Plain Speaking: A Sudra's Story

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About the Book

The memoirs and lectures of A.N. Sattanathan (1905-1991), presented here in a fully annotated edition, with a critical introduction, constitute a key literary historical document of the caste struggle. Sattanathan's autobiographical fragment is a unique record of non-Brahmin low-caste life in rural South India, where the presence of poverty and caste prejudice is the more powerful for being understated.

As the experience - sparsely and beautifully rendered - of the low-caste but not stereotypically 'untouchable' villager, it is, quite simply, revelatory and will make an impact as such on the English-educated reader, to whom that experience has been so far unavailable.

In a complementary narrative, Sattanathan's lectures - on 'The Rise and Spread of the Non-Brahmin Movement' as 'the most outstanding event in South Indian History in the twentieth century' - offer a lucid summary of the cultural and historical conditions that find more personal and immediate expression in the memoirs.

About the Author

A.N. Sattanathan had a distinguished career in the al-India services. He was Collector of Customs and Central Excise, Calcutta, and in later life wrote and published widely on politics and economics in India. In 1969 he was appointed Chairman of the first Tamilnadu Backward Classes Commission and made a lasting impact on the state's policy of affirmative action towards lower castes.

Uttara Natarajan is Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths College, where she teaches and researches in nineteenth-century English literature. Her publications include Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense and Blackwell Guides to Criticism: The Romantic Poets.

Introduction

The memoirs of the late A.N. Sattanathan, Chairman of the first Tamil Nadu Backward Classes Commission, were written in 1958, in his close, cramped hand, from the first to the last page of a ruled notebook of the kind that children use in schools. In the present book these memoirs comprise the first part, entitled 'An Exercise in Biography (1958)'. They cover the period of his life from his birth in 1905 till his second job in 1928. There, where the notebook ends, they break off abruptly. Sattanathan had at one time intended a fuller account, but never resumed his narrative. Instead, some years later, he began to think about publication, at which time he gave the memoirs their title, possibly partly suggested by or humorously alluding to, the 'exercise' book in which they were written. Nothing came of those publication plans in his lifetime. The one or two people Sattanathan spoke to were not encouraging and he himself took a rather deprecatory view of the memoirs: their style, he is known to have said, was like that of his Civil Service reports.

In 2001, I came across the notebook and began to type up its contents, and so also began the process that led to this book.

The second part of the book comprises three lectures delivered by Sattanathan, in 1981, on the Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu.

The overarching title, Plain Speaking: A Sudra's Story, was an editorial decision, agreed with the book's publisher.

A.N. Sattanathan was born on the 6th of May 1905, in the town of Shencottah in what is now southern Tamil Nadu, the second child and first son of Armuga Nayakar and Ayanammal, of the Padayachi caste. Growing up in abject poverty - his very name, as he tells it in chapter 6 of the memoirs, was acquired as a means of currying patronage - Sattanathan managed to obtain, step by step, first a school, then a college education, financed largely by a wealthy family of the town with whom he could claim a connection. In 1926 he qualified with a first-class Honours degree in History from the Maharaja's College, Trivandrum. After a few years' employment as a college lecturer in Trichy and Madurai, in 1929, fulfilling a long cherished ambition, he qualified for the Superior Civil Service. He was allocated to Customs and Central Excise, his first posting, as Assistant Collector; begin to Chittagong in present day Bangladesh (then East Bengal). Six months later be married Meenakshi, of the village of Sundarapandyapuram, in his home region. They had four children, a son followed by three daughters. Sattanathan's middle daughter - his third child- is my mother.

Sattanathan had a distinguished career in the Services. He is credited with formulating excise procedures, during his posting to the Collectrorate of Salt Revenue and Central Excise in Madras in 1942-4 that was subsequently adopted for the rest of the country. In 1945-8, posted to Simla at the time of Partition, he was in charge of laying down the customs and excise frontiers between the newly divided nations. In 1947 he was a member of the Indian delegation to the United Nations Narcotics Commission in New York, and in 1950 and 1951 he was Chairman, respectively, of the fifth and sixth sessions of the Commission. In 1956 he took early retirement on health ground, his last posting being as Collector of Customs and Central Excise, Calcutta.

Retirement was another kind of intellectual beginning for Sattanahan. Settled in Madras, he took up the study of Sanskrit and began to read classical Tamil. He was able to indulge to the full his lifelong love of the theatre. Most importantly, he started to write prolifically, contributing articles on politics, economics, and current affairs to newspapers and journals all journals all over India. The memoirs were written early in his retirement. He also wrote two books for children, the jester, the Judge and the Minister, and Folk Tales form the South, both, sadly, now out of print. It was not until the late 1980s that declining health brought with it an intellectual decline. He died in Madras on the 19th of June 1990.

Perhaps Sattanathan's greatest contribution to national life was his Report, submitted in November 1970, of the findings and recommendations of the first Tamil Nadu Backward Classes Commission. The Commission was appointed by the DMK Government under M. Karunanidhi in 1969, with Sattanathan as Chairman. If Tamil Nadu has been a pioneering example in the history of reservation in India, then Sattanathan has played a leading role in that history. Among other recommendations, his Report prescribe an income limit for reservation: the implementation of this recommendation and on its heels, the volte face in which the economic criterion was withdrawn, has had a significant impact on the shape of Tamil Nadu politics. Sattanathan's phraseology in arguing for the removal of the 'upper layer' or 'upper crust' of the backward classes - the phrase is repeated in the lectures published in the present volume - anticipate the current catchphrase, 'creamy layer', which has come into use since the Supreme Court's ruling of 1992 on means testing for reservation.

In the light of Sattanathan's memoirs, we can read, in every line of his Backward Classes Commission Report, his intimate knowledge and firsthand experience of social disadvantage and marginalization. He worked indefatigably to compile the Report and refused to accept an honorarium. At the beginning of the Report and refused to accept an honorarium. At the beginning of the Report, closing his prefatory letter to the Chief Minister, he writes, with all the sincerity of his plain, strong prose: 'It has been to me a labour of love, working on this Commission, and it is my earnest hope that the Report will be of some use to your Government which has evinced so much interest in the welfare of the weaker sections of society.

The timing of this book has been opportune. The interest in Indian life-writing has burgeoned recently, not so much for the general reader, for whom biography and autobiography have always held an appeal, but for the academic specialist. Life stories - and Indian life stories in particular - have been found to compass the dialectic of self and society, of individual consciousness and collective identity (of a class, or a caste, or a culture), distinctively, in an engaging and personalized into a wider awareness, are being recognized and celebrated as sites of resistance.

To the growing body of such narratives, Sattanathan's autobiographical fragment makes a quite unique contribution. First of all, in respect of content: although narratives of Dalit lives are reaching the public domain in increasing numbers, the same cannot be said of those communities which, as one recent commentator put it, are above the traditional pollution line. These are the lowest of the 'touchable' Sudra castes, or by the present-day classification of the Government of Tamil Nadu, the 'Most Backward Classes'. In Tamil Nadu the largest of such communities, the Vanniyar or Padayachi community to which Sattanathan belonged, has had some political impact. But to the English-educated reader, especially, the community has remained largely invisible. Upper caste readers, indeed, are barely aware of the huge variations in social status across the Sudra caste of Tamil Nadu, or of the possibility of distinction between 'Sudra' and 'Dalit '. By bringing into view a disadvantaged section of society not locatable in the binary domain of 'upper caste' and 'Dalit'.

Sattanathan provides an exceptional insight into the spectrum of caste prejudice and its objects. This is not in any sense to claim a parity between Sattanathan's and Dalit experiences: no such claim could be tenable. Nonetheless, a grasp of the plurality of the identity and experience of the lower castes must in some degree loosen the totalizing tendencies of the uniformed reader. The emphasis on particularity must vitally enhance the raising of awareness.

Another notable aspect of Sattanathan's memoirs it that they are written in English. I have no wish to enter here into a debate about the 'nativity' of English as a medium of expression for Indian writers; in Tamil Nadu, with its decades-long history of anti-Hindi agitations, and its two-language formula, the position of English is especially complex. Sattanathan himself has some illuminating observations to make, in chapter 5 of the memoirs, on the teaching of Tamil in the schools of his time. But it is certainly the case that his memoirs belie many of the generalizations that have been made in the past about English-language autobiographies by Indians, for instance, by Judith Walsh:

…. One of the characteristics of Indian autobiography the tendency of authors to obscure, rather than to emphasize, the regional and cultural backgrounds from which they came. As a rule, the autobiographers… chose to obscure items of indigenous culture and tradition …

English language autobiographies remind us of the degree to which Indians from different regions, cultural traditions and even historical periods could be members of one group - the Westernized, English-educated elite.

Sattanathans memoirs expose the inadequacy of this kind of homogenizing paradigm. And more: whatever might be said of its other problematic, his use of English has at least this in its favor, that it make him more completely the author of his own story that the translated author of an Indian language text. When he speaks in his own voice, we grasp, more fully than otherwise, the humanity of the speaker, his individuality, his agency in his own story.

Indeed, it is one of the peculiar strengths of Sattanathan's narrative that it repudiates categorization. Partly, this is due to its anachronistic character. Its time span is the early decades of the last century; its date of composition the mid twentieth century - at the beginning of the second decade of Indian Independence; and its publication in the early twenty-first century. In its content and stance it stands apart both from the elitist English-language narratives of the first half of the twentieth century (to which Walsh refers), and from the more deliberately oppositional narratives of the marginalized peoples of India that began to appear from the 1980s onwards. Although oppositional relations of various kinds are certainly inscribed here, and in more than one pairing - Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, rich and poor, and perhaps also, and more subtly, North and South - the memoirs themselves cannot be described as either oppositional or collusive. Instead, Sattanathan manages to inhabit, without apology or defense, a range of polarities: a love of Hindu mythology, for instance, as well as a hatred of the caste system; or equally, sympathy with the Non-Brahmin movement as well as a fervent nationalism. In so doing he manifests neither irresolution nor complicity, but a generous and ample humanity.

The form of the memoirs is also unusual. They are incomplete, not in the sense that all autobiographies, insofar as they do not and cannot represent a whole life, must be incomplete, but more overtly, in that they are in the form of a fragment, a form which, like autobiography itself, has been identified as a characteristically Romantic form. Much has been written about the Romantic fragment: it has been argued, on the one hand, that what is incomplete can the more effectively capture the entirety that it does not attempt to embody, and on the other, that the eliciting of totality from what is incomplete is an ideal (and ideologically suspect) whole. In either case, and whether we celebrate or indict it for the comparison, Sattanathan's prose fragment is like its Romantic forebear in that what is fragmentary here is also, paradoxically, capacious. The full humanity of the author, the polarities and contradictions that he occupies, are appropriately accommodated in a form that eschews finality or closure.

At the same time, a wholeness of another kind has been constituted by the publishing of the memoirs in conjunction with Sattanathans lectures on the Dravidian movement, delivered in 1981 as the E.V. Ramaswamy Endowment Lectures as the University of Madras. Some of the statements in the lectures might well be contested, but as a whole the lectures might well be contested, but as a whole the lectures offer a lucid and non-partisan view, and in so doing, stand as a useful introduction to the topic that they treat. As a composite text as well as singly, and in ways that are complementary to each other, the memoirs and lectures exemplify the dialectic to which I have referred, of personal and social history. In the memoirs can be read as social history written as a life, the lectures, no less, contain a personal history between the lines that describe a social movement. Here I should clarify that the word 'Sudra', in my subtitle for the composite text, reflects Sattanathans own usage in the lectures; it pre-dates recent political usage, such as that of Kancha Ilaiah, for instance, to which it is not quite congruent, except - and importantly - as an assertion of low-caste identity, an affirmation.