Cut-out textbooks

A change of government is never simple in Tamil Nadu. It always comes with a long list of amendments and alterations as accoutrements. Almost 100 days after the AIADMK came to power,J. Jayalalithaas unravelling of the previous regimes proposals and policies is still a meticulous work in progress. A look at the three big changes that she insists on reveals much about the nature of the rivalry between the two Dravida parties,the kind of cultural impress in Tamil society that one wants to create and the other seeks to deny,and the cult of personality politics that aggravates and complicates the issues at hand. The new governments immediate and public disapproval was of the uniform system of education that the DMK government introduced,a vast and expensive architectural complex that it created to house the assembly and the secretariat,and its harmless but unnecessary tinkering with the Tamil calendar.

While the education scheme has much merit,bringing a necessary standard to the chaotic school system in Tamil Nadu,Karunandhi used textbooks as tools for ideological initiation,as platforms to play up pet projects like the classical Tamil conference,and to reference himself as a cultural icon. Here,one can sense the old tendency of Dravida parties to use culture and its many pronounced symbols,from movies to poems,to further its politics and to embed itself in public memory. If Karunanidhi set the wrong precedent here,Jayalalithaa missed the big picture in the beginning by disavowing the entire education scheme. Now there is a machinery involved in blacking out and removing references to the DMKs first family from school texts. Her decision to work from the old assembly building and to turn the new one into a hospital is also a display of peeve rather than good politics.

And that is what is often getting lost in this messy battle for cultural suzerainty in Chennai good sensible politics.