Beneath the flowery oratory, a lack of democratic values

Bernard Bate’s book, “Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic practice in South India” discusses the evolution of oratory of Dravidian politicians. The book identifies the cultural roots of the excessive devotion displayed by the cadres of Dravidian parties towards their leaders.
Public political oratory is a democratic ethic that defines the relationship between the leaders and the people.In the west, public political oratory dates back to the time of ancient Greeks whereas in Tamil Nadu, the history of which is as ancient as that of the Greeks, nothing like a Ciceronian style political oratory was ever depicted in Tamil letters until very late in the 19th century.
The praise of kings by Sangam- age poets was a form of political speech. But the antecedents of Dravidian oratory are fairly recent. For instance, using Tamil scholar Tho Paramasivam’s insight, Bate draws stylistic parallels between a stage speech of Vaiko in the 1990s and the speech of Jeevagan in “Manonmaniyam”, a 19th century play written by Sundaram Pillai.
It must, however, be said that the political oratory of Anna and Karunanidhi in pure literary Tamil was a major departure in the 1940s. Until then, Congress leaders spoke in colloquial Tamil to the listening public as if they were landlords addressing farmhands. Even Periyar, the political mentor of Anna, continued to speak in colloquial Tamil like Congress leaders.
This was the time when the rediscovery of exquisite Sangam-age Tamil poetry (100 -300 CE) was making waves and Tamil renaissance was in full swing. With the adaptation of literary high Tamil for his political oratory, Anna brought about a revolution in political speech that enabled him and other Dravidian politicians to pose as heirs to an ancient, non-Aryan literary heritage.
While the practice of formally addressing the audiences as respectful citizens (“Periyorkaley, Thaimrakaley”, or “elders, mothers”) brought the masses on an equal conversation, the frequent references in the speeches of Annadurai and Karunanidhi to the bravery of Tamil kings and women alluded to in Sangam poetry helped them to create an aura of a glorious Tamil past.
Annadurai’s oratory borrowed heavily from the rhetorical techniques of Western political speeches of leaders and thinkers like Emerson, Lincoln, and Ingersoll. Karunanidhi perfected the art of references to classical Tamil texts such as “Thirukkural”, “Silappathikaram”, and “Purananooru”.
Both Annadurai and Karunanidhi acknowledged their indebtedness to Bharathidasan, the Dravidian poet, for their utopian vision that permeated their oratory.
Bate’s study comes from a series of political rallies he attended in Madurai in 1994-1995 and these rallies are not different from what we witness today. Bate writes; “Over a two-and-a-half month period, Madurai was transformed several times from one utopian vision to another.” And the visions of all of the parties were similarly utopian; only the characters that peopled and ruled those utopias changed.
Bate documents the political pageantries that consisted of paper castles, huge cut-outs, praise posters, serial bulb installations, flag poles, and paper photo flag decorations as the paraphernalia of Dravidian oratory. In those pageantries that Bate calls the ‘Dravidian aesthetic’, the bitter ironies of Dravidian oratory’s democratic ethic emerge clearly and loudly.
The classical literary Tamil the Dravidian leaders use to strike a high civilizational conversation with the masses actually functions to reinforce party hierarchy. If the decorative epithets used for the DMK leaders such as “Kazhaghattin Porvaal Vaiko” (Vaiko, the war sword of the party) “Eettimunai Elamaran” (spear-point Elamaran) and “Theepori Arumugam”
(Roman Candle Arumugam) suggest an imaginary war-like situation, the superlatives used for Jayalalithaa of AIADMK like “revolutionary goddess” suggest there has been a revolution. Bate likens the atheist political rallies of DMK to village religious festivals. The Dravidian political orators gesticulate, thump the air, stamp their feet, warn their enemies, adjust their long shawls, roll their eyes, and drink a lot of soda in between to make their leaders demi gods who walk on earth. The party cadres who respond to this oratory and the village festival culture of the pageantries display themselves as self-sacrificing foot soldiers and masochist ritual devotees. Bate records the excessive devotion of AIADMK party workers through a study of posters, cut outs, and praise verbiage.
The sound and fury of Dravidian oratory may be political hyperbole and hubris signifying nothing but they do reveal a fascinating phenomenon of Tamil politics, culture, and history. The excessive devotion Dravidian oratory helped to perpetuate tells us that it is time to reclaim ordinary speech for Tamil political stage so that its democratic ethic is restored.
(The author is a writer and folklorist who heads the National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai)