Globalisation in another age

Book review: <i>Ayya's Accounts</i>

Ayya’s Accounts

A Ledger of Hope in Modern India

Anand Pandian & M P Mariappan

Tranquebar

310 pages; Rs 399

Anand Pandian is an American anthropologist who, in Ayya’s Accounts, has undertaken a fascinating journey into the past. Over several telephone calls and personal visits, Mr Pandian listened in on the life story of his grandfather, M P Mariappan, a fruit merchant in Madurai, resulting in the book under review.

Called Ayya, an affectionate term for an elderly gentleman in Tamil, Mr Pandian’s grandfather teases out an extraordinary story from within the folds of his seemingly ordinary life. Left motherless at a young age, Ayya was taken to Burma (as Myanmar was called then) by his father, where, together with his brothers, he opened a grocery store. As World War II approached, he was forced to return to Madurai, where he got married, had children, and became a prosperous businessman.

Mr Pandian wrote the book on his grandfather’s insistence as an anthropological tract that details the history of the Nadar caste. A professor at Johns Hopkins, Mr Pandian travelled extensively through rural Tamil Nadu for his PhD thesis on the community. Traditionally called “tree climbers”, the Nadars are today one of the most prosperous castes of Tamil Nadu due to their passionate flair for business.

Although the book started its journey in ethnography, it ended up much more than that — a deeply personal rendition of the life and often challenging times of a man who witnesses first-hand several tumultuous events. Ayya’s account of his time in Burma, as he negotiated, albeit on a small scale, commercial deals and kept detailed accounts of his daily transactions, is reminiscent of the histories of other business castes such as the Marwaris. 

The trauma of packing up a flourishing business in Burma to return to an unknown future in India is explained away by the impassive Ayya as an outcome of fate. Yet, the move involved several sacrifices, including the handing over of the shop to a local friend with the assurance that he would run it as his own. Decades before the services-fuelled globalisation of today, Ayya’s Accounts reminds us, there existed a vast network of “global” businesses that, on the one hand, thrived on trust and goodwill, and on the other, were far more vulnerable to external conditions. 

Ayya’s 1,700-mile journey in 1938 has close parallels with the other great migration that millions of Indians were forced to make in a few years’ time, when a newly independent nation was brutally cleaved. From that grim time to America-born Pandian interviewing his grandfather in a comfortable home in Madurai, the transformation was a result of the toil that Ayya put into bettering his lot. With Paati, Mr Pandian’s grandmother, he had eight children, most of whom settled in the United States, another familial migration but one that was born in privilege.

The book’s first-person narration gives it an intimate feel that takes it beyond its anthropological premise. As Ayya and Paati get old, their worries about their future are interspersed with their happiness at having raised a successful family. Their bond is presented as the simple alliance of a man driven to succeed in business and a woman who diligently kept home for him. 

Ayya’s detours about their bickering are a joy, since the book otherwise makes rather serious reading. Their visits to their children in the US are a time of great happiness as the old couple, used to a life of frugality back in India, partakes of the joys of unbridled American capitalism. Paati’s death in 1997 marks a turning point in Ayya’s life, a time of unrestrained grief, the likes of which he seldom experienced. 

The book’s first draft was issued in Tamil in 2013, and Mr Pandian has helpfully included detailed notes in this English version. At crucial moments, his benign voice is heard guiding the reader to make sense of the political underpinnings of as well as the personal lessons from his grandfather’s journey. Touching extracts from their letters to one another are strewn across the book, making Ayya’s Accounts part-memoir, part-moral lesson.

Ayya died in 2014, after battling a lifetime of turmoil, displacement and, towards the end, disease. Yet, his voice shines through as one of contentment and, ultimately, wisdom. Repeatedly asked by his children to shift to the US in his old age, he refused. He was happy going through the motions of a life he had lived for half a century. “I want to die laughing,” he told Mr Pandian after Paati’s death. “When my life passes, my spirit ought to be laughing as it goes. It’s this thought that keeps running through my mind these days.”