India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (16 page)

In this, they took after their mother. She performed a
pooja
every day at four in the morning; she took the kids regularly to temples. Ramadas said the family complained when he spent money, but his wife was always buying gifts and making offerings to temple deities.

He laughed when he told me this—not derisively, but, I thought, indulgently, even affectionately. Ramadas was an atheist. He said he didn’t mind that his family was religious, but he didn’t share their beliefs. He had no intention of quitting his profession. Who could say what was against the gods? He said people always talked about gods and the miracles they’d supposedly performed. People believed the gods could heal a disease. But where was the proof? Ramadas believed only in what he could see. He believed in science. He believed in doctors and their injections.

Like Das, Ramadas was a Dalit. As I got to know him, I realized that his atheism had been shaped by his experiences as a Dalit—by the discrimination he’d suffered and seen all his life, by
the taunts and insults he’d been forced to bear as a young man. He’d grown up at a time of great oppression, before the awakening that Das had spoken to me about. Ramadas could remember standing outside the homes of upper castes as a boy, being forced to drink water from his hands so he wouldn’t contaminate the household vessels. He was restricted to the colony; he wasn’t allowed in the
ur
, the part of the village where the upper castes lived.

“I suffered a lot when I was young,” Ramadas told me once. “My community was always being stared at, hassled, being called names. I tried not to let it bother me, but it’s true that we were often very mistreated.”

When Ramadas was around sixteen years old, he discovered the teachings of E. V. Ramasamy Naicker, or Periyar, a twentieth-century social reformer and activist considered by many to be the father of modern Tamil culture. Periyar (“great man,” in Tamil) fought against social inequality, and in particular against caste and gender discrimination. He was a committed rationalist and atheist; he believed that religion was often used as a tool to oppress minorities and women.

Ramadas was deeply influenced by Periyar’s teachings. He was struck by Periyar’s observations that the discrimination faced by Dalits—as well as the religious justifications provided for it—was really just a way for the upper castes to maintain their dominance.

One night, Periyar gave a public lecture outside Tindivanam. Ramadas attended the lecture, along with a crowd of thousands. They assembled in the open air, under the stars and a half-moon. It was a hot night, without a breeze, and the speech was long. But Ramadas was riveted by what Periyar said.

Periyar pointed out to the crowd that they spent thousands of
rupees on religion and gods, things that they didn’t even know for sure existed. He said that religion was just a creation of the mind. He told the crowd not to waste their money. They should spend their money on their families and friends instead—things they knew were real, things they could touch.

Everyone was silent when Periyar spoke. Some people were offended. But, Ramadas told me decades later, he had been inspired.

Until then, he said, he had blindly followed what he was taught. “I was just a child,” he told me. “What did I really know? I bowed down, I went to churches and temples, I sang songs, I said prayers. I was sixteen when I realized it was all wrong. I went to a temple one day with my parents, and I saw people untie their hair, shouting that they were possessed, that they had a god in them. I realized something was off, it just didn’t make sense.”

He started walking around the villages, going to barbershops and tea shops, preaching what he had learned from Periyar. In a loud voice, often in what he described as a “vulgar manner,” he would proclaim his atheism. Sometimes people would get upset. They would beat their heads in despair. A few friends told him that it was fine if he wanted to believe in Periyar, but he should respect their belief in God.

“Why?” Ramadas would ask. “What proof do you have?” He would ask them how they knew that God existed. Had they ever seen anything, had any of their prayers ever worked? He laughed about one friend whose wife was unable to conceive and who was spending a fortune in offerings to the gods. Ramadas told him: “Why are you wasting your money? Just take her for a nice walk, go to the beach, feed her some fish or mutton, and make love to her nicely. Just sleep with her properly and you’ll get children.”

Ramadas said again it didn’t bother him that his children and wife were religious. He respected their beliefs, and they respected his. Of one thing, though, he was certain. No matter how much they pleaded, he would never stop working as a cow broker.

“I’m a businessman,” Ramadas said. “As long as my blood flows, I’ll be in this business. Why should I do what anyone tells me? If I was a watchman or a mason, then I would have to answer to someone.” He folded his hands as he said this, and looked up at the sky, like a supplicant. “But I’m independent, I’m my own king. If I have ten rupees in my pocket, it’s my money. I earned it, I can spend it how I want.”

Ramadas was unabashed about his atheism; he proclaimed it to
anyone who would listen, and to many who would rather not. It wasn’t unheard-of for a person to be an atheist, especially in the state of Tamil Nadu, where Periyar’s rationalist movement had considerable influence. But it was rare, and it was even rarer for someone to advertise his atheism as loudly as Ramadas did.

The area around Molasur was profoundly religious, steeped in rites and rituals, dotted with temples and ancient shrines. Even most cow brokers, whose trade involved the slaughter of an ostensibly holy animal, were devout. For many modern Indians, there was no contradiction between eating beef and their religious beliefs. Social mores were changing, adherence to some specific religious precepts were perhaps easing; but religion, and in particular the Hindu religion, continued to play a central role in the public and private lives of the vast majority of Indians.

Krishnan told me once that he was scared to discuss religion with Ramadas. He said Ramadas would attack him, question him aggressively about the basis for his faith. Krishnan said Ramadas was so compelling that he worried Ramadas would manage to convert him to atheism. He was joking, of course, but I did wonder about how Ramadas navigated the religious world in which he lived. I wondered, especially, about his relations with his own family.

I visited Ramadas and his family in Chennai one time. He and his wife and their two grown children lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in the suburb of Ramavaram. Ramadas said that Ramavaram had once been posh, a country retreat for the city’s elite. There were a few coconut trees left, reminders of an earlier, pastoral moment. But the ugly city had pretty much invaded. Like much of Chennai, Ramavaram was now a gritty collection of tightly hemmed-in apartments, uncovered gutters, and sandpiles for construction projects.

I visited the family on a Sunday afternoon. I sat with Ramadas and his son, R. Varunprasad, or Varun, in the living room. His wife, R. Malligeswari, a small, self-effacing woman, was in the kitchen, cooking eggplant pakoras. She walked in and out of the living room, batter dripping from her hands. Ramadas apologized for his daughter’s absence. She had been called to her job at the last minute. Companies were like that these days; they expected people to work on weekends.

The family talked about their financial difficulties. They had monthly expenses of 15,000 to 20,000 rupees. Ramadas made only a couple thousand as a cow broker. Malligeswari, who worked in a leather company, made about the same amount. They were
living off the daughter’s 15,000-rupee salary. They barely managed to keep the household running.

They had two hopes for the future. The first was that Varun would get a good job. He was due to get his degree in a few months; he was hoping to go to Australia. The second hope was that their daughter would marry well. They had been searching for “a good alliance.” They wanted someone from the city, someone cultured and educated, not too modern, but with good character.

Malligeswari stood at the entrance to the living room, one eye on her frying pakoras, and said: “If our son had lived, everything would be different. Life would be much easier for us—we wouldn’t have to worry so much about money.”

She told me how her son had died. It happened at five-forty in the morning. The bus driver who crashed into him had been driving all night; maybe he’d fallen asleep. Ramadas got a call from a traffic policeman, a relative, saying his son was in the hospital. When Ramadas got to the hospital, his son was already dead. He didn’t have a single wound; he must have died from internal bleeding.

“If he had lived just three more months, he would have been working in Canada,” Malligeswari said. “He had a job all arranged there.”

“I would have gone to Canada with him,” Ramadas said. “I would have moved there.”

Malligeswari and Varun laughed. Malligeswari said Ramadas would never leave this area. He was a man of habit. She and the kids had been trying for years to get him to quit the cow business, but he was too stubborn. He wouldn’t change his ways.

Varun was sitting on a low stool, just above the floor. I asked him if it was true that he disapproved of his father’s profession.
“It’s not like that,” he said. He said he respected his father. He knew all the sacrifices his father had made; he’d lived a tough life. When his father was a young man, Varun said, he’d been offered a good job in the railways, but he’d been pressured to work in cows with his own father, and he’d never lived up to his potential.

Varun hadn’t really answered my question, so I asked him again if he disapproved of his father’s job. He said: “I am not a vegetarian, but for me it’s a sin. What my father does is a kind of sin.”

Malligeswari said: “See, I was brought up in Chennai, I was taught manners and culture. My family was very religious, and I want my children brought up the same way. I don’t want them to eat beef, and I don’t like it that my husband’s business is beef.”

Ramadas sat impassively through all of this; he’d heard it before. He smiled at his wife and told me: “I eat what I want to eat, she can eat what she wants. I told you already, I don’t believe in all those things. What difference does it make if I eat beef or chicken? Who can say what’s a sin?”

Malligeswari pointed to some shelves at the back of the kitchen. “You can see how religious I am,” she said. The kitchen doubled as the family’s
pooja
room. The shelves were stacked with about a dozen images of deities, many garlanded in flowers and rubbed with red powder. Above the deities was a framed picture of their dead son. It looked like a blown-up passport photo, with a blue background, wrapped in a garland of yellow marigold. The dead son resembled his brother; they had the same long face, inherited from their mother.

Malligeswari said that sometimes it was hard to live with a husband who didn’t believe in any of these things. When their daughter had her first period, he refused to do the traditional
puberty ceremony. When they went to temples, he stayed outside. Even after his own father died, he refused to participate in the one-year death anniversary ceremony. She had to take it upon herself to honor her father-in-law.

She told me about a time the family had gone on a pilgrimage to a temple, one of the holiest in South India. Ramadas went with his wife and children, but he refused to go into the temple. He rented a room in a lodge outside, and hung around watching TV while they waited to get in. The lines at the temple were long; they waited for three days and two nights before they could see the deity.

Malligeswari said she had a revelation in front of the deity. She remembered shivering, being covered in goose bumps. She prayed hard. She asked for things to work out for her family. She prayed for Varun to do well in school. She felt her prayers had been answered; despite some hardships, they had survived, her children had done well.

Ramadas laughed. “We gave him clothes, didn’t we?” he asked. “We gave him books. He has a brain. He studied. That’s why it worked out. It was our effort. Everyone goes and prays and asks the gods to help with their children—do they all do well? Do all the kids in this country get a good education?”

He turned to me. “These are all dogmatic thoughts,” he said. “Look, it’s very simple: I had to drop out of school because of my family. They didn’t support my education. But this family supports education, and that’s what made the difference in his life.”

Malligeswari served us the pakoras. She opened a bottle of orange cola and insisted that I take a sip. I asked if she and her husband fought over their religious differences. She said that
maybe in the early days they had, but never any longer. He didn’t try to control her; she didn’t control him.

“He lets me pray to whomever I want, so I also don’t force him,” she said. “He never says, ‘Don’t pray.’ He never stopped me from teaching the kids about religion. You know, he may look rough, and he speaks harshly sometimes, but he’s never tried to force me into anything. He has a soft heart, he’s a good person.”