Frantz Fanon, the famous Martiniquan psychiatrist, was once walking through a Parisian arrondissement. There was a lady and child coming across him. Suddenly, the boy paused and remarked to his mother: Mom! Look at that Negro! It was as if the child had come across a baboon that had just broken out of the zoo. This minor but serious incident had a definitive influence on Fanon’s later career as a theorist and revolutionary fighting for the cause of the oppressed around the world. I felt like baring my teeth and telling the boy, yes, I have canines and I do bite, Fanon later said, recalling the event.
We can forgive the child in the story: After all, he was a victim of the deeply embedded colonial values in his society that associated everything black with dirt and evil. But what about our grown up and mature politicians?
For Vellapally Natesan, CPI(M) leader M.M Mani is at the same time a black spectre as well as a black monkey. Such ‘monkeys’ he says should neither be allowed to go near a temple nor elected to the Assembly. As for the temple Vellapally has his own justification: M.M Mani, Natesan says, is a non-believer. Indeed this is a great piece of reasoning. But by the same logic neither Savarkar nor Bal Thackeray should have been admitted to a temple. While Thackeray had openly flaunted his lack of belief in God, Savarkar’s faith hovered between atheism and agnosticism.
As for Natesan’s calling M.M Mani a black monkey, the latter can as well ask him to have a good look in the mirror. The pot-bellied liquor baron can sure pose himself for the commercials of his own chain of institutions the way our by now paupered NRI baron cooling his heels in Dubai prison is doing.
However, Natesan’s political inanity, it should be said, points to a more serious rot that has seeped into our consciousness. As for the boy on the Parisian street who gazed disdainfully at Fanon, he belonged to the superior white race, who in Paul Gilroy’s words had only grudgingly granted an associate membership to the black man in the species called homo sapient. Vellapally, on the other hand, belongs to a sect that had traditionally been at the receiving end of upper class oppression and had faced the worst sort of epistemic violence which saw them being cast in all kinds of animalistic metaphors. According to the noted writer and historian P.K Balakrishnan, the lot of the Ezhavas, the caste to which our highness Vellapally belongs and whose main occupation was tending of the cattle belonging to the upper- castes, was as bad as that of the worms in the dung pits of the upper-caste stables. Vellapally, a leader of that faction, is now using a term that the upper-caste had reserved for downtrodden people like him to call a fellow-caste member who had the good/bad luck to have a slightly sallower complexion.
Fanon’s great disciple, Bulhan had spoken about the dangers of the oppressed themselves internalizing the values and codes of the oppressors. He chose to call this intropression, a state wherein the oppressed themselves become partners in their oppression through such an internalizing process. Vellapally who has chosen to ally himself with the likes of Amit Shah and Modi is a classic case of this symptom. But to invoke the likes of Bulhan, in a discursive arena dominated by leaders like Natesan suffering from foot in the mouth disease will be very much off the mark. Our leaders who have torsos like palm trees and brains like palm nuts are not conditioned for that kind of reasoning.
But this would not have been an excuse for Natesan if his pronouncements were made in countries where true rule of law prevails. For much lesser offences, like calling a man with black hide the equivalent of ‘boy’ even football stars in European countries have been subjected to fines and other punitive actions. In our country where the likes of Sakshi Mahajan and Munna Kumar Sukla and Sasikala are busy plumbing the depths of political indecency and vulgarity however Vellapallys are a Z -category protected species, free to bark at and bite into bits anyone they choose.
One can only nostalgically think of the days gone by when Kerala’s political and cultural landscape was dominated by people with a mature and urbane sense of wit and humour. Even the shadows of the likes of R. Sankar, EMS Namboothiripad, TV Thomas, CH Muhammad Koya and EK Nayanar are no longer there to permeate our political discourse with a sense of wit and grace. Who can ever forget TV Thomas, who once told his political opponents not to scare him off by mentioning ‘minister’ repeatedly since he was one who had a minister to fix him the morning tea in his kitchen. His reference was to his estranged wife KR Gouri Amma. EK Nayanar was another such leader whose witticism never failed to inspire and provoke our thoughts. Not that Nayanar wasn’t occasionally prone to the foot in the mouth disease. He certainly was, for instance, when he chose to call the poet Sugathakumari, a woman monkey and in another instance when he chose to dismiss off the molestation attempt at a western tourist: Rape is something as cool as sipping coffee in America, the veteran leader had said. But that was not vintage Nayanar. Vintage Nayanar was at its best when he chose to answer in Malayalam to a Mulayam Sing Yadav missive written in Hindi; it was also the same vintage stuff when he advised Rajiv Gandhi, one who was not totally immune to mouthing inanities, to read if nothing else at least two books written by his own granddad. In Natesan’s time of lurid name calling we can only hark back to those witty masters of a bygone age.
Tailpiece: Next time when Fair and Handsome brand looks for a face for their commercials, they can zero in on the SNDP cum BJDS leader though his bill might be a bit too fat.
(Dr. Umer O Thasneem teaches English at Calicut University. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)