PVK’s conversation with Robin Jeffrey, doyen of ‘Kerala Studies’. Jeffrey, who has been a very good and generous friend since I first met him in 1971 while searching for documents on Kerala. My father K Prabhakaran, son of the poet Kumaran Asan, and an exceptional keeper of Asan’s legacy, found him sleeping on a bench inside the ‘Seminar Hall’ of the Asan Memorial. He brought him home and was like a fond parent to him.
After my father passed away, I took over being Jeffrey’s local guide and companion. We spend days together roaming around Trivandrum, meeting old friends like Puthupally Raghavan, the old Communist leader who was a bit of a fabulist but had lots of credible stories to tell us.
My parents, K. Prabhakaran and B. L. Rajam treated him like a son. After both passed on I took over the role of being his friend and companion.
He has promised to be one of those who will launch my book on Kerala and modernity titled, tentatively, ‘A Willing Suspension of Belief: Kumaran Asan, Kerala and Modernity’. He is one of those who encouraged me most during the writing, made canny comments on it and finally endorsed it.
‘Robin Jeffrey Speaks’
[A conversation with Jeffrey that I shared with Sreejan
Robin Jeffrey is Emeritus Professor of La Trobe University and the Australian National University. He is the quintessential academic – travelling, reading, collecting data, teaching, and writing on what he has discovered. Politics, society, technology, the media and garbage are among the subjects that fascinate him. Each of his books has helped define an area and set the tone for subsequent research.
Born and raised in Canada, Jeffrey considers himself a global citizen and an honorary Malayali. He lived in Kerala for some time in the 1970s, was attached to Sussex University for his doctorate, is married to a Sri Lankan-born Australian and has taught in Australia and Singapore. His latest book, co-authored with Assa Doron, Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India is published by Harvard University.
In Thiruvananthapuram to help launch Of Course It’s Butterfingers! by Khyrunnisa A, he stayed on to visit old friends and find out more about the emerging Trivandrum model of waste management. He interacted with Thanal, whose zero waste project he appreciates, visited some of the waste collection facilities run by the Corporation (“Wonderful”, he said, “no flies or smell.”) and met the mayor V K Prasanth to find out how the city was coping with its waste.
On his visits to Kerala he always drops in at the Modern Book Centre, which he describes as south India’s best book store. On 12 December 2018 he gave an interview to P. Vijaya Kumar, a retired teacher of English, and Sreejan B of the Times of India at Modern Book Centre. He spoke about a variety of subjects – matriliny and Travancore history, the history of newspapers in India, media, the problem of waste in the contemporary world, Butterfingers, Sabarimala, identity politics and the young historian Manu Pillai among them. Here is the text of the interview.
PVK: Good morning, Robin. You’ve been visiting Kerala for close to 50 years. Can you tell us what first brought you to this place?
RJ: I came to do a PhD from Sussex University called a DPhil. At Sussex, they called it a D Phil – a doctoral thesis.
PVK: So it was to study the society of this place. What were the patterns you discovered?
RJ: Two things came together. Because I taught school in Punjab for two years and on the holidays came to Kerala. I came to think that Kerala was a very different, very interesting place. When I went to study India further, I decided I wanted to do a doctorate. My supervisor, who worked on India, was a man called Anthony Low. He worked in Africa and was very interested in indirect rule – using local rulers to work under the authority of the British Empire and this made him very interested in India and in princely states. We started looking at princely states and discovered that nobody had done very much about this strange one called Travancore. I discovered in my reading that the British were calling Travancore a model state in the 1860s. Clearly, whatever was happening in Travancore had got a big tick from the British. So I thought, “What about doing something on modernization, whatever that means, in one of these princely states?” And Anthony Low, my supervisor, thought that was a good idea. So I came to Kerala with the idea that I would write a thesis about what happened under the British when a princely state modernized. But then I came to Trivandrum for the first time. I had been in Kochi and Kannur previously but never been to Trivandrum. I came to Trivandrum in February- March of 1971 and started to work in the archives.
Mrs Padma Ramachandran was the education secretary then and Achutha Menon was the Chief Minister. They gave permission not only to work in the archives but also to look at the old English records in the cellar of the secretariat. I spent the next seven or eight months, either in the old archives, which were in the Fort or in the cellar of the Secretariat with a wonderful team of book binders and peons and supervisors who took very fine lunches. It was a great place to be because you could take dusty old files going back to the 1850s off the shelves and read them.
PVK: What did the files tell you about the place?
RJ: They began, of course, to tell you about how Madhava Rao came to become “Divan Sar Tee”, who we know from Statue Junction. He deserves his statue, I think. He is a remarkable man. Many of the buildings we still see as landmarks – the old hospital and particularly the Secretariat – were started in the 1860s. They are really lovely examples of particular moments in architecture.
I got less and less interested in the British and indirect rule and maharajas and Europeans and more and more interested in what was happening to Malayalis. To begin with I discovered they were called Malayalis, and they had a language that crossword puzzle people love because it is spelled the same backwards as forwards. It’s the only language in the world which makes it popular for crosswords.
I became fascinated by the social and economic changes that were going on along this Kerala coast. And that of course led me to the tharavad. I began to read the old Travancore Law Reports and discovered that so many of the cases from the 1860s on were cases over who owned or had the right to transfer tharavad land. That period culminated with the Marumakkathayam Report of 1908 which was generated by pressure from highly educated young Nair men to change the law relating to marumakkathayam. This also began changes to the law of property and that process went on, really, for the next 70 years. It is 1976 when finally marumakkathayam is almost completely abolished. Though as we know there are still lots of tendencies for matrilineal practices to survive in some forms of property. In some temple managements, it is the female line that determines management rights.
I wrote a thesis that began in 1847, just as the British were – Dalhousie was Governor General at that stage – annexing princely states all over India. The British got very interested in Travancore, and there was fear of annexation. So 1847 was a good starting point for a thesis. By 1858 Madhava Rao had arrived and the whole process of change that he initiated gained pace.
Then 1908 was the Marumakkathayam Report which suggested that matriliny was in danger. In some ways it was having trouble coping and this was having effects on the ownership of land. Land was being transferred. So that was a good place to end the thesis.
Originally I was going to call the thesis Society and Politics in Travancore 1847 to 1908. But to put it in the context of the social science research going on at that time, the “dominant caste” was a very popular conceptual term which M N Srinivas had coined initially and what I ended up calling the thesis and later the book was The Decline of Nayar Dominance. In the book I qualified what I meant by a dominant caste and what dominance was and also what decline in this sense meant. Subsequently, as you well know, the Malayalam translation became “Nair Medhavithathinte Padhanam”, which when you translate back into English is not anything like “The Decline of Nayar Dominance.” It has a much more destructive sense. That was misleading. It wasn’t what the thesis or the book was about.
So, anyway, that’s how I came to Kerala and my interest remained.
PVK: You proceeded to look at newspapers and the media in Kerala and the rest of India. Can you tell us something about that?
RJ: I had the idea that I would write a second book about Kerala after 1908. It was published in the early 90s as Politics, Women and Well-Being: how Kerala became – and then in quotation marks – “a Model”. The book says the “Kerala model” was not really a model in the sense that you could take the policy ingredients of Kerala and place them in Korea or Cambodia or Paraguay. What happened in Kerala was very specific. In writing that book I began to read a lot more Malayalam newspapers. I began to visit a lot more Malayalam newspapers. I shouldn’t say “read” because I don’t read comfortably, but I can pick my way with a dictionary through a short news story or a biographical sketch. This research alerted me to just how remarkable the print industry and publishing industry in Kerala was, going back to Swadesabhimani Ramakrishna Pillai. His statue used to live in MG Road. I don’t know where he has been relocated to.
PVK: He’s still there. Near Palayam.
RJ: I am so glad! My interest in Kerala media led me into a much greater interest in Indian media as a whole, especially the printed medium, because by this time – this is the early 1980s – it was clear that printed publication were growing. Indian language newspapers were growing. I thought that there was something very interesting going on here.
First I got interested in Telegu papers, Eenadu, and the stories one was reading about what Ramoji Rao in Hyderabad had done with Eenadu. I decided that I would try to write a book about Indian print media in the modern period – 1980s through to the 90s. I enjoyed that research a lot, because I got to go all over India sticking my nose into other people’s business. And newspaper people are always willing to talk about their business. I did not have a particular focus on Kerala except that the Kerala newspaper story was again a leader. So many things were being done in Malayalam newspapers. Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi were the two leaders, but there were great local papers that either didn’t do so well in the modern period or changed their focus. And of course there were new ways in which the papers could be produced and distributed. When I first lived in Kerala, Kerala Kaumudi was Trivandrum’s newspaper but by the mid 1980s Manorama and Mathrubhumi, I think, were both producing editions from Trivandrum and that changed the media landscape.
So that was how I came to be writing a book about newspapers and I’d been a journalist as a young guy so I was always interested in the profession. That project again grew out of Kerala.
PVK: You were back after some time, working on mobile phones. Was it an extension of your work on the media?
RJ: Newspapers, mobile phones – they are all media one way or another. I got interested in mobile phones because, generally I am interested in why things are happening that I see around me and I get tempted to try to understand them. And because I am an academic, I am in the fortunate position where I get paid to teach, but I also get paid to write and understand things. It’s a very nice place to be in. So the mobile phone connection was an extension of the newspapers. And I was fascinated with the technology. With the mobile phone, it’s this digital world that is so powerful now – the smart phone particularly.
PVK: That was Cell Phone Nation. And then you moved on to a very interesting area. Can we talk about your latest book, subtitled Growth and Garbage in India? But first, can you tell us something about the title? I can see at least two meanings in “Waste of a Nation”.
RJ: Waste of a Nation came about after a lot of sending possible titles back and forth amongst a few people. The one that the publishers finally liked and we now – my friend Assa Doron who I wrote the book with – we now quite like is Waste of a Nation. Because it has at least two – maybe three meanings. At one level it is “waste”, it is the “garbage of a nation”. That’s very straightforward – looking at a country’s problems with refuse. The second possible interpretation is an implicit question – is this the waste of a great nation – a potential powerhouse state missing greatness by an inability to deal effectively to deal with its refuse? Because India has this terrible problem with dirty things. The Economist last week (6 December 2018) had a story that said India, even amongst developing nations, is “alarmingly filthy”. It is a very provocative story. I am sure that there will be lots of letters.
PVK: I hope our prime minister hasn’t read it.
RJ: They are keeping it from him, perhaps. I hope there is lots of outrage. The third way the title might be interpreted is: are there people who are treated as waste – human beings treated like the waste, of a nation? Because the book talks a lot about one of India’s unique problems – that it has to overcome caste prejudices and beliefs that make dealing with waste even more difficult than it would be in France or America or Japan. Because there is a kind of visceral revulsion at anything that is somehow chhuuta (touched, tainted) even it is only in your mind, not in a scientific or hygienic sense.
So those are the three possible meanings of the title of the book. We don’t have any particular one in mind. We leave it to the reader to decide.
PVK: I think it is a wonderful description of what is happening with waste management all over India. Have you found things that you would describe as positive?
RJ: I think that there are some wonderful stories, but they are a patchwork and all across the country, usually at the local level. That is a problem not just for India. The problem is in scaling up local activities that deal with waste.
It is one thing to do it in a ward or even two or three wards of a city; it is another to do it in the city as a whole. At some point the local initiative has to be matched by some sort of central guidance or central facilitation. Just what that should be depends a lot on the city. And on the climate. And the dirt you produce.
One of the very admirable people I met in Ahmedabad was a senior sanitation engineer and he told me something that I should have recognized. He said that during the mango season the tonnage going through the waste gates in Ahmedabad goes up by some 20 or 30 percent. Because of mango stones. During the monsoon it is much more difficult because the waste is so much heavier. Everything is weighted down with a huge quantity of water. At some point it has to dry out but that water goes into any cart or lorry, even a small push cart becomes a lot heavier in the wet weather.
PVK: On this visit here you have been following up the garbage story. What have you found?
RJ: Kerala seems to be attempting a lot of different things. I have great admiration for Thanal, the environmental organization here in Trivandrum, which, I think, does absolutely wonderful things and has idealistic goals about what can be achieved. I think Thanal is a good example. In fact it seems to me a premier example of similar organizations all round India that are doing some terrific work at organizing communities and changing attitudes. Because improvement in waste management and public sanitation has to happen in people’s mind.
I live in Australia and Australia has found itself with a major waste problem in the past year and waste has become much more a topic of conversation. This is because China no longer takes Australia’s waste paper and waste plastic. So there are huge quantities of segregated waste and plastic building up in godowns around Australia which in the next year are going to go to landfill if they can’t find anywhere else to put them. Australia has lost its capacity on a large scale to reprocess paper. I am not sure we ever had a particularly high capacity to reprocess plastic but we are going to have to learn. All those skills are here in India. Plastic reprocessing at a very local level, at a kind of workshop level, is widespread. Some of it is legal some of it’s not so legal, but nevertheless it is reprocessing of plastic. It is the patchwork quality that is, I think, so admirable here.
It is much harder to do something that takes in a whole city, and I am not sure that intense centralization is a solution. I lived in Singapore and Singapore has four large, very expensive, high combustion incineration plants which burn most of Singapore’s waste. Singapore is a tiny island with five million people. It is also a very authoritarian and neat island. The burning in these incinerators requires high levels of maintenance; it requires a lot of high calorie waste. And it doesn’t like wet waste. If you have wet waste it has to be dried before it can be burned. High-combustion incineration doesn’t look particularly suitable to places with a high level of wet waste. 50 or 60 percent of our garbage in Kerala would be, I am sure, domestic kitchen waste. Now that’s not particularly good for an incinerator and in the monsoon an incinerator will take it and burn it properly only after it is dried.
The other down side, I think, of high combustion incineration is that it likes plastic. Plastic is a petro-chemical so it burns very well when you take it up to a high temperature. But such disposal doesn’t discourage the use of plastic. Plastic is a wonderful material but it is a finite material and it is also not easy to dispose of. We should only use as much plastic as is absolutely necessary. Anything that encourages the use of plastic is probably not the best way of dealing with waste.
The other question with incineration, of course, is the dioxins, the poisonous things that go into the air. High combustion incineration is supposed to eliminate dioxins. The chemical processes of high combustion break down these poisonous molecules into their atomic parts which can be isolated into elements like hydrogen and sulphur and so on. They can be made benign. And the experience of Japan and northern Europe is that they don’t poison the air in a terrible way. But if these incinerators don’t burn properly, they then they do produce harmful air particles. They have the potential to be dangerous. These incinerators require high maintenance, have high costs and need constant feeding of these furnaces to keep the temperature up. Every time you have to relight them, you have to use fuel to get them back to the high temperature. That’s a very long story, but it is kind of an interesting story, I think.
PVK: On this visit you were also part of a book launch and you saw a segment of Trivandrum society after some time. Any comments on that?
RJ: I got to see my friend Butterfingers go into his sixth incarnation. I went to the Butterfingers book launch. That is really why I came to Trivandrum this time – to go to the book launch. That was great fun. I was impressed to see so many small kids running around and wanting to get autographs of the author. It was also nice to be at the old Senate Hall. I had been there lots of times for lectures and so on. And the acoustics still bounce the noise around a lot. It was a great experience. I got to meet old, old friends, like Leela Gulati. It was an opportunity to have a reunion.
S: I would like to add a couple of questions. One, regarding the waste management, you must have noticed the decentralized style of waste management practised in Trivandrum Corporation. They always encourage each household to manage its own waste. Is it a successful model in the large scale? Do you it can be replicated as a countrywide model?
RJ: I think so. It is a difficult one for a bureaucrat or a politician, because it is not a ‘we’re-done, it’s-tick, it’s-finished’ problem. It’s an ongoing, constant process and it depends on good enforcement. If people are not taking responsibility, and they disregard rules, they need to be pulled up on that. That enforcement is required from the government and the law, but public sanitation also requires a change of attitude amongst citizens who have to accept that responsibility. It is about leading people to be good urban citizens. It’s the best kind of social engineering.
And it can be done – because, I haven’t been in a building in Kerala in the last four or five days where I smelled tobacco smoke. People are not smoking in public places now. Fifteen years ago, if you got on a plane to Kerala, immediately the cigarettes would come out. If attitudes to smoking can change, so can attitudes to public sanitation.
S: Even now police catch people and fine them. If they find them, 500 rupees is the fine. On the spot they will be fined 500 rupees. Would you think that will be the sustainable solution from this problem? If it is decentralized and each one is made responsible for his own garbage?
PVK: Robin has been to see the Jagathy composting set-up.
RJ: I think the problems come with the very last stage of what we throw away. There are things that are so useless that no one wants them. Then where do they go? They may have to go to a small landfill somewhere. But they are going to be in such tiny quantities that the landfill will take years to fill up. It will be properly conducted to eliminate future dangers. I don’t think in a city like Trivandrum that the big incineration projects are probably necessary or particularly feasible. There might be a case in Bombay or one of the very big cities to try the Singapore model. They’ve tried in Delhi, but it has not been a great success.
S: Here they are trying right now is the reduce, recycle, reuse model… the three Rs is something…
RJ: It’s a good model but the crux of it is people. And it needs people with real passion in almost every ward. There needs to be 10 or 20 people who really do take some pride in seeing the ward clean. And from them, you have all the lines spreading to the Green Armies in the schools and to having the kids very much attuned to the idea of keeping their place slick and neat.
Again we go back to Singapore. I think a lot of Singaporeans are quite proud of the fact that their big office centres are always neat and tidy. They collect their wet waste because some people are feeding pig farms somewhere. The other element is, people have to make money at some stage. Somebody has to benefit from waste recycling. You don’t do it for the love of it. At some point someone has to be paid for doing the hard part – reprocessing the plastic, conveying the plastic from one place to another and so on. That’s where the state, the government, has to play a part in ensuring that there are fair returns for the people who are doing the nastier ends of the work – carrying away the recycling material or seeing that no waste in effect goes to waste.
PVK: Can you see it working in Kerala?
RJ: I don’t see why it shouldn’t work in Kerala. It seems to be working in corners of Trivandrum pretty well now. The other nice thing with the system is – I’ve seen it here just in a couple of days – is that around composting centres, they don’t smell and they don’t seem to have many flies. But more than that, at least at one of them we’ve seen has a little garden, with a place to sit. They have the potential of becoming little local parks in which the composting and the treatment of the wet waste is just a part of a green area which is a meeting place for people to take their evening walk, bring children for an outing and have a meeting if they need to have a local venue.
S: If properly maintained I think it is possible also.
RJ: But the trick of course there has to be reliable management – and that’s where government comes in. One of the places we saw had its manager, the supervisor of the unit, on duty when we were there. He was properly kitted out, mask, rubber gloves and all the right gear. More than that, we were told that he was on the payroll of the municipal corporation. He is a proper council worker. That sort of arrangement has to be there. There has to be regular, predictable management so that people, when they show up with their wet waste to deposit, they know that there is going to be somebody there who is putting it in the right place and that it is not going to lie stinking in the road way. That’s where government has to come in and regulation with checking up on people and rewarding them for good work.
S: As a regulator the government should act…even local bodies can…
RJ: The Solid Waste Management Rules, mandated by the Supreme Court, talk about regular daily door to door collection of waste. Very expensive. And, in some ways you have got to have safai karmacharis or contractors going door to door every day. That’s hard. If you can encourage people and put centres within five minutes walk of their house to bring their waste to the centre, once or twice a week, knowing it will be well treated, you are saving money. As a municipal corporation you can afford to pay competent managers, supervisors and workers at those centres and expect them to be there regularly. They become a source of local knowledge as well. You could imagine these becoming almost like a local post office, a place where people are drawn to and congregate. That depends on no flies, no smell. It depends on good composting. Composting is just scientific rotting, but rotting smells and has flies. Composting can be clean and pure.
I think there is a lot of hope in these experiments. And what we see in Trivandrum isn’t unique to Trivandrum. There are talents around India. When I was at Pammal, one of the suburbs of Chennai, near the Tamparam railway station, two of three years ago, they were running a programme rather like this but with strong ward-based commitment. They had a small facility where materials were brought, aggregated, segregated and so on. Lots of composting, some biogas being made and I think that’s a very large part of a solution to domestic and commercial waste. But it’s hard work. It’s not a ‘Do Something and It’s Finished’ enterprise. It requires constant maintenance to keep it up.
It is not unique to India. This is a problem in Australia as well. And ‘the reduce’ is important. India has got advantages. It’s got the old kabbadi tradition. There is still the notion that things need to be recycled and can be recycled.
PVK: The throw-away culture has not yet really gripped everyone.
RJ: Not yet. It’s trying, that consumer culture.
PVK: Any ideas for another book, Robin?
RJ: I’ve got a retirement project, to write a book about India in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, based on a historical device that they talk about as “slice history,” taking individual years and exploring what was happening that year and then moving. I want to use the years of the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. So that’s 1942, 1954, 1966, 1977, 1989. They also happen to be very rich and rewarding years. The advantage of the Kumbh Mela is that it is not the predictable western calendar – marking periods with like, census reports, election dates, deaths of major figures – it’s not one of those years. It’s years that make you try to think about different matters, perhaps matters that have a deeper long-term significance.
PVK: You are in Bombay for the Times of India literary festival.
S: That has become a big property these days. It is happening in all major cities. We have been trying hard to bring it to Trivandrum. For the last two-three years I have been trying hard to bring it to Trivandrum.
RJ: Of course. Yes, yes. It would be a great thing. People are fascinated by it.
S: It has reached up to Bangalore.
RJ: It wouldn’t be hard to get international figures to come.
S: I think it will work out, in the next year or so. We are pushing hard. Depends on a lot of factors, though.
RJ: (Laughing) Don’t let them take it to Kochi though.
S: That is one conflict within our organisation. Kochi guys want to take it to Kochi.
PVK: Robin will always bat for Trivandrum.
RJ: Yeah, I will bat for Trivandrum.
When I first came, Pattom had only died the year before and there was a Pattom souvenir, which is probably in my boxes that will come back to CDS. In the souvenir there is an article by an old high court vakil who said that the worst thing that ever happened with this Kerala scheme, which was a stupid scheme in the first place, was that they moved the High Court from Trivandrum to Kochi – the dirtiest city on the west coast! He was a good pukka Trivandrum vakil and he was most outraged it had gone to Kochi.
S: One another question. When you write about history, specifically Travancore history, you said you depended a lot on the state archives. Isn’t there a danger in depending on the state archives, because only the state sponsored history will be there. There is the other reading also, the other history.
RJ: That’s why the Travancore Law Reports were so good. Because the Law Reports recorded all these social tensions that were going on underground. You would find a case where some karnavan had transferred property and all his anandavar were taking him to court saying he had no right to do this; he only has right to manage, not to alienate. The Law Reports were wonderful in that way.
The other thing, of course, when you are doing that kind of work, were the newspapers of the time. There was a lot of reporting on Travancore going into the Madras papers. As far as I know, no Kerala newspapers from before the nineteen teens survived, although there were papers like the Paschima Tharaka, and the English Western Star, running from the 1870s. They’ve all (been lost). There are a couple of numbers of the Western Star that ended up in the New York Public Library and I have those two on microfilm that I got years ago. They were very interesting. It was a newspaper coming out of Kochi with all the gossip of the palace court and such things. These newspapers would have been an invaluable thing if they had survived. Somehow or other these two numbers ended up in New York and they got catalogued.
PVK: Apart from the archives, in the 70s, he interviewed a whole lot of people… there was hardly anyone here of importance and who had a memory whom Robin didn’t talk to.
RJ: There was a certain amount of that.
S: So you had rationalized the documents with the other information.
RJ: Anything I could find, in fact. Biographies for example. P K Narayana Pillai’s C V Raman Pillai biography, quite a chunky biography… that’s how I met Vijayan’s father. Somebody said – “You are interested in the SNDP Yogam, Sri Narayana, Kumaran Asan, there is an Asan museum at Thonnakkal. I didn’t know where Thonnakkal was in 1971. I got there on a bus by asking people. I got there in the morning and there was nobody there except the care taker who said something about the boss would come after lunch. So I stretched out on a bench – you know a hot, hot Trivandrum midday – and fell asleep. I woke up with his father poking me and saying, “Do you want a glass of water?” And we became friends. His father was a huge friend to me.
PVK: Achan used to help him and read out from old newspapers, Malayalam newspapers, because Achan could read faster than Robin could.
RJ: We used to go to Kerala Kaumudi. I could read headlines and so on and I could pick my way through a story, but it took me ages. Prabhakaran would just have a look and say, “You don’t need to read this one… No no … this one might be interesting.” Then he’d read aloud, giving the gist in English while I would take notes.
PVK: I can remember Robin in those days. He always carried a lot of index cards. There was hardly anything that was said that was not jotted down.
RJ: That’s something I was going to ask you about – G P Sekhar, does that name ring a bell?
PVK: G P Ramachandran was my father’s friend.
RJ: He was supposed to be the son of G Parameswaran Pillai. He lived out here… where C P Ramaswami Iyer’s … what was it, something Nivas… out in …
PVK: Vazhuthacaud? Kowdiar?
RJ: Where the diwan had lived.
S and PVK. The AIR building. Bhakti Vilasam.
RJ: He lived out there. He always claimed he had back numbers of the Madras Standard, which was the paper G P Pillai edited. He would never let me see them. I used to go and see him, try to be very nice to him “Yes sir, yes sir,” but he would go “No, no, no, no they are in the back room… no, no can’t be done today.” He was very elderly then. But I often wondered whether they existed and what happened to them, because the Madras Standard I worked on in England – they had them in the India Office library – they were only up to 1889. And the really interesting period was the Malayali Memorial of 1891. It would have been wonderful to have had them for that period. Never found. But maybe in some godown somewhere… the white ants…
S: Are you also following the recent social developments in Kerala – the post flood Sabarimala, how there is a mobilisation, again of casteist forces and all?
RJ: I noticed how people seem to be much more likely to use caste names today. Young people will tag Nair or Pillai after their name whereas in his generation (pointing to PVK) you know… you didn’t do that.
S: True, very true. Even in my generation people did not do that. We have only one name. My name is Sreejan. B Sreejan, that is my name.
RJ: It is an interesting phenomenon. It’s not uncommon elsewhere, I think. Greater nostalgia, greater religiosity. Singapore has a very strong charismatic Christian movement. You don’t think of Christianity and Singapore, but it is very strong now.
S: What is your take on that? Why is it happening? Even if you said it is a global…
RJ: Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that prosperity leaves something missing and people are looking for something else…even if in my terms it might be a fanciful “something else”. It is the promise of something better, somewhere else over which you have no control but you can at least make your pranam to, in the hope that it will bring you some good, some benefit at some time. I am afraid I belong to the older school.
S: That is always true if it is a religious kind of thing… but grouping again in terms of caste and even granting that somebody is after… those are all obnoxious…
RJ: Yeah, yeah.
S: So, why are people claiming caste identity? Why … the craving for reinventing the caste identity. What is the use of that? If it is religion, as you say, may be some fear might be…
RJ: I think, partly, in a democracy it is a way of mobilising voters. In Australia they used to talk about “the Catholic vote”. Now they talk about the “Chinese vote” – recent Chinese migrants to Australia who have become citizens tend to settle in specific localities, as new migrants always have.
S: There should be some other…always… there should be some other always, right?
RJ: If it is a constituency in Australia with a large proportion of Indian-Australians who are voters then, of course, you are going to talk about the “Indian vote”. There is an element, I think, that means electoral politics encourages identity because I think it seems an easy way of persuading groups of people to vote for you.
S: It is easy to group them, right?
RJ: It is easy to address them in ways that maybe appealing to a particular group – though you may be alienating other groups if you do that.
PVK: Almost a part of democracy?
RJ: In some ways, yes. In America they talk about the Jewish vote, the Italian vote, the Catholic vote and so on. In India there are so many other possible magnets by which you can try to attach people to your cause. You could do it by religion or caste or language.
S: So, you say … there is no need of worrying about it as a Kerala specific phenomenon? It is a global phenomenon? It is part of the game?
RJ: It is more complicated in Kerala because you have so many different ways people can aggregate. People can aggregate as Christians, but then what kind of Christians? They can aggregate as Hindus, but then what kind of Hindu? There are so many different ways.
S: It is a complicated matrix.
PVK: You once considered of writing a paper on Sabarimala?
RJ: Long, long ago. Well, I once had the old report that came out in 1950. Part of it is already on the web. I think there is a fuller, printed version which I have and I once collected a lot of stuff with the idea of writing something. I didn’t get around to it.
S: That firing…
RJ: I collected quite a …
S: But you hadn’t come to any conclusion on that? Who was behind that? No? Even the probe report of that is inconclusive. Nobody…they didn’t find anyone…
RJ: If you were a poacher and you accidentally set fire to what at that time was an empty locked-up building, you would go home very quietly and then don’t say anything ever again. You wouldn’t be coming forward.
There was a memorable Australian politician called Mick Young, who was immigration minister, I think, at one stage. His advice was that, if you are given the choice between a conspiracy and a stuff-up to explain why something happened, always choose the stuff-up.
PVK: That’s right. We underestimate the role ignorance and indifference play in history.
S: Are you following the new generation writers in Kerala? Someone who is writing history, like Manu Pillai?
RJ: Manu, of course. I’ve kind of corresponded with him occasionally over the last four or five years. He’s amazing. He’s so young. I don’t think he is 30 yet. What he has achieved in that time is just remarkable. The other thing is that he doesn’t have a PhD!
PVK: He is working towards one.
RJ: How funny! I mean he’s got, what? Probably three PhDs already in that that first book. It could be three books. Then, this new one, looks a very neat little stand-alone. He writes so well. And the kind of work he gets through!
PVK: He says that one of the books that gave him essential orientation as a historian was his (Robin’s) first book. Two writers he mentions… one is (Robin’s) his first book and the other is Meera Nanda’s book on postmodernism, Hinduism and science. Which his professor made him work on when he was doing his final year in college in Pune. He said, “it opened my eyes to what social science was.”
RJ: I see! Good for Poona!
S: Even the column he writes in Mint and all. The perspective is very, very… These are all based on recent issues… I always ask him to write… but because of this Mint contract… we are rival papers… he won’t write for us. Every time he says, my Mint column is almost the same. So, sorry, I can’t.
RJ: He has the Shashi Tharoor talent of being able to sit down and write well.
PVK: I asked him once and he said, I am an insomniac. I sleep only three or four hours a day. I spent the rest of the time either reading or writing. And then he says I don’t have a social life. All my social life is in libraries, with books.
RJ: That’s all right. Books are never bad for you, unless you drop a heavy one on your foot.
PVK: Someone asked him about a girlfriend. He said the maharani I wrote about was in a sense a girlfriend.
S: I heard that in a TV interview.
RJ: The senior maharani!
S: So, sir, thank you very much.
RJ: No, thank you. Thank you for listening to all that.
This conversation was recorded on 12 December 2018.
Location: Courtesy Modern Book Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.
Photos: Courtesy T K Deepaprasad, Times of India, Thiruvananthapuram.
A warm thanks to everyone.
Credit for errors will not be shared with anyone.
P. Vijaya Kumar / PVK
profpvk@gmail.com
Note: A couple of minor corrections have been made to the original article.
Thank you. Nandri. Namaskaram.
PVK 02/June/2026.
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