So it was something of a surprise when the maharaja, who shared Visvesvaraya’s appreciation for efficiency and welcomed Mysore’s status as a model state, began losing faith in his dewan’s judgment.
* * *
In Mysore, as elsewhere in India, Brahmins such as Visvesvaraya, though a statistical minority, held the preponderance of government jobs. And elsewhere in India, including next-door Madras, movements against Brahmin dominance were gathering pace. The maharaja had been following these developments and, under pressure from local leaders, decided in 1917 to improve the position of Mysore’s non-Brahmin castes.
Visvesvaraya had little patience for engineering social change through policy. Moreover, from the limited exposure he’d had to the Mysore masses, he had come to believe that a fair share of Indian poverty was caused not just by a lack of employers, but by the failure of individual noses to bend to the grindstone. Americans, he said, had much more hustle. (Now that stereotypes of American and Indian workers are reversing, it’s amusing to see a quote attributed to Visvesvaraya being bandied about in American conservative circles: “Ignorance, dependence, inefficiency, laziness, want of the spirit of enterprise are the real causes of poverty.”)
When the maharaja instituted scholarships for non-Brahmin students, Visvesvaraya acquiesced. But then the maharaja wanted preferential allocation of educational places (what in later Indian policy would be known as affirmative action or “reservations”) for non-Brahmins. This was hardly common practice among the princely states, and Visvesvaraya was affronted. As he later wrote, “By ignoring merit and capacity I feared production would be hampered and the efficiency of the administration, for which we had been working so hard, would suffer…” Growth could efface caste handicaps, in his view. Trying to correct the problem in the short term was a waste of state and social energy, as well as wrong in principle.
Variations on this argument—ideals of growth and meritocracy versus those of inclusion—continue heatedly today as disadvantaged groups demand that affirmative action be extended into new areas of employment, including India’s dynamic private sector. Back in the 1910s, the maharaja and his dewan conducted their skirmish via courteous memo, stony silence, and sneaky press leak—until Visvesvaraya provoked the maharaja by putting forward suggestions for members of a government commission. The commission was meant to assess the plausibility of caste-based proportional representation in public service. Every name Visvesvaraya recommended was Brahmin. When the exasperated maharaja insisted that at least half be non-Brahmin, Visvesvaraya offered his resignation—probably as a bluff to get his way. To his surprise, the maharaja let his state-shaping prime minister go.
* * *
To MV’s slogan “Industrialize or Perish!” Gandhi had once responded, “Industrialize—and Perish!” Yet in the 1930s and ’40s, as the horizon of independence drew nearer, Gandhi’s became a recessive voice against a political and business elite whose visions converged in an industrial future. The details of that future, though, were contested.
The successful industrialists of western India hoped to secure favorable conditions for their own profitable textile and consumer industries: they wanted the state to invest in infrastructure and heavy industries, and protect them from foreign competition. They had little interest in policies of inclusion, still less in redistribution. Yet among the ambitious politicians of the Congress party were progressives who believed that a state-owned industrial base, built by economic planning and combined with reforms of India’s concentrated landholdings, would eliminate poverty and create a less hierarchical society. They had little interest in private enterprise, still less in private profit. MV’s own views, like those of other technocratic administrators of his era, fell between stools. He wanted both Japanese-style state investment and industrial strategy as well as American hustle and enterprise.
Nehru was not persuaded. He doubted that what had been done by an autocrat in a state of immense princely wealth could be replicated elsewhere in a poor democratic nation. Moreover, he worried that under Visvesvaraya’s plan, India’s already yawning inequalities, both regional and individual, would widen further. And Nehru, unlike Visvesvaraya, was answerable to Parliament and had elections to fight.
After Independence, Nehru did incorporate into the model of national planning the Mysorean’s faith in the idea of a central intellectual “brain” for society: a council of expert economists, technocrats, and businessmen who could determine policy goals. (Nehru was less willing to induct business instincts into this national economic cerebrum.) To Visvesvaraya this was hardly enough. In the 1950s, when Nehru conferred on him India’s highest civilian award, Visvesvaraya remained his crotchety, unbending self: “If you feel that by giving this title, I will praise your government, you will be disappointed. I am a fact-finding man.”
* * *
Today, India’s thirty-five hundred or so engineering colleges train a million and a half graduates annually. The esteem in which they’re held has something to do with the brand Visvesvaraya left on the profession. The work he did to help bring clean water and power to his part of the world, and to reduce catastrophes such as monsoon flooding, would have been a substantial legacy even if he hadn’t done more than anyone to lay the foundations of Bangalore, whose professional class has probably drawn more wealth to the nation than that of any other city.
But what he failed to achieve is almost as impressive. Visvesvaraya died in 1962, at the age of 101. Nehru followed two years later. In less than a generation, it became clear that the planned economy was stifling Indian potential. By 1991, over one-third of Indians were below the poverty line; economic growth had dipped to just 1 percent; and the country’s finances were a mess. Nehru’s political heirs were compelled to open India’s economy to the world, and embrace, even if warily, global capitalism and private entrepreneurship. It’s tempting to believe that if Visvesvaraya had gotten his way, India would be far more developed today—and a real rival to economies such as those of Sweden and Japan. Yet against this flight of speculative inquiry, it’s been argued that in the early years of Free India, a laissez-faire attitude toward urgent social inequalities would have triggered caste and class conflict.
Oddly enough, twenty-first-century India now offers something close to a test case for the Visvesvaraya model. A good deal of the economic revitalization plan Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised in return for the mandate he won in the 2014 national elections parallels what Visvesvaraya advocated: development of large-scale industries, greater power to the states, decentralized administration, efficiency as a primary value of governance, and harsh responses to corruption. Modi also shares Visvesvaraya’s lack of patience for social questions. The weakness of human development indices do not perturb him greatly, and his government has cut funding for schemes to improve them.
In Modi’s conception, model states of the sort Mysore once was might temporarily exacerbate inequality, but they’ll inspire India’s poorer states to join in a race to the top. Competitive federalism, the new catchphrase, reminds me of something Visvesvaraya once said: “Take care of the pieces well. The whole will take care of itself.” It’s a good line, widely quoted nowadays, but one that raises a question of political judgment—the kind of judgment that neither Visvesvaraya nor his modern incarnations consistently excel at. If just some pieces do well, at what point will the whole begin to wobble?
34
PERIYAR
Sniper of Sacred Cows
1879–1973
Imagine, if you will, that Indian women were a country unto themselves—the Women’s Republic of India. At around six hundred million people, the new state would be the world’s third largest, a little smaller than the misruled territory of Male India. On the United Nations’ 2014 Human Development Index, it would rank between Myanmar and Rwanda. Now home in on mean years of schooling. Our Women’s Republic of India would be, at 3.2 years, neck and neck with Mozambique. As for per capita, inflation-adjusted income, hold onto
your hat as Côte d’Ivoire and Papua New Guinea leave our new nation in their dust. It’s sobering to see what a tripling of India’s GDP since 2000 has not done for its women.
In fact, we don’t have to cross borders to imagine an environment less crushing for Indian women’s capacities. In the states of southern India, development indices and daily freedoms have long been different from those across the northern states. In the North, for instance, the majority of women marry before the age of eighteen; in the South, the number in some states is as low as 15 percent. One result is that fertility rates in parts of the South are half what they are in some northern states. You’ll find parallel differences in women’s illiteracy, and in female rates of participation in the labor force (over 50 percent in the South, just 36 percent in the North). Such variations are arguably at the heart of a North–South divide that is often cited as one of India’s major economic and social fault lines. Surprisingly, that divergence has something to do with a primary school dropout named E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, who was born nearly 140 years ago.
Ramaswamy Naicker is best known in India as an anti-Brahmin activist, rationalist, and take-no-prisoners orator—an iconoclast who joined Gandhi’s Congress but became a famous enemy of the Mahatma. In the mid-1920s, Naicker founded the Dravidian Self-Respect movement, whose followers called him Thanthai Periyar, the Great Man—a self-conscious dig at Gandhi (38), the Mahatma, or Great Soul. Though he never ran for office, Periyar left a massive imprint on modern Tamil politics; the political parties that emerged from his movement have governed the state since the late 1960s. Nationally, his advocacy of the Tamil language and his refusal to accept the nationwide imposition of Hindi influenced India’s post-1947 policies of linguistic pluralism, while his views on caste helped create an atmosphere that favored legislation on affirmative action in the early days of the Constitution. He was also the first leader of his time to argue forcefully (without the paternalist condescension many Indian men are given to when they speak on this subject) for the freedom of women in a country where the wagons are always circled around the patriarchal family.
Periyar mocked the “stupidity” of Sanskrit epics that celebrated self-sacrificing women as if they were chaste footstools. He advocated girls’ education, love marriages, divorce if those marriages didn’t work out, women’s property rights, and (most radical of all) respect for women’s sexuality and ability to control conception. Women shouldn’t passively wait for rights to be bestowed upon them, either, Periyar said. In an essay in which he called for manhood to be destroyed in the name of female freedom, he famously wrote, “Have cats ever freed rats? Have foxes ever liberated goats or chickens? Have whites ever enriched Indians? Have Brahmins ever given non-Brahmins justice? We can be confident that women will never be emancipated by men.”
Periyar was making his case in a region with more than its share of ancient warrior queens and powerful goddesses, a lower fertility rate, and, in some communities, an existing tradition of birth control—and this probably intensified the twentieth-century statistical face-off between South and North. Yet the more I learn about this gruff idol breaker with a stiletto tongue and a furnace of a brain, the more I wonder: If only other regions of India had had similar legacies, would our Women’s Republic of India be in better fighting shape today?
* * *
There is no God. There is no God.
There is no God at all.
He who invented God is a fool.
He who propagates God is a scoundrel.
He who worships God is a barbarian.
For decades, Periyar made a habit of beginning his mammoth meetings of the Self-Respect movement with this incantation. He spoke rhythmically, and watching him on video—a bulky man in a black shirt with a bald head, untamed white beard, and, beside him, a little pet dog to scare away Brahmins, who consider dogs unclean—I feel as if I’m in the company of a beat poet. He was in many ways as wild-spirited, though his words were never mystical. He was a scorching critic of anything and everything he considered irrational, beginning with caste and religion.
Periyar was born ten years after Gandhi and grew up in the town of Erode, known for its textile-making and little else, in Coimbatore district, Madras. His caste was a middle one, of agrarians and traders, but his father’s prosperity as a trader protected him from slights. As a child, the boy had a good house, with servants, and could afford to be a little rebellious.
Early on, Periyar would needle the sadhus and Brahmin priests hired by his socially aspiring father to instruct him in Sanskritic ways. The religious men couldn’t take it, and stopped coming, leaving the young Periyar unconvinced by their teachings. Yet he remained enough of a Hindu to make a pilgrimage to Hinduism’s Brahminopolis, Benares. Here, in his early or mid-twenties, he had what is always recounted as his decisive moment, a counter-Damascene one. He wrote and spoke of it frequently afterward. How he fled to Benares after interrupting a big Brahmin feast hosted by his father. How he was repulsed by the money-grubbing Benares pandits and their aggression toward non-Brahmins. How he couldn’t get a meal at any of the Benares feeding stops because of his caste. How he wouldn’t have survived without charity—eating, on one occasion, food scraps used as offerings in death rituals.
Contrary to the myth, the experience didn’t immediately change his life. Yet it implanted in him a slow-burning, private rage against the Brahmins, and he seems to have begun, in his twenties, a long process of reading and self-education. As the Cambridge historian of South India David Washbrook notes, since the 1880s, Madras intellectuals had debated back and forth whether it was possible to reconcile Hindu belief and practices with modern, scientific thinking. Annie Besant’s (29) Theosophy, with its rationalist demolition of missionary Christianity and scientistic defense of Brahminic Hinduism, was a godsend to the South’s upper-caste intellectuals. They could now defend their religious and caste practices in a modern idiom. But Periyar, without a high-caste status to preserve, was free to follow a logic unshackled by prejudice: “He liked to joke, “I’ve got no personal problem with God—I’ve never even met him, not once,” says A. R. Venkatachalapathy, a leading Tamil cultural historian now working on a biography of Periyar.
Periyar’s logical consistency was usefully supported by his material position. His hostility to Brahminism reflected something we’ve seen as far back as Mahavira (2) and the Buddha (1): it wasn’t impoverished low-caste individuals, but men who were effectively bourgeois—higher on the caste ladder, with some wealth—who were most willing to confront India’s oldest form of hierarchy. A person of Periyar’s means was also freer to be provocative. Consider one of his most famous wind-up lines: “If you see a snake and Brahmin on the road, kill the Brahmin first.” If a Dalit had spoken publicly like that in the early 1900s, most likely he’d have been the one killed.
Yet, in his twenties and thirties, Periyar wasn’t shouting that critique in the streets; nor was he swept along by the first wave of mass nationalism, which broke soon after he returned from Benares. Instead, he was married with a family, engaged in successfully expanding his family business into one of the largest merchant trading houses in Coimbatore. By 1918, respected for his managerial prowess, he became the chairman of the Erode municipality, considering budgets, pipes, and drains.
* * *
Kerala’s Kottayam district is today one of India’s most socially progressive places; literacy rates are high, above 90 percent; and some years ago it declared itself India’s first tobacco-free district. One of its oldest shrines sits at the center of a lattice of roads in the town of Vaikom: a wood-pillared Shiva temple controlled by a priestly South Indian caste of extreme orthodoxy, the Nambudiri Brahmins. Those roads would lead Periyar, approaching forty, into politics.
The Nambudiris had for centuries forbidden untouchables and low castes not just from entering the Mahadev temple, but also from walking on the surrounding roads. In the early 1920s a low-caste movement arose, calling for the ruler of Travancore state (a
s Kerala was then called) to open temples to all Hindus. Otherwise, they threatened, they would convert to Christianity or Islam. The Vaikom temple became the epicenter of the movement’s agitations. By 1924, Gandhi had been drawn in—the first occasion on which he made untouchability a cause for public protest.
At the time, Congress party politicians were becoming increasingly embarrassed by how few lower-caste Tamils held senior positions in the party; to dampen the criticism that it was Brahmin-dominated, it was searching out new leaders. Rich, confident, and smart, Periyar had been convinced shortly before the Vaikom protests to join the party, after a chance meeting with two leading Tamil congressmen on a railway platform. Now Congress needed someone of lower caste—a figurehead perhaps—to lead the Vaikom cause. Periyar was their man.
He took to nationalist politics almost instinctively and, initially, with hope. He thought Gandhi, mid-caste like him, might share his opposition to Brahmin control of the Congress leadership—that the interests of nationalism and of caste fairness might be reconciled. Traveling around the conservative state, Periyar was too independent-minded to stick to Gandhi’s view that only the roads around the temple should be opened to all. He supported the protesters’ demand that the temple itself be opened to everyone—even though he told his audiences that they were idiots to want to worship there. He was so effective at galvanizing the movement that he twice wound up in prison.
While Periyar was in jail, Gandhi negotiated gently with the Nambudiri priests. (The low castes, one of the Brahmins said, had to be excluded because they were “reaping the reward of their karma”; no doubt, Gandhi agreed, but asked, “Who are we human beings to take the place of God and add to their punishment?”) Ultimately, in 1925, the new Maharani of Travancore worked out a compromise: some of the roads surrounding the temple were opened, but the main entrance stayed accessible only to Brahmins. The demand that lower castes be permitted to step over the threshold and into the temple compound and shrine wouldn’t be met until 1936.
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