Happy Ant-Heap (15 page)

These are the statistics we associate with the socialist world, and which we sometimes suspect of being accompanied by certain disadvantages. Thus, for example, Cuba is the healthiest and most literate country in Latin America, yet in the view of many of its people these gains are offset by the erosion of individual freedoms.

Kerala seems immune from this drawback, indeed it is hard for the enquiring foreigner to imagine that this is a Communist country. There is an absence of assault by propaganda. One sees no posters of stalwart and joyous workers brandishing the tools of their trade. There are no exhortations by public address system or otherwise to greater socialist effort, or targets to be achieved. The leadership cult has failed to take root in this easy-going environment. Keralans come and go as they please—emigrating in great numbers to the Gulf States in search of wages five-fold those paid at home.

In December 1988 Trivandrum was host to the 13th Communist Party Congress, which was generally regarded as a huge and successful binge. The children got a day off school and many of them wore fancy dress. ‘We are letting our hair down,’ the locals explained to goggle-eyed visitors from out of town. By the time I arrived it was all over, leaving the streets littered with scarlet bunting, which the crows were flying off with to decorate their nests. A remaining picture of Lenin, tacked to a Ganesh shrine, had been taken down, and now stood propped against a wall under an umbrella shading it in token of respect. By late afternoon the sacred cows were back from the side-streets into which they had been pushed, each making for the few square yards of city territory it claimed as its own, where it would settle itself comfortably for the night.

Benefits derived from Keralan reform tend to be played down in the Indian press, as elsewhere. More coverage is given to economic stagnation and unemployment figures. Government successes have been achieved by a better control over existing resources rather than the creation of new wealth. The reforms have, for example, abolished schools without pupils, which had existed purely to give ‘employment’ to teachers. Nevertheless the charge continues to be made that labour unions have forced up wages to non-economic levels, with the result that investment has moved elsewhere.

A government economist, Dr K. N. Raj, told me he believed the party’s election success was largely due to the minor land reforms it had promised, and subsequently put through. An increase in the practice of rack-renting followed by debt default, then eviction, threatened a large class of small farmers with ruin. The Communists promised to reduce land holdings to an average maximum of ten acres, and give tenant farmers the right to buy the land. It was a move that made sure of several hundred thousand votes.

A further view was that the Communists had been helped by the strength of their stand throughout their history against the caste system—possibly the most effective instrument of domination ever to be devised—which in Kerala had reached its ultimate baleful ramification. Here the four accepted divisions of Indian society had proliferated into seventy-seven main and 423 ‘accessory’ castes. These included no fewer than fifteen varieties of Brahmins, headed by the Nambudiris—accepted as the Aryan purest of the pure—followed by the possessors of fourteen lesser gradations of sanctity. At the bottom of the pyramid the untouchables of Kerala, too, were subdivided into unapproachables and unseeables—the last called upon to warn of their presence by ringing a bell.

Some of the statistics of exclusion were remarkable. An untouchable avoided defilement of a Nambudiri by making a detour when one came in sight of at least a hundred feet—a distance reduced to twenty-four feet in the case of a member of the warrior caste, and twelve feet for persons of lesser caste status. A special Keralan refinement in the scale of contempt was the ordinance by which the ‘Children of God’ (as Gandhi called them) were not permitted to wear clean clothing.

The father of the owner of a small hotel in which I stayed was by birth an untouchable. In the days before the Temple Entry Proclamation in 1938, which was designed to put an end to untouchability, he was obliged, if he wanted tea, to throw his money through the teashop window, and the tea would be poured down a bamboo chute projecting over the street, to be caught in his cupped hands. This man’s son, although still regarded as a member of the lowest caste, had become an affluent member of local society.

An intriguing recent development is that, owing to the spiritual cleanliness they are still believed by many to exude, Brahmins are much in demand as cooks, and our friend is quite likely to employ one sooner or later in the kitchen. The caste system then—whatever its original function—has become an absurdity. The revolt against it spreads and gathers speed. The following advertisements from the Match Makers columns of the Keralan
Indian Express
would have been unthinkable thirty years ago:

BRIDE WANTED
An irreligious or moderately religious, beautiful, educated girl for secular-minded graduate government employee. Caste no bar. No dowry.

GROOM WANTED
for white-complexioned attractive girl from upper middle-class family of Kerala. No faith in caste system. Individual merit. Simple early marriage. Furnish horoscope.

About 20 per cent of the matrimonial advertisements in the Saturday issue of this paper reflect similar viewpoints.

Christianity offered the underdog a way of escape from caste, although only too often strings were attached. Fishermen had always provided a high proportion of Kerala’s food but, although not quite untouchable, were kept in contemptuous isolation close to the bottom of the caste pyramid. They offered an easy target for the early Portuguese missionaries. Almost the whole fishing population switched faiths. The converts then discovered that the Church proposed to take over ownership of the boats and divide the proceeds of the catch on a fifty/fifty basis. Additionally, a tithe was imposed upon the fishermen’s share of the sales. It was a system that remained in force until 1957, since when reforms have reduced Church ownership to about one boat in ten. As is to be supposed, fishermen vote Communist to a man; remarkably enough, they have remained steadfast Christians throughout—still poor but much benefited by the creation of co-operatives, which have taken over sales and provided refrigeration plants making possible the export of fish, principally to Spain and Japan.

I went to see the fishing village of Pullivil which, although only six miles from the fashionable resort of Kovalam, is so little known in the area that the taxi driver who took me there had to stop twice to enquire the way. The coastal belt, hardly more than two miles in depth, in which this and a number of other fishing villages are built, manages in some way to have double the population density of the rest of Kerala.

Yet the only evidence of human presence when breasting a low hilltop overlooking it was the triple towers of an enormous Portuguese church, soaring from what might have been the jungle of the Amazon.

Pullivil appeared at the bottom of the hill as row after row of thatched cabins among the tree trunks. In its severe order, its adaptation to its environment, and the absence of any of the visible adjuncts of our days, it gave the impression of being of tribal origin, conceivably unchanged since before the arrival of the first Aryan immigrants some 2,000 years ago. The tall, broad-leaved native trees were interplanted with others: coconut palms, arecas and pepper trees grown for their crop. The road from Kovalam had been stifling; here, under swaying lattices of shade, Pullivil was cool and green. What little tidying-up there was to be done was attended to by crows, spaced evenly like black fruit on the branches overhead, or by scuttling piglets. Pig-keeping is the custom in such Christian communities throughout India—eating pork being accepted as the best proof of sincerity of faith.

My arrival in this place, almost hermetically sealed off from the intrusions of the outside world, caused some excitement, and two young, smiling and voluble young men were found to show me round. They introduced themselves as Ambrose and Wilfred (their names, they said, had been chosen for them by the priest). We exchanged personal details in the customary manner of Kerala: father’s name, religion and political affiliation. They were, of course, Communists; fishermen’s sons studying political economy at the University of Trivandrum, home for the weekend. Together we visited the enormous church, the playschool (where on spotting us, the toddlers broke into a vociferous version in the local language of ‘Goosey Goosey Gander’), the library and the Culture and Science Club—both wonderfully scoured and polished and smelling faintly of Methodist chapels. Next we moved on to the beach.

The climate here was as soft as Portugal with a hint of approaching rain, and a water meadow carpeted with sparkling grass of the European kind separated the front row of the village houses from the sand. In this buffaloes mooched in a languid fashion among patches of lotus and reeds. It was a Saturday and jubilant scampering children released from morning school played a game by which home-made kites were induced to swoop down suddenly over the heads of passing adults—principally fishermen on their way to the boats—in the hope of entangling their legs in the strings. The boats, lined up at the top of the beach, presented black Viking profiles with white tracery painted over their prows. They were of inconceivable antiquity, made of thick teak planks sewn together with coir rope, and, as noted by the Dominican Fray Domingo Navarrete, who passed this way in 1760, no nails are used in their construction. He was taken for a trip in one, complaining that the water entered ‘by a thousand holes and although the Moors assur’d us they were safe, yet we could not but be in great fear’.

The fishermen were preparing the boats to go out that night. They were lean men, calm and slow in their movements, and with expressions of great serenity. Each man wore a white cross, some three inches long, dangling from a string of turquoise beads at his neck. The nets used were heavy and enormously long, and had been deposited in piles at a distance of about thirty feet from each boat. A method of folding and stowing them had been worked out by which a team of twelve (the number of the disciples) loaded boat after boat. A man picked up the end of the net and began to walk towards the boat. After three paces a second man took up the net and followed him, and so on until nine men held the net, fully stretched. They began the process of folding it, then passed it up to three men waiting to stow it in the boat. The procedure, carried out in silence and with military precision, was ritualistic and archaic.

With the first boat dealt with in this way the team moved on to the next. It would take most of the afternoon before some thirty boats were ready for the sea. Ambrose explained that the work of stowing the nets, of launching the heavy boats and beaching them on their return had always been shared in this way; so too were the rewards. The fishermen’s existence depended on perfect co-operation. ‘We have always been Communists,’ he said. ‘Now we vote. That’s the only difference.’

‘Do you intend to become fishermen yourselves?’ I asked.

The question was ridiculous. How could a graduate with a head full of data and figures be expected to go out and catch fish. Nevertheless there was a trace of embarrassment in the answer. ‘We shall be putting our knowledge at the service of the community,’ Ambrose said.

‘But in what way?’

He shook his head in gentle exasperation. ‘These people are not understanding money. When there is a good catch they are buying jewellery for their wives.’

‘What should they do with it?’

‘They must be learning to save—to invest. They must be moving with the times. The future is good. All the time we are making improvements. But have you seen Kovalam? In Kovalam there are twenty hotels. This is a backward place but I am thinking one day we must catch up.’

1989

S
ICILIANS LIVING IN THE
tightly packed, traffic-jammed city of Palermo do their best, naturally enough, to escape, whenever the opportunity arises, into the country or to one of the rare havens of peace still to be discovered by the sea.

Inland, a favourite excursion is to a small town with a relaxed and somewhat ecclesiastical atmosphere. Twelve churches—some superbly baroque—are crammed into the surroundings of the small square. In addition to its ample provision for the devout, the town possesses seven schools, an excellently equipped hospital, and various benevolent institutions. People drive more than thirty miles from Palermo just to stock up with exquisite bread baked in wood-fired ovens and to buy meat free from those adulterations and tamperings associated with city markets. The streets are clean, there is no petty crime—the last burglary took place three years ago. It is a relief to visitors from the city, where muggings happen in broad daylight, to find that here they can stroll in the streets by night in perfect confidence and security.

This is Corleone, made famous by the book and the film
The Godfather,
and generally accepted as being under the stern and watchful control of a man held in custody since 1974, who is currently serving a life sentence for multiple murders and for being ‘promoter and organiser of a criminal organisation’, in the maximum-security prison of Termini Imerese. This surely is a phenomenon without parallel in the modern world and hardly in history. Many Palermitans seeking refuge from the bustle, clamour and insecurity of the city have decided to settle here, although once, back in the Forties, thirteen bodies of murdered men were recovered from the streets in as many days. It holds special attractions for families with children to be educated.

If schooling is of no consequence, townspeople in search of peace may opt for Ficuzza, nine miles away, located in Arcadian surroundings under the portentous shape of the Rocca di Busambra, and at the edge of the Ficuzza wood, once the hunting preserve of the Bourbon King Ferdinand II, whose palatial baroque lodge is just round the corner of the single street. It was the ambition of the Sicilian friend who accompanied me on this trip, and who had taught philosophy for two years at Corleone, to buy a house here. Prices are high—for Ficuzza, too, is under uncontested, and therefore pacific, Mafia control. Cars are left unlocked in the street at night while the populace sleep quietly in their beds. Once a day or so, a policeman on a motorcycle may pass through without stopping. There is nothing for him to do.