The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  Virtue, as we recognise it today in its patriarchal definition, was not a concept that existed in Kerala. And till our colonial masters—and fellow Indians from patriarchal backgrounds—sat in judgement over the matrilineal streak heavily infused among the dominant groups here, women, their bare torsos and their sexual freedoms did not in the least attract attention or odium. Where elsewhere polygamy was a practice available to men, in Kerala there was polyandry on offer, because women were not unequal to their brothers (or, to be more exact, they were less unequal). They owned property and controlled resources, living fuller lives than the domesticated child-rearing destinies ordained to their sisters elsewhere. But this was, of course, the case of women of privilege. For women like Nangeli there was no question of living a life of heroic glamour with armies or ballads; she had to earn her way through every day of uncertainty. It was in death that the songs followed, and they focused not on Nangeli’s message but a perversion of it that was more palatable to changing social mores.

  The advent of the British meant more than just a new political order; they brought to Kerala a new sense of morality, reinforced by missionaries who had the ear of these foreign masters. Polyandrous marriage was deemed ‘very revolting’—women were told that they ought to be virtuous, which meant deference to one husband, one master. They had to cultivate modesty, and toplessness was not a step in that direction. The sexual gaze of the patriarchal Victorian was turned towards the breast in Kerala, till then not a cause of concern. When men and women entered temples, they both took off their top cloth. Today only the men are obliged to do this. As late as the 1920s, when Namboothiri brahmin women for the first time acquired the blouse to cover themselves, purists excommunicated them for breaching custom—modesty and true moral superiority lay, they argued, in not covering up. As Aubrey Menen remarked of his grandmother’s attitude to his Irish mother, it was thought that ‘married women who wore blouses were Jezebels’ and ‘a wife who dressed herself could only be aiming at adultery’. To cover breasts because younger men demanded it was abhorrent to elders. But these elders were a minority in the face of young ‘progressive’ men bent on making their women ‘virtuous’.

  Across the coast, the torso—male and female—was not something that was covered. Higher castes sported shawls, not for reasons of modesty or because they had notions of virtue more consistent with those of a patriarchal society, but because the shawl was a mark of honour. When Christian converts from lower castes covered themselves in the 1850s, riots broke out after violent upper-caste attacks on them. The bone of contention was not that the converted women wanted to cover themselves; it was that they had covered themselves with the shawl permitted only to the high-born. Peace was restored when the converts invented a blouse; the covering was not the issue in the first place.

  The tale of Nangeli that they will tell you today has her fighting to preserve her honour, where honour is construed as her right to cover the breast. But in Nangeli’s time, the honour of a woman was hardly linked to the area above the waist. As F. Fawcett remarked, dress was ‘a conventional affair, and it will be a matter of regret should false ideas of shame supplant those of natural dignity such as one sees expressed in the carriage and bearing of the well-bred … lady’.

  But the import of Victorian patriarchy also imported shame, and women were told that a bare body was a mark of disgrace. Dignity lay in accepting male objectification; honour was located in docility. Men, studying in colleges in big cities, received jibes about their topless mothers who may have had more than one husband. Could they ever be sure about who their fathers were? These men dragged into Kerala the masculinity of their patriarchal interlocutors, and women too, exposed to the West and a new conception of femininity, succumbed. ‘We will publish nothing related to politics,’ declared one of the region’s earliest women’s magazines in 1892, adding that ‘writings that energise the moral conscience’—tips on cooking, stories of ‘ideal women’—and ‘other such enlightening topics’ alone would be covered. A lady’s job was in the home as a mother, as a loyal wife and housekeeper, not outside as a topless harlot who exercised her customary right to divorce. ‘As women,’ another declaration went, ‘our god-ordained duty is the care of the home and service towards our husbands.’

  New icons needed to be found—women who fit the bill of the new order rather than those who were emblems of a now disgusting bare-bosomed past. And where such women were in short supply, existing women were reincarnated, as J. Devika has shown. Umayamma of Attingal, the topless queen whom the Dutch noted for her ‘noble and manly conduct’, who was ‘feared and respected by everyone’, and who was a ‘young Amazon’, became in S. Parameswara Iyer’s poetry a melodramatic damsel in distress, a helpless mother (when, in fact, she had no children) pleading for a male protector. Where once the English had (with perhaps some exaggeration) reported that the ‘handsomest young men about the country’ formed her seraglio and ‘whom and as many [men] as she pleases to the honour of her bed’ could be had by her, now she became a loyal, patriarchal icon of womanly virtue. The women of the past were turned into ciphers for the present, filled with doses of honour and draped in garbs tailored by men. The wheels of time had turned and this is what was needed for a changing society in Kerala.

  Nangeli too was recast. When Nangeli offered her breasts on a plantain leaf to the rajah’s men, she demanded not the right to cover her breasts, for she would not have cared about this ‘right’ that meant nothing in her day. Indeed, the mulakkaram had little to do with breasts other than the tenuous connection of nomenclature. It was a poll tax charged from low-caste communities, as well as other minorities. Capitation due from men was the talakkaram —head tax—and to distinguish female payees in a household, their tax was the mulakkaram—breast tax. The tax was not based on the size of the breast or its attractiveness, as Nangeli’s storytellers will claim, but was one standard rate charged from women as a certainly oppressive but very general tax.

  When Nangeli stood up, squeezed to the extremes of poverty by a regressive tax system, it was a statement made in great anguish about the injustice of the social order itself. Her call was not to celebrate modesty and honour; it was a siren call against caste and the rotting feudalism that victimised those in its underbelly who could not challenge it. She was a heroine of all who were poor and weak, not the archetype of middle-class womanly honour she has today become. But they could not admit that Nangeli’s sacrifice was an ultimatum to the order, so they remodelled her as a virtuous goddess, one who sought to cover her breasts rather than one who issued a challenge to power. The spirit of her rebellion was buried in favour of its letter, and Nangeli reduced to the sum of her breasts.

  PART TWO

  STORIES FROM THE RAJ

  WHAT IF THERE WAS NO BRITISH RAJ?

  The appearance in recent years of a series of books on India and the Raj shows that the history of empire is once again in fashion. There is Jon Wilson’s magisterial India Conquered , which investigates the manufacturing of British power in India, and Ferdinand Mount’s The Tears of the Rajas , which explores its traumatic corollary. Shashi Tharoor delivers a withering review of colonial exploitation in Inglorious Empire , while Walter Reid, in Keeping the Jewel in the Crown , exposes British perfidy in the closing chapter of Pax Britannica. David Gilmour’s The British in India is an apolitical social appraisal of the Englishmen who came to India—sometimes to escape scandal and prison sentences, sometimes to find spouses and fortunes—while Miles Taylor’s The English Maharani situates Queen Victoria as empress of India, whose title and position appealed to colonialists and our early nationalists alike, with no manifest irony.

  It’s a slippery proposition, but what character might India have developed had the British never prevailed to begin with? Would, for example, the south have existed as an autonomous unit, possibly under French influence? After all, by the mid-eighteenth century, the French had temporarily booted the English East India Company out of Madras and establis
hed a robust peninsular presence. The chief of Pondicherry was dignified by the Mughal emperor as a nawab and had managed to keep the Marathas at bay (including, in one instance, by plying the enemy commander’s lady with alcohol). Tipu Sultan was a friend of the French, and had it not been for revolutionary convulsions in the 1790s that preoccupied his allies in their homeland, he might have received the assistance he needed to vanquish the British once and for all. More interestingly, Tipu entertained plans to educate a son in France, and given his interest in engineering, the fruits of the Industrial Revolution may well have found their way to Srirangapatna via Paris long before the British grudgingly allowed them to reach India’s industrialists. Of course, as it happened, the French enterprise collapsed and the English claimed supremacy—it was they who wrote much of India’s subsequent history.

  It was the entrenchment of British power that made racism unofficial state policy; this could, perhaps, have been averted had Indians retained power, dealing with Europeans from positions of strength, confidently commissioning Western talent for indigenous purposes. After all, it was a German who commanded the Maratha troops at the Battle of Assaye, and in Kerala it was a Dutchman who modernised Travancore’s armies under the celebrated king Martanda Varma. So too, in the late eighteenth century, as we have seen, the part-Kashmiri nautch girl turned Christian begum of Sardhana had tragic romances with a German, an Irishman and a Frenchman consecutively even as she became protector to the emasculated Mughal emperor. Such exchanges were a two-way street, and could have continued had India retained its autonomy—just before the dawn of the Victorian age, Tamil devadasis performed in Europe before the French king, and Kalidas, as we saw earlier, won Western admiration when his Sanskrit Abhijnanasakuntalam was staged in London as the English Sacontala . Racism reversed this, but if the politics behind racism could have been avoided in the first place, things might have been happier, and our tale somewhat different.

  Not everything, of course, would have emerged perfect even under sustained Indian rule—caste, for instance, would have remained a deep-rooted handicap to the dawn of any unifying sense of nationalism, and, ironically, it was British rule that allowed low-caste voices to emerge at last: it was a missionary education and access to Western texts, for instance, that galvanised Jyotiba Phule in his programme of reform. Politically, by the late eighteenth century, the Marathas dominated north India, from Lahore in the west to Bengal in the east, and, as we saw in a previous essay, a branch of Shivaji’s family ruled in Thanjavur, deep in Tamil country. But while the Marathas might have united much of India politically, had the final Anglo-Maratha War in 1818 not culminated in their defeat, they would have had a long way to go before being able to claim the loyalty of India’s diverse peoples. After all, it was raiding rather than governing that often animated them, and as the Maharashtra Purana notes in the context of Bengal, ‘When they demanded money and it was not given to them, they would put the man to death. Those who had money gave it, those who had none were killed’—hardly a promising formula to inspire brotherhood and patriotism and pave the way for a shared tryst with destiny.

  The irony, contested as it is, is also that it was a common hatred of the English that energised feelings of Indian unity. And that it was a foreign language that allowed Mohandas Gandhi from Gujarat to mentor Jawaharlal Nehru from Allahabad, collaborate with Tamil-speaking C. Rajagopalachari, and debate with the Bengali Subhas Chandra Bose. A firebrand like Bal Gangadhar Tilak recognised this value of English—though his nationalism was inflected with Hindu pride, when he set up an institution in Pune in 1880, it was the New English School and not a gurukul . Indeed, even V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar published in English, without which large sections of their target audience would have been oblivious to their very existence. In fact, language would have been another interesting twist if the British had never reigned. English was imposed officially in 1837, before which it was Persian, now dead here, that served as the lingua franca of diplomacy across much of the subcontinent. As one 1858 report noted, Persian was ‘for 600 years the language of justice … the language of the Court … [and indeed] it was much better known even than the English language is at present’. It was used in Nepal and in the early nineteenth century, it was employed as far south as Kerala. If English had never picked up, India’s elite may still have been speaking to one another, across divides of region, religion and language, in an equally foreign tongue born in faraway Iran, though among the top layer of brahmins in temple towns, Sanskrit may have remained in place, serving as the language of philosophers and high-caste monks.

  So, instead of the succession of East India Company rule by the Raj under Victoria Maharani followed by a successful nationalist struggle, Hindustan might have come into the twentieth century with a figurehead Mughal badshah, presiding over a Persian-speaking bureaucracy supervised by the Marathas, with diplomatic dealings with a French-influenced peninsula in the south. Like foreigners before them—from the Arabs and Jews to the Turks and Central Asians—the British, Germans and French would have been absorbed into our society, through inducements of marriage and employment. Indian philosophy and art would have proudly travelled beyond its frontiers, and ideas from the rest of the world would have received their usual welcome in India. Of course, this is all a grand hypothetical proposition, and like all such propositions, fraught with peril. But in a time when great attention is devoted to scrutinising the impact of the Raj in shaping modern India, one hopes to be forgiven for wondering what India might have looked like had the English never claimed dominion—what this strange and ever-fascinating land might have become had it never served as the jewel in a foreign monarch’s crown.

  ROWDY BOB THE VICTOR OF PLASSEY

  When, in 1757, Robert Clive prevailed at the Battle of Plassey in Bengal, he secured for himself a place as one of the great villains of Indian history. The wheels were set in motion for what would become British imperium in the East, but, for all its furious rapacity, even years later Clive saw no reason to regret what he had unleashed. Defending his actions in 1773 in the British parliament, he uttered words which have since become notorious. ‘Am I not deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings?’ he demanded. ‘Consider the situation in which victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults … piled on either hand with gold and jewels! By god, Mr Chairman,’ exclaimed Clive, ‘at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’

  One might have sympathised with the man’s stream of thinking had his ‘moderation’ not cost Bengal rivers of gold and silver already. An estimated 75–100 boats were deployed to carry the loot from Murshidabad to Calcutta after the victory of 1757, and Clive alone was granted not only a substantial cash reward by his freshly planted puppet nawab, but also a jagir that yielded £27,000 (a thousand times that sum in today’s money) every year for the remainder of his complicated lifetime. It was an extraordinary achievement for this Shropshire boy who began life as ‘Bob’, and whose career, in the words of a biographer, first saw him serve as a ‘glorified apprentice shopkeeper’. For here was a character who, long before he became a confirmed villain, was a typical specimen of eighteenth-century English middleclassdom, packed off by boat to India in his teens to either die or come back rich, plodding along on an annual £5 salary, and reduced in his misery to writing sad, lonely letters, all the while also complaining about the weather.

  Clive was the son of an undistinguished lawyer, raised briefly by an aunt and her husband. When he was six, his uncle recorded that the boy was ‘out of measure addicted’ to fighting, with such ‘imperiousness’ of temper that nobody seemed able to tame his rowdy behaviour. As a biographer later wrote, he also ‘formed all the good-for-nothing lads of the town into a kind of predatory army, and compelled the shopkeepers to submit to a tribute of apples’—a kind of protection money for not smashing the
ir windows. Insolence travelled with him to India, and he often got into petty quarrels with his superiors—on one occasion, he disagreed with a man of the church and decided to give him a colossal whack in the middle of the street. He chewed paan and smoked the hookah, though the only wine he could afford was the kind that was mixed with plenty of water. ‘I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country,’ he complained between days of clerical drudgery. His only consolation was writing, a practice, he reflected gloomily, ‘invented for the comfort of such solitary wretches as myself’.

  Change came to his monotonous, hitherto unremarkable career during the Battle of Madras in 1746, when this British settlement fell to French forces (it was subsequently returned after a peace agreement in Europe). Clive, all of twenty-one, and earlier written off mainly as ‘a dunce, if not a reprobate’, managed to escape from under the noses of his captors, face darkened and dressed in the clothes of his ‘native’ servant. Transferring from civilian service, he now elected to become a soldier, finding at last his calling. In a subsequent skirmish, he acquitted himself with courage and his superiors wrote to London: ‘Mr Robert Clive, Writer in the Service, being of a Martial Disposition’ was granted ‘an Ensign’s Commission’. Of course, he didn’t shed his trademark impetuosity, though this was perhaps less dangerous than the other thing he acquired in the course of his military adventures in India: plain, old-fashioned gonorrhoea.