My article "Beneath the flowery oratory, a lack of democratic values' was published in the Chennai edition of the Times of India on June 3, 2015. The same can be read either at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Beneath-the-flowery-oratory-a-lack-of-democratic-values/articleshow/47522678.cms
Or at
http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/index.aspx?EID=31807&dt=20150603
The academic version can be read below:
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The sound and fury of Dravidian oratory
Bernard Bate’s “Tamil
Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic practice in South India”
(Columbia University Press, New York, 2009) is a tour de force in unveiling the rhetorical pedigrees of Tamil
politicians’ stage speech, and in providing the cultural raison dêtre for the excessive devotion displayed by the cadres of
the Dravidian parties towards their leaders in Tamilnadu. One would be
surprised to learn that the emotionally charged flowery stage speeches of
Dravidian political leaders have their antecedents in the literary genres of
recent past, in late nineteenth century, and not before.
Public political oratory should be seen
as a form of democratic ethic, which defines the relationship between the
leaders and people, constructs the discourse of ideas in the public sphere, and
gives shape to the social imaginaries of the historical times. In the Western
history of intellectual practices public political oratory dates back to the
time of ancient Greeks whereas in Tamilnadu the history of which is as ancient
as that of the Greeks nothing like a Ciceronian style political oratory was
ever depicted in Tamil letters until very late in the nineteenth century. Bate
asks, “Why? This is a
land with grammar and poetics, and a land with well developed martial tradition.
Why had no rhetoric been written? Aren’t the arts of persuasion and public
speaking integral to political action? Ancient and medieval Tamil scholars were
among the world’s most sophisticated linguists, unrivalled, in fact, until the
rise of Western linguistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
In pursuit of his
questions Bate does discover that the praise of the kings by the Sangam age poets is a form of political
speech but it is Professor Tho.Paramasivam’s insight that makes Bate draw
stylistic parallels between a stage speech of Vaiko, the then expelled DMK
leader and the speech of Jeevagan in Manonmaniyam
a nineteenth century play written by Sundaram Pillai.
Although Bate
is able to demonstrate that the unlikely candidates Sundaram Pillai and
Thiru.Vi.ka were the real precursors of Dravidian oratory, his real
breakthrough emerges when he is able to see the formation of Dravidian
political oratory in pure literary Tamil in the speeches of C.N.Annadurai and
Kalaignar Karunanidhi in 1940s.
In a complete departure from the political
speech styles uttered in colloquial Tamil by the then congress leaders who
spoke to the listening public as if they were the landlords addressing a
gathering of farmhands, C.N.Annadurai inaugurated the Dravidian oratory of
speaking in pure literary Tamil (Cen
Thamiz). Even Periyar E.V.Ramaswamy Naicker, the political mentor of
C.N.Annadurai did not speak in the high literary Tamil, and like other congress
leaders of his time Periyar continued to speak in colloquial Tamil. This was the historical time when the
rediscovery of exquisite Sangam age
Tamil poetry (100 -300 CE) was making waves and the Tamil renaissance was in
full swing. With the adaptation of the literary high Tamil for his political
oratory C.N.Annadurai brought about a revolution in political speech that enabled
him and the other Dravidian politicians to pose as the heirs to an ancient,
non-Aryan literary heritage. While the adaptation of formally addressing the
audiences as respectful citizens (Periyorkaley,
Thaimrakaley Oh Elders, Mothers
etc.,.) brought masses on an equal conversation, the frequent references in the
speeches of Annadurai and Karunanidhi to the bravery of Tamil kings and women
alluded to in Sangam poetry helped
them to create an aura of glorious Tamil past. Annadurai further displayed rare
scholarship in Kampan’s Ramayana, which he used effectively to ridicule religious
beliefs and to advance his rationalist atheist stands. Annadurai’s oratory
borrowed heavily from the rhetorical techniques of Western political speeches
of leaders and thinkers like Emerson, Lincoln, and Ingersoll. Karunanidhi
perfected the art of references to classical Tamil texts such as Thirukkural, Silappathikaram, and Purananooru.
Both Annadurai and Karunanidhi acknowledged their indebtedness to Bharathidasan,
the unparalleled Dravidian poet for their utopian vision that permeated their
oratory.
Bate completely misses out on
Bharathidasan and partially on Annadurai and Karunanidhi since he bases his
research mainly on the field data collected from 1992- 1995 in Madurai. The gain is that Bate is able to situate the
expressions of Dravidian oratory in a series of real political rallies he
attended in Madurai in 1994-1995 and these rallies are not different from what
we witness today. Bate writes; “Over a two and a half month period,
Madurai was transformed several times from one utopian vision to another. The
transformations affected by these events followed a general pattern; these
large procession by virtue of their
filmic representations of remote locales and civilizational formations, as well
as images of a powerful Dravidian past, a past of kings and heroes,
instantiated a far wider set of space times than the temple festival ordinarily
does. And the visions of all of the political parties -DMK, MDMK (Vaiko),
AIADMK (Jayalalitha) and Congress- were similarly architecture and utopianized;
only the characters that peopled and ruled those utopias changed.”
In the first hand documentation of the
political pageantries that consist of paper castles, huge cut outs, praise
posters, serial bulb installations, series of flag poles, and paper photo flag
decorations Bate recognizes the visual and spatial resonances and counter parts
of Dravidian oratory. In those pageantries what Bate calls the ‘Dravidian
aesthetic’, the bitter ironies of Dravidian oratory’s democratic ethic emerge clearly
and loudly. The classical literary Tamil
the Dravidian leaders used to strike a high civilizational conversation with
the masses actually functions to hierarchize the leaders and party cadres. If the decorative epithets used for the DMK
leaders such as Kazhaghattin Porvaal
Vaiko ( Viako, the war sword of the party, Eettimunai Ilamaran (Spear point Elamaran), Theepori Arumugam (Roman Candle Arumugam) indicate as if there has
been a war, the superlatives used for Jayalalitha of AIADMK like the
‘Revolutionary Goddess’ suggest as if there has been a revolution, and a post
revolution trance ceremony. Indeed Bate likens the atheist political rallies of
DMK to the village religious festivals. The Dravidian political orators
gesticulate, thump the air, stamp their feet, warn their enemies, adjust their
long shawls, roll their eyes, and drink a lot of soda in between to make their
leaders demi gods who walk on earth. The party cadres who respond to this
oratory and the village festival culture of the pageantries display themselves
as self-sacrificing foot soldiers, and masochist ritual devotees. Bate records
the excessive devotion of AIADMK party workers through a study of posters, cut
outs, and praise verbiage.
Another remarkable achievement of
Bernard Bate’s book is that he worked with an eloquent female orator,
M.Kavitha, who was willing to divulge her rhetorical strategies and career
frustrations. In an appendix, Bate produces a 1995 speech by Kavitha as
thirty-five page oratorical specimen of stage Tamil in Tamil with English
translation. It would be a valuable document to know the participation of women
as Dravidian political orators. Bate discerns that the modern “Dravidianist
political paradigm… took the form of an invented tradition, a neoclassicism,
the framing of which as a nation and as a people was entirely new, though the
content was quite old”.
The sound and fury of Dravidian oratory may be
nothing but political hyperbole and hubris signifying nothing but they do
reveal a fascinating phenomenon of Tamil politics, culture, and history. The
excessive devotion the Dravidian oratory helped to perpetuate may tell us that
it is time to reclaim ordinary speech for Tamil political stage so that its
democratic ethic is restored.
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