We have not been able to save the life of our comrade, although we knew about the grave threats he faced from the Paddy Producers Association. Even our alacrity could not prevent his murder at the hands of Vinayagam Naidu. We stayed together day and night, we slept at the party office in Nagapattinam, and we stayed like each other’s shadows. Alas! We have lost one of our most popular grass-roots workers who organized the people. They attacked him in a blink of an eye and we no longer have this brave and committed comrade with us. His murder was the result of a deal between Vinayagam Naidu and Gopalakrishna Naidu – a division of labour – the former wanted to finish off his biggest threat, and the latter has taken upon himself the task of forcing the people of Kilvenmani to abandon the red flag, an end for which he is willing to adopt any means. Our appeals to the police and the chief minister to provide protection to the people of Kilvenmani have fallen on deaf ears.
This must not go unopposed. The Paddy Producers Association must be banned for the sake of democracy. We need all possible support and solidarity for our strikes. Let us show our strength in Nagapattinam. Let us stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Kilvenmani and tell them that they are not alone. The proletariat rallying together can be the biggest homage that we can pay to our slain comrade, SIKKAL PAKKIRISAMY! Let us pay our red salutes to him by putting an end to the atrocities of the murderous PPA landlords!
RED FLAG SHALL TRIUMPH!
LONG LIVE COMMUNISM!
LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!
6. Oath of Loyalty
Police Constable Muthupandi; Gopalakrishna Naidu’s nameless-for-the-purpose-of-this-novel cook; and the official party organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) share the uniform opinion that the agricultural workers’ demonstration held to pay homage to Comrade Sikkal Pakkirisamy attracted more than 3,000 people. More than 300 policemen were deployed to ensure that this public rally passed off peacefully.
These facts, plain and unadorned, will be rejected by those readers whose minds have been poisoned by the passion of the novel. Such injured souls – as a certain Mr Thomas Jefferson observed – carry a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. They are not going to be dazzled by date and time and location. They will not give in to name and place and all the greasy, gratifying noun-fuck that gives one the aura of authenticity. If they want a linear narrative and a self-contained story, they will read the day’s newspaper, not a novel. Being in the business of entertaining such disturbed minds, I shall don the mantle of devious author, and set about my job of disorienting the reader.
Now, the readers-at-large don’t know what exactly happened between the murder on 15 November and the massacre on 25 December 1968. They can find the dateline in an excellent documentary on this subject, Ramayyahvin Kudisai, but asking them to rush to their nearest video library is not a good way to fill up a first novel. Sitting here in Canterbury, with video footage of the village ready to run continuously for five solid days, and with four diaries bristling with notes, I shall surmise and theorize, assume and presume, speculate and conflate and extrapolate every detail revealed by my field research in order to make it fit into the narrative mode of my novel. The age of apologizing authors is long gone.
Let me follow the format of the previous page.
A villager asked to face a handheld video-cam for the first time, a reporter writing his in-depth opinion piece on this subject in under 1,000 words, and a novelist sorting out her storyline, will tell you with an air of certainty that Comrade Sikkal Pakkirisamy’s murder on the day of the district-level agriculture strike proved to be a flashpoint for all the tragedy that followed. They will not begin their story with the arrival of the various Europeans, or the story of rice cultivation in this delta district, or the local kings’ largesse and land grants to the Brahmins, or the history of local invasions, or the emergence of communism, or the shrill independence movement, or the manner in which Murugan first manifested himself to the divine in their dreams and then had a temple built in his honour and for his worship, or the origins of untouchability that set apart and put aside some men and some women, or the succour offered by the slave trade of the brown peoples, or the anti-God activities of the Self-Respect Movement or the establishment of the first church at Tranquebar or the formation of the peasant associations or the foundation of the Paddy Producers Association, because it would be easy to get caught up in this multi-dimensional mess of events and impossible to pull oneself out of these knots. Unlike this jumble that is beyond disambiguation, the selection of a key incident such as the murder of Sikkal Pakkirisamy removes the creases from the timeline. Like a lullaby, it transports us to a safe zone in time so that when we wake up, we can discuss this historical tragedy with the same self-assuredness that everybody employs when they speak of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria as being the immediate trigger that led to the First World War.
So, somewhere in this sultry chapter, we shall begin at the immediate beginning.
What is a story worth if it does not have a supernatural element? Why begin when you cannot bring in gods?
On the day Jayabalan’s mother-in-law dropped dead from starvation, a legislator in faraway Madras expressed concern about chronic food-grain scarcity, famine conditions and exorbitant prices, another took issue that cultivators in Tiruchy had been deprived of paddy for their own consumption as state revenue officials had forcibly procured all their harvest; the chief minister tabled a report on the extent of damage caused by a cyclone, along with a detailed break-down of the relief and rehabilitation measures undertaken by his government; while local temple-dweller Lord Murugan, popular in these parts under his alias of Sikkal Singaravelan, according to his strict daily regimen, was bathed in milk twice that morning, noon and night.
When he learnt, after his sixth bath, that the local Communist leader Sikkal Pakkirisamy had been killed off by the landlords, his lordship Sikkal Singaravelan prayed for his own safety – Murugamurugamurugamurugamurugamuruga – and decided not to interfere in the internal affairs of this mad and murderous district. Although he was not bothered about the equitable distribution of resources or the wage struggle of the workers, his lordship always knew that he was no different from the local Communist leader in two aspects: he always sought to be defined by his domain of influence, and he could put up a good show of strength at short notice. Being a bright young chap, he decided that he would not risk taking a position on anything outside his own war portfolio, as long as he was provided with food to eat and milk to drink so that he didn’t drop dead and make two women instantaneous widows. He kept his word. He turned a blind eye to blood baths.
Any student of history with access to Wikipedia will be able to tell you, with the requisite annotations, that in the 1968 winter session of the parliament of gods, he abstained from voting on every issue except Vietnam, where he enjoyed cult status as Saigon Subramaniam.
We cut to the chase. We jump past the murder scene. We display the novel through a series of rushed frames. We recreate the aftermath.
When news of the marked man being successfully hacked to death was conveyed to them, the landlords rejoiced and called for grand celebrations. They feasted on flesh secure in the knowledge that a corpse that has gone to the burning ground does not return.
As demanded by chronological narrative and the rigours of routine, the landlords went to their fields the day after the agricultural strike. There, the much-anticipated twist lay in wait for them: none of the workers had turned up. Then it was revealed to them – in a discreet fashion as merits a novel of a certain literary quality – that every worker in Nagapattinam was away attending the funeral procession of Sikkal Pakkirisamy. As warranted by the mores of their social class at that time, they took it as a personal affront. They termed the two-day absence from work as arrogance and insolence and impudence and a Communist nuisance. They met together, called on each other, and decided to obey their leader. Naturally, as always happens
in these novels and is sometimes reflected in real life, the landlords turned away the agricultural labourers who came to work the next day and demanded that they pay a fine.
Since mirroring is a major plot device, now it was the turn of the peasants to meet together, call on each other and decide to obey their party leader. And, incredible as it may seem to any reader, the Communists announced that they would not pay any fines and that they would go on an indefinite strike until they were allowed to work. As if not reporting to work was going to solve the problem of being ordered not to report for work!
Now that both sides are in a clear deadlock, the nailbiting reader can join the nervous author in elaborating the rest of the story.
Slowly the deadlock was unlocked. Some landlords relented after a token fine was paid. Some workers, dreading death by hunger, came to a compromise by discarding their party connections. Some others, petrified of the many horrors that would visit their village if they enraged the mirasdars any further, went to work.
As happens in stories of a similar nature, one village stood apart. Kilvenmani paid the token twenty-rupee fine for abstaining from work, but it didn’t strike a deal, and it continued to strike. The one-day district-level strike had been marred by a murder, but their collective demand for higher wages was kept alive by Kilvenmani. Common sense and Communist thinking told them that their labour was indispensable in the harvest season. They expected the landlords to give in and grant them the daily wage of six measures of paddy they had been fighting for.
But, the mirasdars saw no reason to relent.
Moving beyond the ensemble cast that has been employed for the purposes of the novel so far, the mirasdars simply brought in outside labour. The agents, exploitative and eager to please the landlords, transported labourers willing to work for a mere meal a day from Ramnad and other nearby districts, setting the strikers against the starving, the poor against the desperate. The police, so far relegated to the position of a neutral observer, extended protection to these agents and their congee coolies. This, expectedly, made matters worse.
In order to move this narrative turn of events to its next level of complexity, let us assume that this loss of employment causes enormous hardship to the agricultural labourers, who appeal to the Communists to solve the problem, who petition the government to step into the matter, but nothing comes of it. So, at this point, where they appear to be losing, the Communists decide that enough is enough and hold a series of public meetings to garner support for the villagers of Kilvenmani. To maintain the element of balance, one has to concede that the Paddy Producers Association also held rival meetings. Things happened, but we need not give everything away right here in such straightforward fashion.
What’s a story without a strong voice, anyway?
Reader, now that you have swallowed the pulp, you can leave the peel intact. Trust your instincts to tell you the rest of the tale.
This is what Muthusamy the Communist and Muniyan the Headman and Ratnam the Communist Party secretary and Subban and Murugan and Karuppaiah and Palayam and Pandari Ramayya and Thangaraju and Natesan and Panikkan and Kaliyappan and Srinivasan and Jayabalan and Veerappan and Kathaiyan and Arumugam and Seppan and Thangavelu and Sellamuthu and Vairakannu and Veeraiyyan and Balakrishnan and Muni and Ratinasamy and Palanivelu and Ramalingam and Thayyan and Kannusamy and Marudaiyyan and Periyaan and Raman would have said – when questioned alone or as part of a group – about what transpired after the village of Kilvenmani had taken its oath of loyalty to the red flag.
Gopalakrishna Naidu ordered our village’s owner, Ganapati Nadar, who ordered his pannaiyal Subramanian, who asked our village head, who asked the people of our village and they said they would not obey. It was the people’s decision and so our village stood by the red flag, fearless of the consequences. We decided there was no way the flag was going to be removed. We knew that it would save us. We knew that it would voice our demands. Any other flag had no business here. This information was relayed to Gopalakrishna Naidu. He went wild. He promised to burn our village and kill our people. He wanted to teach us a lesson. He wanted us to go hungry so that we would be forced to beg for food. He ordered that anybody from our village should not be given any job. We would go looking for jobs but all the landlords in East Tanjore had been told not to employ us if and when we came to them. Gopalakrishna Naidu had sent a messenger with a written letter to all these landlords in the neighbouring villages in the district.
It was a suffering that we had never undergone so far. We went to where our sisters and cousins and aunts had been married away, under the guise of guests, but kept looking for any job that we could find. Only a handful of us stayed here. We would borrow rice or money or grain or lentils and come home and live here for a few days and then go to another relative’s house and this is how we passed the time. Gopalakrishna Naidu had reduced us to slaves. We starved. The landlords did not give us work. They did not give us loans. It was a complete social boycott. We lived through those difficult days with hunger and fear and fortitude. The party told us that they did not have money, but they had the masses. What could we do? What could be done?
Words transform when they travel through a medium. They die, but, worse, they can kill. In a novel like this, there is no point in shooting the messenger dead.
In the village of Kilvenmani, pannaiyal Subramanian is the link man. It is through him that the villagers pay the fine for abstaining from work; it is through him that they are ordered to join the PPA; it is through him that they are ordered to pay the fine for boycotting the PPA and for instead staying with the Communist Party and swearing by its red flag.
He speaks forwards and backwards.
Through him the village of Kilvenmani declines, and through him the village hears the voice of untrammelled arrogance. ‘I have said what needs to be said and so there is nothing more to say.’ It is through him that they receive their threats; it is through him that they learn that their end is near.
Like the fool of all folklore, this man will survive and stay unscathed.
The Paddy Producers Association’s regular, endlessly repeated formula – threaten, beat up, force the labourer to leave the Communist Party – failed miserably in Kilvenmani. The ripple effect of terror that forced other villages to abandon the red flag did not shake this village. They continued to strike.
That is why the association decided to use blackmail tactics in Kilvenmani. It could be called into question for undemocratic practices and extrajudicial trouble-shooting methods, but the association stuck to its logical loops of threat, which were difficult to fault at first sight.
This was a collective decision taken by Ganapati Nadar, Muthukrishna Naidu, Narayanasamy Pillai, Ramu Thevar, Ramanuja Naidu and other mirasdars on behalf of Gopalakrishna Naidu. For the criminal transgression of participating in Sikkal Pakkirisamy’s funeral procession and boycotting work the following day, it went beyond collecting the twenty-rupee fine, and it put forth a list of conditions:
Kilvenmani must leave the Communist Party.
Or else, they must pay a fine of Rs. 250.
Or else, they must join the Paddy Producers Association.
Or else, they must face the consequences.
Or else.
In the midst of this drama, there is one scene that involves the surly priest, Sundaresa Gurukkal, making sakkarai pongal, the cloying feast of rice and jaggery at the Kali temple. The feast is sponsored by the princely sum of twenty rupees collected from the Kilvenmani villagers as punishment for being absent from work for two consecutive days. This money has been donated to the temple by the Paddy Producers Association. All the office-bearers partake of the sakkarai pongal.
This is utterly useless information at present, but it might come in handy at a later date. Try and remember this.
The elders of Kilvenmani are clear about certain things: we are not asking for the land. We are not asking for homes. We are asking for work because we need food. We are asking for food, for our s
ix measures of paddy, because we are going hungry – because what we have, what we are getting paid, is not enough for our stomachs. We may die of starvation but until our demand is met, we are not giving up the strike.
Though their demand is just, it is ignored. Ganapati Nadar, Muthukrishna Naidu, Narayanasamy Pillai, the landlords who employed them previously, are ordered not to appeal on their behalf. The pimping-landlord, Ramasamy Porayar, and his son, have also been ordered not to employ anybody from Kilvenmani, not even the women.
Gopalakrishna Naidu’s writ runs large. On the first full-moon day in December, his relative Kerosene Govinda summons five active party workers from Kilvenmani: Muthusamy, Muniyan, Natesan, Kaliyappan and Subramanian. And he is said to have reportedly said: ‘Your demand was conveyed but our president is very firm. He will not budge. He has asked me to collect this fine of Rs. 250 from you for continuing to strike.’
Kilvenmani’s representatives refuse to pay. They say that they cannot pay. They say that even when they harvest a sackful, they are paid only a pittance. Four and a half measures of paddy for every sack containing sixty measures. The women are paid even less.
They have a simple answer: ‘You cannot ask us for a fine, you should not ask us for a fine, and even if you did ask us for a fine, we cannot pay. We simply don’t have that kind of money.’
Then they are warned of the attack. They are told how angry Gopalakrishna Naidu is. Kerosene Govinda says that the only way to avoid trouble is to pay this fine. He knows, like everyone else, that this money is way beyond their reach, that even if all of the men and the women and the children in Kilvenmani went into the fields and worked and worked, it would take a few weeks for so much money to materialize. The fine is an excuse, a fine ruse, to shame the stubborn village.
The Gypsy Goddess Page 7
