The making of Amma

Renowned danseuse Anita Ratnam, who attended the elite Church Park Presentation Convent School where J Jayalalithaa had also been a student, albeit a few years earlier, recalls the construction of the personality cult around the actress at a time when her mentor MGR was initiating her in to politics. “We heard about the special vehicle that had been commissioned for her from a car maker down South,” she says. “It was to be an SUV with a roof that opened at the touch of a button, fitted with a contraption which enabled the actress’s seat to rise dramatically out of it with maximum effect on unsuspecting passers by.”

“In school, she’d been a real star,” adds Ratnam. “A topper in academics and an excellent dancer, one of the most hero worshipped girls, loved equally by fellow students and teachers. Some one who read Somerset Maugham and enjoyed Western pop music. Then, she’d gone on to become one of the state’s most successful actresses. When we heard about the car being constructed for her, no one was surprised. It was just one more extraordinary detail in the larger than life story of J Jayalalithaa,” she explains.

Understanding the J phenomenon

For those who do not live in South India, and who have paid scant attention to its often OTT personality cults, the outpouring of genuine grief and mass adulation following the death of the ailing Tamil Nadu Chief Minister at the relatively early age of 68, has come as a bit of a surprise. Elsewhere in India, politicians who die are rarely grieved with such fervour. So it is not hard to see why the rest of India is slightly bewildered by the J phenomenon. After all, hadn’t it more or less written her off as that ‘imperious megalomaniac from Chennai who wears a cape’?

The rest of India, who came in too late in the Jayalalithaa saga, feel a bit cheated now. After all, when it learns how the six-time Chief Minister assiduously introduced social welfare schemes, launched subsidised stores, ensured police protection for women and still managed to make Tamil Nadu one of the fastest-growing states in the country, clocking an 8.8 per cent gross state domestic product growth in financial year 2015-16, and ranked second among large states on the Human Development Index, it is beginning to wonder if too much attention has not already been squandered on other CMs given to more braggadocio and PR, whose performance pales before Jayalalithaa’s.

Reluctant, but gifted

“I met Jayalalithaa the day I had my Bharata Natyam Arangetram in 1956, but our friendship blossomed a few years later, when she also became a student of my Guru, Kalaimamani Smt. KJ Sarasa,” says Rathna Kumar, Founder-Director, Anjali Center for Performing Arts Houston, Texas, USA. “In those days, I would call her Ammu, and we hit it off from the moment we met, in spite of our very different personalities. She was gentle, shy, not effusive, not over friendly, and usually kept to herself. We bonded over our common love of books and music. From the Beatles to the latest Hindi movie songs, we knew all the lyrics and belted them out with vim and vigour,” says Kumar.

By now, everyone is aware of how the brilliant student and gifted dancer who wanted to become a lawyer had been forced, not once but twice, in her life by the two imposing personalities she was closest to, into becoming an actress and a politician against her will.

India reserves a special cache for reluctant politicians, but what was so extraordinary in Jayalalithaa’s case was that despite her initial hesitations, she went on to make a staggering success of both careers. It was said that in that atmosphere of rampant patriarchy, few heroes would object if she was given a better role than they. Though her debut in state politics was not as easy, Jayalalithaa is said to have outshone even her mentor by not only ensuring that his people oriented policies flourished after his demise but that this populism was balanced by some serious attention to attracting industry and growth in the state.

The inner life

So why was it that for her critics (read all those who lived up North and members of the DMK) Jayalalithaa had come across as a self aggrandising, egotistical mercurial, hilarious and corrupt politician? Some of it perhaps is to do with the scars that this basically docile and sweet natured girl had endured in her growing years.

In her interview with Simi Garewal, Jayalalithaa recounted with astonishing candour the hurts and slights that she had to endure: the absence of her mother’s attention during her growing years and the merciless teasing of her school mates. She spoke about the anguish she’d experienced when her mother passed away and how she was left vulnerable in the simplest things, and of course the brutalities foisted on her by her political opponents.

For all her worldly successes and brilliance, Jayalalithaa led a startlingly bereft and lonely personal life. No surprises then that when she met Sasikala, the ordinary housewife leading an ordinary existence, who pledged her devotion and assistance, she was in no position to refuse. Perhaps it was Sasikala, with her mostly rustic sensibilities who introduced a surreal atmosphere of court intrigue, grandiose financial chicanery and the phenomenon of obsequiousness in to the Maugham and Beatles loving, academically inclined and shy Brahmin born politico’s life. And perhaps like she had done with her mother and MGR before, Jayalalithaa had only done as she’d been told.

“She was too young to die, and my heart is filled with immense sadness at the sudden loss of someone who definitely had the potential to rise to even greater heights,” says her former dance colleague.

“The world has lost a great leader and a genuinely good-hearted person.” One that unfortunately few of us outside the South had occasion to understand or know.

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