(Ex-Editor, ‘Sind Observer’, Karachi)
To the present generation the name of Kandukuri
Veeresalingam Pantulu may be a faded memory, but to us of the older generation
he is a living reality. He was and continues to be the hero of my life. Time
has in no way diminished the veneration, love and affection I had for him as
the greatest social and religious reformer of Andhradesh. He was a master of
Telugu prose and a great literary man of his time. He was a dogged fighter all
his life in the cause of the Hindu widow, Indian womanhood, and the underdog.
He dedicated all the faculties of his mind and spirit, and the strength of his
body to the regeneration of his Andhradesh, and was also known outside his
Province as a giant amongst men. Frail of body and a chronic sufferer from
asthma his indomitable will prevailed against bodily infirmity, and he led a
most strenuous and purposeful life till his last days.
Veeresalingam Pantulu died at the age of over
seventy years, full of honour and glory. His bitter opponents for fifty years
amongst Hindu orthodoxy bemoaned his death and garnished his sepulchre. He was
a philanthropist of a high order. He created a trust called the Hithakarini
Samaj to which he entrusted the management of his property (including the
royalty from his books) and which was to maintain the famous Widows’ Home built
in his own gardens at Rajahmundry and conduct the several institutions founded
by him.
I devoured all his books in Telugu; and even before
I saw him in 1902 at Guntur in connection with the celebration of a widow
marriage, which at that time convulsed the whole district, I was thoroughly
imbued with the spirit of his reformist writings and liberal thought. I went to
Guntur during the Dasara holidays like a young pilgrim of seventeen years to
worship his deity. Physically he was not an attractive man; he was already
advanced in age; but mentally he was as alert and pugnacious as ever.
My pilgrimage to Guntur was a decisive
turning-point in my own personal history. I drew water from a deep well of
Guntur for the occasion, and partook of the marriage feast. The couple were
both Brahmins. The orthodox Brahmins of Bapatla excommunicated me and did not
readmit me to the caste until I was administered a big dose of Prayaschit.
As the barber was shaving my head, I inwardly resolved never to be a Brahmin
but only a Brahmo, never to marry within the so-called sacerdotal caste but to
go outside it, thereby becoming a casteless non-idolatrous Indian. In later
years I practised my principles without molestation, thanks to the
revolutionary spirit instilled in me and several of my contemporaries by the
life and teachings of Veeresalingam Pantulu.
Readers of his Autobiography in Telugu and
the volumes containing vivid and graphic descriptions of the earlier widow
marriages at Rajahmundry, are thrilled by the superb courage, unconquerable
will, and supreme tenacity of purpose of the greatest man that Andhra had
produced for a hundred years. Every day he was in danger of his life. Every day
calumny and abuse were his portion in life. Every day he went about his noble
mission of saving the young Hindu widow from a loveless, cheerless and, not
unoften, degrading life. He gave to these sisters his full measure of devotion;
he gathered them in his Ashrama at Rajahmundry as a hen gathers chickens, spent
all his money on their protection and education, and, himself a childless man,
he was the father of numerous remarried women; and the grandfather, and
great-grandfather of a few battalions of children left by his adopted
daughters.
Today we are living in more spacious times. Hindu
orthodoxy is dying, though a slow death. Women have come into their own, and
widow marriages have become common amongst all castes. Post-puberty marriages
are the order of the day among the higher classes, as amongst the lower castes.
The rigidity of caste has considerably relaxed. Inter-caste marriages and
inter-dining are common features of our social life. Even an excommunicated
person like myself and my Brahmo friends in Andhradesh are not treated today as
outside the pale of society. We are shown grace by being invited to dinners
(even by Brahmins) and we are no longer social outcastes. Veeresalingam blazed
the trail of social and religious reform, and many like me have followed him,
and the harvest has not altogether been disappointing. It is claimed that the
Andhras are in the forefront of social reform and women’s emancipation in the
South, and that they are the faithful followers of Mahatma Gandhi. I should
permit myself to say that Mahatma Gandhi’s work itself would have been
impossible either in Andhra or any other part of the country, but for the
earlier labours of the pioneers of social, religious and educational reform
like Veeresalingam. Gandhiji watered the ground prepared by the toil and sweat
of the earlier generation of reformers. This applies even to the uplift of
Harijans.
Social reform was only one side–though a very
important side–of Pantulu’s activities. He was a pioneer in the field of
journalism, a profession to which I have the honour to belong. Journalism was
to him a mission–a powerful weapon to fight social evils and to elevate
society. He never espoused a cause for which he did not fight with all the
fervour of his soul, whether successful or unsuccessful, and when he entered a
fight his opponents knew that he would not take or give quarter. He was said to
be a relentless, unforgiving and obstinate man. Circumstances might have made
him so. Nevertheless, it must be said in extenuation that he would never have
achieved his life’s great mission if he had been a boneless and spiritless
person–all things to all men–without high aims, great ideals, and a firm
determination to achieve them. Veeresalingam was a hero of action and one who
gave and took blows without a whimper. He was a Karma Yogi.
As a journalist he was dreaded by evil doers and
was a special terror to corrupt officials. In his days it was the fashion among
the Indian officers of Government and wealthy persons to keep concubines and to
gloat over the fact. It was a shameless exhibition of immorality. This social
reformer waged a war against such immoralities and greatly contributed to
purify society and to bring peace and happiness to many homes. Veeresalingam Pantulu
was an unequalled master of satire and his trenchant writings in the Viveka
Vardhani, his weekly Telugu paper, exposed to shame and ridicule these
immoral practices. Never was satire used with such good effect in the cause of
social reform and purity of personal character. No officer or rich person dared
to visit his keep’s house as openly as before, and some could do so only after
midnight. Housewives thanked and prayed for Pantulu Garu in their hearts.
Veeresalingam was no less merciless in dealing with
corrupt officialdom. He tackled them, from the village official to the head of
the district, and exposed their corrupt ways and exactions. There is a
beautiful satire on ‘Vasoollu’ or illegal exactions to meet the expenses of
touring officials. Nobody can improve upon it. Since Pantulu’s death I do not
think Andhra has produced another satirist of such power and purpose. Combining
a fine intellect with an iron will, he had also a very sensitive soul and a
heart flowing with the milk of human kindness and sympathy. He was deeply moved
by oppression and injustice from whatever source it came, and fought against
them with all his characteristic energy. It is only just to mention here that,
like most men of fifty or sixty years ago, he was loyal to the British
Government and cultivated good relations with the top-ranking district
officials, for he needed their help in his social reform activities, specially
during the early days of the widow-marriage movement. He was proud of being
made a Rao Bahadur and I heard him complaining to a Guntur reformer about the
latter not addressing him as ‘Rao Bahadur’ on the envelope of his letters to
him. He was equally proud of being an F.M.U. or Fellow of the Madras
University, and this fact was inscribed on the front page of all his volumes.
Such are the foibles of great minds.
In Rajahmundry there was a corrupt Hindu Magistrate
whose bribe taking became a scandal. In one case he wrote a judgment different
from the one he had actually delivered in the court after receiving a bribe,
and the copies of the first judgment were torn and thrown out of the window of
the Magistrate’s house. The Rao Bahadur had them picked up, pieced them
together, and he started a crusade. The corrupt Magistrate eventually committed
suicide.
There was another corrupt official. Veeresahngam
produced a satire against him, and remarked significantly that “a new bull has
come to graze in Rajahmundry’s pasture-land, and the quantity of grass he has
been consuming beats all previous record.” After this appeared in the Viveka
Vardhani the officer was transferred. On one occasion he wrote that a
retiring District Judge had been distributing sanads to budding legal
practitioners so freely that Pantulu Garu’s barber only half shaved him one
morning and ran to the Judge’s house to obtain a sanad for himself–those
were days when there were no law examinations for practitioners in the lower
law courts–lest he (the barber) should be late in obtaining his promised sanad.
Thereafter the system was abolished and the power taken away from District
Judges.
Present day journalists write on all things under
the sun except on the affairs of their own town, city, taluka or district.
Veeresalingam made journalism a vehicle for the ventilation of local grievances
and thereby directly appealed to the heart of the sufferers, created sympathy
for them, and built up popularity for the paper by fearless advocacy and
criticism. People may deride Parish Pump politics but in future these are going
to sway the elections in India as in all countries.
No Andhra has done as much as Veeresalingam to
enrich Telugu literature. He used this sweet and sonorous language to the best
literary advantage and was the first to exploit its possibilities in
innumerable ways. In fact, he blazed a trail for generations to follow. He was
rightly called ‘Gadya Tikkana’ i.e., the greatest prose-writer. He
combined simplicity and charm of style with the power of lucid expression. He
would tell a tale with magical effect. He wrote books for the bairns. He translated
or adapted into Telugu some of the best English books. He introduced the novel.
He wrote the history of the Telugu poets after much labour and research. His
translation of Sakuntala from Sanskrit into Telugu is still the best and
has not been equaled by other poets. He made the leading article the instrument
of his high purpose. His idiomatic and chaste expression is even today the envy
of many writers.
In his later days Pantulu Garu became an anushthanic
Brahmo. No man could have achieved his noble ends without deep piety, and
the Prarthana Samaj at Rajahmundry is his gift to fellow-believers.
Veeresalingam hated to parade his piety and religion. He kept his religious
light under bushel. His religion expressed itself in action and the service of
humanity. A born fighter, and not unoften a cynic, he did not expect much of
human nature. The older he grew the more numerous became the objects of his
compassion; and in ripe old age he mellowed much.
Every year on his way to Bangalore to spend the summer
he would visit the ‘Andhrapatrika’ office at Madras to see Sri Nageswara Rao
and my humble self too. In his later days he was among the advocates of a
separate Province for the Andhras.
Veeresalingam was blunt, straight, and outspoken in
his speech and made more enemies than friends. His was not the soft answer that
turneth away wrath. He never suffered fools gladly. He was very liberal with
his money but did not waste it. It may be said that he was a good businessman
and a careful manager of his affairs and estate.
This sketch will not be complete without paying my
humble tribute to the noble lady who, through good report and evil, stood by
her husband in all the vicissitudes of his life. It is only just to say that
Rajyalakshmamma Garu did not sympathise with her husband in the early days of
his social reform activities, as they brought much trouble to the family and
odium and excommunication. But like a good Hindu wife, she followed him though
she did not understand him. She bore her heavy burden heroically and was of
much help to him when both grew to middle age, as she then realised what great
and noble causes her husband was espousing. She had joined him as a girl in her
early teens and lived long enough to see honour and public esteem showered on
her husband. She became herself the mother and the guardian of the Widows’ Home
and saw many unhappy young widows resettled in life enjoying the happiness of a
married life.
None in the Andhra country did greater service to
his fellows than Veeresalingam Pantulu during a period of fifty years of social
and literary activity. We are celebrating the centenary of his birth this month
(April 1948), He was an Andhra to the core. He lashed his people because he
loved them and served them too for the same reason. He gave his tan, man and
dhan–his body, mind and wealth–to the cause of Andhra regeneration. He was
one of the greatest social reformers of India, and one of Andhra’s literary
geniuses; a pioneer who cut out for himself and others new paths; a humanitarian,
a philanthropist, a friend of the oppressed and the downtrodden. And a tale of
woe or injustice turned him at once into a flame of indignation.
May his spirit continue to animate Andhra life!