COMMENTARY 

NOVEMBE R 29, 2014 vol xlIX no 48 EPW   Economic & Political Weekly24

M S S Pandianand His Critical Pen

Janaki Nair 

How does one speak about a fig-

ure who has in equal measure

been lionised, vilified, celebra-

ted, denigrated, by all those whom he

 wished to influence, convert, contest,

teach or quite simply annoy? How, ex-

cept by admitting that he succeeded in

doing all of the above. He was an agent

provocateur, the high priest of icono-

clasm, a scholar who inconveniently

turned up at quite a different place from

 where you expected him: now a Marxist,

then a critic of Marxism; a diehard Tamil

nationalist, but taking a principled stand

against Indian nationalism; an avowed

rationalist, yet an advocate of nuanced

readings of religion.

There were few people – writing in

particular on Tamil Nadu or on caste –

 who escaped his acerbic comment or his

savage pen. It was far too rare a kind of

intellection, a passionate attachment to

certain political goals without lapsing

into sloganeering. At a time when many

are moving, as if mesmerised, towards

the strong man who is offering us a

solution to all our problems, and public

intellectuals are increasingly revealing

 what Edward Said called a “fawning

elasticity with regard to one’s own side”,

M S S Pandian’s death has been an

irreparable loss for the Indian academy

in particular and public intellection

more generally.

There was ample testimony on the

 walls of Jawaharlal Nehru University

(JNU), following his sudden death, to his

short but pervasively influential life as a

teacher, mentor and participant in the

life of the university. His courses were

immensely popular, and his role as men-

tor was well acknowledged. Many stu-

dents spoke of how he had introduced

them to important texts, opened their

eyes as it were. I would like to look back

on his other pasts, other institutional

spaces where we were together, to

reflect on his trajectory as an intellectual

and the important milestones of his

scholarly career.

First Work 

 Although he proudly announced, at

many meetings at the Centre for Historical

Studies (CHS), JNU  that he had never

entered the archives and that he was

therefore not a historian, his first work,

The Political Economy of Agrarian Change:

 Nanchilnadu 1880-1939   was economic

history of the recognisable kind: in it he

adopted and challenged Marxist under-

standings of capitalism with reference to

a period of increasing wet rice cultiva-

tion in southern Travancore; he not only

critiqued political economy frameworks

by introducing the idea of environmental

factors and social structure (the first, a

relatively unexplored framework at the

time), but mounted a challenge to those

organising peasant movements in the

area for not adequately understanding

“local conditions”.

From Marxism and the mode of pro-

duction debate, Pandian marked a radical

shift in his interests when he joined the

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in

Calcutta/Kolkata as a fellow, and began

 work on his new provocation, The Image

Trap. It was an analysis of the phenome-

nal success of M G Ramachandran (MGR )

not just as an actor but as a chief minis-

ter. Pandian’s interest as an ardent fan of

the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) 

section of the Dravidian movement was

to expose the spurious politics of the

upstart Ramachandran in “using” the

DMK  film to advance his career. This

foray into the links between cinema and

politics was the start of a lifelong inter-

est in reading Tamil films, from his

legendary and important critique of

 Parashakti to his analysis of Mani Rat-

nam’s  Roja, from an explicitly political

perspective. It was a reading that was

largely uninformed by film theory, but

nevertheless opened up new and re-

freshing questions about politics and

culture. His Marxism was still an active

part of his analytical frame, though not

for nothing did Nasir Tyabji term him a

“DMK Marxist”.

Brahmin/Non-Brahmin

It is of course for his long and continuous

engagement with the history of the chal-

lenge to brahminism in colonial and

postcolonial Tamil Nadu that Pandian is

most well known. His critiques of many

different kinds of historians, ranging

from those of the Cambridge school to

 

COMMENTARY 

Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   NOVEMBE R 29, 2014 vol xlIX no 48 25

K N Panikkar (the latter for his instru-

mental reading of religion and rationa-

lity) led to his gradual development of a

larger argument in the shape of a genea-

logy of the brahmin/non-brahmin dyad.

This work came together eventually as

a book in 2008. For someone who was

a practised polemicist, brahmin/non-

brahmin revealed that Pandian had

learned a great deal from the interven-

ing decades, in his acknowledgement of

 what had been a huge lacuna in his

earlier work, the neglect in short of that

large community of dalits from the way

in which non-brahmin histories and

futures had been conceived, even by

Periyar E V Ramaswamy Naicker.

In part this was the reflection of the

late development of the dalit movement

in Tamil Nadu compared with the neigh-

bouring Karnataka and Maharashtra

(although I am sure Pandian would not

like to admit that Tamil Nadu was be-

hind Karnataka on any question!) and in

part his own blindness to the far more

complex patterns of caste that such a

binary could not capture: by the 1990s,

southern Tamil Nadu (as indeed parts of

Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh) was

riven by conflicts between newly asser-

tive, educated and socially mobile dalit

castes, and asset-owning Other Back-

 ward Classes (OBCs). A series of articles

Pandian authored in EPW  in 2013

acknowledged some of these intra-caste

dilemmas within a radically altered

political scenario.

Pandian chose to end his 2008 book

 with a chapter on one of the most influ-

ential dalit writers of Tamil Nadu, Raj

Gowthaman. His detailed new history of

Tamil Nadu politics thus indirectly ac-

knowledged the limits of political non-

brahminism. It is striking that Pandian

(like the other historians of the move-

ment, S V Rajadurai and V Geetha) did

not displace this English term which

arose from the negation of brahminism

(and indeed there is no real Tamil equi-

 valent for non-brahmin) and no neologism

 was coined to take its place. Although he

acknowledged the problems with the

figure of the “virtuous woman” which

pervaded Tamil popular culture and

politics, feminism and its interpretative

frames did not feature centrally in his

 work, despite the fact that his partner,

S Anandhi, is an established feminist his-

torian and thinker. His book was acclaimed

and critiqued, but everywhere acknow-

ledged as a significant intervention.

Much can also be said about his writ-

ings on the language question and the

anti-Hindi agitation in particular. I will

simply here recall his virulent opposi-

tion to Hindi when we were both at the

Calcutta Centre in 1987: when the librar-

ian began jabbering away in Bangla

 which I then did not understand, I asked

her to speak in Hindi. A furious Pandian

emerged suddenly from the stacks and

to her rescue, admonishing me for mak-

ing such an unreasonable demand. He

saw no irony in speaking only English to

the librarian himself, but he had saved

her from north Indian imperialism per-

petrated by a perplexed south Indian!

Despite moving to Delhi, and warming

up slightly to Hindi speakers/the lan-

guage, and indeed Hindi films, he

remained firmly against the imposition

of Hindi as a national language. So I

 would like to read the small act of insur-

gency by which the Hindi nameplates in

CHS were covered in black on the day

after he died as a loving tribute of the

students he had trained in scepticism

and argument.

The late 1980s and the 1990s were a

time when reading, and especially writ-

ing for, the EPW were a hallmark of ones

arrival as a serious Indian scholar; Pan-

dian too shuttled between the first half

of the journal, which consists of reports

and comments, to the more scholarly

second half, and he continued to inhabit

both worlds until he passed away.

Public Intellectual

It is his life as a public intellectual, as a

member of the non-public sphere left,

that was on full display when I joined

Madras Institute of Development Studies

in 1994: in his spacious corner room in

that lovely building, Pandian held an

interesting court of sorts. Scholars from

all over the world flocked to hear him

explain the intricate politics of Tamil

Nadu or perhaps India to them; at other

times, scholars and writers and drama-

tists from all over Tamil Nadu flocked to

the man who opened their window to

the world. These bilingual transactions

continued on all working days, and

spilled over into the weekends. He was a

unique quilting point, bringing two

 worlds together in his room.

It was against this broad intellectual

engagement that the idea of a journal

called South Indian Studies  came up,

published by DC  books of Thiruvanan-

thapuram. Pandian brought out several

issues before the publisher found it diffi-

cult to continue; in fact sadly, it was the

issue that I had put together that was

never to see the light of day. Still, that

brief experiment forced Pandian to

think more broadly than Tamil Nadu,

and to be more willing to listen to other

perspectives. This also led him to join

the Subaltern Studies collective, and led

to his election as a member of the Advi-

sory Board of the Dutch SEPHIS  pro-

gramme which brought together schol-

ars of the south in productive dialogue.

For some years he was an independent

travelling scholar, beginning a career in

teaching in the United States, and find-

ing a new vocation. In the democratic

space of the US university, adulation of

Pandian gave way to appreciation, and

engagement. This was the spirit that

 was echoed in the corridors of CHS  of

JNU that Pandian joined in 2009. In the

programmatic statement on “The Post-

national Condition” Pandian joined sev-

eral other scholars and intellectuals who

recognised that nationalism no longer

had an emancipatory potential, and that

the loss of that ethico-moral horizon was

as much an epistemological loss which

required urgent theorisation. It was an

agenda he took seriously in the structur-

ation of his courses, and in his interven-

tions and interactions with students,

despite considerable opposition from

those committed to nationalist frame-

 works for understanding Indian history.

Challenging Friendship

We had a challenging friendship, but he

 was a worthy foe. It was impossible to be

indifferent to Pandian. It was even more

difficult to tell a compliment from an

insult, as in his repeated insistence that

I displayed what he described as “Nair

energy”. His powers of exaggeration

 were legendary, so a minor altercation

 

COMMENTARY 

NOVEMBE R 29, 2014 vol xlIX no 48 EPW   Economic & Political Weekly26

bet ween myself and a policeman in

Madras over a Karnataka nameplate on a

scooter, when Pandian was riding pillion,

 was richly embroidered in its retelling.

Our antagonisms were many and var-

ied, and Pandian did not hesitate to draw

generously on the long tap roots of history

in remarkably ahistorical ways. For Pandi-

an, social origins were irreducibly forma-

tive of identity: thus our early 21st century

exchanges could not shake off the deep-

rooted antagonisms between landowning

Nairs and aspiring Nadars from early 19th

century Travancore. At other times, our

quarrels were emplaced in the riverine

disputes of the late 19th century between

the upper and lower riparian states of

Mysore/Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, as

during the Cauvery agitations of the

1990s. To foreground the women’s ques-

tion was arguable, while the reverse (i e,

foregrounding caste/class) was tactically

necessary: we spent at least one long

evening quarrelling about how to inter-

pret the warm hug between Sushma

Swaraj and Brinda Karat over the passage

of the women’s reservation bill in the

Rajya Sabha in 2010. He refused to place

this on the same plane as the billboards

 with which Chennai was once awash,

showing Karunanidhi and Vajpayee in a

more pernicious electoral embrace.

More recently, he enthusiastically and

gleefully pathologised the corruption of

Jayalalithaa, while remaining somewhat

silent (and thereby rationalising) A Raja,

Kanimozhi, and Dayanidhi Maran’s dis-

proportionate assets. His optimism about

a DMK win in this 2014 elections under

the son and heir of Karunanidhi, Stalin

(“I am happy that DMK has finally got a

new leader”, he said with shining eyes

the day Stalin was anointed) was, we

now know, radically misplaced optimism

of the will. In fact, I wonder how he

 would feel about his posthumous appro-

priation by Thalapathy Stalin, as the most

important intellectual to endorse the

DMK as the true heirs of Periyar!

Despite this, when the protests by a

range of Nadar associations and Tamil

Nadu political parties against the chapter I

 wrote for the National Council for Educa-

tional Research and Training textbooks

on the breast cloth disturbances broke out

in October 2012, Pandian deployed his

formidable skills in my defence, writing a

timely and well-researched piece which

revealed the long past of Nadar censorship

of history. By this time, I had discovered an

old and very interesting article that he

himself had written on the breast cloth

disturbances, that largely supported what

I had said/not said in the chapter.

We were both “Ex-Centrics” (the name

I give to all those who passed through

that fertile intellectual space of the

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Cal-

cutta). We warmly shared a love for sea-

food, Grisham novels, and a cordial dis-

like for Bengali bhadraloquaciousness.

His extraordinary generosity was quite

 well known, and sometimes exploited;

his compassion, equally appreciated. Of

late, he revealed not just the customary

scepticism about national politics, but

actual pessimism: perhaps he too, like

U R Ananthamurthy, did not wish to live

under the new regime.

It is entirely fitting that the admission

forms at  AIIMS where he spent his last

hours entered his gender as “uncertain”:

in his last hours, everything he had stood

for, argued against for decades, suddenly

dawned with a great clarity. Some north

Indian admission clerk clearly could not

make sense of M S S Pandian: was it a

 woman with a stammer, or …? I would

have liked to embellish that little joke for

Pandian’s pleasure; wherever he is now, I

raise a toast to the unexpected last laugh

he enabled.

Janaki Nair (nair.janaki@gmail.com) is with

the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal

Nehru University, New Delhi.

The Adivasi QuestionEdited By 

INDRA MUNSHI

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This volume situates the issues concerning the adivasis in a historical context while discussing the challenges they face today.

The introduction examines how the loss of land and livelihood began under the British administration, making the adivasis

dependent on the landlord-moneylender-trader nexus for their survival.

The articles, drawn from writings of almost four decades in EPW, discuss questions of community rights and ownership,

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Oliver Springate-Baginski • Indra Munshi • Jyothis Sathyapalan • Mahesh Rangarajan • Madhav Gadgil • Dev Nathan,

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