There was another crisis soon after. It was discovered that, at a Congress school for propagating Gandhian thought, brahmin children were fed separately from non-brahmin children. And then it turned out that the school, though run by a brahmin, was being financed by non-brahmins. The matter was reported to Gandhi; but his response was ambiguous and light-hearted.
Periyar at that moment broke with Gandhi and the Congress. (There is a – brahmin – story in Madras that the break really came because Periyar had been asked to account for money connected with the handloom campaign.) In 1925 Periyar founded the Self-Respect Movement, and it was his brilliant idea then to symbolize his cause by wearing a black shirt. Black-shirted, he campaigned for the rest of his life, for nearly 50 years, against brahminism, caste, Congress, the Hindu religion, the disabilities of women. He established the idea of Self-Respect marriages for non-brahmins, marriages conducted without priests or religious vows. And he preached a crude kind of socialism.
‘In the world of the future, there will be no men without character and culture … The depravity of modern character is founded on culture, justice and discipline being used for maintaining caste and class differences among men … When these capitalist and individualist conditions are absent, the need for depraved character will not arise.’
He offered a vision of a future bright with the fruits of science, and without the need for the idea of God.
‘Communications will mostly be by air and of great speed … Radios may be fixed in men’s hats … Food enriched with vitamins will be encased in pills or capsules sufficient for a day’s or week’s sustenance. The average life may stand at 100 years or more … Motorcars may weigh about one hundredweight and will run without petrol … Electricity will be everywhere and in every house, serving the people for all purposes … No industry or factory will run for the private profits of individuals. They will all be owned by the community at large, and all inventions will cater for the needs and pleasures of all people … When the world itself has been converted into a paradise, the need to picture a paradise in the clouds will not arise. Where there is no want, there is no god. Where there is scientific knowledge, there is no need for speculation and imagination … The struggle for existence needs to be changed into a life of happiness.’
With this preaching, reiterated day after day, this vision of the pain of caste disappearing together with the idea of God, there went his inherited feeling for the practical side of things. He had been born into a business family, and he remained concerned with money all his life, never denying its value, seeking always to keep himself and his movement independent and free of pressure. His movement was never short of money; the trust he left behind to look after his cause was rich.
His relics were in a big room in the main building at the Periyar Thidal. On a four-poster bed in the front part of the room there was a life-size photographic cut-out (the cinema-advertisement style and election-campaign style transferred to this private museum) of Periyar, very old, with a big beard, sitting cross-legged, in a writing posture. There was a patterned pink blanket on the bed, and the cut-out leaned against a bolster. The poles of the four-poster were white; there was no canopy. A tall revolving bookshelf stood at one side of the bed, with small busts of Buddha and Lenin, souvenir-shop objects, and a statue of a horse, a gift. The horse had no significance; it had been kept by Periyar for its beauty, and as a memento of the giver.
More symbolical gifts were in a glass case: silver implements of iconoclasm: two silver mallets, and two silver sticks, in shape like the stick the aged Periyar used.
The leadership of the Periyar movement had passed to Mr Veeramani. He was the keeper of Periyar’s memory, and the guardian of his relics. When he showed me the mallets and the sticks, he reminded me with a laugh of what he said was an old Sanskrit saying: The poison of the cobra is in his tongue alone. The poison of the brahmin is from head to foot.’ That saying led to another, which Mr Veeramani said was a well known Hindi saying: ‘If you see a brahmin and a snake, kill the brahmin first.’ (I had heard that years before in a different version, and I had been told then that it was a household saying of the people of south-east Asia: ‘If you are in the forest and you see a snake and an Indian, kill the Indian first.’)
After the emblems of iconoclasm, the emblems of kingship. Periyar had often been called the white-bearded king of Tamil Nadu. A town in the South had given the old man a decorated silver throne, and that throne was in a glass case, with a silver crown, the gift of followers in another town. Another gift was a silver sceptre, with small heads of Periyar and Buddha at the top; and in yet another glass case were curving silver swords.
Right around this big museum room, at the top of the walls, just below the ceiling, was a set of 33 oil paintings depicting the stations of Periyar’s long life. It was as with Bible pictures: you had to know the story. And once you knew, it was all there: Periyar as a naked sanyasi in Banaras in 1904, eating such food as he could find; Periyar 10 years later in municipal politics in his home town; Periyar with the Congress in 1919; Periyar campaigning in Kerala in 1924 for the rights of non-brahmins to enter temples; Periyar campaigning not long after for the abolition of caste distinctions in the Congress school; Periyar founding his Self-Respect Movement in 1925, and wearing his black shirt for the first time; Periyar in Germany in 1932, in the company of ‘German atheists’; Periyar in Russia the same year with Russian sanatorium employees; Periyar in 1943, discussing the break-up of India after independence with Mr Jinnah (campaigning for a Muslim Pakistan), Dr Ambedkar (wanting a scheduled-caste state called Dalitstan), Periyar himself hoping for a southern, Dravidian, non-brahmin state called Dravidstan. Later paintings showed Periyar, after independence, painting out the Hindi names of railway stations in the South, in 1952; breaking idols of Ganesh, Ganpati, the elephant god, in 1953, to show that they were only of clay, and quite harmless; in 1957 painting out ‘Brahmin’ from a signboard saying ‘Brahmin Hotel’, ‘brahmin’ meaning vegetarian, as opposed to ‘military’, non-vegetarian; and in the same year burning the Indian Constitution.
He had been single-minded and unwearying through a long life. In the centre of the room a collection of his personal relics had been laid out by Mr Veeramani in another glass case: his flashlight, his magnifying glasses, his unusually stout stick, his watch, his spectacles, his stainless-steel food tray, his bedpan and syringe and other medical paraphernalia. Almost like Gandhi’s relics; and they would have been Gandhian, if Periyar had left nothing else behind. But the property he had left in his trust, including the large city site of the Periyar Thidal, was worth many millions; and this worth had multiplied many times over in the 15 years since his death.
In spite of his love of food and his meat-eating, there was, in his single-mindedness and obsession, something like purity, and it was this quality that made him the anti-Gandhi. But that figure, of the anti-Gandhi, had meaning only because the real Gandhi existed. Gandhi developed and grew; for the first 40 years of the century, from his thirtieth year to his seventieth, he was constantly searching for new political and religious ways. His search made him a universal figure; people to whom the politics were far away could yet refer their own search to his. Periyar was a local figure; he never outgrew his cause. Without Gandhi and the Congress and the independence movement his cause wouldn’t have had the power it had; he was riding on the back of something very big. That might have been why I hadn’t heard of him.
It was Sadanand Menon, a writer living in Madras, who had taken me to the Periyar Thidal and had given me the background necessary to an understanding of Periyar’s life and movement.
Towards the end of the 19th century, with British rule, Sadanand said, the brahmins became dominant in a way they hadn’t been for some time. They were dominant in Indian social life, the professions, and in the beginnings of the nationalist movement. But Madras Province (taking in Tamil Nadu and other areas) was very large; Madras was a port; and, as the economy of the province grew, o
ther middle castes began to produce their own prominent personalities. Many of these middle-caste people were well-to-do – like Periyar’s own family; many were landlords; some could send their sons to Oxford and Cambridge. As soon as such people had emerged from the middle castes, the antique brahmin caste restrictions would not have been easy to maintain. What Periyar did was to take this mood of rejection to the non-brahmin masses.
Sadanand said, ‘His mode of communication was cultural. The Self-Respect Movement began three or four newspapers simultaneously. They laid great emphasis on education. In the 1930s one of the methods of the movement was the method of social discourse – not lecturing down. An educated volunteer would go to a slum area in a city, or to the village square, and he would start reading aloud from a paper. In no time he would have a crowd around him. And he would interpret what he was reading according to the Self-Respect Movement’s ideology. This has remained a form till today. It has remained the backbone of the DMK, this direct contact between the party cadre and the people. The other parties don’t have this. They haven’t even attempted it. I remember in the 1960s going to a place near where I was living, and observing a DMK party worker. He would come on the dot at 6.30 in the evening, carrying the party newspaper, together with an English paper and any other Tamil paper. He would have a hurricane lantern. He sat in a shed, just four poles and a roof, and he read aloud, and he would have an audience of 150 people.’
How deep, or important, was the rationalist side of the movement? How far had people been able to reject God or the gods?
Sadanand said that the rationalist movement as such had become a parody of itself over the years. But political power had come to the DMK, which was the political offshoot of that movement, and there had been an upheaval.
Sadanand said, The DMK came to power in 1967’ – the year I had come to Madras for the second time, and I had gone to see Sugar and his father in their two-storey house in Mylapore, and Sugar had told me about the books of prophecy – ‘and they created a ministry, the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments, the HR&CE. The HR&CE minister controlled the enormous resources of the Hindu temples and trusts. Land, fixed assets, jewelry – every temple has enormous amounts of jewelry: the idols themselves, and the daily donations. The donations to a temple are anonymous; there is no means of accounting for them. The temple wealth was unassessable. How could you put a value on a 10th-century Shiva? After this – and this was quite separate from what the government was doing – the idols began to be stolen and were replaced by replicas. Archaeologists have recently pointed out large-scale replacement of temple icons by fakes. The originals have ended in private collections around the world.’
‘Didn’t the DMK mind about that? Isn’t it their art too?’
The DMK didn’t think twice about that. They were dealing with the enemy. At the same time the new government started on a policy of distributing temple lands to the landless. But this was a notional thing. The names of 200 people could be produced who had been given one acre of temple land each, but actually that land might all belong to one man or the party. The people didn’t get anything out of it.’
Sadanand spoke of this as the ‘looting’ of the temples, using that word – originally a Hindi word, and this fact reflecting something of the history of India – in the Indian sense. Had the brahmins been impoverished as result?
‘In most of the temples the brahmins became simply the conductors of rituals, the purohits, and certainly there was impoverishment.’ But more important, in Sadanand’s account, was the downgrading of the temples. ‘The temples as originally conceived were largely social institutions. Each temple had schools, granaries, facilities for large-scale water-storage – the origin of the temple tank – hospitals, stalls for cows. They were also patrons of the arts. But the DMK made crude equations. The temple became equated with oppression of a certain sort, and then the whole thing was vandalized, without discrimination.’
The movement claimed to have a link with the non-brahmin past of Tamil Nadu, and especially with the Chola emperors of the eighth to the 10th centuries. But this again, according to Sadanand, was glib and unhistorical.
‘The Cholas were democrats, if you can imagine democracy within a feudal structure. But they were also the imperialists of the area, and the Chola symbol of the movement is the symbol of Tamil imperialism, nothing else. The Cholas were known to be learned people, to have written books on astronomy, and to have been patrons of the arts. The DMK Chola symbol stands for none of this. The Chola kings developed fascinating systems of irrigation in the Tanjore area. The DMK never bothered to look at irrigation.’
Out of their narrowness, their regionalism, their caste obsessions, other things suffered. The English language suffered. The number of people from the state holding positions in the central government declined; many of the central government officers in Tamil Nadu now came from outside. The Tamil language itself deteriorated.
The movement is not creative any more. Tamil has become a language which is incapable of expressing one modern idea. It’s a fosssilized language, and this is reflected in the quality of Tamil journalism. Much of it is frivolous, inane.
The movement still has a place. But what it keeps reproducing nowadays is this parody. Out of it there has come an impoverished iconography. You saw that flat cut-out of Periyar on the bed. That idea was extended later to the politicians of the movement, the leaders of the DMK and its successor parties. They were projected as giants in 8o-foot cut-outs – a substitute for what they have lost. And religious or neo-religious movements have become stronger in Tamil Nadu.
The current neo-religious movement here is the Adi Parashakti cult. You’ll find it at a place half-way between Madras and Pondicherry. It’s a cult of the primal mother – the Dravidian religion, as opposed to the Aryan religion, was mother-centred. From that has emerged this new cult. Just this one man, a schoolteacher, claimed one fine day that he had had a dream of this Mother or Shakti coming to him and ordering him to propagate her name. He claims that when he woke up there was an idol of Adi Parashakti growing out of the earth in front of him. The followers of this cult have a uniform, red and red. This is one of the paradoxical fall-outs of the rationalist movement.’
There was a deeper irony. The anti-brahmin movement was not a movement of all the non-brahmin castes. It was a movement mainly of the middle castes. There was, as ever in India, a further lower level, a further level of disadvantage. For these people at the very bottom the DMK offered no protection.
Sadanand said, ‘The DMK came to power in 1967, talking of the oppression of the lower castes. In fact, the most brutal attacks on the scheduled castes have happened post-1967. In 1969 40 harijans were burnt alive in a hut. The caste known as the Thevars was responsible. They are a middle caste, a backward caste who have in the last 100 years come up socially and are now powerful, with their own caste association. They are one of the most militant castes. They call themselves the kshatriyas, the warriors, of the Tamil hierarchical order. The Dravidian Movement had been founded by the middle castes. When their government came to power, they became the oppressors.’
Sadanand’s analysis of the cultural impoverishment brought about by the movement was almost certainly true. It was there in the iconography; it was there in the exaggerations and simplicities and contradictions of Periyar’s speeches, where words seemed to have been loved for their own sake, and where speeches, in order to be relished, had to be spun out, conceit upon conceit. But, equally, there was the passion of the followers of Periyar. Periyar had touched something in these people, something deeper than logic and a regard for historical correctness; that also had to be taken into account.
Mr Gopalakrishnan was the proprietor of Emerald Publishers, publishers of school textbooks and books about the rationalist movement. He told me this story.
‘My father was a very small businessman. He was of the Mudaliar caste. We were lower middle-caste people. He kept a stall. He sold cigarettes, aerated
water, little things like that.
‘I became a rationalist in the early 1940s, when I was ten or thereabouts. I was a student at the Sri Ramakrishna High School in Madras. It was a brahmin-dominated school. Even the peons and the watermen, four or five of them, were brahmins. We were only a few non-brahmins in each class. Every day we got sermons from some of our teachers that we were only fit for grazing cattle. We heard that from three teachers in particular. They thought that non-brahmins shouldn’t study, and the words they oft repeated were: “Go and graze the cattle.”
‘We had to go to the prayer meeting in the prayer hall every morning. The prayers were in Sanskrit. They were the same prayers every day; they were boring. I had a non-brahmin classmate who didn’t go to the prayer meetings; he would get beatings very often for that. All the boys would come with their caste mark. I used to use a piece of chalk, instead of the so-called sacred ash, to make the horizontal marks on my forehead. My friend never did it, and he was beaten for that, too. He was a creative boy. Ten years later he wrote a play and acted in it – a play with rationalist views.
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 29