Anna

Anna

There was no midwife, but then, in the chill December of 1934 when most Indians lived in villages, less than a tenth of the expectant women had access to medical facilities as we know today. Not that there was no help at all. The mother, the grandmother, aunts and the village’s maternity assistant, the delivery assistant was there at hand to help the 22 year old Rukmini deliver her second child, also a boy, at Neelathahalli, in her maternal home, on or around 24^th December. It’s a fair estimation that what was lacking in proper medical facilities was compensated for by the love, care & affection showered by the mother & the grandmother. The bigger factor, probably, was the tolerance for pain and stoicism that girls were ingrained with by their mothers and grandmothers.

This was the second child of Rukmini, another boy, a matter of no disappointment for the mother, father or the family. A boy was always welcome in those days. In any case, there will be so many to come, surely there will be at least one girl - a line of  thought,  so outlandish today in an urban setting, but not so at all in many parts India even today.

After five months of careful & loving nursing, Rukmini was ready to go back to her marital home with her two sons,  the elder one being an already aggressive four year old. While Srinivasa, Seenasamy to his friends, was an appropriately restrained father, Shrngaramma the proud grand mother had no reasons to control her joy. Thus started the childhood of Sampattu, later to be known officially as Hunisemaram Sampath Iyengar. His given name, Sampattu, was  a common name in the Brahman Hamlet, so common that every household in the village had a boy by the same name. This perforce meant boys had to have a prefix or a suffix to identify the different ‘Sampattus’ ! He became ‘’Pulimarat Sampattu’, Sampattu from the household with the big tamarind tree, ‘pulimaram’being the tamarind tree in colloquial Tamil. Now, such prefixes or suffixes surely didn't become the official name ! Probably the tradition, even currently on, of the official names of children being of three parts - names of the place & father followed by the given name, started sometime around the same time - after all he belonged to the first generation who were sent to  school by default under Macaulay’s education system. Sampattu was taken by his father to enrol him into the Government primary school. Unlike many villages of that time, rather even today, Gorur had a full fledged school including the high school even in the forties of the last century. The father’s memory on the date of birth and name as given was good enough for the school to enrol, no hassles about birth certificate or registration ! Srinivasa who had been given the prefix ‘Hunisemaram’ decided instinctively that his second son shall also have the same. Thus, Sampattu alone, amongst all his children, had this big tree attached to his name while all his siblings including his elder brother, had the standard name of the village followed by the father’s name prefixed to their own given names ! Now, its a fair guess that Sampattu was the only child whom Srinivasa himself took to admit into school !

In a brood of ten, the second will be an elder, more so when the eldest was sent away to seek a life at 17 and the man of the house had not learnt to take responsibility for the growth, health, education and other such needs that a father today deems a fundamental duty of his to provide for, if not personally provide.

To be fair to him, Srinivasa, the much sought after baby boy after 5 girls, the only male heir left after losing a boy to the river after a dispute, another boy who preferred to move to his new wife’s place on marriage and seven girls that followed, was a much petted young man meeting the primary expectation of his now widowed mother - to be within her sight always. It didn’t help that the Brahman family had large land holdings that boys were expected, not to cultivate, but to let the deferring farmers work the farms to reap harvest. Not fully though, the societal norm dictated that the farmer share a part of the harvest with the family which held inherited rights over these farms. The male Brahman children were expected to learn the Vedas, Upanishads by rote, and become a priest, not at a temple to carry out regular rituals to the deity, but to guide people perform their obligations on occasions of vital importance in a person’s life –marriage, birth of a child, initiation of the child into education, death of a parent and anniversaries thereof. Now every male Brahman could not become a priest obviously. Hence, growing number of Brahman boys were sent to school, as we know today, to get education as Lord Macaulay introduced in the previous century. A few of them went on to become teachers in the local or nearby village school, many left the village to seek their fortunes in the nearest town, few others went out to seek salaried employment in the government or till the land themselves. The choice was not at all difficult for Shrngaramma, the doting mother to make for Srinivasa, her lone surviving son. You’ve to give it to her – widowed soon after his birth, five daughters already married and with children,  she’d lost her elder son – one to the river when he drowned himself after a heated argument with his father soon after which his wife went away to her parents’ place in Belagere, a distant village. All she wanted was to have the apple of her eye within eye sight all the time. After all, the family had sufficient farm lands along with hereditary rights to portions of produce from four other villages. ‘ Why should my son struggle to clear an exam, when there’s no need for any job at all ?’ Even her brother, a formidable man with  a house secured by a granite door (amusingly, that stone door, ‘Kallu BAgilu’ in his house, was what he was known for, so much so that his & descendents’ family name came to be ‘Kalbagal’) with a college degree, a rarity in those times in those parts, couldn’t persuade her to let her son study further.  That meant Srinivasa didn’t have to work for a living even as an adult, a  fact that significantly shaped his life. Then what did he do with his life ? He was in the school up to his tenth grade, stopped there as further education meant going out of the village, something Shrngaramma would just not have, learnt some of the verses in Samskrut from ancient works like Rg & Yajurveda, Puranas by rote from the village teacher who would herd all the male children before dusk everyday for performing the ablutions to the setting Sun followed by recitation of these poems and verses.

The idyllic village of Gorur where Srinivasa spent all his life, on the banks of Hemavathi, the largest tributary of Cauavery, the lifeline of present – day southern Karnataka & Tamilnadu, had a decent strength of more than 80 Brahman families. These Tamil Brahmans descended from the followers of the 11^th century Shrivaishnavite saint, Ramanuja, who migrated from the unfriendly scene in Cholanadu, ruled by Shaivite Chola kings, today’s Central Tamil Nadu, to the region that forms the southern districts of today’s Karnataka – Hassan, Chikkamagaluru, Mandya, Mysuru, Chamarajanagara and Bengaluru. With other Vadyars (priests) also in the fray, this vocation hardly filled all his time. Thus he had time to do whatever he wanted and he did indeed – open a book stall, join others of his generation to run a protest march to the office of the Amaldar, the revenue collector carrying the banned tricolour of the Congress (and vanish before the cops came with their lathis to disperse them), collect, by asking or stealing, the cloths and dresses made of imported cotton of Manchester from the few affluent households to make a bonfire and shouting ‘Vande Mataram’, open a Swadeshi cloth store and occasionally indulge in small works at the farm and in the own backyard. No that any of them sustained for long, each one went on for a few years till it remained his fancy or till something else caught his fancy. One major consumer of time was the regular travels to villages in the vicinity where his family had traditional rights over farms – to collect the family’s share of the harvest. if this level of activity left him with a lot of time to look after his children, help his wife with things at home, enrol children into the school, college thereafter, etc., you’d probably be right but only a century too early. A century ago, as a male Brahman,  If you think he led a charmed life, you wouldn’t be wrong in many ways. As a male, he was taught that he did not have to help with any work at home, that was the woman’s vocation.   As a Brahman, he was not expected to pursue physically demanding vocations like working the farms. This he followed with occasional deviations. For a few years, he took up working the farm himself with his sons. As landed gentry, with hereditary rights over farm lands spread over several villages, he was expected to be just a rent seeker – collect his family’s share after every harvest. This, he followed till two developments put paid to these claims. The Government of the state of Karnataka in the newly independent India in the late sixties brought in land reforms that enabled the farmer who worked the farm to claim ownership from the hereditary claimants. Second was the commencement of the construction of an irrigation barrage across the river in his village. He lost his hereditary rights to a share of harvest as  landlord to the first and with the second, he saw his fertile farmlands going under the huge lake created by the backwaters of Hemavathy once the barrage started coming up. Just as in the case of all other land owners in Gorur and neighbouring villages coming under the barrage, he got a combination of a compensation and alternate land elsewhere. The money in compensation just vanished – conducting the marriages of daughters and meeting other expenses. The land received in compensation was just that, a piece of land, not a farm. It had to be developed into a farm.

These changes, inevitable in that period of transition of India in the late sixties, particularly its Southern parts, from an agrarian subsistence-  driven society to a neo-industrial economy, affected different people in Gorur in various ways.

-           Those who had continued their studies and got into college, found new exciting opportunities opening up – regular employment in the new factories and businesses that came up in cities like Bengaluru & Mysuru, as teachers in the numerous schools that the government was opening in every other village.

-          Those who worked on the new lands got in compensation, reaped good rewards for their efforts becoming the new land lords in the village, They were also helped by the  sweeping agrarian revolution bringing in chemical fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides and irrigation dramatically increasing the yields. 

-          There were others who were too comfortable with the traditional way of life, not equipped to handle the changes with education, fell back to stick to the traditional occupations and see the old and known privileges and standing gradually vanish as the new egalitarianism take roots.

A peek into the life of Srinivasa in his later years and retrospect into his life makes it clear that he fell in the last category. He saw a few of his peers & cousins continue their education and take up jobs, a few others grab the opportunities that came in the form of new support for farming, & subsidised inputs that helped them grow into  landed gentry not only protecting their traditional standing in the society but enhancing significantly. To be fair to him though, his kind were numerically stronger than both the other two groups. The difference the choice he made, rather made for him, did not affect so much his life as his children’s.

A carefree childhood unburdened by the feverish expectations of the kind today’s children have to live with, is what made Sampatthu, as he would recall later, very independent from a very young age. The loving care of the grandmother & mother in his infancy, a vigorous lifestyle in a village with a lot of friends to play with & the generous river where he learnt to swim & swim well, not to mention the good genes, together ensured that Sampatthu grew up to be a tall, dark & handsome young man, the tallest in the family, a six footer.

When he was around 10, it was the  day of Gokulashtami, the eighth day of the month of Shravan (also commonly as Savan) that also coincides many a times with the advent of Rohini star, that Hindus celebrate the birth of Krishna, the lovable philosopher god. As it happens in a typical Iyengar household in this part of the world, the mother was very very busy. After all, it is for Krishna, the loveable little god for whom the devoted woman would make every sweet and savoury that she knows of and has been taught to make. And make all these before having anything to eat herself. The father was getting everything ready for the set of customs he would perform to ceremonially bathe Vishnu, the ultimate god embedded in the stalagmite picked up in Nepal from the riverbed of Gomti, a tributary of Ganga, chant the poems of creation of the world and all the beings - animate and inanimate, composed by the sages of ancient India, reputedly about twenty five centuries or more earlier, usher in and celebrate the birth of Krishna.

It was Rukmini who noticed the young sampatthu from behind as she came out from the kitchen, his hair, forehead covered in blood, she could see blood oozing out from somewhere at the top of the head, the boy seemed to be in a daze, neither crying nor shouting, staring at them blankly.

She immediately made the little boy lie down, held the pried open skull together with a piece of cloth, applied turmeric powder on the edges. That is when the boy felt the pain and reacted, howling in pain. Sampatthu was on the verge of losing consciousness. Both kept talking and stroking him, giving him water to drink. It was almost dusk, even the native doctor was not available in the village. Srinivasa took the boy and put him up on his shoulders holding his injured head in his hand and walked up the 3.5 km to the neighbouring village of Ponnatapura where he knew the native Pandit (the traditional doctor who applied traditional knowledge) personally and knew he would be able to help. On reaching there after a brisk walk in about 20 minutes, Pandita saw the boy who was almost unconscious, the broken skull bloody and still wet with warm blood. The anxious parent waited as Pandit quickly examined the wound. ‘Seenasamy, this Gokulashtami is a lucky day for you, there appears to be no wound to the brain and your boy is a tough one, though I can’t say what long term damage may have happened’ – Srinivasa sat down and exhaled in obvious relief. His exertion striding down the dirt path didn’t go in vain. Later, Pandit went across to his backyard and collected a few herbs and leaves, ground them together with some dry herbs he had in his stock in to a smooth paste. Applying the paste to the open wound, he closed it with a pack of some more leaves and tied a cloth bandage around. By now, Sampattu was too tired to cry, was panting. He was given more water & a little sugar . Thereon for 15 days, Srinivasa got a new work schedule for 3 hours in the morning – taking his little son, Sampattu on his shoulder, Srinivasa would walk down the country road every day carrying the boy for the bandage to be replaced with a fresh paste of herbs & leaves that Pandit alone knew. It was about 20 days later that Sampattu was able to walk comfortably and go out. The Pandit’s medicine obviously worked and the boy slowly regained his strength in about three months. The deep scar, about 3 inches, where the skull had parted and had been put back together stretching from just beyond the crown to the back of the skull was visible all through his life as no hair grew over that scar. It, of course, also reminded all those around him of the miracle that survival turned out to be. It didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for things physical, however.

 

This was the childhood that Sampattu grew up from completing his 10^th standard that was the end of schooling in those times in Gorur itself, well before he became Anna to me.