The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy

Revolution quote – ‘Those who make revolutions halfway only dig their own graves.’ He had been saving up these words for a long, long time.
    Any sociologists and other bored academics who may scour my novel for information about the sexual, alcoholic and deviant indulgences of my protagonists will be sorely disappointed. I am telling a story so that a story gets told, not with the intention that somebody, somewhere, is going to be awarded a PhD for studying the postmodern perversions of this novel. If you want to learn who was boozing that morning, who were the two lovers who stayed away from the village meeting for a secret rendezvous, or which was the one family that had switched its loyalty to Gopalakrishna Naidu, you won’t find that information here.
    Okay, curiosity is inevitable and I can understand why you would want to know at least some of the things said at the village meeting. Of course, you are aware of the fact that I was not there, so to make up these monologues-dialogues-speeches-soliloquies on demand causes great discomfort to me as a writer. Here are three snippets. Go ahead, paste your smiley faces on them.
    Dialogue 1 : Srinivasan, angered by his brother Subramanian being the go-between, threatened to stop talking to him if he kept pleading the case of the landlords. He is also said to have called Subramanian a thodanadungi , a Tamil insult that signalled way more derision than its literal translation: a man-with-twitching-thighs.
    Dialogue 2 : ‘Bait does not become food,’ Muthusamy said.
    And in order to dangle a convincing explanation for his aphorism, he pointed out that everyone in the village would have witnessed first-hand the fate of the hungry fish who seeks to eat an easy worm. This fishy symbolism was not immediately understood because the people who were fighting for increased wages and more paddy were in no mood to listen to a man who was pontificating about a mysterious fish that should hunt for food and not be beguiled by an offered feast.
    â€˜What is being offered to us by the landlords – like the loans they lend us during marriages, like the arrack money they give us once a week, like the promise to provide us jobs when we join their association – these are baits. None of these will change our life. None of these will give us rights. None of these will make us own the land we till. None of these will make us their equals. None of these will make them treat us with respect. They are not waiting to become our brothers. They are using every opportunity to lure us into their fold. We should remain clever,’ he said, and, returning to his metaphor, added, ‘and not bite the bait.’
    Then he underlined the importance of sticking with the Communists because they were fighting for the rights of the workers and the tillers and the toilers. He also reminded the others that the Agricultural Labourers Trade Union was fifteen years old, but the Paddy Producers Association– an overnight mushroom – was only three years old. He believed this fifteen-year-old fledging movement would fight and uproot centuries of caste and feudalism.
    â€˜Oppression must be met with transgression,’ he said.
    So, he asked the people of Kilvenmani to be brave.
    He also said, ‘Transgression will be met with more oppression.’
    And so, he asked the people of Kilvenmani to be more brave.
    Dialogue 3 : Karuppaiah swore that his pubic hair will not be plucked either by the elder-sister-fucking Gopalakrishna Naidu or the elder-sister-fucking god who created that elder-sister-fucker. The others might have nodded in vehement agreement, reaffirming their firm belief either in the tensile strength of his pubic hair, or in the epilatory ineptitude of Gopalakrishna Naidu and his maker.

    Revolutions are usually verbose and, sometimes, they make too many promises.
    Since the issue of funeral processions of the untouchables not being allowed to pass through the