‘Is It Family or Politics?’ Reflections on Gender and the Modern Tamil Subjectivity Constitution in the Discourse of C. N. Annadurai

1940s–1960s: C. N. Annadurai and Tamil Political Subjectivation

The 1940–1960s, with (a) the gradual unshackling of the Indian political sphere from the hard clutches of literacy and intellectual debates to tie itself with the mass-based politics and (b) the emergence of the perception of mastery in regional languages, here Tamil, as a major political power via vernacular ¹ political journalism and public oratory (and a little later, cinema), stands as a crucial period in the political and cultural history of modern Tamil Nadu. The emergence of vernacular public sphere with its ability to cut across not just castes/classes but also the boundaries of literacy unsettled the predominance hitherto enjoyed by the English dailies and journals. Closely related to it is the significant transformation that happens in the space of politics. The dethroning of English and the coronation of regional languages helped transferring politics from the sophisticated halls and lounges of the elites to places of the common and the downtrodden—places such as tea-shops, saloons, street corners and markets. These places of mundane life emerged as spaces for heated political debates during this period. Thus, this can be rightly called the period that took politics to the masses.

Second, in the political history of Tamil Nadu, this period is noted for the continuous vehement protests against the introduction of Hindi—widely known as ‘anti-Hindi agitations’—in the Tamil speaking region of Madras Presidency, which at certain moments even challenged the unity of India as a nation. ² These protests took place on four different occasions between 1938 and 1965. ³ Among these, the fourth set of protests that took place in 1964–1965, as noted earlier, was very crucial in influencing certain significant political happenings both in the state and the country. Following these protests, DMK’s colossal victory in the 1967 elections—the victory of a regional party that emerged only in the late 1940s—dethroned the Congress party once and for all in the state and established a firm ground for the sustenance of politics based on Tamil language and identity. This victory can be ascribed to nothing but the DMK leader’s passionate relationship with and competency in the newly emerging mass media that gained predominance in the state during these decades—print (more specifically the vernacular political journalism), public oratory and cinema.

Third, this period also witnessed a larger reconfiguration of the Tamil political public sphere on the basis of communal lines as Brahmin and non-Brahmin. Although the communal mode of politics in Tamil Nadu emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the emergence of (a) Dravida Mahajana Sabha in 1891 under the leadership of Pandit Iyothee Thoss and its development as a major cultural and political force and (b) the South Indian Liberation League, widely known as the Justice Party in 1916 and its growth as the major oppositional political party for the Indian National Congress, the 1940s marked a crucial moment in its maturity. This is particularly due to the emergence of Tamil as the trope for many significant identity categories, such as non/anti-Brahmin, anti-Sanskrit, anti-Hindi, anti-Aryan, anti-caste, anti-congress, anti-North and so on. While one could have seen the Tamil versus Sanskrit tendency even before this period, neither was the Tamil community defined overtly on communal lines nor was the polarization materialized in the political sphere as Brahmin versus non-Brahmin. But from the late 1930s to the 1940s, there emerged a dominant tendency to polarize Tamil as non-Brahmin and Sanskrit/Hindi as Brahmin in the popular political sphere (Aarooran, 2008, pp. 233–245). Such a tendency emerged out of a complex interaction among many forces—sects such as the depressed class Parayars, the Saivite Vellalars, the anti-caste Self-Respecters, the Muslim reformists and so on—that had already established a steady ground in the Tamil social, political and cultural spheres. These forces, as noted by scholars like M. S. S. Pandian, in spite of other differences, share a commonality in their assertion of the ‘non-Brahmin-ness’ and ‘non-Hindu-ness’ of the identity they evoke ⁴ —be it religious, communal or political. Making Brahmin as a trope for certain qualities, values and identities, these forces defined their identity by placing themselves in stark contrast to this trope. However, till the 1930s, this commonality did not function as a natural binding medium or ever had a wider influence on redefining Tamilpattru (the affective relationship with Tamil) as an exclusively ‘non-Brahmin’ sentiment. But during the anti-Hindi agitations, there emerged a united identity called ‘non-Brahmin Tamils’ that accommodated many of these groups and ascertained their joint functioning in the political public sphere.

This larger reconfiguration of the Tamil political sphere on communal lines as Brahmin and non-Brahmin, however, should not be seen as the division of people into two communal groups based on their caste identities. In contrast, it signifies the formation of new political subject positions which refashion and consolidate communal identities in newer ways. That is, caste identities cannot be considered the natural foundational ground on which individuals joined different political groups. These caste identities themselves were formed along with the fashioning of new political subject positions with regard to many issues among which Tamil language occupies a predominant place. This shows how this context functions as a field that reconfigures and produces many things including new power institutions, identity categories, ethics and values. C. N. Annadurai’s (hereafter Anna) role in such a reconfiguration and production is seminal, if not decisive. The institutions which played a crucial role in altering the experience of Tamilpattru, Tamilian and Tamil during this context were to a large extent shaped by the new style of Tamil prose which evolved in Anna’s writings and speeches. This prose and the institutions it characterized have a telling role in the formation of the modern Tamil political subjectivity.

Anna: Tamil Rhetoric and the Modern Tamil Political Subjectivity

Anna’s role in the politicization of the Tamil masses is substantial, and a study on modern Tamil subjectivity cannot be done without paying due attention to C. N. Annadurai. The story of how this man from very humble social and economic background grew to be a major political force is noteworthy because, as A. R. Venkatachalapathy rightly observes, it is ‘in the rise of this barely five-and-a-quarter feet man with a balding pate, tobacco-stained teeth, stubbed chin and a captivating husky voice to prominence lies the story of modern Tamil Nadu’ (Venkatachalapathy, 2008). This is primarily because it is not the story of an individual, but that of the new institutions of power, new modes of relating with language, new ways of desiring, new forms of experiencing pleasures, new modes through which one makes sense of oneself as a self—in short, the new modes of subjectivation.

Anna is a person who straddled different spheres, such as the social, political and cultural ones, and brought about significant transformation in them. Born in a lower middle class weaver family, he studied up to MA and emerged as a significant politician, orator, journalist and a litterateur. He began his political career as a member of the South Indian Liberation League (popularly known as the Justice Party) with only his MA degree and competence in Tamil and English as his qualifications. Soon he associated himself with E. V. Ramasamy Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement and participated in its first anti-Hindi protest in 1938. Through the anti-Hindi protests of the late 1930s and 1940s, he emerged as a significant leader in the Dravida Kazhagam. In 1949, he broke ties with Periyar and founded the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (known as DMK). Within a short period he, along with his party, emerged as a major political force in the state. Following the vehement self-immolations and continuous violent protests of the party in 1965 against the introduction of Hindi as an official language, he became the chief minister of Tamil Nadu with a historic victory of the DMK over Congress in the 1967 elections. As noted earlier, this victory remains significant in the history of the state not only because it swept national parties like Congress away from the centre stage and established a firm ground for regional parties but also because it led to a fresh perception with regard to politics in the state. Anna, if not exclusively responsible, has a sizeable role in this.

Anna’s rhetoric is known for its intellectual and pedagogical quality. His speeches and writings, more particularly the Thambikku Kadidhangal, that is the ‘Letters to the Younger Brother’ that he wrote in his journal, Dravida Nadu, is the foundation on which Tamil political cognizance has been shaped to a large extent. However, besides being a politician, Anna was also a notable litterateur, skilled journalist and a powerful orator. He introduced a new style of Tamil prose with a stress on a refined form of Tamil language, often deemed as thooyatamizh (pure Tamil), which shows little or no difference from the written form. This new style—a prose which is semi-poetic, adorned with alliterations, rhythms, simple vocabulary and mundane similes, metaphors, analogies, stories and an unorthodox use of syntax along with the novel subject matter—created a new and enduring aesthetic sensibility in relation to Tamil print, public oratory, drama and cinema. This style soon emerged as a common technique to be followed for attracting masses in the state and continues to define and qualify public speech-making, more particularly, political exchanges in Tamil Nadu even today. The political and cultural institutions—journalistic print, public oratory and cinema—which constitute the modern Tamil subjectivity were to a large extent a legacy defined by him and carry his enduring influence even today. It is thus that the political cognizance shaped by Anna’s rhetoric—which includes a range of his writings and speeches—gains significance.

Anna’s Discourse and Political Pedagogy

Anna’s writings and speeches can be called the manuals from which Tamil masses learnt their lessons in politics. With (a) the intense intellectuality, reasoning and critical outlook to analyse the contemporary political situations, (b) detailed treatises on political concepts, such as democracy, federalism, citizenship rights and duties, and so on, (c) rich examples and analogies from world politics and history and (d) the beautiful, rhythmic and ornate language, they actually read like a lesson in politics presented with a keen sense of aesthetics. However, more important is the engaging and thought-provoking style of Anna’s language which differs drastically from the rigid and rubric-like language of many of his predecessors and contemporaries, namely Thiru. V. Kalyanasundaram (known as Thiru. Vi. Ka) and Periyar. This engaging style seems to carry a space for dialogue with the reader, and the conclusions drawn appear to evolve with the consensus of the reader. This specific characteristic of his rhetoric, which in many ways supplements the image he possessed in the public sphere as a democratic and power-sharing leader (Arinjar Anna Ninaivu Malar, 1969; Chezhiyan, 1959; Rajaram, 1964), has a lot to tell about the desires, pleasures and aspirations of the modern Tamil subjectivity.

However, besides these intellectual, aesthetic and democratic features, his rhetoric also exhibits a strong emotionality. His letters, the intellectual field that shaped the popular political cognizance in the Tamil context, also constitute a strong emotional bonding between him and his audience and establish a familial relation between them. For no less reason was he affectionately addressed as ‘Anna’—a short form for Annadurai, meaning ‘elder brother’ in Tamil—by his followers. It is not just a coincidence that he was so addressed. As the very title of his letters reveal, he continuously addressed his followers as Thambi, younger brother, both in his writings and in his speeches. The very split from the Dravida Kazham by Anna and a few other members which led to the foundation of DMK was metaphorized continuously as the split of the eldest son, Anna, from an autocratic father, Periyar (Chezhiyan, 1959; Dravida Nadu, 1948). This fusion of the political and the domestic spheres is also present in the image of Anna constructed in various issues of Anna Malar and Anna Ninaivu Malar—magazines carrying articles, poems and memoirs on Anna—published, respectively, to celebrate his birthday during his lifetime and in memory of him after his death. This further asserts how the very icon of Anna carries the intense spatial tension between the domestic and politics that characterize the modern Tamil subjectivity. ⁵ He is at once admired as a leader, who is intelligent, politically astute, democratic and ready to share power, thus being capable of guiding them to a progressive and self-respecting future, and also loved as an affectionate elder brother whose pains and pleasures are integrally linked with that of his younger brothers. Both the sagacity with which he handles political issues and the emotionality and sentimentality with which he is attached to his younger brothers are his truly praise-worthy characteristics for them. The admiration for the efficiency with which he performed his role as a political leader and the care, affection and intimacy with which he performed his role as the head of his family have been equally portrayed in the issues of these magazines. This confusion of the spaces—domestic and political—in the Tamil subjects’ association with Anna is present, even at deeper levels, in the latter’s pedagogical discourse on politics. An examination of the ways in which these two spheres correlate in this discourse sheds some light on the spatial tensions and gender constitution of the modern Tamil subjectivity.

Politics, Domestic and Gender in Anna’s Pedagogical Discourse

Following is an example where one of Anna’s letters explained the necessity to stand firm in one’s political goal/aspiration:

Behold! Ask that thaamaraiyaal (lotus-woman), who because she has obtained your love, comes here walking like a swan with her slender waist frail with a plate full of sweet fruits, ‘Can we renounce the goal that we have set in for ourselves because the path seems tortuous?’ You won’t get an answer—But that woman’s eyes would be filled with horror! ‘How is he able to ask so? If he calls for me, I would rush to his aid without any hesitation even if it is a forest in which snakes flounder’. ‘Ammavo! [A word expressing intense fear and shock] If he is someone who sets away his life’s principle fearing the perils of the path’, her eyes would say, ‘wouldn’t he set away even the [effortless] act of a little stroll to get the love of his wife fearing that his heels would ache?’ (Annadurai, 1986, pp. 37–38)

One can see that the domestic, more particularly, the woman of the domestic—who avows her resolution for conjugality—plays a significant role in making the man learn his political lessons. The domestic woman, by expressing her shock and contempt towards the man’s wavering character, asserts the significance of being firm in one’s ethical belief in the political sphere, a trait Anna tries to entrench in the Tamilian. While it is the fear of the man of becoming an object of contempt in the eyes of the woman whom he loves that teaches him the necessity of standing by one’s political ethics, this contempt is rhetorically expressed by applying the wavering character of the political man to the realm of conjugality.

Thus, the ethics, qualities and the values that the Tamilian needs in the political sphere are repeatedly paralleled, metaphorized or even interchanged with domestic values and conjugal mores. In the following example, the domestic woman’s strong investment in chastity functions as the analogy for the awareness and vigilance that a Tamilian requires to challenge the political processes that impose Hindi as the official language of India:

If someone knocks at our door in the middle of the night, around 12 or 1 o’clock, would we open the door immediately? Staying inside without opening the door, we would ask ‘who is it that knocks at the door?’—‘It’s me, open the door’—‘I won’t open if you just say “it’s me”, tell me who you are!’—‘Don’t you understand? It’s me!’—‘No. I don’t know. Tell me who you are!’—‘Can’t you recognize even my voice?’—‘No, tell me’—‘Come on, it’s me, Arumugam!’—Yet, a wise woman would not open the door immediately. Hiding in a corner, she would open the door a little and peep outside to ascertain it is indeed Arumugam before allowing him inside. Wouldn’t she? Some houses may open. But good houses won’t. (Natarajan, 2000, p. 281)

The critical awareness needed in the political sphere to evaluate the decisions of the government is equalled with the alertness that a woman exhibits when someone knocks at her door at midnight. As in the first example, here too, the righteousness of the action of the woman in the domestic functions as a touchstone to establish the rightness of the political awareness that he tries to invoke among Tamilians. The conjugal morality in the alertness of the domestic woman is analogous to the awareness of the Tamilian about the dangers of certain political processes. The mores and values that characterize domesticity are similarly invoked in several such contexts as the pedagogical ground for a Tamil man to learn about the relevance of the ethics and values that he needs to hold in the political sphere. The sacrifice that a woman does for the happiness of the family—like undergoing the toils of the kitchen to provide tasty food for the family—is hinted as a model for a man’s selfless sacrifice for the society. Similarly, the ignorance of his followers about the complex functions of the bureaucratic system which delay him from fulfilling his electoral promises is equalled to the ignorance of a man about certain domestic affairs like cooking:

Today is the Pongal day. The [Tamil] New Year. When your girl prepares pongal, adding rice to the milk and boiling it, you ask many times through your eyes and sometimes through words: ‘Hasn’t it boiled yet?’ And you hear her answer: ‘So soon?’ while her look says ‘How impatient you are!’ It is natural that the maadharasi (queen of women) has got the right to answer you so. But it wouldn’t be proper if I respond so, right? I need your support and comradeship to get the necessary enthusiasm and strength to do what I need to do. You are continuously giving it. I know that very well. And I take pleasure in thanking you [for that]. (Annadurai, 1986, p. 128)

The impatience of the thambi in this example symbolizes his youth, energy, excitement and ignorance. The answer and gesture of his wife instructs him the need to be a little more patient and provides a context for self-reflection. The reflection on his ignorance of the domestic chores functions as a means to understand his ignorance of the political duties as well. These pedagogical contexts, although aimed at inculcating a distinct political self in Tamilians, repeatedly position the woman of the domestic as the role-model for the man in politics. The ethical dilemmas and choices faced by the Tamil subject are to be resolved by imagining how the wife—the ethically stronger conjugal partner—would respond in such instances. The wife’s righteousness towards conjugality is the touchstone by which the Tamil political subject can judge his own actions.

How is one to situate the function of the category ‘woman’ in such a discourse? Since the woman is claimed to be ethically strong, offered a position to teach the man and is established as a role-model for him to follow, can one consider the discourse as non-discriminative in terms of gender? The figure of dasi—the immoral, wicked and leery woman—invoked in similar pedagogical contexts would not entertain such fantasies.

While the domestic woman is invoked as a moral inspiration for the Tamilians and a model from whom he should learn, the dasi is invoked in quite a different position—as a distracter who diverts the Tamilian from these very ethics and values. For instance, the Tamilian who lets Hindi take over the place of Tamil is often compared with a man who ‘bewitched by the deceitful speech of a dasi, has abandoned his mother’ (ibid., p. 355). The Congress government which tries to make Hindi as the national language is labelled as a sagasakaari (a woman of loose morals, who is skilled in enchanting men) trying to beguile the ‘innocent’ and ‘ignorant young man’—the Tamilian. The present regretful condition of Tamil culture and the ‘spell-bound Tamilian’ are compared to the condition of a ‘dim-witted’ person who, not listening to his true friend’s advice, went behind a dasi and later regrets on contracting a disgusting, deadly venereal disease (Annadurai, 1995, pp. 24–26).

The Aryan/Brahmin/North Indian cunningness to which the Dravidian land succumbed is compared to a man who falls dead after having ignorantly tasted the poisoned lips of an inbavalli (refers to a prostitute) (Natarajan, 2000, p. 31). The stupidity of the ‘mesmerized Tamilian’ who gets attracted to the cunning, deceptive propaganda for Hindi by the North Indian Congress leaders is compared to an idiot who,

worrying that the woman who has come to reside in his neighborhood has got only little hair, cuts the dark-coloured hair of his wife and offers it to the former, only to receive a few moment’s winks and an alluring smile from her in return. (Pattazhagan, 2000, p. 328)

The Congress government’s propaganda on the merits of having Hindi as the national language are compared to the irrationality of convincing a man to leave his beautiful wife for a loathsome and ignoble woman (Natarajan, 2000, pp. 274–275). Pronouncements and reminders that their ultimate goal—the attainment of Dravida Nadu—should not be forsaken by giving in to the temptations of electoral victory are made by juxtaposing the triviality of the desire for electoral victory with the meanness of the sexual temptation evoked by an immoral woman. It is declared that:

If our only intention is to win in this election, innumerable possibilities stand before us winking alluringly at us. If we wave our hands expressing our consent, the temptresses would run towards us with their wriggling waists, unhooked attires and luring smile. Yes thambi, it is enough if we just succumb to temptation. But we are not the men of lowly desires, looking for ways to attain victory in elections. We should neither forget nor hide the fact that our aim is to make use of this election to attain our goal. (Nadarasan, 2003, p. 169)

Differing largely from the image of the wife, the benefactor of Tamil ethical subjectivation, the image of dasi is conceived as cunning, wicked, mean, disgusting and deceptive, enchanting the Tamilian towards danger, an embodiment of all trivial desires and thus a threat for the Tamil ethical subjectivation. How is one to understand these two extremely contradicting invocations of woman in this discourse? Existing feminist scholarship on this area encourages us to see this as an ideological function of patriarchy to curb women of an active self by providing two extremities—the benign, all-sacrificing and unconditionally loving domestic woman, a position that is extremely difficult to reach and that which makes women selfless, and the dasi, a position that is highly disrespectful, disgusting and one which is detestable to occupy—as only possible subject positions. Such a criticism, as we could see, is concerned about the effect of this discourse on women in society. Unarguably, this is an important thing to be considered. However, it is equally crucial to note how these two categories get constituted and function in the discourse especially as it affects and shapes the former in many dynamic ways.

First, while the categories wife and dasi are extremely contrasting women, they do an identical function of proclaiming the significance of domestic in this discourse. While the instances that encompass the ideal domestic woman establish the significance of the domestic by revealing its superiority—that is, its capability to stand as an example for the political—those that invoke the dasi do it in a different way. The dasi does not just stand away from the realm of the domestic but also poses a threat to its integrity. By colouring her as someone who is treacherous, wicked, deceitful and untrustworthy, this establishes the domestic, the realm which she threatens, as a good, noble and trustworthy place.

Second, the way in which wife and dasi are created as contradictory categories in this discourse differs largely from the premodern communal categorization. While in the premodern categorization, biological and communal identity assumes a primacy by ascertaining its power to determine qualities of the person belonging to one particular gender and jati, here the qualities themselves emerge as the foundation for categorization. In our case, where conjugality is not even strictly characterized by marriage, it is a set of qualities like one’s resoluteness in a love relation, the strong investment in karpu, the self-sacrificial love towards the family’s well-being and happiness or the deceitful, treacherous and untrustworthy qualities towards a love relation, craving for physical and material pleasures and so on are the ones that produce woman as a wife and dasi. Interestingly, these oppositional qualities are anchored in the body versus mind/interiority discourse of modernity. The dasi is constituted of the qualities that mark the body—the physical drives which include both sexual desire and material cravings—which are characterized as inferior and the wife of the qualities of the interiority which helps one go beyond the limitations of the body and invest firmly in certain superior ethics (which are dealt in detail further). These qualities of the interiority which make a female person as a wife—a figure of veneration—predominantly are also those that show her strong investment in the structure called domestic and the values that constitute and strengthen its existence. Similarly, the qualities that make a woman a dasi are those that show her unreliability for a love affair and conjugal relation. Thus wife and dasi are categories constituted by a set of oppositional qualities and values which work together to establish the domestic as the first and foremost institution of importance in human life. The hierarchal arrangement of them within this discourse has an integral relation with the significance domestic gained within modern governmentality.

However, it is not to be understood that domestic functions as the normative structure in determining the superior and inferior positions in which these two categories of women have been portrayed in this discourse. On the contrary, it is in this extremely opposing and hierarchal portrayal of women that domestic emerges as a normative plane. Hence the normative character of the domestic is actually the effect of this discourse rather than its cause and wife and dasi are discursive categories that establish the domestic as the normative plane rather than mere subject positions prescribed for women to occupy.

This becomes clearer in the repeated imaginations of DMK as a family. When the attempts to persuade the Tamilians accept Hindi are metaphorized as the deceitful ‘winks’ and ‘leering smiles’ of the dasi, DMK—which is aware of these ‘deceiving tricks’ and makes tireless attempts to ‘enlighten’ the masses about it—is repeatedly affirmed as a ‘disciplined family’ who cannot be tricked or bewitched by the mean tricks of a dasi (Pattazhagan, 2000, p. 86). The strong attachment and determination of the Tamilians towards their language is compared to a man’s sincere love for his wife and family, and it was proclaimed that ‘at least in the age of Silappathikaram there was a merchant who went astray to Madhavi’s [a dasi] home for she gave the pleasure that Kannagi [his wife] couldn’t give. Here [in DMK] we do not have Kovalans’ (ibid., p. 275). The repeated pointers at the incapability of discriminating between the wife and the dasi via their respective qualities as instances of shame and disgrace and the assertion of Tamilian as someone who is aware of this shows that Tamil political subjectivation happen not in the sheer contradiction and hierarchy between the wife and the dasi in the discourse but in the assertion of it via a public performance of choice.

At this juncture, it is helpful to consider two things which are in many ways interrelated: (a) the gendered nature of this discourse and (b) the intricacies in domesticizing politics. First, as far as gender is concerned, who does these warnings of shame and disgrace address? That is, who can possibly be deceived by a dasi? Clearly, in this heterosexual matrix, such a deceit is possible only for a man, and it is he who is warned against being tricked by a dasi. This suggests that the political consciousness and awareness that this discourse invokes is directed only at men. Even while women are directly addressed, they are warned against their men becoming a prey to such women. One of Anna’s public speeches which brings in the analogy of dasi to hint at the insensible political persuasions of the Congress party asserts that ‘even men can keep silent about it. But the thousands of taymaargal [a word that literally means “mothers,” which is used to refer to women in the DMK’s discourse] who have gathered here should rise up against it with rage’ (Natarajan, 2000, p. 275). Such addresses establish the active political struggle and participation of women for their rights to language and citizenship in par with their struggle to protect their ‘legitimate’ place in the domestic.

The way in which this discourse a) repeatedly situates its ideal woman within the topography of the domestic and b) celebrates the women anti-hindi agitators (like Dharmambal and the numerous others who dared to go to jail during the first anti-Hindi agitation) as the images of domesticity as marakula tay (the mother of the brave clan) or veerataymargal (the brave mothers) (Annadurai, 1959, p. 1) reveals its gender processing where domestic is established as the normative place of women. The fact that Anna’s letters—which aimed at educating the Tamilians about world politics, history, revolutions and so on and a genre that he discovered ‘to debate and discuss’ political problems and ‘to let [his] ideas be known’ to the people and ‘get [their] consent’, in short, a space for political pedagogy, debate and consensus—is addressed to Thambikku, that is, ‘to the younger brother’, a male addressee, further asserts the gendering nature of this discourse. Thus, it is clear that the public sphere produced by this discourse via the practices of political pedagogy, discussion, debate and consensus is intended only for men.

How is one to situate these processes which establishes the political as the realm of men, construct domestic as the natural and legitimate space of women by repeatedly producing her not only in the images of domesticity but also as the natural carrier of its founding values like resoluteness in a conjugal relation, a strong investment in and an awareness of the significance of guarding her chastity, and so on? Feminist studies like that of C. S. Lakshmi’s ‘Mother, Mother-Community and Mother Politics in Tamil Nadu’ (1990) see this as patriarchy’s castrating of the political self of woman by consecrating her as the ‘angel in the house’. It is seen as yet another ideological project of patriarchy, which by canonizing the domestic woman and by giving her a venerable position, actually traps women within her family by denying them, even ideologically, the access to the political (Lakshmi, 1990, p. WS-78). ⁶

If we situate this as a project of patriarchy to demarcate the spheres of men and women as those of political and domestic respectively, how are we to understand the repeated invocation of these women, whose existence is limited only to the domestic sphere, as the source or warehouse of the ethical integrity that men needs in the political sphere? As C. S. Lakshmi does, can we understand it as patriarchy’s ‘cleverly woven pattern of sequences’ that attempts to subjugate women in the guise of venerating them? Critiquing the sheer imitation of the feminine self produced in this discourse by the women associated with the DMK in the 1950s and 60s, she observes that,

… the DMK Party functioned in a way that put women in specific roles where they did not play a prominent role in making decisions or generating debates. Women’s support for the party was expressed in ways considered ‘womanly’. When the rising sun emblem was granted to the party many women drew the figure of the rising sun outside their door step as a part of the kolams they drew every morning. In 1975, the secretary of the women’s wing of the head office of the party, could only list opening of orphanages and building of marriage choultries as active programmes for women. This is the logical outcome of the place assigned to women in the party from the beginning. Thirukkural classes were conducted for women stressing their family duties. The women went along with the decisions of the party and when they staged plays, they were full of foamy, bubbling dialogues of social change not very different from the dialogues and screenplays their own party leaders wrote …. The DMK was familial in structure and women in the party occupied the same position they did in families. When Satyavani Muthu left the party after disagreement with Karunanidhi, it was seen as an act of defiance [of the] head of the family. The secretary of the women’s wing put the situation in an analogy that was very expressive. She said that the party was like a family and that a wife must not leave the family if the husband, in a fit of temper, asks her to leave. In a very succinct way, this analogy expressed where women stood as far as the party was concerned. (ibid., p. WS-81)

Such an observation springs from a framework that understands DMK’s discourse and the women’s performance in a cause-and-effect relation where the former functions as the overpowering cause that determines the latter in all possible ways. Women’s performance of the domestic self is situated here as ‘the logical outcome of the place assigned to women in the party from the beginning’. Thus, women who perform in accordance with the ‘womanly’ selves stand as sheer manipulative objects of the ‘cleverly woven’ plans of patriarchy. Can these women’s performances be situated only as the manipulative effect of the all-powerful, overtly-domineering patriarchal discourse of the DMK? M.S.S. Pandian's observation regarding the women fans of the actor-politician M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) could help us here. On a similar note regarding the massive women following that MGR enjoyed despite the blatant gender discriminatory ideology that his films propagated and the misogyny that it continuously displayed, M.S.S. Pandian very incisively argues that women’s adherence and fondness for the actor-politician should be understood, on the other hand, by paying due attention to how they were bestowed with an active desiring sexual agency in his films. Similarly, V.Geetha very perceptively observes, although only with regard to the women of Self-Respect movement, that a ‘portrayal of women as victims only betrays a scientific, male disenchantment with the subject’ (Geetha, 1991, p.388). While V. Geetha's observation regarding the portrayal of women self-respecters as victims of Periyar's all-domineering discourse reveals the work of ideologies that downplay women’s agency for certain other ends, M.S.S. Pandian's insightful observation shows the complexity of modern institutions of power and the new modes of self-fashioning that they inspire (Sathya Murthy, 1996). The adherence to the ‘womanly’ self by the women associated with the DMK also needs to be understood by paying due attention to other kinds of agency that this discourse promotes. This becomes particularly important, when we take into account the ways in which Anna’s discourse, both political and literary, extends sexual agency to women.

Besides these, the perception of the domestic and the political as essentially polarized and intrinsically hierarchal spaces without paying attention to the cultural processes that construct them differently in varied spaces and times is both ahistorical and Eurocentric and thereby acts as a denial to recognize any mode of modernity other than the European. Within such a conceptual framework, we end up, against our very critique, in essentializing these spaces as natural rather than cultural categories. By negating the role of historical and sociopolitical contexts, this mode of critique also prevents us from addressing the exact processes through which gender reconstructs and animates itself during varied modernities.

This leads us to the second issue: the intricacies of domesticizing in this discourse. It is clear from the analysis that this discourse persistently invokes an analogy between the domestic and the political. Such analogies are not peripheral as these two spaces are built on certain common ethical values. For instance, in the example discussed in the beginning of the last section, the quality of ‘resoluteness towards the principle that one has taken in his life’ fuses the political obligation with conjugal commitment. The absence of this quality disqualifies a Tamilian from both these spheres. Thus, this discourse actually constructs an intimate relationship between these two spheres, unlike the premodern imaginations of them.

Similarly, even on the functional plane of this discourse, these two spheres are integrally linked. The practices that enlighten the Tamil subject about the political realm also simultaneously establish a certain kind of domestic space as normative. That is, the process of politicization is integrally at once a process of domesticization and that of gendering. An investigation of the characteristic features of this domesticity would help us understand the intricacies of Tamil political subjectivation and its specific mode of gendering.

The Domestic and Domesticizing in Anna

In Anna’s discourse, the ideal domestic is a continuum of the past golden age of Tamil, which it eventually constructs. It is a place constituted of two individuals who possess the qualities and ethics that ‘naturally’ characterized the Tamil self in the classical golden past. Thus, it stands as a space that connects the present day uprooted Tamilian to his/her classical history and culture. In addition to this intimate connection with the past, this domestic also highlights certain structural features which tie it strongly to the present. First, the domestic space within which Anna’s letters repeatedly imagine the thambi is a modern nuclear conjugality where the young, newly/recently married husband and wife form the family. Second, this conjugality is neither validated by religious rituals nor characterized plainly by sexual morality/loyalty—but by khadhal (mutual love/desire) for each other. Such a construction of the domestic strikes certain significant differences not just with the ritualistically validated premodern imaginations but also with many other modern imaginations of it. Significant among them is the egalitarian domesticity that emerges in Periyar’s discourse. The main reason for taking up Periyar’s ‘domestic’ here is the complex relation that existed between Periyar and Anna. They share many features besides having certain significant differences. A comparison of these two would help us mark the subtler features of Anna’s ‘domestic’.

Periyar’s and Anna’s construction of conjugality has many similarities such as: (a) negating conjugal as a divine relationship necessarily constituted by the ‘auspicious’ Brahminical rituals, (b) stressing on mutual consensus and love as the foundation of a wedding partnership (c) negating endogamy as the normative form of marriage and so on. Despite these similarities, Anna’s ‘domestic’ differs in certain subtle ways from that of Periyar. Periyar imagines family/domestic by foregrounding the concept of equality. Family is a place that relates two individuals through mutual consensus. They love and live together without one affecting/intruding in the other’s freedom, rights and self-respect. While Periyar’s imagination foregrounds equal rights, self-respect, mutual freedom and so on as the characteristics of a conjugal bonding, in Anna’s imagination, inbham (pleasure) sidelines and occasionally even takes over these qualities. Although mutual consensus and love are common features of both these imaginations, they exhibit certain structural and analytical differences. The difference in the set of vocabulary that Periyar and Anna employ to refer to marriage or the wife would help us identify these differences.

Periyar coins phrases such as vaazhkkai thunai (life partner) and vaazhkkai thunai oppantham (a contract for life partnership) to refer to the spouse and marriage respectively, which exposes the rational egalitarian ground on which his domestic is situated. This shows us how the mutual consensus and love that Periyar considers as the foundation for the ideal conjugal are rational categories substantiated by the discourse of rights. In contrast, Anna’s domestic is founded on an affective plane. This is clear from the set of vocabulary that he applies to refer to the domestic woman. Although this woman appears as the ‘wife’ of the Tamil man, she is never identified by the word pendaatti (or pondaatti)—a colloquial word that denotes ‘wife’ in Tamil. She is referred through a new set of vocabulary—un manathirkiniya mangai nallaal (the noble/virtuous woman who is pleasurable to your [the husband’s] heart), un anbinai pettraval (one who has earned your love), un idayam/ullam vendraval (she who has won your heart), illakizhaththi, manaivi, manaiyaatti, illaal (the woman of the home), illatharasi (the queen of the home) and so on. These words, along with the words that are used to denote conjugality such as illara or khadhal inbham (the delights/pleasures of conjugality or love), show that egalitarianism is not the leading motif here as it was in the case of Periyar. On the contrary, it is pleasure that characterizes Anna’s domestic. This in turn reveals the affective ground on which Anna’s domestic is situated. One can see that the words used to denote conjugality and domestic woman in Anna’s discourse, like manathirkiniyaval or illara/khadhal inbham (the pleasures of conjugality/love) carry with them the aesthetics of the pleasure that characterize the conjugal space.

This pleasurable domestic, in spite of its affective character, cannot be categorized as premodern because, as we have already noted, it exhibits significant structural variations from the latter. The mutuality of love, the nature of conjugal relationship where, in many instances, the wife is placed in a position of teaching the husband, and, more importantly, the way the pleasure is placed in the realm of interiority (which the words like manathirkiniya mangai nallaal reveal) by differentiating it from the physical kind of pleasure that the dasi gives, all exhibit the modern features of it. While this new pleasurable domestic is invoked as the model for the political, the very mode or process through which the Tamil subject learns about this normative domestic is actually performed as a fraternal responsibility. That is, the advice on the superiority of the ideal domestic woman and the warnings about the treachery and meanness of the dasi—the process through which this specific kind of domesticity is established as the normative epistemological ground for politics—is delivered as an advice and guidance of a lovable and concerned elder brother to his ignorant-but-good younger brother. That is, here, the domestic not just becomes a pre-knowledge for understanding politics but the very process of political pedagogy is performed as an act expressing filial responsibility and obedience. This reveals that, in the Tamil sphere, domestic is not just the mode of political activity but it is the very cognitive framework of politics.

In other words, the spheres of the domestic and politics are integrally linked in this discourse, which in turn foreground the inadequacy of the analytical tool of ‘domestic versus politics’ to examine the Tamil subjectivity. In addition to this, the modes and mediums through which the subjects’ affective relationship with Anna and the party are constructed also reveal its modern characteristics. As Lisa Mitchell notes with regard to abhimanam and pattru (devotion) to a nation, language or movie artists in the Telugu and Tamil contexts, this affective relationship of the followers with Anna is also ‘between individuals and some sort of publicly available—and, most importantly, shared—object’ (Mitchell, 2010, p. 16). As she rightly points out:

Fans and patriots know that although their relationship with the object of their affection is an individual relationship, it is one that they share with many others, and thus they can imagine themselves as part of a much larger group of people with whom they may have little else in common other than the shared object of affection. (ibid.)

This bonding through the shared object of affection also characterizes the filial relationship of the Tamilians with Anna that cuts across caste and religious boundaries to bind all party men as the younger brothers of Anna. As it is with nation, language and movie stars, this relationship is constructed every day via mass media or the public spaces of modernity such as magazines, conferences and meetings, drama, cinema, libraries and the reading halls opened by DMK, their activities and events, party offices, literary associations, festivals, celebrations and more importantly Anna Malars. This shows how this relationship is situated corporeally in the institutions and spaces of modernity which strongly resist its classification as premodern. The fact that the very instance that seeded the split in DK and led to the founding of DMK is continuously represented and perceived as the eldest son’s split from a family headed by an autocratic father in order to establish a separate, democratic family for his younger brothers further challenges its labelling as ‘undemocratic’. This labelling becomes even more problematic especially when the critical historians, who mark it as feudal and undemocratic, themselves observe that this familial politics is ‘nevertheless nurtured and practised in a popular-democratic space’ (Geetha, 1991, p. 387).

More significantly, does not the critique that classifies the Tamilian—who chooses the ‘elder brother’ over ‘father’ for the former is democratic and can provide space for one’s desires, pleasures, tastes and aspirations—as premodern, feudal and a mere object of manipulation eventually end up in negating his/her agency?

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.