http://www.tehelka.com/story_main38.asp?filename=hub050408caste_out.asp
Sunday, 30 March 2008 TEHELKA INITIATIVES: Critical Futures | Tehelka Foundation From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 13, Dated April 5, 2008 CULTURE & SOCIETY books Caste Out, Caste In Vaasanthi's examination of the Dravidian movement is chatty but bereft of conceptual apparatus, says ARUL MANI SOME SEVEN decades ago, public life in Tamizh Nadu came to be dominated by Dravidian groupings that defined themselves in opposition to Brahminical Hinduism. Their skill in parlaying aspects of this opposition via film and print enabled them to seize political office. No national party has been able to form a government on its own in the state since 1967.The Dravidian movement chose to oppose the imagined, historically continuous India of the nationalists with another imaginary construction, the 'pure' Tamizh nation. In doing so, they challenged the centrality of Brahminical Hinduism to formulations of nationhood and the need for deference to this tradition. The exuberant irreverence of this enterprise is perhaps the template by which social assertion in other parts of India continues to work. While the manner in which the Dravidian movement grabbed centre stage has attracted much research, there has never really been an accessible history of this phenomenon for the non-Tamizh speaking reader. Vaasanthi's stint as editor of the Tamizh India Today in the 1990s gives her the sort of vantage point from which such a history could be written, and ambling through the first chapter could lead one to believe that this may well be that book. The author elicits reminiscences from critics and admirers of EV Ramaswami Naicker, better known as Periyar, to illustrate his contrarian politics and its varied effects. What emerges is an engagingly composite portrait. Vaasanthi's strength as a writer lies in the journalism of conversation. The best part of the book is an illumining chat with Puthiya Tamizhagam Krishnaswami. Illumining because it drives home the failure of the Dravidian parties to turn the rhetoric of liberation into Dalit empowerment as well as the fact that Dalit mobilisation is a fragile coalition between different castes rather than an unshakeable union. She has an eye for inconvenient detail — a talent fully expressed in her sketches of Vaiko, PMK supremo Ramadoss and Jayalalithaa in her relentlessly baroque splendour. One of the problems with this book is a woolliness of purpose. This is apparent in the introduction where she says, "This is neither a book of political history nor an academic exercise....There may not be an apparent connection between chapters following one another, but the discerning reader will find an undercurrent linking all of them." To send a book into print with a swimming reader in mind smacks of an unhealthy optimism. And I'm particularly unimpressed by that discerning reader dodge; a hardworking writer is more likely to make a book work. The writer should have restricted herself to letting other people talk and to thus let untold stories emerge. When she exits this mode, the results are disastrous. Her attempts at opinion and analysis often end up being repetitive rant. She simply does not have the conceptual apparatus required to deal with the battle of the imaginaries that the Dravidians launched against the nationalists and does no more than call them names. Her account of MGR's rise to stardom and political authority is equally simplistic. His fans coalesce into an undifferentiated mass and have no function except to be poor things. The exceptional chutzpah of Annadurai and Karunanidhi shows up only as an occasional blip. The book is thus an unintentionally transparent account of the teethgnashing and the sputtering incomprehension with which the Brahminical classes visit Tamizh Nadu's recent history. Far more execrable are her shots at hip cultural commentary. I produce here one such cultured pearl: "The growing religiosity, as I see it, is a direct result of shifting caste hierarchies that led to a silent and willing 'Brahminisation' of the backward communities who tend to project their caste status through their religiosity — thanks to the Self-Respect Movement and the Reservation policy and the resultant upward social mobility. The Dravidian movement's total rejection of all forms of higher religion led inevitably to the Sanskritisation of the masses, which sociologist MN Srinivas speaks of." When we get our breath back, we can wonder how she arrived at this rather startling cause-and-effect relationship. Vaasanthi's primary achievement lies in demonstrating that the bathetic transactions between and within the Dravidian parties are no small travesty of past promise. In choosing to confine herself to these parties, she misses out on the ferment of auto-didacticism by which a generation chose to define itself, and that is a lost opportunity. >From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 13, Dated April 5, 2008 ------------------------------------ -- Subscribe to ZESTCaste by sending a BLANK email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/joinYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
