This course presents some important vignettes of a complex, highly diverse India that is also witnessing unprecedented changes since its formal independence in 1947 from Great Britain. The lectures revolve around social dimensions of change, the continuing influence of ancient texts on contemporary India, political democracy, economic transition from the state to the market, gender relations, India's economic globalisation and changing world view. While one of the objectives is to capture the multifaceted process of change, the course also critically examines some of the tensions inherent in these changes. For example, how does gender inequality play itself out in a changing Indian society, how do the modernist conceptions of art entailing market valuation challenge the more socio-centric values found in South India, what are the politics linguistic identities, and how might India address its myriad development challenges such as poverty and unemployment. No specific prior knowledge is required. However, it would be helpful if students are aware of the socio political dynamics at play in contemporary India and keep themselves abreast with current affairs and debates in the country to fully appreciate the various dimensions and contours if the subject matter in the course. This course is taught in English. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/hx8mhxb
2.5 India from ‘Below’--1
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From the course by The University of Melbourne
Contemporary India
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From the lesson
Indian politics 1948-2014
This week we will cover the post-independence politics of India from 1948 to 2014. It will discuss the various leaders especially the contribution of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi to Indian polity. You will get an idea about how India went about its task of nation building and the various challenges it confronted along the way. The section will also cover the dominance of the Congress party and the factors that led to its downfall in recent times. The debates about linguistic states, affirmative action, secularism and the changing nature of Indian federalism will be discussed. You should be able to appreciate the reasons as to why, even with all its shortcomings, India remains an exemplar of robust democracy unlike most other post-colonial countries.
Meet the Instructors
Anthony D'CostaProfessor
School of Social and Political Sciences
Hi, welcome back.
We're now going to look at India From Below and
I'm going to focus in particular on the social, political history of Tamilnadu,
which was a leader in a phenomena, which I would argue really became
dominant overall the country in the 1990 and 2000s.
So I'm going to start, as this outline indicates,
looking at Tamilnadu and the issue of language in the nation.
Very briefly touch on the history of the non-Brahmin movement,
the Dravidian movement.
And it's connection, surprising, wonderful, interesting, with the Tamil
film industry, then tie it into the process of social change in politics in Tamilandu.
And look at the rise of the two parties, which have benefited from that -
the DMK, I'll unpack that in a minute and the AIADMK.
So I want to start then with another of these violent deaths,
suicides in the cause of politics and talk about the story of Chinnasamy.
Chinnasamy lived in the town of Tiruchirappalli.
He left his family, his young wife and young child.
Walked to the Tiruchy railway station doused himself
with kerosene, lit it and died saying, “Hindi Ozhiga! Tamil Vazhga!”.
That is down with Hindi, up with Tamil.
Long live Tamil.
He was a martyr for the cause of Tamil.
He was one of a group of people who wanted not simply a separate state for
Tamil, but for Tamil to become a separate nation.
Here's where we're talking about Tamilandu down here.
Here's the capital, Chennai.
Let's go back a bit and
do a quick recapitulation about the long history of linguistic divisions in India.
There are about 1,420 major languages, about 7,000 if you count the minor ones.
But there's a major invisible divide in India,
which I've indicated by this line here.
South of this, these languages here,
Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil are all Dravidian languages.
The languages spoken North of the line have their roots in a completely
different language family.
Nobody really knows where the Dravidian languages came from.
They have completely different grammar,
no known living associates in broad terms.
North of the line, the Indo-European languages have links with Iranian,
with Latin, with Greek, with English, with German, with French, Spanish and so on.
All of the Indo-European languages.
The most commonly, the most widely spoken and
I've included in this big blue circle here is the Hindi-speaking region.
Not all of these people speak exactly the same varieties of Hindi.
If I go a little bit outside of Delhi,
I find myself scrambling to understand what people are saying.
But broadly speaking,
the largest single linguistic group in India are those speaking Hindi.
In the period before independence,
we had the emergence of what's called the Non-Brahmin Movement.
And essentially, it represented the sequential involvement of different
groups, different caste groups in particular into the modern economy.
And the fact that the first group to get English language education,
the first ones to be able to take up positions in the government,
to take up positions in the modern sector as lawyers,
as schoolteachers, as journalists, were Brahmins.
They were the traditional literary class, they were the first to take up
the opportunities provided by English education.
They moved in even though they are a minority, less than 5% of the population
probably, they colonized the majority of the positions in the modern economy.
The majority of the population, let's call them two-thirds,
who are essentially the equivalent of OBCs are the backward castes.
Then came on the scene, especially those in the advanced section and
realized that their hopes for
moving into the sect here were being bought by the position of the Brahmins.
Now the Brahmins, as for as the ideology and probably the actuality
were a group who had originally come into India from somewhere,
maybe originally in Turkey, but who had come in to India and it come to the South.
Sanskrit, the traditional religious language of the Brahmins is one of
the Indo-European languages.
So the terms of political struggle were cast in
Tamilnadu in terms of Tamil and in terms of the fact,
that Tamil had imported many words from Sanskrit.
So the struggle against Brahmin domination had it's
form in the structure of the purification of the language.
And the rejection also of many aspects of caste and caste hierarchy and
the place played in it by the Brahmins.
So the groups that come forward have social reform, rejection of caste and
promotion of things like self-respect marriages.
You marry yourself, you don't need a Brahmin priest and
that opposition to the place of the Brahmins continued in a much stronger
way when we come into the electoral politics after independence.
One of the leaders of that movement was this chap here,
EVK Ramaswamy Naicker,
otherwise, known as Periyar.
I met him when I was first doing my fieldwork in India.
Funny old bloke, but he was a very sharp polemicist in his youth.
And if there's time, we can talk about some of the things that Periyar did,
but he was one of the ones who promoted the cause of the Dravidian speakers.
He had hopes of uniting all the Dravidian speakers.
And he promoted or created this party, the DK,
the Dravida Kazagham, the Dravidian Party.
And they promoted various things, like a separate nation or
maybe separate nations or maybe including all of them.
But in 1949, Periyar who was already getting on,
married a young woman in her late twenties.
And other follows of his and he also made her his successor in the party.
Other followers in the DMK, which is the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham,
Dravidian Progressive Party who rejected that,
split off and created the DMK.
Those people were people who'd been part of the party in the anti-Hindi agitations
before independence.
But what's really striking and one of the most interesting things,
if you want to follow it up is their involvement in the Tamil film industry as
we'll see in a second.
The Tamil film industry and the DMK and
the success of the AIADMK have all grown out of film, quite amazing.
It's hard to imagine a parallel anywhere else in the world.
The language issues becomes critical,
because of a provision in the National Constitution adopted in 1950,
which said that Hindi and English ought to be the two national languages.
There are other state languages, but the national languages ought to be Hindi and
English.
Hindi in its form written in the Sanskrit script, Devanagari.
Was to become the official language after 1965, a time bomb.
And as we got closer to 1965,
people in Madras state but particularly in the city of Madras, now Chennai, and
Tamil Nadu generally, became agitated, began to protest against this possibility
that Hindi would become the only national language.
It's not spoken much.
It wasn't spoken much in Tamil Nadu at that time.
When I went to Tamil Nadu in 1967 for
the first time you could not see any sign written in Devanagari.
Signs outside post offices had been tarred over in those parts which were written
in Devanagari and you had these violent agitations,
you had suicides like the one of Jena Sami that I mentioned as protests.
And as a consequence, the government had to relent.
They had to accept that there was a veto by the non-Hindi speaking states in India.
And that as long as they wished to retain English as one of the official languages,
that would have to happen.
One of the things that came out of that was the so called three language formula
where a student, ideally, would study their mother tongue,
would study Hindi, and maybe English as well.
So If we look at the experience of the DMK and
its rise to power, we can see that by granting a linguistic state,
by accommodating their protests against Hindi,
the potential threat to national unity was diffused.
Because in effect the democratic process accommodated them,
allowed them to achieve their major demand,
which is a space in the political firmament for
this large group of other backward castes.
Okay, but that's only part of what's going on.
And so we need now to dig down a bit deeper.
I’m only going to refer to two ideas here.
One of them comes from a famous article by M.N. Srinivas, an eminent Indian
anthropologist, called <i>Mobility in the Indian Caste System.</i>
And refers to a concept which he called Sanskritization.
Basically it’s a process of emulation by those
lower down in the caste system of those higher up.
That is, if my group is doing something which those above me think is demeaning,
not clean, less acceptable, we'll change.
We'll give it up.
If the fact that we eat meat is a problem, we'll become vegetarians.
If we allow our widows to remarry and
they don't, then we'll stop our widows from re-marrying.
We're going to emulate our betters to become more like them so
that the grounds for discrimination against us are reduced.
The other idea comes from Karl Deutsch's article, which I've listed there.
The idea of political and social mobilization.
And as the quote says, “The process in which major clusters of old social,
economic and psychological commitments are eroded or broken and
people become available for new patters of socialization and behaviour”.
It's a process by which, in other words,
you cast off the old and begin to be pulled into a new world.
And I want to look at some of the ways that that's happened
in this area of South India.
Not just in Tamil Nadu, but in adjacent areas which are relevant for our purpose.
So I'm going to begin by referring to an important book
written by Robert Hardgrave Jr., The Nadars of Tamil Nadu.
It's a historical account of one particular group,
this chap is a member of that group from the neighbouring state of Andhra,
who had originally had the caste name of Shanars.
Their job is to climb up palm trees,
harvest the nuts, and ferment a wine
called toddy from the wine, or from the juice that comes out of the palm.
Climb up.
I wish you could see these guys.
There is a YouTube video which you can find about it.
Okay so basically to climb up the tree, he has almost nothing.
A couple of ropes like that.
He has a knife here and basically that’s it, and
they whiz up the tree like nothing.
But they were considered to be a poor, low caste.
In part, because they're working class,
but also because of their association with alcohol.
The upper castes traditionally don't drink alcohol.
In the neighbouring state of Kerala,
they were subject to all forms of discrimination.
They could be forced to work by a landlord without pay.
So called begar.
Now, many of them,
when British Colonialism provided the opportunities, took it up.
Went overseas,worked in places like Sri Lanka or Malaya.
Made money, came back, bought land, bought jobs, and
began to raise their economic status.
Some of them took the opportunity to convert to Christianity.
There's a famous episode, which I wish we could go into,
called the Breast Cloth Controversy.
Shanars in Kerala were
prohibited by the upper castes from doing a whole series of things.
One of which is wearing any covering from the waist up.
Women had to go nude from the waist up.
You can imagine how Christian missionaries from Britain in the late nineteenth
century felt about constituents who were nude from the waist up.
So they started dressing their ladies up in jackets and things like this.
They were then set upon by the upper caste, who went to the courts.
Eventually, the courts and all decided that they had a right to do it, but
it was a big struggle on the part of the Nadars to get that accepted.
They followed the path of Sanskritization that Srinivas talked about.
They changed their status.
They stopped making alcohol.
They became educated.
They changed their diet.
They took on more Sanskrit-type names,
the kind of names the Brahmans gave their children.
They changed the kind of jewellery that they wore.
And most importantly, they changed the name of the group, so they're no longer,
at least in some parts, called Shanar, they were called Nadar.
Which meant rulers of the land, something fancy and high sounding.
Here is a member of the syndicate.
K. Kamaraj.
Kamaraj Nadar.
One of the syndicate who appointed Shastri as prime
minister appointed Indira Gandhi as prime minister.
In his time, a very powerful politician.
Now I want to touch on an account that's in the book written by Kusum Nair,
called <i>Blossoms in the Dust</i> because it explains something of a huge
transformation which was wrought by a whole series of things in Tamil Nadu.
Shortly after independence, Nair went around various parts of India,
but in this particular episode she went to the Tanjore delta,
the rice bowl of Tamil Nadu.
And she was engaged in conversation with a group of landless labourers.
People who had almost no clothes to wear, who lived in very simple huts,
had almost no possessions beyond a few pots.
Where subsistence farmers lived by sharecropping.
And she talked to them about their lives.
And then she tried a kind of thought experiment.
She said, well, I want you to think about this…
supposing that the government offered you land, any amount of land,
how much would you ask for?
And she says they were puzzled.
She pressed them.
She said, you know it's free, you don't have to do anything.
They're going to give it to you.
How much would you ask for?
And eventually a few of them said a half acre.
One of them who has six children and was hiring in, I think from memory,
three acres said that another acre and a half or two would be fine.
And he'd be happy to do that on a sharecropping basis.
Nair's point is that these people's expectations are so
low that they can't imagine breaking out of a world
in which the best that you could expect was a few more acres.
A small increment, to the land you already have,
which might help you survive a little bit better.
So that's a mindset which is due to be changed.
And it's being changed by the impact of the Dravidian parties,
by the impact of technology, by the media, especially film,
but later radio and later television, by the newspapers.
But by the whole idea of involvement in the idea of being a Tamilian,
of being proud of Tamil culture, of Tamil literature.
That kind of nationalism which drives the anti-Hindi movement is also
a major force in bringing a new kind of consciousness to these very,
very poor labourers that Nia was interviewing.
We could follow that up if you're interested by looking at
Sumathi Ramawamy's book, <i>The Passions of the Tongue</i>.
It explores the whole relationship between language and politics and
society, but we don’t have time to go into it.
And if you’re interested in following up film, have a look for
Hardgrave’s really interesting article, <i>Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu</i>.
One of the things that is really important as we come into it in Tamil Nadu
is the fan clubs which follow different important actors also then
become recruiting places for recruitment into political process.
Support for the DMK, support for the AIDMK.
So let's look at some of these crucial leaders, chief ministers of the state
who are also involved in the film industry.
The first of them, C.N. Annadurai, was a film director,
a film writer, and really the first of the significant DMK leaders.
This is a statue of him, as you can see,
outside of Engineering College to the south of Chennai.
Here is M Karunanidhi, until very recently
Chief Minister of Tamilnadu, been Chief Minister five times.
His son, with the very interesting name of Stalin is next in line
if it's not his younger brother.
So here we have somebody also a film writer,
a film director, and a chief minister.
On the other side of politics, we have M.G. Ramachandran.
Nobody calls him M.G. Ramachandran, he's only referred to as MGR.
And here he is at a meeting, but
MGR was a major film star and also a chief minister.
He was succeeded by his partner, Jayalalitha, and
in Tamilnadu people often only have one name.
Here's a picture of her with Hillary Clinton.
Jayalalitha, Ama as she's known has been Chief Minister of Tamilnadu four times.
And she's still currently in office since 1911, but a former film star.
If we then step way back and look at the politics of Tamilnadu,
although multiple parties contest election in 2009 from memory in Chennai South.
43 candidates contested the election, of whom 41, I think, lost their deposit.
But overall, what we have in constituency after constituency is coalitions.
Basically two coalitions, one based around the DMK.
One based around the AIDMK, but
lots of other parties in different areas being the ones who do the contesting.
Here's a chart put together by Sheena Vasenremani
which shows that basically we've converged to around, not quite, but
a two party situation in Tamlinadu.
So to wrap it up then, the impact of rise of the DMK and the AIADMK,
has been to really bring the OBCs into politics.
To open up the scope by widening the range of reservations by a whole
series of populous measures, like a free lunch scheme.
By bringing out other wealthier schemes like that,
free televisions, free electricity, I can't remember them all.
Some of them it's really hard for a government to pay for.
But the most important thing then to draw out of this is that on the whole,
we've seen huge political and social change, which has been peaceful.
A major transformation of the political landscape,
the obliteration of the Congress.
Not formed government since 1967, or actually since before then.
And only a few number of MPs referred to the National Parliament.
But, a major transformation,
basically bubbling up from this major change, based on language, based on film.
But, a remarkable change in consciousness amongst the population in Tamilnadu,
which has led to the rise of the OBCs and their domination of state politics.
Now, in the next lecture, we'll follow that same theme, but we'll look at India's
most populated, most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and see what that story tells.
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