On a late Sunday morning, after making a grass widower’s breakfast out of a paper dosa at my favourite eatery in Bangalore’s Koramangala, I crawled down the road in my car looking for someone who could wash it. The tribe was not to be found as such people usually finish their job early in the morning. So, I stopped before a posh block of flats and asked the young uniformed security guard if he could help. He told me in chaste Hindi to come back next day early morning when he would either find somebody or do it himself as, he said in explanation, “main garib Brahman hoon”.
The clean look of the man, his ease of expression and the frankness with which he confessed his poverty (why else would he come all the way to Bangalore from the North to work as a security guard) sent me back to my childhood when the huge kitchen in our joint family was run by a succession of Maithili Brahmin cooks. They were all dignified, scrupulously adhered to all the norms of cleanliness followed in a traditional family (my grandmother did her own cooking in the vegetarian kitchen for widows) and, most important of all, generous to a fault towards us children. I remember myself, cranky after a fever, demanding an extra piece of fish one afternoon. The cook of the time readily obliged, my mother told me later, by giving me the choice bit of his own food.
A liberal education, first in a Christian missionary school and then an iconoclastic Left-leaning college, had taken out of me whatever little bit of caste consciousness I could have retained from taboos and rituals which were part of my early family life. On my first proper visit to UP — by that time I was a journalist — I noted with disapproval that almost every conversation over someone had to be suitably anchored sooner or later by posing and getting a reply to the question: what was his jaat? But the words of the guard brought back to me the other face of the Brahmin I had known, someone who was, far from being an exploiter, a kindly helpful soul who had not lost his humanism despite his poverty.
This different kind of Brahmin was placed for me in the country’s cultural history by a play I had seen in my college days — Mudrarakshasa, made unforgettable by the towering performance of Sambhu Mitra as Chanakya. He was the great strategist, the implacable foe who planned and successfully vanquished his enemy but at the end of the day did not destroy him, only brought him around. Most memorable was his leave-taking from the world of statecraft after he had done his job, brought in a reluctant Rakshasa, the chief minister of the deposed dynasty, to be Chandragupta’s chief minister so that Chanakya could retire. He had done it all for a cause, not for himself. His stage whisper, which carried to the farthest corner of the balcony, still rings in my ears, declaring, “Aami daridra Brahman.”
Another prominent Indian in our times, I G Patel, has given an elaborate rationale of who does what and in return for what in the Indian scheme of things. In his farewell remarks after completing six memorable years as director of the London School of Economics (LSE), he regretted that in his time, the school had had to contend with the simplistic philosophy of the marketplace that ruled Thatcher’s Britain and dipped into his Indian background to explain what he called non-competing groups in society.
Civilisation survives because some people will not compete at the marketplace, but only in their own field, among themselves and on their terms. Teachers are the true Brahmins of the world. They are not well-paid but they demand the respect of society. They do not want to share power with the ruler, the Kshatriya, or ask for a share of the wealth of the Vaishya, or do the labours of the Sudra. “In a well-ordered society, some will be paid in the respect of society, some will be paid in power, some will be paid in money, and some, I am afraid, will be paid only in the next world.” The day the teachers of LSE have to compete as a commodity in a free-for-all market, that day will be the end of the school.
How to separate these two faces of brahminism, that of the person who sits at the top of the heap of an oppressive system and that of society’s leader who excels in his own task and does everything for a cause and not for himself. Patel himself was a close friend and associate of S Guhan, the administrator-turned-social scientist with a keen sense of social activism. Guhan, who grew up in the heart of Tamil Brahmin Chennai, Mylapore, belonged to a family of achievers. His father was a distinguished physician, one of his uncles was the principal editor of Mahatma Gandhi’s collected works and the other a distinguished chemist. Academic excellence and the ability to provide intellectual leadership ran in his blood. He perhaps summed it up best by saying that brahminism (pursuit of excellence) was fine with him, it was the Brahmins he couldn’t stand!
