The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  A BRAHMIN WOMAN OF SCANDAL

  At the dawn of the twentieth century, a scandal of horrific proportions reared its head before Kerala’s brahminical elite. The year was 1905 and the setting was princely Cochin. Home to prominent Namboothiri families, this was also one of the seats of orthodoxy in India. The Namboothiris were fond of rules and ritual, perched though all of this was on extraordinary social privilege. As E.M.S. Namboothiripad put it, these brahmins ‘occupied the highest position among all other communities … collected fabulous amounts as rent, enjoyed undisputed supremacy over the tillers of the soil, and maintained intimacy with the ruling monarchs’. The immortal Parasurama, they claimed, had bestowed Kerala upon them, this being the fount of their legitimacy. Every other group was to serve, and the Namboothiris would apportion caste status and privilege to those who subscribed to this world view. As late as 1875, the brahmin was officially cast as the common folk’s ‘royal liege and benefactor, their suzerain master, their household deity’, and indeed, ‘their very god on earth’.

  While colonialism began to chip away at this cocoon of ritual and luxury, one of the earliest cracks in the order appeared not outside, but within—in the quarters of a woman. Namboothiri women, after all, saw little of the privilege that was so normal for their men. The only Malayali females in purdah, they had no freedom of movement, no ownership of property, and little education. Or as one of them put it, the antharjanam (literally, ‘indoor person’) was ‘a jailed creature’. She was ‘born crying, lives her life in tears, and dies weeping’. It was not an exaggeration. Even marriage—the only prospect for women in a patriarchal set-up—was denied to many of them. Among Namboothiris there was no rule decreeing early marriage for girls, while only the eldest male was permitted to take a brahmin wife. The result was that younger sons married non-brahmin women, while legions of Namboothiri females lived in sequestered spinsterhood. And if they did find husbands, it was often already married men, who used the opportunity to exchange their own sisters and daughters as though this were a transaction for chattel.

  In 1905, however, the world of the elite was shattered by our protagonist, since enshrined in Malayali imagination as a pratikaradevata , goddess of revenge. Her name was Savitri, and she lived in Kuriyedathu house in Thrissur district. Married at eighteen to a man whose brother had sexually abused her at ten, she took it upon herself, it is said, to unleash fury upon her caste and its leaders. While Namboothiri men took wives and mistresses, the antharjanam was to be chaste and docile: it was this presumption that Savitri would demolish. In the words of the writer V.T. Bhattathiripad, she challenged male sexual entitlement ‘with the same weapon’—she slept with men other than her husband. There were high-caste men, and there were lower-caste men; there was her brother-in-law, as there were other relations; there were Tamil brahmins and Nair aristocrats. There was even a Kathakali star, not to speak of an epileptic. By the time her deeds were revealed, occurring in her chamber as much as the temple grounds, Savitri, now twenty-three, had been with no less than sixty-six men.

  It was a scandal unparalleled, partly because it was the first such to be disseminated widely through the newspaper press. There was a traditional round of interrogation by her caste-men, but the furore caused the local maharajah to order a second round in his palace. Various theories circulated: as scholar J. Devika records, one of these placed Savitri as the pivot of a cunning plot hatched by the ruler. She was apprehended with fewer lovers, but prevailed upon to name many more, to get rid of an emerging class of Namboothiri modernisers who were challenging the orthodox old guard. But what shocked all involved—and the public witnessing—was her reported coolness. As the Malayala Manorama put it, ‘She replied like a barrister.’ For she had evidence of her trysts. She knew what marks her lovers had on their persons, or if there were warts on their genitals. She remembered dates on the basis of festivals and events, and one by one she named them—great exemplars of contemporary society, all guilty of fornicating with a brahmin wife.

  Cast as a victim seeking vengeance, Savitri has been reincarnated in fiction as well as film. Lalithambika Antharjanam retold her tale, and Matampu Kunhukuttan too describes this heroine who paid patriarchy back in its worst coin. But there are others who seek nuance. She was certainly a victim, many of her ‘affairs’ occurring when she was only an adolescent. But the emphasis on a calculated quest for revenge was perhaps exaggerated by voices championing reform, the scholar Rajeev Kumaramkandath suggests, seeking to use these unparalleled events to force change. Savitri herself had more complex experiences, as her testimony reveals. A mahout, for instance, had a bottle of rose water she wanted: he had heard of her relations with another mahout, and offered her the bottle if she would sleep with him. Savitri agreed. Another time, she slept with a man fearing he would divulge her involvement with a third person—it was fear of blackmail that motivated her, not necessarily a desire to ensnare more men in a web of revenge.

  Still, there is in her meticulous recollection of each tryst something formidable. So too in the fact that when she was excommunicated, with her she took sixty-six men and their reputations. All of Kerala seemed to savour the blow she dealt her community, while champions of change rejoiced at the exposure. ‘It is indeed a sight to watch the indomitability on their face when [the men named] go to question the woman,’ it was reported, ‘and the grief-stricken expression when they come back.’ In the years that followed, Namboothiri women began to reject their seclusion; men began to breach custom. Savitri herself disappeared into Tamil country, never to be seen again. But in her wake she left horror and admiration both, casting the first stone at the house of orthodoxy. No longer was the brahmin a veritable god on earth—he had been tainted, his pretensions dismantled by a woman who was beyond shame and fear.

  ‘I’M A NAGA FIRST, A NAGA SECOND, AND A NAGA LAST’

  On 12 June 1960, puzzled immigration officials in London detained a traveller who had landed up without bothering about that small thing called a passport. His face was partially paralysed, but his tongue was defiant. ‘When the British came to my country,’ he declared, ‘they did not bring any passport with them. Why should I now carry one to Britain?’ It was a startling riposte but the visitor’s identity clarified matters. Angami Zapu Phizo, one-time insurance salesman and proprietor of ‘Gwiz Products’, which offered a range of face creams and balms, was a dangerous separatist, sentenced to death by the Indian Union—a union over a decade old at the time but which was yet to fully reconcile with the people Phizo represented, and whose cause delivered him to his tragic destiny: exile and death in a foreign land.

  The Nagas, descended from Mongoloid tribes and members of the Tibeto-Burman language family, occupied a vast hilly tract in the north-east of India for much of known history. Then, in 1832, an East India Company captain with 700 soldiers, 800 ‘coolies’—and no passport—decided to gun his way through their lands. Held loosely by rival clans, the advent of the British produced the tribes’ first common enemy, transforming also into a catalyst for unity. For the captain, however, the motive was clear—the company had brought Manipur next door under its control and now sought a direct route into nearby Assam; a route that could only be had by bulldozing through what was later described as this ‘savage tract lying in the midst of our settled districts’. A few patronising lines about ‘civilising the hillmen’ were also thrown in, and Naga territory was promptly justified as for the British to seize.

  Despite the hysterical onslaught of propaganda about headhunting, the Nagas were not convinced of their so-called inferiority. On the contrary, ‘We are all equal,’ Phizo proudly noted. ‘We have no caste distinctions, no high class or low class. There is no minority problem and we believe in that form of democratic government which permits the rule of the people as a whole. We talk freely, we live freely, and we often fight freely too. We have few inhibitions. Wild? Yes, but free. There is order in this chaos, law in this freedom.’ It was not what the West defined as ‘civili
sed’ but it held many other cultural ingredients for nationhood. The Nagas of the time, naturally then, were alarmed to discover that an accident of history—and the construction of a highway—had transformed them into ‘Indians’ overnight.

  Phizo, however, was an unlikely voice for Naga nationalism. Born in 1904, his was a family of converted Christians (and it should be remembered that after British arms, it was missionaries who followed into Naga territory). And yet their tribal background retained enough influence for his parents to delay his baptism till the age of eighteen. Selling insurance for a Canadian company in the bigger towns of the region, and the Bible in its villages, the man travelled extensively. Over time, he developed a sense of nationalism inspired by the past as well as by his peers. The time, though, was not ripe. He married and eventually moved to Burma, never, however, relinquishing his vision for a sovereign Nagaland. ‘I am a Naga first, a Naga second, and a Naga last,’ he announced, even as the British thought him ‘as thoroughly a nasty piece of work as ever there was one’.

  It was the Second World War that allowed Phizo an opportunity to realise his vision and rise above his middle-class existence. And this did not merely entail terminating British domination, but also aimed to challenge any Indian claims over Naga territory—he did not intend to watch a ‘black government’ replace the white. When in the 1940s Subhas Chandra Bose and the Japanese took Burma, Phizo cooperated more readily with the latter than with Bose, even as the campaign to invade India was ultimately defeated. The British, when they returned, locked him up in jail for his efforts. ‘I was condemned a traitor,’ he remembered without repentence. ‘But I was certainly not a traitor to my own conscience.’

  In 1946, Phizo came home to lead the Naga National Council. His opening sentiment was disappointment. In Burma, he ‘had witnessed what patriotism could achieve’. In Nagaland, there ‘was nothing—no unity, no ideas’. He decided to plant these ideas, therefore, meeting Mahatma Gandhi to negotiate a space outside India for his people. ‘I will come to the Naga Hills,’ Gandhi promised when the possibility of military coercion was raised, and ‘I will ask them to shoot me before one Naga is shot.’ But Jawaharlal Nehru after 1947 would not brook any talk of tribal autonomy—India was already in shock after partition, and the territories and borders that remained were not negotiable.

  Phizo, who ‘gave the impression of carrying, single-handed, in his little briefcase, the destiny of the entire Naga people’, was prepared to fight. But when events turned violent under his direction, Nehru’s determination was matched by the march of Indian troops. Phizo had no option but to live with the consequences. He went into exile, travelling via East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on a fake El Salvadoran passport to Switzerland first. He made every effort to attract and win international support for his cause, but there was nothing tangible anybody could offer. After all, Nehru, despite a blood-curdling (though perhaps necessary) policy in Nagaland, was a towering post-colonial figure; Phizo, as London’s newspapers announced, only a famous ‘headhunter’.

  By the time he died in 1990, thirty years later, Phizo was resigned to his fate. ‘I made a mistake in over-estimating the will of those I had left behind in Nagaland to resist the pressures put on them,’ he remarked gloomily to a journalist. ‘I made another mistake in believing that in the West truth would conquer. That was not so. Having come here, I could see the world is too distracted, too divided. I thought of myself as a student of history, but I have discovered I have a lot to learn.’ He had a dream that seduced many of his people. What he learnt painfully was that it was destined to remain just that: a dream.

  THE MONK FOR EVERY INDIAN

  It is tempting to wonder if Swami Vivekananda might have achieved his enduring fame and celebrity had he chosen to remain a ‘Vividishananda’ or even a ‘Satchidananda’ at the time of his sensational (and defining) visit to the United States. These were, after all, names he preferred at various points before finally confirming, in 1893, the label by which the world remembers him. ‘Vivekananda’ certainly rolls better off the tongue than the first of the other options, but more importantly, it is also the name by which this peerless Bengali monk has been appropriated by practically every political camp in India, to deploy in support of varied and sometimes antithetical motives. To those whose blood is not red but saffron, he was a champion of Hindu might and a beacon for resurgent pride. Those who abhor majoritarian claims also point to the very same man, in whose preachings may be found endorsements of a liberal order. This iconic thinker-saint has emerged as everybody’s favourite precisely because he can be different things to different people—a feature in which resides both his strength and his fascinating longevity in the tug of war that is popular imagination.

  His story is well established: birth as Narendranath into a bhadralok house in Calcutta, a promising academic career, his encounter with the spiritual master Ramakrishna, and his transformation as not only an architect of modern Hindu thought but also as a messenger for India itself. What firmly confirmed him as a force was his time abroad, beginning with his famous address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. As his Irish disciple, Sister Nivedita, remarked, ‘it may be said that when he began to speak’ at that 1893 gathering, ‘it was of the religious ideas of the Hindus’. But by the time he had finished his monumental address, ‘Hinduism had been created’. This modern rendition of ancient traditions entitled him to a place in history already, but some offer fantastical tales that heralded much earlier the certainty of distinction: he was Shiva incarnate, so that as a child the only way to calm his mischief was to pour ‘cold water on his head and simultaneously [chant] the name of Shiva’. Other stories have him showing a tendency towards meditation—when a snake slithered into his room, so admiring was the reptile that it coiled up to study Narendranath, utterly transfixed. It can be safely concluded that these stories are entirely apocryphal, though they served their purpose in romanticising Vivekananda’s work with the magic of god-ordained destiny.

  The philosophy he upheld was a refashioned Advaita Vedanta, most famously associated with the eighth-century thinker Sankara. But esoteric concerns aside, what electrified contemporary nineteenth-century minds was his blending of a religious reawakening with national reinvigoration. After generations of an inferiority complex fed by a colonial state— that India was rotten and devoid of civilisational value—Vivekananda refused to argue on conventional measures of progress. ‘Let others,’ he declared, ‘talk of politics … of the immense wealth poured in by trade, of the power and spread of commercialisation, of the glorious fountain of physical liberty.’ The ‘Hindu mind’ did not care—India’s mission was not to count coins, focused as it was on ‘the evolution of spiritual humanity’, making it ‘the blessed punya bhumi ’ of mankind itself. This formula was not original, but where Vivekananda differed from previous reformers in Bengal—who too sought to restore pride in Hinduism but whose message circulated within the elite—was in his conviction that the masses needed awakening, and religion was the medium for it. ‘Before flooding India with socialistic or political ideas,’ he argued, ‘first deluge the land with spiritual ideas.’ That he travelled the length of this vast country, and to places as distant as Nagasaki and New York, further energised his cause.

  His spiritual ideas were derived from Sanskrit philosophy, even though its dissemination was not to remain in the language of philosophers. ‘It is,’ observed Vivekananda pithily, ‘an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.’ Things would have to be simplified, translated into vernacular tongues, and ‘fiery’ missionaries were to transport the message. Old movements such as the Bhakti of popular worship had to be discarded. ‘Look at this nation,’ claimed Vivekananda, ‘and see what has been the outcome.’ While in Chicago he highlighted divine love, in India itself he saw Bhakti as making the nation ‘effeminate—a race of women!’ Orissa, for example, was ‘a land of cowards; and Bengal, running after the Radha-prema … has almost lost all sense of manliness.’ While
not violent or muscular, Hinduism had to become a proactive faith, he thought, and eschew the complacency of disorganised variety. Vivekananda affirmed his belief that such a reinvention of Hinduism was the key to ‘awaken the national consciousness’, in a point that proponents of Hindutva cherish. Internal differences had to be weeded out because ‘the whole secret lies in organisation, accumulation of power, coordination of wills’, and all this through a common religious spirit pervading the land—a spirit firmly Hindu.

  Reformers from below were not to act too aggressively against brahminism. An example Vivekananda cited was the case of America’s blacks. ‘Before the abolition, these poor negroes were the property of somebody, and … [were] looked after… Today they are the property of nobody. Their lives are of no value.’ So too, in India, despite injustices of caste, it was unwise to attempt too aggressively to push the elite out of the way, for it might cripple unity. Besides, ‘To the non-Brahmin castes I say … you are suffering from your own fault. Who told you to neglect spirituality and Sanskrit learning? What have you been doing all this time?…Why do you fret and fume because somebody else had more brains, more energy, more pluck and go than you?’ Despite problematic pronouncements like this at home, to his global audience, Vivekananda’s words were refreshingly open. ‘I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true’—a message often highlighted by liberal Hindus to challenge the intellectual and often physical violence against minorities by right-wing groups in India now.