A most ugly spectacle of cyber-bullying has been unfolding in Kerala over the past week.
Professor M Leelavathy, a hugely respected figure in the state as a prolific writer, critic and teacher of Malayalam literature, turned 98 on the 12th of this month, and when a student who had come home to wish her on her birthday, enquired how she was going to celebrate the day, she said there will be no celebration because, “How can I even swallow food, when I see the children of Gaza standing in lines with vessels for food, hungry and desperate?”
This private remark, which was later reported by the media, would appear to any neutral observer as a statement of deep anguish from a grandmother on seeing the sorry plight of innocent children trapped in a war. However, it was pounced upon by social media handles and people aligned with the Sangh Parivar, and Leelavathy has been subjected to some of the worst kinds of vilification for her alleged partisanship for Palestine, and by consequence for Muslims.
There has been widespread criticism of this totally uncalled-for spate of hatred against one of the most significant figures of the Kerala cultural scene and even calls for legal action against the perpetrators.
Affectionately known as “Leelavathy Teacher”, Leelavathy is a legend in her own right among Keralites. A revered teacher of literature, she has taught in major colleges and universities in Kerala for more than seven decades, and has mentored several generations of students who belong to every walk of society – poets, writers, critics, artists, cinema actors and directors, politicians, teachers, administrators, doctors, engineers and so on and so on (even this author is one) – who consider it their great fortune to have been taught by her.
Even those who have not been her direct students proudly claim her as their teacher because she has positively touched their lives in manners that defy easy explanations. Ask anyone, and the first thing that would come out in their responses are her natural affection, care and concern for others, and then of course her broadness of vision that can happily accommodate differences and disagreements.
As K. Satchidanandan, the renowned poet, says, “I don’t know whether to call her mother or teacher. She was among the first to recognise and defend the shifts in language and sensibility that I had attempted to bring to Malayalam poetry.” Balachandran Chullikkad, a major modernist Malayalam poet and one not easily given to praise, has often spoken of how she was the first critic to understand and appreciate the value and deeper suggestions of his poems.
Such affidavits will be plenty, given that her literary and intellectual acumen is of the highest order, but never ever employed to damage or to tarnish a writer or an artist, only to inspire and motivate.
Fondly referred to by many as “the mother voice of Malayalam”, her writings range across the entire gamut of literary critical possibilities and many areas of social criticism too. From a very young age, she made a distinctive mark for herself in a heavily male-dominated literary field and as the years went by she established herself as a major critical voice to reckon with.
With her almost unparalleled erudition in both Sanskrit and Western poetics, she was able to yoke together two seemingly disparate worlds of thought and sensibility and to bring them to bear upon the Malayalam literature of the 20th century.
A major aspect of her critical writings is that she brought feminist perspectives to literary research, psychological interpretation and sociological analyses, and thus engaged with new and emerging sensibilities in Malayalam writing.
As social and cultural critic TT Sreekumar has aptly observed, “Professor M Leelavathy is a marvel. What makes this writer remarkable is that, as a critic, she created a vast world of ideas while at the same time was unafraid of the conflicts within it … Leelavathy’s is the firm female voice that has been resonating in literary criticism here [in Malayalam] for nearly half a century.”
She continues to read and write to this day, even at the age of 98 because, as she told me rather pithily, “There are three things that still function properly: the head, the eyes and the hand.”
As far as awards and recognitions go, every conceivable honour has come her way: Padma Shri, Kendra Sahitya Academy Award, Ezhuthassan Award (the highest literary recognition of Kerala), Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award, Odakuzhal Award, Nalappadan Award, Lalithambika Antarjanam Award, Vallathol Award, Basheer Award, Mathrubhumi Literary Award, the list goes on.
Not that any of it has made any difference to her; in most cases, these awards have actually honoured themselves in honouring her.
Even more importantly, Leelavathy Teacher has functioned as a veritable voice of conscience for Kerala, taking positions in issues of societal importance without fear or favour. Fiercely independent, she has never aligned herself to any political dispensation or party, and has resolutely spoken out whenever she felt it was required to do so, irrespective of who was being criticised or opposed.
Whether it was the Shah Bano case, the issue of dowry, the entry of women to the Sabarimala Temple, causes related to the environment or several similar matters, she has consistently taken rational, non-conservative positions that have most often served to guide Keralites with a sense of what is right and just.
She has fought her battles with courage and conviction, but always maintained the utmost of democratic respect to her opponents, never stooping even remotely to any form of personal enmity, effectively commanding the same respect from them in return. In that sense, she has been the voice of a “civil society”.
However, when at the ripe old age of 98, Leelavathy invites the caustic ire of Sangh parivar cyber-bullies because she said something that any honest mother in any land would say with heart-wrenching pain is cause for grave concern.
Before and beyond anything else, it was the voice of utter distress, of terrible sorrow, at the plight of innocent children being starved, maimed and killed, under the grinding wheels of a merciless military machine that gorges itself on blood and death.
Forget the writer, the critic, the teacher, it was primarily the voice of a mother, of a grandmother, for whom all children are hers, irrespective of where or to whom they are born. It was the simplest and most lucid expression of the principle of “Vasudhaiva kudumbakam” that Indian culture – and more precisely, Hindu culture – apparently prides itself on. It was the voice of elemental humanity.
But, for the right wing it was anathema because it was for the children of Palestine, Muslims to be more precise, that the professor was expressing her solidarity.
Social media broke out into a cacophony of insults, abuses and down-right obscenities, all directed at this frail wisp of a lady, who had only spoken of her heart-felt anguish and her personal pain at an unfolding catastrophe. It was verbal lynching at its worst.
The trolls kept harping on the self-same themes: why she kept silent on Pahalgam, why she has not condemned Hamas and their acts of violence against Israelis, why she did not respond when children were being killed elsewhere, how she has become a Muslim-lover, why she does not just die and be done with, why not try other ways of consuming food if she cannot swallow it, and so on.
Now, these are highly muted paraphrases of only a few of these trolls because the actual language and expressions cannot be reproduced; they are so reprehensibly obscene, brutal and violent that they have no place in a civilised discourse.
This may be normal in the highly toxic atmosphere of social media these days, but when it comes to be used against a person of Leelavathy’s stature and good will, that too an elderly lady in her late 90s, there is more than meets the eye there. It signals the breakdown – or deliberate taking down – of all canons of civility and respect, and the creation of a culture of impunity for perpetrators of such online hostility, which will remove even the last remnants of decency from our public discourse.
It is tantamount to opening the gates of a hell of hatred. It is an exhibition of how low the Sangh parivar can stoop, how there is no depth of depravity that is beyond them.
That it is the work of, among others, the same outfit that is led by Modi, our esteemed prime minister who tried to make political capital out of a chance insult thrown at his mother by a lone individual, makes this vicious attack even more unpalatable. It only goes to prove that statements such as “insults to mothers will not be tolerated” and “Mother India has been insulted” are mere rhetorical flourishes designed to pull the wool over people’s eyes and that when it comes to those they deem their adversaries, the Sangh parivar will stop at nothing.
It is evident that there is a well-planned strategy at work here, especially given the highly repetitious nature of the abuses. One also suspects that there is a more serious political game afoot. By taking on a person of such wide acceptance and esteem, it is a clear signal that no one shall be spared who seems to stand in the way of the Sangh’s nefarious agenda: if Leelavathy Teacher can be attacked, then no one – repeat no one – is safe.
What one also perceives in the onslaught is a sense of frustration being turned into explosive fuel for a concerted offensive. Kerala, like Tamil Nadu, has always remained a thorn in the Sangh’s flesh; despite strenuous long-term efforts and some minor advances, the vast majority of the state’s population have refused to succumb to its wiles or its propaganda, and charted a largely secular course distinctly at odds with the rest of the country.
In such a context, the attack on Leelavathy Teacher is a conscious attempt to sow the seeds of discord and create the conditions for a radical polarisation of communities. Further still, it could also be a kind of priming on a virtual platform of a lynching that is ultimately designed to spill out onto the streets and to invade homes, as we have seen time and again elsewhere.
Lest it is thought otherwise, it has to be said, Leelavathy does not need support or protection. Frail she may be, but there is steel inside, a steel that melts not with anger or hatred, but with love and compassion.
Her later response, when asked about the cyber violence, speaks volumes:
Let those who oppose me do so freely; I hold no animosity toward them. From the very beginning, my life has been about facing opposition head-on. No matter which country they are from, or what their caste or religion, all children are the same to me. That’s all I’ve ever said. There is no specific political agenda behind it. During Onam in 2019, I ate only kanji [rice porridge]. There was no one else with me. The reason was a news report about the starvation of children in Wayanad. Whether they are from my own hometown or any other place, in my eyes, children are just children. I look at them with the eyes of a mother. There is no background of religion, caste or colour in that. Let those who oppose me oppose me freely; I hold no malice towards them.
These are words that will make Gandhi or Narayana Guru proud, from both of whom Leelavathy draws her intellectual lineage. It also suggests to the Malayali people the course, the path, they should adopt. Now the choice is for the Malayali to make.
Mundoli Narayanan was formerly professor of English at the University of Calicut.
This article has been republished from The Wire.