To the Congress, the Vaikom Satyagraha movement was a model success, a breaching of the barriers of orthodoxy. To Periyar, it was an exercise in high-grade deception: Gandhi had sold out the lower castes. Over the next two years, he gradually detached himself from the Congress and Gandhi, whom he never forgave. With his family money, he began the Self-Respect movement. His arena was the Dravidian-language-speaking South—Tamil Nadu as well as Andhra, Karnataka, and Kerala—and his agenda sometimes the very opposite of Gandhi’s.
Where Gandhi and his followers wore white, Periyar instructed his supporters to dress in black. Where Gandhi massaged the religious beliefs of his audiences, Periyar called his listeners fools, insulted their beliefs and caste practices, and threatened to thwack their gods and idols with his slippers. And where Gandhi wanted to build a national movement, Periyar reveled in the Dravidian South.
* * *
As with many autodidacts, it’s tricky to trace precise philosophical antecedents for many of Periyar’s ideas. Venkatachalapathy, who has spent years with Periyar’s papers and letters, notes his habit of referencing sources, ex post facto, for what seem to be original ideas. But in the case of his radicalization on the subject of women, it’s clear his thinking was affected by the controversy over a notorious book published in 1927—a work that Gandhi and the Congress officially despised.
Mother India was the American journalist Katherine Mayo’s muckraking exposé of Indian life, and particularly of how Hindu traditions exploited women. Mayo laced her polemic with dismaying statistics on child marriage, venereal disease, and the treatment of widows, along with official commentary justifying traditions such as marrying girls before the age of fourteen. While some Congress leaders were actively pressing for reform on these same issues, this influential critique from America—a case of “concern-trolling” avant la lettre—implied that Indian self-rule would be catastrophic for women. (One Indian suspicion, which proved correct, was that Mayo had the counsel of British Intelligence in India.) Congress leaders chose to close ranks, affirming Hinduism as a noble protector of women.
Periyar saw the ideas in Mother India differently. Of course he delighted in the attack on Hinduism, but he also recognized, in the social issues kicked up by the controversy, connections to what he had been learning about feminist movements in Europe. Starting in the late 1920s, the issue of Indian women’s rights became a significant part of his Self-Respect campaign. He pressed it in his oratory and in a weekly magazine he founded, each as direct, unpretentious, and outrageous as the other.
In centuries-old Tamil folk songs, women sometimes protested that they were expendable servants of men and nurses of children, and that neither married women nor widows had any property rights. (“If a son had been born in my womb / The son would have got his rightful share / We would have had justice in the courts of Madurai…”). Part of the problem, Periyar believed, was that their marriages were essentially enslavements: loveless financial barters among elders of the same caste, in which the volition of the bride (often a child) was immaterial.
Periyar’s dramatic, colloquial public voice had extended his movement from the urban classes, with whom his rationalist rhetoric was most compatible, across the Tamil heartland. In 1928 or 1929, under his auspices, rural men and women began having what were called Self-Respect marriages: often intercaste love weddings, conducted without Brahmin priests or mantras. Against elaborate, multiday traditional weddings, a Periyar-inspired ceremony was fast and simple by design; he thought money lavished on ritual was better directed toward educating a couple’s presumptive children. At the same time, there was no pretense in the resulting unions that sex was just for procreation.
Officially, Self-Respect had five aims: “no god; no religion; no Gandhi; no Congress; and no Brahmins.” Abolishing patriarchy was ancillary. Yet, over time, Self-Respect marriages, in which the equality of bride and groom was explicit, became important, movement-defining occasions. They were a way to shake the bedrock of Hindu society (which depended on family rituals, conducted by Brahmins), to spread Periyar’s ideas village by village, and to demonstrate one of his ideals: rational argument and frank exchange between men and women.
To Periyar, the evil of arranged, caste-sanctioned marriages perpetuated the widespread illiteracy of girls: parents wanted daughters to be more ignorant and helpless when married off to strangers. He called instead for girls to be trained intellectually and physically, through active sports. Once those girls were grown and married, preferably to men they chose themselves, he wanted them to know how to control their childbearing capacities. This wasn’t the sort of prescription for health and population control that is now vaguely in the air; it was about women’s (and men’s) autonomy, in sexual activity and, through that, other domains of life.
The Tamil press went after him for peddling immorality. Periyar responded, in one wedding speech, with cool logic:
If a wife has to obey her husband, then why should a husband not have to obey his wife as well? If a woman has to obey her in-laws, then why should a man not have to obey his? For if there is no reciprocity, then it is as though a slave girl has been bought to do the housework or for sexual enjoyment. We should not allow this kind of marriage in our land for even half a second.
* * *
Over the course of the 1920s, Periyar had become interested in the social experiment under way in Communist Russia, and in late 1931 he traveled there and across Europe to see for himself. He spent almost a year abroad, and it removed him further from the Indian mainstream. In Berlin, he delighted in visits to nudist camps—he later asked, futilely, that his authorized biography include a photo of him au naturel—and he came home more convinced than ever that science, technology, medicine, and contraception were needed for Indians to advance.
He was particularly interested in how Soviet policies relating to divorce and to state support for children were changing the nature of the family, making it less essential. He was also intrigued by some of the economic ideas he encountered, and on his return he introduced notions of employee share ownership and partnership companies into the family business—giving workers a share of profits, for instance, instead of paying wages.
It’s often said that Periyar imitated his nemesis Gandhi in seeking to shift social attitudes and sway public opinion without aspiring to political office himself. It’s also noted that his following was significantly diminished when, in 1948, Periyar, now a widower, married a much younger woman. A faction of young Self-Respecters cooked up a scandal around the marriage and went off to create a rival party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (the Progressive Dravidian Federation), which, along with another offshoot of Periyar’s movement, has dominated Tamil politics for approaching half a century.
Still, Periyar exercised a good deal of influence in independent India’s electoral politics. For decades, he appeared as the star campaigner on behalf of candidates, and his mass appeal kept him a kingmaker. He was thus able from the outside to exercise pressure on governments and on legislation, a position of some power and no responsibility that didn’t seem to trouble him.
Unlike Ambedkar (41), Periyar never generalized his critique into an all-India one. He was too deeply rooted in the Dravidian culture of the South. As his ideas seeped into that culture, the legendary sniper of sacred cows became, over time, something of a sacred cow himself. Even politicians who tried to marginalize Periyar for twenty years, after the 1948 controversy, later pretended otherwise. He died in 1973, and today, David Washbrook says, “No major Tamil political leader doesn’t claim a lineage of descent from Periyar—even while doing things he’d detest.”
* * *
Demographers and historians of science and medicine are right to protest that Periyar shouldn’t be overcredited for the progress that South Indian women have seen in their health and well-being; many of these changes stem from trends that began well before he was born. Yet the fact that fertility rates in the Tamil region declined markedly during the int
erwar period suggests that his rhetoric on contraception had influence. If nothing else, he interjected the idea into debates, and lodged it in people’s minds. It would be foolish (to use one of Periyar’s favorite adjectives) to think that this passionate leader with a mass rural and urban following for more than five decades was extraneous to the improvement of women’s lives.
In Tamil Nadu today, the social progress of women as measured by development indicators seems to have stalled, despite the propitious legacies. Meanwhile, states in the historically poor, tribal Northeast India have made significant if underreported strides. It’s startling to see, in the tables of the 2011 Census, that tiny Sikkim, a remote Himalayan state, has surpassed Tamil Nadu in female literacy. Since 2007, more Sikkim girls than boys have been enrolled in school at every level.
The causes of the narrowing gender literacy gap, and the obliteration of the schooling gap, are surely multiple, but one of them is sustained, obsessive campaigning: women’s rights advocates banging the drum not just until victory in the next election, but year after year after year—as Periyar did. Persistent public advocacy may not change lives quickly, but in the long run, the Women’s Republic of India will register the difference.
35
IQBAL
Death for Falcons
1877–1938
Whose law should we show allegiance to, God’s or the state’s? It’s an old question, and a bloodstained one. Although it might have seemed exhaustively debated in Western societies, it is once more exercising a significant proportion of the planet’s people.
Its bluntest formulation these days comes from a Muslim leader with an international following. In 2014 he announced that there was a state that would give Muslims dignity and rights, a state that transcended racial or ethnic boundaries, “where the Arab and non-Arab, the white man and black man, the Easterner and Westerner are all brothers.” It sounded like the progressive vision of a nonracial society.
The speaker was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Muslim world and leader of ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The state he imagines seeks not only to efface social divisions, but also to abolish political boundaries. “The earth,” al-Baghdadi said, “is Allah’s.” Al-Baghdadi’s vision of how to reconcile identity and authority is particularly malign. Yet the problem he is addressing is one that many Muslim statesmen and thinkers have grappled with since the dawn of nationalism and the territorial state. As they have done so, many have looked to the same lodestar: the Indian poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal.
It’s fitting that the afterlife of a thinker who was dismissive of nationalism and iconoclastic toward national borders can’t be contained by geographic boundaries. Both Shia-dominated Iran and Sunni-dominated Pakistan claim Iqbal as their founding spirit. One of India’s most patriotic, eloquent panegyrists, he is also celebrated as Pakistan’s national poet. Like al-Baghdadi, Iqbal believed that the ideal ethical, political, and legal order that Islam represented stood above all national identities, but accepted that it might require a state of its own to realize those ideals—though not, for Iqbal, through violence. To concede the necessity of the state, of course, was to be plunged back into the realm of man-made and state-dispensed law, to be subject to human judgment, free to turn its back on the divine.
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Muhammad Iqbal was born in Sialkot, in the Punjab, in 1877. His family was descended from Kashmiri Hindu Pandits who had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century, and he stood in many ways at the confluence of the two belief systems. As he put it in a poem, “though a Brahman’s son I be, / Tabriz and Rum”—intellectual godfathers of Sufi Islam—“stand wide to me.”
Though Iqbal exuded an air of poetic melancholy, and was often prone to tears, people flocked to his home in Lahore, for he was, as one visitor put it, a “performing artist of conversation.” He held a gracious court, reciting his verse in flights of inspiration. His son Javid learned to detect when an idea took hold of his father: “the colour of his face changed, and he gave the impression of suffering from physical discomfort.”
Iqbal authored a dozen collections of poetry, in Persian and Urdu, and numerous essays, speeches, and volumes of correspondence. One of his works, the Javid Nama (1932), or “Book of Eternity,” has been compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy, with Rum (the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi) playing the role of Virgil. In his spare time, Iqbal wrote one of the first Urdu textbooks on economics; earned a doctorate in philosophy, which he studied in Lahore, Cambridge, and Germany; and became a barrister in London.
Hermann Hesse once remarked that Iqbal’s “tremendous work” belonged to three domains: “the worlds of India, of Islam, and of Western thought.” R. A. Nicholson, one of Iqbal’s tutors at Cambridge, called him “a man in disagreement with his age.” He was, but he was also deeply engaged with the histories, themes, and conflicts embedded in Islamic thought and in the literary traditions that fired his imagination. Most pressing, for many who came into contact with his thought, was the way he intervened in the global debate between those conceptual edifices the East and the West. This was an exchange about the form that individual lives and entire societies should take—one that had become particularly acute in Iqbal’s day through the intellectual and political convulsions of Europe in the years during and after the Great War. Yet it also reflected a personal struggle between the imperatives of Iqbal’s heart and the cultural expectations into which he was born.
In the late 1920s, Iqbal became embroiled in a distinctly Indian version of the argument over the relationship between religious identity and the territorial state. As India moved gradually from the imperial dispensation established by the British and toward national sovereignty, a serious debate erupted over the shape of a self-governing India. How should the state reflect the religious variety (and related social conditions) of its citizens? Given the depth of those differences, how (if at all) could they be arranged in a single political order?
Other nations have faced similar questions about the relationship between religious diversity and political power, but none faced the issue on the colossal scale that India did in the middle of the twentieth century. “If an effective principle of cooperation is discovered in India,” Iqbal once declared, it would “solve the entire political problem of Asia”—and, one might add, by extension, the world. As with several other Indian thinkers of his era, including Tagore (32) and Gandhi (38), there was nothing modest about how Iqbal saw the stakes and the implications of his own engagement with his times.
Though Iqbal occasionally tried to answer these questions in bald prose, poetry was his natural medium of thought and expression. His poems bear all the marks of a struggle to balance an idealizing account of human nature with the political realities of Asia. As the historian Rajmohan Gandhi put it, Iqbal “sang with impudence and acted with prudence.” Iqbal himself put it more loftily, and perhaps more accurately: he was a “visionary idealist,” he said, who often had to yield to “the force of those very limitations which he has been in the habit of ignoring.” Many of his most daring propositions seem like remedies to counteract the poisonous effects of his era. Against the dehumanizing consequences of materialism and totalitarianism, he celebrated the individual’s spirit and capacity for self-determination. Against the specter of total war, he sought to imbue modern politics with the force of love. And against fascist discourses of racial and national superiority, he advocated submission to a far higher power.
* * *
He began with the devil. Though Iqbal’s verses are included in many a Pakistani bride’s trousseau, he was perhaps the devil’s most sympathetic ventriloquist since Blake:
For a falcon, living in the nest spells death.
You do not yet know this,
But with union comes the end of longing:
What is eternal life?
To burn—and keep on burning!
Like his devil, Iqbal urged man to “Keep desire alive in thy heart,
/ Lest thy little dust become a tomb. / Desire is the soul of this world…” Indeed, the devil was his ideal image of man—in all but the most crucial respect. It was a conviction that seems to have taken hold of him while he was in the West, before becoming the basis of an ardent critique of Western society.
Iqbal arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1905, during the philosophical heyday of A. N. Whitehead, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell; but the biggest impact on his thought was made by the English Hegelians, philosophers such as J.M.E. McTaggart, and by the atmosphere of social freedom. Although his parents had arranged his marriage after high school, in England he fell for an intellectually daring, aristocratic Indian Muslim, Atiya Faizi, who had been educated in London and went around without the veil. Their relationship may have remained at the level of conversations and correspondence, but it would haunt Iqbal for life.
Much of the poetry Iqbal composed during the three years he spent in Europe was about love. Yet love and desire for him were confusing categories—part sensual, physical, heterosexual; part Keatsian in its idealistic regard for a fleeting yet eternal Beauty; part piously metaphysical, an illuminating love from God. One focus of this poetry may have been Faizi; another was certainly Allah.
At the same time that Iqbal had the freedom to form an intimate bond with a woman he chose (something next to impossible back in Lahore), he was also gathering impressions for an Islamic critique of Western society that would eventually become famous in Europe, India, and the larger Muslim world.
“Pleasure is the only effect of the West’s wine,” Iqbal wrote of the materialism he saw in Europe. Another lyric from this time strengthened the theme and became one of his most well-known verses on the subject:
O Western world’s inhabitants,
God’s world is not a shop!
What you are considering genuine
Incarnations Page 31