Ayya's Accounts

M. P. Mariappan, Anand Pandian

Description

2nd Place, 2014 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing 2015 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection—rated outstanding

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Ayya's Accounts explores the life of an ordinary man—orphan, refugee, shopkeeper, and grandfather—during a century of tremendous hope and upheaval. Born in colonial India into a despised caste of former tree climbers, Ayya lost his mother as a child and came of age in a small town in lowland Burma. Forced to flee at the outbreak of World War II, he made a treacherous 1,700-mile journey by foot, boat, bullock cart, and rail back to southern India. Becoming a successful fruit merchant, Ayya educated and eventually settled many of his descendants in the United States. Luck, nerve, subterfuge, and sorrow all have their place along the precarious route of his advancement. Emerging out of tales told to his American grandson, Ayya's Accounts embodies a simple faith—that the story of a place as large and complex as modern India can be told through the life of a single individual.

Preface

1. A Century of Experience
2. In Some Village, Somewhere
3. Taj Malabar Hotel, 2005
4. Things I Didn't Know I'd Lost
5. Pudur, 2012
6. A Decade in Burma
7. Okpo, 1940
8. When the War Came
9. Kovilpatti, 1946
10. A New Life at Home
11. Victoria Studio, 1949
12. Dealing Cloth in a Time of War
13. Dindigul, 1951
14. A Foothold in Madurai
15. Gopal Studio, 1953
16. A Shop of My Own
17. Madurai Fruit Merchants Association, 1960
18. Branches in Many Directions
19. Norwalk, 1974
20. Between Madurai and America
21. Madurai, 1992
22. What Comes Will Come
23. Oakland, 1997
24. Burma, Once Again
25. Okpo, 2002
26. Giving and Taking
27. Listening to My Grandfather
Afterword \ Veena Das
Acknowledgments

Notes
Bibliography

Sujets

• Asian Studies
• Personal Memoirs
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• South Asia
• Memoir
• General officer
• South
• History of Asia
• Anthropology
• General
• Asia
• India
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 17 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253012661
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Ayya s
ACCOUNTS
ANAND PANDIAN M. P. MARIAPPAN
Afterword by Veena Das
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone [phone]
Fax [phone]
2014 by Anand Pandian
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pandian, Anand.
[Micham meethi. English]
Ayya s accounts : a ledger of hope in modern India / Anand Pandian and M.P. Mariappan ; afterword by Veena Das.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-253-01258-6 (hardback) - ISBN 978-0-253-01250-0 (paperback) - ISBN 978-0-253-01266-1 (e-book) 1. Mariappan, M. P., 1919- 2. Tamil (Indic people)-India-Biography. 3. Tamil (Indic people)-India-Social conditions-20th century. 4. Nadars-Biography. 5. Nadars-Social conditions -20th century. 6. India-Social conditions-20th century. 7. Merchants-India-Biography. I. Mariappan, M. P., 1919- II. Das, Veena. III. Title.
DS489.25.T3P35813 2014
954 .82-dc23
[B]
2013042011
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
For Karun and Uma, for their cousins, and for the others yet to come
A couplet like a mustard seed, pierced and filled with the seven seas . . .
-Attributed to the medieval Tamil poet and mystic Idaikkadar
CONTENTS
Preface
1. A Century of Experience
2. In Some Village, Somewhere
3. Taj Malabar Hotel, 2005
4. Things I Didn t Know I d Lost
5. Pudur, 2012
6. A Decade in Burma
7. Okpo, 1940
8. When the War Came
9. Kovilpatti, 1946
10. A New Life at Home
11. Victoria Studio, 1949
12. Dealing Cloth in a Time of War
13. Dindigul, 1951
14. A Foothold in Madurai
15. Gopal Studio, 1953
16. A Shop of My Own
17. Madurai Fruit Merchants Association, 1960
18. Branches in Many Directions
19. Norwalk, 1974
20. Between Madurai and America
21. Madurai, 1992
22. What Comes Will Come
23. Oakland, 1997
24. Burma, Once Again
25. Okpo, 2002
26. Giving and Taking
27. Listening to My Grandfather
Afterword by Veena Das
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
PREFACE
This book grows out of conversations with my grandfather. I was born and raised in the United States. He has spent most of his life in India and Burma. The chapters pass back and forth between my voice and his, between his recollections of his life as a merchant and my reflections on his life as a grandson and an anthropologist. Although my grandfather has long had many languages within reach-some Hindi, Telugu, Burmese, English-the two of us have always spoken in Tamil, his native language.
Tamil is a diglossic language, with tremendous differences of feeling, implication, and solemnity between its written and spoken registers. My grandfather has always been a man of plain words and sparing expressions, a thrifty merchant with little interest in ornamentation of any kind. Nevertheless, there is a stark beauty to his stories.
In the original Tamil edition of this book, published by Kalachuvadu Publications in 2012, we sought to convey the modest elegance of my grandfather s language by relying on his own verbal idioms and the spoken quality of his vernacular Madurai dialect. With this English edition, based on my translation of his words, I have tried to maintain some sense of the colloquial personality of his speech.
What I know of Tamil was learned in bits and pieces over many years. Every word in Tamil has ever so many meanings, my grandfather has often said to me. With this translation, I have tried to keep this idea in mind, working out the various meanings and implications that a single word may bear in diverse circumstances, while also striving, at the same time, to relay something of the simple clarity of my grandfather s voice.
What I mean to say is this: the person speaking here about his own life is not exactly him. Nor am I still the one who began, some time ago, to listen closely to his words. This is what happens when you do anthropology. In fact, this is what happens whenever you really listen to someone else. Your experience is no longer your own.
Anand Pandian
Baltimore, Md.
November 2013
Note: This symbol, , marks each passage between Ayya s voice and mine.
Ayya s
ACCOUNTS
India and Burma, 1941
A CENTURY OF EXPERIENCE
1

We were on a train clattering to Madurai seventeen years ago when my grandfather first told me the story of his passage back from Burma to India in 1941. Ayya had come of age in a small town in the lush lowlands north of Rangoon. For nearly a decade, he and his brothers kept a shop there, on the veranda of their house. Then the Second World War reached their town, driving them back to India. One among hundreds of thousands of refugees, Ayya survived a deadly trek through the bamboo jungles of western Burma and landed in the dry, dusty village of his forebears in southern Tamil Nadu. He married, and with patience, thrift, luck, and cunning, he eventually secured a decent life for his family.
I sat beside Ayya on a green vinyl berth as he described all of this, grateful for the cool, dry air of this coach car on the Pandyan Express. It was early June. The unrelenting heat outside was thick, sticky. But there was something else that I could almost feel floating in the air around my grandfather: the absence of Paati, my grandmother. 1 It had been just four months since Ayya had lost his wife. And now it seemed, as he spoke, that this loss was cloaked in other losses that he d seen-the mother who had died when he was a child, the father he d buried back in Burma, the rubble of their livelihood there. Who was left to tell me stories? he asked plaintively, as if, for a moment, the septuagenarian widower was once again that orphaned child.
I also missed my grandmother and the raucous tales that she could tell. I d grown up in New York and Los Angeles. Every year or two, we would see Ayya and Paati for a few weeks at a time. I don t remember Ayya being a very avid or captivating storyteller in those years. In fact, he was rather quiet. Most of what I knew about him came from the stories that others would tell about his life: his ceaseless toils, the hardships he had survived, and the responsibility that all of us had inherited to struggle in turn. Ayya was never one to call attention to himself. But at a certain moment late in life, perhaps when he began to feel the tremors of his own mortality, my grandfather found that he had a lot to tell. And I happened to be there to listen.
This was something that began as an accident, my presence beside my grandfather as he reflected on his life. But then, over time, listening to him became more of a habit. For most of his years, he had made a living by dealing in fruit. As his eldest grandson, and an anthropologist, I learned to make my living by dealing in the stories of others like him. I began to travel often from the United States to India, spending many years with farmers, activists, writers, and filmmakers in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where my grandfather lived. On these many trips, I would always pass in and out of Ayya s company. And slowly, I began to see how deeply my pursuit of this vocation had been shaped by my sense of his history.
Most of us have had grandparents or other elders murmuring from the corners of our lives, sharing tales that are sometimes riveting, sometimes simply tedious. The lessons of their experience may go heeded or unheeded by those who follow them. But with Ayya, I found that I couldn t shake the sense of a deep and insistent debt.
Something about this debt was very personal. My grandfather s life had taken a precarious route, nothing like the stiff railroad tracks that led us to Madurai that night or the steady beat of our passage over them. What if his journey had suddenly ground to an unexpected halt? What would I have become, if anything at all?
But there was also something else that I began to see by listening to my grandfather, a lesson in the formidable reach of historical perspective. There he was, a small man seated beside me in a musty railway compartment, passing the time with stories that stretched far beyond the south Indian countryside we were traversing, chronicling events that I could barely recall from the pages of my American school textbooks. Where on his person could he have kept this immensity, this vast world of his experience?
No life is as small as it might first appear from a distance. Extraordinary tales may be found in the most unlikely places. This book grows out of a simple faith-the idea that you can tell the story of a place as large and complex as modern India through the life of a single individual, through the life of someone like my grandfather, Ayya.
The year is 2014. Nearly a century has passed since Ayya s birth in 1919. He ha