoholics who can only walk steadily when they are drunk. Our land has become addicted to these chemical fertilizers in the same manner – if she does not have her fill, she forgets her fertility. She stops bearing crops. The government does not care because these projects fill its coffers.

Let us not forget what this DMK government has said. Although they could never have ousted the Indian National
Congress without the support of the Communist parties and the intense door-to-door campaigning undertaken by our cadres in every tiny hamlet, they have betrayed us. Karunanidhi has boldly proclaimed that the Communists will be crushed with an iron fist. They have made a pact with the ruling classes. They have no sense of shame in promoting feudal tyrants to occupy positions of power in their party. All the laws have been framed by the government only to protect the ruling classes and to safeguard their political and economic interests. Just as the Pannaiyal Protection Act brought bonded agricultural servants to the streets and made them mere daily-wage earning coolies, the Land Ceiling Act has proved to be another ploy to secure the interests of the ruling classes. We know of an instance where a landlord in Tanjore set up sixteen trusts to manage thousands of acres of temple land, and then these lands were leased out to tenants, all of whom happened to be his hereditary slaves, his domestic servants, his barber and his cook and his book-keeper and their children. On paper, they were in charge of the land but, in practice, they continued to do the same menial chores, absolutely unaware of what they were materially worth.

Our cadres – no, indeed, the whole of Nagapattinam – lost all respect for the DMK when Chief Minister Annadurai came to unveil the statue of Vengadangal Naidu, a landlord infamous for his atrocities against women and
the ‘untouchable' castes. The landlord sharks here came together under his leadership and the banner of the Paddy Producers Association. Their only common goal is to harass the agricultural labourers, deprive them of all their rights and drive them deeper and deeper into misfortune. The oppressed ‘untouchable' castes, who form the majority of the working-class peasantry, have no safety. They have no right to any type of social justice.

The government is not doing anything to help matters. Indiscriminate police shooting and
lathi
charges have now become commonplace. The police have attacked peaceful processions staged by workers in Nellikuppam and Neyveli. If this is the state of affairs in northern Tamil Nadu, one cannot even begin to imagine the high-handedness of the police in southern Tamil Nadu. They are guests of the
mirasdars
, they feast on the mutton curry cooked in their honour, and behave as if they were nothing but a private uniformed army. The atrocities committed by the policemen against the women labourers are so savage that they cannot even be written down. The police force has become a pack of hunting dogs that the government unleashes on any dissenting force.

But the working masses have been unfazed in facing this brutality of the state machinery that has always acted at the behest of the feudal structure. Our comrades have filled up jails with joy with the knowledge that their suffering today
will ensure a better life for the entire world tomorrow. The red flag rests in revolutionary hands.

Revolutions and uprisings have toppled dictators, they have sounded the death knell of oppression! This is not the time to sit at the sidelines. This is not the time to be a spectator. This is the time to take to the streets. This is the time for the workers of the world to unite. Comrades, let us never forget that the future will only contain what we put into it now!

The district-level agricultural workers' demonstration to be held on 26th November at Nagapattinam bus-stand is meant to show the huge opposition that exists to the pro-feudal, pro-imperialist activities of the state government. The Marxist party wants to condemn the violence unleashed against our cadres, most recently the cold-blooded murder of party leader S
IKKAL
P
AKKIRISAMY
on 15th November. No action has been taken, and even though the entirety of Nagapattinam knows that the man responsible for his murder is Vinayagam Naidu of the DMK, the police force, under the instructions of the DMK high command, has not arrested anybody. On the other hand, police have increased their atrocities against our party, and they have threatened to order a blanket ban on all our meetings, rallies and demonstrations. They refuse to understand that the anger of the proletariat will rectify every injustice in this world. We should be angry that we are not angry enough.

We have not been able to save the life of our comrade, although we knew about the grave threats he faced from the Paddy Producers Association. Even our alacrity could not prevent his murder at the hands of Vinayagam Naidu. We stayed together day and night, we slept at the party office in Nagapattinam, and we stayed like each other's shadows. Alas! We have lost one of our most popular grass-roots workers who organized the people. They attacked him in a blink of an eye and we no longer have this brave and committed comrade with us. His murder was the result of a deal between Vinayagam Naidu and Gopalakrishna Naidu – a division of labour – the former wanted to finish off his biggest threat, and the latter has taken upon himself the task of forcing the people of Kilvenmani to abandon the red flag, an end for which he is willing to adopt any means. Our appeals to the police and the chief minister to provide protection to the people of Kilvenmani have fallen on deaf ears.

This must not go unopposed. The Paddy Producers Association must be banned for the sake of democracy. We need all possible support and solidarity for our strikes. Let us show our strength in Nagapattinam. Let us stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Kilvenmani and tell them that they are not alone. The proletariat rallying together can be the biggest homage that we can pay to our slain comrade, S
IKKAL
P
AKKIRISAMY
! Let us pay our red
salutes to him by putting an end to the atrocities of the murderous PPA landlords!

R
ED FLAG SHALL TRIUMPH
!

L
ONG LIVE COMMUNISM
!

L
ONG LIVE REVOLUTION
!

6.
Oath of Loyalty

Police Constable Muthupandi; Gopalakrishna Naidu's nameless-for-the-purpose-of-this-novel cook; and the official party organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) share the uniform opinion that the agricultural workers' demonstration held to pay homage to Comrade Sikkal Pakkirisamy attracted more than 3,000 people. More than 300 policemen were deployed to ensure that this public rally passed off peacefully.

These facts, plain and unadorned, will be rejected by those readers whose minds have been poisoned by the passion of the novel. Such injured souls – as a certain Mr Thomas Jefferson observed – carry a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. They are not going to be dazzled by date and time and location. They will not give in to name and place and all the greasy, gratifying noun-fuck that gives one the aura of authenticity. If they want a linear narrative and a self-contained story, they will read the day's newspaper,
not a novel. Being in the business of entertaining such disturbed minds, I shall don the mantle of devious author, and set about my job of disorienting the reader.

Now, the readers-at-large don't know what exactly happened between the murder on 15 November and the massacre on 25 December 1968. They can find the dateline in an excellent documentary on this subject,
Ramayyahvin Kudisai
, but asking them to rush to their nearest video library is not a good way to fill up a first novel. Sitting here in Canterbury, with video footage of the village ready to run continuously for five solid days, and with four diaries bristling with notes, I shall surmise and theorize, assume and presume, speculate and conflate and extrapolate every detail revealed by my field research in order to make it fit into the narrative mode of my novel. The age of apologizing authors is long gone.

Let me follow the format of the previous page.

A villager asked to face a handheld video-cam for the first time, a reporter writing his in-depth opinion piece on this subject in under 1,000 words, and a novelist sorting out her storyline, will tell you with an air of certainty that Comrade Sikkal Pakkirisamy's murder on the day of the district-level agriculture strike proved to be a flashpoint for all the tragedy that followed. They will not begin their story with the arrival of the various Europeans, or the story of rice cultivation in this delta district, or the local kings' largesse and land grants to the Brahmins, or the history of local invasions, or the emergence of communism, or the shrill independence movement, or the manner in which Murugan first manifested himself to the divine in their dreams and then had a temple built in his honour and for his worship, or the origins of untouchability that set apart and put aside some men and some women, or the succour offered by the slave trade of the brown peoples, or the anti-God activities of the Self-Respect Movement or the establishment of the first church at Tranquebar or the formation of the peasant associations or the foundation of the Paddy Producers Association, because it would be easy to get caught up in this multi-dimensional mess of events and impossible to pull oneself out of these knots. Unlike this jumble that is beyond disambiguation, the selection of a key incident such as the murder of Sikkal
Pakkirisamy removes the creases from the timeline. Like a lullaby, it transports us to a safe zone in time so that when we wake up, we can discuss this historical tragedy with the same self-assuredness that everybody employs when they speak of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria as being the immediate trigger that led to the First World War.

So, somewhere in this sultry chapter, we shall begin at the immediate beginning.

What is a story worth if it does not have a supernatural element? Why begin when you cannot bring in gods?

On the day Jayabalan's mother-in-law dropped dead from starvation, a legislator in faraway Madras expressed concern about chronic food-grain scarcity, famine conditions and exorbitant prices, another took issue that cultivators in Tiruchy had been deprived of paddy for their own consumption as state revenue officials had forcibly procured all their harvest; the chief minister tabled a report on the extent of damage caused by a cyclone, along with a detailed break-down of the relief and rehabilitation measures undertaken by his government; while local temple-dweller Lord Murugan, popular in these parts under his alias of Sikkal Singaravelan, according to his strict daily regimen, was bathed in milk twice that morning, noon and night.

When he learnt, after his sixth bath, that the local Communist leader Sikkal Pakkirisamy had been killed off by the landlords, his lordship Sikkal Singaravelan prayed for his own safety –
Murugamurugamurugamurugamurugamuruga
– and decided not to interfere in the internal affairs of this mad and murderous district. Although he was not bothered about the equitable distribution of resources or the wage struggle of the workers, his lordship always knew that he was no different from the local Communist leader in two aspects: he always sought to be defined by his domain
of influence, and he could put up a good show of strength at short notice. Being a bright young chap, he decided that he would not risk taking a position on anything outside his own war portfolio, as long as he was provided with food to eat and milk to drink so that he didn't drop dead and make two women instantaneous widows. He kept his word. He turned a blind eye to blood baths.

Any student of history with access to Wikipedia will be able to tell you, with the requisite annotations, that in the 1968 winter session of the parliament of gods, he abstained from voting on every issue except Vietnam, where he enjoyed cult status as Saigon Subramaniam.