Adavi Kolanu means “forest pond.” That was the name of the village where the newlywed couple was sent to teach. The adavi was by then long gone but the kolanu is still there.
Of all the castes in Adavi Kolanu, it was the rajus who dominated. There were some kammas and some reddis, but the rajus were and still are the most powerful. A rich man of the raju caste owned most of the land around there.
Rajus are second in caste status only to brahmins. They once were kings, warriors. Brahmins may be the highest caste, but it was rajus whom they served as priests and advisors, and rajus for whom they performed rituals, and rajus whom they eulogized in poetry. It was rajus whom the brahmins vouched for as incarnations of the gods whom everyone must obey.
In that village there were low castes too: blacksmiths, diggers, potters, prostitutes, weavers, and all.
And then there were outcastes who lived far away from all castes, outside the village boundary, despised and segregated. Even by and from each other. Because there are two untouchable communities there, each with its own colony: the malas in their malapalli and the madigas in their madiga-goodem. The malas are menial laborers who serve in landlords’ houses and in their fields. The madigas haul away dead animals and tan their skins for leather.
For the people who live inside the village, all those living outside of it are despicable. It isn’t as if, to them, one type of outcaste is worse than any other. Both malas and madigas are equally impure, equally filthy, equally repulsive.
But among the outcastes themselves, each community looks down on the other and considers itself higher. A mala would never eat sitting next to a madiga, nor a madiga next to a mala. Even when they convert to Christianity, they still refuse to interdine or intermarry, and they live in separate colonies. But--one thing--they do not consider each other’s touch polluting.
When Prasanna Rao and Maryamma moved to Adavi Kolanu, they set up their home in the village’s malapalli, in a small tattered hut by the pond. The thatched roof was so full of holes it offered little resistance to the rain. When the nice summer breeze turned a little brash, the roof would unceremoniously fly off the mud walls, leaving the hut and its inhabitants feeling naked and powerless. That roof was worse than pointless, it was a menace.
There was only one school in that village, a Christian mission school. Prasanna Rao and Maryamma were hired by the Canadian Baptists to teach there. The two of them were the only teachers. They were also the principals, the clerks, and the janitors, as well as pastors in the church that the school turned into on Sundays. For all this they earned one rupee each per month, which wasn’t enough to buy even a week’s worth of food.
They were even poorer now than they would have been back in their native villages. There they could have devoted their time to catching fish or gleaning fields rather than spending the whole day at school without earning enough for two square meals a day. And they wouldn’t have needed to wear decent clothes. Prasanna Rao could have gone around in loincloths and Maryamma in any old saree, blouseless. Now they were teachers and had to maintain a certain dignity.
But that dignity was precisely what gave their life its meaning. Though they didn’t have enough food to grasp with all their five fingers, they enjoyed the happy sense of social ascent. This was only the beginning.
And indeed both the malas and the madigas of Adavi Kolanu and all the neighboring villages treated them like beneficent beings from another world. Their own teachers. They were determined to make them as comfortable as their means allowed. Every Sunday the untouchable Christian folk from all around made a collection of rice after the church services and donated it to the young couple. They were so impoverished that only a few families were able to contribute, and even they only a fistful each. On the best week, the rice might have added up to five cups. Those poor people would also contribute dung cakes, two from each family, as fuel for the teachers’ hearth.
For Prasanna Rao and Maryamma, life was so different from anything their parents knew or could even imagine. They had been educated from childhood, and now they were educating others. All the people whose children they taught looked up to them. The whole untouchable community felt proud of them. One of their own teaching even the caste children. There was no caste Hindu in the village who could read and write like they could.
And, unlike their parents, Prasanna Rao and Maryamma had been raised as Christians since they were very small, and couldn’t even remember the time before. In church they were taught that Jesus loved them as he loved all human beings, as a father loves his children. In two thousand years no untouchable had ever heard that they too were children of god. Hindus believe the brahmins sprang from the mouth of Brahma the creator, the kshatriyas from his arms, the vaisyas from his thighs, and the sudras from his feet. The untouchables did not come from any part of Brahma. They came--unsanctioned--from the dust under his feet.
There were also around this time some very novel things being said by political leaders. These things that were said had an effect on the way untouchables thought of themselves, even the illiterate majority who couldn’t follow the events of the day in any depth. When social change is taking place, it is like a scent in the air that anyone can smell.
It was at this time that the nationalists were asking the British, “Is it just for you to treat Indians as slaves and inferiors?”
And during the course of this struggle, a strange question came up: “Is it just for Hindus to treat untouchables as slaves and inferiors?” It was being posed not only by defenders of the empire but also by some of the nationalist leaders and reformers.
Satyamoorthy
Soon after moving to Adavi Kolanu, Maryamma gave birth to the couple’s first son, a beautiful infant with red skin, soft curls, and big eyes, just like Prasanna Rao’s mother Rahelamma. They named him G’nana Satyamoorthy--Wise Figure of Truth. G’nana, which means “wise,” was in memory of Maryamma’s father G’nanandam, the railway gangman who had died of smallpox at the age of twenty-seven, and, through him, in honor of Marthamma, whose husband he was. When Satyamoorthy was born she left her bible woman job and came to live in Adavi Kolanu to help care for him.
Maryamma had no milk in her small breasts. She paid a half-starved, black-skinned young mother named Mariamma one meal a day to nurse Satyamoorthy along with her own child. Her huge breasts had enough milk in them for two.
The three women, Maryamma, Mariamma, and Marthamma, all doted on Satyamoorthy. Every evening, holding him in his arms, his proud father took him for a ride across the pond in a canoe. The canoe man was a madiga named Samson who was as strong as Samson in the bible. Prasanna Rao and Samson were friends despite one being mala and the other a madiga. They would pluck lotuses and present them to the child.
The young couple was, as the saying goes, as contented as a full pitcher.
Violence and non-violence
December came.
The month of Christmas.
A beautiful month for a beautiful festival. The nights were cold and there were warm fires in the untouchable colony. In the mornings people woke up to bright sun, warm days and the sight and smell of marigolds. Those marigolds--they are the flowers of Christmas. Their smell is the smell of Christmas.
No festival can be more important to untouchable Christians than Christmas, because it is the birthday of the god who said that they too were his children. So in Adavi Kolanu they celebrated the festival as fabulously as they could. It was only a matter of what they could afford.
A wish sprouted in Prasanna Rao’s heart. He wanted to celebrate a grand Christmas for the sake of his son, only eleven months old, who had yet to experience the joy of Christmas.
What with the excitement natural to a newly wed, newly employed young couple, this was going to be a special Christmas for Prasanna Rao and Maryamma.
They had a plan to make their celebration this year especially happy. The plan involved:
1. Getting new clothes for their son.
2. Beautifying their hut (i.e., cover up its worst flaws)
3. Making ariselu
4. Making a feast with pulav (seasoned rice) and beef on the twenty-fifth.
All of this would cost money. They had to save up paisa by paisa for months in order to pull it off.
In their neighborhood all the untouchable Christian girls and women were joyously jostling each other as they ran after buffalos (these are milch buffalos, not the Wild West buffalos), competing for the dung they needed to repair and renew their floors.
Marthamma also enthusiastically gathered dung. For two weeks before Christmas, she pursued buffalos keenly, ready with her basket whenever they lifted their tails and twitched their anuses. Prasanna Rao bought a potful of white lime to whitewash the walls of their hut.
Christmas brought enormous joy to Christians.
As teachers, Prasanna Rao and Maryamma were also responsible for Christmas celebrations at their school. The missionaries gave them a modest sum, with which they were asked to decorate the classroom with bits of colored tissue and to buy candy for their students. Those children had never seen candy in their lives and were excited beyond limit when they were handed their single, cheap, hard piece of sugar candy. Maryamma, with her years of experience participating in Christmas pageants during her own school days, organized one in Adavi Kolanu. All the characters--Mary, Joseph, angels, Oriental Wise Men, shepherds--were played by pot-bellied, twig-limbed, runny-nosed, severely malnourished schoolchildren. The teachers, students, parents, and other spectators all had a great time at the pageant.
Maryamma and Prasanna Rao could never afford even to think of new clothes for Christmas. But the missionaries surprised them by giving new clothes as a Christmas bonus. When she saw her new saree, Maryamma’s heart overflowed. It was a nice saree. The saree was all that she received. The missionaries didn’t give her a blouse to wear it with. But they gave her some cast-off clothes that arrived from Canada--shirts, dresses, scarves, sweaters--which they gave as presents to their favorite Indian Christians.
Even though these were prized possessions considered worthy of jealousy and thievery and fisticuffs, usually they were in fact useless. The sweaters were no good, people got all scratchy and hot in those sweaters. And how can a coolie walk around in trousers? Everyone would say: “He’s out of his mind.” How can he wash cows and plow fields in stylish Western clothes? It would be like an emperor washing dishes in the kitchen sink. How can an Indian woman in a village wear a skirt or a dress? It would look bizarre, not to mention immodest.
But luckily when Maryamma spotted a very wrinkled little dress with some orange color in the print, she had an idea. She figured it would match her new saree rather well. Luckily also she had learned how to sew and stitch in CBM School. So she took the old dress from Canada and made a blouse out of it to go with her new saree.
They had all the things they needed for the kind of Christmas they wanted to make. It got colder and colder as Christmas approached. More and more beautiful.
Prasanna Rao mixed the white lime with water and fashioned a makeshift paint brush by wrapping old rags around one end of a bamboo stick. He and his friend Madiga Samson together whitewashed the hut walls until they were so white they glowed eerily and prettily in the night.
When they were done, Maryamma and Marthamma plastered the floors with the dung they had accumulated over several days, filling all the small ditches but leaving out the big ones which would require more material than they could get. While the dung was still wet, Maryamma made big big muggus (floral and curlicue patterns drawn with a mixture of powdered rice and white lime) on the floor. When she was done, she stood back and looked over her work and thought how, when the floor dried, it would look so beautiful, the white white muggu against the black black dung.
Marthamma made her rice and jaggery eats for the festival.
And one more day to Christmas and their house and neighborhood was filled with the Christmas smells of marigolds, dung, white lime, and melted jaggery.
They all went to sleep talking about the day to come.
Maryamma got up early, even before the cock crowed. There were many things to do. Wash hair, put on new clothes, cook feast, and go to church. The feast had to be made before leaving for church, because they would want to eat as soon as they returned.
The sun was not up in the sky. In the dark she boiled a big pot of water for their baths. She washed her long hair carefully and finished bathing. Finally, the sun came up and her son woke up.
All the mala Christians were getting ready to go to church. Maryamma still had to bathe her son. Marthamma laid him on her legs and massaged him firmly with coconut oil. Then the two women took the boy outside and poured steaming water on his head. They scrubbed him with black lentil powder and squeezed his nose clean. Maryamma held her son’s head over an earthen vessel filled with smoldering frankincense. His hair dried into soft, perfumed curls. And with a great deal of ceremony, with praise and cajolements from his father and grandmother, she put new clothes on her son, which they had managed to scrape up enough money to buy. Marthamma ran her hands on both sides of his face and cracked all her knuckles, admiring their handiwork: “Our son!”
The church service would start soon, and Maryamma still had to make the trip into the village to the komati kottu-- general store--to buy spices for the feast. Komatis are the trading/merchant caste and kottu means store.
Maryamma put on her Christmas clothes to go out. They were new. Well, practically new. Maryama’s blouse had puffed sleeves on it, according to the latest fashion.
It was only within Maryamma’s lifetime that untouchable women had been allowed to go around in sarees. Before that no untouchable--male or female--was allowed to wear anything more than a loincloth that barely covered his or her genitals. They had to stay, at all times and in all seasons, naked from the waist up so their clothes would not accidentally billow and pollute a caste Hindu by contact.
In those old days, when the cloth produced by the weaver-caste people with their ancient tools was scarce, the brahmins decreed that none of it should ever go towards clothing untouchables. An untouchable could only get his loincloth from clothes he had taken off the dead body of a caste Hindu before it was cremated. The right to pick clothes from corpses was an exclusive privilege of untouchables that no caste Hindu, however poor, had the right to infringe upon.
This dehumanizing dress code varied only slightly from region to region. In Kerala an untouchable woman was allowed to wear a saree but not a blouse, and whenever she saw a caste Hindu man, she had to throw her pamita--the part that goes over the chest--to the ground and stand bare-breasted before him. This was all seen by the caste Hindus as well as the untouchables as absolutely normal. It was the horrified Christian missionaries who first introduced blouses to the untouchable women of Kerala.
Starting in Marthamma’s time, untouchable women began to be allowed to wear sarees and men to wear dhotis and shirts (though the men were still required to wear a dirty rag around their necks to offset the decency of their clothes). Maryamma--an educated woman, a teacher, and a Christian--felt she had the right to dress as well as she was able to afford. She was proud of her new orange saree and flower-print blouse.
In these new Christmas clothes Maryamma went out into the village to buy spices for the Christmas feast.
There was no Christmas inside the village since there were no Christians inside the village, only caste Hindus. Maryamma walked fast towards the komati kottu. As usual there were caste men standing around the kottu smoking cigars and chatting. Maryamma saw several of them, mostly rajus, the powerful rajus with cigars in their mouths and hands. Maryamma lowered her head as she entered their field of vision, as untouchables had to in the presence of caste people.
For the men standing there, it wasn’t enough that she lowered her head. When they saw this mala girl in colorful new clothes, their eyes turned the color of bile. They could not believe what they were seeing. The gall of this girl. Not only was she wearing a saree, she wasn’t even wearing it in gochee (gathered and passed between the thighs from the front and tucked in the waist in the back, like a loincloth). She was wearing it like a caste woman, a high-caste woman at that! And the blouse! It had puffed sleeves, like the blouse of an aristocratic lady.
Maryamma, even with her sight clamped to the ground, immediately sensed the contempt. Her heart beat fast. The taste in her mouth was metallic. She didn’t know whether to turn back or proceed to the store. It was then that one of the men took his cigar out of his mouth. “Look at this! A mala bitch wearing a saree! It would do her good to have it ripped off.”
Maryamma withered in her flower-print blouse. Her puffed sleeves deflated. She gasped for breath. She turned and ran home without her spices, with tears running down her face as the men behind her jeered.
It took a long time for Prasanna Rao to make out what had happened because he could not get his wife to stop crying as she told him. When he finally understood, he could not be still. He, in his shirt and dhoti (his own nicest clothes), his face red with rage, at once went off to see Madiga Samson. He in his soft tense voice explained to his friend what had happened to his wife. Together they headed to the church.
The church was all clean and ready for the festival, but Christmas service had not yet started. The pastor, the untouchable elders--both mala and madiga--and a few early parishioners were already there. When Samson told them what had happened, they called the Christmas off. The congregation turned around and went somberly home. Their Christmas had been poisoned.
For centuries they had put up with insult. But on that Christmas day what had happened to Maryamma hurt the entire community. They could not take it willingly anymore. People stood in knots at the street corners, and under the trees, bibles in their hands, and talked in low tones with serious expressions. The elders and the pastor and Prasanna Rao and Samson all tried to make up their minds what they should do, what they could do.
After a long debate, it was decided that the untouchable elders should meet with the village caste elders to get an assurance that they, the people inside the village, acknowledged that what was done to the lady teacher was not just.
But when they did they were told to go back and tell the mala-madiga whores and sons-of-bitches not to forget where their proper place was. What was that teacher munda--prostitute--doing wearing a blouse? Had her eyes climbed up on top of her head just because she’d learned two bits of alphabets?
When their elders came back and told the untouchables what had been said, the malas and madigas burned with humiliation. They seethed with rage.
And in the village the uppercaste Hindus burned, too--with contempt and righteous anger. They wanted to teach the untouchables a lesson.
That Christmas morning, Adavi Kolanu turned into a battlefield. The forest pond churned. Both inside the village and outside in the untouchable colonies, men were raising clouds of dust in the streets and alleys as they ran here and there to gather forces. They carried swords, sickles, hoes, and hammers. Women hid inside armed with brooms, pestles, and pots of chili powder. Children clung to their mothers’ sarees and calves.
Each side knew the other’s intent to bring the matter out into the open. The two factions met at the border of the village in tense, sweating knots. That morning, they were ready to slit each others’ throats. The Hindus and the untouchables.
Those raju men who had insulted Maryamma stood at the head of the caste Hindus, while on the other side of the line untouchables gathered behind Prasanna Rao and the giant Madiga Samson, who, eyes wild with rage, slapped the inside of his thighs in a mad gesture of challenge and roared, “Come on you sons-of-bitches, if you have the balls. We’ll rip you to shreds!”
Maryamma and Marthamma stood in fright on the side trying to calm Satyamoorthy, who was crying uncontrollably, by passing him back and forth between them. But he wouldn’t be quiet. He knew something bad was happening.
At that time in Adavi Kolanu there lived a diminutive brahmin who was a fervent follower of Gandhi. The British had put him in jail for working as a Congress volunteer in the East Godavari district. After he was released and returned to the village he was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to put Gandhi’s teachings into practice. Gandhi was at that time campaigning to preserve the caste system by reforming the practice of untouchability.
Every evening the little brahmin would sit in the village square and gather a crowd around to sing to:
Malalu mathramu manushulu kaara....
(Are not the untouchables also human beings....)
Some of the villagers thought he was a joker and some admired him and said, “Aha! Oho!”
On Christmas Day 1933, when the caste and outcaste men of Adavi Kolanu faced each other with weapons in hand, ready to kill, the little brahmin saw his big chance to put his Gandhian principles into practice. He came running in his white dhoti, with his tuft of hair in the middle of the back of his shaved head, he made his way through the crowd to the eye of the storm, and right there he fell to the ground on his knees. With his hands folded in supplication and tears in his eyes, his stomach heaving, he begged the men to stop the violence: “Kill me first before you kill each other.”
And when he said these words men began to wilt under this dictum.
Killing a brahmin is the maha pathakam--the sin of sins. It is equivalent to killing a thousand cows or sixteen sudras. The brahmin, in offering himself to be killed, had played a subtle trick. With those potent words he was forcing the untouchables to drop their modest demand for a little dignity or commit a sin that had no redemption.
The untouchables backed down. Seeing that, the rajus withdrew in a manner which suggested: “Very well. We’re not the cowards. Since you backed down, we are relenting.” Men and women turned around and went back to their respective places--the rajus to the village and the untouchables to their colony. The brahmin had restored things to normal.
Later the little disciple of Gandhi went around to the untouchables and preached to them the principle of ahimsa (non-violence). He advised them, in order to avoid conflict, not to put on nice clothes when going into the village.
Very precocious disciple he was. Three years later, a thousand miles away, Gandhi himself would resolve a similar conflict in a similar village in a similar manner.
The village was Chakwara in the northwestern state of Jaipur (now Rajastan). An untouchable, as an act of piety upon returning from a pilgrimage, arranged a dinner for his fellow untouchables. As the guests sat down to enjoy the meal, scores of caste Hindus, armed with clubs, attacked them, beating the untouchables as they fled and stomping in their food. The cause of the conflict: the host had dared to serve, and the guests to eat, ghee, which the caste Hindus of that village decided was too good for untouchables. When the victims approached Gandhi, whom they had heard was the uplifter of untouchables, and put their case, he chastised them for provoking caste violence by eating what was forbidden to them.
Satyamoorthy always remembered that terrible day in Adavi Kolanu but he had been too small to understand what was going on. Years later his grandmother explained, “That day, if the great Lord Jesus Christ were not on our side, they would have surely slain us all.” His mother would tell him, “Nayana, I want you to understand what bad things can happen when an untouchable wears decent clothes. They would never allow us to, never.” She shook her head sadly and told him that that had not been the first time, nor the last, that she was humiliated. Humiliated for wearing nice clothes, for being clean, for being literate, for being a teacher, for desiring to be treated with dignity.
The untouchables backed down. But it had been a day when the malas and madigas of Adavi Kolanu had stood up to the rajus. It was that day, the day of Satyamoorthy’s first Christmas. Part of the credit for that goes to the missionaries who first gave the untouchables clothes and taught them how to wear them.
Many of the untouchable teachers who had been educated by the missionaries became the torchbearers, in villages like Adavi Kolanu, in struggles against caste oppression. They were the ones who did not want to go on begging the caste Hindus for water. They were the ones who led the struggles for independent water sources in the 1920s and 30s. Prasanna Rao’s own nephew Krupanandam, a teacher, would be beaten by the kammas for daring to fetch water from a caste well.
But the same missionaries who, knowingly or unknowingly, stirred the untouchables’ desire for social dignity were revolted by their militancy and opposed their taking up arms in self-defense.
Comments