For so long an abstraction. An inanimate motif that occupied the vital centre of an argument. An idea that lay orphaned outside history. A belief system that colonised the space between knowledge and memory. A heritage that the mind refused to accept. An antique curio in the marketplace of dead certainties.For so long EMS, a subject, subordinated to the deadline.
The moment of submission came after a hundred paragraphs, in a sweltering, humid afternoon in February. EMS stayed there, in that third-floor apartment in the suburb of Thiruvananthapuram. Arya Antharjanam, his wife, sat alone in the drawing room. EMS, never alone, sat amidst so many words in the next room, amidst bound Vedas and weekly journalism.
He was visibly ill, and his swollen legs were supported by a wooden stool. The intrusion was anticipated, but did he anticipate that rather unprofessional tension of the visitor? There he was, his welcoming eyes, released a moment ago from the pages of a magazine, now two bright, burningquestions behind thick glasses. The smile was benign: ask me, for I trade in answers; question me with your doubts, for my faith is absolute. No sir, for so long a subject ... let me savour this moment a bit more, this moment of transformation.
That was my first and only meeting with EMS Namboodiripad. There was no argument, really. Only the unravelling of a subject. I was talking to EMS the person, at last. He was passionate. He was angry. He was forgiving. He was dreaming. Yes, he was waiting. The New Man, the grand old man, the learned man. Answers never died for the last Brahmin of Marxism. They were as repetitive as my questions. The abstraction melted in the energy of belief. EMS was not repudiating the ebony jokes of history. He was living, living to redeem a dead idea.
Another afternoon last week, a little more than a month after our meeting, the flash came as everybody was talking `portfolio'. EMS died in a private nursing home in Thiruvananthapuram. Better we write an edit today itself. Ah, thereturn of the subject. Or, is it the end of an argument? A subject vanishing into the text of memory? I time-travelled back to that small, spartan, book-lined room in Thiruvananthapuram. For a last darshan in the monastery of the purest of Marxists. Elsewhere in the shelf of knowledge, comrade, a passage remains unread. Let me give you a hand to turn the pages. No argument, sir, the words are yours. It is the orphan's turn to confess.
In the beginning, as you know, there was no word. Only the raw passions of liberation. Kerala, a postscript to geography, was then aspiring to be a footnote to history. There was struggle. There was sacrifice. The hammer didn't suppress. The sickle didn't seek blood. And the red star danced in every man's eyes. Wasn't it communism without Marx, a struggle without the burden of theories, a rebellion from the heart? Its sociology was not written in a library in London. It was co-authored by the anger of dispossession and the idea of liberation, in the dialect of romance. And youbecame the first popularly elected communist leader in the world.
That heritage was part of my growing up. EMS: a face to a Great Experience; a name for redemptive subversion. Communism in Kerala: a social renaissance with a non-communist legacy. For, there were revolutionaries before the comrades. There were movements of social justice before the slogan of socialism. You could not have been unaware of the reality: the script of your revolution was hardly European. But you were the Brahmin, the wisest of men. So you sought to bring the New Man of communism closer to the Vedic system of your learning. The book hijacked your heroism. You sought refuge between the pages.
I lost EMS, and got a subject in return. I wanted to retrieve him as the pages flew apart in the maelstrom of history. An empire fell, the satellites searched for truth in the wreckage of a lie. But EMS refused to come out of the freedom of the prisoner. True, it was not his empire. But he never said it was not his idea. A scientific error,nothing more. A hundred deaths in Tiananmen oh, a small incident compared to the multimillion martyrdom of the Cultural Revolution. EMS had no decaying dictatorships to defend. All he had to do was to defend decayed texts, and rearrange the `good' and `bad' theories in a scenario of the imagination. As history staged an awesome dance of punishment, EMS remained stoic in the safety of theories.
Today, perhaps, I understand why. Why he was proofreading the redundant script his Brahminical passion had acquired. Why that day in Thiruvananthapuram he was repeating an optimism: ``It will come back, and the future of humanity is communism''. He too had an empire, an empire that withstood the `practice' of history. The mind was his domain. Djilas was right, but EMS was not one of them: ``The world has seen few heroes as ready to sacrifice and suffer as the communists were on the eve of and during the revolution. It has probably never seen such characterless wretches and stupid defenders of arid formulas as theybecome after attaining power.'' The power of the believer didn't require the forgiveness of history.
For, his kingdom was immaculately pure, his scholarship was entirely harmless. But this EMS was a repudiation of a romance. Hence the quarrel, sir. You had reduced an experience into an idea. Someone said the quarrel was a display of pathological anti-communismm. Silly. An idea is incomplete without the benefit of the rebuttal. I was only looking up and asking: has your intellect exiled your romance? The answer came during our first meeting: `I lived it. I won't let it go out of me. For the true communist, living is dreaming'. He didn't say it, but the statement was in the eyes, in the pause after those precise pronouncements. The ruler played out the idea in blood. EMS preserved it in a dream. It was poignantly tragic: the highest guru burning out in a dream. Wasn't I quarrelling with his harmless freedom?
Last week, he walked out of the argument. The passage of questions are dull without you. And youtook away with you the most ambitious dream man had ever dreamt. Better you did it. There was no one better qualified to take it to that bearded German Jehovah. Only the Brahmin can argue with the Author. Thank you sir, for so long arguing with questions. And goodbye.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
