A brigand's background

"WILL Veerappan ever be caught?" Sunaad Raghuram asks at the end of the book. It is a question he doesn't quite address in Veerappan, The Untold Story. If you are looking for a detailed exposition of the Special Task Force's (STF) long and fruitless history to catch the ruthless serial killer or a studious explanation of what exactly needs to be done to nab him, this isn't the book for you.

Raghuram's main purpose in this anecdotal journalistic account is quite different. It is to provide a profile of the man of whom little is known and to understand the circumstances which led him to become what he is. In this, Raghuram succeeds reasonably well, tracing Veerappan's alarming career path, from elephant poacher and sandalwood smuggler to mass murderer and serial abductor. For the most part, the author restricts himself to the facts (as he has gleaned them) and his narrative is mercifully free of the temptation - which surfaces from time to time in journalistic accounts of the brigand - to portray Veerappan as a victim of his socio-political environment, someone who was inextricably drawn into a life of crime because of poverty or oppression.

By choosing, either deliberately or otherwise, not to do unto Veerappan what Mala Sen did unto Phoolan Devi, Raghuram steers clear of the danger of the pop socio-psychology and the eccentric political correctism which plagues many "Veerappanologists". "My intention in writing this book," he declares, "is not to lionise Veerappan but to provide a narrative that puts him in context and explores the many aspects of his life and relationships." By his own account, his interest in this man - against whom there are well over a hundred cases for murder, dacoity, extortion and kidnapping - stemmed from a wholly legitimate journalistic stimulus: intrigue.

In a couple of other ways, however, the account is perplexing. For the most part, it is not clear where the information has been sourced, an omission which unfortunately leaves the reader somewhat unconvinced at times about its veracity. Given that the mainstay of the book is a shadowy character about whom there is little that people agree upon, the book adopts a much too definitive tone. It would have been far better if Raghuram had chosen a more circumspect approach - if he weighed competing accounts, assessed rival explanations, or examined possible motives. Such an approach may have intruded on the free flow of his narrative but it would have rendered his work more thoughtful and more convincing.

Raghuram sometimes fails to appreciate that readers need to be guided, equipped with the necessary information to be able to separate truth from falsehood. The chapter on Veerappan's wife Muthulakshmi is an illustration of this attitude. It is wedged into the narrative suddenly, without any warning or explanation. Unlike the rest of the book, it is written in the first person. Muthulakshmi's stories of her first meeting with Veerappan and the torture she allegedly underwent at the hands of the police are moving, but the reader is left with no mechanism to assess the veracity of the account. Is it all true? False? Are they conflicting accounts? Raghuram does not say.

There are some mistakes. Jayalalitha couldn't have "thundered" in the Tamil Nadu Assembly during the Rajkumar abduction, simply because she wasn't an MLA then. There is some exaggeration. It's a bit much to paint the terrain Veerappan inhabits as "impenetrable" and "almost inaccessible". Any forest official will tell you that the deciduous forests are widely networked by roads and paths - their supposed impenetrability is a fiction that many journalists sustain either out of ignorance or in order to explain why Veerappan hasn't been caught yet.

The book succeeds in one important way though. The writer's obvious fascination about the man who makes up his subject matter surfaces strongly and in such a candid manner that, in a peculiar way, it infects the reader and keeps his interest alive.

MUKUND PADMANABHAN

Veerappan: The Untold Story, Sunaad Raghuram, Viking, Rs. 395.

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