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Divide and rule

By M.S.S. Pandian

The new robustness of the Tamil identity... has dissipated the charm of the dream of aligning the language with a composite territory.

THE RECENT demand by S. Ramadoss, founder of the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), that Tamil Nadu should be bifurcated so that a Vanniyar could become the Chief Minister, has its obvious political rationale. Confined to the northern districts of the State, drawing its sustenance almost exclusively from the Vanniyars and lacking a broad political agenda which will bring other communities under its sway, the PMK's dream of ruling the State would be if at all possible, only by dividing it.

Dr. Ramadoss' `divide and rule' demand is indeed a desperate demand by a desperate politician. However, there is a more interesting question which hinges on his demand. What has made it possible for Dr. Ramadoss to place such a demand in the public realm of a State which is supposed to be overcrowded with language fanatics who, in their irrationality, value their mother tongue more than their lives?

By no conventional yardstick can Dr. Ramadoss be characterised as anti-Tamil. In fact, his enormous political investment in the Tamil identity is exactly his burden at the moment. His espousal of the cause of the Sri Lankan Tamils and vociferous support to schooling in Tamil medium are well known. Despite this commitment to Tamil and Tamil identity, he is not one bit embarrassed to seek the division of Tamil Nadu.

As much as Dr. Ramadoss' demand, the responses of the major and minor political parties to his demand are also untouched by much of an anxiety about whether the bifurcation of the State would run counter to the interests of the Tamils and weaken their collective linguistic identity. The most ambiguous of the responses came from the DMK chief, M. Karunanidhi, who characterised the demand as `impractical and unacceptable'. He left it to everyone's imagination what these words meant. While J. Jayalalithaa, leader of the AIADMK and Chief Minister of the State, found his demand `casteist and separatist' capable of encouraging `fissiparous tendencies', E.V.K.S. Elangovan, president of the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, viewed it as an invitation to separatist forces. While one is hard put to understand how Dr. Ramadoss' demand would lead to separatism at the national level, it is clear that the concern expressed by the opponents of the demand is not so much about Tamil identity, but about pan-Indian identity and unity. Dr. Ramadoss himself defended his demand by claiming that smaller States would contain separatist forces faster.

This lack of anxiety about Tamil identity, even in a context where there is a demand to bifurcate the State (whose present geographical shape owes to protracted struggles in places such as Kanyakumari and Tiruttani in the 1950s) indexes the significant transformations which Tamil identity has undergone over the past decades. Tamil identity that began as a defensive identity is today a self-confident and self-critical one.

In its early defensive phase, Tamil identity which was defined as non-Brahmin, was mobilised and deployed to defend the interests of the subordinate sections of the Tamil community — in particular that of the backward classes, by the Dravidian movement. As is well known, this took the shape of contestations against the dominance of the north, imposition of Hindi and Brahminical Hinduism which celebrated Sanskrit in opposition to Tamil. The de-Brahminisation of the Congress under the leadership of the late K. Kamaraj and the DMK's spectacular electoral victory in 1967 were significant moments signalling the popular support received by this politics based on a defensive Tamil identity.

The implementation of positive discrimination in favour of the backward castes and Dalits, which began in the 1920s, was part of this politics. Over the decades, slowly and steadily, reservation and other policies meant to benefit the non-Brahmin communities have given rise to a sizeable middle class among them. Occupying positions of power and confident of itself, this class no longer finds Hindi or Sanskrit as threatening, but has chosen English as the vehicle to seek its educational and professional fortunes, not just within the State, but nationally and globally. With the need to contest Hindi and Sanskrit on the decline, it has also redefined its relationship to Tamil. Tamil has, by and large, ceased to be a weapon in its struggle for advancement.

Simultaneously, a section of this class which is bilingual in the sense of being proficient in English and Tamil has found new uses for the language. The new wave of high quality Tamil literature and literary criticism, the avalanche of translations from western theory and its engaged application to local problems, proliferation of avant-garde magazines in Tamil — both in print and on the web — are all substantially a product of this class. With a considerable non-Brahmin Tamil diaspora in the West — both from India as well as Sri Lanka — the local Tamil intellectuals travel these days to London, Frankfurt, Toronto and Chicago to participate in literary and other meets. The old insularity is displaced by a new self-confidence. In the domain of popular culture, the proliferation of private television channels in Tamil has rendered Doordarshan's earlier agenda of prioritising Hindi over regional languages an impossibility. And it now competes for Tamil viewers with new channels and programmes.

The new self-confidence of the Tamil non-Brahmin middle class is accompanied by a vigorous sense of self-criticism about what the Tamil identity has failed to achieve. The fictive unity of the Tamils advanced a defensive Tamil identity that had suppressed the articulation of other identities such as the Dalit identity, in the public domain. This realisation has led to debates about the need to pluralise and even reject the Tamil identity. The participants in the debate are all Tamils. It is also important that at the political plane, the past two decades have seen the decline of single party rule at the Centre. Apart from the United Front experiments, even the Ministries led by national parties can no longer ignore regional parties as important partners. Tamil Nadu has been a beneficiary of this trend with the DMK and the AIADMK holding ministerial berths in different Central Ministries. On the one hand, the need of the regional parties from the State to set Tamil identity in opposition to the pan-Indian identity has declined over the years. On the other hand, the national parties, given the compulsion of contemporary Indian politics, have been increasingly forced to accommodate regional parties and their political agendas. After all, today the Tamil Nadu unit of the BJP, a party committed to Hindi as the national language, is seeking the status of classical language for Tamil and its conference venues carry couplets from the Tamil classic Thirukkural.

In this new context, the old-style Tamil nationalism has truly become the agenda of the fringe political groups and parties in the State. Even the old-style Tamil nationalism has to be reworked by these groups. It is no longer a nationalism involving the Tamils of Tamil Nadu but surrogate nationalism in defence of Sri Lankan Tamils. Exaggerated claims about these groups can sustain the story of `nation under threat' and aid most undemocratic interventions by political bosses. But for such cynical use, these groups and parties are marginal and of not much consequence.

The new robustness of the Tamil identity, its own internal criticism, and the decline of the necessity for it to be defensive, have dissipated the charm of the dream of aligning the language with a composite territory. And, Dr. Ramadoss and his detractors can squabble about the possible bifurcation of Tamil Nadu without being too concerned about Tamil identity.

(The writer is Honorary Visiting Fellow, Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.)

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