The Pathos of being a Jayalalithaa

The Pathos of being a Jayalalithaa

We are a sentimental people. Sentiments are a strength. But sentimentality is not. It effects a blurring of reality, an exaggeration of the given and a loss of proportion. Sentimentality blinds us to truth.

Many moving things were said all through the mourning about the late Amma. Fortunately, the commentators and experts did not have to jog their ingenuity to fill the time. Amma is a rich reservoir. She was all that they said she was. But she was more….

Amma was also a victim. The fact that she was a victim of domestic circumstances – lost her father when she was two years old and lived, for the most part, in emotional neglect – was repeatedly mentioned. That her psyche was shattered and her health ruined by her incarceration in 2014, also was.

What no one dared or cared to mention was that she is a victim of the political industry in which she, like all else (our poor, pathetic VVIPs), was an employee, so to speak. If you want to access the pathos of being a Jayalalithaa, you need to look at her predicament in politics without alibis and prejudices.

The clue lies in the fact that the young, prescient Jaya was genuinely reluctant to enter politics. It meant only one thing: she understood politics and sensed a deep, inner dissonance with it. It is quite certain that this corrosive tension, this ontological incompatibility, plagued Jaya all through her iconic political career and continued to exact a heavy toll till the end.

Ironically, what made her predicament inwardly painful is her passion for perfection, of which there were unmistakable signs even in her Bishop Cotton days. She was the best outgoing student, an unmatched all-rounder. The burden that perfectionists live with is easy to see. The passion for perfection is the wind under your wings only in conducive situations, which is why Jaya continued to talk nostalgically about wanting to become an academic or a lawyer. In circumstances incompatible with your native genius (what the Greek called your daemon) this very wind breaks your wings.

The shattering truth that stares us in the face as we reckon the pathos of the Jaya predicament is this: your strengths become your chinks in your armour when you accept or find yourself in, a context contrary to your essential genius. This truth needs to be confronted at a time when millions of young men and women are being sacrificed to the Moloch -the god of child sacrifice – of prosperity by enslaving learning to earning.

Politics, as it is practiced today, is not a domain of perfection. It is a jungle of compromises and dishonest strategies. How glibly we define politics as “the art of the possible”! ‘The possible’ denotes not art, but artlessness. Art is the domain of the impossible, the ideal, and the visionary. We endorse the lie that politics is an art, and go on endorsing its practice which insults the very idea of art. The one thing that contemporary politics lacks is art, a sense of beauty!

Jaya was a reluctant entrant into the cinema world. Yet, once she was dragged into it, she went the whole hog after it and conquered it. Paid the price for it with her life. Continued to do so, until the last day.

That too needs to be noted. We don’t stop paying for a wrong choice the moment we break away its trajectory. Our wrong choices continue to stalk us, just as we retain the strengths from past healthy choices.

Re-located in politics, Jaya remained just the same: the dreamer after perfection, except that her core predicament got worse. In the tinsel town, she could, to an extent, choose her roles and partners. Her vulnerability as a woman, if any, was mostly sexual in nature. In the political jungle, her very being was in jeopardy.

Consider the two distinct phases of her political career. In the first, she was marked and marred by covetousness and an extravagant lifestyle. We condemned her. We showed poor discernment. It is easier to condemn than to confront the truth. The truth is that she was learning the ropes in politics as politics was played then, and still is.

She imbibed the prevailing myth that money and glamour alone matter in politics. She went after it like a maestro. It is dishonest to blame her for it. Who does not know that politics runs only on money?Jaya did not invent this! The rules were, and are, in vogue. She played it to perfection. That’s all.

The consequences caught up with her. She learned. She was, remember, an outstanding student. You can’t be a seeker of perfection and not be an excellent learner.

So she entered the second stage in her tryst with politics. This is where other politicians stop short. They do so because they are cynical about seeking perfection.

It is laughable to interpret the attachment of the masses to Jaya as an outcome of her politics of charity. Come on, we know better than that!

Jaya, I dare say, was not distributing peanuts to money! She was learning politics anew when she could afford to do so. She couldn’t have done this sooner than she did. The curtain rose, and an ascetic version of Jaya entered. Her outlandish wardrobe and trinkets of flamboyance all faded out. She assumed an image of royal simplicity: simplicity as only queens can. When will we learn that true royalty can be expressed better through simplicity?

So, what is the difference between the two paradigms of politics?

In the first, you matter because you ‘have’. People look up to you because you have what they don’t and can never have. It is this that fuels corruption via politics. Corruption will be an irresistible outcome in and through politics, as long as this thievish paradigm reigns.

In the second model of politics, you are loved because you give. It is not the volume of what you give that matters, but the fact that you care enough to give. But beware! People know the difference between giving with your heart and giving at the end of a hook! What is at the end of a hook is ‘bait’.

Bait is what politicians customarily hold out to the masses. You may forge the hook in gold, but that will not change the nature of what it holds. Bait is bait. You may pretend it to be otherwise, but it won’t work for long.

Jaya played on the platform of the first model of politics. It landed her in jail. The jail crushed her wings. For a perfectionist, that is as good as breaking her heart. She never recovered.

The true pathos of Amma’s story is that of a victim recasting herself as a redeemer. That is how it has been in history. Only victims save. Heroes? Well, their job is to multiply victims.

Those who swallow baits, logic demands, must end up as victims. You are known not only by the company you keep but also by the baits you swallow.

Note : Published with permission from the author

The Author:

Rev. Valson Thampu is an Indian educator, Christian theologian, who was a Principal of St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Delhi, from 2008 to February 2016. Prior to this, he was a lecturer at the college and its officiating principal since May 2007. He is a translator from Malayalam to English and his translation of The Scent of the Other Side won the Crossword award. His second translated work, Gift in Green was published by Harper Collins in 2011.

He was a controversial figure during his tenure as Principal of St. Stephen’s, with numerous calls for his removal (particularly from alumni, as well as from professors at the institution). He is an Ordained minister of Church of North India and a member of the National Minorities Commission and Delhi Minorities Commission. Thampu pursued PhD in Theology from Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences.