Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
———Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958INTRODUCTION
On 6 April 1919 the first great satyagraha in the Madras Presidency was conducted in Madras City in protest of a new set of restrictions on political activity ushered in under the Rowlatt Act. Officially known as the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919, these laws extended emergency measures instituted during World War I (such as the Defence of India Act, 1915), and were thus viewed by many as bitter reward for the loyalty, service, and sacrifice Indians had demonstrated to the King and empire during the war. The satyagraha had been billed by Mahatma Gandhi as a Day of Humiliation, and the people were called out to partake in a demonstration against this erosion of their natural rights as citizens of the empire. In response, a massive crowd estimated by organizers and police to exceed one hundred thousand peopleFootnote 1 assembled on the Marina beach before five stages set up for simultaneous oratorical performances, mostly in Tamil and Telugu, some in Urdu. The speeches delivered in English were translated into Tamil.Footnote 2
The stages were aligned one after another, and separate stages were set on either end for the members of the newly established Madras Labour Union and the Tramway Workers Union. Devotional singing (bhajan) groups that had formed in different parts of the city earlier in the day processed via various routes to the Marina, singing and dancing all the way. A police sub-inspector who provided an account of this event derisively noted that the crowds continued to break out into bhajans while the orators were speaking. He wrote that at least one-quarter of the crowd, “made no attempt to hear the speakers and were taking their ease all over the sands.… It can truly be said that the bulk of the people were there more to gratify their curiosity than anything else. Everyone was there to see what the crowd would be and they contributed to swell the number. The majority was neither keen on, nor impressed with the day's speeches.”Footnote 3 But he also conceded that “the crowd surrounding the speakers was enormous and kept moving from place to place in their vain attempt to hear them.”Footnote 4 By his own admission, the sub-inspector's report suggests that some large portion of an immense crowd had come to the Marina beach to listen attentively to speeches by the local and national leaders of the day.
By all accounts the crowd was the largest anyone had ever seen in Madras for a political event, and it shattered the expectations of the organizers. It was probably some four or five times larger than any political meeting in Madras theretofore. The Madras Times, an Anglo Indian paper hostile to the nationalists, wrote, “Whatever may be said about the causes which induced the people of Madras to carry out the dictates of the Satyagraha, ‘satyagraha Day’ (6th April) will be remembered in the annals of the city as unique occasion.”Footnote 5 Numerous meetings had been held during the month prior to the satyagraha in order to educate the public and ensure a large turnout. Organizers included not only the current luminaries of the Indian National Congress, including Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, Bepin Chandra Pal, and Mr. Gandhi himself, but also political martyrs from the previous decade of action under the Swadeshi movement.Footnote 6 And there was a new generation of leaders in the labor movement that had enjoyed explosive growth over the previous eighteen months. Despite their extensive preparations, however, the organizers themselves were stunned by the turnout. One of them, a journalist, Tamil scholar, pioneer in public oratory, labor organizer, and politician of profound impact, Thiru. Vi. Kalyanasundaram (hereafter Thiru.Vi.Ka.), described the crowd as a “great army, like a surging ocean” moving toward the beach.Footnote 7
But even more germane for our purposes, the crowd was quite mixed, and not limited to the upper-caste Hindu and Christian boys and men, the students and educated classes that had been the usual participants up to the most recent times. Our sub-inspector wrote, “Muhammadans, though not in proportion to the Hindus, were in much greater numbers than ever at such meetings,” and that while “the bulk of those present were middle class persons of the trading, official and student community … the poorer classes were also numerous.”Footnote 8 The Madras Times reported that the crowd was composed “mostly of the labouring and trading classes.”Footnote 9 And the sub-inspector also observed that they were not only men: “There were about 200 women present and they were provided with an enclosure in the 5th platform [i.e., one of the labor platforms], but they were all mostly illiterate people of the working classes who had come there merely to see what took place.” Thiru.Vi.Ka. extended his metaphor of the army by calling it, “Gandhi's army, a satyagraha army, an army of labourers,” expressly linking labor to the satyagraha itself. They had come, rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, man and woman, to partake of politics.
The birth, as it were, of modern mass politics in the Madras Presidency has long been dated to this period, and few would question that this period of post-World War I politics represented a phase-shift in political action and organization. Many have noted that by 1918 and 1919 virtually all the elements of twentieth-century Tamil politics had converged: natural rights, women's rights, the labor movement, satyagraha, passive resistance, pan-Islamism (the Khalifat Movement), and even caste reservation.Footnote 10 The crowd that gathered on the beach that April was a manifestation of a new efflorescence of political action, a new politics that set the stage for the kinds of mass actions that would take place throughout the twentieth century, first in the freedom struggle and later in democratic politics itself: satyagraha, non-violent protest, and mass meetings featuring hundreds of thousands gathering to hear, or at least see and be seen by, the great leaders of the past and the present. There is no doubt that this period was unprecedented in the production of modern mass politics.
What changed such that people previously excluded from, or indifferent to, formal political action suddenly appeared in great numbers in the political realm? David Washbrook (Reference Washbrook1976) argued that the new organization of mass politics was the direct result of new kinds of horizontal linkages among elites in the cities and the mofussil (interior) new networks of factions that enabled the formation of trans-Madrasi political action from city to countryside. This may indeed be the case, and while strong arguments against Washbrook's thesis have been made for some decades now (Hardiman Reference Hardiman and Guha1982; Pandian Reference Pandian1994; Guha Reference Guha1997), it would be difficult to dispute the claim that there were unprecedented linkages among ever-expanding groups of people.
But the organization of metropolitan and provincial elites hardly accounts for the emergence of vast numbers of laborers, lower classes, lower castes, and women in the satyagraha, both in meetings leading up to it and in the decades to come. Indeed, the very concept of “laborer,” as a category of person that cut across various previously distinct kinds of practices and was now active within formal mass politics, was something quite new (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty1989: 116–54; Sarkar Reference Sarkar2010: 156–214; see also Wadia Reference Wadia1921). It hardly seems reasonable to suppose that horizontal linkages between subaltern categories of people and their class enemies had a great deal to do with their presence at the satyagraha, and certainly that alone could not account for it. Something else must have changed to enable such people to suddenly see themselves as a new kind of political category that was relevant to, and even an element of, the political class in the Madras Presidency.
What changed was a new communicative medium that enabled a new kind of political organization and a new definition of politics itself: vernacular political oratory—basically a secular, or at least self-consciously political, avatar of the Protestant sermon. From the stages set up on the beach that day came oratory that was expressly addressed to the uneducated classes in the Presidency, what were called in those days by the now rude term pamara makkal—“illiterate” or “poor people.” We might call this a new interpellation, to apply Althusser's (Reference Althusser and Brewster1971) concept of calling and naming, and the reciprocal self-recognition of the called and named, which indeed it was: a calling out to new entities—laborers, the people—who would now recognize their own vital relationship within a new political dispensation. Tamil has another word for this that captures a different dimension of the transformation: nokkam, which as a noun means intention, aim, reason for doing something; as a verb nokkuthal means to physically turn or face someone or something. Together, this Goffmanian term captures the materiality of communication, the physical change in stance associated with new intentions and ideologies of communication. In this new interpellative transformation, elites had, quite literally, turned towards and faced the masses with the intention of calling them to politics. The events of April 1919 were possible only because a certain kind of communicative action made them possible, a possibility that had only existed, in fact, for a little over a decade, since the Swadeshi movement of 1905–1908, though never so robustly or broad-based as it became in 1918–1919.
In essence, the emergence of vernacular oratory played an infrastructural role in the transformation of Tamil society and the production of modern forms of politics, or at least the politics that came to dominate the twentieth century however we want to describe them. Indeed, as Sudipta Kaviraj told me in a personal communication, the independence movement, and post-colonial democratic politics generally, were at their heart oratorical. Vernacular sermonic oratory provided an interpellative infrastructure involving new kinds of agency and practice that was a necessary (if insufficient) condition for the development of mass politics, a point I will return to in my conclusion.
For the moment, the bare facts of the matter are this: In 1900, if you were engaging in “politics” in Madras City, you would bear a Brahmin surname such as Aiyer or Aiyengar (or perhaps one of the socioeconomically forward non-Brahmin communities such as Chettiar or Pillaimar), you lived in the neighborhoods of Mylapore or Egmore, and when you engaged in politics in what were called public meetings you spoke in English. By 1920 things had changed: now if you were engaged in politics your surname might still be Aiyar or Aiyengar, but it might also be Chettiar, Pillai, Naidu, Naiyakar, Mudaliar, or the name of a far broader set of non-Brahman communities. When you engaged in politics in public meetings you likely spoke in Tamil (or Telugu), and if you could not speak one of the vernacular languages your English would be translated for your audience. During this period a new kind of politician emerged, people like Dr. P. Varadarajulu Naidu, who undertook a major vernacular speaking tour throughout the Tamil country in 1917 on behalf of nationalist politics (Irshick Reference Irshick1969), or Thiru.Vi.Ka. who became the single most important figure in the formations of Madras politics in 1918–1919. These people were (minimally) bilingual orators capable of engaging in an entirely new kind of politics, one that targeted and brought into relevance the vast majority of illiterate farmers, laborers, women, dalits (adi-dravidars), and so on who had previously been entirely left out of politics.
This provokes a question: were such people not political before? Did they not engage in stratagems to acquire spoils? Did they not struggle with each other for material advantage, as the Indian political treatise the Arthashastra would put it? Or were they not a part of great groups of people that struggled class against class, as Marx would say? They certainly did do these things; they were a part of such struggles. The ordinary people were not somehow pre-political prior to the vernacular interpellation of them as politically relevant. They were a part of great struggles within the broad realm of action that Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur1965, cited in Marchart Reference Marchart2007: 35–60) called the political (le politique), that set of practices that would involve any number and kinds of calculations and weighings of instrumental action, say in a marriage alliance, the partition of agricultural land, the alliance of a farmer with one landlord or another, or the negotiations of women within a family for authority over each other, their children, their men, and their futures. And people embodied the political in any number of peasant uprisings described by Ranajit Guha (Reference Guha1999 [1983]) and labor agitations analyzed by Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty1989).
But something within the political changed dramatically during the two decades between 1900 and 1920 insofar as elites began quite pointedly to direct their utterances toward people they had never bothered with before as politically relevant. The difference was in the universalization of Ricoeur's politics (la politique), that realm of action expressly epistemized as political, set apart, named, and, at essence, defined by speech itself.
Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt1958) called this form of practice action. Politics, as distinct from the political in a broader sense, ties together praxis and lexis, instrumental action and speech, into a form of life for which Arendt imagined the classical period of Athens as exemplar (ibid.: 25). Of course, in Athens such action was limited to citizens, to land-owning men. Most members of the social order (women, slaves, non-Athenians) would be absorbed with labor and work.Footnote 11 In this formulation, the ancient regime of the aristocracy, of family life (oikos), was defined in dialectical opposition to political life in the polis, in which free men enter into a bios politikos, and a new form of life that was simultaneously a new genre of the political: politics itself. And it was there and then that the new arts of rhetoric were systematically developed to complement and stand in opposition to the arts of violence and war. In the bios politikos, life devoted to the public good, “the emphasis shifted from action to speech, and to speech as a means of persuasion.… To be political to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence” (ibid.: 26).Footnote 12
Politics (la politique), in Athens and elsewhere up to the most recent times, was always an elite activity for it presupposed the kind of freedom that only the hegemon enjoyed. For some decades prior to the moment that is our focus here, elites in India had lamented their inability to draw the common man (if not woman) into politics. K. Sundararaman's discussion on “Religious Education in Indian Schools,” published in the Indian Review in 1902, is merely one of many complaints made during this period regarding the need to begin interpellating the vast majority of people beyond the Anglophone classes. The educated classes, he wrote,
seek out a hundred opportunities for making a stir in the minds of the few who are akin to them in tastes, pursuits and aims. The leaders as well as the rank and file of this cultured minority of Indian society creates but very little impression on the immense population around them on whose behalf they work and for whom they speak. As people concern themselves but little with their view or activities in regard to public needs and wishes and as in most cases their views and feelings find expression in a language unknown to the millions, they produce little or no effect on the practical life of society at large, or any section of it. Hence there is little real vitality in the movements set on foot for the formation and expression of public opinion or for the achievement of social progress and unity (Indian Review III, 4: 174, my emphasis).
For Sundararaman and others, the lack of a mass political was a sign of their own political backwardness—their pre-political modernity, as it were. The situation had changed so little by 1918 that the Theosophist and labor organizer B. P. Wadia could still be considered a pioneer in the formation of mass political action when he published an open letter in his journal, New India, in June 1918:
We want to bring the masses into line with the educated classes. Much lecturing work has been done already and what seems now necessary is to combine them in all sorts of ways. Agricultural societies, Trade and Labour Unions, Ryot Combines, Craft Guilds—these should be started. Let common interests in each taluq and village combine to remedy the evils from which they are suffering. The masses do possess political outlook; they have lost the art of making themselves heard, and our task should be to persuade them into speech and action (1921: xvi).
In this passage alone, Wadia links the political, the masses, speech, and action in a way perhaps unprecedented in Indian history, and he ties them together with a particular form of action, “lecturing work.” This marks a triple transformation in the broader polity: the first is from the political (le politique) to politics (la politique), from a generalized set of actions into what Arendt called action itself; the second is from English to Dravidian oratory; and the third is from elite to mass forms of political action. When elites made the conscious move to turn towards, to face (nokku) and begin addressing the common man, when Everyman was called to join into the political, a new agency was figurated along with a new definition of politics.
Below I will provide an outline of the emergence of a political Tamil in its first explicit articulation in the Swadeshi movement (1905–1908) through its adoption as a means of political communication in 1915–1916 in the Home Rule movement and the formation of the non-Brahmin Madras Presidency Association. It was members of both these organizations who transmitted the concerns of the educated elite to a subaltern working class in the establishment of the labor movement in 1917–1918, when elite politicians turned toward people utterly unlike themselves to persuade them into speech and action. This move, I believe, was the key transformation that enabled mass politics itself to emerge, which enabled the masses, as it were, to become the people.
POLITICAL TAMIL
Early Attempts and the Swadeshi Movement
A new kind of political practice associated with the Swadeshi movement emerged across British India in 1905 following the partition of Bengal.Footnote 13 Responses to the partition were split among the several factions of the Indian National Congress, from the moderates who advocated continued Anglophone meetings and memorials petitioning the English government and, via the press, the English people, to the nationalists who advocated a faster path to swaraj (literally “self-rule”) via the promotion of swadeshism, a boycott of foreign goods, and national education. For the first time in India, this latter, younger group of political actors was systematically taking to public spaces and speaking to larger and larger crowds in vernacular languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil. Meetings of people numbering in the thousands were crowding the squares, bazaars, and other open spaces of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, and provincial congress committees and other groups organized speaking tours of “preachers” to villages and towns of the mofussil, taking the gospel of swaraj to the ordinary Indian.
This was the first time that political actors had systematically taken to vernacular oratory. This is not to say that Tamil oratory itself was created at this moment; the oratory of this period seems very well worked out, with people able to deploy already extant oratorical forms that had been developed in Tamil as modes of preaching in Christian churches, and later, Saivite contexts (saiva cabaikal, starting in the 1880s).Footnote 14 But the Swadeshi movement saw the systematic use of vernacular political oratory delivered to far-flung “common” or “illiterate” people, well beyond anything that had gone on before.
This all emerged very fast: as late as 1906 the police were utterly unaware of any organized political activity going on in the Madras Presidency, with the exception of the usual sorts of activities by the educated elite reported in Indian-owned newspapers such as the anglophone Hindu and the Tamil Swadesamitran. The police did take note of a few new vernacular newspapers starting up, such as the nationalist poet C. Subramania Bharati's India in Tamil and the Andhra Patrika in Telugu, but these were easy to monitor—and with translators, to know—and they caused little worry. What did alarm the police were the new and immense meetings that, almost overnight, began to take place. They were held predominantly in three places in the Madras Presidency and for very different reasons: educated activists went on tours of the Andhra Deltas in what looks to have been missionary zeal to spread the gospel of swadeshism to people in remote villages; Bharati and others on the Marina Beach in Madras City spoke largely to students and vakils (lawyers) in near-messianic terms of imminent social and political transformation; and V. O. Chidambaram Pillai (of the newly formed Swadeshi Steamship Navigation Company) and his comrades Subramania Siva and Padmanabha Ayengar brought the mill and port town of Tuttukidi to the brink of revolution through their charismatic oratory addressed to immense crowds of workers from the Coral Mills. The particulars and complexities of these situations are beyond the scope of this paper; what is important about them for us is that, for the first time, authorities saw something they had never seen before, which angered and frightened them: meetings in the vernacular, often with thousands of attendees, and often directed not only at students and vakils but also at farmers, laborers, and others outside the traditional caste/class boundaries of the Western-educated elites.
By the middle of 1907, officials in the Government of India and in Madras were coming to understand that these new meetings were occurring, and they scrambled to devise new modes of surveillance and recording, and new standards of evidence, by which prosecutions might be instituted to combat what they considered “seditious sentiments.”Footnote 15 The sentiments being expressed at the meetings were not necessarily new, since the same ideas had been expressed in the vernacular papers, and many of them had been articulated for decades. What concerned the authorities was that these ideas were now crossing caste/class boundaries in an unprecedented way. The meetings were moving from the community halls and temples to new public places such as the Marina Beach (where the great satyagraha would take place in 1919) and bazaars and markets where ordinary people gathered as part of their daily lives. This latter feature of these meetings—their universalizing nature and their interpellation of people who had never before been a part of political practice—were what truly marked their newness.
The authorities did not like it. In mid-1908, the British came down hard on the leaders of the Swadeshi movement. Most of the leaders were prosecuted, and some, such as V. O. Chidambaram Pillai, were given harsh sentences of rigorous imprisonment. Others, including the poet C. Subramania Bharathi, fled to Pondicherry. Though Bharathi would become Tamil's single most important modern poet, he would never return to politics. So complete was British prosecution of the Swadeshi speakers that, by the following April, Central Investigation Division officer J.T.W. Filson could boast, “Public speaking in Madras has ceased,” and that the primary organization that had sponsored the meetings, the Chennai Jana Sangam, “has ceased to show any outward signs of activity.”Footnote 16
The oratory that bloomed in this period would not be heard again at the same volume until 1916, with the Home Rule Movement, the formation of the Madras Presidency Association, the linking of the formally political concerns of the educated elite to the concerns of ordinary people—mostly in the labor movement—in the vernacular speeches of labor activists P. Varadarajulu Naidu and Thiru.Vi.Ka., and the return of some of the Swadeshi movement speakers (see below). But the political phase of 1908 was over, probably because the organizers had failed to link their politics to the people they hoped to mobilize through their oratory.
What provoked the British was something brand new in the world, something that they knew they could not control, or perhaps more importantly, comprehend. Before, most of those who engaged in formal politics had been members of the educated elite, most of them from families boasting generations of service to and critical engagement with the British Government. “Politics” had been conducted in English from the first glimmers of respectable political engagement in the Madras Native Association in the 1850s through the forerunner of the Congress itself, the Madras Mahajana Sangam in the 1880s (Sundralingam 1974).
English oratory was largely controllable since the social fields in which it was delivered were fairly small and circumscribed. The educated elite who orated did so largely in hall meetings, at Pachaiyappa's Hall in Madras, for instance, and the social groups were also limited to the elites. The elites also had much to lose, since many of them had government jobs, or at least standing among the ruling British, which would be jeopardized by open antagonism toward the authorities.
But the unknowable of these speeches was perhaps the key reason why the police came down so hard on the speakers.Footnote 17 The extreme police and judicial violence that met this movement was based on an epistemological darkness that not only forced the speakers into jail or into exile in Pondicherry but also spurred new modes of knowing, new kinds of police procedures (officers openly taking notes in meetings), and new modes of colonial governmentality. Perhaps the most striking of these was the development of Tamil (and Telugu) shorthand. A remarkable series of Government Orders and official correspondenceFootnote 18 documents how officers in the Secretariat called for shorthand reporters only to find that there was virtually no systematic vernacular shorthand available. The only exceptions were two recent attempts by missionaries for the purpose of transcribing vernacular sermons, one using a method devised for French, the other for German. Reports indicate further that there were simply no experts in the field at all in the Madras Presidency for either Tamil or Telugu. Given indigenous textual practices (Bate Reference Bate, Pandian and Ali2010), it had never been necessary to develop them.
Home Rule and the Madras Presidency Association
After it was shut down in 1908, vernacular political oratory would not be heard again until late 1916 and 1917. Police and judicial attentions under the India Press Act of 1910 move from a concern with “sedition” from 1911–1912 to one with “obscenity” by 1913–1914. Starting in 1914, the Fortnightly Reports from the secretary of the government of Madras show virtually no interest in “politics” per se until late 1915, when notice began to be given to the increasing activities of Theosophical Society leader and political activist Annie Besant and her nascent Home Rule movement. As far as the political is concerned, reports from the beginning of 1916 concentrated on the war effort, prices of basic commodities, and Muslim reaction to British enmity with Khalifate. In one Fortnightly Report, the secretary of Madras dismissively predicts that Mrs. Besant's activities will not be supported by the people. Over the course of the year, however, his mocking tone turns to concern and then to genuine alarm as the movement grows by leaps and bounds, Mrs. Besant is nearly deified in her reception around the Presidency, and subscriptions to her newspaper, The New India, explode to over ten thousand, eclipsing even the Hindu.
Her movement began with a transformation of some thirty-four Theosophical lodges in provincial towns and centers throughout the Presidency from strictly religious and philanthropic organizations into an outright political machine.Footnote 19 Mostly coming from the educated classes, several thousand students, vakils, and landowners, the meetings were still conducted in English, as were the great public meetings that Besant held at Gokhale Hall in Madras throughout the movement.
But by December of 1916 and early 1917 Mrs. Besant was calling for a new kind of political action that involved vernacular pamphlets and the “itineration of Home Rule preachers,” very much like what had happened some nine to ten years earlier in the Andhra deltas and parts of the Tamil-speaking lands of the Madras Presidency. The Government of Madras in Fort St. George saw the connection immediately: “Hitherto the district reports have for the most part pictured the Home Rule movement as confined to the younger vaikils and students in the central towns, but in the report from Guntur district for the past fortnight the Collector lays stress upon the activities of the league in the delta villages of Tenali Taluk.”Footnote 20 Just a few months later, in March of 1917, the Home Rule League's main office issued a notice to the members of the Theosophical Society: “It is proposed by Mrs. Besant that a more vigorous campaign must begin throughout the Tamil districts of the Presidency to form as many branches of the Home Rule League and enlist as many members as possible. To do this, fluent speakers in Tamil are required.”Footnote 21 Besant's involvement in the Provincial Congress Committee, too, seemed to spur on calls to vernacularize meetingsFootnote 22 and thereby persuade more and more categories of people into speech and action.
This was the crucial moment when the non-Brahmin movement began to formally organize itself in the establishment of the pro-British/anti-Congress Justice Party, on the one hand, and the formation of the pro-Congress Madras Presidency Association, on the other. The Justice Party continued to hold Anglophone hall meetings, while the Madras Presidency Association established itself in the very first meeting by passing a resolution declaring that henceforth all meetings in Tamil-speaking areas would be conducted in Tamil. The great newspapermen, politician, and labor activist of this period, Thiru.Vi.Ka., wrote of that meeting:
The Trichy-Tanjavur conference was organized on behalf of the Madras Presidency Association and met in Tanjavur on 20, 21 April 1918. Under the Presidency of Indian Patriot editor Diwan Bahadur Karunakara Menon, many resolutions were passed in that conference. One of them involved Tamil. I seconded the motion which stated that, henceforward, the Tamilians' mother tongue must be spoken in public meetings, that foreign tongues are not to be spoken, and that if anyone should speak in a foreign tongue, the general public would reserve the right to rebuke him.… Of all the revolutions (puratchi) of my life, this was the first.Footnote 23
In this period the Andhra movement started to formally demand separate political accommodation for the furtherance of Telugu-speaking people; at the Ganjam District Conference of May 1917 there was a major split between the Oriya and Telugu speakers over representation; and one even begins to read from this period of the return of some of the vernacular lecturers of the Swadeshi movement.Footnote 24 The vernacular had arrived in a big way and vernacular oratory was back. The authorities were becoming worried and began to compare these times with the Swadeshi movement, and take action accordingly.
The Labor Movement, 1917–1919
This time it would be different. First, the people engaging in these lectures and organizations were not upstart young men without standing but rather established politicians and respectable people. The Madras Presidency now had all-India figures of status, such as Besant and her two chief lieutenants in the Home Rule movement, George Arundale and B. P. Wadia. This time they were not going to be so easily dismissed or crushed.
A second difference was that now they not only reached out to the lower classes and appealed to their nationalism and devotion, as during the Swadeshi movement, but they also tied their politics to issues of direct concern to ordinary people, especially to the economics and dignity of the new proletariat toiling in the cotton mills around Madras. The biggest transformation, and probably the key element in the establishment of vernacular oratory, was the formation of the Madras Labour Union and other unions that arose immediately thereafter, in 1918. The labor movement was started, flourished, and became established precisely due to the direction of vernacular oratory to the workers.
It is important to examine, briefly, what kinds of actions and communicative practices were engaged in prior to the formation of organized labor institutions. Work stoppages, strikes, workers riots, and other disturbances are as old as industrial forms of production in India. The managing agents of the Buckingham and Carnatic (B&C) Mills in Perambur, outside of Madras, reported a strike just a few months after opening their first textile factory in 1878. They continued to report major strikes at intervals of every two years throughout the 1880s, a figure consistent with reports from other factories surveyed in an 1892 Royal Commission on Labour report (Veeraraghavan Reference Veeraraghavan1987: 88–89). Modes of protest frequently took the form of idling, theft, sabotage, throwing spindles at managers, and sometimes riots involving thousands, violence directed at supervisors, and destruction of factory property or the personal property of their tormentors. Workers' demands were sometimes monetary, but often had more to do with assaults to their dignity by their European managers, overwork, the denial of previous privileges, or what were perceived to be unjust dismissals of fellow workers. As Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote, the kinds of industrial violence that followed often took the form of personalized vengeance precisely because of the form of colonial authority that was practiced in the mills—a kind of ma-baap system of parental despotism—which was personalized, excessive, and bore the marks of terror (1989: 170–77). The forms of struggle against this system of unreasonable power were met with unreasonable violence, and managerial terror, in turn, met with workers' vengeance (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty1989: 182). These all continued well into the twentieth century.
What was born with the organized labor union was a different mode of communicative practice, even as a paternalistic system continued to operate by other means. The direct oration to the workers constituted a new mode of action that would be fateful indeed. The formation of an organized union was the result of a conscious, deliberate move by a series of different groups to address the workers directly. It began, curiously enough, with the ethical and humanitarian idealism of a Perambur-based merchants' philanthropic and religious organization, the Sri Venkatesa Gunamrithavarshini Sabha (VGS). Run by two small shopkeepers in the Perambur area—cloth merchant G. Chelvapathi Chettiar and rice merchant G. Ramanjulu Naidu—the VGS sponsored weekly discourses by religious orators such as Thiru.Vi.Ka., who was by then well known for such oration, and N. C. Kannabiran Mudaliar, a Vaishnava preacher of some renown. Just as the Besantite Home Rulers based their organization initially on the infrastructure laid down by the Theosophical Society, it is no coincidence that the fateful move to address workers came from a group that was organized around oratory, in this case Vaishnava sermons and literary discourses (Chettiar Reference Chettiar1961; Murphy Reference Murphy1981; Souvenir Reference Souvenir1963).
As providers of goods to the local workforce, Chelvapathi Chettiyar and Ramanjulu Naidu were well aware of the plight of the workers, their sub-subsistence wages, inhumane living conditions, and the constant humiliations and degradations they faced as the lowest-status workers in an apartheid-like social situation.Footnote 25 Over the course of several months in late 1917 and early 1918, the VGS moved from sponsoring strictly religious discourses to ones addressing the need for an organized labor union (Veeraraghavan Reference Veeraraghavan1987: 119–23). It began on Vijayadasami Day (mid-October) of 1917, when the VGS organized a small meeting of some thirty workers who were addressed by N. C. Kannabiran Mudaliar on “a few victorious passages from Mahabharata” and the need for a labor union. Thiru.Vi.Ka. participated in meetings of this sort for some months thereafter, and his memoir states that with every speech more workers showed up.Footnote 26 After the enthusiastic reception of the Kannibiran's proposal for a labor union and the successes of Thiru.Vi.Ka.'s speeches, Chelvapathi and Ramanjulu decided to organize a public meeting of workers.Footnote 27
The first meeting was held at Janga Ramayammal Gardens on Straham's Road, Perambur, on 2 March 1918. By all accounts the meeting was massive: the police estimated that one thousand B&C workers—“most were coolies”—showed up, but Thiru.Vi.Ka. said that “many thousands of workers thronged the meeting, filling the maidan, the walls and the trees” (Kalyanasundaram Reference Kalyanasundaram2003 [1944], 352); Chelvapathi claimed that ten thousand came, but that seems high. In any case, the meeting was most likely the single largest event of its kind ever in the Madras Presidency, and certainly nothing close to it had ever been organized specifically for workers. The only meetings that might have rivaled it were those that V. O. Chidambaram Pillai and his colleagues had organized for workers in Tutukudi, some ten years earlier.
The meeting was chaired by V. E. Sudarsana Mudaliar, an honorary magistrate, and the main speakers included Thiru.Vi.Ka. His speech, and the reactions to it, serve well to illustrate the crossroads of, and emerging contradictions between, religious philanthropy and political organization. Chelvapathi described it as “a powerful speech in chaste but simple Tamil” (Veeraraghavan Reference Veeraraghavan1987: 120–21). Police reported that Thiru.Vi.Ka. “spoke on the need of organizing labour at Madras. In doing so he emphasized the fact that labour plays an important part in the prosperity of a country and how India is becoming poorer day by day by the industrial exploitation of foreign countries.… He placed the picture of Mr. Gandhi's life before them and exhorted them … to follow his example. They should all be loyal, constitutional and do their work with truth in one hand and fearlessness in the other, thinking that service to man is service to God because man is but a moving temple to God.”Footnote 28 According to Thiru.Vi.Ka., he spoke about “the history of the labour movement in Western countries, the dignity of economic liberty, and the necessity of a labor union. The workers were brimming with a sense of new possibility” (Kalyanasundaram, Reference Kalyanasundaram2003, 352).
Clearly, Thiru.Vi.Ka. saw his purpose as being to address the political, economic, social, and even spiritual challenges facing the workers as a whole. However, the Chair, Mudaliar, was displeased with his remarks and in his closing speech rebuked Thiru.Vi.Ka. for what he felt was an overly political oration: “The Chair, for his part, had come with the expectation that this was going to be some kind of religious speech. He was a government employee. He began to rebuke my speech. The uproar made by the workers, who had gathered like the sea, reached all the way to the stage. Mr. Chelvapathi Chettiyar [in his vote of thanks] cut and felled the Chair's rebuttal decisively.… The worker's honor had been protected. And the question of when a new ‘Labourers’ Union' would be formed circulated widely among the workers” (Kalyanasundaram Reference Kalyanasundaram2003, 353; see also Veeraraghavan Reference Veeraraghavan1987: 120–21).Footnote 29
Given the success of the first public meeting, Chelvapathi Chettiyar and Naidu took the next step of approaching the highest profile persons they could find who might be sympathetic to their cause. They spoke with a number of prominent politicians, including congressmen, about joining them as leaders, but no one was interested in the plight of “lowly, illiterate labourers” (Murphy Reference Murphy1981: 82). Finally, they turned to Annie Besant and her people, and though they went to the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar with the hope of luring Mrs. Besant herself, she was out of the office that day and they chanced to meet one of her lieutenants, B .P. Wadia.Footnote 30 In the end it was he who, despite his own ignorance of the mills, the workers, and the overall condition of labor in India, immediately understood that labor would be a key ally in their larger struggle for Home Rule in India. “The educated classes in India,” he wrote, “have so far failed to realize the great value of the Labour Movement as a factor in the general political advancement of the country. Without the masses there can be no true Democracy” (1921: xvi).
The first meeting with Wadia was held at the Janga Ramayammal Gardens in Perambur, at 5 p.m. on 13 March 1918. Five hundred people attended. Tellingly for our purposes, the police report of this meeting spends a significant amount of time on the codes deployed, the languages spoken, the quality of that language, and the work of translation:
Mr. B. P. Wadia presided. Mr. T. V. Kalyanasundarm Mudaliyar (editor of Desabhaktan) explained to the audience that Mr. Wadia did not know Tamil and so he would speak in English and after his speech Mr. Kalyanasundaram Mudlr. would translate into Tamil so that the whole audience might understand what Mr. Wadia said. Mr. Wadia then addressed the audience in English and laid stress on the fact that they were all sparks of the Divine Being and so they are all equal.…
Mr. Kalyanasundaram then translated into Tamil the ideas mentioned by Mr. Wadia … and pointed out how influential the labour movement was in England. He also referred to the success achieved by the mill hands at Ahmedabad by the kind intervention of Mr. Gandhi.
Mr. Kurnivala, a Parsee on the staff of ‘New India’ next spoke in broken Tamil and compared the labourers to the feet and hands of a man's body and the mill owners to the head and said that if there are no feet and hands the head would be worth nothing.Footnote 31
Most reports mention translations not at all or, at best, very little, and the attention paid here to translation and the broken Tamil of speakers is no doubt an index of just how strange and significant this kind of meeting was to the officer observing it. Unlike the Swadeshi speakers of ten years earlier, who were youngsters and upstarts, students and people without status, B. P. Wadia was a major political personality whose internship (house arrest) the previous year along with Mrs. Besant had only boosted his fortunes and made him a pan-Indian political hero. For men of that stature to not only take an interest in the welfare of the common man but to actually commit to addressing them in the vernacular (albeit translated by Thiru.Vi.Ka.), was extremely rare if not unprecedented.Footnote 32
From the establishment of the Madras Labour Union on 27 April 1918 onward, Thiru.Vi.Ka., along with Chelvapathi and Ramanjulu, spoke at Perambur and “wherever workers were” (Kalyanasundaram Reference Kalyanasundaram2003, 354). The major vernacular politicians of the day, including many who had been active since the Swadeshi movement and many others who would come to dominate politics over the next several decades, all fanned out to help organize new unions.Footnote 33 The result was an explosion of labor unions, many within months, most within one year. By April of 1920, there were some eleven major unions, and another ten to fifteen organizations of workers organized enough to issue collective bargaining statements and go on strike.Footnote 34 Thiru.Vi.Ka. lists the Madras & Southern Maratha Railways Workshop Workers Union, the Tramway Workers Union, the Madras Electric Supply Corporation Workers Union, the Kerosine Workers Union, the Aluminium Workers Union, Domestic Servants in European Homes, Barbers, Conservancy Workers, Rickshaw Drivers, Police, Postmen, the Southern Railway Workshop Union in Nagapattnam, and the Textile Workers Unions in Madurai and Coimbatore (Kalyanasundaram Reference Kalyanasundaram2003, 354).Footnote 35 All of these organizations and more emerged within two years of the founding of the Madras Labour Union. It was a fundamental transformation in social organization, as if the entire society suddenly phase-shifted from one state to another that provided the basis for a new mode of action on the part of workers and new relationships to owners. A necessary condition of that shift was the new interpellative power of the vernacular oration to persuade the people into speech and action.
A final point to notice is that while these unions were started at the instigation of elites from “outside” the workforce, over the course of the following year workers themselves began to address meetings, first the skilled laborers such as weavers, carpenters, clerks, and so on, and later some of the ordinary workers (Veeraraghavan Reference Veeraraghavan1987). We see numerous reports over the course of 1919 and 1920 of meetings from which the leaders were absent or in which members of the general workforce countered their recommendations.Footnote 36 A meeting of the Tramway Union of 1919 was chaired by Thiru.Vi. Ka. and featured speeches by old-time Swadeshi activists such as V. O. Chidambaram Pillai and Subramania Siva. A meeting ten days later, chaired by another Swadeshi speaker, Padmanabha Ayyangar, included other current and former politicians of note. But both meetings heard speeches by Mohaiuddin Sahib, a former Tramway employee, and Vasudeva Ayyar, a secondary school teacher. The secretary of the union, one Sriramulu Nayudu, reported on responses authorities gave to the grievances the workers presented. But they were no longer responding only to the luminaries of the union, the heroes of the past, or important figures of the nation (B. P. Wadia and his co-Theosophists and Home Rulers C. W. Andrews and George Arundale) or of the Madras Presidency (Thiru.Vi.Ka.), but also to a tramway driver, a school teacher, and a clerk.
Finally, George Arundale, a man of all-India stature, chaired a meeting of the Madras Labour Union in February of 1920. As was the wont of the responsible elite liberals, Arundale cautioned prudence and patience on the part of the workers, and counseled them to wait for negotiations to go through among their leaders and elected representatives. He “repeatedly exhorted [the workers] to refrain from strike. He even threatened to sever his connection with the Union should they be hasty” To this, a man named Natesan rose upon the platform and presented a tableau that is striking when we consider the career of vernacular oratory over just fifteen years: “One Natesan, a weaver, followed Mr. Arundale. He told the men that Mr. Arundale's preaching were no longer of any use to them.… The only successful course now therefore left open to them was to strike. Natesan's speech is said to have created a more favorable impression than that of Mr. Arundale's.”Footnote 37
The ability to speak, though still highly restricted, was being extended, as all people were being invited to the political through being interpellated, called, via the vernacular press and the vernacular platform, and through being invited to interpellate the public itself. By the end of 1919, as Wadia had called for just one year earlier, the masses had been persuaded to speech and action.
CONCLUSION: AN INTERPELLATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE
Political men faced the common man of 1916 and 1917 and began to address them directly. Their address called the people into being as a new category of social action, a new estate, and a new agency. By 1919, at least, the common man began to stand up alongside, and sometimes against their masters and began to speak back with greater force than ever, Natesan the weaver being but one case in point.
When we consider what constitutes political action in general, we invariably must account not only for the ideas and the people engaging those ideas, but also the real-time practices and actions of those people that are, invariably, couched within very particular communicative modalities. Writing, printing, and the circulation of printed texts throughout a limited vernacular geography have been the usual foci of analysis in considering the political practices that constitute the large-scale social imaginaries such as the public, or the nation (Anderson Reference Anderson2006 [1983]; Habermas Reference Habermas and Burger1991; Taylor Reference Taylor2003; Blackburn Reference Blackburn2003; Venkatachalapathy Reference Venkatachalapathy2012). The present work adds homiletic oratory, which has generally been forgotten in the genealogies of such imaginaries for a number of reasons. Perhaps chief among them is that it is an embodied form of action—rather than a new technology such as printing, the telegraph, or the internet—and its embodiment has suggested to people that it is therefore natural and pan-human, that people must have always orated. But in fact this equally invented form enabled politics on a new level, mass politics of the kind that came to dominate twentieth-century India.
Anyone familiar with Tamilnadu will find this claim bizarre and counterintuitive: twentieth-century Tamil country was an empire of orators. Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy, the founder of the first major Tamil nationalist organization, the Dravida Kazhagam, emerged as a major politician in the 1920s by virtue of his charismatic, if folksy, oratory. Ariñar C. N. Annadurai and Kalaiñar Mu. Karunanidhi, likewise, recast dravidianism within a democratic modality with the formation of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, along with a brand new refined style of political oratory that was marked by literary citations, poetic alliteration, and the use of language that sounded ancient (Sivathamby Reference Sivathamby1978; Kailasapathy Reference Kailasapathy1986; Pandian Reference Pandian1996; Ramaswamy Reference Ramaswamy1997; Bate Reference Bate2009; Cody Reference Cody2011a; Reference Cody2011b). The Dravidian paradigm of political oratory sounded as if the orators were speaking in the voices of ancient Dravidian kings, which was exactly the point: to effect not only a political distinction between the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Congress, but also a civilizational distinction, Dravidian vs. Aryan, and an epochal distinction between the antiquity and autochthony of the Tamils and the otherness of the Aryans. The orator became an avatar of Tamil's purity, antiquity, autochthony, and civilizational right to lead the people. To suggest that there was a time in which such a highly developed and everyday practice did not exist violates the commonsense understanding of the order of things in the Tamil world.
But there was such a time. Tamil contains myriad interpellative practices that stretch back into dim antiquity, including various forms of theatrical and musical performance (e.g., koothu, villuppattu, Blackburn Reference Blackburn1988), text recitational genres (e.g., readings of sacred texts such as the Devaram or Kandapuranam in temples, Peterson Reference Peterson1991), and lower class/caste funeral petitions and drumming (Clark-Decès Reference Clark-Decès2005). But there was nothing like modern oratory in Tamil until the vernacular sermon was introduced and propagated by Protestant missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Bate Reference Bate2005, Reference Bate, Pandian and Ali2010). Modern Tamil oratory outside the Protestant context was probably first deployed by people like Arumuga Navalar (1822–1879), who first offered a Saivite sermon (on the model of a Protestant one) in 1847. It continued to develop in educational and religious contexts throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when politicians began to speak in Tamil instead of English to ever-larger audiences.
This period also saw the transformation of practices among higher-status people who, in previous generations, had left loud, audience-directed utterances (in particular, drumming) to lower classes. The drum, a leather-bound object wielded by the lowest classes and castes, appears as the very paradigm of generalized interpellation in Tamil India, for millennia perhaps, a calling out to a social universe regardless of status or distinction. Its voice or “roar” (murasu) spoke to all without distinction, a feature that led murasu to become the name of some early Tamil newspapers, texts printed to be broadcast into the world. To be a leader, on the other hand, such as a king or even a district or village-level official, was to be relatively taciturn in speech, even silent; it certainly did not involve anything as vulgar as directly addressing a crowd. Higher-status literary people such as poets, teachers, and scholars had very different understandings of textual authority: rather than interpellating an audience, their authority resulted from the rote memorization of texts and their recitation in highly restricted contexts. The texts, as Kamil Zvelebil (Reference Zvelebil1992) and others (e.g., Kersenboom Reference Kersenboom1995) have argued, were actually performative and tended to forefront the quality of nada, the power of sound itself (Yelle Reference Yelle2003), over logos, the word in its denotational functionality (Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj, Hellmann-Rajanayagam and Rothermund1992: 27). The reciter (othuvar) of text was in, essence, the text embodied.Footnote 38
But whereas Indic models of textual authority resulted in a kind of identity, or consubstantiality, of text and person, in modern, or sermonic oratory the object was to effect some kind of change, to transform the world and the hearers from one state in a linear chain of becoming to the next, just as the Protestant sermonizer attempts to transform the souls of his auditors from a state of being lost to one of salvation. Oratory embodied a new kind of agency with entirely new models of textual authority and social order, from religious discourses, to new forms of education, and, of course, to political action.
The history of Tamil oratory, then, is also a history of the social and cultural transformation of the practices, statuses, and agencies of the population that enabled new kinds of political and social action. The vernacular oratorical revolution that I have outlined in this paper entailed a new kind of agency on the part of an entirely new genre of political actor, the vernacular politician, who could now turn toward and evoke the participation of people formerly thought to be irrelevant at best and irrational and dangerous at worst. In that interpellation, it was Tamil oratory that enabled the production of a new Tamil people whose agency came to define twentieth-century Tamil politics.
What does it mean for the definition of politics, then, to say that in 1918–1919 the people emerged as an agentive category in politics? If we say that the people became relevant to politics, then what were the people doing prior to that point? And who was engaging in politics? If a riot broke out between two communities, was that not politics? Or was it something else? When laborers attacked their supervisors and charged out of the factory floor, was that not politics?
I think it was political, but I do not think they were a part of what we call politics, that is the particular realm of action in which people directly face the state, an activity that is called politics itself. Elites of the time, such as Wadia, clearly understood that inviting the masses “to speech and action” was, in fact, calling them into politics.
Politics (la politique) was enabled not only by the rupture of historical events and the emergence of factions such as Gandhian satyagraha, non-violence, or the massive events that shook India at the end of World War I, such as the infamous massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh on 13 April 1919, and are said to have transformed the nationalist movement into a fully fledged mass movement. These events had to occur within some kind of sociocultural context in which they could cohere as events that large groups of people would recognize as relevant to them, and then mobilize appropriately (see Sahlins Reference Sahlins and Biersack1991).
More pointedly, these events emerged at a moment in which mass politics was possible due to the infrastructure of new communicative forms. There could have been no mass politics without the presence of such interpellative networks, without the interpellative infrastructure of the mass meeting and the “public” oration. Such an infrastructure provided a practical basis of action within which new kinds of agency and agents, that is, the vernacular politician, produced new kinds of effects, and a practical basis of action in which a speaker could call an audience, and the audience would return his gaze and recognize itself as such. Without the interpellative infrastructure of the public address, the forms of politics that emerged in 1918–1919 could not have occurred.
But they did not emerge just as they pleased—the new modern social political forms were modern, but they were also Indic, and as time passed, the more twentieth-century politics became Tamil politics itself, the more Indian those forms became (Kaviraj Reference Kaviraj2005: 293).
