I am such a Malayali — and in towns and cities around India and across the world, thousands more are growing up like us. Our very names are often absurdities in Kerala terms. In my case, my father’s veetu-peru (house name, the family name handed down from his mother and her female forebears in the Nair matrilineal tradition) has been transmuted into a surname. We speak a pidgin Malayalam at home, stripped of all but the essential household vocabulary, and cannot read or write the language intelligibly. I tried to teach myself the script as a teenager on holidays in Kerala, gave up on the Koottaksharams (joined letters), and as a result can recognize only 80 percent of the letters and considerably fewer of the words. (When an Indian ambassador in Singapore wanted to inform me discreetly of his imminent replacement by a Kerala politician, he passed me a clipping from a Malayalam newspaper and was startled at my embarrassed incomprehension of the news.) Our parents consider it more important that we master English and do well in the prevailing second language, whether Hindi or one of the “regional” languages (Bengali in Calcutta, perhaps Spanish in New York); so no serious attempt is made to teach us to be literate in our mother tongue. Malayalam books and magazines may be found at home, but they are seen by us as forlorn relics of an insufficiently advanced past and are ignored by the younger generation, whose eager eyes are on the paperbacks, comics, and textbooks of the impatient and westernized future.
Even the Keralite liberality and adaptiveness, such great assets in facilitating Malayali emigration and good citizenship anywhere, can serve to slacken, if not cut, the cords that bind non-Keralites to their cultural assumptions. I remember one trivial episode during my student theater days at Bombay’s Campion School, which helped make the point. I was a ten-year-old representing the sixth grade in an interclass theatrical event at which the eighth grade’s sketch featured Chintu (Rishi) Kapoor, younger son of the matinee idol and producer Raj Kapoor, and later to become a successful screen heartthrob in his own right. I had acted, elocuted a humorous poem, and MC’ed my class’s efforts to generous applause, and the younger Kapoor was either intrigued or disconcerted, for he sought me out the next morning at school.
“Tharoor,” he asked me at the head of the steps near the bathroom, “what caste are you?”
I blinked my nervousness at the Great Man. “I — I don’t know,” I stammered. My father, who had shed his caste name for nationalist reasons in his Victoria College days and never mentioned anyone’s religion, let alone caste, had not bothered to enlighten me on such matters.
“You don’t know?” the actor’s son demanded in astonishment. “What do you mean, you don’t know? Everybody knows his own caste.”
I shamefacedly confessed I didn’t.
“You mean you’re not a Brahmin or something?”
I couldn’t even avow I was a something. Chintu Kapoor never spoke to me again. But I went home that evening and extracted an explanation from my parents, whose eclectic liberality had left me in such ignorance. They told me, in simplified terms, about the Nairs; and so it is to Chintu Kapoor, celluloid hero of the future, that I owe my first lesson about my genealogical past.
That was not untypical, because Keralites tend to be the chameleons of India, adjusting to the circumstances they see around them. The children of Keralites outside Kerala generally tend to be well adjusted and increasingly deracinated. Even growing up in India, our music was the eclectic mix of all cosmopolitan living rooms, from Madonna to Mozart, rather than the fifteen minutes of All-India Radio’s Malayalam “Vividh Bharati” to which my mother avidly listened. Even when we turn to “Indian pop,” our film philistinism bears the voice of Bollywood’s Lata Mangeshkar, not Kerala’s P. Susheela, and the national superstar Amitabh Bachchan means more to us than the Kerala screen legend Mammooty. We may eat idlis at home if we are lucky, but most of our food would be unrecognizable in Kerala, and our wardrobes are largely bereft of the distinctive white waistcloths, the mundus, which are the standard attire of the Malayali male. In the process Kerala becomes a remote place, an ancestral homeland long since abandoned, associated with family but not friends, a repository of other people’s memories. Our visits to what our parents continue to refer to as “home” are increasingly the self-distancing trips of tourists. “Home” is, after all, where our parents are, not where their parents used to be.
It is all too easy to slip into this mindset. My parents were both born in little towns that had barely outgrown village status, but having lived all my life in concrete metropolises, I felt the experience of their upbringing only secondhand. When, on our annual visits to Kerala, I overcame the initial childish condescension of the city-bred for village life and genuinely tried to understand and to belong, I met with the most unexpected resistance from my Keralite relatives themselves. It was not just that my world was seen by my cousins as impossibly removed from theirs. What was worse, in a curious kind of inverted snobbery, they delighted in my difference from them. “He doesn’t speak Malayalam, only English,” they would boast in perverse pride to their neighbors, before I could voice an embarrassed (and no doubt ungrammatical) disclaimer in Bombay Malayalam.
What does it mean, then, for a non-Keralite Malayali like myself to lay claim to my Malayali heritage? In many ways my sense of being Malayali is tied up with my sense of being Indian. I may not be able to quote from Vallathol or understand the whirling dance of the village vellichapad, but what my Kerala roots have given me is a sense of the infinite variety of humankind and the vital importance of engaging openly with all of it. And so the Indian identity that I want, in my turn, to give my half-Malayali sons imposes no pressure to conform. It celebrates diversity: if America is a melting pot, then to me India, like Kerala, is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. And the important thing is that Mathai and Mohammedkutty and Mohanan still sing the same songs and dream the same dreams together, preferably in Malayalam.
It may seem paradoxical that I am advocating a vision of a pluralist but united India while singing the praises of a single Indian state. In fact the contradiction is more apparent than real. Western students of nationalism, most recently Michael Ignatieff, have tended to suggest that group identities breed conflict, and that the only solvent for the intolerance and hatred of competing chauvinisms is the replacement of group identification by raging individualism. As a Keralite and an Indian I have profound difficulties with that view, though I yield to no one in my respect for individual rights and in my assertion of my own individuality. The Kerala experience suggests to me that the best antidote to unhealthy group-think is healthy group-think. If you want to discourage Indians from mobilizing themselves principally as Hindus and Muslims hostile to each other, you can do worse than to instill in them pride in identities that transcend the Hindu-Muslim difference, including regional and cultural identities founded on the same pluralism you want to promote across India. A Malayali Hindu feels instinctively closer to a Malayali Muslim than he does to a Punjabi Hindu, and there is no harm in that, in and of itself— unless, of course, the regional identity becomes the source of a different sort of chauvinism, the kind that has led to separatism among some Indian groups. There is no danger of that from Kerala, both because of the pluralist traditions of Keralite culture and because Malayalis have always understood that there are far too many of us who would have to cope with far too little space if Kerala did strike out on its own. Keralites see the best guarantee of their own security and prosperity in the survival of a pluralist India. It is a belief that exists, if in smaller measure, throughout the rest of India — and one that must be extended further and deeper if it is to be self-fulfilling.
The Malayali ethos is the same as the best of the Indian ethos — inclusionist, flexible, eclectic, absorptive. The central challenge of India as we enter the twenty-first century is the challenge of accommoda
ting the aspirations of different groups in the national dream. The ethos that I have called both Keralite and Indian helped the nation meet this challenge. It is an ethos rooted in our native tradition, and therefore in what, for lack of a better word, we can call Hinduism — or at least one kind of Hinduism. The battle for India’s soul will thus be between two Hinduisms, the secularist Indianism of the nationalist movement and the particularist fanaticism of the Ayodhya mob. The danger of neo-Hinduism, of “us” and “them,” is that the cancer will spread; there will be new “us’s” and new “thems.” It was no accident that Bombay’s Shiv Sainik rioters in early 1992 particularly targeted South Indian Muslims: the Shiv Sena had first acquired attention and notoriety by attacking South Indian migrants in Bombay, irrespective of their faith. Today it is “Hindus” and “Muslims”; tomorrow it could be Hindi-speakers against Tamils, upper castes against “backwards,” north versus south.
We are all minorities in independent India. No one group can assert its dominance without making minorities of the majority of Indians. If upper-caste Hindus agitate for Hindutva, a majority of Hindus are not upper caste; if North Indians in the cow belt clamor for Hindi to be the “national language,” a majority of Indians do not speak it as their mother tongue and so on. India’s strength is that it is a conglomeration of minorities using democratic means to ascertain majority opinion on the crucial questions of the day.
This is why the change in the public discourse about Indianness is so dangerous, and why the old ethos must be restored. An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition — and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians.
4
Scheduled Castes, Unscheduled Change
I was about eight or nine when I first came across Charlis.
A few of us children were kicking a ball around the dusty courtyard of my grandmother’s house in rural Kerala, where my parents took me annually on what they called a holiday and I regarded as a cross between a penance and a pilgrimage. (Their pilgrimage, my penance.) Balettan, my oldest cousin, who was all of thirteen and had a bobbing Adam’s apple to prove it, had just streaked across me and kicked the ball with more force than he realized he possessed. It soared upward like a startled bird, curved perversely away from us, and disappeared over our high brick wall into the rubbish heap at the back of the neighbor’s house.
“Damn,” I said. I had grown up in Bombay, where one said things like that.
“Go and get it, da,” Balettan commanded one of the younger cousins. Da was a term of great familiarity, used especially when ordering young boys around.
A couple of the kids, stifling groans, dutifully set off toward the wall. But before they could reach it the ball came sailing back over their heads toward us, soon followed over the wall by a skinny, sallow youth with a pockmarked face and an anxious grin. He seemed vaguely familiar, someone I’d seen in the background on previous holidays but not really noticed, though I wasn’t sure why.
“Charlis!” a couple of the kids called out. “Charlis got the ball!”
Charlis sat on the wall, managing to look both unsure and pleased with himself. Bits of muck from the rubbish heap clung to his shirt and skin. “Can I play?” he asked diffidently.
Balettan gave him a look that would have desiccated a coconut. “No, you can’t, Charlis,” he said shortly, kicking the ball toward me, away from the interloper who’d rescued it.
Charlis’s face lost its grin, leaving only the look of anxiety across it like a shadow. He remained seated on the wall, his leg — bare and thin below the grubby mundu he tied around his waist — dangling nervously. The game resumed, and Charlis watched, his eyes liquid with wistfulness. He would kick the brick wall aimlessly with his foot, then catch himself doing it and stop, looking furtively at us to see whether anyone had noticed. But no one paid any attention to him, except me, and I was the curious outsider.
“Why can’t he play?” I finally found the courage to ask Balettan.
“Because he can’t, that’s all,” replied my eldest cousin.
“But why? We can always use another player,” I protested.
“We can’t use him,” Balettan said curtly. “Don’t you understand anything, stupid?”
That was enough to silence me, because I had learned early on that there was a great deal about the village I didn’t understand. A city upbringing didn’t prepare you for your parents’ annual return to their roots, to the world they’d left behind and failed to equip you for. Everything, pretty much, was different in my grandmother’s house: there were hurricane lamps instead of electric lights, breezes instead of ceiling fans, a cow in the barn rather than a car in the garage. Water didn’t come out of taps but from a well, in buckets laboriously raised by rope pulleys; you poured it over yourself out of metal vessels, hoping the maidservant who’d heated the bathwater over a charcoal fire had not made it so hot you’d scald yourself. There were the obscure indignities of having to be accompanied to the outhouse by an adult with a gleaming stainless-steel flashlight and of needing to hold his hand while you squatted in the privy, because the chairlike commodes of the city had made you unfit to discharge your waste as an Indian should, on his haunches. But it wasn’t just a question of these inconveniences; there was the sense of being in a different world. Bombay was busy, bustling, unpredictable; there were children of every imaginable appearance, color, language, and religion in my school; it was a city of strangers jostling one another all the time. In my grandmother’s village everyone I met seemed to know one another and be related. They dressed alike, did the same things day after day, shared the same concerns, celebrated the same festivals. Their lives were ordered, predictable; things were either done or not done, according to rules and assumptions I’d never been taught in the city.
Some of the rules were easier than others to grasp. There were, for instance, complicated hierarchies that everyone seemed to take for granted. The ones I first understood were those relating to age. This was absolute, like an unspoken commandment: everyone older had to be respected and obeyed, even if they sent you off on trivial errands they should really have done themselves. Then there was gender: the women existed to serve the men, fetching and carrying and stitching and hurrying for them, eating only after they had fed the men first. Even my mother, who could hold her own at a Bombay party with a cocktail in her hand, was transformed in Kerala into a dutiful drudge, blowing into the wood fire to make the endless stacks of thin, soft, crisp-edged dosas we all wolfed down. None of this had to be spelled out, no explicit orders given; people simply seemed to adjust naturally to an immutable pattern of expectations, where everyone knew his place and understood what he had to do. As someone who came from Bombay for a month’s vacation every year, spoke the language badly, hated the bathrooms, and swelled up with insect bites, I adjusted less than most. I sensed dimly that the problem with Charlis, too, had something to do with hierarchy, but since he was neither female nor particularly young, I couldn’t fit him into what I thought I already knew of Kerala village life.
We finished the game soon enough, and everyone began heading indoors. Charlis jumped off the wall. Instinctively, but acting with the casual hospitability I usually saw around me, I went up to him and said, “My mother’ll be making dosas for tea. Want some?”
I was puzzled by the look of near panic that flooded his face. “No, no, that’s all right,” he said, practically backing away from me. I could see Balettan advancing toward us. “I’ve got to go,” Charlis added, casting me a strange look as he fled.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked Balettan.
“What’s the matter with you?” he retorted. “What were you saying to him?”
“I just asked him to join us for some dosas, that�
��s all,” I replied. Seeing his expression, I added lamely, “you know, with all the other kids.”
Balettan shook his head in a combination of disgust and dismay, as if he didn’t know whether to be angry or sad. “You know what this little foreigner did?” he announced loudly as soon as we entered the house. “He asked Charlis to come and have dosas with us!”
This was greeted with guffaws by some and clucks of disapproval by others. “Poor little boy, what does he know?” said my favorite aunt, the widowed Rani-valiamma, gathering me to her ample bosom to offer a consolation I hadn’t realized I needed. “It’s not his fault.”
“What’s not my fault?” I asked, struggling free of her embrace. The Cuticura talcum powder in her cleavage tickled my nose, and the effort not to sneeze made me sound even more incoherent than usual. “Why shouldn’t I invite him? He got our ball back for us. And you invite half the village anyway if they happen to pass by.”
“Yes, but which half?” chortled Kunjunni-mama, a local layabout and distant relative who was a constant presence at our dining table and considered himself a great wit. “Which half, I say?” He laughed heartily at his own question, his eyes rolling, a honking sound emerging from the back of his nose.
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