In the chapter ‘Obscurantists to the fore’ in his notoriously remarkable book, Reminiscences of the Nehru Age, MO Mathai describes his encounter with Ambedkar. The great architect of Indian Constitution did not mince his words when he learnt that Mathai was from Kerala: you Malayalis have done India the greatest disservice, he observed and went on saying: “You sent that Shanakaracharya, a desiccated expert at logic , on a padayatra to drive away Buddhism from this country.”
Shankaracharya indeed had his own reasons for championing Sanathana dharma based on Chaturvarnya. For a Brahmin, a philosophy that reaffirms the superiority of the twice born would certainly sound palatable. Only a fool, to be sure, would spurn a theory that reinforces his and his progenies’ right to hereditary glory thanks to the simple virtue of a propitious birth. How can anyone but the most brainless remain mute when he hears alarm bells heralding the imminent demise of such a philosophy at the hands of a faith proclaiming human equality? Certainly Shankaracharya was no fool by any count or criterion. And he realised that though the world itself was an illusion, the threat to Chaturvarnya from Buddhism was as real as the cow that had once come to attack him or the lowly one who once waylaid the acharya and quizzed him about the stupidity of believing in superior and inferior births.
It was this threat that prompted him to set himself on a pan-Indian padayatra to save the Hindu faith and launch those infamous crusades against the followers of Buddhism. What if he ended up burning to death some Buddhists on the banks of Periyar and at a few other places? Didn’t it secure the future of Chaturvarnya in this country for ages to come? Just as all the twice born have a right to feel proud of Shankaracharya for this service he rendered them, Ambedkar as a member of a caste that was at the lower end of the spectrum had every reason to nurse an undying antipathy towards the acharya: as Newton has it and as our wise prime minister reminded us during the dark post-Godhra days, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
But how would have Ambedkar responded to it if he had known that Kerala, that once upon a time produced the wise and witty and Shankaracharya has also the distinction of producing someone as prodigious as Vellapally Natesan. If Shankaracharya was a Brahmin who upheld the rights of Brhamins and their right to trample upon others, Vellapally is the representative of a caste which , like Ambedkar’s own, had always found itself at the receiving end of upper-class brutality. In the words of the eminent writer and historian PK Balakrishnan, the upper castes in Kerala treated Eazhavas worse than the cows and calves whom they tended in the caste Hindu’s cow dung-clogged stables.
Yet in his magnanimity, Vellapally espouses the cause of the same philosophy that treated people like him as pariahs (the etymology of the English word pariah rooted in our ancient sense of egalitarianism need not detain us here) and clamours for the right of the upper castes to continue trampling upon the likes of him. How else can one explain his zeal to ally himself with a party whose minister saw the burning of Dalits as of no great consequence than that of someone shying a couple of pebbles at a stray dog (certainly not a dog who in his previous incarnation was a Brahmin)?
You can’t entirely blame the liquor baron for this. After all, he is a businessman who seldom gets his arithmetic wrong and this time too he might have his own arguments: hasn’t the whole country witnessed the photos of Togadia a high caste Hindu sharing a meal with an untouchable? In times such as this should anyone hark back to old times and harp upon past injustices?
Detractors might beg to disagree: the very fact that Praveen Togadiaji wanted his photo of sharing a meal with an untouchable splashed as an event, they would counter, smacks of condescension and superciliousness, worse than untouchability itself.
Vellapally however won’t be one to give into such spurious reasoning. For him the threat that his community faces is not from upper caste Hindu’s who tyrannised them from times of yore; but people of his own ilk. People like his ancestors, who found the tyranny and oppression of caste Hindus too much to bear and chose to embrace faiths that opened the gates of their altars to all. For them, the new faith that they embraced was one that recognised them as humans and not as less than bovines.
Vellapally, pace Thackareys and Togadias, describes them as Varathans (aliens) cannibalising the country’s resources and parasitising its body. Surely the liquor baron hasn’t done his history lesson well at the primary school. If so, he would have known the insider/outsider question better. Or probably, in order to camouflage his own nefarious blood sucking activities in the form of micro finance , the macroglot wants to raise the bogey of the evil Other.
His reasoning is simple: if the great Guru could install and sanctify an Ezhava Shiva, why can’t he himself become an Eazhava Togadia or a Mallu Thackary, especially when there is an Udhav waiting in the wings like an eager cockerel?
(Dr. Umer O Thasneem teaches English at the University of Calicut. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)