01. A dubious form of human development

02. Defining the lower classes as idiots

03. Internal quality versus external splendour

04. When speaking about Subash Chandran

A dubious form of human development

There is another aspect of human improvement that I had discerned. It was in the Mappila population of Malabar (Malabar Muslim). In the early 60s and 70s, they went to the Middle East for doing menial jobs there. It was a not a huge deluge of people going there then. In the later years of the 70s, I did start seeing a particular kind of people. Totally uneducated and totally featuring the local tribal social communication and human relationship codes. Yet, carrying modern gadgetries like Cassette Players and such things. The local man even though employed in better jobs, couldn’t compete with them. It certainly was a physically tangible improvement. Yet, I couldn’t see a social refinement in them.

For, they came with money, and more or less used the brutal power of the indicant codes on the impoverished locals. This impoverishment was also a relative thing. For this impoverishment was caused by the exponential expansion allowed for the earnings of the foreign-employed. Now, how would one compare this with the slow and steady, yet, persevering development that the British educator has given to the Thiyyas of Tellicherry area?

In the present case, there was essentially no societal improvement for the others. They went down. Not only in wealth, but also in indicant word content. The Mappillas then went in for a baby boom. Every Mappilla wife would bear six to twelve children. It seemed as if they were on a demographic correction spree. There appeared on the social horizon a new wealthy class of persons. {For example, the district of Malappuram, which had been a very sparsely populated place at that time, is now teeming with people}. However, the original people of the place who were not Mappillas remained not unaffected, but negatively affected.

I need to slightly digress here to narrate another thing. When the newly improved Mappillas started appearing on the economic scene loaded with cash, it was a very funny situation. People who inherently had the intellectual stance of the Indian lower classes in demeanour and information were moving around with cash. However, it would not be correct to say that they were uncultured or impolite, but they were different. The local society especially in South Kerala where the concept of going to the Middle East to do low quality jobs had not caught up, reacted in a very funny manner.

Everywhere people were making fun of these new rich guys. I remember seeing many mimicry stage programmes wherein the ill-educated language quality of these persons was taken up for acting out buffoonery. The general refrain would be that these persons were quite idiotic. Well, actually they were not idiots.

Defining the lower classes as idiots

Now speaking about idiots, there is this experience of mine that in almost at all levels of Indian communication, there is a rabid mood to define many others, especially persons of relative lower social or position levels, as idiots. On close examination, I found that any man who is categorised in lower indicant words is quite easily described as an idiot. The spur for doing this is ignited mainly when the thus despoiled individual shows some calibre or capacity that is beyond the limits of the indicant words. The general refrain would be, ‘Avanenthariyaam? Verum vivaramillathavanalle! Avanenthinu kollum?’ ‘What does he know? He is just a nitwit! What is he fit for?’ (All ‘He’s are lowest indicant).

This is not something that only the higher groups say. Every social level of people does it on to persons who they visualise as below them. In many ways, it is a sign of insecurity that sets in when the so-presumed lower person starts sending signals of more than expected capacities.

Now speaking about higher technology improving a section of people, it is not an innate improvement. It is an improvement that can be loaded on to anyone. For example, a White English man of the colonial times is in the African jungles. He has a gun with him that assures his superiority above a group of mutually competing Negroes. One fine morning, a Negro gets hold of the gun. He has managed to learn how to use it. Now who is the superior?

Well, improvement shown by any person based on having a technological gadgetry is not an innate personality refinement or improvement. For example, in the early 90s, I came across young men, reasonably un-educated, and with zero-English, driving modern commercial vehicles like the Mazda etc. That these huge commercial vehicles could be manned by such intellectually inferior persons was quite a remarkable information. At their levels, they also put on a show of being the masters of great mechanical devices which ordinary human cannot deal with.

This was associated with another Indian official misdemeanour. Only persons who had commercial driving licences could drive these contraptions. Now, getting a commercial vehicle driving licence is not the issue. The real issue was that they needed to wear a khaki uniform. Once this is worn, the local policemen starting from the lowest constable would interact with them using only lower indicant words. So, in a powerful way only persons who can bear this level of demeaning taunts could drive these vehicles. So, it existed as a reserved profession for such persons, and they were not unduly bothered about the pejorative words kept for them. For, it was these words that assured that the profession was not invaded by higher quality persons.

When our family had a Mazda, I drove it. It was quite a remarkable understanding that it was quite easy to drive one. Actually even a youngster could drive it. So easy were the controls. Not like the lorries of my childhood days.

Internal quality versus external splendour

Now being able to drive a Mazda cannot be seen as a criterion of quality refinement. Quality refinement is contained in a way of life in which everyone in the social system can function in a healthy social interaction and communication environment. The civic areas become neat and healthy. It is this that makes the English educators’ efforts to be mentioned as quite different from modern Indian development. At best an ability to drive or possess a Mazda is an individual improvement that does not lend any similar development to others.

See these items: A totally uneducated-in-English feudal-language speaking person of refinement, who is attired in quite expensive garments. Second a not-so-well-dressed person of refinement, but one who is quite at home in the English classics. Who would I see as elegant? Well, I would choose the second man as elegant and refined.

There was a similar comparison that took place right in front of me once. The year was 1999. On the table were two books. One was a selected prose writings of Oscar Wilde. The other was a book designed in Photoshop with full colour everywhere. At that time, this type of colourful coffee-table books was not so common. (At least among the people who were present there). That book I saw to be full of wrong English and with lots of grammatical errors. There were no intellectual inputs, other than dull, insipid writings.

However, the Oscar Wilde book was old and its cover was looking drab. However, I viewed that book with fascination and a drooling mouth. Yet, I heard the others around making sounds of exclamation over the colourful designs on the other book. Saying how wonderful that book was. Well, the way to evaluate a book is by its contents.

It is the same way. One has to evaluate a society by its innate qualities and not by the colourful gadgetry that is heaped on it. For example, as I mentioned earlier, the so-called presence of a small group of Thiyyas who looked so un-Indian and were called as White Thiyyas was due to the innate difference that the English education and English social focus perched upon a lower caste people. The same physical and mental change comes over on every man and woman, even of the worst caste from India, if he or she can get born and bred in England in an English ambience.

{It is true that a minor percentage of the Thiyyas of Tellicherry area did have a slight hue of English blood in them. But then, that was not the thing that gave a cumulative refinement elevation in a minority of them. It was English education.}

Following Nehru, Subash Chandrabose, Gandhi and such others will not give this type of improvement, other than to those who reach on to the top. The majority people would sink to stinking levels if one were to follow these men. For these leaders would stay at the golden levels of indicant words and position the vast majority at the lower levels.

DIGRESSION: When speaking about Subash Chandran, there are a few things that come to

my mind. First of all, why did he leave the Congress and try to find an alternative platform for attaining leadership, when he was the party president? Well, it would be that the Gandhi-Nehru coterie would hold him down in a pincer-like grip with the pejorative part of the Hindi indicant words. There is no way to overcome this other than to exist under them, for all others to view and evaluate him at that level. For, he was continually irked by Gandhi when he was elected as the Congress president despite Gandhi’s staunch antipathy. Gandhi would naturally use the indicant word weapon, from which there is no defence.

However, his actions were quite foolhardy. He went seeking a friendship with Hitler. Even though he was in Germany, it took him quite a long time to arrange a meeting with Hitler. The problem here is that German language is also slightly feudal, and the issue of him being referred to in a lower pejorative code would be there. It is not like going to England. Moreover, Japanese is a mighty feudal language. The Japs would also place him quite at the bottom.

Subash’s levels were certainly not at the level that the English were giving to the ‘Indian’ politicians like Nehru and Gandhi. For, they would at the best and at the least remain at ‘He’ and ‘Him’. As to what would have been Subash’s level in German and Japanese needs to be studied. It would give a lot of insight what would have happened had the German-Japanese side won.

There is this oath that Subash’s small group of men were made to swear:

‘I swear by God this holy oath, that I will obey the leader of the German State and people, Adolph Hitler, as commander of the German Armed Forces, in the fight for freedom of India, in which fight the leader is Subhas Chandra Bose, and that as a brave soldier, I am willing to lay down my life for this oath’.

What we see is the English version of the oath. In German, what it would really mean has to be seen.

There is this statement also from his biography: ‘Through radio he issued warnings to British-Indian soldiers and police to the effect that unless they assisted the liberation forces they would one day have to answer to the free Indian government for their criminal support of the British’.

The question is would the ‘Indian’ soldiers who are used to English ambience like to move into an environment of feudal languages, wherein they would be just Thu and Nee, and USS and Avan, and their officers Aap or Saab and UNN and Adheham? Would their wives allow them to be thus degraded before their officer class? Who would heed his threats?

An attempt was made to create an army with the surrendered Indian troops of the British-Indian army. A few did join, possibly to escape the harsh Japanese imprisonment. Bose had hoped that a huge number of soldiers would come to join the INA. But this did not materialise. As the situation for the Japanese worsened, these turncoat troops started deserting. Moreover, Japanese funding was stopped. Bose resorted to raising money by forced taxation on the Indian populations of Malaysia and Singapore.

The Sepoys of British India Army were terrible angry with the turncoats who had tried to escape the travails of Japanese imprisonment by jumping into the Japanese side. When these turncoats were captured, the Indian soldiers would simply shoot them to vent their fury. In many cases, British troops had to guard the surrendered INA soldiers from being shot dead or harmed by the British-Indian soldiery.

There is this thing also to be mentioned. He was reported dead. However, ample evidence had surfaced after the fall of the Soviet Union that he had died in a Siberian prison. Since Siberian prisons have very terrible reputations as living hells, in which prisoners are degraded into menial servants of the jailers there, it is quite possible that he would also have suffered such a fate. Now, comes the next terrible fact. Nehru had very good relationship with the Soviet Union. His daughter Indira also continued the same relationship, to the extent that when the then Prime Minister of India Shastri died during a brief visit to Soviet Union, there was accusations that he had been murdered to make way for the Indira to take over the Prime Minister-ship.

Nehru would very well have been aware that Subash was in a Russian prison. Why wouldn’t he try to save him? Why would he try to spread the false news that Subash was dead? Well, the answer to this very perilous question is that a mythical image had been given to the dead Subash in India. If this Subash came back alive, Nehru’s support base would have weakened. It does not mean that Subash would take over, but then there were so many other contending political parties, who would have profited from this development.

There is this thing also to be mentioned. It was actually Mohan Singh who started the INA. However, when he refused to be just a minor guy for the Japanese, he was removed. Mohan Singh was a British trained person. It is quite easy to know that he would not be able to act as a servant of the Japanese for long. Then Subash arrived, seeking some avenue for leadership. He took over the mantle of leadership and subservience to the Japanese.