The story of Jael and her “foremothers” is an Indian story, because the stories of India cannot be narrowed to the Sanskritic specifications of the Hindutva bigots. The Calcutta Jews, alas, left only a few traces of their presence for a century and a half in that metropolis — three impressive large synagogues, two small prayer halls, two schools, and a cemetery. Two sizable buildings, Ezra Mansions and the Ezra Hospital, still bear the name of the Jewish merchant who built them. Ezra Street and Synagogue Street have been renamed. “Very soon,” Jael Silliman observes, “matzohs will no longer be made in Calcutta. The Jewish community will exist only as a memory…. The Jewish Girls’ School, once the center of community life, has no Jewish girls attending it. It has been increasingly difficult for the synagogues to attain a minyan — the ten men required to conduct a service. The imposing edifices and physical spaces that denote a Jewish presence are hollow, for they are bereft of the people and social relations that gave them their purpose and meaning.”
That is a sad ending to a happy story. As the Jewish community of Calcutta dies out, a part of India's history dies with it. It was a remarkable son of this community, Major General J. F. R. Jacob, who helicoptered to Dhaka to negotiate the surrender terms of the Pakistani forces there in December 1971. Indian Jews have left their mark on our national evolution. And yet, as Jael Silliman writes, “The Jewish presence has been written over by contemporary India and is only visible to those in search of it.” I am glad, for all our sakes, that she conducted this search.
39. Southern Comfort
WHEN A. P. J. ABDUL KALAM OF TAMIL NADU WAS ELECTED president of India in 2002, I had just finished a visit to his home state's capital, Madras, a city I still cannot bring myself to call Chennai (any more than I would refer to Deutschland when speaking in English of Germany). I grew up between the ages of three and nineteen in three cities — Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi — where being from the South meant you were generically classified as Madrasi, even if, like myself, you were from another state altogether. In vain did I protest that my parents were from Kerala and we had not spent five minutes in Madras: to most of our neighbors, Madrasis is what we were.
I doubt very much whether, three decades later, “Chennaiyyas” has acquired the same resonance in the suburbs of Matunga or Jodhpur Park. By reducing the term Madras to the petty specificity of “Chennai,” the city has lost its claim to stand for an entire peninsula. But this essay is not a lament for the lost redolence of Madras, whose renaming, along with Bombay's, I objected to in print at the time as emblematic of much that was wrong with modern Indian chauvinism (those who cannot create, I suggested somewhat nastily, can only rename). That battle is over, and the votaries of tradition and historical accuracy, not to mention linguistic common sense, have lost it. The Hindu’s masthead now proclaims that it is published in Chennai. But I took some perverse pleasure in the knowledge that one of my engagements in the city was an evening with the members of a group that still defiantly calls itself the Madras Book Club.
What did it mean to be a Madrasi? To those who used the term, we were a tribe of articulate, bustling people with polysyllabic names, who spoke with astonishing rapidity in a number of incomprehensible languages and were clever enough to have risen high and wide both in government jobs and in private sector corporations. The untiring stenographer, the gnomic bureaucrat, the brilliant professor of mathematics, the formidable nuclear scientist — these were the Madrasis the Delhiite came across in the course of a typical day, and they shaped the stereotype. The average Madrasi was also seen as smaller, darker, and more agile than his northern brethren, who made fun of his accent while secretly admiring him for his competence and dedication. It was always the Madrasi who was scurrying briskly to fulfill every responsibility, who came up with new ideas and was all too willing to put in overtime to implement them, who was the one person to be trusted with the cashbox when the manager was away. Ability, commitment, energy, initiative, integrity — these were the qualities the North saw in Madrasis, and many of us came to believe the stereotype enough to live up to it ourselves.
I spent most of my childhood in the North, visiting the ancestral homes of my parents only on the annual holidays they took to Kerala. When I began working abroad, returning to India meant going to Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, where I found family and friends and the familiar associations of my own upbringing. But over the years I began to spend more of my limited vacation time in the South. My mother now lives in Coimbatore, and that is a powerful motivation. But getting to know South India better is only partly an effort to rediscover my roots; it is also an effort to stay connected with the future. For the future of India lies in the South.
No, that is not mere regional chauvinism. Nor am I just referring to Bangalore's “Silicon Plateau” and Mr. Chandrababu Naidu's “Cyberabad,” though these are powerful symbols of an India that is wired to the twenty-first century. I am thinking also of the South as the part of our country that is getting the basics right — where literacy rates and educational levels are higher than in the North, where women are respected and empowered, where infrastructure is built and maintained, and where the disadvantage of being born in the wrong caste is less of an obstacle to advancement than elsewhere in the country. Above all, the South is a place of time-honored coexistence among religious communities, where the evil bigotries that have been allowed to flourish in northern India simply have no place. We may have had the odd episode of communal violence — sadly, no place on the subcontinent is immune to rioting — but it is inconceivable that the murderous rampages of Gujarat could ever have occurred anywhere in the five southern states.
For all his delightful idiosyncrasies, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam is still a product of the southern India I cherish — a man who rose from humble beginnings to acquire a decent education and build a brilliant governmental career, a Muslim whose mentor was a Hindu priest, a rocket scientist who writes like an advaita philosopher, a college professor whose inspirational vision for India's future is a staple of NRI exchanges on the Internet, a polymath who plays the veena and quotes with equal felicity from the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita. The Dravidian cast of his features and complexion, and the Tamil inflections of his English, complete the picture.
The Delhi wallahs who elected him knew what to expect from President Abdul Kalam. He is, you see, a Madrasi — the very best of the breed.
40. God's Own Country
THOUGH I AM A MALAYALI AND A WRITER, I have no claims to be considered a Malayali writer: indeed, despite setting some of my fictional sequences in Kerala and scattering several Menons through my stories, I could not have written my books in Malayalam because I cannot write my own mother tongue. And yet I am not inclined to be defensive about my Kerala heritage, despite the obvious incongruities of an expatriate praising Kerala from abroad and lauding the Malayali heritage in the English language.
As a child of the city, growing up in Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, my only experience of village Kerala had been as an initially reluctant vacationer during my parents’ annual trips home. For many non-Keralite Malayali children traveling like this, there was often little joy in the compulsory rediscovery of their roots, and many saw it more as an obligation than a pleasure. For city dwellers, rural Kerala (and Kerala is essentially rural, since the countryside envelops the towns in a seamless web) was a world of rustic simplicities and private inconveniences. When I was ten I told my father that this annual migration south was strictly for the birds. But as I grew older, I came to appreciate the magic of Kerala — its beauty, which is apparent to the most casual tourist, and also its ethos, which takes greater engagement to uncover.