Southern    
                    Comfort
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MANI SHANKAR AIYAR reacts to PMK’s demand
for the secession of Tamil Nadu

It seems to me slightly ridiculous to be invited to speculate on the possibility of the South seceding merely because a seminarist in a fringe political party, the Pattali Makkal Katchi, PMK, has prompted the thesis of a Tamil nationhood, which he regards as real, in contradistinction to an Indian nationhood, which he regards as false. This is not even the view of his party, a constituent of the National Democratic Alliance ruling at the centre. It certainly does not square with the avidity with which the leader of the party, the querulous Dr Ramdoss, scrambles for places for his men in the Union Council of Ministers or the gusto with which PMK central ministers travel the length and breadth of a country they show every sign of owning as their own.

Of course, the South is different. But that is what unity in diversity is all about. Differences unite if what is different is celebrated. Uniformity divides if what is different is denied. The South will secede if the Madrasi is parodied as in some Bollywood films. It will not so long as its pride is respected.

Not only is the South different, its constituents are perhaps more different than the constituents of any other region, except perhaps the North-east where the diversity is still greater. Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, and Kannada are distinct languages with distinct scripts, almost if not quite as removed from each other as they are from Devnagri and the languages which derive from Sanskrit. If separatist sentiment is somewhat more in evidence in Tamil Nadu than the other states of the South, the root cause is to be found less in culture than in history.

Till the mid-18th century, the Tamil-speaking people were never a part of the political empires that rose and fell elsewhere in the land. Ashoka’s sway did not extend that far south; nor did the Guptas’; even the Mughals stopped short at the Deccan. Afghanistan was much more part of the political entity called Hindustan than Tamil Nadu was, from ancient to medieval India.

The closest we got politically to the North was a Chola king who carried the sobriquet Gangaikonda Chozhan because it was said he went right up to the Ganga and conquered the kingdoms on its sacred banks. It was not till the Marathas that a part of the Tamil heartland was incorporated into a northern empire. Thus the royal family of Thanjavur is more related by blood to Madhavrao Scindia than to any of my constituents. And my relationship to royalty is confined to my Hindi-accented Tamil, the consequence of my belonging to the smallest minority in the country — a Tamil Brahmin refugee from Pakistan, birthplace: Lahore! The locals have a term for it — Rayar Tamil, the Tamils of the Raos.

The political inauguration of Tamil Nadu with modern India really begins with the East India Company. Commercial rivalry between them and the French Compagnie des Indes split into political rivalry when the two started being wooed by rival claimants to the thrones of the Deccan kingdoms as the long twilight set in on the post-Aurangzeb Mughal empire. The French General La Tour became the first European at the Battle of Adyar (1742) to defeat an Indian army after Albuquerque’s conquest of Goa 250 years earlier. Dupleix chose the wrong side to back and Clive the right. The French lost the Battle of Wandiwash and thus the foundations of what was to emerge as the British Indian Empire more than a century later were in this fashion laid in Tamil Nadu. The British acquired a fishing village from a local grandee called Madarasa Raja. Thus Madras came into being. The Indian state of Tamil Nadu is still ruled from Fort St. George, seat of the legislature and the government. Tamil chauvinism has not seen fit to change the name. (The Congress, of course, dare not agitate to change the name of anything named George!)
As the British Empire expanded through peninsular and Gangetic India, the Tamil, along with the Brit, got Indianised. For those interested, I recommend Philip Mason’s A Matter of Honour, the best history I have read of the origins of the Indian army. It was an army born in the south, specifically Tamil Nadu. And what distinguished it from the indigenous hordes it went on to vanquish was that instead of living off the conquered lands, the Company army carried its own stores. And the stores had to be accounted for. And the accounting was done by the ‘‘conicopolies’’ — the Angrezi corruption of kanakkupilllais — accountants. As the accountants had to be literate and education was a virtual monopoly of the upper castes, the Tambram race of accountants was born. It is a race that continues to fester!

If the Tamils were among the first to become part of the British Indian empire, they were also among the first to unfurl the flag of freedom. As elsewhere in the country, in Tamil Nadu too it was the children of Macaulay — those compelled by Macaulay’s notorious Minute to learn the English language and a smattering of European political thought — who were the first to revolt. From the earliest days of the Indian National Congress (founded: 1885) till about the second decade of the 20th century, it was the upper castes who were in the vanguard of the struggle for Independence. If Subramanya Bharati emerged as the Rabindranath Tagore of the Tamil language, it was Rajagopalachari who was among the earliest and closest of Gandhiji’s associates.

Yet the Brahmin-led revolt against colonial rule (The Hindu was started in the 1880s by an Aiyar from my home-town of Thiruvaiyaru: he was arrested for his inflammatory writings by the Brits who so terrified him that he sold his paper to an Aiyangar — the present owners— for all of one 100 rupees: so, you can see why the Aiyars looks askance at the Aiyangars!) — the Brahmin-led revolt, as I was saying, sparked its own internal revolution: the revolt of the depressed classes against the upper caste domination. On the political plane, this resulted in the establishment of the Justice Party, which wished to ensure that the end of British rule did not lead to Brahmin Raj; on the ideological plane, the definitive turning point was the self-respect movement of Thanthai Periyar, E. V. Ramaswami Naicker of the Dravidar Kazhagam.

It was within the Dravidian movement — at once political, social and ideological— that Tamil nationalism, in contradistinction to Indian nationalism, was fanned. I once wondered what was the headline story on the day I was born — 10 April 1941. I looked it up and found it was the day on which Periyar had welcomed Mohammad Ali Jinnah at a massive public meeting in Madras to link Dravidastan with Pakistan.
But for all its pretentions to the contrary, the Dravidian Movement was much more a movement for social liberation than secession. The target was the Brahmin and the values of the caste system the Brahmin represented. It was, in a democracy of numbers, an unequal battle. For, unlike in northern India where the upper castes constitute a significant percentage of the population, the upper caste population of Tamil Nadu was about five per cent, of which the Brahmins constituted two per cent, if that. The political empowerment of the Tamil bahujan samaj has had a number of significant consequences which need to be better understood in the North, where Mandalisation in the Nineties is bringing about the same kind of profound socio-political changes which occurred in the south generally, and in Tamil Nadu in particular, half a century ago. First, the empowerment of the generality of the people, at the expense of a tiny upper-caste elite, killed separatist sentiment.

Why would any Dravidian wish to secede from his own land, the land he himself ruled? C. N. Annadurai did not even wait till he became Chief Minister to disavow separatism; he seized the opportunity provided by the upsurge in nationalist sentiment associated with the Chinese invasion of 1962 to declare himself an Indian nationalist. Indeed, so thin is the veneer of Tamil chauvinism on the Dravidian movement that it has from the beginning been dominated by non-Tamilians; Periyar himself was a Telegu speaking Naidu; MGR was a Malayalee Nair born in Sri Lanka; and Jayalalitha is a Mysore Brahmin. The Dravidian movement is about political empowerment, not secession. Second, far from ruining governance, as most Tambrams then believed and still like to believe, lower caste empowerment in the states of the south has resulted in faster economic growth and greater political stability than in the northern states, which were (and still, to some extent, are) politically and administratively dominated, at least until Mandal, by the upper castes. And the politically deprived upper castes of the south have shifted into business, rendering both themselves and their state more prosperous than in their wildest pre-Justice Party dreams.

The south is not seceding. It is integrating the north — with idlis and masala dosa. Even while itself getting culinarily colonised by chhole bhature and tandoori murgha. Two memories from childhood stick out: one, in 1952, the opening of the Annapoorna on Janpath (then Queensway): my father proudly inviting all his north Indian friends to sample ‘‘Madrasi omlette’’, the first masala dosas to hit Delhi in the gut. The other, 1957, my village of Kargudi where I had been sent after my school-leaving exam for a spot of ‘‘roots’’. I was asked whether I had eaten something called ‘‘bread’’ which, rumour had it, was being sold in one up-market shop in Thanjavur (seven miles distant). I said I had, and a loaf was sent for; they did not even know it had to be sliced! Today, at the entrance to my constituency town of Kumbakonam is a huge hoarding advising the traveller where to go for Continental, Chinese and Tandoori.

What secession? Especially now that Mani Ratnam is the most well-known Hindi film director and A.R. Rahman’s songs are written in Tamil before being sung in Hindi. We’re staying here, we’re not going anywhere — except perhaps in cyberspace to the Silicon Valley!

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