Namboodiripad: last Brahmin of Marxism

When I met E.M.S. Namboodiripad for the first and only time, it was a humid afternoon in his flat on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram, a few months before his death. There he was, waiting for you in an easy chair in a room whose only adornments were books and magazines, and fading little red stars still twinkling behind those power lenses. He was elsewhere, beyond the lashes of history, in the kingdom of his mind where the socialist ideal was intact, in spite of the human errors that let capitalist malignancy spread across the erstwhile Soviet bloc. In God's Own Soviet, he was the last Brahmin of Marxism, undaunted till the isolated end by the proofing mistakes in the vedic text of ideology. Such magnificent absurdity! And what poignancy of make-believe! Those images returned when the wagging fingers of an angry local apparatchik pierced my TV screen, and the accompanying shrillness in Malayalam almost shattered the windowpanes of my bedroom: communists have to change with the times; who says they should subsist onvadaandchai? (Ah, the price one has to pay for catching up with news from home). Certainly, I agree with the guy, you have to break the cultural stereotype: thebidismoking, subaltern comrade in tattereddhoti. Time for caviar and Dom Perignon, or karimeen and a glass of chardonnay. Or do you prefer Marx, single malt and Cohiba-not necessarily in that order? I'm with you, comrade.

Change is what we need, and let it begin with the state that had the first elected communists in power. It has already begun, and see how, and look at those agents of "refolution" (to borrow that word coined by Timothy Garton Ash to describe Eastern Europe circa 1989-revolution plus reform). We hear a lot about the party's performance in real estate (that is perfectly in tune with tradition: those soaring grayness in stone has always made man look smaller than his materialistic size); we hear about how the Pravda in Malayalam promotes the expensive business of progressive journalism; and we are yet to be bored with the standoff between the cheerless party boss-Lord Voldemort of Kerala communism-and the endearing cartoon chief minister-Dumbledore of the masses. In Communist Kerala, Marx is making it big in the black-market, and his business partners are reducing the distance between Pyongyang and Thiruvananthapuram. And there lies our hope: the scrap value of CPI(M) has gone up. Isn't it time to sell it for good, Dark Lord?

S.Prasannarajan