India (42 page)

Kakusthan’s father had come to make his way in Madras in 1932 or 1933. He was twenty-two then, and married, but he didn’t bring his wife with him. Not only did he not have the money; it was also not quite right, at that time, for a husband and wife to break away, as a couple, from the joint-family house.

Kakusthan’s father was the first in his family to have gone to an English-medium school. He got only as far as the 10th standard; but he later became a teacher. He was especially good in mathematics, and he gave private lessons in the subject. As with other brahmins of his generation, he was hard to categorize. It could be said that he was a half-educated village man; at the same time, so far as mathematics went, he was gifted and unusual. And there was, in addition, his Hindu and brahmin learning. This was considerable.

In the family village there was an old temple. For 700 or 800 years, since the time of the Chola emperors, Kakusthan’s father’s family had had special rights and privileges in that temple. They did the pujas for the temple deity, and everything offered to the deity in that temple went first to the deity and then to Kakusthan’s father’s family. In that temple the privilege of Kakusthan’s father’s family exceeded that of emperors.

His breeding and ancestry made Kakusthan’s father the equal of anyone; yet when he left his village, all that he and his family could raise was the train fare to Madras. He left six people behind in the village: his wife, his parents, the family of his elder brother. None of them had an income; all of them depended on the young man who had gone to Madras on the train.

Having no money at all, Kakusthan’s father stayed with relatives in Madras. For some time he lived on charity as a young brahmin, eating at different brahmin houses on different days. But then he
began to make a little money from his learning. He knew by heart all the 4000 verses of the Vedas in Tamil. The fact got around, and at pujas the young man would be called upon to recite the 4000 verses. He would get a rupee or two for that, and his food as well. With the money for the verses, and then his fees for the private lessons he gave in mathematics, and his salary as a teacher, he was able in the end to have a decent income. He would have made about 40 to 45 rupees a month, enough to keep himself and the six people he had left behind in the village.

Some time in the early 1940s, after 10 years of this life, Kakusthan’s father finally brought his wife to Madras. They found a room for 10 rupees a month, about 75 pence. Children were born. And then, with the help of friends, Kakusthan’s father got a place in the brahmin colony, paying more or less what he had been paying outside. He would have been in his early thirties; security of a kind had at last come to him. He moved twice within the colony; some people did that. In 1943 Kakusthan was born.

It was like the beginning of a success story. There had been a good deal of movement – but had there been success? Forty-five years later Kakusthan was showing me round the place where he had spent all his childhood and adolescence, and where he had come back to live for good; and Kakusthan was dressed as a brahmin. He was almost certainly the richest man in his little community. But the community was poor; historical though the setting was, with all its promptings to religious pastoral, with the enclosed temple garden at the front, the well and the winch in the central yard (and with the people of Lord Krishna’s cowherd caste in the high buildings at the back), many of the women and girls at the well, filling up their pots of rationed water, looked pallid and undernourished.

The brahmin colony was a little urban slum, lower in energy than the Muslim community on the outer limit of the temple area. And the colony was under pressure. Its already compromised brahminical ways were being steadily more compromised. The most dreadful compromise had been made when the sweepers, the cleaners of latrines, had begun to ask for sums the community couldn’t afford. Then, to show the sweepers, and to deter further blackmail, the brahmins had cleaned their own latrines. Kakusthan himself had rallied the young men of the community. He told them that every day every person touched excrement, even if it was his
own; and that it was therefore all right for them to clean their own latrines and sewers. At any other time what Kakusthan proposed would have been regarded as a form of caste suicide; but Kakusthan spoke of it as a moral, caste triumph.

He was a small man, an inch or two above five feet, warm-complexioned, well made. His eyes were bright and steady. It was his eyes that gave away his passion – at one time the passion of the renegade, the man who wished to break out at whatever cost, now the passion of the man wishing to honour what he felt to be the true way.

He lived in one of the five houses which had an upper floor, with a sleeping room off an open terrace. The room to which he led me when I first went to his house was at the far end downstairs. It was perhaps against the boundary wall; it was dark and airless, with a slight smell of drains, a little cell, where everything, paint and walls and cupboards and fittings, showed age and use in the fluorescent light, but where no doubt everything was ritually clean. Cleanliness – like pollution – could come easily to a brahmin: a finger flick of water could be deemed to purify a room.

Since I was a visitor, and this was India, Kakusthan wanted me to eat something in his house – though having a stranger in his house wasn’t strictly what he should be doing as a man trying hard to live as a good brahmin. Of course, he wasn’t going to eat with me; but he wanted me to eat something from his kitchen. That was why we were downstairs. We had passed by the kitchen when we had gone through to the little room at the back; and I had seen, on a table or a stand or a half-wall next to the kitchen doorway, a black image, with a flame burning before it in a tall, sooty oil lamp of bronze or silver. The lamp was of a style that took one back to the ancient world: the wick burned in the mouth of a shallow oil container shaped like a curling leaf, and this oil container was attached to a vertical pole. The black image was of Kakusthan’s deity; everything that Kakusthan ate had first to be offered to this deity.

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.