The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Page 20
Pillai, who seemed to almost harass Gandhi with letters in 1915, was unrecognisable from the man who once handled lakhs of rupees and was a celebrated shipping magnate. Born on 5 September 1872 in Ottapidaram in Tamil Nadu, he had followed his lawyer father’s instructions and become a pleader in 1894. But if Pillai Sr was pleased, it didn’t last—father and son soon found themselves on opposite sides of a touchy case, and the latter demolished in court not only his esteemed parent’s arguments but also the former’s pride. It was decided that Pillai should move elsewhere for peace to exist between them, and so, in 1900, he transplanted himself permanently to Tuticorin. Influenced by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, he embraced swadeshi activities (firmly siding with the Extremist faction of the Congress, as opposed to the Moderates with their talk of patience and constitutionalism). It was in 1906, however, that the cause which would define his life came to him, putting him on a path that would bring pain as much as it would acclaim, accumulating honour but also inviting unhappiness.
At the time, Tuticorin was an established centre for shipping, with thousands using its harbour. But the entire industry was in the hands of British companies that were, unsurprisingly, in bed with the colonial government to cement their mutual interests. It was not astonishing, then, perhaps, that the city was also a nursery for sustained nationalist activity. Or as one report put it, in the Madras Presidency the ‘only district from which any suspicion of anti-British feeling is reported is Tinnevelly district, and there only in the town of Tuticorin’. So, when in October 1906 Pillai opened the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, there was a great deal of condescension, followed by a ballooning of anger and suspicion. After all, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy writes, in most places across the country at this time, the idea of swadeshi as popularised by the Congress ‘was limited to such tokenisms as making candles and bangles’. In Tuticorin, however, it took ‘the spectacular form of running nothing less than a steam shipping company’—a project that was not merely a business enterprise for its founder, but also a statement of nationalist pride in the face of unjust colonial disdain.
Scholars have investigated the systematic destruction in the nineteenth century of Indian shipping, so that by the 1850s, India’s shipbuilding industry was practically history. Even with the advent of steam engines and advanced technology, while efforts were made by Indian industrialists and entrepreneurs, most attempts floundered into oblivion. Of the 102 companies floated in India between 1860 and 1925, only a handful became successes. ‘The failure of India’s shipping,’ we are informed, ‘was not caused by the non-existence of her marine engineering industry … Nor did shipowners demonstrate a lack of managerial skills or experience specific difficulties in manning and running their fleets … The basic cause of the lamentable position of Indian shipping … was the formidable opposition they encountered from the major British companies operating in Indian waters’—companies that enjoyed a practical monopoly, to which they would brook no challenge or competition.
Given these circumstances, Pillai’s attempt was truly novel, and his ambitions high—though Swadeshi’s services were restricted to Tuticorin and Colombo only, the company aimed to ‘popularise the art of Navigation’ among ‘Nations of the East’, to employ ‘Asiatics’, to open dockyards, and do whatever it could to revitalise India’s maritime traditions. Many prominent Indians invested in the venture, while local merchants were persuaded to ply goods on the company’s hired steamer, the Shah Allum . ‘This,’ one newspaper report recorded, ‘has naturally aroused the jealousy of the British Indian Steam Navigation Company.’ The authorities, for their part, ‘have not always been impartial. The impression that the white Civilian (i.e. government official) is likely to favour the white trader is gaining ground.’ The principal rival company in the area engaged in rate wars and even offered free umbrellas to passengers, but Pillai and his enterprise did not fold. He was offered a princely 100,000 to sell the company, but this too failed to distract him—after all, Swadeshi was about a principle, and not merely about personal profit.
Initial attempts having failed, Pillai’s rivals escalated their attack. Intense pressure was brought to bear upon the owner of the Shah Allum , who then withdrew it from Swadeshi. Undeterred, Pillai acquired ships from abroad and sailed into Tuticorin flying flags emblazoned with Vande Mataram . The British authorities, along with the rival company owners, threw all they could his way, not least of which was bureaucratic harassment, but Pillai’s energy saw him through—that is, till two years later, politics furnished an excuse to smash his commercial successes as well. In early March 1908, the acting collector of the area, RWDE Ashe, ordered Pillai, who was planning a public meeting to celebrate the release from prison of the Bengali nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal, to leave the city—this, after they had already had a run-in over a workers’ strike in which Pillai was involved. He refused, and was arrested on a preemptive basis. The result was that by 13 March things got out of hand—mobs set fire to public buildings, made bonfires of state records, and for days Tuticorin witnessed riots, with four people losing their lives. Pillai was awarded twenty years in prison—the British judge held him ‘morally responsible’ for the deaths, and charges of sedition and worse were slapped against him and some others.
Pillai appealed the decision and eventually, the Madras High Court reduced the sentence to a maximum of four years. But while Pillai languished under a particularly sadistic jailor, his company collapsed, his family was bankrupted, and his friends disappeared, out of fear as much as reasons of self-preservation. Collector Ashe, meanwhile, went down as the last colonial officer to be assassinated in India during the freedom struggle. He had taken an aggressive interest in containing nationalist activity in Tuticorin—and this meant directly targeting Pillai’s company and all that it represented. Indeed, to this day he is held responsible for the failure of the company, and when he was murdered in 1911 as part of a revolutionary conspiracy, Pillai wasted little sympathy on him. As he recalled, ‘One day in the night at twelve, hearing the many loud calls of “Mr Chidambaram Pillai”, I woke up. At the entrance to the cell the prison’s junior sub-assistant surgeon enquired after me and asked, “Do you know collector Ashe?” “I know him too well!”, I replied. “How?” “He is the cause of my being locked up here and the death of the swadeshi shipping company [sic].” “Yesterday someone shot him dead at Maniyachi rail junction and killed himself too.” “You have given me good news, may you live long!” I said. “You will not get released at the Coronation [of the new British king emperor] this year,” he said. “Even if I am not to be released forever, that’s fine,” I replied.’
As it happened, Pillai was freed, but by the time he emerged in 1912, he was not only poor but also forgotten. Prohibited from returning to Tuticorin, he moved to Madras, set up a shop there, getting by tutoring college students. Though a judge called Wallace restored his legal licence (to thank whom Pillai named his son Wallacewaran), his career was essentially over. During the next many years and decades, Pillai existed on the margins of the freedom struggle, frustrated and unhappy, and altogether disillusioned—he was one of those heroes who fell by the wayside, ignored even by his erstwhile colleagues. It would be 1949 before he was brushed up and restored to public memory. Soon after independence, India’s first and only Indian Governor General, C. Rajagopalachari, came to Tuticorin to flag off a shipping service to Colombo—the first vessel was dutifully named the SS V.O. Chidambaram . Statues of the forgotten hero were installed and flowers and garlands were heaped to honour his legacy; in 1961 there was even a feature film produced which told his life story, called Kappalottiya Thamizhan (The Tamilian Who Launched a Shipping House). It was all too late though—in 1936, Pillai had already died in penury, surviving his last days selling his law books and ruminating on all that he had once been—a once famous lawyer and businessman destined to drown in an ocean of disappointment and sorrow.
THE COMPLICATED V.K. KRISHNA MENON
Setting out for London in 19
24, V.K. Krishna Menon found himself in the awkward position of being the son of a very rich father with very empty pockets. ‘I telegraphed you yesterday that I wanted money’, he wrote to his sister, weeks later, hoping again ‘to get 100 pounds from Father’. The old man, of course, had no intention of subsidising his son’s journey towards potential self-destruction. For at twenty-eight, Krishna Menon looked every inch a disappointment. He was sent to Madras to qualify as a lawyer but returned to Calicut, a bedazzled theosophist. He was raised to take over his father’s legal enterprise, but all he talked about was Annie Besant and the imminent earth-shattering advent of a supposed ‘World Teacher’. Now, to add to his erratic peregrinations, he was off to London for a diploma in education, planning to become, of all things, a simple schoolteacher.
Krishna Menon’s was a family that thought modesty overrated. His father was a legal luminary in British Malabar and the son of a local raja. They paraded elephants (Sanku, Sankaran and Gopalan were favourites) and saw Queen Victoria’s passing as tragedy unparalleled. His mother was the daughter of Koodali Nair, master of tens of thousands of acres, and played chess when she wasn’t enjoying her ample inheritance. Of the eight children born to this proud and handsome couple, Kunjikrishna, as our protagonist was originally named, was from the start considered somewhat limited. Where a sister pursued French and Latin and upheld her family’s imperious standards by discarding a husband, young Krishna was busy being sensitive and gentle, insisting on feeding his pony milk and oats from the breakfast table.
The unworthy heir who left India’s shores in 1924, however, was far from the domineering, vain man who returned in 1952, cloaked in Cold War suspicions. The British saw in Menon Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘evil genius’, while the Americans were more colourful when they branded him a ‘poisonous bastard’. In the 1950s, Menon was difficult to miss on the world stage: even a US president noted this ‘boor’ who thought himself so superior. Much of this reputation was accumulated from the 1930s. A decade into his stay in London, British intelligence was already tapping Menon’s phone and reading his letters. In the 1940s, they feared he was both a prescription drug addict and a closet communist, warning Nehru that plans to appoint him India’s high commissioner would not be ‘well received’ in their quarter.
Menon’s journey from aspiring schoolmaster to the 1962 cover of Time magazine as an international mischief-maker is fascinating. Soon after he arrived in London, he upped his ambitions and acquired a string of qualifications. He studied under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics and wrote a thesis on psychology at University College London. On the eve of his father’s death in 1934, he at last even became a lawyer. Breaking from his theosophist mentors, he became the face of the India League, and chief lobbyist for Indian independence in Britain’s political circles. He cultivated links with the Labour Party, and, in the midst of all this, helped launch Penguin, the publishing house, only to quarrel and withdraw forever. In the late 1930s, the prospect of a parliament seat too appeared, but his ‘double loyalty’ meant plans for a political career in Britain were ill-fated from the onset.
In 1935, the dissolution of a complicated romance left Menon suicidal and he became more dependent than ever on astrology and medication. Still, when Nehru came that year to Britain, it was this complicated Malayali who was anointed local spokesman of the Congress. Nehru later dismissed views that his friend held great sway over him, but what is certain is that Menon’s meteoric ascent after India’s independence owed much to his access to the first prime minister. It was no wonder, then, that from the start, the man made enemies in the Congress—while they were parked in jail during the freedom struggle, it was argued, Menon served the London borough of St Pancras for fourteen cushy years as councillor. While they suffered kicks and blows, he was faraway on foreign shores.
His stint till 1952 as high commissioner was controversial. His arrogance, a defence mechanism to conceal lifelong insecurities, left him unapproachable. Worse, British intelligence saw in him (mistakenly) a Soviet pawn who might slip secrets through a mysterious mistress. When the Indian army sought jeeps for use in Kashmir, Menon embarrassed Nehru by delivering second-hand goods that were unserviceable. The prime minister tried to cajole him into leaving London—he was offered a vice-chancellorship, the embassy in Moscow, even a cabinet position—but Menon refused. At last, he was persuaded to represent India at the UN, where, while advocating non-alignment (a word he took credit for and a concept he claimed to have co-authored), he drove paranoid Americans wild with suspicion.
Menon was abrasive, but he got India noticed. He punched above his weight and strode the world stage with regal confidence. By 1956, this ‘thoroughly dangerous man’ was in the Union cabinet, but his role as defence minister culminated six years later with the debacle in 1962, where India was humiliated by China at its northern frontiers. He spent the rest of his years giving lectures, arguing cases in the Supreme Court, and quarrelling with a niece’s husband over his traditional ‘right’ to name her children. Sometimes he gave long, ponderous interviews to foreign journalists, who alone seemed to think he remained a personality of tremendous influence.
‘Krishna Menon was essentially an extremely lonely man,’ wrote a relation, and his was a life that married emotional instability to political petulance. But for all that, the dangers of his influence were overrated. As he himself said in an interview, ‘I was neither a buffoon nor a Rasputin.’ He was merely Krishna Menon, who did some good but invited plenty of trouble.
THE SEAMSTRESS AND THE MATHEMATICIAN
In the Madras suburb of Triplicane, there once lived a seamstress called Janaki. Respectfully addressed as Janaki Ammal, to her came many with saris to mend and blouses to stitch. But there was more to the old lady than tailoring. She was, for one, a pious brahmin who chanted mantras and went often to the temple. She gave to charity and educated a number of grateful children. Though in her youth she was cheated of a prodigious sum, she acquired skill enough to run a chit fund for the housewives of her neighbourhood. Upstairs, she lived in a little place, and downstairs, she conducted business. But for all the decades of her self-supporting life, she kept with her also a tin trunk, full of crumbling papers that concealed the most poignant memories. For in a different time and a different space, Janaki of Triplicane was married to a ‘somebody’. And before she became a seamstress, she had been wife to a man who scaled the very heights of cerebral greatness.
It is not known what, as a ten-year-old, Janaki made of Srinivasa Ramanujan, who arrived in her Tiruchirapalli village to wed her in the summer of 1909. His train was delayed and her father was furious. Yet, once tempers were soothed and insults forgotten, the mathematical prodigy and this young girl from the country were married. To look at, the bridegroom was uninspiring: Smallpox had devastated his face, and a classmate described him as ‘fair and plumpy’, built like ‘a woman’. At twenty-one, there was little to commend him to the top league of prospective husbands: Five years ago, he had dropped out of college, and a second attempt at university had also ended in depressive despair. His energy was electric, though, and his mathematical abilities astounding. But he had no patience for other subjects and spent his days doing humdrum accounts and failing hopelessly as a part-time tuition teacher.
Raised by a masterful mother, and awkward around his disapproving father, Ramanujan took some years to find his bearings. In 1912, employed as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust, he finally crawled out of poverty, renting a house where he was joined by Janaki. While he solved sums on discarded packaging paper and engaged with the city’s mathematics professors, the young girl watched from the side and learnt what it meant to be a brahmin wife. He was a sensitive man, full of fears of rejection but bursting with godly devotion. ‘An equation for me,’ he declared, ‘has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of god.’ Of course, little of this was discussed with his teenage wife—he never saw her alone, and, when she slept, it was with her watchful mother-in-law. Janaki cooked, an
d Janaki cleaned. And then, one day, she heard that her husband had been invited to that alien country people called Great Britain.
The decision to go was not easy: Ramanujan had been corresponding with the celebrated G.H. Hardy and in Cambridge his name was already a sensation. But what sensible brahmin boy with a government job could toss aside everything to scramble after an abstract world of numbers? Finally, the gods were consulted—the family went on pilgrimage, and divine sanction was received in a dream that came to his shrewd mother. Janaki, all of fifteen, mustered up all her courage and asked to sail with Ramanujan. But this was dismissed as outrageous—he was going to achieve great things, and she would only distract him from his god-mandated purpose. Besides, where his mother could not go, his wife could not be allowed either. And so it was that, a week before he departed, Ramanujan said goodbye to his family, packing them off home before he cut off his tuft of hair and wore for the first time the garb of a Western gentleman. When a photograph arrived showing her son like this soon afterwards, it took his mother some time to recognise him.
For five years, Janaki didn’t see her husband. At first, she served her mother-in-law, but soon there was mutiny in the kitchen. Letters addressed to her were intercepted by the older woman, and young Mrs Ramanujan built up the pluck to ask direct questions. Our genius himself, while making history, was living a life of personal misery—there was tuberculosis, social awkwardness, a suicide attempt, and all the inconveniences of the First World War afflicting life in Great Britain. In 1919, with much distinction under his belt but his health in pieces, Ramanujan returned at last to India. He asked for Janaki to come and greet him, but his mother ‘forgot’ to let her daughter-in-law know: It was from newspapers that the wife of this freshly minted Fellow of The Royal Society discovered that her husband had finally come home.