Book review: Pulling MGR out from destiny's red and black boxes

Chennai: Biographies are most instructive, illuminating and come with a relish when they mirror the space-time of their subjects without a twist. International civil servant R.Kannan's latest biography on the legendary actor, AIADMK founder and three-time Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M.G. Ramachandran - popularly MGR- has that realistic touch.

Though as the author says he was initially reluctant to write this book, three decades after MGR's demise but happily coinciding with his birth centenary year (2017-18), Chennai-born Kannan, home-grown in the Dravidian Movement and whose first biography was on DMK's founder-leader C.N. Annadurai, deserves full marks for walking the razor's edge in penning this fascinating story of MGR, not just as a charismatic hero in both reel and real life, but also in juxtaposition with other leaders and personalities.

True to his UN moorings, whose charter was itself inspired by the great German Philosopher Immanuel Kant's enlightenment-era ideals of reason and reflection, Kannan's work on MGR has reaffirmed the virtues of the chronological tradition, grounded in unadorned, rigorous factual narration.

The 'Red and Black boxes' are a powerful metaphor in the DMK's annals. The historic May 1956 party conference in Tiruchy, termed a turning point as at that meet two boxes - one painted in red and another in black- were placed to hold a referendum for its members then on whether DMK should contest elections or not. The large majority was in favour of electoral action as an organisation, casting their 'yes' in the red box. The rest is history.

That was a landmark that roughly marked the transition of MGR from an emerging, successful actor in Tamil filmdom to politics. With MGR being both a great humanist - his concern for the poor and downtrodden and charitable and generous nature were never doubted - and an enigma, Kannan's 495-pages work is a remarkable effort to distil the political significance of the MGR phenomenon from out of the red and black boxes.

Thus MGR as administrator, running a full-fledged government despite his serious illness in his last three years, expanding the school midday meals scheme, the political economy that made it possible, which at one point meant giving up his most dearly held ideal of total prohibition and that leading to a 'liquor barons' milieu, the hard political choices he had to make vis-a-vis four different Prime Ministers, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Rajiv Gandhi, the rough edges he had to handle in Chennai vis-a-vis his closest friend-turned-political rival M. Karunanidhi after being expelled from DMK, the key role MGR played in India's efforts to resolve the Sri Lankan Tamils' ethnic conflict, even being serious about a DMK-AIADMK merger at one stage, stemming revolts within the party and his ambivalent stance towards his protégée J Jayalalithaa, have all been very well documented by the author.
 Yet, "on the ethnic issue, while cultivating and funding the LTTE's V Prabhakaran, he (MGR) also helped balance the DMK's shrill demands; however, his influence over Prabhakaran was greatly overrated," writes Kannan.

The author, in fact, has quite extensively dwelt on the highs and lows of the MGR administration - over-reliance on the Police machinery was one aspect of it. The internal feuding within AIADMK was another.

As the 'author' of the memorandum of corruption charges along with the late CPI leader Kalyanasundaram that led to the Sarkaria Commission of Enquiry against the earlier DMK regime, Kannan tells us, based on personal interviews with party veterans like Panruti S Ramachandran, how compulsions of real politik forced MGR to play down his all-powerful anti-corruption plank after he returned to power in 1980.   

Equally, the early years of MGR have been retold with sympathy and aplomb by Kannan. Crushed by poverty and humiliation, along with his elder brother MG Chakrapani with their domineering but caring mother Sathyabhama, MGR attempted suicide twice and was stopped on his tracks by his brother, according to the author. Abuses and rivalry MGR met while cutting his teeth in theatre as a school dropout with the 'Madurai Original Boys Company' in Kumbakonam, his tragic short-lived first marriage in a Malayalee household, seeing the first big buck in Tamil cinema - a hundred rupee note which MGR even wondered whether was fake or real - as he walked out of a film producer's premises on Wall Tax Road in old Madras with his brother, the crisscrossing interests of producers-directors-musicians, artistes, song and screenplay writers, MGR's fascination for Gandhi and ideological beginnings as a Congress man before being drawn into the DMK fold, all these and more come out vividly in Kannan's sober prose.
 Kannan also has very interesting insights about how, unlike the other towering star of his times, Sivaji Ganesan who was content with taking a professional approach to acting, MGR deftly networked with all strands of the film industry, including song writers and music directors to cultivate an eternal do-gooder image that was to simultaneously ring his political career.

'Goondukili (caged parrot)' was the only Tamil film both MGR and Sivaji would act together in. But by then a 'fan clubs system' for biggies had grown to disallow any future co-starring, points out Kannan. Yet, MGR did not see all these as a dichotomy, between the 'Man and the Myth'. Kannan quotes a 1974 interview to the New York Times in which MGR said, "What I say in my films, what I do, I try to live up in my personal life." Such rich anecdotal information, backed by references, makes Kannan's work a balanced and even-handed narration, without having to shut out MGR's adversarial relations with likes of poet Kannadasan and tragi-comedian Chandrababu.

While a few minor clarifications and corrections on places and dates may be required in the next edition of this biography, some of Kannan's observations are interesting. 'MGR never moved away from Gandhi really," says the author, something which today's hardline Hindu nationalists may like to ponder upon.
 However, Kannan concludes with the lament about Ms. Jayalalithaa "disappointing" her mentor in politics, and how she came to "symbolise all that has gone wrong with the Dravidian Movement'. That reductionist sting to an otherwise memorable biography on MGR was least expected from a scholar of the Dravidian Movement.