India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  I had my own scruples, too, about eating far from home – far, at any rate, from the Taj Coromandel Hotel. But I felt ashamed of those scruples, and I accepted a little food from Kakusthan’s kitchen, and put my lips to the glass of coffee, though the breaking of bread (or a puri) in Kakusthan’s back room did make my writing fingers oily. This became hard to ignore; it called for a more than ritual washing outside – Kakusthan pouring for me, not complaining, wasting precious water from the well, one of the six evening pots he was allowed. (And there had been no need for me to feel ashamed, or to feel that I had to eat. Kakusthan was a man of the world. When I next visited him at the colony, some days later, I told him straight out that I was like him, too, and didn’t eat away from home. He accepted that immediately. He laughed and said, ‘All right, I’ll be the untouchable this time.’)

  That first afternoon, in the dark, fluorescent-lit room at the back of his house, he talked in a matter-of-fact way of his neighbours.

  He said, ‘It is a poor community. Almost the entire community is poor. The first generation largely consisted of purohits, pujaris, cooks, and a few office-goers. The second generation is somewhat better. There are more boys and girls in the family earning money, with jobs.’

  ‘What kind of jobs?’

  ‘Jobs which were not dreamt of by traditional brahmins. Like operating machines, working as mechanics, and all other industrial manual labour. My neighbour on this side is a cook.’

  Fifteen people lived in the cook’s room. This wasn’t as bad as it sounded: the 15 didn’t sleep in the room at the same time. In fact, they had their own reserved sleeping places in the central yard: in the summer, which lasted the better part of the Madras year, everyone slept in the yard or in the open. The cook made the greater part of his money at weddings; but he had to employ so many assistants that the profit on a 1000-rupee wedding job was really very small.

  The neighbour on Kakusthan’s other side was a ‘peon’ or office boy. He worked in a government office. There was another boy in the colony who drove a mechanized rickshaw. His father had been a Sanskrit scholar, an authority on the Vedas and Hindu rituals.

  ‘It’s really sad,’ Kakusthan said. ‘The boy himself says, “What can I do, when there is no other means for me? I’m not educated. Nor did I follow in my father’s footsteps.” ’

  I said, ‘That sounds unusual.’

  ‘He wasn’t educated because of lack of parental care.’

  And when Kakusthan and I next met, in the hotel where I was staying, it was of the poverty of the brahmin colony beside the great temple of Parthasarathy that he continued to talk.

  Kakusthan said, ‘The situation today is many times better than what it was in the 1950s, when I was growing up there. I felt the need for better comforts. The people I knew at school dressed better, looked better, were stronger, and more modern in their appearance. I looked more like a village boy – with my dhoti, my religious marks on my forehead, and my churki.’

  It was, barring the churki, the way he looked now. The churki, the long, uncut tuft or lock of hair at the back of the head, was an antique brahmin badge. Kakusthan no longer had a long churki; the one he wore was just an inch and a half long, but it served his purpose. (Four or five times a year, on an auspicious day, as part of his revived brahminism, Kakusthan had all his body hair shaved – eyebrows, everything, except for the hair under his arms and the churki. He was between shaves when we met; the hair on his head looked like a crewcut, and the short churki wasn’t particularly noticeable.) When he was a child he had been made to wear the churki by his father. It wasn’t something that many brahmin boys wore in the 1950s; it had been at the root of his torment at school.

  Kakusthan said, ‘All these things brought contempt and ridicule by other boys, which even today continues. I used to react violently if the boy who ridiculed me was weak, and used to ignore the boy who was strong. I complained to my father about my social plight at school, and his reply would be, “Go and report to the headmaster.” He would also say that it was to uphold the family tradition that I had to wear those religious marks and have the churki – without which the entire family in the village would be looked down on by other families, particularly as our family as brahmins were serving the deity there.

  ‘My father himself was suffering from the same kind of ridicule in his own school and elsewhere in the city – on the buses, on the streets. The whole brahmin community was suffering at that time from that kind of ridicule, due to anti-brahminism, let loose by the so-called Dravidian Movement.’ The Dravidar Kazagham, the Dravidian Movement, started by Periyar. This was in the mid-1950s, when there was widespread movement against brahmins and their practices. This took the form of breaking idols, cutting off brahmins’ churkis and sacred threads, and rubbing off the religious marks on the forehead. In Madras most of the vegetarian restaurants used to boast themselves as “brahmin hotels” – and the Dravidian people would erase the word “brahmin”. Now hotels do not have these words in the city. In those days you would have the “brahmin hotel” and the “military hotel”.’

  The ‘military hotel’ still existed when I first travelled in the South. It meant a place where meat was served; and – as though accepting the brahmin prejudice against such places, as though revelling in the difference and absolute freedom such a prejudice gave – the military hotels in the South were really very dirty and unwashed.

  Somewhere on the bus route between Bangalore and Madras in 1962, somewhere on the red earth of that region, I had my first sight of the military hotel. It was a shack on bare earth, part of the informal bus-stop area. The English words on the signboard – in that old-looking landscape of simple colours, like an exotic view in an English 18th-century print – seemed to go back to the British East India Company’s wars against Tippu Sultan. The quaint words seemed to hold something of Indian history, something of the 18th-century Indian anarchy, when armies, of Indian hired troops, fought over the land, without reference to the people who worked in the villages or in the fields.

  From one kind of war to another, one kind of consciousness to another: in the main museum room of the Periyar Thidal, among the 33 paintings of the stages or stations in the life of Periyar, was one showing the great man in 1957, when he was nearly eighty, painting out ‘Brahmin’ from a hotel or restaurant signboard. Periyar in this painting was white-bearded and very grand. He had a whitewash brush in one hand; he stood on a bench or stool to reach the signboard; and he was calmly going about his business, without interference from anyone, policeman or politician or hotel-owner or hotel customer. The colours of the painting were simple, the details curiously literal (the signboard, the stool or bench on which Periyar stood, the painting brush edged with white), as though they were illustrating a well known text; and the effect was that of the calm world of a children’s comic strip.

  Kakusthan, talking of the humiliations he had to put up with as a boy because of his traditional brahmin dress, said, ‘I resisted whenever I could, and I got beaten, even while I was telling my parents that I had to switch to the new ways of life – particularly removing the churki, and wearing trousers. We suffered from the churkis. That was the thing we suffered from the most. When I used to go to school sports, there used to be a lot of amusement when I took part in running-races and the sport known as kabbadi. When I ran, my churki would get loose and fall down, and that got a lot of laughs. In kabbadi my opponents would seize me by the churki, hold me by that long strand of hair, and they would win the game.

  ‘I stayed at school until 1958. I joined a college then on a pre-university course, and the irony is that I got into that college only because of my churki and caste-marks. The man who recommended me was a brahmin, and he cherished the same values we had in our family. But I was in that college for only six months. I was subject to more intense ridicule from my college mates. And they were adults now, not boys.

  ‘All this made me very sad. I started feeling entirely different from my father, and
begged him to spare me these agonies. But he was firm. He said that family respect and tradition were more important than these passing experiences. I was not convinced. I dropped out of college. I felt I had to be independent.’

  Independent – it was a strange word.

  Kakusthan said, ‘Independent of these practices. I was sixteen. I felt I must be as modern as anybody else.’

  ‘Weren’t you frightened when you left the college?’

  ‘I wasn’t frightened. I was full of hope that I would be able to do what I wanted once I was away from home. I told my mother these things in confidence. She partly agreed with me, and partly didn’t. She understood my feelings.’

  I tried to set that family drama of 30 years before in the colony I had seen. In the yard around the well the people would have been more obviously brahminical in their dress and restrictions: people once of authority, now safe only in this little area of theirs. I tried to think of the passions of father and son exploding in the small private space the family had in the colony: the dark small room at the back of the kitchen on the lower level, the sleeping room off the common terrace above, with a view – as you climbed the narrow stone-and-concrete steps at the side of the house-row to that terrace – of the overgrown temple garden, memorial of a calmer time.

  ‘For a few days I stayed at home. My father was very angry. He didn’t talk to me. He didn’t want me in the house. I had betrayed the family and let down his prestige. He wanted me to be a graduate and a bank employee or a central government employee, even while adhering to my religious pursuits at the temple in our village – where we had much honour as brahmins. He would cite several examples of people who did the two things – wear the long tuft, the churki, and at the same time did good, secure, modern jobs.

  Through friends in the colony, friends of my own age or a little older, I got a job with an electric-bulb dealer as an office boy on a salary of one rupee a day. This was in 1959. But since the father-and-son relationship was extremely strained, there was no peace at home. There was also a mother-father tussle, with mother and father quarrelling, and with occasional beatings for me from both father and mother. So I left home.

  ‘I decided to go to my married sister. She lived in the town of Vellore, 100 kilometres west of Madras. Her husband had become a schoolteacher after retiring from the army. I went to Vellore by bus. I got the fare out of the old college books. My father had bought them new. I sold them to a hawker for a throw-away price.

  ‘It was a Saturday when I left home. Every Saturday and Wednesday I had my traditional oil bath, and my mother used to soap my long hair. She did so that Saturday. I had my morning meal around 10.30, and immediately afterwards I slipped away to the bus stop, not telling any soul I was leaving for Vellore. I had very little money, just enough for the bus fare to Vellore, and I walked from Triplicane to Parry’s Corner. Five miles, in the scorching heat. It took about an hour.

  There was a lurking fear in me. Was I doing the right thing? What would be my mother’s reaction? This agitated me all through my travel to Vellore. Mid-way I even thought of returning home. But then the other half of my mind compelled me to go on – and I told myself I was only going to my sister’s place, after all.

  ‘For a few days I was a welcome guest there in Vellore, at my sister’s. But then their sympathies were more with our parents than with me, after I had explained why I had come to them. My sister wrote to my parents that I was with her. My father had been quietly looking for me, but he had been pretending not to be concerned about my disappearance.

  ‘My brother-in-law tried to get me a job in Vellore. But Vellore is a predominantly Muslim town, and I was handicapped by my Hindu-brahmin appearance. Whenever I went with my brother-in-law to get a job, the first question would be: “Why don’t you wear pants and become more modern, if you want a job?” But even though I’d left home, I wasn’t courageous enough to remove the churki or put on trousers. I was in a dilemma. I had no job, and I couldn’t go home. I spent some sleepless nights, even while putting a brave face on things.

  ‘I must have stayed a month at my sister’s. And then, reluctantly, I went back to Madras. I didn’t go back to my own home. I went to the house of a friend of my mother’s. This house was outside our brahmin colony.

  ‘The son of this friend of my mother’s also wore the churki and the caste-marks and was obedient to what his parents told him. He was an extraordinarily brilliant boy, in mathematics and statistics. He is today a professor in a big American university. And even then, when I went to his house – he was two years older than me – he was an admirer of the genius Ramanujan, whose mathematical work he and his equally brilliant colleagues would discuss and debate for hours together. They especially discussed the unsolved mathematical problems of Ramanujan’s. These boys were college students. I couldn’t follow the discussions, but I could admire the deep commitment to the studies they were pursuing – commitment which I didn’t have.

  ‘What impressed me most was the way in which the father of the boy took interest in these discussions, and encouraged them by supplying coffee. You must imagine these discussions going on in a house as poor as my father’s in the agraharam, the colony. There was an irony. My mother’s friend’s husband was a Sanskrit teacher, and yet his son was a mathematical genius. My father was a mathematics teacher, and I was a mathematical zero.

  ‘The mathematical debate went on past midnight. I felt sorry I couldn’t participate, and I literally wept that night that I had had to disappoint my father.’

  Tears came to Kakusthan’s eyes. He tried to ignore the tears, to go on talking. But then he began to cry at those memories of 30 years before. He stood up and said, ‘Let me take five minutes off.’

  He walked to the rear of the hotel lobby and began to walk up and down, a small figure in his brahmin clothes, noticeable, five feet one or two, walking up and down, wrestling with his grief, looking down, in his abstraction like a monk or holy man in his cloister, indifferent to the hotel setting.

  Were the tears for himself, for what he might have made of himself if he hadn’t been pushed into rebellion? Or were the tears for the unhappiness he had caused his father 30 years before? The tears were for both things: he said when he came back and sat down and collected himself that it was the difference between the two families that had upset him all over again.

  ‘I spent 10 to 15 days in that atmosphere, and was full of guilt that I had left home and studies. This boy I have mentioned would teach me mathematics, and console me that nothing was lost, that even now I could pick up the threads. That gave me encouragement to go back to being a student.

  ‘I went home to the agraharam. I settled there. But I couldn’t get back into college. It was the middle of the year. I took a job. I needed the money, to satisfy my social cravings – taking friends to hotels, going to movies, etc. None of these things would have been available to me, if I had to depend on my father. In fact, they were forbidden. At home we never even drank coffee – it was a foreign item, an item invented by the British. And even today in strict brahmin homes coffee is not drunk, because of its intoxicating effects – the caffeine.

  ‘I went back to my job with the bulb-dealer. I got 26 rupees a month. I gave my family 20 rupees, and I kept six – to fulfil all my cravings, without the knowledge of my father. I stayed in that job for a year. And having tasted money power, I was reluctant again to take up studies. So I went back to my old ways again.

  The work was hard. I literally had to hawk the bulbs around the city, sometimes on a bicycle, sometimes walking, when the cycle was punctured. It used to be so hot that sometimes the tires used to burst. Even my father was moved by the arduous nature of my job, which was telling upon my health. I became very lean, with the irregular food. So he got me a job with an engineering consulting firm, making blueprint copies, at 65 rupees a month – a big jump.’ Sixty-five rupees, £5 a month, in 1960.

  ‘One day I burnt a blueprint. The engineer slapped me, and went awa
y without saying a word. I was at fault. I didn’t blame him. I told my father when I went home. He advised me to take it in my stride as part of life. I was surprised – I thought my father might also want to beat me for the mistake with the blueprint.

  ‘I did the blueprints for the company for nine months. Then I was posted to one of the company’s construction sites. Work was going on at that site on behalf of one of the big industrial concerns of the South. It was here again, for the second time in my life, my traditional brahmin appearance and approach came to my aid or advantage.

  The managing director of the company we were working for was very pleased with my strict adherence to the brahmin way of life. He was so pleased to see a brahmin boy in churki in charge of a building site, being a maistry – especially at this time, when anti-brahmin feeling was at its height. This was in 1961.

  ‘I did not know how important this managing director was, how many businesses he controlled. He asked me about my father, and he sent a message through me asking my father to meet him. I was a little nervous. So also was my father. We didn’t know what the managing director wanted or who he was. They met, and the managing director got on well with my father immediately. After hearing about my father’s background, and especially his versatility in the 4000 hymns of the Tamil Vedas, he asked my father to be his teacher in the Tamil Vedas. Which my father did. This happy meeting with one of the very great industrialists of the South made my father so happy he wondered how I could have pleased an outsider, when I couldn’t please people at home.