R. Nallakannu’s fight for many forgotten freedoms

"There were times during the freedom struggle, too, when things looked bleak. We were told you cannot win. You are up against the greatest empire in the world . . . But we rose above all those warnings and threats. And fought anyway. That’s why we are here today."

R. Nallakannu

“Vote for the Yellow Box!” went the cries. “Choose the auspicious manjal petti!”

This was Madras Presidency during the 1937 provincial elections held under British rule.

The slogans came from groups of youngsters beating drums. Most of them not of voting age. And ineligible to cast ballots even if they had been. not all adults could vote.

Franchise restrictions favoured land and property owners and, in rural areas, rich farmers.

The sight of young people without a vote campaigning vigorously was not entirely new.

As early as July 1935, Justice—the newspaper and organ of the Justice Party—noted with disdain, and not a little contempt:

You might visit any village even in outlying areas and you were sure to come across groups of urchins wearing Congress khaddar uniforms and Gandhi caps and holding aloft the tricoloured banner. nearly eighty per cent of these men, workers and volunteers had been drawn from the voteless, propertyless, unemployed hundreds of the urban and village areas . . .

One of those youngsters in 1937 was R. Nallakannu, barely 12 at the time, now 97 [in 2022]. He’s telling us of the drama, laughing about his having been one of those ‘urchins’.  “Those who owned land and paid a land tax of 10 rupees or more could vote,” he recalls. The 1937 polls did see some broadening of the franchise. But “it was never meant to allow more than 15–20 per cent of adults to have a vote,” he says. “And not more than 1,000 to 2,000 people voted in any one constituency.”

Nallakannu was born in Srivaikuntam, then in Tirunelveli district. Today, the taluk of Srivaikuntam falls in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district (which used to be called Tuticorin till 1997).

Nallakannu’s activism, though, began early.

“When I was a child, in fact. Mill workers in Thoothukudi, close to my town, struck work. That was one of the Harvey Mills group. This came to be known as the Panchalai [Cotton Mills] workers’ strike.

“To support them, rice would be collected from every home in our town and sent in boxes to the strikers’ families in Thoothukudi. It was young boys like us who would go around to collect the rice.” People were poor, “but every household contributed something. I was just 5 or 6 at the time, and this solidarity with the workers’ struggle had a huge impact on me. It meant I would get used to involvement in politics quite early.”

We pull him back to the 1937 polls: What did he mean by voting for a manjal petti or yellow box?

“There were only two main parties in Madras then,” he says. “Congress and the Justice Party. Instead of symbols, parties were identified by a ballot box of some colour. The Congress, for whom we then campaigned, was assigned a yellow box. For the Justice Party, there was a pachchai petti—green box. That was the best way at the time for the voter to identify which party he was supporting.”

And yes, there was much colour and theatre around the polls even then. The Hindu writes that “Devadasi campaigner Thanjavur Kamukannamal . . . would ask everyone to vote in the “snuff box!” Gold or yellow being a common colour for snuff boxes of the time. The Hindu itself carried a headline calling on readers to ‘Fill the Yellow Boxes’.

“And of course, I could not vote at age 12,” says Nallakannu. “But I went out and canvassed as strongly as I could.” Three years later, he would be involved in political campaigns beyond the electoral. And “beating a parai [a type of drum] and yelling slogans.”

But he was no longer a Congress supporter. “I was with the Communist Party of India [CPI] from age 15,” says Nallakannu, ‘Comrade RNK’ to his friends. Formal membership of the party would have to wait till he was older. But RNK would emerge one of the most important figures of the Communist movement in Tamil Nadu over the next few decades. He would be seeking—often successfully— support for the sengodi (red flag) and not the manjal petti (yellow box).

“There was only one school in our part of Tirunelveli and so it was simply called ‘School’. That was its only name.”

Nallakannu is speaking to us in his small home office in Chennai. Beside him, on a sideboard of his table, are a bunch of little busts and small statuettes. Lenin, Marx and Periyar right next to him. Behind them, a bigger, golden statuette of Ambedkar that stands in front of a larger sketch of revolutionary Tamil poet Subramania Bharati. Behind the small Periyar bust is another sketch, drawn from a photo of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. And next to all these, a calendar that asks all of us to ‘Use Less Water’.

The whole tableau captures, at a glance, the intellectual development and history of the man we are in conversation with for the third time. It is June 25, 2022. The first of our interviews with him was in 2019.

“Bharathiyar was the most inspirational poet for me,” says Nallakannu. “Often his poems or songs were banned.” He cites some lines from ‘Suthinthara Pallu’ (Independence Song), an extraordinary song by the poet. “He wrote it, I think, in 1909. So he celebrates independence 38 years before India attained it in 1947!”

We will dance, we will sing
For we have achieved the joy of independence

The time when we used to call Brahmins as ‘Sir’ has gone,
The time when we used to call the white men as ‘lord’ has gone,

Bharathi died in 1921, four years before Nallakannu was born. The song was written even earlier. But it, and others, inspired him through his fighting years. RNK knew many songs and poems of Bharati before he was 12. He is able to recall quite a few of the verses and lyrics verbatim even today. “I learnt some of those from the Hindi pundit Pallavesam Chettiar at school,” he says. And of course, none of those were on the official curriculum.

“I also got a book of Bharathiyar’s writings from S. Satyamurti when he came to the school. It was a collection of his poems Thesiya Geetham.” Satyamurti was a freedom fighter, politician and a patron of the arts. Bharati was one of the first to acclaim the 1917 october Revolution in Russia and even wrote a song in its praise.

It’s good to try and understand Nallakannu through his love for Bharati and the prism of the agrarian and working- class struggles he was part of for eight decades.

For it is really difficult to tell the story of ‘Comrade RNK’ otherwise. This is one of the most self-effacing souls I have ever met. He gently but firmly declines to place himself at the centre of any of the great events, strikes and struggles he tells us about. His role in some of those was vital and central all right. But you can never get him to portray or narrate it that way.

“Comrade RNK was one of the founding leaders of the farmers’ movement in our state,” says G. Ramakrishnan. ‘GR’ is a state committee member of the CPI(M), but unreservedly salutes the role and contribution of the 97-year-old CPI leader. “Through the decades—starting from when he was still a teenager—it was he who, along with Srinivas Rao, created the bases of the Kisan Sabha across the state. Those remain a source of the strength for the Left even today. And Nallakannu helped create that by tireless campaigns and struggles all across Tamil Nadu.”

“We’d fight them at night, throw stones—those were the weapons we had—and chase them away. Sometimes, there would be pitched battles. This happened several times during the protests that came in the 1940s. We were still boys, but we fought. Day and night, with our kind of weapons!”

Fight whom? And chase them away from what and where?

“The uppalam [salt pans] near my town. All the salt pans were under British control. The condition of the workers was miserable. Like around the mills, where the struggles began decades earlier. There were protests and there was a lot of public sympathy and support for them.

“The police simply functioned as the agents of the salt pan owners. In one clash, a sub-inspector died. There had even been an attack on the police station there. Then they set up a mobile patrolling unit. They would go to the pans during the day and come to camp near our villages at night. That’s when we clashed with them.” These protests and clashes went on and off for a couple of years, maybe more. “But it was around 1942 and the Quit India movement that they really grew.”

Nallakannu’s taking part in all of this while barely a teenager did not go down well with his father Ramasamy Thevar. A farmer, Thevar owned some 4–5 acres of land and had six children. The young RNK was often punished at home. And sometimes his father would withhold paying his school fees.

“People would tell him—'Your son does not study? He’s always out and shouting. Looks like he’s gone and joined the Congress’.” The deadline for paying the fees at ‘School’ fell between the 14th and 24th of each month. “If I asked him for the fees, he’d shout at me: ‘You leave your studies and help your uncles on the farm’.”

“As time ran out, someone close to my father would placate him. They would promise him that I would not speak and act the way I was doing. only then would he pay the fees.”

However, “the more he opposed my life, my ways, the deeper my dissent grew. I made it up to intermediate level in Tamil, at The Hindu College, Madurai. It was actually at the Tirunelveli junction. But it was called Hindu College, Madurai. I only studied there two years. I couldn’t go further.”

Because he was busy taking part in protests. And significantly—though he is far too modest to say it—he had even begun to organize them. RNK was swiftly emerging a young leader. But one who never sought, and mostly avoided, a high profile.

It’s hard to keep a chronological track of the events and actions he was involved in. More so as they were many in number and occurred on quite different fronts.

He sums up the most important moments for him during the freedom struggle simply, though: “The battles around the Quit India movement.” He was not yet 17 at that point, but already an important figure in the protests. The years between age 12 and 15 were also the time of his transition from Congressman to Communist.

What sort of protest meetings did he help organize or take part in?

Early on, “we had megaphones made of tin. We’d gather any tables and chairs we could in a village or town and sing. Mainly the table was for the speaker to stand on and address the crowd. Mind you, crowds would unfailingly show up.” Once again, he says little about his own role in mobilizing people. Though it was foot soldiers like him who made that possible.

“Later, speakers like Jeevanandam would stand on those tables and talk to fairly large audiences. With no mikes. He did not need them.

“Over time, we began to get decent mikes and loudspeakers. The most favoured one,” he recalls, “was what were called the ‘Chicago mikes’ or Chicago Radio systems. Of course, we could not afford them too often.”

What about when there was a British crackdown? How did they communicate then?

“There were many such situations. Like after the Royal Indian navy [RIN] mutiny [1946]. There was a total crackdown on the Communists. But there were raids earlier too. And the British would sometimes search every party office in the villages. That happened even after Independence, by the way, when the party was banned. We did have bulletins and magazines. Like Janashakti, for instance. But we had other modes of communication. Some of those were simple signals going back centuries.

“Right from the time of Kattabomman [legendary 18 century anti-British fighter], people used to place neem twigs at the entrance of a home. It was a sign to indicate that someone inside was sick with smallpox or other ailments. But it was also used as a secret symbol to signal that a meeting was going on there.

‘If there were sounds of a baby crying inside the house, that meant the meeting was still on. If the cow dung near the entrance was wet, the meeting was still on. If the dung there was dry, it was a signal to turn away and leave, as danger lurked. or meant that the meeting was over.’

What was RNK’s greatest source of inspiration through the freedom struggle?

‘Why did I remove my moustache when I was arrested?’ RNK laughs. ‘I never did. And I never grew it to disguise my face in the first place. If that was the case, why should I have grown one at all?

‘No, the police burnt it off with a cigarette. That was part of the torture inflicted on me by an Inspector Krishnamurthy from Madras city. He tied my hands at 2 a.m. He only untied them the next morning at 10. Then he beat me with his baton for a long time.’

Again, like many fellow freedom fighters, he recalls the incident with no personal rancour. no animosity towards his torturer. RNK never looked for the police inspector in later days to settle scores. It never once occurred to him to do so.

‘This actually happened in 1948,’ he says, after India attained Independence. ‘The party had been banned in many provinces, including Madras, and remained that way till 1951.

‘But you should understand there were also anti-feudal battles that had to be fought. That we had to pay a price for. And these began long before 1947—and continued well after Independence.

‘Freedom movement, social reform, anti-feudal struggles—we combined these issues. That’s how we worked.

We fought for better and equal wages. We fought for the abolition of untouchability. We played a serious role in the temple entry movements.

‘The campaign for abolition of the zamindari system was a major movement in Tamil Nadu. The state had many important zamindaris. We fought the mirasdari [land held under hereditary title] and inamdari [lands assigned free to individuals or institutions by the ruler] systems. It was the Communists who were at the forefront of these battles. There were very major landlords to contend with, and their private armed goondas and thugs.

‘There were people like Punniyoor Saambasiva Iyer, Nedumanam Saamiyappa Muthaliyaar, Poondi Vandiyar. They held thousands of acres of fertile land.’

We are now sitting in on a fascinating history lesson. From a man who helped make that history.

‘There were also the centuries-old practices of brahmatheyam and thevathaanam.

‘Under the first, lands were given for free to Brahmins by the rulers. They ruled and profited from the land. They would not directly cultivate it, but the profits would go to them. Under thevathaanam, such gifts of land would be made to temples. Sometimes a temple could be gifted an entire village. The small tenants and workers lived at their mercy. Anyone who stood up to them could and would be evicted.

‘Know this, these institutions, the madams [mutts or monasteries] owned six lakh acres of land. Maybe even now. But their power has been strongly curtailed by people’s unflinching struggles.

“The Tamil Nadu Zamindari Abolition Act came into force in 1948. But it was the zamindars and giant landowners who were compensated. not the people who had worked the land for them. The affluent tenants got some compensation. The poor who worked in the fields got nothing. Between 1947–49, there were a large number of evictions from these temple lands. And we launched huge protests along the lines of: ‘only when farmers own the land can they live well’.

“These were our battles—and from 1948 to 1960, the fight went on for getting their rights. C. Rajagopalachari [Rajaji] as Chief Minister took the side of the landlords and mutts. We said, ‘Land to the Tiller’. Rajaji said land belongs to those who have the documents. But our struggles saw us break that total power these temples and mutts had. We defied their harvest rules and protocols. We refused to be slaves.

“And, of course, all this could not be separated from the social battles as well.

Now he’s moving back and forth between pre and post Independence periods. At one level, that’s confusing. At another, it brings home the complexity of those times. That there were many freedoms involved. That some of these did not have clear start and end dates. That people like RNK remained steadfast in the pursuit of those freedoms.

“We also, right through those decades, fought against the beatings and torture of the workers.

“In 1943, Dalit workers were still being whipped. And having cow dung water poured on the wounds created by the whips. They had to go to work at 4 or 5 a.m. in the morning—whenever the rooster crowed. They had to be at the mirasdars’ lands to bathe the cattle, gather the cow dung, then go to water the fields. There was a village near Thiruthuraipoondi then in Thanjavur district. That’s where we held their protest.

“There was a huge demonstration headed by Srinivas Rao of the Kisan Sabha. The sentiment was ‘if they hit you for carrying the red flag, hit them back’. Finally the mirasdars and Mudhaliars at Thiruthuraipoondi signed an agreement that this whipping, use of cow dung water and other barbaric practices would be stopped.”

RNK plays down his own huge role in these great battles all the way from the 1940s to the 1960s and well beyond. He would succeed Srinivas Rao as the head of the All-India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), Tamil Nadu. In the decades after 1947, the silent foot soldier would emerge a strong general in the battles of farmers and labourers.

Both of them are excited and emotional. We are doing one of our interviews at CPI(M) leader and freedom fighter N. Sankariah’s house. That is, we’re talking to both him and Nallakannu together. The way the comrades of eight decades greet each other touches the emotions of the rest of us in the room, too.

Is there no bitterness, no sadness? They went their different ways when the Communist Party of India split into two some 60 years ago. It was not an amiable parting.

“But we have worked together on many issues and struggles even after that,” says Nallakannu. “With the same attitude towards each other as from before.”

“When the two of us meet,” says Sankariah, “we are still one party.”                

How do they respond to the present-day rise in communal violence and hatred? Do they fear for the nation’s survival? A nation whose independence they helped achieve.

“There were times during the freedom struggle, too, when things looked bleak,” says Nallakannu. “We were told you cannot win. You are up against the greatest empire in the world. Some of our families were warned to keep us away from the struggle. But we rose above all those warnings and threats. And fought anyway. That’s why we are here today.”

There is also the need, both of them say, to build broad unity. To reach out and learn from others as in the past. “I think even an EMS [Namboodiripad] had a Gandhi photo in his room,” says RNK.

How do the two of them remain so calm and sanguine about the state of politics that so scares millions among the rest of us? Nallakannu shrugs: “We’ve seen worse.”

Postscript

On Independence Day, 2022,  The Last Heroes: Footsoldiers of Indian Freedom had already gone to press when the government of Tamil Nadu conferred the Thagaisal Thamizhar Award on RNK. This is Tamil Nadu’s top prize instituted in 2021 and given to an eminent personality who has contributed a great deal to the state and the Tamil community. It carries a cash prize of Rs. 10 lakhs, and it was handed over to RNK by Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on the ramparts of Fort St. George.