Eternally EMS

Ideally, there should not be a last word on Elamkulam Manackal Shankaran Namboodiripad. In the world in which he lived, the idea of liberati...

Ideally, there should not be a last word on Elamkulam Manackal Shankaran Namboodiripad. In the world in which he lived, the idea of liberation was eternal. Whenever the impulses of history made an unsolicited intrusion into that world of permanent struggle, the pure, sacred passions of EMS contained them. It was not defiance. It was the triumph of belief, the belief of the purest of Marxists. And EMS attained this rare freedom in an age of turbulent questions, of uncertain alternatives.

He could keep his autonomy intact because his personal revolution was exceptional, both culturally and geographically. Red stars really twinkled in a million eyes in Kerala when EMS, exuding the energy of sacrifice and hope, became the first popularly elected communist ruler of the world.

It was the romance of the dispossessed, played out in the leafy remoteness of Kerala. That moment signified the redemption of an ideology, the text of which was certainly Eurocentric despite Mao8217;s morning deluge8217;, and it was smudgedby blood. EMS: communism8217;s most creative translator. In the beginning, as communist Kerala swelled and swayed, the book8217; was not all that important. EMS took that great experience of social liberation closer to the book8217;. He was the learned man, the Brahmin, the lord of dialectics.

It doesn8217;t mean that Chief Minister Namboodiripad was a ruler of abstractions. The communist government of Kerala rewrote the sociology of Kerala, to some extent. It happened because the communist movement in Kerala, unlike the distant revolutions, was indebted to the pre-communist social movements in the state. Land reform and education were two areas in which the EMS government had applied its sociology with enduring consequences.

The proverbial literate state owes a great deal to the socially conscious governance of EMS. But EMS, too literate to be a mere administrator, was going deeper and deeper into the book. As the rust of power accumulated on the romance of rebellion, the Marxist of the mind began writing andrewriting his private universe of eternal romance. Kerala, the little Kerala that once saluted his social subversion, couldn8217;t keep pace with the ideological march of the never-say-die Marxist.

The solitary travel of EMS was a testament to man8217;s immense freedom to dream. As empires fell and emperors stood on trial in the courts of freedom, EMS surfed in theories 8212; immortal and intact. There was no need for him to repent 8212; or confess. EMS never pretended to be the keeper and the arbiter of people8217;s conscience. The philosopher was beyond the crimes of the king, and the philosophy of EMS reigned only in the private kingdom of his own mind.

EMS the communist outlasted communism because he had no empire in which to experiment with his ideas 8212; except the rich laboratory of his own dream. Once upon a time, it was almost every man8217;s dream. Yesterday EMS walked into his own dream, to share it with Marx.