Subir Roy: 'Main garib Brahman hoon'
The words of the guard brought back to me the other face of the
Brahmin - a helpful soul, full of humanism despite his poverty
Subir Roy / New Delhi May 22, 2010, 0:22 IST
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!
------------------------------------
----
INFORMATION OVERLOAD?
Get all ZESTCaste mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to ZESTMedia-digest@yahoogroups.com, OR, if you have a Yahoo! Id, change your settings at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/join/
PARTICIPATE:-
On this list you can share caste news, discuss caste issues and network with like-minded anti-caste people from across India and the world. Just write to zestcaste@yahoogroups.com
TELL FRIENDS TO SIGN UP:-
If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTCaste by sending a blank mail to ZESTCaste-subscribe@yahoogroups.com OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join/
Also have a look at our sister list, ZESTMedia: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTMedia/Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTCaste/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
ZESTCaste-digest@yahoogroups.com
ZESTCaste-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
ZESTCaste-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
No comments:
Post a Comment