Ants Among Elephants

by Sujatha Gidla

  The St. Gabriel School for Boys, in Khazipet, was the most prestigious boarding school in Warangal. All the students there were sons of rich landlords or Muslim aristocrats, men who had held titles of dora, nawab, or jagirdar under the Nizam.

  At St. Gabriel, starting in the summer of 1962, Satyam taught English, Telugu, and social studies. A week after he started, the principal called him into his office. He asked him if he was settled, how he liked his house, whether he cared for the job. Then the principal told him he had walked past Satyam’s classroom the other day. In a hushed and thoughtful voice, he said in English, “It was something like an ocean. It was silent, and then I heard roars of laughter like waves crashing onto the beach. And then silence again.” He’d heard Satyam’s class alternately paying attention to his lessons and laughing at his jokes. The principal was pleased to have Satyam at St. Gabriel.

  Satyam, too, was pleased to be there. In the seven years they’d been married, Satyam had never provided Maniamma with either a home or his own company. Now that they were finally together, she realized how happy life could be. Though she had little education herself, her goal in life was to educate her children. When Siddhartha was six and they were living with Prasanna Rao, he couldn’t go to school because he had no clothes to wear. Now she was able to buy him a school uniform and textbooks and pay the fees to send him to St. Gabriel. And Anupama was sent to the St. Gabriel’s sister school, Fatima Girls’ School, where she was first in her class.

  The children thought their father owned St. Gabriel School. It amused him to see little Anupama walking the school premises. How proud her gait was! She walked like a little princess.

  In no time Satyam grew close to his students. They liked to spend time with him at his house or under the mango trees. He directed the school play. The Catholics were delighted with his services.

  But after only three months, his family’s tranquillity was broken.

  At 5:00 a.m. on October 20, 1962, the Chinese army fired heavy mortars and artillery on Indian troops at the border, decimating two brigades in a mere four hours. The strike was launched in retaliation for India’s advances into Chinese territory after the Chinese government put down the 1959 uprising in Tibet. The Chinese went on to attack another Indian position, bombarding India’s Seventh Brigade out of existence.

  That same morning, Sundarayya, the leader of the dissident faction of the Indian Communist Party, issued a statement even more shocking than the news of the war itself: “We stand with China.”

  How can anyone support an enemy country? Sundarayya explained that in a war between a socialist state and a capitalist state, true Communists must take the side of the socialist state. So it was their duty to defend China.

  This statement split the Communist Party in two. Within hours of its being issued, supporters of the dissident faction—thousands of Communists all over India—were rounded up and jailed without trial on charges of sedition.

  These events shattered Maniamma’s dream of a peaceful life.

  *

  PARTY MEMBERS SUCH AS SATYAM had for a long time looked to Sundarayya to lead the Communist movement onto a revolutionary path. Just when Satyam had given up on him and settled down to live like anyone else, the war with China had forced Sundarayya to act.

  Now a great historical task had fallen to Satyam. The leaders of the pro-China faction were all in jail. In Warangal also the dissident leaders had been locked up.

  Satyam and Seetharamayya were both spared. They were not known to police in Telangana.

  It was up to them to spread pro-China propaganda and try to win over the masses to the cause of revolution, to lay the groundwork for a new party that would be ready to take action as soon as its future leaders were released.

  Satyam somehow got hold of a banned English-language pamphlet on the antecedents of the war and sat up through the night translating it into Telugu. He sent it to a sympathetic printer, who rushed the little booklet into press.

  The pamphlet set out to show that not only should China be defended as a socialist state but it was also in the right in the border dispute. Both the United States and the U.S.S.R. had egged India on, even after the Chinese had repeatedly sought a diplomatic solution.

  Equipped with that booklet, the two teachers entered the campuses of the Regional Engineering College (REC) in Khazipet and Kakatiya Medical College (KMC) in Warangal city. The majority of students in Warangal were from families who had taken part in the Telangana Armed Struggle and who still had Communist sympathies. It was easy to approach them.

  Warangal also had many workers. The Azam Jahi textile mill was there, and Khazipet was a major railway junction. The mill workers and railway workers were made up largely of sons of Telangana peasants who had suffered under, and rebelled against, the dora system. They, too, were receptive to Satyam’s propaganda.

  There was no time for sleep. Every evening after it got dark, Satyam would set out for the textile workers’ colony in Warangal. It was far, but because he wanted to keep his movements secret, he never took the bus. He walked the whole way through fields and scrubland. By the time he reached the colony and gathered the workers, it would already be midnight. He would get home at four or five in the morning, sleep until nine. By nine-thirty he had to be at school. Maniamma would heat the bathwater, get him to the well, scrub him clean with soap, feed him, and send him off to school with the word “Go!” as if she were calling the start of a race. He hardly saw his children’s faces.

  It was risky work. The government didn’t take the appearance of seditious materials on college campuses lightly. The notorious Warangal police were hunting for those responsible. They questioned students suspected of pro-China sympathies, some of whom came to Satyam and Seetharamayya for help.

  Meanwhile, a few students from St. Gabriel came to them with a mysterious complaint about the Catholic fathers. The two teachers took the leader of the unhappy boys, the fourteen-year-old son of a rich Muslim landlord, for a walk where they could be assured of privacy. They asked him to explain what it was all about. He told them the fathers were being disrespectful to the boys.

  “Disrespect how?”

  “I mean, they are ill-treating us.”

  “Ill-treating you how?”

  Little by little, the boy was led by Satyam’s questioning to say enough that the rest could be pieced together. The priests were entering the boys’ rooms after dinner and falling upon them.

  Seetharamayya failed to understand. Unlike Satyam, who had read of it in English novels, Seetharamayya did not know of this phenomenon whereby some men desired to fall upon other men instead of women. Satyam explained there was a term for it. “Hmm. Let me think. Ah, yes. It is called homosex.” Seetharamayya was aghast. The two teachers promised to help the boys, but they wanted their role kept secret.

  The following Monday, with the help of REC students organized by the two teachers, the St. Gabriel boys held a rally and marched into the principal’s office. The Catholic management had never seen such disobedience. They expelled several twelfth-class pupils for their part in the protest. But when, encouraged by their supporters from the REC, the boys threatened to expose the “homosex,” the administration decided to hush up the matter. They sent home some of the accused priests and took back the expelled students.

  When it was all over, the principal, Father John, summoned the Muslim boy who had led the protest and congratulated him on the successful agitation. “Very good work, my son.” The boy was pleased. Then Father John asked him how he had pulled off such an excellent thing. The boy—flattered beyond endurance—naively admitted that the new teachers had given him a lot of support. Now it was Father John who was pleased.

  When Satyam learned that his role had been exposed, it didn’t bother him too much. “What will happen?” he thought to himself. “What is forever? What is true and what is false? Only revolution is truth. Everything else may come or go.” In those days he was in that sort of mood.

  In the
end, the management took no action against him. He was a popular teacher, valuable to the school, and besides, they didn’t want to risk his causing any more trouble.

  *

  AS IN MANY OTHER PARTS of the world, the 1960s were turbulent times for students in India. Inspired by the Chinese revolution, many educated youth were turning to Maoism. Satyam went out nightly to talk to students and hold classes for them. This new milieu was very different from that of Satyam’s old comrades. These people were intellectuals. He was impressed by the high level of political discussion among them, by their eagerness to study Marxist theory. Their attitude seemed cultured, serious, free of pettiness. He tried to make them see that in the recent split, the correct line was Sundarayya’s, and that when Sundarayya organized his new party, it would be the one to make a revolution in India. He encouraged the students to read and study Marxism, but the real task, he told them, was to prepare for the coming revolution.

  As this activity was heating up, Seetharamayya announced he was leaving his job and moving away to Adilabad. “I must go and protect my parents. Their lives are in peril.” His parents, like many rich kamma and reddy landlords from Andhra, had sold their five or ten acres of land and settled in Telangana, where they bought up twenty or thirty acres of land cheaply. They came under attack by Telangana landlords who resented this encroachment.

  Seetharamayya assured Satyam, “Don’t worry, I will visit every ten days. When I do, you can give me a report on the activity and we will plan everything together.”

  Seetharamayya did come back for a time to help campaign for the by-election that was about to be held to replace a minister who left office unexpectedly. Omkar, the Communist leader in town, was campaigning from his jail cell. While Seetharamayya ran the campaign office, Satyam went out on the road. The party hired a small car for him. The luxury of riding in a car was too much for someone from Satyam’s background. He felt too embarrassed to ride in the backseat. Instead he sat beside the driver in a dirty khaki uniform and pretended to be a repairman. He claimed this was a ruse to evade police.

  The pro-China Communists, having been released from prison after a cease-fire was declared in November 1962, formally broke with the old party in April 1964 by walking out of a national council meeting. This was the moment Satyam and Seetharamayya had been preparing for. The call to form a new party was expected any day.

  Because of the organizing Satyam had done in Warangal, the pro-China leaders had solid support in the medical and engineering colleges, where students had split from the SFI to form a new student union loyal to the dissidents. The Azam Jahi mill workers backed them, as did the formidable railway workers’ union in Khazipet. Field laborers and rural youth from Warangal, Jangaon, and the neighboring villages had formed village committees supporting the pro-China faction.

  Upon his release from jail, Sundarayya had paid tribute to the young activists who had built up the new party in the leadership’s absence. He told them, “We conceived the idea of a Marxist party. We gave birth to it and went away to prison, abandoning the infant on the streets. It was you who picked up that baby, you who cared for it and nourished it.”

  In July 1964, the dissident leaders and their ardent followers from the four corners of the country gathered in Tenali to hold the new party’s founding conference. It was to be called the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), to distinguish it from the old, degenerated, revisionist CPI. Some 100,000 of the old party’s 175,000 members quit to join the new, truly Marxist one.

  When Satyam went to the conference, he was shocked to discover that the leaders had no program to show the members, not even in draft. He had expected to be told what the party stood for before being asked to join. The leaders’ attitude was “First become members of the party, and then we will tell you its program.” What were they hiding?

  Sundarayya, having praised the hard work of younger activists such as Satyam, now brushed them aside in choosing leaders of the new party. Instead, he chose two old men. One was Jyoti Basu, the son of a wealthy Bengali brahmin family, who had studied in prestigious schools in England. The second was another brahmin, an ex-Congress man from Kerala, E.M.S. Namboodiripad.

  The most glaring incongruity in Sundarayya’s choices was that neither of these men agreed with the founding principle of the new party, defense of China. These old brahmins had opposed the split and were the last to quit the old revisionist party.

  But Sundarayya wanted those men for their prestige. To accommodate their politics, he had to avoid producing a draft program.

  Seetharamayya’s request for membership was turned down. The new party didn’t want him any more than the old one had. Sundarayya did not approve of Seetharamayya’s extramarital affair.

  Satyam joined the party despite his misgivings. It was useful to have a party affiliation to carry out his own activities.

  But his hopes now turned to the movement his old AU classmate and comrade Panchadi had invited him to help build a few months before he’d moved to Khazipet. There was unrest in the tribal area of Srikakulam, not far from Vizag. The tribals were forbidden by the forest and revenue officials to live off the forest as they had always done. And when they went out onto the plains like Satyam’s grandparents and tried to cultivate land, they, too, were cheated out of it by moneylenders and landholding castes. Deprived of any means of living, the tribals were ready to revolt.

  Satyam planned to remain in Telangana with the aim of helping his friends from afar when the time came, and possibly starting something similar in the forests of Adilabad in the northern part of the region.

  EIGHT

  AFTER PRABHAKARA RAO’S FAMILY REJECTED Manjula at the engagement ceremony, she had no hope that anyone else would ever come forward to marry her. After all, engagement is practically marriage. Something had to be terribly wrong with a girl for her to be discarded at such a late stage.

  Five months after she’d gone to have it out with Prabhakara Rao, she hadn’t heard a word from him. Manjula was no longer just an unmarried woman. She was a spinster.

  She was at home with her family for the summer when her father received a telegram:

  “Wedding fixed. May 22.”

  It was from Prabhakara Rao’s brother. No mention of a dowry.

  Carey cried, “But today is the seventeenth!” They had no idea what had changed, and why the rush. But they did not pause to inquire. Shamelessly, they launched into a frenzy of preparation.

  Tasks were divided up. Prasanna Rao had to find the money. Carey would do the heavy work, cutting wood and building the tent for a nischitartham ceremony that would take place at their home. Maniamma and her sister were in charge of the feast. Manjula had no money to buy wedding clothes, so she had to travel to Guntur, where the merchants would give her credit.

  To get married in a church, Manjula had to first get baptized. As is the custom among the Andhra Baptists, the choice to do so had been left up to her, and she had never bothered until now. Sentimental Prasanna Rao wouldn’t let her go to any church but the one in Sankarapadu.

  For the nischitartham ceremony, in place of the terrible aunts and uncles they’d met earlier, some good-natured aunts and uncles of the groom were dispatched to the Kambham home. They brought the customary sari, the ring, and other gold jewelry for Manjula. She went inside and put on the sari and jewels. When she came out, Carey couldn’t believe his eyes. He had always thought his sister to be the plainest girl on earth. In a nice sari and with a few ornaments, she was beautiful—albeit in an unconventional way. The ceremony concluded and the groom’s party returned home to Kakinada, where the wedding was to be held.

  There was neither time nor money to print invitations, or even to notify friends and relatives. Manjula wrote to O. Vijayalakshmi. O. Vijayalakshmi wasn’t free to make the journey to Kakinada. But knowing Manjula had no womanly skills, and that her relatives were almost like bushmen, OV felt it was her duty to come and help Manjula prepare herself.

  “Manjula,
first, take all your wedding clothes out of the trunk.” She did. “Now you put them on.” Manjula put them on. “Now take them off.” Manjula took them off. “This is loose.” With a needle and thread OV restitched the blouse to fit better. She showed Manjula how to wear a sari properly.

  “Now look at me. Listen to what I tell you. At the wedding, try not to look like a woman who has lost everything in life. Remember to smile once in a while.”

  The bride’s party departed for Kakinada. It consisted of only two people, Prasanna Rao and Carey, for there was no more money for train tickets.

  The moment Manjula stepped out of the house, Satyam broke down, fell to his knees, and wept. No one could console him. They all thought that he wept because he couldn’t attend his sister’s wedding. But it wasn’t that. He was thinking of their common struggles, growing up motherless and abandoned by their father, their efforts to get educated, the shameful way in which her match had been arranged. What was to become of Satyam-Carey-Manjula?

  The bride’s party took a bus to Eluru, where they would catch the mail train. Manikya Rao and Niranjanamma joined them there.

  In the untouchable slum of Elwin Peta, in the town of Kakinada, Prabhakara Rao’s family, the Gidlas, were the most prominent family. Whenever their household held a celebration, everyone in the slum came to watch the spectacle, enjoying it vicariously. When Manjula’s rickshaw arrived in Elwin Peta, the slum children ran alongside her, heralding her arrival: “The bride is here! The bride is here!”

  When Manjula saw how Prabhakara Rao’s family lived, it was as if she had been taken up in a spaceship and—bhaiiiiiiiii!—she was instantly transported into a marvelous new world.

  There were two two-storied houses, two separate buildings for two separate families who lived as one. They towered over the squalid huts all around them. To Manjula, used to living under a thatched roof, these large cement structures with two separate levels seemed magnificent dwellings.