PROLOGUE

“Long Live Agriculture! Agriculture is National Service!!
We Will Increase Paddy Production!
We Will Eradicate Famine!!
PADDY PRODUCERS’ ASSOCIATION,
NAGAPATTINAM TALUK
42/2, Mahatma Gandhi Salai, Nagapattinam, Tanjore District
MEMORANDUM SUBMITTED TO THE HONOURABLE
CHIEF MINISTER OF MADRAS SEEKING
IMMEDIATE REDRESSAL OF THE GRIEVANCES
OF PADDY CULTIVATORS

Greetings!
It is with a heavy heart that this petitioner begs to bring to the kind attention of your Honourable Self, some of the sufferings undergone by the paddy cultivators of Nagapattinam as a consequence of the mischievous politics and misconceived propaganda that has gripped the coolies.

For the past ten years, agricultural coolies have been constantly demanding an increase in their daily wages, and whenever it has been denied to them, they have organized strikes and paralysed life in our district. Self-styled Communist leaders, who are themselves comfortably well off, are also responsible for illegal encroachment on other people’s lands. Not merely do they disregard the rights of the landowners, but they do so like militant Naxalites, by instigating the labourers to commence farming on these encroached lands. It suffices to state that, in practice, they harvest other people’s fields and take away the agricultural produce, a major share of which is given to their leaders.

The increasing agony faced by the landowning mirasdars has forced us to create the Paddy Producers Association, and the aim of our organization is twofold: to liberate the agricultural coolies from the wicked company of these dubious leaders; and to create a relationship of mutual goodwill and understanding between the landowners, tenant farmers and the agricultural coolies who play a crucial role in rice cultivation.

The Communist leaders merely keep coming up with a list of demands and inciting their followers to go on strike. When their unreasonable demands are not acceded to, they approach the government, which holds talks between the warring landowners and the labourers, and a temporary settlement is then reached. This petitioner, like other cultivators, is of the opinion that every meeting has extended the privileges of the agricultural coolies and this has empowered and emboldened the Communist leaders, who seek to create famine in order to make this land a fertile breeding ground for Maoism.

This petitioner wishes to point out that in order to keep creating new agreements, the agricultural coolies keep protesting. All these agreements have been a threat to peace and law and order. Whenever the government officials have decided to hold tripartite talks, these leaders appear with a list of impossible demands. This petitioner, as a landlord from Irinjiyur and being the representative of the mirasdars, has remained stubborn and refused to entertain any of these demands, saying that implementation of these demands was impractical, displaying the same tenacity exhibited by the intractable leaders of the opponents. As a consequence of this petitioner’s uncompromising stance and his determination not to be held to ransom by a bunch of blackmailing Communists, he has been considered their foremost enemy. They have taken it upon themselves to cause irreparable damage and hardship, and, on several occasions, they have threatened to finish off this petitioner and his relatives. Moreover, these verbal threats have often sought to be fructified by carrying out violent agitations outside the petitioner’s home. By following his instinct of self-preservation and maintaining a high degree of tolerance to their provocations, the petitioner has managed to safeguard himself from physical harm. However, their immature acts and political tricks have not been successful in shaking either the petitioner’s determination or his ideology, and, consequently, the desperate Communists have embarked on another shocking and dangerous strategy.

Presently, their leaders have sent away one of their dutiful henchmen named Chinnapillai to some undisclosed location, and they have submitted a complaint that this petitioner killed that man and destroyed all evidence of such a murder. It is reliably learnt that this has been filed as a ‘Missing Persons Report’ at the Keevalur police station, Nagapattinam, on 15th March 1968 or thereabouts, and this hoax is currently under investigation by the police. At this juncture, it becomes necessary to point out that three years before, a similar conspiracy was hatched to implicate the petitioner. A man named Sannasi went to a village near Karaikkal, and immediately a story started doing the rounds that this man was killed by the landlords. But before this rumour could take the shape of a malicious complaint, it came to be known that Sannasi had died of intoxication from drinking bootleg arrack in that village. The aforementioned complaint exposes the mala fide intention of the Communist leaders, who doggedly seek to imprison this petitioner because he presents the greatest threat to their nefarious activities.

Not only have they filed such a complaint, but they have also held public meetings to demand the immediate arrest of this petitioner. Incapable of achieving the expected results in spite of their best efforts, these leaders have changed their plan of attack. As a part of this new strategy, they organize marches close to the petitioner’s residence, chant provocative slogans and condemn the petitioner in the most disparaging manner possible. They have rained down curses on him with the secret motive of making him step out of his home so that he could be dealt with in any manner they deemed fit. In such excruciating circumstances, the petitioner cautiously stayed behind bolted doors and saved himself from a miserable fate.

Without a shred of doubt, the petitioner believes that the Communists have identified him as a target of their agitations and that they will succeed in their objective. If the Communists are not made to restrain themselves, and permanent legal measures are not taken to solve this problem, no landlord can remain safe The petitioner feels that unless this nuisance is nipped in the bud, Nagapattinam is bound to face unprecedented law and order problems.

Although the Communist leaders and the gullible workers who follow them have trespassed on our lands, illegally harvested our crops and caused us immense suffering, we, as the members of the Paddy Producers Association, are committed to a policy of staunch non-violent opposition. To protect ourselves from such routine blackmail and misguided attacks in the future, it has become incumbent upon this petitioner to appeal to your Honourable Self to deliver justice. East Tanjore district is in dire need of protection in order to sustain its honour and tradition of being the granary and rice bowl of the entire land. If the Communists are allowed a free rein, famine is imminent, and it will prove to be calamitous to the people.

In your exemplary book, Thee Paravattum, your Honourable Self has written about the fire of reason destroying the dogma of superstitions. Now the time has come to destroy the dogma of communism that has divided the people into classes and set them against each other. If left unchecked, these weeds in our society will choke the hope of any future harvest.

It is respectfully prayed that as the Honourable Chief Minister, Your Excellency shall interfere in this grave matter at the earliest and take necessary steps to restore the lost confidence of the terror-stricken landowners who are living in a constant state of fear, and thereby liberate Nagapattinam from the clutches of Communists in order to prevent violence and bloodshed.

I have the honour of being, Sir,

Your most humble and obedient servant,

Date: 1st May 1968                               Station: Irinjiyur
GOPALAKRISHNA NAIDU               President

 

Chapter 6, Oath of Loyalty

Police Constable Muthupandi; Gopalakrishna Naidu’s nameless-for-the-purpose-of-this-novel cook; and the official party organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) share the uniform opinion that the agricultural workers’ demonstration held to pay homage to Comrade Sikkal Pakkirisamy attracted more than 3,000 people. More than 300 policemen were deployed to ensure that this public rally passed off peacefully.

 

***

A villager asked to face a handheld video-cam for the first time, a reporter writing his in-depth opinion piece on this subject in under 1,000 words, and a novelist sorting out her storyline, will tell you with an air of certainty that Comrade Sikkal Pakkirisamy’s murder on the day of the district-level agriculture strike proved to be a flashpoint for all the tragedy that followed. They will not begin their story with the arrival of the various Europeans, or the story of rice cultivation in this delta district, or the local kings’ largesse and land grants to the Brahmins, or the history of local invasions, or the emergence of communism, or the shrill independence movement, or the manner in which Murugan first manifested himself to the divine in their dreams and then had a temple built in his honour and for his worship, or the origins of untouchability that set apart and put aside some men and some women, or the succour offered by the slave trade of the brown peoples, or the anti-God activities of the Self-Respect Movement or the establishment of the first church at Tranquebar or the formation of the peasant associations or the foundation of the Paddy Producers Association, because it would be easy to get caught up in this multi-dimensional mess of events and impossible to pull oneself out of these knots. Unlike this jumble that is beyond disambiguation, the selection of a key incident such as the murder of Sikkal Pakkirisamy removes the creases from the timeline. Like a lullaby, it transports us to a safe zone in time so that when we wake up, we can discuss this historical tragedy with the same self-assuredness that everybody employs when they speak of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria as being the immediate trigger that led to the First World War.

***

On the day Jayabalan’s mother-in-law dropped dead from starvation, a legislator in faraway Madras expressed concern about chronic food-grain scarcity, famine conditions and exorbitant prices, another took issue that cultivators in Tiruchy had been deprived of paddy for their own consumption as state revenue officials had forcibly procured all their harvest; the chief minister tabled a report on the extent of damage caused by a cyclone, along with a detailed break-down of the relief and rehabilitation measures undertaken by his government; while local temple-dweller Lord Murugan, popular in these parts under his alias of Sikkal Singaravelan, according to his strict daily regimen, was bathed in milk twice that morning, noon and night.

When he learnt, after his sixth bath, that the local Communist leader Sikkal Pakkirisamy had been killed off by the landlords, his lordship Sikkal Singaravelan prayed for his own safety – Murugamurugamurugamurugamurugamuruga — and decided not to interfere in the internal affairs of this mad and murderous district. Although he was not bothered about the equitable distribution of resources or the wage struggle of the workers, his lordship always knew that he was no different from the local Communist leader in two aspects: he always sought to be defined by his domain of influence, and he could put up a good show of strength at short notice. Being a bright young chap, he decided that he would not risk taking a position on anything outside his own war portfolio, as long as he was provided with food to eat and milk to drink so that he didn’t drop dead and make two women instantaneous widows. He kept his word. He turned a blind eye to bloodbaths.