MANU PILLAI

The Courtesan,the Mahatma and the  Italian  Brahmin   by Manu Pillai; Published by Context ; Pages 394 ; Price Rs.590/-

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Manu Pillai  is an astonishingly young writer—only 30-- who won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for his debut book, “The Ivory Throne”.

The book under review —The Courtesan, The Mahatma and The Italian Brahmin— is an engrossing collection of essays on arresting incidents from Indian history. These essays have appeared earlier in Pillai’s regular columns in the Press. Pillai has divided the book into three parts: Before the Raj, Stories from the Raj and Afterword.The book has around 60 stories in all.

Pillai declares “Pride should not eclipse the realities of feudalism, caste, class, and other dynamics that shaped society."

Pillai is tracing the diverse and disparate narratives reiterate ancient India’s plurality. Heterogeneity in our world  exists with all manner of warts and inequities.

Part One of the book is peopled with those who opposed the repulsive practices of their times and called into question the status quo. A wonderful beginning is with the utterly butterly tale of Roberto de Nobili who proclaimed    ‘I will become a Hindu to save Hindus’ in his quest to convert Brahmins . 

This is followed up with the story of the mischievous Maratha king of Thanjavur who wrote a satirical play featuring a Brahmin priest and a lower caste woman challenging upper caste beliefs. 

These two essays are the first steps towards a fascinating sojourn through Indian history.

Pillai recounts the stories of Bhakti saints which present the revolutionary aspect of their work while highlighting the contradictions in their work such as the anti-women couplets of Kabir, the upper caste privilege of Basava which possibly allowed him to be a contrarian and the submissive nature of Chokhamela’s devotion.

Intrepid women are featured here and they include the fearless courtesan Muddupalani, Akbar’s wife and a warrior Jodhabai, the all-conquering Madurai Meenakshi and the brave Begum Khunza Humayun. We have remarkable portraits of Jahangir, Ibrahim Adil Shah II and Alauddin Khilji. We also peek into the lives of Gauhar Jaan, Annie Besant, Balamani, Savitri and Janaki Ammal, controlled and shaped by patriarchy.

The essay on the syncretic history of the Mappilas of Malabar with their own Ramayana ‘featuring Ravana as a sultan; Surpanakha’s proposition to Rama in this version seeks sanction from the Sharia’ and the story of theTulukka Nachiyar (Tughlaq Princess) who falls in love with a Hindu god and is ‘commemorated in Srirangam in a painting on the wall’ provide a great glimpse of the multicultural history of South India.

Lesser characters appear in  Part Two of the volume. Foremost is the one on Sir William Jones, followed by the determined queen Malika Kishwar, the brave Savitri who challenged the male sexual entitlement in the Namboothiri clan, the enterprising Chidambaram Pillai from Tuticorin, Janaki the wife of Ramanujan and Naga rebel leader Angami Zapu Phuzo.

Finding out Malika Kishwar’s grave in Paris is a fascinating story. In fact, in the essay,A Forgotten Indian Queen in Paris, the author describes his own travels from London to the French capital tracing the whereabouts of the graves of the baby princess and the last Begum of Awadh. After tracking down the cemetery in Paris, it was still a challenge to locate the Begum’s grave which is now identified by a plaque but until January 2018 lay unmarked, “a square plinth overgrown with weeds,” upon which people would sit to smoke.

The portrait of the eccentric Wajid Ali Shah reveals hilarious details such as his attempts to divorce the remaining 27 wives (after divorcing 50 earlier) in one go, much to the chagrin of the British whose efforts to stop him forced the Nawab to respond, ‘But the women are old and ugly!’ and when asked who should take care of them, quick came his reply ‘The Government’. 

The bloody account of the rebellion and its aftermath in 19th century Vellore and the story of the attempted demolition of a temple in Ayodha bring to the fore two lesser known episodes in Indian history, the first of which, Pillai says, had the potential to be the first war of Independence if not for the silly mistakes committed by the rebels and the second one should have been a lesson to the state on how to quell attempts by extremists to damage any religious structure.

The Ifs of History are intriguing and Pillai has his quota. ‘What if Vijayanagara had survived?’ explores the possibility of a more balanced power equation with Mughals in the North and Rayas in the South, ‘What if there was no British Raj?’ dreams of a more diverse India sans Victorian moralities.

‘What if the Mahatma had Lived?’ The projection of Mahatma Gandhi into a futurity where he could have lived to see 125 years and died in obscurity , while battling modernity and watching his philosophy and values fall into perpetual neglect, echoes patterns in the life and death of V O Chidambaram Pillai in The Champion of Tuticorin, among others.

Part Three--- ‘An Essay For Our Times’ is a detailed meditation on nationalism where Pillai pits the two prominent ideas: our founding fathers’ ‘unity in diversity’ and the Hindu Mahasabha’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ against each other, and after making convincing arguments declares: ‘To re-engineer this mature, long-standing policy in black and white today will only prove calamitous, showing that far from making India great again, what one will end up doing is breaking India.’

A phalanx of Indian residents of diverse faiths from different walks of life entertain and enlighten us . We run into Tipu Sultan and Shivaji, a gamut of English administrators: good, bad and indifferent, including Sir Arthur Cotton, whose avant-garde environment-friendly irrigation practices in Andhra Pradesh allow him to be revered to date.

These thoroughly researched episodes from the lives of history’s instrumental figures – Queen Victoria, Wajid Ali Shah, Meerabai, Mahatma Gandhi, Dara Shukoh and others – form Pillai’s latest collection which offers a glimpse into a realm of victories and foibles that is India’s history.

Tipu Sultan, for instance, Pillai says, stood up to the British on the one hand, and on the other desecrated temples in the lands of enemy kings that he conquered. He called Kerala Hindus infidels and yet employed many such "infidels" as ministers and functionaries in his court. He is regarded as a hero by a certain quarter even as some of his acts were horrific.

Then how do we regard Tipu Sultan? Was he a brave, heroic soldier or a violent conqueror?

"Context is what helps us comprehend this and shows us how it is not a case of either-or. On the contrary, he was all of this at once."

Through his work, Pillai suggests he is trying to "construct a bridge so that these tales can travel down, and we too can walk across and know our past more fully, in all its layered, exquisite complexity."

Manu Pillai is a master of precision and wields an exquisite style of writing unlike Shashi Tharoor noted for his obfuscation and wordiness. I have selected three pieces from this book to give the reader an idea.

"Krishna Menon was essentially a 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.

Writing on the widow of Srinivasa Ramanujan—the great mathematician, Pillai has this to say--

“A widow at barely twenty one, Janaki learnt English and acquired the skills of a seamstress...... Occasionally great scholars from abroad came to see Janaki, seeking answers to questions left behind by her legendary husband. But she only had only memories. and gentle words to offer .As this seamstress of Triplicane said to one of them, the chief thing she remembered about her beloved Ramanujan was that he was always surrounded by sums and problems.

Mokshagundam Visveswaraya—the Dewan of Mysore—had risen from legendary mind into an object of sheer wonder. Nearing his hundredth birthday,when asked about the secret of his longevity he remarked in a matter of fact fashion

"Death called on me long ago but found me not at home and went away.” It returned on April 12,1962,and this time the bachelor from Muddenahalli was ready, having made his mark in the world,and having said everything that needed to be said.

Pillai’s book offers a thoroughly absorbing account of those played a key role in history textbooks or were wrongly relegated to footnotes .

Pillai has a remarkable style and Priya Kurian’s wonderfully detailed charcoal sketches enable one to assimilate the fascinating stories in every essay.

PPR

10/11/2019.