Interview in The Hindu Metroplus with Baradwaj Rangan

There’s something entirely appropriate about the lassi that Meena Kandasamy orders one April afternoon. It isn’t just that a merciless sun is beating down upon us, sneaking up even in the shade we’ve settled into. It’s also the rage bubbling beneath the surface of her small frame, threatening to erupt any instant. She needs that lassi like the Fukushima facility needs coolant. She also needs her poetry. “You don’t know how it heals you, but it heals you,” she says. “It helps you channelise your anger.”

Looking at this young woman, all of 26, exuding a gypsy-beauty in jeans and a light top matching her purplish earrings and a cotton stole thrown casually around her shoulders, you wouldn’t know she needs healing. But she insists it’s not about personal healing. “I think society needs healing. Something like the caste system is society wounding itself. Every time you accept your superiority it’s because you don’t want to be wounded in some way, and you have at least this one thing to be proud about. But to feel proud, you go and hurt somebody else. This is the cycle.”

She enumerates the other ways in which society wounds itself — with domestic violence, with child sexual abuse, with the hatred around us. “These are all things that need healing.” At her most excited, her sentences wrap around an ascending series of notes that makes it appear that she’s the one asking the questions.

Sometime after school, Meena began volunteering with the Dalit Media Network. She says it wasn’t just empathy that made her interested in Dalit causes. “It’s also about being very shrewd and looking at the fault lines. You go to the OBC leaders, and they are very proud of the fact that they are OBCs. They hate Brahmins, and yet they are not accepting of Dalits.”

It was someone similar, a Nobel-winning non-accepter of Dalits, who spurred Meena’s foray into journalism. “When I read Naipaul, he came across as really slum-o-phobic. He says crazy things about the caste system. How did this guy get the Nobel Prize? That’s how I wrote my first article, ‘Casteist. Communalist. Racist. And Now, A Nobel Laureate’.”

A different writer who made news around the same time elicits an altogether different reaction. Talking about Arundhati Roy, Meena positively coos with admiration, seeming for the first time the girl-woman her age would seem to indicate. “All of a sudden, it was a post-Arundhati Roy world. After her Booker happened, it became a cool thing for girls to want to write.” She says she can still reel off sentences from The God of Small Things, and she does. “Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it.” That’s a good sentence, I say. She agrees.

Meena is currently writing her first novel — The Gypsy Goddess, inspired by her ancestral deity Kurathi Amman — but her early attempts at the form were abandoned hastily. “A novel is not something you can write at 17. You can write excellent first chapters, but beyond that do you really want to stay with those people?”

Ultra-sensitive

Poetry, she says, is more convenient. “It’s not unwieldy and large.” Meena started writing her own poetry at 17. Her first poem was about a sex worker. “I don’t know why I wrote this kind of poem. I think it’s a lot of reading feminist literature and things like that.” I ask her if she remembers what triggered this sudden outburst of poetry. She laughs and says, “I think things just started because I’m ultra-sensitive.” She sobers up. “I don’t know. I think I’m a deeply disturbed, deeply angry person.”

Her favourite poem is Mulligatawny Dreams, in which she dreams of an English language that “shall tire a white man’s tongue” and where “small children practice with smooth round pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha.”

With so many poems published, with so much fame at such a young age, I wonder if she’s finally happy, if her writing has finally healed her wounds and alleviated her anger. She thinks for a moment and says, “I’m not sure what happy means. When I feel happy, I feel empty. It’s a crazy situation. Misery is a very solid emotion. You can hold on to it and cry. But happiness, you can let go of it. You don’t know where it went. Misery, you can save it and keep it and…” I suggest, “Make poems out of it?” She laughs, “Yeah. It’s very nice to be melancholic and miserable.”

I conclude that she’s a Romantic at heart, a Byronic heroine even, completely at odds with the activist persona that prompts people like me to meet her. She should be writing about lost lovers amidst swooning sunsets. She laughs again.

“I never imagined this kind of success,” she says. “It’s really success. There’s no other way to put it.” I ask if she’s really honest about herself, the way artists are supposed to be in the pursuit of great art. For the first time during the interview, she plays cute. “Am I allowed to lie?” she asks. And then she says, “Of course I’m honest.”

Poetry-translation workshop by Literature Across Frontiers

Poetry Connections: A Multilingual and Multimedia Performance
in Chennai and Pune, India, December 8 – 19, 2010

(From Wasafiri)

As part of the Literature Across Frontier’s (LAF) translation workshop, POETRY CONNECTIONS: A Multilingual and Multimedia Performance will be held in India across two cities – Chennai and Pune. The poetry translation workshop leading up to these events is scheduled to be held from 8th to 15th December, 2010 at Pondicherry. Eight national and international poets (Arjun Bali, Bill Herbert, Meena Kandasamy, Raphael Bendicht Urweider, Robin Ngangom, Roselyne Sibille, Sampurna Chattarji, Zoe Skoulding) will be participating in the workshop. The intensive workshop is envisaged to bring poets in contact with various contexts of their languages, regions, styles, formats etc.

The cross-translation and creative work achieved during this intensive workshop will be showcased as a performance at the inaugural of the Prakriti Poetry Festival on the 15th December in Chennai and as part of the Open Space on the 18th December in Pune.

Chennai: 15 December 2010, 7pm, Amethyst Gopalapuram, Chennai
Pune: 18 December 2010, 6.30pm, Kala Chaya Campus, Patrakar Nagar Road, Chaturshrungi, Pune

Ok my dears, would love to see you at the performance.

Day Two and Three: Shillong

Since I love this dictum of Show-rather-than-tell, I am going to simply upload my Cherrapunji/Sohra pictures on facebook and not write about it.

Waterfalls at Cherrapunji, Meghalaya

The awful part of the trip was realizing how fragile my health is. First I was complaining of giddiness because of my low blood sugar, then I started feeling breathless because of the heights, then I said I was cold, and then, I refused to enter the caves there saying I was claustrophobic and on the way back, I broke out into rashes because of msg allergy. Wow! Nobody complained really, but trust me, I wasn’t overdoing anything. And this is the first time I’ve felt so weak in all my life. I just pray that such a lot of symptoms don’t rush in the next time I plan a trip to anywhere. On the way back that was the only appeal on my lips–God, please, please, please let me live. I am so far away from family should I die now.

We were back by round 1pm (we had started around 5am), and that was the evening of my reading. I skipped lunch, took avil and eno and lots and lots of water. That helped. That, and the fact that I love my life the best when i am actually reading before an audience. The NEHU girls were just brilliant and their reactions were spontaneous and everyone loved everything I read and that sort of cured me. That’s another kind of elation, really.

Enough abt me. Of those who read with me, I loved the poetry of  Nabaneeta Konungo, S.Joseph and Ravi Dravida. I hope Google directs you to some of their best poems.

Got back to the guesthouse, where I slept for a long time. Then, joined in a conversation about migrants in India, and Indian perceptions of the northeast, and integration and so on. Some insights were startling, as were some stereotypes. Will write on that later, in this blog.

Day Three: Said goodbye to all everyone around. I was leaving because otherwise the next available flight was only on June 6th and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. So I and Joseph reach the Shillong airport two hours in advance, and begin waiting for our ATR flight to Kolkata that should supposedly take off at 1335 hours. It comes at 1835 hours. I already know that my connecting flight to Chennai has left. I reach Kolkata late at night, and begin begging the Air India guys to do something about me. I am joined by a bunch of Tamil men who threaten to sue the company, stage an agitation, and so on, if they are not sent back to Chennai immediately. The last flights to Chennai have left Kolkata, so we are told to leave the next day, by the late evening flight. No one agrees. The men seek a total refund. The men want to be booked on other airlines. I lack all energy to fight. The men give up on me. They leave me alone, make inquiries and realize there’s a Jet Airways flight early the next day to Chennai. There are 6 vacant seats and 4 of them manage to book themselves on it. Air India agrees to pay their fare. They come to me and boast about their victories, and say that if I had spoken up they would have done me the favour of booking me in with them. Honestly, I have no mood to fight. Besides, I can never act like that bunch of men: “We have an urgent meeting tomorrow. Our presence is highly important. What do you think you are doing? We want damages”

I find another non-confrontational soul. An Anupam Kher lookalike who missed his flight to Mumbai. Air India decides to put us both together to Mumbai, and then books me on a Mumbai-Chennai flight. I think my friends who fought arrived about 15 minutes earlier than me, that’s all.

Thanks to Air India, I get an All India flight. Shillong-Jorhat-Kolkata-Mumbai-Chennai.

On the plus side, Mumbai was the only airport I hadn’t seen so far, and thanks to all this drama, I am there. It is love at first sight with that airport. I want to visit that city just for the sake of that airport  : )

On the down side, this delay means that I keep sitting for 35 hours or longer. No stretching my legs, no sleeping. That kind of wrecked me even more, but I am not going to complain.

My article on Chennai in TimeOut :)

The text version follows:

Give it to Chennai for chutzpah, for her courage to take on the world. For all the laidback calm, she launched the Home Rule League to overthrow the British, the Anti-Hindi Agitation to show New Delhi that she wouldn’t stomach another tongue being thrust down her throat. If you care to learn her whole history, listen to it come away in layers, like the names of old, unforgettable lovers: Pallava, Chera, Chola, Pandya, Vijayanagara. Empires who held her close, coveted, almost concealed since the seventh century—a port city on the Coromandel Coast. Then there were those who colonized her: the Portuguese, the British, and sometimes in between, the French. The earliest sale-deeds date to 1632, but who bothers about such barter? Her soul is as old as the sea by her side.

Chennai once began as a group of villages; the rural roots reflect in her fondness for gossip. She is sometimes harsh in her judgment—even an off-the-cuff remark about chastity sends her women marching on the streets—but she is always hush-hush in her affairs. Trust her to be tight-lipped about her secrets. Success-stories of her booming economy merely provide the subtext: auto-manufacturing plants eating into faraway suburbs, software giants clamouring to claim real-estate space. Rumpelstiltskin-like when labouring, she only shows you the garish gold.

She is famed for her margazhi dance and music concerts, but anyone here can demonstrate the dappankuthu: endless, drunken dancing to funeral drums. When you learn to appreciate her refinement, brace yourself for her rawness.

Etched in memory as Madras, she is also a city of moderation. She boasts of masjids and maths. She caters to 1000-year-old temples and temples under traffic lights with equal panache. She enshrines a bleeding cross, and in her most ornate cathedrals, Santhome Basilica, is buried one of the 12 Apostles of Jesus.

She harbours a fetish for fair-skin, but her men are mostly dark and moustachioed. Her women, grace and grievance combined, deserve a separate treatise. A diehard cinema fanatic, she houses India’s second largest film industry. She crawls to a stop whenever there is a movie-shoot nearby, but makes no fuss over the fact that A.R.Rahman brought home two Oscars. For all her mood-music, she relies heavily on Ilaiyaraja.

Three of her rivers are remembered because of the bridges built over them, otherwise their names aren’t taken in polite conversation. It is this sea that sways us. Even the 2004 tsunami did little harm to Marina Beach, the twelve-kilometre long sparkling seashore that defines this city.

She considers Mount Road her lifeline, its Spencer Plaza the mecca of malls. A movie-date would have you ending up at Inox, CitiCenter. A marriage in your family would land you up in a shopper’s paradise called Pondy Bazaar. Driving down her East Coast Road will satisfy all your hedonistic urges. Even as you splurge, she will look away modestly.

Since she is humble, she wouldn’t even point out that she has produced more Noble Laureates than the other Indian cities taken together. She would be more pleased if the monsoons were on time. Every fifth person is a migrant, and no other city invites people with such open arms. Periyar EVR was a Kannadiga; MGR was a Malayalee—but try telling that to anyone here. She celebrates kinship, everyone is hers the moment they set foot, much before they even settle down.

She is also the city of garrulous graffiti, city of cramped slums and flyovers, city of laughter, city of slaughter. She unfailingly stars in the dreams of the eight million men and women she shelters. Once ravaged by famines, her standard line after every salutary smile is, Saptengala? Have you eaten? She hates to see anybody go hungry.

She speaks a language with a legacy of two thousand years; she understands every word of English. She romps around with jasmine on jet-black hair, night or day. No other city shall ever seduce you in Chennai’s Tamizhachi style: with sultry, sidelong looks; with spontaneous speech; with all her selfless, surplus love.

(Here’s the official link)

Interview with Leela Samson and review of her book on Rukmini Devi in today’s New Indian Express

PORTRAIT OF A REVOLUTIONARY (Read the official online version here)

Rukmini Devi always stood out: as a child who spoke up against corporal punishment, a large-eyed girl with a long line of admirers, and as somebody who silently def­ied social conventions. Leela Samson’s biography of the dancer and social activist brings out her radical side as well.

Rukmini’s childhood was shaped by her father who disapproved of crudity and lewdness, a Brahmin attracted to Buddhism, a traditionalist who sympathised with women who suffered from Hindu orthodoxy. He pledged his support to social reform and that led to his association with the Theosophical Society.

Samson revisits this period gracefully in Rukmini Devi: A Life, pointing out not just the highlights of the Society, but also telling the reader about the controversies that the fledging movement had to face on foreign soil. The social activism and intervention of the Theosophists — in diverse ways, such as taking up the cause of labour unions and textile workers or providing education to the depressed classes — is brought out diligently. Likewise, she takes pains to tell in parallel the story of J Krishnamurthy — his indoctrination, involvement and later estrangement from the Theosophists.

Her father’s deep connections with the Theosophical Society led to a love affair and, in a move that shocked traditionalists and scandalised liberals, 16-year-old Rukmini married 41-year-old George Sydney Arund­ale, an English aristocrat and vital figure among Theosophists. Severely critici­sed by the newspapers of the day, the storm over such a cross-cultural marriage subsi­ded over time, and Rukmini and Arundale soon went to work for Annie Besant at Adyar.

A European tour shortly thereafter altered their lives irrevocably. At 22, she accompanied her husband to Australia, where he was general secretary of its unit of the Theosophical Society. She travelled with him all over Europe and the United States. Back in India, she was consecrated as Rukmini Devi by Annie Besant.

Her long-term association with Anna Pavlova kindled her interest in dance. In 1932, for the first time, Rukmini watched the Pandanallur sisters perform. She fell in love with it, and she yearned to learn it too.

Refused the tutelage of the dance-doyen Meenakshisundaram Pillai at first, she began learning form from Gowri Ammal, a devadasi who served in the Kapaleshwar temple. Later, convinced of her genuine commitment, Meenakshisundaram came to Chennai to teach Rukmini. She became the first Brahmin woman to learn the Sadir, even as members of her community had signed and circulated a pledge never to witness a Sadir performance and also discourage others from doing so.

Rukmini Devi gave her first public performance in 1935, hardly two years after she had started learning. Two years later, she had established an academy to teach dance with just ‘one tree, one pupil and one tea­cher’, which is Kalakshetra, one of India’s premier dance-schools.

She was a revolutionary woman: in her first performance at the Natarajar temple in Chidambaram she chose to dance Varugalaamo ayya, a composition identifying with Dalit devotee-martyr Nandanar who was killed in his day for seeking entry into the portals of the same temple.

Samson’s devotion to history ensures that Chennai — with its political climate, cultural heritage and zeal for reform — comes across as another character in Rukmini Devi’s life. She tracks the story of how Rukmini Devi single-handedly strengthened Kalakshetra after a fallout with the Theosophical Society. These anecdotes of how she struggled through the litigation, or how she silently managed cancer, bring out her susceptible, human side.

~~~~

INTERVIEW WITH LEELA SAMSON

You outline hardly half-a-dozen insta­nces of having personally interacted with Rukmini Devi. Why did you push yourself into the shadows? Isn’t it unusual for a biography?

It is an obvious answer for anybody who knew Rukmini Devi. With a personality like her, you are in the shadows. She was a powerful individual, a complete person. There was a sizeable age difference between us; besides, she was a guru and I was a shishya, actually quite low in the hierarchy of shishyas. Writing about a guru is not easy, and when the guru is someone like Rukmini Devi, it becomes very difficult. When you write about a life that encompasses so many things, you really don’t have space for anybody else.

Rukmini Devi was a strong and radical woman; so, how difficult was it for you to also write about her vulnerability?

I think one has to face reality. She had her weak moments. All of us are human, nobody is a saint. She was not a good judge of people and often entrusted the wrong person with the job. On the other hand, for the kind of work she was doing, it was all right to have one or many faults, since the work was so much more important than anything else.

You don’t let the controversies between the Theosophical Society and Rukmini Devi turn into a mudslinging match. What helped you in this concise and eloquent choreography of the text?

I don’t think it was a mudslinging match, but there was a lot of bad blood over it. She wasn’t always right. You could even say she was legally wrong. This was her baby, she created it, she put down every stone — how could anybody come and take it away from her? That was the sentiment that guided her.

There was no guidance on what I chose to reveal, I went by instinct. I am not a confrontationist, but I say what has to be said even if it is not palatable. I spent a lot of time with both sides of the story and I feel that she should have been advi­sed correctly through that. After all, artists are vulnerable.

Rukmini Devi is this true renaissance woman, an activist who took up social concerns that lay outside of dance. As her disciple, and as director of Kala­kshetra, what do you think is the role that artists can play in today’s fragmented society?

The problem with being an artist is that you spend so much time correcting form, in becoming that perfect artist who can survive the market and say something with an element of truth. You don’t have time not just for society but also for yourself, for family, for a good marriage. Some people negotiate, but there’s an element of sacrifice. I know many artists who are activists inside. I think an artist can influence hugely. As an artist who has put her career on the backburner and made the institution my priority, I reach out to society. Making connections bet­ween all kinds of artists, bringing the sense of beauty of life into the lives of those who work and live on campus, these are things which ensure that art is taken to a larger spectrum.

You lament the fact that Rukmini Devi’s works haven’t been properly archived; what do you feel about the preservation of history?

We don’t have a sense of history in our country. Any other country would have written copious biographies. One of the things I have taken up very seriously is that we have to get the history of the institute and Rukmini Devi documented. We are about to start a museum — the history of Bharatanayam will run concurrently to her life because that century encompassed the struggle and the renaissance leading to the development of the dance form by Rukmini.

Everyone knows Rukmini Devi remo­ved the erotic in her effort to sanitise Bharatanatyam, but you speak of how she worked against narastuti (the deification of individual patrons). Your biography doesn’t quite sing her praises, right?

If I did that, it would belittle her a little. She was very private. She never praised us if we danced well. It was never her way.

Your experience with writing this book?

I would rather do a kutcheri. There, I at least know what I have to do.

Interview in Muse India — In Conversation with Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Presently, he lives in Delhi, India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization, was billed as a modern-day Canterbury Tales with stories narrated overnight by thirteen passengers held up at an airport. Tokyo Cancelled was short-listed for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Dasgupta’s second novel, Solo, was released earlier in 2009. It is an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man.

Here Meena Kandasamy, a noted poet, engages Dasgupta in conversation on his novels, in Chennai during launch of Solo.

Meena - All over Solo, we have people trying to preserve the remnants of their culture. How important do you think is the preservation of culture? What about the dangers of such a project—a monolithic Hindutva that seeks to impose itself, or fundamentalist Islam that refuses to respect native traditions?

Rana – In a way, the book deals not so much with the idea of culture, as just the idea of preserving it. There is a difference between the attempts of an individual, to sort of, find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people. The character in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category. He’s being forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project. I think the idea of culture is a very difficult one. For instance, it is assumed that we all know what our culture is. Most of us have constructed our culture—it’s fairly complex, it is not necessarily shared with people who live in the same place as us. So, I don’t see culture as a sort of organic and obvious thing. For my character, it is just an aspect of the self. It is how people tell their stories themselves. I was looking at how politics and times completely rips that language apart and deprives individuals of the ability to link various bits of their lives together.

Meena - Tokyo Cancelled was ultramodern, consisting of stories swapped in an international airport. Why do you have to take us to the 19th century in Solo? Is it to tell us that it was a better world?

Rana – Tokyo Cancelled had no historical depth of any sort and was very much in the contemporary moment. We didn’t know the stories of the parents or grandparents of any of the characters. They were just simple situations which didn’t have a past to them. After that I felt that I had to write about history. And I feel that the times we are living in, make sense only through history. I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character. I think there is some romance in the book about the time in which Ulrich is born. This romance for the 19th century is quite strong in me, for certain kind of incredible creativity in the European bourgeois culture of that time. So, one thing I wanted to do was to write a history against the Anglo-American version of 20th century. The 20th century is shown as the American century, with great progress and meaning and fulfillment, and I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain. I think we are also used to the idea that the 21st century is a place of great doom and pessimism, but I wanted to find some kind of hope in the present moment. So, the second part of my book, also quite crazy and violent shows characters who are full of immense creativity. My main character ends his contemplation of the future with some kind of hope.

Meena - This is a successful book about a man who has met much failure. Was this a conscious decision?

Rana – I wrote about failure partly because I am surrounded by success stories all the time. I was bored by it. People are kind of obsessed with success in this country. It is never the reality for lots of people. The main pages in a newspaper are only about endless success, but tucked away in the small columns are news of people committing suicide. Writing about failure was also because I wanted to set myself a writing challenge—if you strip away success and events and achievement from a life, when you basically have to narrate one hundred years of duration, it makes you engage with the role of life itself, of what it means to just exist. I found that an interesting project for writing a novel.

Meena - Why did Ulrich have to be so unlucky even in love?

Rana – I think Ulrich survives a hundred years because he never really becomes entangled with anything. As the experience in the middle period of his life shows, your attachments are going to kill you, your attachments to political movements, your attachments to people. Ulrich basically survives because he is incompetent at making attachments. He doesn’t quite believe in himself to make the things work. After he turns blind, this character finds a new lease of life.

Meena – Daydreams are the only redeeming feature of this doomed man’s life. What do you think of old age? And isn’t daydreaming no country for old men?

Rana – To me, Ulrich is some kind of novelist. So, on one level, this novel is an examination of the relationship between what a novelist imagines and writes, and what their life is, and how elements of life become mutated into fiction. The daydreams here are fictions that are too coherent and directed to be daydreams. I think that old age is undervalued. I think it is difficult to grow old with all your faculties intact. Both my books have been interested with what wisdom means in the contemporary world, and wisdom is something that is associated with old age.

Meena – There are echoes of India in the Bulgaria that you have described. Your novel could have been about India instead. Or is it because you would have been criticized if you had penned a honest novel about India?

Rana – There is particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India to ridiculously claim that there is no poverty or violence in the country. Poverty and violence are absolutely legitimate subjects to write about. I still haven’t found a way of writing about this country. It’s a very, very complex place and it’s been written about very much. I would like to write about this country, and if I do, it will probably be non-fiction because I find that the reality of this country is itself complete. One doesn’t have to make it up. The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is kind of enough. Also, the last two countries I have lived in have been India and the US. And in a way, I am bored of big countries and their arrogance and their assumption that they are so unique. Both America and India have this very intensely and both are very self-absorbed. So, I wanted to write about a small country that I didn’t know much about.

Meena - There’s so much of reference to gypsies—they seem to be the only truly happy people in the Ulrich’s world.

Rana – Gypsies are interesting because they are the ones who cannot really be categorized. Even the Communists tried to lock the gypsies down and make them factory workers. They always remained somehow outside the social system and when the system crumbles one suddenly realizes that they are running all kinds of businesses and also producing the kind of music that became the anti-state sentiment. So, I suppose that they are fascinating in one respect, they are figures that are not pinned down and one cannot really define who they are: are they criminals, are they heroes. Both my books have figures who cross borders, who are never categorized, who refuse to allow an identity to be given to them from outside. There’s also a long history of romanticizing gypsies which is quite unfair. They have also had a terrible time in Europe—they are mentioned in connection with the Holocaust, they were also gassed along with the Jews.

(Reproduced from Muse India)

TAMILS AGAINST GENOCIDE Counsel Bruce Fein in Chennai

The Tamils Against Genocide Counsel Bruce Fein (ex-Deputy Associate Attorney General, USA) was in Chennai recently. We (mainly Dr.Ezhilan who runs Max Foundation and me and our friends) organized a meeting Friday where he addressed select members of the media, and some of the city’s intellectual crowd. Our aim was to get people here understand that the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka is not something that only Tamils should be bothered about, it is something that every human being should react against. 

The meeting went off spectacularly well. And although we didn’t even *dream* of press coverage (we called the media so that they would *know* what was happening, and that would someday reflect on the way in which they covered the atrocities.. .)

Here’s the full-version Tamilnet.com report of his speech. And here’s the story in the New Indian Express (Pressure group bid to put Fonseka in the dock) and in the Times of India (US lawyer wants Lankan leaders tried for genocide) .

And, here’s a pic of Bruce Fein meeting with Dr.Veeramani (we rushed from the meeting venue ICSA to Periyar Thidal which is about five minutes away)..

Bruce Fein with Dr.Veeramani. Also seen are Kali Poongunran (Gen.Sec., DK) myself, and Dr.Ezhilan

Part of the reason why I am throwing myself so totally into this sort of activism is the gravity of what is happening in the Vanni. In the past four days, there have been over 150+ civilian deaths and hundreds more have been maimed/injured for life because of the Sri Lanka Army’s continuous shelling/bombing/what-not. I think the war is in its scariest phase, and I know I cannot sit still.

UPDATE: BRUCE FEIN’S SPEECH VIDEO (in 5 parts), AND THE TAMIL TRANSLATION (in 2 parts) CAN BE ACCESSED ON PERIYAR WEBVISION.

Silence may be costly, hence this post

I would have remained silent about the caste clash among the law college students, but for this extremely abusive and derogatory comment from a casteist person who prefers to go by the pseudonym Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar (PMT).

This is the said comment from PMT:

“You inhuman ambedkar people beat up our thevar people. How barbariands you are not at all human. you should register under wildlife act. down with the inhuman ambedkarisms”

I have not written about the caste clash among the students any where on this blog, so I fail to understand why I got this comment. However, I have taken the pains to write this post, because I want the world (and at least the readers of my blog) as to what exactly happened in the Dr. Ambedkar Government Law College premises. This post is based on what my friends told me. If this comment had not appeared on my blog, I would reacted like any other mediaperson. I wouldn’t have taken caste names, I wouldn’t want to complicate an already confounded situation. (Now the names of the warring factions are out in the open, so I needn’t apologize). I would have remained silent and started worrying about solutions, rather than take the pains/risks of exposing the real story. But I think that people might be really getting the wrong news, or not getting the long background to this, hence this post.

For the past couple of years, the Thevar Peravai (based in Egmore, Chennai) has been organizing students of their community under the banner of Mukkulathor Maanavar Peravai. Particularly within the law college campus, where politics and caste rule the roost, the effects of such an organization has been enormous. And scary. They have taken an anti-Dalit line and this has led to minor skirmishes in the recent past. In pamphlets and posters within the campus, the Mukkulathoor Maanavar Peravai specially omitted the usage of “Dr.Ambedkar’s” name while referring to the college. By refusing to use the Dalit leader’s name, they were taking an explicit anti-Dalit line. It is easy to argue that there’s really nothing to a name, but if there was nothing, why did the Mukkulathoor Maanavar Peravai not evoke his name? And according to students there, these caste tensions ran high especially after the Thevar Jayanthi celebrations (30 October 2008). Within a ten-day span, there had been four assaults on Dalit students. One student of the Mukkulathor caste: Mr. Bharati Kannan, had arranged for rowdies from outside to enter the campus and assault Dalit students. A few Dalit students had been hurt in this attack, but that wasn’t publicized. The chief intention of this oppressive caste students’ organization was to prevent Dalit students from writing their exams. However, the Dalit students who came to know about this, had gone ahead and informed the police who went on to seize weapons from within the campus. The Dalit students also reported this instance to the principal. Because of this widespread fear about what these frenzied casteists (with support from violent/nefarious outside elements) could do to them, around 50-60 Dalit students (primarily those who were keen activists and were publicly known/ identified as ‘Dalits’) refrained from attending the exams. It was the sanest choice, because they had to choose between taking an exam, and having their life taken away. Only those Dalit students whose caste identity was not obvious to a lot of people came to take the exams. These students had complained to the police though about what they were facing. Those who did not undertake the examinations were standing as a group, because of their belief in unity, and belief in the fact that if they were together, they couldn’t be harmed. They also felt that their unity would ensure that other Dalit students (who were taking the exam) would not become victims. However, one Dalit student Chitiraiselvan, who walked out of the exam hall after finishing his exam was attacked brutally by these caste-Hindu Mukkulathor/Thevar students. He was stabbed in the head and his ear was cut off. (News update: A plastic surgery has been performed on him to restitch the ear back into place.) Even as mindless brutality was going on, Chitiraiselvan was stabbed in the stomach. It seems the oppressor caste hoodlums had planned to kill at least half a dozen Dalit students to prove their superiority, that is why they were murderously attacking students who did not even flaunt their Dalit identity. Having realized the possible consequence of where this could lead to, and to safeguard the rest of their friends from further harm, the gathered group of Dalit students decided to retaliate. Nobody must forget that what comes out of video as brutality has a story behind it–this is not to justify the series of events, but to say that there is the other side to the story. The subsequent, and extremely delayed, police intervention turned the tide against dalit students. And I am not even sure I have the confidence to say that things have come to an end. Friends from other places in Tamil Nadu say that Dalit students are being attacked in law colleges in other cities: Coimbatore, Salem and so on. This is how caste has a nuclear fission effect. I think the State has at least done some good by shutting down all law colleges in the state.

Of course, the video coverage doesn’t point out to the students’ caste identities. What has taken place there is a tragedy, it shows brutality. I would blame the police more than anyone else. The police can say that they can’t enter the law college campus without its principal’s permission, but a single shot into the air would have made all the difference in the world. The spectators are more heartless than the rampaging students themselves. And I don’t know where to place trollers like Pasumpon Thevar, who decides to pick on an unrelated person like me simply because I happen to be an Ambedkarist.

I really think being a Dalit student is the hardest job in the whole world. Those who struggle hard and enter the upper crust institutions, are mentally harassed and driven to suicide. In places like the law college, they pay with their blood. When will academic casteist terrorism come to an end?

UPDATES: These are updates that I found in yesterday’s newspaper and in today’s. I think it will tell you more. It is a pity that provocative posters continue to appear. . . Bharati Kannan flaunts his caste and power connections…  And, the state police have only arrested Dalit students so far. 

I am in a mood to actually meet all Dalit lawyers who passed out of the Dr.Ambedkar Govt. Law College and make them share their experience of both violence and casteism within the college campus. Somethings have to be recorded.

The Emergency, remembered

It’s early in the morning, and dad fetched the daily newspaper for me. and then we read that it is 33 years since the infamous Emergency. All that I know about it is what I have read in various books, newspapers and magazines.

Not so for appa.

He was jailed then and spent nearly a year in Chennai’s Central Prison. He was as old as I am now. Twenty-three years and some odd months. He tells me he was the youngest among those who were arrested. He was a sub-editor of a Tamil magazine. Their press was seized, they had to throw all their copies, books, documents into a well, but they couldn’t escape. He wasn’t married, and he had no dreams of marrying. Ever. He was a migrant in this city of lost dreams. He was raw and fresh: he tells me only Chennai taught him the difference between tea and coffee. His parents never knew of his arrest, they never knew about the subsequent release. They probably never even knew about the Emergency. He subsisted with strange faith and the friendship of those who shared the same ideas. He too wrote poems.

Thirty-three years later, he’s on the other side of the divide. He sees his involvement as the product of the times: that he was where he was wanted then. And he tells me, he is where he is needed now. Maybe discrimination pushed him to make the choices he made. Maybe ideology. One never knows.

All that I can safely say is that inspite of all my misunderstanding with him, all his impossible rules and stifling parenting, I idolize him. If all this is possible for me today, it is because of the struggles that my appa waged in his life. Moving to the big city from an anonymous village. Thriving on the compassion of strangers. Marrying far above his status and then stomaching all the insults that came his way. Sacrificing without making any bit of noise about it.

He is one of the reasons why I never feel satisfied with myself, or the work I am putting in. A lot of people think I have come a long way for a girl in her early twenties, but heck, no. I know I battle casteism ( or at least its subtle machinations which somehow ensures that people like me are weeded out), I battle people’s assumptions about my gender, I battle a very low sense of self. Yet, I had ultra-educated parents, the privilege of an English education, the comfort of a family. Not so for my father.

Someday, I will share his story with you.

Why I should use public transport more often

I can’t really list out the many causes and risk sounding superficial or out of touch with reality, but hey, there are some things one can’t really learn otherwise (yeah, i am on a learning spree).

SCENE 1: Tambaram Railway Station

And I was taking the train to Guindy. And just in front of me there is this couple:20-something gal, 35-something man. And the gal, you know, looks like the apavi type: you know the one who can do know wrong, with kumkum and vibhuti and flowers. And the man looks like any other Indian man holding a managerial job. And she’s sitting next to him one minute, sleeping on his lap the next, resting her head on his shoulder and so on. PDA, uncensored by the unnecessary attention we heap on her. And he’s unmoved, expressionless. One has to imagine that some undercurrent does exist, otherwise why would a girl fawn so much attention on a man? And then, a friend of mine, who regularly commutes on this route tells me that she’s been seeing this girl for the past five days. This girl in our train is taking her exams at another center, and so she has called her lover over. So that they can talk on the way back. Or, to put it the way I saw it: so that they can tell each other that the outside world doesn’t really exist. On trains, in their lives, anywhere. I personally think it takes a great deal of love to come to that state where you don’t mind The Rest Of The World.

SCENE 2: MTC Bus, from Chepauk to Adyar, evening

This happened today, that’s why this blog post. I got into this worn-down bus and sat next to a flower-vendor. She was busy stringing jasmines. And it was unbearably windy and I was wearing my hair loose, and she told me to tie it up. She was busy with the flowers, she just told me. And then she turned and we saw each others faces, and she was my local flowerseller. The one from whom I buy white lotuses every weekend (for my mother’s siddha potion, I never buy flowers for myself because I never wear them on my hair). And our conversation goes something like this:

She: What are you doing? All alone?
Me: No, no, appa has come. He’s there. (And I point to him).
(Sometime later)
She: You are only two girls. Do you have a brother?
Me: No. Why?
She: That is okay. But you know, you should take care of your father when you start earning. You should take care of him after you get married. You shouldn’t forget him after you are married.
(I vigorously nod my head).

And she asks me whether I can help her grand-daughter’s admission, and we chatter till I have to get down. Small talk with someone I know by face, but who was a stranger otherwise.