by Anita Nair
For the first time in their lives, they had secrets from each other. His dreams were no longer hers. Her plans no longer his. When they met, they never had enough time to say everything they wanted to. The first few precious moments were spent trying to regain the closeness that they once had. It was frustrating for the two of them, and they weren’t old enough to understand it or even know how to handle it, and so once in a while they fought. Mukundan never won those fights. His need to be with her was more than hers. They fought in whispers but there were times when he couldn’t control his anger. Then he would seize her arm and press his fingers into its softness, enjoying seeing the pain fill her eyes with salt. Sometimes she would let him draw his secret vicious pleasure from her pain. Sometimes she would raise her foot and expertly kick him in his balls. Painful enough so he would let her go and light enough to cause no real injury. But their differences, like their plans to escape, were a secret.
Stalinist and Indian: E.M.S. Namboodiripad
Ramachandra Guha
This extract is taken from An Anthropologist Among the Marxists and Other Essays, published by Permanent Black (2001).
The paradox of Indian Marxism is that its practice has always been more appealing than its theory. The Naxalite theoreticians dismiss swidden or shifting cultivation as a ‘primitive economic practice’, bound to disappear with modernity, yet their cadres organize tribals to protect their traditional forest rights, in most cases the right to cut swidden in land usurped by the government. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) swears by Soviet-style central planning, but in West Bengal they have taken the process of political and economic decentralization further than has any other party anywhere else in India.
Communists used to speak of ‘socialist internationalism’, that is, the right to take their orders from Moscow or Peking, yet they are now, and have been for some time, the most patriotic of Indians. Certainly it is only in the Communist Party of India and the CPI(M) that one finds politicians who have enjoyed power for long stretches but are not known to take bribes or maintain Swiss bank accounts.
E.M.S. Namboodiripad, who died in March 1998, was a fundamentally decent and public-spirited man whose mind was messed up by reading too much of J.V. Stalin and VI. Lenin. In his tribute to EMS, published in The Telegraph, Ashok Mitra called him a ‘great Marxist theoretician whose thoughts had a pure classical grandeur’.
With due respect, this is one party man talking about another. While Namboodiripad wrote many works of history and political theory, none rose above the second rate. Even if one allows the qualifier ‘Marxist theoretician’, EMS does not begin to compare with men such as D.D. Kosambi and Ranajit Guha, who stretched Marxism to its limits, going beyond economic determinism through the incorporation of insights from archaeology, linguistics, numismatics and, above all, anthropology.
As a historian, Namboodiripad interpreted everything through the lens of class struggle and the inevitable victory of revolutionary communism. As an ideologue he followed a man greatly inferior to Karl Marx, and even Lenin, namely Stalin. I have before me a booklet called On Organisation, published by the undivided CPI in 1954, and based on a series of lectures delivered by its leading theoretician to the Central Party School in Delhi. Stalin has just died, but Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech repudiating him lies a safe two years in the future. EMS thus begins his talks with the obligatory salutation: ‘As Comrade Stalin explained in his Dialectical and Historical Materialism …’ Some pages later we find a worshipful reference to Stalin’s ‘last work on the Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’, followed again by a long quote. Deeper into the tract are excerpted some gems from Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, another book that quickly and deservedly fell into oblivion.
In his writings, Namboodiripad was a craven follower of a crude despot, but as a practising politician EMS was one of the finest in the land. He was, for most of his life, a leading light of the most progressive party in the most progressive state in India.
Much has been written about the Kerala miracle: the strides in health, education and land reform and the quality of governance that has made this possible. As a column of the left and twice chief minister of the state, EMS was a key player in all this. His work for his people was repaid by a deep and genuine affection. On one of his last birthdays, 10,000 Malayalis contributed voluntary labour to desilt a long stretch of an irrigation canal, the patriarch looking on. It was a remarkable tribute, when compared especially with how the birthdays of politicians in other parties are remembered by their followers.
The moral distance between men like EMS and those who now rule India was underlined some years ago by an incident little noticed at the time. In January 1992, P.V. Narasimha Rao’s government decided to award the second highest national honour, the Padma Vibhushan, to EMS and to Atal Behari Vajpayee.
It was a noble gesture, recognizing contributions to national life by people other than Congressmen—one cannot see governments headed by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi displaying such generosity of spirit. Now while Vajpayee accepted the award, EMS declined, for his personality would not allow attention to be drawn to his achievements. Some weeks later, his home in Kerala was robbed. The police caught the burglar, repossessing for the original owner the stolen goods amounting to one gold sovereign and Rs 800. This after fifty years in public life.
Mitra speaks of the ‘purity’ of EMS’s thought, but we might speak with more justice of the purity of the lived life. In her novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy makes the unfortunate claim that EMS transformed his family home into a luxury hotel. As everyone in Kerala knows, this was another Namboodiripad with similar initials: the Communist EMS had in fact donated his property to the party, an early example of a lifelong and always unselfconscious asceticism.
When one considers what kind of man EMS was, one must also consider it a great pity that he mortgaged his mind to Stalinism. Namboodiripad, of course, did not regret this. He liked to write of how he left his landlord family to join the Congress, then helped start the Congress Socialist Party, then broke away altogether to become a communist, the last constituting, in his view, the decisive step towards the promised land. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru he criticized as ‘bourgeois’ leaders who could not transcend the ideology of their class.
There is a most revealing moment in his book, The Mahatma and the Ism, where he complains of the poverty of Gandhi’s intellect. This man, he says, came as a student to London in 1889, when Das Kapital had just appeared in its first English edition, when the Fabian Society of the great Bernard Shaw and the greater Sidney Webb was taking its first bold steps. And yet, writes a non-comprehending EMS, Gandhi chose to join Henry Salt’s Vegetarian Society.
The Marxist was bewildered, but bourgeois thinkers like myself see Mahatma Gandhi’s vegetarianism as a prelude to his mature political philosophy. For his later attitude to compatriots and adversaries was steeped likewise in ahimsa and karuna, the ideas of nonviolence and compassion. Namboodiripad could not understand this, which is why, in the late thirties, he left the Congress for the CPI.
In the next decade his new party committed a series of colossal errors: the support to the British during the war, the support to the Pakistan movement, the ridiculous Russian-inspired attempt to foment an armed revolution immediately after India gained independence. But what if EMS and other like-minded patriots had followed Gandhi instead of Stalin? And what if socialists like Acharya Kripalani and Jayaprakash Narayan had also chosen to stay within the Congress? Might not the party that came to power in 1947 have then had a first-rate set of organizers providing the support that Nehru so desperately lacked to challenge the bunch of conservatives and reactionaries he was instead left with?
This did not happen and EMS and his comrades went on to lead a double life of bankrupt ideology and meaningful practice. Totalitarian thinker and practising democrat, subservient Stalinist and proudly patriotic Indian: this was the tragedy as well
as the achievement of E.M.S. Namboodiripad.
The Bonsai Tree
David Davidar
Vijai’s father came home early from work that day. The boy watched him park the car and come up the driveway. It was still light though black shadows had started sliding up the low hills that surrounded the bungalow.
‘Hello, son.’ Vijai ignored the greeting. He sensed his father turn away and go into the house.
They had announced the party to him a week earlier with a slightly wary look, knowing the news would not be well-received. Always shy, their son seemed to have retreated even further into himself ever since he had gone away to boarding school. Although Vijai hadn’t remonstrated with his parents on the day they brought up the party, he had stopped talking to them. This hadn’t seemed to affect them in any manner he could see, and he felt foolish. But he was determined not to make up.
He loathed the parties his parents gave. He wasn’t sure who he hated more: the guests or the people his parents became. His father, normally reserved and poised, turned hearty and laughed a lot. His mother, naturally fluttery, would talk incessantly with an accent he found irritating. And she liked Mr Bopanna. Vijai disliked the planter’s broad face, broad moustache and broad country speech. A fortnight earlier at the club, after he’d become bored with a game he had been playing with some other children, Vijai had gone to find his parents. His father, engrossed in a game of poker, had waved him away. He found his mother in the club’s deserted smoking room, sitting very close to Mr Bopanna. Their voices were low and his mother was talking fast, the way she did when she had had too much to drink. The atmosphere in the room had been curiously unpleasant. Mr Bopanna had noticed him and had called out. Getting up quickly his mother had hustled Vijai out of the room. She insisted to his father, that they go home immediately. Vijai had noticed that his mother and Mr Bopanna were holding hands. Mr Bopanna was coming to the party that evening.
He could hear his mother calling him to tea. He decided he wasn’t going to have any. Nor would he have any dinner. Let them have their party, he thought. He was going to starve.
The first mists of the evening slipped over the hills. Vijai loved this time of the day in the high isolated Peermade tea country. It was so different from the brutal heat and dusty reality of the plains where he went to school. The aqueous light, the hills helmeted with tea bushes, the sibilance of rain, the mist—all these seemed to enclose him, hide him away in a private sanctuary that soothed and enchanted him. Especially at times like this. As he sat there, letting himself relax under the influence of the evening light, he remembered something from a few days ago. They had gone for a drive, as they sometimes did when his father came home early from work. About an hour from the house, it had begun to grow dark. Great columns of mist, grey and big as cathedrals, had gathered and begun to sweep down the hills on either side of the road. As he had strained to see through the milky whiteness that enveloped the car he had spotted a tiny tree perched almost at the top of a hill like the foresight of a rifle. Imprinted on a sheet of mist, it had looked as pretty as a Japanese bonsai. He thought about the tree now and wondered how it would look in the garden.
The door to the veranda opened, and his father came out. Vijai thought he was going to talk to him and hunched deeper into the wicker chair he sat on, but his father walked past him and headed down to the garden. Vijai could hear him whistling as he worked, pinching off the vast sagging heads of blown roses.
His mother came out of the house. Vijai drew his legs up onto the chair and looked at his frayed sneakers. ‘Put your legs down, Vijai.’ He didn’t look at her. ‘I said put your legs down. Right now.’ Still not looking at her, he put his legs down.
‘Mani,’ his mother called.
‘Yeah, what’s up?’ his father shouted from the bottom of the garden.
‘Tell your son to stop sulking and go and have his tea. Why on earth can’t he behave himself?’
His father came slowly up the lawn. He held a bunch of roses in his hand. ‘Here, honey. These should do, I think.’
‘Mani, you’d better talk to your son. This is getting ridiculous.’ His mother went back inside.
His father sat down on the steps of the veranda. ‘Why don’t you go have some tea, son?’ Vijai decided not to say anything.
‘Are you boxing this year?’ his father asked after a long silence.
‘No.’
‘Tennis?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the matter?’
He didn’t reply. His father got up and Vijai heard his knee joints crack. He studied his father covertly. Still slim, tall and erect, silvering hair worn slightly long at the back. Vijai wondered why he disliked his father. Was it because of his looks, his presence, his success? Why wasn’t he the same way? Bastard, he said to himself, and liking the sound of the word repeated it.
‘Vijai.’
Surprised, Vijai looked at him. His father never addressed him by name, always calling him ‘son’. Coming from him it sounded formal and distancing.
‘Is there anything I can do for you, son?’ This time even the ‘son’ sounded different. Kinder, Vijai thought.
The moment passed and the boy grew hostile again. What did his father care? He was only being nice to him because of his stupid party. Bloody hypocrite. To hell with him and his mother. If she loved him, if they both loved him, they wouldn’t have their party. After all, he was home for only a week more.
‘Do you want to go for a drive? Look, it’s beautiful outside. Maybe we could go see if we can get some jungle-fowl. Would you like that? Come on, you’ve always liked to go shooting.’
‘No. I don’t want to go shooting.’
‘Then what do you want to do?’
‘Nothing.’
His father shrugged. Most of the yellow had left the sky and mist swirled on the hills. Vijai suddenly remembered the beautiful tree he had seen. ‘I want the bonsai, Dad,’ he said.
By the time they reached the spot, it was getting dark. As they parked the car, Vijai panicked for a moment thinking he wouldn’t be able to find the tree. Then he saw it, a faint feathery shadow on grey. His father took a shovel and pruning knife from the trunk; Vijai took the knife. As they started up the hill. Vijai said: ‘Dad, it’s OK, isn’t it? Ma won’t mind.’ His father said: ‘No, son. She’ll understand. Don’t worry about it.’
They were nearly at the top of the hill now and Vijai started panicking again, for there was no sign of the tree. Ahead of them, the broad back of another hill stretched under a wind-whipped bank of mist, and beyond it, another hill rose indistinctly. To Vijai’s dismay, the tree was on that hill. And it had seemed so close from the road! His father had spotted the tree too. The boy’s mind rushed back to the quarrel his parents had had just before his father and he had set out.
‘Don’t spoil him, Mani,’ his mother said when his father told her what he was planning to do. ‘Why should it always be like this? I slave to bring the child up properly and you go and ruin it all.’
‘It’s OK, let me handle this.’
‘Fine, you handle it. And you stay at home and handle his tantrums, you pack his trunk when he goes to school, you make him study.’
‘Listen, Kiri.’ His father had put his hands on his mother’s shoulders but she had shrugged them off angrily. Vijai had cringed. Now he would be held responsible for everything, for ruining the party, for making his parents fight. If he knew his mother, she wouldn’t talk to his father for a week. Absurdly, he wondered who would pack the trunk he took to school. His mother always got his things ready. Then a petulant anger had reasserted itself and he had been glad when she had run up the lawn and into the house, slamming the door behind her. When his father had come slowly up to him Vijai’s anger had quickly faded to be replaced by an almost unbearable anxiety. How was his father going to deal with the situation? His father had smiled at him wearily. ‘Come on, son, let’s go get your tree.’
They trudged up the next hill slowly;
Vijai’s legs began hurting and he was cold, frustrated and angry. Finally, as his breathing grew laboured, they reached the top of the hill. Vijai looked at the third hill and realized with a dull fatalism that they wouldn’t go through with it. His father was looking into the distance, not particularly focusing on the tree clinging black and minute to the top of the hill before them. When he spoke, his voice was calm and reasonable. ‘Listen, son, I don’t think we can get the tree today. It’s already very late. Why don’t you bring the mali and get it tomorrow?’
Vijai didn’t look at him. Fine, go back, he thought, go back but I’m not going back with you. Go back to your car, go back to your party, go back, and do you know that last year I was knocked out in the school boxing championships because it was a grudge match and though I’m a lousy boxer, I took on the school’s best boxer because he called you a fancy dressed up sissy, and all you care about is your goddamned party. I hate you, you bastard, go back to your goddamn party, you don’t care for me, you care only for your friends and you love only Ma. But do you know that Ma was holding hands with Mr Bopanna at the club and I never told you because I love you Dad and all you can think about is your goddamn party, go on leave me here, you bastard, I’m never going to come back with you.
As he succumbed to the fear and the fury coursing through him, the boy started screaming his thoughts out, tears sliding down his face. He stopped abruptly, wondering what he’d said, how much he’d said aloud. ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ he sobbed. His father had not moved. He stood looking at Vijai thoughtfully. The boy’s body heaved as he gulped in air between great choking sobs. He looked down at his sneakers; he was gripping the pruning knife fiercely, the wooden handle painfully hard in his hand. Slowly he released his grip. The wind and mist on his drying tears felt cold.