Periyar: A Political Biography of E.V.Ramasamy Bala Jeyaraman Rupa 124 pages, Rs 295 Kamaraj: The Life and Times of K.Kamaraj Bala Jeyaraman Rupa 114 pages, Rs 295 MGR: A Biography Shrikanth Veeravalli Rupa 145 pages, Rs 295 People like us are writing history. And no easy history at that. Bala Jeyaraman, a software engineer, and Shrikanth Veeravalli, a management professional, have ventured into the mined terrain of Tamil Nadu’s personality politics. Thanks to their three short biographies, a formidable Tamil trinity enters our Googling mindscape. To start with, target readers like us would be fairly clueless — more about Periyar and Kamaraj than MGR, the youngest of the three, who is still paying political dividends to legatee Jayalalithaa. The savvy authors make quick introductions. Meet Periyar, atheist and pioneer of Dravidian politics; Kamaraj, Chennai’s CM and Delhi’s kingmaker; MGR, the ultimate in charisma and enigma. Soon enough, we gather that politics even in those structured times was a hyphenated practice. Periyar vibed better with Kamaraj, a die-hard Congressman, than with his own political heirs, Annadurai and Karunanidhi. MGR shows up in these pages as a crypto-Congressman who merely acted out the Dravidian screenplay. In the thick of DMK politics of the 1960s, he made a surprise appearance at Kamaraj’s birthday celebration and threw in a semantic puzzle for good measure. He called the Congress veteran “leader”, and his own chief Annadurai “guide”. Such teasers are raised only to be left up in the air. The biographers quickly develop cold feet and return to cold facts — to honour the stated mission of redeeming man from myth. Periyar is constructed from secondary print sources that could have originated only after he became big enough to be written about. Early life, mostly private, is dismissed in just one chapter. A major personal event in his later life, his remarriage at 70 to 30-year old Maniammai, seen by some as a trigger for the Dravidian split between social movement and power politics, goes hardly explained. The fact is that such crucial private moments get politicised in these parts, and how! Look at DMK’s first family, currently on public display. Even the self-willed MGR is tracked in the interest of objectivity from event to public event. The high point is when co-actor MR Radha shot the hero and then shot himself. Even as the two in trauma were being wheeled in, each told the surgeon to take good care of the other. This competitive nobility apart, there isn’t much emotion in this narrative on a mass leader who revelled in sentiment. More than the heart that bled, he is credited with a brain that kept calculating. Well-meant authorial preferences — public over private, printed word over the spoken, facts over feeling — haven’t produced uniform results. Bare-bones sculpting works well for Kamaraj. He stands out like a robust X-ray. With no Hindi, no English and frugal Tamil, this school dropout did statecraft like few. Long before governance was a buzzword, with no help from filmi promotion. Something of Periyar’s pre-eminence too comes through but the real loser in this demystification project is MGR. What use is a denatured demigod? What you miss in this trilogy is the way historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam treated the career and legend of Vasco da Gama — man, myth and all. The myth-making was addressed as assiduously as the man himself. Yet another distinguished Tamil, far from a historian, neuroscientist Dr Vilayanur Ramachandran might wonder, “Where’s the other hemisphere?” EP Unny
