 "Jayalalithaa")
It wasn’t long ago that I came across a deeply personal facet of my cousin’s childhood, he wished I would have never discovered. This cousin now in his late 20s is a stereotypical Tamil born in Madras, working in the Information Technology industry and “well settled in the U.S.A”. Here he was in the photo frame, all of 5 years, donning a white fur cap on his head, a green shawl draped around his shoulders, a spotless white veshti and dark sunglasses wrapped around his tiny egg sized talcum powder smattered face. There he was, little M G Ramachandran, making the family proud whenever outsiders or family members plonked themselves in the living room on Sunday lunch visits and lovingly commented on the similarity between the kid in the frame and the real icon himself. For periyappa (my cousin’s father), dressing his son as MGR was a matter of pride and principle; respect and adulation; of deference and defiance.
So on one of these days while catching up with him for a seaside beer luncheon I asked him what he thought of that photo and what would he tell his America born daughter if she ever asked why in the world would her father dress up like a politician even though the man her father impersonated was none other than the incredibly popular MGR. My cousin deftly shrugged off the question saying, “Let’s call for more beer. What da, has Delhi made you a champagne sipping socialite?”
Tamil Nadu exemplifies renowned sociologist David Mandelbaum’s Change and Continuity and Continuity and Change axiom better than any other place in India. The more things change in Tamil Nadu, the more they remain the same.
Tamils have a proclivity to hero worship which often touches maniacal proportions manifesting itself in myriad ways often hinging on the irrational. There is something about the Tamil psyche that makes it receptive and susceptible to the influence of the personality cult.
To a typical Indian outside Tamil Nadu, this is symbolised by the feverish celebrations that precede the release of a Rajnikanth movie. Scenes of Rajinikanth fans pouring gallons of milk on their icon’s three storey high life size cutouts before his movies release and the grandiose opening each of his movies get is just one example of the Tamil psyche’s inclination to make a god out of a mere mortal. Other film stars in Tamil Nadu have fan clubs with numbers that could put an English premier league football club to shame. Reports suggest that after Rajnikanth, film actor ‘Ilayathalapathy’ Jospeh Vijay has the second highest number of fan clubs across the state totaling over 20,000 counting over 2 million members.
Film stars achieve such cult status and go on to become political masters because Tamils over the years have looked at cine actors to get a glimpse of what they themselves may never achieve in life. The Tamil psyche feels empowered when an ordinary actor who looks like them performs extra-human antics on screen. This association of one’s own self-esteem with that of the film actor is rooted in the deep poverty the state was until the early 1990s.
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The Social Development Report prepared in 2000 shows that poverty levels were endemic and persistent in the state for a long time after India’s independence. The report notes that between early 1960s to the 1980s, almost half the state was always below poverty line. Between 1963 and 1970, the rural population in Tamil Nadu below poverty line rose from 64% to 74%. In urban areas the population below poverty line touched 72% from 62%.
In terms of nutritional adequacy, the numbers were equally grim. Almost 49% of the state’s rural population wasn’t even meeting the minimum calorie needs to qualify as living at or above the poverty line during the period. Jayalalithaa’s mentor MGR was at the peak of his acting career. The people of Tamil Nadu, living in miserable conditions, burdened by poverty and with little hope of a better future found succour in MGR’s films. His charming ways and onscreen roles were an alternate world, an escape route for the Tamil people from the drudgery of daily existence.
This was also the time when prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru enacted the Official Languages Act in 1965 which triggered violence and anti-Hindi protests in the state. The Dravidian movement got a major boost and Jayalalithaa’s mentor MGR grew in political stature. In 1967, MGR successfully made his debut in electoral politics.
Meanwhile economically, things further deteriorated during the 1970s. The National Sample Survey figures in 1977-78 showed that Tamil Nadu had the second largest number of people below the poverty line among India’s 22 states. By the 1980s, a quarter of the state’s rural population had less than Rs 500 in assets while a vast majority of the state’s population had less than Rs 1000. By the 1990s, almost 40% of the state’s population was below poverty line. Jobs in the state were few. Many educated Tamils migrated to other states in India in search of jobs. Those who were lucky enough migrated to the developed world for greener pastures.
It is in such dire circumstances that MGR introduced the Mid-day meal scheme in schools in 1980 that aimed to save an entire generation of Tamils from the devastating impact of poverty on life expectancy. This endeared him to the masses. Tamils who had learnt to worship his on-screen persona and voted him to power now believed that their messiah had delivered. When MGR died, estimates suggest that 30 people committed suicide. Widespread violence lead to the loss of public property worth crores and many died as mobs went on the rampage. People killed themselves because the very person who had given them hope in life was no more amongst them. Without MGR, death would be better than an undignified life.
The Tamil Nadu in which our fathers and grandfathers lived was a cruel place to be if one wasn’t born in the right caste or class. The Tamil Nadu as of date is a much healthier shadow of its former self. It is one of the engines of India’s economic growth attracting global manufacturing giants from across the world. It has the second highest GDP in the country and stands third in per capita income. The strong growth during the 1990s under alternative DMK and AIADMK governments led by M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa extracted millions out of destitution.
But has economic progress had any impact on the Tamil psyche’s propensity to make gods out of mortals? The fallout of Jayalalithaa’s demise could well answer that question.
