A Dogmatic Goddess

The book is engaging, despite its excessive running commentary

‘Remember, dear reader, I write from a land where people wrap up newborn babies in clumsy rags and deck the dead in incredible finery.’ Such is the tenor of 30-year-old poet, writer and activist Meena Kandasamy’s self-proclaimed ‘mighty thunderclap of a novel’. It tells the true story of the infamous massacre of 44 landless Dalit labourers in 1968 in the village of Kilvenmani, Tamil Nadu; when they asked for more rice, they were locked in a hut and burnt alive. The tale is so medievally brutal as to feel dated; yet stories like this continue to play out amongst beleaguered farming communities. This is the traditional province of non-fiction, but it is easy to see why the novel might better dramatise its conflicts and enliven its bleak context.

“Kilvenmani was a story I first encountered in detail in 2003 and just the horror of what had happened was too much to take,” says Kandasamy from London, where she lives at the moment. “It was something that was desperate and defeating on all sides, and at the same time, it was one of the most inspirational stories.”

Kandasamy is not one to avoid difficult subjects. She has written about violence in her marriage and her support of a beef biryani festival at Osmania University (fighting ‘food fascism’ on the part of conservative elements disallowing its consumption) is among the many controversies she readily fuels. Her books of poetry, Touch and Ms Militancy, are stylish cult classics dealing with caste and feminism, if they are a bit green. Most striking are her descriptions of passion and reform, which display the influence of legendary poet Kamala Das, who provided a foreword to her first book of verse.
 

You try suicide to sleep off
such horror. Coma gifts you
a lover, carrying him over
on a crow’s wing.

You give yourself to this man,
like you are giving yourself to rain.
Love lights up like lightning
and you scream in sleep.

— from ‘Sleeping Beauty on Celluloid’
 

The verse and journalism has earned her almost 25,000 Twitter followers and lots of heated virtual engagement. Social media, which makes frequent appearances in this book, has often been Kandasamy’s battleground, and it is the same feisty tone she engages in her novel, enlisting us as ‘comrades’.

The trolls here are village landlords, the language ‘Taminglish’. The novel is broken up into four parts: background, breeding ground, battle ground and burial ground, and they combine to tell the tale of an uprising and its consequences. Communism, we are told, first arrived in Tanjore because it has the most tea stalls in the province; conducive both to talk of big things and the idle chatter that filters through the narrative describing the history of this place. The first protest calling for higher wages takes place in 1943, and the prospect of rebellion hangs hot and heavy over the miserable plight of the peasantry.

It must be quelled: party organisers are killed off and food supply to the marketplace is cut off. Gopalakrishna Naidu, the self-styled leader of the landlords of Nagapattinam, is loud in his encouragement to rascals like Kerosene Govinda, telling them to ‘make [the labourers] mend their ways’. Everyone else, he proclaims, should wear bangles – such is the idiom of macho Tamil movie talk, which Kandasamy captures perfectly and satirises with her confident and amused mimic’s eye. Velaikaar (white people) are laughingly referred to, colonial histories are playfully recounted. You can almost hear the ‘dey, mind it’. It’s all good fun, as it is bad politics.

But the rhyming political verse, redolent of Brixton, doesn’t work quite as well. Lines like ‘Carrying the tales of their cunts and their cuntrees and their cuntenants, women cross all hurdles’ seem a bit forced, as much as they are in keeping with the political agenda. “A poet is an anti-social on the loose, and then, you are becoming a novelist, which means you are an anti-social in solitary confinement,” says Kandasamy. The struggle shows. Her prose truly achieves meaning in the breathless chapters 9 and 10. Here, we see mature Meena, being serious and doing it well, without all the self-consciousness explanations her backdrop seems to entail.
 

‘The streets are alight
and the marauding mob of landlords is at arm’s length and
those who have stayed behind in Kilvenmani apprehend its onward
approach through shrill synchronized whistles piercing
the cold night air and rapid gunshots being aimed at moving
targets and the crackling noice of their homes bursting into
flames and the screams of their women caught in the clutches of
these attackers

and so they seek shelter in Paappa and Ramayya’s hut because
there is nowhere safer to go and because they believe in
the strength and safety of their numbers and in staying together
and so united they stand as they squeeze themselves inside and
lock the door

and the mob soon arrives on its rampaging feet and tries to
forcibly gain entrance and fails and in a fury sets the hut ablaze’
 

 

The first part, though funny at times, might have been better relegated to interviews, though the information it contains is of course necessary. Kandasamy herself acknowledges that a soundbyte would have given it to us; ‘Some headlines say the whole story: Madras is Reaping a Bitter Harvest of Rural Terrorism: Rice Growers’ Feud With Field Workers Has Fiery Climax As Labor Seeks Bigger Share of Gain from Crop Innovations’.While the regional nature of this world calls for explanation, the reader shrinks from the overabundance of metafictional commentary that results, detracting from the genuine feel of the story.

What all the talk does is to sustain the sense of a silenced oral history that is finally being passed on. The collective nature of this exercise is wonderfully invoked. But this novel, choppy and staccato, never really feels like a novel; it is an extended oral history, a play, a dialogue. This belated conversation between history and the present follows the trial of the perpetrators through to its farcical end; yet no resolution. Sri Lankan writer Shobasakthi, whose playful novella Gorilla contained a similarly fractured narrative around that country’s terrors, put this quality down to the violence that formed its subject.

“I still suspect that somehow India in the West has been reduced to a few tropes—and those who step across that line are not really noticed,” says Kandasamy.

It is heartening, however, that publishers, blessed and cursed with an abundance of texts, are willing to back dissidents. One can only hope they do not succumb to the trappings of the attention that ensues.

The political writer has always been a popular entity, and Kandasamy is lucky to have both talent and a message, stories she has engaged with to tell us. She is vulnerable to the packaging that publishing, particularly Western publishing, entails. But who can begrudge her turn in the spotlight?

Harpercollins IndiaMeena KandasamyThe Gypsy Goddess