Madras, Chennai and the Self
Author : Tulsi Badrinath
Publisher : Pan Macmillan, Rs299
This book, a collection of 12 interviews of Chennai residents belonging to different backgrounds, intends to appropriate the socio-cultural demography of the city as the key tool to mould the consciousness of its people, and vice versa. A city, after all, is not just its buildings and roads but is also made up of the energies of the people who live in it, Tulsi Badrinath tells ANANYA BORGOHAIN
Tulsi Badrinath’s fourth book is a riveting sketch of a city as a historical and socio-cultural idea. The cultural pulse of the city is realised evocatively and without excessively romanticising itself. Badrinath is a Bharatnatyam danseuse who was born in Madras. In this book titled Madras, Chennai and the Self, she revisits her relationship with her birthplace where she has been settled for decades now. Subtitled ‘Conversations with the city’, the book seeks to demonstrate the Chennai landscape as the metaphor for the personal growth of its people. It looks at how the city designs the very consciousness of its people and how its people shape the core of the city in return.
The book entails a series of interviews of 12 selected residents of Chennai. All of them hail from contrasting but fascinating backgrounds and each has a compelling tale to tell. The interviews intend to appropriate the socio-cultural demography of the city as the key tool to mould their consciousness. What materialises out of the experiment is a pastiche of a locale with multiple promises and awareness. Badrinath says, “I believe that a city is not just its buildings and roads but is also made up of the energies of the people who live in it. I wanted to interview people who exemplified the spirit of the city to me”.
And she does choose the interviewees carefully enough to effectively paint the dichotomy which the city manifests — of tradition and modernity, of old and new, of unlearning a relearning. Her first subject is K Seshadri, a Hindu priest whose alternative career revolves around his black-belt in karate. Badrinath believes that he embodies the in-between of desire and constraint in a community. There is gynaecologist Uma Ram, whose account projects how the ‘modern’ city is still entangled in the web of superstitions. Then there is also the account of Nawab Mohammed Abdul Ali, the eighth prince of Arcot. Sarathbabu Elumalai’s story is awe-inspiring as he narrates how he survived hunger and penury and eventually built his own successful empire, Food King Catering Services. It’s fascinating to see his familiarity with numbers as well as his moral fabric which urges him to indulge in constructive social pursuits. Badrinath says, “I chose people who in some way straddled the modern and the traditional. Also, they had to live in different parts of the city”.
In stark contrast is the famous filmstar Vikram, a rage among most South Indian cinephiles. Badrinath’s organic portrayal of the inner life of a public figure is engaging as she uncovers lesser know facts about the star. She explains, “While notionally everyone inhabits the ‘city’, in truth we only occupy certain neighbourhoods or visit certain parts of the city. large areas remain unfamiliar. Vikram talks about how when he came home from boarding school he preferred to stay at home, so he was familiar with very little of the city. later, when a terrible accident landed him in hospital, his world, this city was shrunk to the size of the room in the hospital and within it his bed, since he could not walk for a long time. The city was the place where he struggled for 10 long years before his first hit Sethu. Today, since he gets mobbed, he can’t visit certain areas openly”.
Certain mundane but interesting facts about the superstar is revealed as he says that he often disguises himself to hang out in malls (once he even overheard someone say about him, “Who does he think he isIJ VikramIJ”) and how he chooses an average gym as opposed to the posh ones because the former has easy parking facilities!
Badrinath, whose first two works of fiction were long-listed for the Man Asian literary Prize, successfully brings out quotidian facets of a regular person and transforms them into representatives of the ambivalent modern society that Chennai is today.
She says, “Madras came into existence on August 27, 1639, when the village of Madraspatnam was given to the East India Company by the local ruler for a period of two years. Francis Day and his boss Andrew Cogan were looking for a place from which they could source an uninterrupted supply of chintz. What began as a commercial enterprise resulted in the establishment of a Fort, of an army, of meddling in the affairs of local rulers and finally ruling the Indian sub-continent. But surrounding Madras were older villages which had existed for centuries, which were amalgamated into the growing city.
So Madras has always had the dual identity of a modern city with traditional roots. That continues to this day. Only it is split into the name ‘Madras’ representing the old and Chennai the new hip metropolis”.
She also had her share of extraordinary moments in the course of working on the book. About a particularly striking moment while conducting the interviews, she says, “Visiting Saravana Shakthivale’s snuff factory was memorable: Standing near the furnace in which tobacco was being roasted, watching the labourers sweat in the intense heat, and the realisation that it’s so hard to earn a living. Also that ironically, the more physical labour one puts into work, the less one is paid. But managers in a swivel chair in an air-conditioned office get paid absurd sums of money”.
These 12 interviews sure restructured the notions of the city in her too. She says, “Well, everyone has an affection for the city. They live here because they choose to. When Sivakami talked about how liberating the city is for a Dalit from a village — one mingles with other castes in the buses, on the roads, at tea-stalls and other public places — I realised how much we take for granted. Seen from her perspective, a simple ride on a bus became exhilarating. At another level, hunger is ever present and poverty, as the life of Sarathbabu Elumalai shows. We all inhabit different realities within the same city”.
Homi Bhabha had famously said, “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation — or narration — might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west”. Tulsi Badrinath has grippingly underlined the same.